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5 Things You Can Do To Boost Social Media Presence

5 Things You Can Do To Boost Social Media Presence

A guest blog by Elaine Bennett

In a social-media-driven world, where everyone and their grandparents have a social media account, there is really no viable excuse for your business not to be present in the SM arena as well. After all, some three billion people use some form of social media on a daily basis, it only stands to reason that you should try to tap into this wealthy pool of opportunities – you can bet that your competitors are doing the same.

But you need to be better than they are. With that in mind, here are five things you could be doing to boost social media presence, reach new audiences and transform them into paying customers.

Developing a personality people will love

The days of faceless corporations with cheesy slogans are long gone. Nowadays, customers expect brands to have a personality, a unique tone of voice, and an aesthetic presentation that is relatable and portrays the right values to the public. Needless to say, your brand cannot afford to be just another face in the crowd – it needs to stand out.

Uniqueness is the key to brand recognition in the online universe, which means that you need to build a brand personality audiences can connect with on a profound, emotional level. Only by striking an emotional chord with your demographic can you hope to transform them into loyal brand followers.

Building SMART goals for your SM strategy

The concept of SMART goals has been around for decades, used by managers from every department to keep the cogwheels turning and keep the higher-ups happy. Now, you can use the SMART concept to optimize your social media strategy and take it to new heights.

Succinctly, in order for your SM presence to thrive, your goals need to be:

  • Specific – what is the goal, specifically?
  • Measurable – how do you measure effectiveness?
  • Achievable – the goals need to be realistic.
  • Relevant – creating a positive impact internally and externally
  • Timely – setting a realistic timetable.

SMART goals will allow you to build a comprehensive, realistic social media strategy. However, setting these goals will require constant feedback and social media monitoring.

Gather relevant insights to boost your SM game

Knowledge is power. The more you know about your audience, as well as your brand’s performance in the online realm, the better the chances of your marketing team crafting a winning SM strategy and improving upon past results.

Strategies such as media monitoring have become an integral part of every brand’s social media strategy, as it provides you with the relevant insights your company needs in order to eliminate any guesswork from the equation. Also, it is important to consider where your audience comes from. For instance, if they’re based mostly in New Zealand, you should use a media monitoring platform or a media portal from New Zealand to collect this data. This real time information will help you safely plan for the future and mitigate any risk, allowing your brand to gain the traction and recognition it deserves.

Post engaging, quality content across the board

In the online world, content will always be king. No matter how much money you pour into advertising or sponsorship deals, nothing will be able to save your brand’s reputation from the backlash that inevitably follows a poorly-written blog post.

This is why complementing your posting schedule with stellar content across all social media channels will be essential in portraying your brand in the best possible light. What’s more, if you want to take your game to the next level, be sure to diversify your content pool by introducing various blog content, images, infographics, videos, podcasts, and more.

Be consistent and drive innovation

Finally, a silent social media feed is soon to become a barren one in terms of followers. There is no better way to lose your audience and push them into the loving embrace of your competition than to post seldom or irregularly, so make sure you have a tight schedule in place, jam-packed with engaging stories and visuals.

Moreover, you also want to retain a hefty dose of spontaneity, and keep your followers coming back to your page, by being innovative, always offering something new and exciting for your audience to experience. Remember, only by staying on top of the latest trends and changing with the tide can you hope to stay afloat and surpass the competition.

The race for social media dominance is a never-ending one, especially if you consider that the number of social media users is only expected to rise in the years to come. With that in mind, now is the time to implement these solutions into your SM strategy and pave the road to long-term recognition in the SM universe.

boost social media

Elaine Bennett is a regular contributor at Bizzmark Blog.

She’s a marketing specialist, focused on branding, social media marketing and small businesses.

She’s also a tech enthusiast and a video games lover.

How To Reap The Benefits Of A Content Marketing Strategy

Content Marketing can have some incredible benefits for your business

But a lot of people still underestimate the value of Content Marketing, or indeed don’t fully understand what it is or why they should invest in bespoke content.

So let’s start by working out exactly what it is!

CONTENT MARKETING – a type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.

But I prefer Content Marketing Institute’s definition:

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Especially the line following that definition which says “Instead of pitching your products or services, you are providing truly relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers to help them solve their issues.”

So Content Marketing is a way to talk about your products or services in a way that’s audience first and user driven. It’s less about you, and more about them – a good place to start.

What can be content?

Anything your audience can consume can be content.

  • Blog posts
  • Video & Slideshows
  • Graphics & Animations
  • Podcasts
  • Quizzes
  • Ebooks & Whitepapers
  • Resources & Workbooks
  • Playlists
  • Q&A or AMAs
  • Facebook/Instagram Live
  • Branded Filters & Camera Frames

And the list goes on!

The type of content you create for your Content Marketing efforts will depend completely on your audience and objectives.

Great Content Marketing can have a multitude of benefits to your business, let’s look at some of them.

Traffic & Search Results

Everyone wants more traffic to their website, or at least more qualified traffic. When you publish or host quality content on your site, people hit your site to consume it. And you know they’re more than likely interested in your product or services because that’s what your content (even if loosely) relates to.

When you offer something of value to your audience, they’ll come to you. This is the complete opposite of traditional marketing where you go to where they are and interrupt them. If you content is strong enough and valuable enough you might not even have to pay to promote it. You can publish it, and let people come to you in their own way and their own time.

Here’s a great example – Jon Loomer’s Facebook Image Dimension Guide. In case you don’t know who Jon Loomer is he’s a Facebook Ads heavy hitter who runs online training and a couple of membership clubs for exclusive content. In fact, everything Jon does is an example of excellent Content Marketing.

I read in one of his emails a while back that this page on his site is the most visited. It comes up if you Google “Facebook Image Specs” and in creating it, he knew that anyone who visited that page was looking for information on how to optimise their creative to best display on Facebook.

Whether they were marketers, or business owners, or entrepreneurs – they all had that in common. And they were coming to him. For free!

Imagine you’re in a competitive niche; all clamoring to get to the top position in a Google search, but your content – perhaps a simple “how to” video is what people are visiting? That’s YOUR brand getting ahead. Standing out without pushing people away with a hard sell.

We’ll talk more about what you can do with this traffic in a sec.

content marketing

Brand Awareness & Recall

Word of mouth is still an incredibly powerful way to get your business noticed, and you’ve probably heard the phrase “word of mouse” said too. It’s so important to be known and remembered.

How can people use your services if they don’t know who you are?

How can they recommend you to their friends if they can’t remember your business name?

Create content that resonates with your audience and they’re more likely to remember you. And if they hadn’t heard of you before it’s an even better way to make them aware of your brand!

The idea is that it’s not only valuable enough for them, but sharable as well. Any time you can get people to share your content as a brand you’ve allowed them to represent you and vice versa. They’ve thought whatever you created was good enough for them to put their name to and pass along to their friends and colleagues.

And with Content Marketing you can do this without the rude interruption of more traditional types of advertising.

Brand Affinity & Loyalty

Something else you can achieve with Content Marketing is affinity from your audience, and loyalty from your current customers.

This isn’t just touchy-feely (not that there’s anything wrong with that) but in a crowded market you want people can choose your brand, over others and their affinity for what your brand stands for could be the deciding factor. But they can’t do this unless they know what your brand MEANS.

You content can explain your brand positioning, and win your audience over into fans and purchasers.

Tell your brand’s story and let your audience fall in love with you.

Then once you’ve earned their support you want to retain them!

Great content can remind people why they choose you and not your competitors. It can help deepen the relationship they have with your brand and make them less likely to stray.

content marketing

Audience Segmentation

Content Marketing can help you segment your audience and only show them what they want to see more of.

You can track and tag pages of your website and/or individual pieces of content, to build audience pools from your different content themes into remarketing segments.

That way when you pay to promote a new piece of content you can target the people who’ve consumed similar content. Facebook targeting allows us to differentiate traffic that’s visited certain pages of our website and not others, and also people who’ve spend a certain amount of time on a particular page so we can serve ads to people who interacted with particular content this way.

It’s the same concept ecommerce stores use when they offer you similar items to the ones in your cart. They know you like xyz product with certain attributes, it follows you’ll like other products with similar attributes.

This segmentation keeps your audience seeing the content that resonates with them, and prevents them seeing content themes that may not.

content marketing

Funnel Content

If you have a sales funnel you need to fill that funnel with content.

This content needs to be relevant to the audience AND their buyer journey.

Content Marketing can attract people to your brand and fill the top of the funnel.

And it’s especially important during the consideration phase (middle of the funnel) to make sure people choose your brand over your competition.

content marketing

Thought Leadership

Content Marketing can position you (as a personal brand) or your company as the thought leader in your niche.

Great content will ensure your fans know you’re the “go to” source for information on your product or industry and give you an edge over your competitors, just like in the Jon Loomer example.

content marketing

Business Opportunities

Checking the data from your Content Marketing efforts can point you in the direction of new business opportunities.

If you’re looking at expanding or even narrowing your offerings, the data on which content your audience consumed can help you refine your business to offer what has most resonated with your target market.

Content Marketing & Social Media – BFFs

Why am I telling you about Content Marketing?

Because Content Marketing and Social Media are BFFs. Your content can be distributed on Social Media, and content themes can be established based on your social posting.

Think about your most popular Social Media posts – what were they about? What can you learn from this to inform your content offering?

Social Media gives us the power of community for our brands, and it also allows us to target with a high level of accuracy people we want to reach beyond that community where we know our content will resonate.

So put some thought into your Content Marketing efforts and invest in some quality creators if it’s not your thing. The work of an excellent copywriter, graphic designer or videographer will elevate your content and you’ll reap the benefits.

But make sure to leave some money in the budget to ensure this content sees the light of day with the people you made it for.

Do you invest in Content Marketing?

What questions do you have about content?

Facebook Apocalypse | Actionable Tips To Negotiate The Fallout

Facebook set it’s house on fire by changing how the newsfeed works – so what do we all do now?

There’s some things in Social Media Marketing that will always be true. I’m going to start with those, as many publishers and brands will really need to go back to the basics to make sure they are still reaching their audience.

These are simple, but often overlooked and there’s only 3 main ones…

1. Strategy

What do you WANT from your Facebook activity? What does success look like for your accounts?

Is it sales, brand awareness, leads, customer service?

Think about what you actually want to achieve by being on Facebook in the first place. What’s the best way to achieve your goals, bearing in mind Facebook is saying they will be preferencing “meaningful” content that evokes deeper thought and attracts long comments.

I’ll outline a few formats I think will still be viable under this newsfeed change in the next section.

2. Audience

Your Facebook page isn’t for you.

Let that sink in.

It can be ABOUT you, but it’s supposed to be for your AUDIENCE. Facebook’s trying to put the Social back into Social Media.

newsfeed

What does going back to basics here look like? Stop creating content you like, and put your efforts into content that means something to your audience. Keep it relevant, put some thought into who your audience is, what they’re day looks like, when they want to hear from you and you should see success with Facebook’s new focus – creating a meaningful experience, keeping you safe from the newsfeed update.

Dive into your insights and check out who your audience are (you might be surprised) and always keep them central to your content creation (or curation)

You may need to post less often to achieve success here, but putting the extra thought into your content, and cutting down on your frequency could definitely help your newsfeed visibility.

3. Community Management

This one has been around as long as Facebook itself, but it’s lost a bit of shine, at least to me if I’m honest. I’d say this was mainly due to the amount of effort it takes to run a community, the fact that you can’t really measure community ROI, and the declining organic newsfeed reach which pushed all us former Community Mangers into the realm of Paid.

Having said that, it’s always been important to answer the questions, queries and issues of your fans and customers on your Facebook page. It’s Social after all!

In the announcements by Facebook in the previous week they’ve stated that simply replying to all your comments isn’t enough. They say they don’t care about page-to-person interaction (I have a hunch they still keep tabs on it, like they do with answered messages in Messenger, but I have no proof) they only care about person-to-person interaction.

So if you already have a community of active commenters, who participate in thoughtful conversions about the topics around your brand – this is going to be a huge advantage! If you don’t it looks like trying to build one is the key here.

I’m not going to lie, starting from scratch is going to take a lot of effort on your part, especially if you’re a small business. For larger businesses this will mean they might decide to dedicate a Social Media team member to “conversation starter” rather than simply moderating comments or providing customer service.

It also makes me wonder about the Telcos. If you’ve been on a Telco page lately (or ISP for that matter) you’ll find long, detailed accounts of people’s greivances. Is this what Facebook will end up preferencing in the newsfeed? Might be good news for NFPs and cause related communities?

I guess we’ll have to wait and see…

Another thought pops into my head about trolls. Will brands now ‘Fake Troll’ themselves to get longer comments? Yuk. Let’s hope not.

Ok, so that’s my 3 back to basics tips. Bring Sexy Social Back with a re-think about your strategy and why you are on Facebook in the first place, ALWAYS post audience-first, and have a plan to engage your community.


How are you going to stay ‘newsfeed visible’ though?

It’s all very well and good for the answer to be “create better content” but HOW?

Here’s some tips I think will still be effective on Facebook, depending on your niche and audience.

Facebook Live

Facebook Live generates heaps of interaction. I wouldn’t say long comments per se, but it’s an awesome way to get your content seen in the newsfeed. If you haven’t thought about how you could go live with a tutorial, or something that helps your audience then the time is now.

AMAs

Ask Me Anythings would be a good way to get people thinking, writing longer comments and having meaningful interactions in their newsfeed. As a brand or business owner there’s surely things you know that your audience would be interested in. You could always invite guests in your niche to answer questions for your audience to keep it interesting.

You could even schedule these as Facebook Lives! Double whammy.

Facebook Groups

This newsfeed update will affect groups to a degree, but they tend to inspire more thoughtful dialogue as people feel safer to share in a group of likeminded people.

Perhaps your brand could benefit from it’s own group?

Facebook Events

As well as groups, events get a lot more interaction than pages. If your brand hosts events you can use them to help keep the interaction from the event off the main page and in one spot where it’s easily manageable, but more importantly you can promote them too (as long as they have more than 15 “attending” responses)

The final one is pretty obvious…

Facebook Ads

There’s a way you can get your important content into the newsfeed. You can pay for it to appear there.

Facebook did announce they were running out of ad inventory, but everything they’ve mentioned so far in this newsfeed update hasn’t included ads.

But don’t be fooled into thinking you can just boost a post that wasn’t written with your audience in mind and achieve success.

I think this newsfeed update has made sure we all know Facebook is getting serious about the social aspect of Social Media, and with potentially more brands moving into the paid realm, ads may get more expensive.

Over to you readers, what do you think? Have you seen any changes on your newsfeed yet? I’d love to know!

Facebook Zero | OMG! | Algorithm Armageddon

Facebook Zero, the algorithm armageddon!

If you use Social Media for promoting your business, chances are you follow a couple (if not tonnes) of Social Media related publishers, and you would no doubt have seen a huge reaction from the community about the latest announcement from Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg (below) where he states they’ll be changing the way they select posts to display to users in the newsfeed.

This update is stated to prioritise user to user interaction and focus on quality of engagement – which appears to mean time spent and meaningfulness, favouring longer, well thought out comments over tagging friends in memes or simple reactions.

Cue freakouts over Facebook page reach.

Facebook seems to be taking aim at the passiveness of users simply scrolling the newsfeed and not interacting, and publishers – including those looking to game the system with engagement bait (which Facebook announced they were cracking down on a couple of weeks back)

BUT there’s so much we don’t know!

Facebook Zero – Really?

Social Media Examiner was one of the first (naturally as probably the most well know Social Media publisher) to get vocal and ask if this was “Facebook Zero” in an 11 minute live video (below)

Would pages get any organic reach? Are we all doomed to the naughty corner? Are our Facebook pages going to be put out on the lawn with the big TVs and DVD players?

Let’s just calm down and look at what we know for a sec, which to be honest isn’t much.

If you’ve been in this world a while you know for a fact every time the newsfeed algo is tweaked people lose their minds, and each time we adjust, measure, test, refine and evaluate our accounts to try and work out a way to stay relevant and SEEN by our target audience, followers and fans – both organically and using paid distribution.

Let’s remember we all use Facebook differently!

You get the newsfeed you deserve.

I have quoted this before, a friend of mine said it to me once and it’s so true. If you hate your newsfeed – I’m sorry to say you did that to yourself. There’s so many options to unfollow people who annoy you, unfriend people you have no interest in, hit “see first”on pages and people you like, and generally reacting to things you’re actually interested in.

Facebook’s smart at figuring out what we like – but it’s not flawless. If you hate cats – stop tagging your friends in cat videos. Facebook thinks you like cats and will show you more cat content, pretty simple right? If you want to know more about the newsfeed read my post here.

You see, Facebook’s ONE JOB is to learn what you like and optimise your experience to that so it can keep you on the platform longer. Mainly to serve more ads (to make more money) but also to make sure you aren’t using the other platforms (except Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp since it owns those)

But so what, Carma? What’s this got to do with this new Facebook Zero announcement?

The curated newsfeed

I, and probably many other Social Media Marketers might not be typical users – but we know one thing, and that is that Facebook has made a pretty big assumption in the basis for this update: that we want to see more content from our friends in our newsfeeds. For me this is not the case (soz friends)

People think the newsfeed has become a crowded place for ads and page updates, and they aren’t seeing enough posts from the people they care about. I don’t find this the case, as I’d rather read a breaking story from ABC News than another “creative” engagement, pregnancy or gender reveal announcement.

Adam Barrell of The StoryLab Perth put it this way:

Facebook used to be about sharing your whole life and connecting with friends. Now more than ever Facebook is used to engage with pages and publishers. People want to explore and find new things to read and engage with.

When I want to engage with friends and family I use messenger to share photos, articles and arrange catch ups.

Wasn’t Facebook meant to make the world more open? And now Zuck is telling us we’d much prefer seeing posts from friends and family the most?

Just make a Tab/filter that users can select to just see friend posts – don’t go changing the algorithm again.

 

Good point! Bit hard to connect the world, when people wont accept a friend request from people they don’t know…always too many degrees of separation!

 

And Jon Loomer (Facebook Ads Legend from Jon Loomer Digital) described it like so:

Not everyone uses Facebook the same way. I purposefully see more brand and publisher content in my news feed than posts from friends. That’s only partly because I’m an antisocial jerk. But it’s mainly because I care most about political and sports news.

That’s the stuff I actually want to see. I don’t comment on those posts. I don’t provide “long and thoughtful replies.” Will I stop seeing that content?

If I do, that would kind of suck. That would be bad for my Facebook experience.

 

Jon posted a long and very considered post this quote was taken from, you can read the full post here.

 

So why this change?

Facebook has been trying to prompt us, as users – not publishers, to post more original content since this has been declining. Also it’s no secret the kids don’t think Facebook is cool…PLUS they’re running out of ad space.

Facebook knows it needs to tread a very fine line between showing you what you like organically and what advertisers might think you like. This is why better targeted ads with higher relevance scores perform better. As users we accept there’s ads, we just don’t wanna see ads for things we’re not interested in.

In theory this change prompts less but deeper connections to the people we’re friends with, with less page posts cluttering it up, and would help achieve Facebook’s goal of making us feel better mental health wise than passively (maybe obsessively) scrolling our newsfeeds. We’ve all had one friend say they felt happier after quitting Facebook (or Social Media more generally) so essentially it’s a retention strategy.

Will it work?

IMO? No.

For the way this update appears to work (once it’s rolled out – again we don’t really know til it happens) would be based on the fact that people want to post more, or at least the same amount of original content they do now. Your newsfeed will always be full – so if your friends aren’t posting photos, live video, links, events etc then what will make up the rest of your feed?

Page posts and ads, right?

You probably already interact with the people you want to hear from, so their posts will get upweighted, but beyond that who are we going to see posts from? Old high school acquaintances? No thanks (no offence JFSHS class of ’96)

You can leave me with my newsfeed full of tech pages, recipe videos, and Social Media publishers thanks.

But what do you think?

Will this clear up your newsfeed for more friend action? Good or bad? If you’ve got some thoughts drop a comment, I’d love to know!

Facebook Sound Collection | New Facebook Feature

Listen Up!

Facebook’s got a new featiure and not everyone has it yet – so I’m going to show it to you. Have you heard of Facebook Sound Collection? Neither had I, but I was doing to scheduling this morning and I stumbled across it in my page menu and decided to take a look.

It’s a library of sounds – both track and souns effects and you can download them to add to your content. Awesome!

I wondered if I was the first to discover it – so a quick Google search said that I was about a day behind – but none of the articles I read on Facebook Sound Collections had any screenshots of what it actually looked like.

Welcome to Facebook Sound Collection

Facebook Sound Collection

 

Thanks Facebook! So polite, happy to be here 🙂

How do you get there?

Facebook Sound Collection

In my page it’s under Publishing Tools, but there could be other ways to navigate straight there.

Then What?

You’ll notice it in the menu:

Facebook Sound Collection

 

So what’s it got?

Facebook Sound Collection

Sound Collection is literally a collection of sounds. It’s got 1,00 Tracks (I expect they’ll keep adding to it) in 24 Generes and 21 Moods. Then there’s also Sound Effects broken up into 17 Categories and lengths of between 2sec to 30sec+.

For some reason there’s more different zipper noises than you’d think were required…

Anyway as you can see above you can play the track or download it to your device.

But how is this useful?

Well if you’ve ever uploaded video and had it rejected by Facebook for the audio breaching copyright then Facebook Sound Collection is a good way to get around that as the tracks have been pre-approved.

Although many of us use Facebook with the sound off, anyone who’s ever consumed content knows that the right sound track can make all the difference. I’m seeing this new feature as another commitment by Facebook to removing the barriers of users to create high quality original video content.

Or is this just a play for Spotify’s business?

I guess we’ll see…

have you got Facebook Sound Collection yet? What do you think? Will you use it?

 


Want to read more?

Read Facebook’s announcement.
Endgadget’s post
Techcrunch’s post

My 2017 Digital Marketing Predictions

Everyone’s doing a 2017 Digital Marketing Prediction post!

Which is fine because none of us can see into the future, we can only make guesses as to where Digital Marketing will grow (and where it won’t) so we can try to focus our attention in the right places to maximise returns.

Here’s my big three Digital Marketing predictions:

BOTS

Bots are only going to get bigger. More and more businesses will engage bots to take some of the heavy lifting from their digital customer service. If you’re not sure what a bot is you can check out this article from CNET. Chances are you’ve spoken to a bot before, you might have known it wasn’t a human, or you may not have. Bots will continue to improve and will be used by more companies world-wide.

LIVE

People love live. I think partly because we’re so sick of the falseness of Social Media, lies of politicians, and stagedness of infomercials – and partly our FOMO and our desire to be the first to know. We want to see something NOW and we want to see it how it REALLY IS. Live video gives us both of these. The way people used to flock to their Twitter feed when a news story broke, will now be the way people rush to find someone live on Facebook or Instagram (or perhaps Twitter – who knows, they did announce a new live feature)

VIDEO

Video and live go together, but there’s also another aspect I wanted to touch on. Explainer video is going to get bigger. Businesses that couldn’t afford video production will bite the bullet and get animated or stop motion videos on their websites and social channels. I must say I’m not the hugest fan of my Facebook newsfeed being full of video. But I have a weakness for those stop motion recipe videos. You know the ones…you see them on pages like Thrillist, Tasty etc. like this handy cocktail recipe below.

You can see by the views I’m not the only one who loves these. As well as my top three Digital Marketing Predictions, here’s some other aspects of Digital Marketing that will stand the test of time:

Customer Journey Mapping

Basically this just means tracking your customers through their buying journey with you. Which pages of your website did they land on first? Next? How many visits before a purchase?  What prompted them to buy that final time? The more of this type of data you have the more streamlined you can make this buyer journey, essentially increasing your conversions.

Email Marketing

I sometimes cop shit about my views on Email Marketing – but it works and I stand by that. There’s a reason it’s the only service I offer outside Social, and not only is it effective, but it’s Social’s best friend. Businesses would be smart to continue to capture emails, and to improve their automation and segmentation to make sure the right people are seeing the right messages at the right times.

Authenticity

As mentioned above, people are a bit sick of “fakeness” and want to see the ‘real you’ of your business. You’ll stand out of you embrace what makes you different, rather than try to be like the others. Go live, post behind the scenes, people will appreciate the glimpse into your real world.[/fusion_text][fusion_text]

Platforms I think worth the investment in 2017:

LINKEDIN

I think LinkedIn is getting better. The app works better, and although there’s some glaringly obvious problems with LinkedIn I do think it’s a worthwhile use of your Social Media time allowance.

INSTAGRAM

Instagram will go from strength to strength, regardless of what people think about its copycatting of Snap. It’s easy to use, it’s growing it’s user base rapidly and for the most part it’s a very positive platform in terms of overall sentiment. In short people just enjoy being on Instagram, so it will develop in 2017, and it completely worth your time invested.

FACEBOOK

Facebook cops a lot of flack, but when you think about where it came from, and how it found an untapped need and embedded itself into our lives it’s actually quite remarkable. Facebook is not going anywhere in 2017. Sure, it’ll make some moves to clean up the “fake news” stories (or at least appear to) and hopefully there won’t be anymore ‘metrics fails’ we have to endure, but in general we’ll get more and more features trying to keep us happily spending time on the platform so they can sell more ads. And the ads will get better too.

Instagram and Facebook appear to be moving together – great news for marketers, and I think this will continue. With the combined inbox feature now rolling out, the upkeep on two platforms gets easier removing the need for people to choose between them.

SNAP (But only if your target market are under 30)

Snap (formerly Snapchat) is already a HUGE platform and I think it’s a great place to showcase your products on the following 2 conditions.

1 – You GET it:

Don’t think that any normal ads you’ve done anywhere else are going to work here. They wont. Understand the platform and how it’s used. Make something that suits it, that speaks the language and it could be a great success.

2 – Your target demo are young people:

Don’t get me wrong, I know people who are older than the main Snap demo who use and love it, but they are an exception. If your brand is not appealing to young users don’t even bother.

Things I think (hope) will decrease in popularity:

Vanity Metrics

Seriously, stop it. Your likes don’t mean anything (past a certain couple of set-up stages) A post that gets a lot of comments but contradicts what your brand is about is still a shitpost. So stop shitposting!

Marketing like it’s 2012

See above and add in all the tricks used to make people interact with content. They don’t work anymore. The only thing that works is knowing your market, having a strategy, and working on it consistently.

Booma-bounce

I don’t know what you call these so I gave them a name that’s as stupid as they are. Please stop doing a bounce on Boomerang! Fine if it’s your personal account (not really – but you do you) but I personally can’t stand them. Boomerang is awesome for certain things, jumping into a pool for example, anything that flows one way can look cool in reverse, but your cutesy bounce does not look cool. Sorry – it just doesn’t, and I like to think I’m that type of friend who tells you if there’s something in your teeth.

What will improve:

Customer Service

Customer service on Social is going to get better. Small businesses are doing a great job these days at getting back to you with helpful information about their products and services. The big end of town also does ok, since they can afford a team to handle the bulk. But there’s a big middle here. Improved technology like bots will definitely help the customer service aspect of Digital Marketing.

Not only that, but user journeys should improve too, becoming more personalised (again due to improved technology) and therefore reduce the need for people to reach out via Social channels.

Corporates “getting it”

There’s a growing number of businesses that are getting it. They know their Digital Marketing needs a strategy, metrics, time, effort and money to achieve their business goals. The more this is understood the better the marketers servicing these needs can be at their job, as they get back to the business of doing, rather than arguing about how to make your post “go viral” or some other cool thing my cousin’s friends’ sister did that made her totally Insta-famous.

Overall?

The early adopters are going great. They may need a refresher on their strategy – but these guys knew digital was here to stay and they got to build audiences back when it was easier (and free) Businesses like this will continue to go from strength to strength whether they outsource or have in-house digital teams.

The middle gets bigger. Just like all of us, the middle is expanding! Some of the previously mentioned early adopters may have dropped behind, being hoodwinked by a smooth-talking salesman, or simply not found reward for their efforts. Similarly there’s small businesses working really hard on their digital marketing and not yet reaping the rewards. This middle level of digital success is where most businesses will find themselves.

The newbies are either new businesses competing for a share of the spoils; or businesses that thought investing in digital marketing was a fad, a waste of money, not ‘right’ for their business, or were just too risk averse to put themselves out there. I think the second group are the ones to watch. The reluctant. The begrudging. The haters of change…I think we might be in for some surprises from some of these tortoises. He did beat the hare after all!

So? What did you think of my 2017 Digital Marketing Predictions?

Do you agree? Disagree? Have your own Digital Marketing predictions I didn’t mention? I’d love to hear from you. Drop me a comment 🙂

Engage Bali by Socialbakers: Part Two – The Main Event

Engage Bali Day Two

If you just want a “feel” for what Engage Bali was like I recommend you watch the video above.

In the below sections I’m summarising what I thought the main points of each speaker was, and it’s quite long, since there were so many. I have included as many links to videos and slideshows if you want to drill down into any of the speakers content. And I’ll update as more becomes available.

Strap yourself in – we’re going to Bali![/fusion_text][fusion_text]Day Two of Engage Bali started pretty much the same as the previous day, waking up in paradise and having a quick breakfast. I wish now I had’ve taken photos of the breakfast options! I’ve been to a lot of different countries around the world but never before seen a breakfast spread like this one. I was missing normal coffee though…

Day Two of Engage Bali was to be made up of 17 speakers and 4 panel discussions, followed by networking and dinner. On a humid Saturday, when your body clock is telling you you can take it easy (not saying I don’t work Saturdays – I freelance after all, which includes regular weekend work) this was going to be a long day!

I chose a seat in the second row and got prepared to get down to business! First up was Jan Rezab, founder of Socialbakers. The crowd loved him – and so did I![/fusion_text][fusion_text]

Jan Rezab – Founder, Socialbakers

Jan had a treasure trove of stats, tips and tricks for a Social Media nerd like me! Here’s my key takeaways from Jan’s wonderful presentation:

The state of Social:

Brands are growing on Social Media – but Media companies are killing it!

  • Media companies know how to create great content, but you also need to be an ad specialist to get your content seen.
  • Monitor the top 5 Media companies in your market for content trends.

Photos are still the dominant content type.

  • Even with the rise of video, it hasn’t taken over – yet.

Frequency is important:

  • Impressions – Reach = Frequency.

Make sure you stay informed about changes to the Facebook algorithm

Tips, Tricks and Facts:

Make beautiful content

Instagram has regional scale and can kill Snapchat

Video,Video, Video – but don’t measure it but the views!

  • A view is not a good metric. Measure Viewthrough rate (VTR). Organic Vs Paid video have around the same viewthrough rate.
  • Average Snap 1-2 secs. Average FB Video 3-5 secs. Unlink YouTube video no waiting for the ad to finish.
  • 85% of video is played without sound and 95% are autoplays. Not putting captions on your video is a missed opportunity.
  • Brands are beating Media at video VTR

There’s no such thing as a yearly marketing plan anymore.

  • Accept changes/new features and adjust as you go.
  • You can’t fail if you are looking after Customer Care and Engagement. People want help with their issues and problems, they want information.

Jan sees an opportunity for Twitter to become THE customer service channel.

Only 16% of questions asked by consumers on Facebook pages are public!

2016 is the year of Bots!

No-one wants new apps!

  • 65% of people did not open the app store/Google Play store in 2015. That means NO NEW APPS were downloaded.

Can we please stop using fan counts as a metric! It’s 2016 FFS!

Define your goals

Look for the big moments in your Social journey and analyse why they worked.

Watch the video of Jan’s keynote below, or you can also see the slideshare HERE.

Robert Lang – SEO, Socialbakers

Next was Robert Lang, CEO of Socialbakers. Here are my takeaways from Robert’s presentation:

Is the term “Social Media” outdated?

I think so, although I’ve been thinking about it for ages and I haven’t come up with an alternative I think covers the whole scope of what Social Media means to us.

Did you know Facebook’s 2015 revenue was $80 BILLION?

Whoa.

AND they have 60% of the market share! Measuring “time in platform” Facebook is leading the game.

Is Tinder a Social Media platform?

I don’t consider it one – but I haven’t used it so I’m open to feedback from others.

Will 2016 see the end of free Social Media?

I mean, it’s already happening…but I think we’ve got a little bit longer to go on some platforms.

Facebook judges the quality of your content every time you post or advertise.

How RELEVANT is your content to the target market? We know ds have relevancy scores, but we can assume ALL content have this same hierachy to reach the newsfeed. Content is rated by Facebook (and perhaps also Instagram) uy the first 100 impressions. Has anyone interacted with it? Clicked, reacted, commented, shared…? If not it’s not likely to be shown to any more people as your content is deemed to be of low quality.

Don’t boost bad content! EVER.

If you think you’ll get more engagement by boosting awful posts or making terrible ads – you’re incorrect. You will actually damage your pages overall relevancy score. Maybe it’s time to spring clean your history?

Connect Social Media to your business objectives

Period. Otherwise what is the point?

Focus on producing quality content and posting it at the correct times (Socialbakers can help you with that)

Be Bold and invest in things that work with your audience.

You can see the slideshare of Roberts presentation HERE

Sabeen Ahmad, Director of Digital Strategy – Publicis

Sabeen Ahmad was next. Sabeen is the Director of Digital Strategy at Publicis, and she had a lot to share. This is probably why she had to talk so fast to fit it all in!

I really enjoyed Sabeen’s presentation and meeting her afterwards! She was one of the wonderful examples of women smashing it in the digital marketing field, which is an inspiration to me personally.

Think Social, Act Global.

Sabeen took as through the AT&T campaign #catchjeremy as an example of how you can stage a stunt, with Social Media as the hub, and use it as advertising that’s global, relatable and effective.

Here are my main takeaways, but as I said there was a LOT of content covered – so please check out the slideshare which I’ll link to at the bottom of this section.

Everything is a business problem.

What is my brand trying to achieve?

The 5 Questions make an appearance again:

  • Why are you doing this?
  • Who is your audience?
  • Where are they?
  • What do they like?
  • How do you reach them?

Make a plan – use all the tools at your disposal.

  • Step into your customers life. The more you understand the better you can market.
  • Track the customer journey
  • Use influencers
  • Decide on the metrics you’ll measure
  • Create content that achieves your goals

Keep your efforts Efficient and effective.

Check out the slideshare HERE.

Daniel Morel, Chairman & Global CEO – Wunderman (retired)

Daniel Morel, retired Chairman & Global CEO of Wunderman was next up – and although his presentation wasn’t strictly about Social Media it was definitely one of my favourites! He’s a veteran of business strategy, and had some awesome insights!

Daniel’s favourite number is nine and so he made nine points in his speech.

Do you want to be RIGHT or do you want to be ELECTED?

1- Aim low and say yes to everything

2- The formula – don’t make (too many) enemies!

S = 100 – (Nb year x P)

P < 1%

S > 80%

For those of us not mathematically inclined – For every year of business you can piss off 1% of your colleagues and still work with 80% of them.

3- If you aren’t the lead dog, the view is always the same (bums of the lead dogs)

4- Out of many – one

E pluribus unum. “we must hang together, or we will assuredly hang separately.” Ben Franklin on signing the declaration of independence. Build consensus, otherwise you can’t win.

5- Don’t be a Lady Mary

This is a Downton Abbey reference that was a bit lost on me, but the meaning is business MUST be predictable.

6- Amateurs discuss strategy. Professionals study logistics.

I love this one! It’s all well and good to have a grand plan – but it has to be able to work.

7- Leadership is not about being liked

Leadership is defined by results, not attributes. People follow results.

8- Leading from the front

Leadership doesn’t kill you. Engage – give your pound of flesh.

9- Data Monster

Be aware of the amount of data, and who’s feeding the data monster.

Lars Silberbauer – Global Director of Social Media & Search, LEGO

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Everyone knows of LEGO. We all know the pleasure of creating with it, and the pain of stepping on one. Their Social Media is amazing, and a fantastic case study for marketers who are looking to entertain and delight their audience, and encourage fans to share photos and become brand advocates.

Lars Silberbauer was definitely a big drawcard for me to attend EngageBali. I wanted to know more about LEGO’s Social strategy, and the man who was behind it. You can watch the video below – his slides are really good, and well worth the watch!

LEGO, Lars explained, produce a lot of content, they’d want to- they’re the world’s most watched brand (on YouTube)! The aim of this content is to engage the creativity of people, and prompt them to share it. LEGO are a 24/7 operation who have diversified their team around the globe to make sure they are always available to their fans. Lars also explained that one of the reasons this works so well is that global brand need diversity. We are a mixed bunch, us humans – and you’ve heard the saying “takes one to know one” right? When building teams make sure you have diversity in mind. They also don’t let people loose on their Social channels without them first gaining their Social Media Drivers License.

Lars explained that having a connection to your customers was like a relationship.  LEGO wants to hold you! They aren’t here for a fling. They want to be in your life. He has an interesting definition of Social Media: “Social media is nothing…but a set of technologies that enhances our social nature” It’s all about PEOPLE.

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When people build with LEGO, they want to share their pride in their creations. Lucky LEGO, having an awesome, long standing brand people just love to love.

But what are their goals? LEGO has a two-pronged approach, Monetisation & Brand Strategy, and Lowering Cost & Minimising Risk.

Lars then took us through his $100 marketing campaign. He decided to spend $100 to prove that even as a market leader you need paid Social as part of your strategy. I won’t go into the strategy of this campaign, you can see the video if you’re interested in finding out what happened to George.

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Then he went on the explain the Kronkiwongi. What an excellent example of getting people to change the way they think of and use your product! I loved hearing about this campaign!

Parents were thinking of LEGO as a set you buy, with instructions of how to build the bricks inside the package, into the picture on the outside of the package. Because, as Lars explained,  once you’re 3 years old, your creativity levels only decrease. Our imagination gets stale, because we stop using it as much. But kids know better! LEGO asked children to build a Kronkiwongi. And they did. You have to see the video, even if it’s just for this part (it starts at 17.49) LEGO worked closely with Facebook on this campaign, and sent Kronkiwongi kits to influencers in the space. This was a very successful campaign, but at the end of the day, it’s not all about metrics, or money. It’s about PEOPLE.

Lars’ top tips on Social Media:

  • It’s about creating relationships – no one night stands!
  • There’s no trick or short cuts
  • It’s a lot of hard work that needs to be:

Timely

Relevant

Brave

Personal

  • Don’t just invest your money – invest yourself.

I’d thoroughly recommend following LEGO’s Social accounts, and seeing how they engage their fans. This was truly one of my favourite parts of the day, and indeed of the whole conference!

You can also see him appear on the Panel Discussion too.

Nina Spannari – Head of Digital, Canon (Australia)

Firstly – Nina is just like the rest of us (a LEGO fan) and presented Lars with a Canon camera made from LEGO! Marketing genius.

I really enjoyed Nina’s presentation. Another wonderful woman in the digital field, doing inspiration work for a global brand!

Whether you are aware of Canon Australia’s Social accounts, one look will show you there’s a lot of success there. They have an engaged fan base, who love the product and love to interact with the brand. But its more than that. If you are a bit of a photog, you’ll know camera brands are very important to people. If your Australian think Holden V Ford, people have a favourite and they’ll defend their choice – and I don’t think this has waned much with the rise of smartphone cameras. Nina addressed people’s constant access to photo taking technology (I’m not calling your phone’s camera a camera, it just isn’t) by saying “the best camera is the one that’s on you” Fair enough!

So since mobile technology is stealing our “quiet times” what a great strategy to position your SLR camera as a way of getting them back! Switch off, disconnect, and let your lense follow a rabbit into wonderland. Canon is your companion in this, nurturing the creative process.

They focus (lol!) on the post purchase experience, develop (another lol) love, skills and the relationship you have with your camera – and the brand! The 3 key pillars of Social Media according to Nina are:

  • Inspire
  • Enable
  • Celebrate

She then discussed some of their campaigns. The first was about content Curation.

“No one sees it like you” doubled their Instagram following in 12 months, adding around 8k each month during the campaign, eliciting an average of 9k interactions per day on Instagram alone, and 1k views on YouTube every hour (With Jan’s advice from earlier in the day it would be interesting to see the VTR for this) so I’d say that was pretty effective! If you haven’t seen it you should check out their Instagram, it’s pretty bloody good!

Nina showed us some video I have been unable to locate about Canon’s collaboration with Perth prominent photographer Jarrad Seng, and a beautiful campaign where photographers are briefed to create a scene from either a child’s imagination or a dream (I cant quite remember which)

I also had the pleasure of meeting Nina, who’s a lovely lady that was also missing “proper” coffee 🙂

See the slides here, and if the video goes up I’ll update to include that too!

Veronica McGregor – News and Social Media, NASA

Veronica McGregor is the brains behind the Social of NASA. Let’s just stop and think about what that means. Do you follow NASA on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or elsewhere? If the answer is no then you should definitely open another tab and check them out, right now! Unless amazing photos from the depths of space aren’t your thing.

NASA is obviously in a world of its own as far a content goes. No-one else has images of Jupiter’s moons, and their content is never going to be stale either, it’s always advances in their technology, or their missions so their content team is probably spoilt for choice!

There’s so much great information in this presentation, and I’m sure you’ll want to watch it for yourself, so I’m going to keep my wrap-up brief. I’m just going to tell you the two things that really stood out to me about what Veronica shared with us, and that is:

100% of NASA’s Social is Organic.

One. Hundered. Percent. Now even with what I said earlier about their unique content that’s still pretty amazing. Their Social is ALL in-house and none of it is sponsored. The sheer scale of their accounts are amazing, and to have not ever paid a dollar – well, that’s awesome.

People Power took over during the Government Shutdown

During the Government shutdown NASA was one of the departments that had to stop working. So they were unable to update their Social channels, so what happened? Their fans took over, and posted on their behalf! You know you’ve got an engaged audience when they’re willing to step up and fill the void!

You can find out more about how this happened in the video. It’s pretty amazing.

On a personal note Veronica was a lovely lady, another fantastic example of women in our field being awesome. She stood for selfies, (a LOT of them, including one with me) gave out stickers, (yep! I got one) and made herself available to everyone. I invited her to Perth and have said I’ll drive her to GinGin Observatory, (which she knew of, apparently they had helped out from time to time when they need someone in the Southern Hemisphere) if she takes up my offer.

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The you can see the slides here!

Piotr Jakubowski – Chief Marketing Ojek, GO-JEK

Piotr Was fantastic! I don’t know that much about Indonesia, but the examples of the campaigns his business was running really touched me. They were emotional, but not in a sickly sweet way. They showed what seemed to be a very real side of life in Indonesia, and  told the story of GO-JEK, a service similar to Uber.

There’s not a lot of relevant facts and figures for you to take away from this one. It more cuts to the heart of what good marketing is – and that’s real. They develop a real connection, to real people. They know their market so they aren’t afraid to be open and honest about who they are.

You can check out the slides here.

Beverly Jackson – VP, Social Media Marketing and Content Strategy, MGM Resorts International

Beverley Jackson is another fine example of females leading the way in the business of Social Media. She explained through her presentation the logistics of one of MGM’s current marketing challenges. Shifting demographics. She told us about a hotel that MGM is redeveloping, that has an older market – but the refurbishment will attract a much younger one with different interests. The challenge of keeping both groups engaged while the build is complete so they can continue to trade during the transformation is a tough one!

She explained a campaign they had done where they made a group of young Scottish lads enjoying a birthday trip, where they completely made the trip with free concert tickets, and other surprises to make the birthday a trip to remember, and gain customer advocacy for life!

There’s some amazing nuggets of wisdom in Beverly’s speech. Including that you can die from lack of entertainment, and her content mixologist recipe is pretty awesome too! But the main takeaways from her presentation are to define your goals, purpose and objective – and create your campaigns around them.

Be true to your brand, and over-communicate to your fans.

And finally – credibility silences noise.

Dennis Owen – Group Manage Social Media, Cathay Pacific

Time to get serious for a minute, do you have a Social Media Crisis Management Plan? Well, you’re going to wish you did, and probably make it an agenda item in your next marketing meeting after reading about the presentation from Dennis Owen from Cathay Pacific.

Dennis explained to us an issue that happened on board a Cathay Pacific plan. All ended well, but it doesn’t always – which is why you need your plans in place to kick in the minute a crisis starts.

He explained how Social Media has changed the game when it come to crisis management, where you used to issue a press release, or hold a press conference – now you must be social-first. The reason for this is that people involved in the crisis will most likely be publicising the event live. Your crisis or communications team might not even know about the issue until your Social Media monitoring picks it up! So you start already on the back foot.

So here’s some things to know from Dennis:

The crisis will pass – but the Social proof that it happened never will. What’s on the internet stays on the internet.

Be social-first with your responses.

Know who was first to “break” the story and try to get to them. That’s where the media will be heading – so get there first and control the narrative as best you can.

Communicate, communicate, communicate! The comms are more important than the crisis itself (from a brand point of view, obviously not to the victims…)

Have a plan in place and implement it quickly.

Find an expert to advocate. They have more credibility than your brand in a crisis. Shut down speculation, it’s the enemy!

He also had some tips for building up your Social Media Crisis Toolbox:

Check how other businesses in your industry have dealt with crises.

Make a checklist. You will be busy and distracted at the time. You need to have a list!

Don’t create a second crisis with the handling of your crisis.

Hit Social first!

Monitor and respond in real time is appropriate

Test and learn!

Unfortunately there aren’t any slides or a video of Dennis’ presentation. But it got me thinking. How many of you have a crisis management plan?

Michael Bouda – Senior Brand Manager, Jägermeister

I’m not really going to go into this one in much detail as I found the content a bit too ‘dude-bro’ for me, which is not a reflection on the campaign, more than the fact that I am so far removed from this demographic.

The one thing I will state though is that I really liked the way this brand invented it’s own influencers. It’s a tough ask, advertising alcohol in Australia (compared with many other countries, and especially in WA) and I thought the invention of the cartoon “pack” and the positioning of them as influential was quite genius if intentional, and incredibly well handled if it happened by accident.

It would be interesting to see if this sort of campaign could work for other brands, and how it might have differed had it have been a female demographic with similar content.

Tanbir Rahman – Head of Digital, Huawei Technologies

Tanbir Rahman spoke to us about launching a product, the P9 Huawei smartphone – using Social Media. He had some excellent insights and the slides are also available here.

Paul Moore – Head Content Producer, Tennis Australia

Paul Moore talked about producing content for one of the world’s biggest sporting events.

Roy Simangunsong – Country Business Head, Twitter

Roy Simangunsong talks about how companies can use Twitter, and gives examples from the local Indonesian market. See the slides here.

Wrap up…

I hope you’ve enjoyed my wrap-up of the days speakers! There was so much going on that I haven’t covered absolutely everything – I just hope I’ve done the event justice. It really was an amazing few days in an amazing setting!

If you want to get some more info leave me a comment, or better yet – stay tuned to Socialbakers and make sure you go to their next conference, whether that’s #EngageBali (I would DEFINITELY go back if they do another Bali event) or one of their others.

I also wanted to say a quick thank you to the Socialbakers team for looking after me. Sometimes events can be a bit awkward when you’re by yourself, especially in between the formal schedule! The Socialbakers team made sure I was included in everything, and they were so nice and helpful that I really felt like we’d known each other for ages!

I also met some wonderful people, not just the speakers mentioned in this epically long blog post – but regular folks slogging it out in the Social realm for various agencies and businesses in different parts of the Asian Pacific region.

My next mission is to get some feedback from some of them to add to my own, so stay tuned!

I hope to see you in Bali 2017!

LinkedIn: Now More Than A Digital Resume

LinkedIn has moved on from being thought of as a ‘digital resume’ where people only log in to update their skills when searching for a new role.

These days it’s a great place to publish your original content! It’s a must if you’re trying to build your personal brand and position yourself as a thought leader in your field.

Most of you would have a LinkedIn profile, and have probably at one time or another posted a status update.  If you do it regularly, that’s awesome! You’re already half way there. You know who’s who in your sector. You already have connections and followers.

Use LinkedIn Published Posts to extend this to building influence beyond your connections. Published posts go to LinkedIn’s Pulse platform. Here they can be swept up and read and shared by anyone, whether they follow you or not! And not only that, each time you publish a post your own connections will receive a notification that you did so, encouraging them to come and check it out.

Top Tip: Use tagging. People on Pulse don’t follow you necessarily – they follow subjects that interest them. Think about your tags carefully, you are only allowed 3.

LinkedIn also has a product called Slideshare where you can post publications. These are similar in essence to the old PowerPoint Publications but more image-focused. You can publish your own LinkedIn Slideshare content and depending on the quality and category can be seen by tens to hundreds of thousands of people. Pretty cool huh?

Top Tip: Use content that has performed well as a blog post and re-create as a Slideshare. It’s a bit of work to make them look good and you don’t want to risk it on un-tested content.

LinkedIn Groups can be a great place to publish valuable content to your industry peers. Just make sure it’s a group in which you contribute to the discussion, dropping in to post a link to your latest post is considered a bit rude if that’s all you ever do.

Top Tip: Seriously, don’t be that guy who drops in once a week to post a link to their latest article – the rest of the group secretly hates you.

LinkedIn Pages are a good way for your company to have a business profile on LinkedIn, and your content can be shared there. LinkedIn Pages have a post max of 400 characters, so not really any good for articles – just a blurb and a link with an eye-catching image is all you need. If it’s not your company you’ll need to submit your article to the page admin/s to post for you should they deem it appropriate to come from their corporate voice.

Top Tip: You can advertise from LinkedIn Pages. Targeting examples that work well include roles within industries, i.e. Assistant Manager in Human Resources.

Whether you choose LinkedIn as a place to publish original content or not, you can add your links under publications on your profile. This way people will be able to find them if they are LinkedIn stalking you; which they will if you start getting some attention.

Top Tip: You can set your LinkedIn to private so when you stalk people your name is not listed, however this might not be the best idea. The first thing you do when someone checks out your profile – is look at theirs in return!

These are my top no-fuss tips to using LinkedIn for your personal branding. Do you have any to add? I’d love to hear your feedback!

What Are Hashtags and Why Should I Care?

What is a Hashtag for anyway?

A hashtag is used to group information by topic. They make searching easier and can elevate your reach on Social Media, making your content more easily found by people outside of your current followers!

Hashtags join your content (posts, tweets & grams) to a wider conversation! You could find fans, enthusiasts, influencers and more – but even better, they can find you. So the more the merrier, right? Not exactly.

Let’s look at how hashtags are used on different Social Media platforms.

Twitter

Hashtags are at home on Twitter. They belong there. Tweets without hashtags are pretty much ignored. There are some conventions you will need to keep in mind though.

Twitter is a busy place. You have 140 characters to make your point so you have to do it without any anything unnecessary – no frills! It can be tough to get your point across in such a brief manner, so it’s common for people to use Twitter to link to longer-form content. That link takes up some of your characters.

Tweets with photos perform better as they stand out in the newsfeed. But that photo is also going to eat away at your character limit too!

Mentioning people you think will like and respond to your content is a good way to get your tweets seen, but there’s even more characters used. Suddenly your message needs to fit into a smaller and smaller space. How can you let people know what your tweet is about?

Hashtags!

If your tweet refers to an industry, sector, or topic use those as a hashtag. This means people looking for information about that topic (who may have never heard of you) can still discover your tweet. If that tweet links to your blog or website – they can click through and read your content! You have gained a web visitor and potentially a new customer.

Some other things you can do with hashtags on Twitter:

  • Consider using your brand or product name – that way all your tweets are linked
  • Create unique event hashtags & promote these for people who like to ‘live tweet’
  • Be funny or convey tone

There are 3rd party tools to help you make better use of hashtags.

You can monitor a hashtag to see tweets that contain it, this can be used to keep tabs on your brand reputation, your competitors, your industry trends etc. Examples of free programs you can set up hashtag feeds are Tweetdeck & Hootsuite.

You can check for the popularity of hashtags, letting you see how likely your tweet will be found. You’ll need to find a hashtag popular enough but not saturated; try RiteTag or Hashtagify.me for this.

Chameleon’s top tips:

  1. Use an image in your tweets and 3 hashtags max. This will help extend reach without people ignoring it for looking spammy.
  2. Use third-party tools to help your understanding of hashtags and monitor those relevant to your niche

Instagram

Another place hashtags are at home is on Instagram!

Instagram has a much meatier character limit of 2200, but it’s a visual platform – so just because they are available to be used doesn’t mean you need to use them all. Your image selection matters much more than your caption, as after all that’s all it is, a caption to give context to your image.

Hashtags on Instagram have the same purpose as they do on Twitter, for the ease of search as they group posts by topic. Many Instagram users spend the majority of their time on the platform searching hashtags to see the latest and greatest in whatever they’re interested in.

So you can express yourself more freely on Instagram – plus you can use up to 30 hashtags! Again, don’t feel the need to use 30 just because you can, make them relevant to the photo and your niche. Brands will tend to post their hashtags in a comment under their caption to keep them a bit more ‘out of the way’ of users.

You can also use popular for sharing – say you’re in Perth, WA and you post a great photo of Perth, you could tag #soperth or #perthisok as they are large accounts that re-post tagged content. Getting your post re-posted (called a regram) can really raise your profile on he platform. There are plenty of accounts that share curated content and you should look into this as part of your hashtag homework.

Similar tools exist for Instagram hashtags, but there’s not as much choice as with Twitter. Hashtagify.me is good for looking up Instagram hashtags and seeing which ones have been used in conjunction with the ones you are using.

As with Twitter it makes sense to use a hashtag for your company or product. Do a search first to make sure it’s unique.

[bctt tweet=”Research & use Instagram hashtags that relate to your brand, your photo & your niche. Steer away from spammy ones like ‘instagood’ or ‘followme’ #instagram #hashtags” username=”carmalevene”]

Chameleon’s Top Tip: Research and use Instagram hashtags that relate to your brand, your photo and your niche, and steer away from the spammy ones like #instagood #followme etc.

Facebook

Facebook was slow to embrace hashtags, it was never really considered a place where you would do a lot of searching. More commonly people use Facebook’s newsfeed to connect with their friends and family – not to research brands or topics.

You can use hashtags on Facebook and they do still serve the same purpose as the other platforms, however people are not as receptive to seeing them and studies show Facebook posts with hashtags receive lower engagement from users.

If you are going to use hashtags in your digital marketing you can use them on Facebook to keep consistency. I use them from time to time but always leave a line break between the copy of the post to make them more ‘ignore-able’ to users.

Chameleon’s Top Tip: If you are going to use hashtags on Facebook, limit it to 3 max and try to put them at the end of your post, not littered throughout as this will put hashtag haters off your post altogether.

Things to remember about hashtags

You can use hashtags on Google+, Pinterest and Tumblr as well. We’re not going to go into further details on those channels in this post – but if you do want to know more about them, leave us a comment, we’d be happy to help you!

Do some research on the channels you want to use for your business, find out if they are hashtag friendly and what the individual conventions are; one tag doesn’t fit all.

Here are some hashtag facts you might like to know:

  • Most platforms don’t allow spaces in hashtags (Tumblr is an exception)
  • Hashtags can’t contain punctuation
  • Spaces must be left between hashtags
  • Hashtags can be tracked for reach using third-party software
  • There are popular hashtags like #TBT (Throwback Thursday) you can search for ones that might apply to your niche

#FAIL

An article on hashtags would be negligent if it didn’t warn you about possible issues with choosing a hashtag. There have been many bad examples!

We’re just going to leave you with probably our favourite – which involved a well-intentioned but badly thought out launch party tweet for a Susan Boyle album.

The hashtag that was chosen made it sound like an entirely different party altogether!

Susan Album Party became:

#susanalbumparty

Which (if you are a little slower on the uptake, or have a very clean mind) became:

Sus Anal Bum Party

The Venn diagram intersection of people who would attend both these parties would be interesting!

If you’re keen on reading more of these fails, there are loads! You can check some of them out in this article. It’s important to learn from other’s mistakes!

Wrapping Up

Hashtags are a great way to join in the conversation – and that’s what Social Media is about, being social! So with some quick research and a bit of care you can use hashtags to increase the reach of your content on Social Media and be found by more people looking for information about your industry.

[bctt tweet=”Hashtags are a great way to join in the conversation – and that’s what Social Media is about, being social! #hashtags #socialmedia” username=”carmalevene”]

We’d love to hear from you!

Did this article help you understand more about what hashtags do and how to use them? Leave us a comment or swing by our socials.

NEW – Local Insights: Find out about the people nearby your business!

I have a new client page that just got access to insights (the tab at the top of your page where you can look at your stats, you need 30 likes to gain access) and noticed something new!

Local Insights!

How many people walk or drive past your business every day? What if you could find out more about who they are?

Well, now you can – thanks to Facebook!

New Local Insights

Here’s where you can find it what it looks like:

local insights

We posted recently that insights had been upgraded. But this is new again. Insights into the Facebook users in a radius of your page!

It’s been broken down into sections; Activity & Peak Hours, Demographic Info and Ad Performance so I’ll go through the information available set by step with some screen shots.

Firstly let’s get a closer look at the map! You can choose a radium of 50 or 150 meters from the address of your business page, so the data is hyper-local. You can choose data from a week, month or quarter to look at.

map

You can see who is the most popular demographic nearby and the busiest time for Facebook foot traffic to the area.

Activity & Peak Hours

With the People Nearby section you can look at hourly, weekly, and historical data plus view your page check-ins. And there’s no surprise there’s a prompt to create a Local Awareness ad here too.

nearby

Demographic Info

Learn more about the demographics of the people (on Facebook) who are in your local area. See their gender, age bracket and whether they are “local” or not to the area. Local is defined as living less than 200km away.

demographics

Ad Performance

As this feature was found on a new page, there’s not much here to really delve into. It can be assumed that this data will allow you to benchmark your Local Awareness campaigns by percentage and improve them with time and testing.

ad performance

Why is this exciting?

Knowing more about the people in your business’ local area can help you make better results from your Social Media efforts. If you know which people are nearby and at what times you can create tailored hyper-local content to attract their attention. You would be able to promote a lunch special, a sale item or a happy hour, for example, to people already in the area at the time.

And if this didn’t get enough traction organically, you could use some advertising budget on expanding your local reach.

Not only can you create hyper-local time sensitive content for your markets, you may be able to make wider business decisions too! Say you are a local pizza store thinking about expanding to open for lunch, you could find out how many people are nearby during that period that fit your diner demographic. Very cool!

With the population becoming more mobile, as marketers we need ways tap into that. It’s less effective to target ads to people who live in the vicinity when you’re only open business hours, as most of them will be at work – being able to target people nearby as they walk past your door with a snappy sales message, a promotion or something that grabs their attention could be a game changer for your business.

Facebook understands this and has started adding features such as this one, which I’m sure will be expanded in the future!

What do you think about this addition to your insights? Would you be more likely to use Local Awareness ads on Facebook now?

Feel free to leave us a comment, or swing by our socials – and as always, if you would like help with setting up your own Local Awareness campaign don’t hesitate to get in touch.