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

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.

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.

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.

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!

September 6, 2016June 2, 2019

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!

August 24, 2016October 31, 2018

The WA Digital Marketing Report 2016 – Stats the way (uh-huh uh-huh) I like it

What’s the state of WA Digital Marketing?

Are you interested in how WA businesses approach their Digital Marketing?

I asked Freddy Hollow from Bang Digital some questions about their annual WA Digital Marketing Report to find out more!

What do you think is significant about the move from top place to third position for Search Marketing?

Well SEO and SM were the old faithful’s and they still have a very important place in the mix, but it indicates a broader acceptance and recognition of Social Media and Email marketing as viable channels. The updates in the FB advertising platform and email automation have likely had a big hand in the jump.

Will Search continue to drop?

I don’t think so, Search, Social, and Email are the core 3 channels that should be the basis of a marketing campaign.

Do you think Video will continue to rise as a content strategy?

Yes, the cost of entry is lowering and it’s such a good method of delivering messages. Like anything, people will need to be creative with it and use it in the right way.

Do you think “Content Marketing” is widely understood in the Business world as a term? Would more people have had that as a response if they were more familiar with the term?

As a general concept it is definitely well known, but I’m not sure if it’s understood correctly. The marketing trends page (7) gives an indication to how Content Marketing is understood by businesses as 52% were planning to utilise content marketing this year so businesses obviously understand that Content Marketing is important.

Generally people think content marketing is social or blogs or videos (which are all great) but really content marketing could be the way you design or format instruction sheets or FAQ’s or a pricing comparison on a product page. These aren’t the exciting things people think of when discussing content marketing, but good content marketing is about providing the right information at the right time during your customer’s (or customer segment/avatar) particular customer journey.

Next year we will definitely add Content Marketing as its own answer to the list on the Marketing Priorities section of the survey.

We’ve seen some of the “Main benefits of digital marketing” responses in the report – what would your response have been?

Trackability – the accuracy in which you can track your results vs spend.
Targeting – the amount of targeting options available through digital channels.
Segmentation & Customization – the ability to segment your audience and then customise the messaging for those specific audience segments
Automation – all of the cool new marketing automation techniques/platforms that can help you do all of the above

All of the “Digital presence” stats for the individual social platforms are up on last year – do you think any will drop next year? Will a new player be introduced in 2017?

I don’t think any will drop and we will add Snapchat into the survey for 2017.

The stats for “Digital marketing spend” are all increasing. Do you think this will continue into 2017? Are some businesses being priced out of the market?

Yes, it will only continue to increase year on year for the foreseeable future. I don’t think businesses are necessarily getting priced out – there are plenty of activities that businesses can utilise themselves and marketing professionals are only getting stronger in this area.

We’ve seen some of the responses to the “Digital challenges facing business” question – what do you think the biggest challenge is as a marketer? What’s the one you hear from clients or your team most often?

Time and understanding seem to be the biggest challenges. The amount of time it takes be across or implement the relevant channels and the understanding of the digital marketing mix. People understand what a tv, print or radio advert is but don’t understand some of the newer digital techniques and channels.

Are WA businesses becoming better at analysing their data from digital marketing?

Yes – we have seen a big jump in the understanding of digital as a whole but definitely an increase in the understanding of Google analytics and key digital marketing metrics.

Do you infer anything else from the survey results about the state of digital marketing in WA in 2016?

Not as something that jumps out – working with clients constantly I’m pretty in tune with how people view digital marketing in WA.

As an agency, how do these stats help you? And how do they benefit your clients?

From us as an agency it’s really positive to see an increased understanding in digital and it also highlights areas that people are interested in, so we can tailor or own content accordingly but really as an agency we are always educating our clients or providing them with recommendations that help their specific business – so although the stats may say that everyone is interested in Video it really depends on each businesses individual situation.

For clients it hopefully it acts as a reference or education piece that helps them plan out their marketing activities or acts as a verification of sorts for their own strategy recommendations.

Freddy Hollow — This is Freddy, Operations Manager at Bang Digital

So there we have it folks! We got a bit of insight beyond what’s available in the report itself, which if you haven’t read in full and would like to make sure you check it out! Thanks so much to Bang Digital for putting together this report every year, it’s so interesting for a stat nerd like myself – and for businesses to see how the rest of the industry is travelling! And a big thanks to Freddy for fitting me into his busy schedule and answering my quesitons!

For those who have read the report – did you have any other questions I didn’t ask? I’d love to read them in the comments!

April 3, 2016October 31, 2018

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:

Use an image in your tweets and 3 hashtags max. This will help extend reach without people ignoring it for looking spammy.
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.

March 4, 2016October 31, 2018

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

April 25, 2015April 10, 2016

Know Your Enemy

Ok, so that’s a bit of dramatic title, we apologies for that – but we really want to stress to our readers that the more they know about the social media platforms they use for their businesses the better their efforts will work.

How can you create good posts, great content and awesome engagement if you don’t know how – or what the users (let’s call them people) are looking for?

To expand: How do you know how to promote your messages on Instagram if you don’t have an account and have never used it? How would you know what content people like, what types of interactions are commonplace, how often to post and what hashtags to use? We know there are loads of great tools out there to help us – but that doesn’t beat knowing.

PLUS you spend your precious time creating these posts – if you don’t make them count it can become a big drain!

So, where do we start?

[bctt tweet=”The Chameleon’s suggest that you have personal profiles on each of the platforms you use or intend to use for your business and suss them out!”]

Do you research and gain advice from the “big guys” like Social Media Examiner, Moz, and your favourite Thought Leaders in social so you stay up to date with trends and feature updates.

If it’s a new platform – maybe ask a millennial 😉

We’re going to start with a quick couple of things about Facebook, which will hopefully help you understand how you can improve your business page!

1) You have a Facebook email address

You have a facebook email address which is yourname@facebook.com and it’s how messaging works.

2) Saving Posts

You can save posts to read later!

Ever seen something in your newsfeed you wanted to read but couldn’t at the time you saw it? Well you can click on the right arrow of posts that contain links (and some others) and click “Save Link” to add it to your “Saved” listing on the left hand side of your timeline. One of our chameleon’s described it in detail here.

[bctt tweet=”Did you know you can save posts on Facebook to read later?”]

3) Interest Lists

have a particular interest or hobby you like to read about? Find all the best content on that subject in the one place with Interest Lists. Create a list and then add pages or people who have relevant content! This gives you a whole new newsfeed just of those accounts you added about what you’re interested in!

A great way to stay up to date in what you like – and an awesome way to curate content for your page.

[bctt tweet=” Find all the best content on that subject in the one place with Facebook Interest Lists!”]

4) See & Manage your Facebook Ad Settings

Ironically you can only get to this from an ad, and when you’re looking for one it’s harder to find them – the rest of the time they seem to be everywhere!

Find out why you get targeted by advertisers on Facebook in a blog post a chameleon wrote here.

5) See where you are logged in to Facebook

You can find out where your Facebook account is logged in – the location, operating system and whether it’s mobile or desktop. You might be surprised where you are logged in, the first time I did this there was an old phone listed that hadn’t worked for 3 years!

Go to Security>Where Your Logged In and check for yourself.

We recommend taking the time to familiarize yourself with your Facebook settings. This can help you become a better “user” of the platform, in turn helping you run your pages.

6) Graph Search

There have been many blog posts written on this subject – so we’re not going to cover it end to end in this one, but we probably will take another run at it at a later date.

Graph Search has been around for about 3 years – but you need to have your language selected as English US. This pains us as much as it might you – but it’s worth it as all updates from Facebook roll out to US users first! Graph Search means you can find all kinds of data about your friends, your page likers, and – well anything really! And they have now released this feature on mobile too.

This will be handy with your profile for finding “that post with the turkey recipe that Julie had around Christmas” or “That photo of Dad with the lawnmower” but this information can be incredibly powerful for brands.

Imagine you can search for which other pages are liked by people who like your page? You can! What about where they live, what they are interested in, where they go, how old they are? That too – the possibilities are endless!

Having this information can help you align your brand with other brands they love, help you post relevant and engaging content and teach you about what audiences your messages appeal to! You can use this info to determine if your online fans are the ones you were after and adjust your posting to suit if they aren’t – AND see whether your online fans are the same sort of people who love your brand in real life! Amazing, well worth leaving the “U” out of words like colour…

There’s some great article articles on Graph Search here for you – but stay tuned here too as we will definitely be going deeper into this one.

Facebook’s description

Social Media Examiner’s Blog Post

Moz Post

We hope that by better understanding the playing field you can gain insight into how your fans use social media and act more like a person than a branded self-promotion robot we often see, as no-one wants to follow those brands on social.

[bctt tweet=”Being good at social media is about being social after all!”]