Tag: social chameleon

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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
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Hiding, Pushing & Growing

Hiding, Pushing & Growing

My blog is normally about Social Media or Digital Marketing – but I wanted to share something a bit different today. I want to talk about evolution. Not the “we walked out of a swamp” sciency stuff. The personal kind.

I hope you indulge me a personal piece that I was prompted to write after hearing business owners complain about their business progress.

Most businesses don’t start and then get overwhelmed with orders. That’s just not the way the real world works.

Hiding

You might not know this about me but I’m a hider. I sometimes wish I actually was a chameleon…because when I get scared I like to hide and pretend that everything’s fine, and working for yourself you have to get used to a certain level of scared.

Scary Stuff

This type of fear can be hard to get used to, but in reality I don‘t see freelancing, consulting, or working in your own business to be essentially any more ‘risky’ than having a full time job.

People who’ve recently been made redundant can probably feel me. Tradesmen who have their own businesses would get it, and anyone from the mining sector would definitely understand. Being employed is not a static state like it may have once been.

So if it’s no more risky then what’s the scary part?

Relying on yourself alone to collect a steady income.

It’s not because the work isn’t there – it’s that it’s YOU, and often only you as an entrepreneur, micro-business or whatever you call yourself that has to drive everything. From the strategy, to the implementation, to the admin…it’s all you.

Eeek!

I’ll be the first to admit this lifestyle isn’t for everyone, but with the future of work facing new challenges from technology and automation every day one can’t hide from the fact that this model will be more and more common.

So why am I sharing these thoughts with you here?

Because I get it. It’s a challenge. And if you’re running a small business or your out on your own it’s a constant juggle – it’s not without its perks. But I also wanted to highlight that if you’ve started this journey that you might have to hang on to see results.

You need to push yourself (because no-one else’s going to!)

My Story

If I reflect on my own journey over the past (almost) two years I’ve been through many phases. I had plenty of my own clients and some agency contracts. My client load fluctuated (for many reasons) and at the moment it’s the contracts that have kept me going.

Many can relate to this. It’s frustrating, it’s often daunting. It’s definitely the cause of some financial insecurity, but it’s certainly shaping and teaching me along the way.

I’ve recently done some things that scared me – and I want to encourage you to hang in there and do the same; to just keep on pushing, the next phase of your businesses is just around the corner.

Pushing

I took a gig delivering Social Media workshops. I have done loads of this type of training before, but not in a formal setting with attendees I didn’t know. I was nervous as to how I would be received. After the first session and some tweaking of the content to better fit the audience I had great success with these projects. I got more confident in what I knew and my ability to communicate my knowledge to a varied and inexperienced room increased dramatically.

I learned to better explain how what I do grows a business, to people who don’t usually talk my lingo. I learned a LOT about the challenges business owners face when trying to do their own marketing.

One of the reason my first session was not as successful as it could have been was that I pitched my ‘beginner’ course too advanced. I had forgotten just where the beginning was. I was worried that my audience would see me as a fraud, so I concentrated too heavily on “adding value” rather than keeping it simple enough for non-industry, non-tech savvy people to get the most out of it. It was my insecurity that they wouldn’t learn enough from me that saw me endeavour to teach them too much.

The reality was – they weren’t ready for so much so fast.

Once I refined the course the next time I delivered it, it was a smash hit (if I do say so myself!).

Qualified?

Another project I tackled recently was to talk to some uni students about Social Media as a career and how I got started. My presentation involved an overview of useful industry skills that they need to expand on before they’re ready to join the workforce. I took an experiential learning approach and gave them a practical activity to start – followed by plenty of Q&A.

I was really nervous about this too, I mean these guys were studying marketing. I didn’t study marketing. I barely got through 8 months of an Arts degree! Would I have anything useful to share with them? Or would they find out I was a fraud! But I went along, and I had a blast! I even did it again with another student group a couple of weeks later.

Same theme. Same result. Same self-doubt. How crazy! I DO know what I’m doing. I live off my skills, it earns me a great living. It’s funny how our internal dialogue always want to self-sabotage. But I pushed on.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Get

I sent an email to a connection who was looking for a full time employee, essentially doing what I do and asked them if they’d consider taking me on until they found the right person to join their team full time.

I met with them and I got some contract work, causing them to re-evaluate their need for a full time position in that role. Excellent for me and a smarter outcome for the business, they recognised the role they needed to recruit for was a different one.

Never be scared to ask; we are all in sales. Don’t ask, don’t get.

Video – oh no!

I was contacted by Al Jazeera (not a terrorist organisation) to contribute a 1 minute video about a current issue around Social Media Marketing that had hit the mainstream media.

WHAT? A video? Ew.

I want to be confident enough to do more video content and live video, “but I’m not ready!” I told myself. (There’s that self-doubt again!).

I said yes. I had to webcam myself talking for one minute. Doesn’t sounds like a long time; 60 seconds is hardly an epic. Most people would have shot it, sent it, and moved on pretty quickly.

Not me. I took 40 takes (give or take, lol), then I sent it. And my doubt convinced me that they probably wouldn’t use it – because what after all did I have to offer?

They used it!

Growing

Now I have to stop worrying about whether I have something to offer or not. It’s time to get on with it. There’ll always be something to worry about, but I think I’m done with this self-doubt. At least for now.

And the result?

There’s been bigger meetings, with more lined up, meetings old me would have been scared to take.

I’ve expanded services without having to haggle over small fees I may have charged in the past.

But the most exciting lesson I want to share with you is that if I can do it in my business – you can in yours too! We all go through professional ups and downs, that’s life – but if you have skill, passion, integrity, experience, and be authentic to you, you’ve got the recipe to succeed.

You just have to push through the scary barrier and keep going. What’s just round the corner is up to you!
While there’ll always be an ebb and flow – you can swim, so the tide needn’t be scary.

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Gifs That Keep Giffing | Show Personality with GIFs

Gifs are more than just cute cats…

Gifs are a whole new way (I say new but they have been around since the late 80’s) for brands to express themselves. They’re easy to consume, and a great way to convey tone, humour and personality!

After you’ve finished arguing over whether I’m saying gif with a hard G or a soft one (hard btw) we’ll get into how they can make your content stand out in the newsfeed.

If you don’t want to write a paragraph to describe what you mean, a gif is the perfect tool. But it all comes down to context. When brands use gifs literally, that’s when they tend to fail. For example, let’s say your brand talks about sleeping through your alarm.

You could post a gif like this:

But that doesn’t say anything about you, your brand or anything that your copy doesn’t.

In fact, something like this isn’t as literal, shows a whole lot more personality and emotion – and in this context makes perfect sense.

Once you’ve understood the type of content to post, it’s only a matter of posting!

Posting Gifs on Facebook

So you have your gif ready to go on your desktop, you’ve been trying to upload it like a photo or video, because hey, a gif is just a short looping video, and… no dice 🙁

That’s because Facebook doesn’t allow you to upload gifs directly so you might find your gifs posting as a still photo with this method. Think of it more like posting a link instead.

All you need to do is copy the link of the gif and paste it in, just like you were posting an article.

In the same way, you would for an article, simply delete the link once it’s loaded and write in your caption.

It’s that easy!

If you’ve created your own gif, you need to find somewhere to host it online to create a link for it. I use Giphy, it has a great library to choose from and uploading your own is super easy.

Now adding gifs to comments on Facebook will be even easier. In the same way that you can add a gif to your messenger conversation, comments will have a gif button with all the gifs you could desire right at your fingertips! If you don’t have this feature yet it’s coming!

Posting Gifs on Instagram

This is where you’ll see why Giphy works so well. There is an app for iOS and Android so you can search and post gifs straight to Instagram.

Once you’ve found a gif you love, tap it and expand your sharing options. Hit the Instagram icon to download it to your app, You will then be prompted to open Instagram and finish your post as per normal.

Alternatively, if you want to make gifs on the fly, you can use Boomerang within Instagram. Boomerang takes 10 quick snaps and stitches them together into a 1 second video loop that you can post then and there!

Posting Gifs on Twitter

What do you do when you only have 140 characters but a lot more to say? Add a gif!

Twitter is the most advanced gif posting platform around all things to the addition of one little thing… a gif button!

Powered by Riffsy and Giphy, you are provided with a library of gifs to search through to spice up your tweets.

Whether you’re on your phone or desktop, it’s exactly the same process. Compose your tweet and hit the gif button right next to the image button and search for the perfect gif!

twitter gif

Gif it your all!

Used thoughtfully, gifs can provide brands with a new way to show personality and relate to their audience so don’t hesitate to incorporate them into your social strategy! It’s about being social after all.

Do you have a favourite gif? Let us know how you use them.

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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 🙂

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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.

edited_1475923280893

 

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!

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Engage Bali by Socialbakers: Part One

Engage Bali by Socialbakers – Social Media Summit

Over the weekend I attended the #EngageBali Social Media Summit by Socialbakers, held at the Grand Hyatt in Nusa, Bali. #EngageBali was my first Social Media conference and I was really excited to attend and learn some new things, meet some social media professionals and enjoy the luxurious surroundings of the resort.

I was not disappointed!

I flew in late on Thursday night, and was lead through the expanse of the resort to my room. Wow!

We really were learning & networking in paradise!

Friday was our day of workshops. I had downloaded the Engage Bali app and after much deliberation signed up for “INCREASING YOUR SOV – HOW DUAL BRAND STRATEGIES CAN INCREASE MARKET SHARE” with Holly Stewart from Seek for the morning session and “FACILITATING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA INTELLIGENCE” with Olivier Girard from Digimind for the afternoon session.

Armed with the sim card given to us by sponsor Telkomsel (super handy!) I managed to find breakfast, eat a quick bowl of noodles (I love embracing different breakfast cultures) and headed into the main conference area. The Telkomsel sim wasn’t the right size for my phone – so I went to see them and in 1 minute flat they had punched it into a microsim and fitted it to my phone. Yes! No data roaming fees 🙂

I picked up a free bubble tea and headed to my morning workshop.

Holly is clearly very knowledgeable about Social Media Marketing and the focus of the session was using a Dual Brand Strategy.

Dual Brand Strategy

For the non-marketers reading, this means creating or acquiring a secondary brand as a strategy to help you maintain share of voice (market share) that wouldn’t necessarily appeal to your main brand.

Think of Coke and Mount Franklin. Coke know not everyone drinks Coke, but they can still drink Coke brands when they’re drinking water – ie. Mount Franklin. They maintain market share, it doesn’t hurt the main brand (not sure if anything could in this example) and they can reach new audiences who would have dismissed Coke.

Clever, right?

Background

There are some challenges involved in running a dual brand strategy. The main one is not to cannibalise the main brand in building the secondary one. But we’ll get back to that in a bit.

Seek is a transactional brand. People looking for work go to Seek to find job ads. So who are their target demographic? EVERYONE.

Ugh. That’s tough! How do you appeal to everyone? According to Holly at any given time there are:

 

looking-for-work

So at any given moment up to 75% of people are looking for work!

To further complicate this: Low skilled jobs are easy to fill, and high skilled jobs much harder to fill she said. Makes sense.

Traditionally Seek has been among a small field in the online jobseeker realm and has occupied 80% of the market. A great place to be for a brand! But they were starting to face increased competition from new players.

How would they maintain their share of the market? This is where the dual brand strategy comes into play.

How does the Dual Brand Strategy Work?

Since people wanted to make sure they were getting all the available information users were looking at more than one job site. Seek had to make sure they weren’t losing ground to one of the others that “scrapes” jobs from all over the web. They stopped these scraping sites being able to access Seek – so if you visited them, you could get all the other jobs – but not the ones from the biggest jobs marketplace and would have to look there separately.

Seek introduced JORA, their secondary brand. JORA was able to scrape the job websites, but it also had access to the Seek.com jobs – meaning it had ALL THE JOBS, which when you’re job hunting is what you want. One site to rule them all.

But you can’t just launch a secondary brand on a whim.

Holly explained the following phases:

  1. Engagement
  2. Traffic & Conversion
  3. Segmentation & Relevancy

Your brand has to be ready. Listen before you launch! She said that with 30b pieces of content fighting for your attention in the newsfeed, it’s not easy to gain attention for your brand. In Australia 1 in 3 internet minutes belong to Facebook owned sites (Facebook, Messenger, What’s App, Instagram…) and that a dual brand strategy can help open up new segments.

It was all about mapping your customer journey, and using what data you have to either include or exclude potential customers.

I think this is where we lost some people.

I’m not sure everyone was fully across segmentation and the ability to exclude audiences via pixels and custom audiences. I have some photos of Holly’s slides (which aren’t very good quality photos, but it might help me explain the strategy)

So here goes – you can use the data your brand has to grow your supporting brand through targeting and exclusion.

If you were a bank and someone had been to your main site to look at credit cards (which would know because of the segmentation set up on your site) you could target them with a credit card offer from your supporting brand.

Then follow them through the customer journey, making sure the secondary brand is seen as the alternative voice at each touch point through the journey.

You’re drowning out your competitors, and with this the chance of losing your market share to them decreases.

Pretty simple concept, right? It’s a bit more complicated to implement – but the idea is a simple one!

measure-it

How do you measure it?

Holly identified the metrics to use to measure if your dual brand strategy was working:

1. Increase your brand share (growing secondary brand)

Measure: share of visits/share of wallet/share of attention

2. Decrease competitors share

Measure: Measure: share of visits/share of wallet/share of attention

3. Brand Health (don’t cannibalise your primary brand)

Measure: Brand study metrics

4. Brand Lead

Measure: share of visits/share of wallet/share of attention

You can see the slideshare of Holly’s presentation HERE.

After Holly’s presentation we moved on to an exercise in groups where we came up with a strategy using what we had just learned to create a pitch for the brans we were allocated, which was a good way to cement the learning.

I learned a lot from this session, even though I don’t currently work with any multi-brand clients – to know how one group of marketers can go about finding market segments is always interesting!

And the negative targeting, and the workflows associated with this process means it’s a well established method in Seek’s repertoire, which we can assume means if set up correctly it works!

What I also found interesting was seeing how diverse the APAC region is. Although I think Australia is still an emerging market for Social Media, with many brand still resisting or implementing their strategy like it’s 2012, there are some people (like Holly) obviously leading the pack too. But we’re very different from Asia! Their population density means they have huge audiences that devour content and these content machines need to be fed! Some of the small teams in attendance had audience numbers and publishing schedules that would make an Aussie marketer choke!

Morning session done, we headed to lunch, and the hotel had not let us down!

After lunch (and another bubble tea) we proceeded to our afternoon sessions. As I mentioned in the beginning – I had chosen after much deliberation on the Digimind session about Data Intelligence.

I did not find this session as in-depth as the morning session, and think it was more of an overview of what Data Intelligence is and a little bit of background.

Digimind is a tech vendor, Olivier said, and has been in business for 18 years. That’s a lot of listening!

social-intelligence

So what is Social Intelligence?

There’s a huge amount of data on Social Media that can be used to identify trends and support marketing teams. But there are also many challenges.

  • Anyone, anywhere – so much data!
  • All demographics – who are you looking for?
  • Influencers
  • New Platforms
  • People have choices & preferences

So he outlined some Digital Intelligence Best Practice tips:

1.Understand your audience (which will be a theme over the weekend)

What is their “digital maturity” how tech savvy are they?

2. Teamwork & Diversity

He said it was better to interpret data from a diverse base to be able to see the data from different approaches.

3. Make a contact person

If it’s one person’s responsibility they’ll be more engaged.

4. Apply SCIP principles (Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals)

They are not hackers! There’s a limit to what they can access.

5. Focus on the right scope

There’s so much data – “let’s try to structure that”

6. Ask Questions

Find out more about what the data is for

7. Make your goals very specific

It’s easy to exclude irrelevant data in the scope, than after the data is collected. You can always expand the scope next time

8. Add your insights

And importantly –

9. Present the data in an interesting way

 

looking-for-work-1

 

So, what can be measured?

The 5 Ws – What | When | Who – Influencers | Where – Platforms | Why – Sentiment

 

Something else I got from this session; whether you engage and the success of your engagement in crisis management is not only based on your content, but timing!

Olivier gave an example of how 2 brands that supply the same product fared in a crisis management situation. One brand chose to engage. The other decided to wait it out. Surprisingly the brand who did not engage came out unscathed. Now I do how some hesitation that ignoring crisis’s is ever a good idea from a Community Management point of view, but you can’t argue with data!

Again there was a workshop to reiterate the learning.

You can see the slidershare of Olivier’s presentation HERE.

And that was day one!

There was some networking, where I met up with Helen Cripps from ECU (who I had previously met at an SMPerth event), Sasha from Fanfare Media, and Matej and Claire from Socialbakers, among others. But the structured part of the day was done.

Time for some R&R!

I hope you enjoyed this first instalment! It’s been fun digesting it all and sharing it with you!

Stay tuned for Part Two – where I’ll get into the main event. I can’t wait to share with you the speakers insights! When you have the brains behind the Social Media of brands like LEGO, NASA, Canon Australia, MGM Hotels, Cathay Pacific and more – plus businesses who’ve achieved success by an in depth understanding of their audience, like Go Jek there’s no way you can’t pick up some valuable insight!

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2 of my all-time favourites: Social Media & Learning!

Engage Bali 2016 Social Media Summit

Engage Bali is a Social Media Summit by Socialbakers, who are a Social Media Management tool. I don’t currently use their tool for my client work, but I have often read their reports, especially to get Australian specific data!

One of their features that really interests me is their performance optimisation tool, that uses “predictive analytics” to determine how your content will perform! Thier announcement post has a detailed explanation of how it works.

One of the other things Socialbakers do that’s pretty rad is put on a summit for Social Media Marketers. Normally the big Social media Summits are either in Europe and the US, so it’s a big undertaking to make it when you’re from Perth.

Since the announcement of Engage Bali, I knew this time would be different! Being only 4 hours from Bali, with frequent and cheap(ish) flights this was much more realistic for me – and the idea to go along to my first Social Media Summit was hatched.

engage bali

It’s very exciting! If you’ve read some of my previous blog posts, you’d know that I love my stats! I truly believe that good Social Media Marketers are equal parts creative and analytical. Also with my love for learning (I’m currently completing an Advanced Diploma of Business and the Digital Marketer courses, among others) this really appeals to me.

I can’t wait to see how the world’s top Social Media minds are using Social Media to reach, inform and delight their audiences! If you want to see them it’s all on the Engage Bali website.As a freelancer, I’m privileged to work with some very diverse people – but I am aware that we can easily become stale in our own little bubbles.

As a freelancer, I’m privileged to work with some very diverse people – but I am aware that we can easily become stale in our own bubbles. We are all occasionally guilty of doing things the way we think is right and not investigating new functionality or features. Sometimes we think that’s just the way things are, then you find out someone else has tackled the issue completely differently to you did!

I’m even more excited for Engage Bali because the amazing people at Socialbakers have allowed me to attend free of charge (bonus!) and also asked me if I would host one of their panel discussions – how terrifyingly wonderful!

I can’t wait to bring you updates of what I learn during the day of workshops on the Friday, and the full day event on Saturday. I’m going to be a busy girl!

Have you ever been to an industry conference? Do you have any tips for me – a conference noob? I’d love to hear them! You can leave a comment here of hit me up on my Socials.

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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!

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Facebook interests examined | Have you lost interest?

What on earth does Facebook know about me?

Why am I seeing these ads?

If you want to see what Facebook thinks your “interests” are you can have a look and edit them. You’ll have a good laugh at the things you apparently like!

Go to Settings > Ads > Ads based on my preferences > edit > visit ad preferences. Then they will all be neatly displayed in little boxes. You can hover and close the ones you aren’t actually interested in.

facebook interests

facebook interests

facebook interests

facebook interests

interests

 

It can be a lengthy process – but very eye-opening! This is a great experiment to do on your profile to show you why interest targeting on Facebook can be so hit and miss. You’re must better off using custom audiences based on your website traffic or email databases!

This won’t mean you’ll see fewer FB ads, but it might mean the ones you do see are relevant to you! And let’s face it, we’ve all come to terms with the fact that there’s ads on Facebook. PLUS occasionally you’ll see an ad for a flight, concert, or something that you ARE interested in and you didn’t already know about. Ok, it’s infrequent – but it does happen.

What do you think? Did you find this useful? Is it time to update your interests on Facebook, I mean it’s more than 12 years old now – and if you’ve been on it since the beginning you might have changed a bit since then!