Prioritize Social Media Platforms For Your Brand

There are SO many social media networks out there and new ones seem to pop up everyday, just ask any teenager they are sure to know what’s new. With that said you don’t have to be on everyone of them. It’s important to understand them and find the right platform for your brand based on both industry and target audience. There are so many things to think about so we’ve broken them down for you and found some resources to get you started!

They say AGE is just a number but depending on your product or brand it can be extremely relevant to some ages and not all or vice versa. Don’t just think about “generations” as sometimes that isn’t a one size fits all either as someone in their 30s could have very different cares than someone at 25. Just an example of how different age groups feel about various platforms, check out this great overview, Social Media At Every Age. One thing I pulled from this post was that people like photos. We all know this but understanding which apps seem to be popular amongst all ages it is clear that people like easy and images. When it comes to thinking about your target audience, age can be one of the first things so take these great nuggets of Wisdom from Gabbi when thinking about the age you are targeting:

“Before launching your next campaign or creating your social media plan, take a step back. Go back to what your college professor told you to do (and how you proceeded to roll your eyes) and create an outline for your paper – with section A being audience analysis. Turns out, that professor was right.”

 Does GENDER matter to your brand? It might, especially if we are talking toiletries or makeup! This one may not always matter but when it does consider these quick facts (based on report from Business Insider December 2014):

  • Facebook still skews slightly more Female
  • Twitter has begun to lean more towards a Male audience
  • Pinterest is made up of mostly females
  • LinkedIn is slightly more popular with Men

Now what type of CONTENT do you have to share? Are you a company with tons of stats? Too many photos? A little bit of everything? Of course you can do a mix across all social networks but don’t waste your time. If you have photos they can be more powerful on networks that users expect to see them such as Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook (maybe even Tumblr!). If you have more content focused around articles or words then Twitter and LinkedIn could be the place for you.

Finally, some INDUSTRY related stuff! We found this great rundown of what different industries are doing across social media platforms. Released recently, Hubspot does a great job with “Benchmarks for 9 Different Industries”. Of course Marketing Services Industry is posting the most per week but it’s interesting to learn how valuable social media is to other industries such as Real Estate. We think this breakdown is pretty spot on so have a read on the section specific to your industry and see how you compare against others.

With all that in mind and understanding there are tons of platforms out there, narrow down which ones make sense for you. We would encourage you to pick only one or two if you are just starting out or three if you are already up and running. Most brands can benefit from doing three platforms well instead of trying to do them all. Once you start don’t stop, Social only works if you continue to stay involved.

One last thing, want some of the latest and craziest stats about social media out there? Have a quick read of these 30 Crazy Stats We Heard at Social Media Marketing World #SMMW15. (Don’t be shocked that “10. You will only get a 1-6% organic reach on your posts in Facebook. So heart-wrenching.”)

 

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Gartner’s Cool Vendors in Social Marketing (2015)

Gartner has just released their list of “Cool Vendors in Social Marketing” for this year and we’re proud to announce making the list! Making the ranks with four other great industry tools, CommandPost, Expion, InsightPool & Traackr, to “help run social initiatives at scale, to a point of measurable performance. Each of the providers, [including yours truly,] help marketers bring more intelligence, scale, efficiency, measurability and accountability to their social marketing programs.”

From Gartner:

“Social marketers can advance their programs by gathering and applying
audience insight, and by using better performance metrics to improve
execution. Our Cool Vendors offer emerging tools and technologies to help
social marketers design more effective engagement strategies and improve
ROI.”

 Julie Hopkins carefully provides an analysis on LiftMetrix giving insight into all the great reasons we love our product along with some challenges organizations may come across. Finally she emphasizes the importance of digging into Social ROI and tracking how to value your organic and paid social activities. Read the full report and analysis here.

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Social Media Stats To Share With Your Boss

So what should you be sharing with your boss? As we all know there are so many stats to review and analyze on a day to day basis within our social media platforms. However most of our bosses and supervisors don’t necessarily need to see all the nitty gritty. So we’ve put together the top 5 stats you should be sharing with your boss on a regular basis.

  1. Total Growth: The top number everyone wants to see is your total numbers so always pull together how many likes you have on Facebook, followers on Twitter or Instagram and so on. This number is important but it’s also important to share how you’ve gotten here. In most instances you won’t hit a million followers over night so understanding how well your numbers are increasing over time and organic vs paid.
  2. Increase in Engagement: Engagement is incredibly important but if you constantly get great engagement the number will no longer mean much to your boss. It’s important to take a look at the growth of your engagement and also the tone. If you are getting great engagement but month over month it is increasing and providing a much more positive tone then it can tell your boss a lot more about your efforts than simply staying the same.
  3. “Top” Posts (content, type, time, etc): Pull out the top posts since your last report along with providing what type of posts made up the “top”. Was there a specific type of content (photos, links, etc) or was there a topic that sparked a lot more conversation?
  4. Recent Promotions Results: If you had any special promotions since the last time you provided information to your boss it’s important to call this out. Let them know the top line numbers from the promotion and any top line learnings.
  5. Ad Spend: This is where your social roi really comes in. Not only are you looking at your total ad spend and the results generated from each platform but this is a great way to see what your ROI was for the ads and your social media efforts overall. Take the opportunity to walk through your boss on this one.

We know there are many many more stats and everyone’s team may be focusing on different things but overall these are important to any supervisor. Any stats we missed that your team likes to see?

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Who said FB organic reach is dead?

Help! My Facebook organic reach is DYING!

There’s been a lot of talk in the past year about how Facebook is limiting organic reach (Tech Crunch Article) and the perception that organic activity is ‘dead’ because Facebook is becoming a “pay-to-play” channel.

Additionally, there are great articles (like this one) from the team at Buffer on how the Facebook algorithm selects valuable content over unloved content. Their blog post can help you stay current with the frequent algorithm changes. The article is great, but be warned it’s quite long. The TL;DR:

The most engaging content will be shown more often on the news feed!

A solid conclusion but brands are still left guessing as to what content they should post today or this week, to drive engagements and lift ROI.

Does your organic fanpage ROI look something like this?

unnamed

Its just humming along, sideways, so you decide to simply put more resources and money into FB ads because you’ve seen articles about Facebook becoming “pay to play” like this one (from the Guardian).

However, despite the ad spend, your organic ROI stays relatively flat, right? Some days you’re up a bit and some days you’re down without ever knowing why. You post once or twice per day as ‘maintenance’ but can’t figure out what content is going to drive a lift in engagements.

What if there was a way to break out of an ROI flat-line and experience an organic ROI spike like this?

Screen Shot 2015-03-27 at 2.33.26 PM

Here are the organic numbers behind the ROI spike for this brand:

 

Metric                       Daily avg 2/26 - 3/15     Daily avg 3/16 - 3/26      % Change
Posts Per Day                   2                    2        -
New Fans                  43                   66    +53%
Impressions               24,859                37,644    +51%
Likes                 186                  343    +85%
Shares                   8                   13    +56%
Comments                  22                   29    +31%
Website Visits               2,798                 2,993     +7%
Site Conversions                 678                  783    +15%

 

How did this social media team succeed across the board?! They learned what content performed the best and received content recommendations for their daily posts.

Ultimately, the ability to identify and learn from the most engaging content drove real business results: 7% more daily website visits and 15% more conversions. While Facebook has reduced the impact of organic posting, brands are still able to improve their content strategy and create a plan to accomplish their objectives.

How was this brand able to identify the content that drives real business results?

How to Analyze Your Content:

  1. First, define your goals on social media (drive sales, engagement, site visits).
  2. Experiment with a variety of post types, timing and content themes.
  3. Export your post results from Facebook and Google Analytics into excel. Merge Facebook post data with Google data using UTM parameters as the connection. (This can be tricky)
  4. Tag each post with themes or any descriptor (‘celebration’, ‘user images’, ‘pants’, ‘discount’) to classify posts by their content.
  5. Run a pivot table to determine your post theme cohorts which would help you identify if ‘black skirts’ drive higher sales than ‘dark wash denim’ over the time period.
  6. Optimize the content calendar on the next campaign reflecting this data.

There’s a couple issues with this:

  1. Bandwidth - It takes a lot of excel gymnastics to get the data you need. You may involve your data scientist or digital marketing analytics team to arrive at actual resuls. If you could do the data analysis yourself, do you have the time of day?
  2. Speed - Assuming you have the data team, how often could you connect and receive recommendations from them? One week or one month later to make the necessary adjustments simply isn’t fast enough in social.

Doesn’t sound like much fun does it?

And if you’re doing the above already, my condolences. (I could never excel in excel.)

This is the moral of the story:

Better Content -> More Engagement -> More Shares -> More Fans -> More Conversions

Finding out what content works is good for everyone. Its great for your fans and drives business results for your brand.

The faster you can make the necessary change and see what’s working for you the better. In fact, if you could estimate the engagement of a post, based on content type or theme prior to posting, wouldn’t that be useful?

And what if you didn’t have to work in excel anymore (unless you really loved it). What could you do with that time?

Shameless LiftMetrix plug: LiftMetrix can do this for you. LiftMetrix was built to help social marketers determine which post themes drive the highest ROI. LiftMetrix connects the dots to your site to measure full conversations and conducts tagging analysis to provide you with recommendations. Our customers have experienced a 20% lift in their ROI after following our plan.

 

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How to grow your social media ROI 400% in the first month!

If you’re on the marketing team, understanding your ROI on Social Media could be the hardest part of your job. Like you, one of our clients wanted to understand what the return was for their social media efforts and what they could do better.

Leveraging the daily recommendations (sent to their inbox each morning) from LiftMetrix they were able to alter their strategy and content plan to improve performance dramatically. In addition, using split testing they began to understand their audience better and develop content that works best for their core users. With each change they were able to drive more car bookings and see an increase in ROI.

See the full case study here and understand how our client grew 400+% within the first month of joining. No matter how you define your social media goals - engagement, acquisition, transactions, LiftMetrix can help. Start a free 14 day trial today :)

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Monday Morning Social Media Routine

In the world of social media no day is the same so you are constantly on top of your toes. We understand this but also know there are a few things you can do each Monday to get you ready for the week and stay on top of your goals and consumers.

  1. Follow Up on Your Weekend
    • You may or may not be active over the weekend but it’s important to check first thing Monday that everything went out smoothly.
    • It’s also a great time to see if you had any engagement or mentions that you should respond to immediately.
  2. Check your Analytics
    • What time of day and days of the week received the most engagement?
    • What times of content got the largest responses? (photos, status, video, links, etc)
    • How did any of your social media ads perform?
  3. Make a Plan
    • Put your learnings into action and create a plan for the week including adjustments to make and what content you will share.
    • Create an engagement plan including how many people to begin following and searching out on various platforms.
    • Check your keywords, what’s trending based on the content you plan on creating this week?
  4. Plan weekly content
    • Create your call to actions based on this weeks goals, are you driving to your website, a webinar, to purchase, etc?
    • Start putting together your content and matching it up with your planned timing.
    • Prepare visuals to go with your content.
    • Plan any ad budget for your content when available.
  5. Curate
    • Did you miss anything related to your industry or that may resonate with your consumers this weekend?
    • Are your feeds set up for any new articles or information for the week?
    • Start collecting and organizing curated information into your content calendar.
  6. Final Checklist
    • Do you have any important dates this week such as holidays, company happenings or weekly updates?
    • Have you set up your monitoring and engagement plan for the week? Read our post on increasing twitter engagement if you need help getting started.
    • Do any ads need adjusting or do you need to start and create new ads?
    • Are all of your documents and tools up to date?
  7. Coffee Break
    • Well it’s not exactly related but it will help jump start your morning! Once you’ve put together your plan and gotten your week off to a good start, now is the perfect time for a coffee or tea break to get you ready for the week.
    • Have a chat with coworkers, they may have general knowledge of company happenings or consumer behaviors from the weekend you can use! Who know’s.
    • Also, step away from the computer :)

Did we miss any steps? Tell us below!

Or do you want an easy way out? If the above is taking too long or not giving you the results you expect, then check out LiftMetrix. Each week we prepare insights based on how your content performed taking into consideration your business objectives. In addition, each day your recommendations are updated in a way you can understand. Simply adjust your content based on these recommendations to see your ROI grow and keep your boss smiling. Recommendations include which days and times to post, how many times to post, types of content, character length and more. Set up a free consultation today or just go straight for our 14 day free trial!

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