This is the first post in LiftMetrix’s latest blog series surrounding our recent webinar: “Is Social Driving Your Business Objectives?”. The full presentation can be downloaded by clicking here, or you can view the recording by clicking here.
Leading up to the webinar, we published a post offering a sneak peak into what was going to be presented, particularly highlighting how the social media measurement has matured. Brands need to see to how their social strategies are driving their company business objectives, not just look at how many likes, shares and retweets their social content captured. Conversion on site should be the main focus for brands; and a conversion can manifest itself in many forms which we will address in this post below. You can view the sneak peak post by clicking here.
We’ve pulled together examples of various industries that we work with and the common business objectives that have been identified by brands in the industries.
We dove into these industries as well as various others in our presentation and we will be highlighting them over the course of this blog series to show how you can create social campaigns to drive business objectives. To start, let’s take a look at the Media Publishing industry. In the webinar, we analyzed The Huffington Post and The New York Times.
The Huffington Post has over 8 million fans on Facebook, so we thought they’d be a great case example to analyze and see if their social content was driving business objectives. Below, you can see two of The Huffington Post’s top engaged Facebook posts over the past month (September 15 - October 15, 2016). These posts include a quote that incite the reader to want to learn more, include a link embedded in the post, use someone notable and tag that person so that the post reach increases, and utilize an open-ended caption with no conclusion that makes the reader want to learn more and thereby click the link.
So, if we click on the post with Zach Galifinakis, we’re directed to the article below. Notice that The Huffington Post has ads, Trending Posts which increases page views, and a callout to Suscribe, thereby driving more subscriptions for the media publisher. The Huffington Post is trying to get your attention on social with catchy headlines and make you want to learn more by clicking the link. The media publisher’s website is then optimized to drive conversions - just in this example there are three different ways that The Huffington Post can convert readers, all of which can drive their business objectives.
Looking below at The New York Times’ top Facebook posts by social engagement during the same time period, we saw that they utilized similar strategies as The Huffington Post: they utilize quotes, notable figures, tags and catchy headlines. However, they are missing a link which could convert users to The New York Times’ site which is already optimized to drive business objectives i.e. page views, subscribers, ad clicks, etc. By not embedding or including a link within these posts, The New York Times is missing out driving readers to the media publisher’s site where there are many opportunities for these readers to convert.
Stay tuned for our next post in this blog series which will analyze how the retail industry is using social to drive business conversions. In the meantime, you can download the “Is Social Driving Your Business Objectives?” presentation by clicking here, or you can view the presentation recording by clicking here.
