Mediastreet
Tag

Social Media

Browsing
In News

What’s next for social ad spend as one third of brands plot hate-speech boycott?

No Comments

By Rebecca Stewart

As brands continue to add their name to the growing list of companies boycotting Facebook, fresh research from the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) has painted a sobering picture of how marketers view the social network and its rivals.

Volkswagen and Mars are the latest corporations to halt ad spend with Facebook over its handling of damaging content and misinformation. The car marque and food giant join Levi’s, Coca-Cola, Unilever and more in signing up to the ‘Stop Profit for Hate campaign’ which is backed by civil rights groups including the NAACP, Color of Change and the Anti-Defamation League.

The coalition has been calling on major corporations to put a pause on advertising on Facebook for the month of July, citing its “repeated failure to meaningfully address the vast proliferation of hate on its platforms”.

Some brands have gone further, pulling the plug on all investment for the foreseeable future across all social networks.

The WFA’s research has revealed a diminishing faith in not only Facebook, but also its bedfellows, to address the issue at hand.

What did the WFA’s research find?

  • The WFA’s members control nearly $100bn in global ad spend. Following on from the news of the Facebook boycott, the trade body asked members about their policies on social media ad spend. The WFA’s research asked advertiser views on all social media platforms.
  • 76 responded, representing 58 companies and $92bn in marketing dollars.
  • Almost one-third of these marketers (31%) said they will, or are likely to, suspend advertising on social media over platforms’ failure to police hate speech. A further 40% said they were also considering doing so.
  • 17% said they were unlikely to withhold spend. 12% said they had no plans to withhold spend.
  • Brands were also asked which other actions they’d taken or had considered. 53% said they’d already had direct conversations with social platforms about hate speech. 48% said their main approach was to work through industry bodies to deal with the issue. 32% said they weren’t taking action for now and 13% said they were taking other actions.

What does the data show?

  • If anything, the survey shows how divided the industry is on how to handle the issue. Some brands are set on pulling spend, where others remain undecided.
  • The WFA also released some anonymised qualitative responses as part of the research. Again, these are a mixed bag: one marketer laments that it’s “simply depressing” how much the platforms are still falling short and says they would “appreciate support with identifying and viable alternatives for investments”.
  • Another pointed out that neither the platforms nor the advertisers propping them up are perfect: “Advertisers may pull out of these platforms,” the brand marketer continues, “but consumers will not.

What’s next?

  • Hate speech and how brands inadvertently fund it is an issue that has been on the WFA’s radar for some time. Working with social networks to find a solution to the problem is already being prioritised by the trade body’s Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM).
  • For its part, Facebook has promised “new policies to connect people with authoritative information about voting, crack down on voter suppression, and fight hate speech”.
  • Actions include labelling posts that are potentially harmful and even in violation of the platform’s policies but are not censored by the platform because they are deemed newsworthy.
  • Facebook will also add a link to its voting information centre to posts that reference voting, including those made by politicians such as President Trump.
  • Speaking to the Financial Times earlier this week, chief executive of the WFA Stephen Loerke noted how this moment feels like a turning point amid the pressure of the ‘Stop Hate for Profit’ campaign.
  • “What’s striking is the number of brands who are saying they are reassessing their longer-term media allocation strategies and demanding structural changes in the way platforms address racial intolerance, hate speech and harmful content,” he explained.
  • The magnitude of the brand exodus won’t really be clear until Facebook releases its Q3 results in October.

Feature Image Credit: Volkswagen and Mars are the latest corporations to halt ad spend with Facebook over its handling of damaging content / Unsplash

By Rebecca Stewart

Sourced from The Drum

Read More
By
In Uncategorized

Pandemic Exacts Toll: Digital Strategies Pay Off And Marketers Expect Them To Pay Forward

No Comments

By Christine Moorman

Optimism among marketers plummets to levels last witnessed during the Great Recession. Optimism about the economy is 50.9 (out of 100) compared to just three months ago when it was 62.7. In February 2009, following the Great Recession of 2008, this rating was 47.7. B2C companies are more pessimistic than their B2B counterparts, as are larger revenue companies (>$10B) compared to their smaller counterparts (<$25M).

Against this backdrop, The CMO Survey conducted a Special Covid-19 Edition survey, asking marketing leaders at U.S. for-profit companies to share their survival strategies, KPIs, and predictions about the future. Here are the top results.

1. Marketing jobs lost: Although 62% of marketing leaders reported no job losses in their companies, 9% of marketing jobs have been lost, on average, due the pandemic. The largest percentage of marketers (24%) anticipate these jobs will never return. Planned marketing hiring drops to the lowest point in CMO Survey history, going negative for the first time ever with average hiring predicted to be -3.5% in the next year.

2.    Customer prioritize digital experiences: Marketers report increased openness among customers to new digital offerings introduced during the pandemic (85%), increased value placed on digital experiences (84%), and greater acknowledgements of companies’ attempts to “do good” (79%). Marketers expect this increased focus on digital to be a permanent shift in consumer behavior.

3.    Marketers pivot digital: Given customer shifts, marketers are, in turn, adjusting their offerings and pivoting their businesses. Some 60.8% indicate they have “shifted resources to building customer-facing digital interfaces” and 56.2% are “transforming their go-to-market business models to focus on digital opportunities.” Consistent with this, CMO Survey results show the largest single drop in traditional advertising spending (-5.3% expected over the next year), further solidifying the shift toward digital.

4.    Marketing budgets hold: Despite headcount loss, 30.3% of marketers—the largest segment—have experienced no change in their overall marketing budgets during the pandemic with 41.3% reporting gains and 28.4% reporting losses. On average, marketers report they have gained about 5% in their budgets during the pandemic and expect an 8.4% increase in digital marketing spending over the next year.

5.    Marketing objectives remain modest: When asked what objectives they are focused on during the pandemic, the #1 and #2 responses from marketers are “building brand value that connects with customers” and “retaining current customers.” Consistent with this, marketing employees were leveraged more for “getting active online to promote the company and its offerings” (69%) and “reaching out to current customers with information” (65%) compared to growth objectives such as “generating new products and service ideas” (44%) or “building partnerships” (41%).

6.    Marketing leadership promoted: 62.3% of marketers report that the marketing function has increased in importance during the pandemic. Building brand and customer retention through digital, mobile, and social strategies are reported to be key to that heightened role. This importance is striking given 9% marketing job losses—marketers are doing more with fewer people.

7.    Social media shines bright: 84.2% of marketers say they have used social media for brand building and 54.3% say they have used it for customer retention during the pandemic. Given this focus, marketers have increased investment social media budgets 74% since February—an increase as a percent of marketing budgets from 13.3% to 23.2%. This strategy appears to have worked: For the first time in CMO Survey history, the rated contributions of social media to company performance rose—up 24% since February. This is an important finding because social media contributions have previously remained flat and at average levels since 2016 despite rising investments.

8.    Online sales performance increases: Online sales have grown to the highest level in The CMO Survey history. They now constitute 19.3% of sales—a 43% increase over just three months ago. Small companies (with fewer than 500 employees) are taking advantage of selling online, with ecommerce accounting for 26.1% of sales.

9.    Overall sales revenue drop 17%: Despite online sales gains, marketers report major losses across sales revenue, profits, and customer acquisition during the pandemic. Biggest reductions are to sales revenue, which dropped 17.8% on average, with 16.9% of marketers reporting the loss of over 50% of their revenues. Considering winners and losers, 64% of marketers report sales losses compared to 30.3% that report gains and 5.2% reporting no change. Marketers expect these sales revenues to increase 4.2% in the next year driven by the view that consumers’ current lower likelihood to purchase (67%) and unwillingness to pay full price (43%) will return to pre-pandemic levels within 6-12 months.

10. Pandemic weakens environmental focus: Covid-19 has also dampened marketers’ likelihood to make changes to reduce their offerings’ negative impact on the ecological environment. The number of marketers indicating a willingness to change their products or services to reduce their negative environmental impact has dropped from 72.9% to 52.7% with attention shifting to easier-to-implement marketing promotions (58%). More marketers report that Covid-19 makes sustainability efforts seem “like a luxury” than it “created opportunities to increase sustainability efforts” in their companies.

11. Use of influencers expected to rise: Marketers report that 7.5% of their marketing budgets is focused on online influencers, mostly on LinkedIn, company blogs, Instagram, and Facebook, and that they anticipate large gains in the use of influencers in the next three years (up to 12.7%).

Detailed analysis of these and other results are available here. I hope these findings from our Special Covid-19 Edition of The CMO Survey are useful as you navigate these next few months and beyond. I will be taking a deeper dive into these findings during a webinar on June 25th at 1PM Eastern sponsored by the Marketing Science Institute and the American Marketing Association. You can register by following this link. I look forward answering your questions and taking your comments.

THE CMO SURVEYSurvey Results Archive – The CMO Survey

By Christine Moorman

Sourced from Forbes

Read More
By
In News

Now You Can Opt Out of Seeing Political Ads on Facebook

No Comments

By Mike Isaac

The change lets Facebook play both sides of the debate about political advertising on social media.

SAN FRANCISCO — For months, Facebook has weathered criticism for its willingness to show all types of political advertising to its billions of users, even if those ads contained lies.

Now the company is changing tack — sort of.

2020 ELECTION
Facebook removes Trump ad displaying symbol used by Nazis.

 

The social network said it would allow people in the United States to opt out of seeing social issue, electoral or political ads from candidates or political action committees in their Facebook or Instagram feeds. The ability to hide those ads will begin with a small group of users, before rolling out in the coming weeks to the rest of the United States and later to several other countries.

“Everyone wants to see politicians held accountable for what they say — and I know many people want us to moderate and remove more of their content,” Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, wrote in an op-ed piece in USA Today on Tuesday. “For those of you who’ve already made up your minds and just want the election to be over, we hear you — so we’re also introducing the ability to turn off seeing political ads. We’ll still remind you to vote.”

The move allows Facebook to play both sides of a complicated debate about the role of political advertising on social media ahead of the November presidential election. With the change, Facebook can continue allowing political ads to flow across its network, while also finding a way to reduce the reach of those ads and to offer a concession to critics who have said the company should do more to moderate noxious speech on its platform.

Mr. Zuckerberg has long said that Facebook would not police and moderate political ads. That’s because the company does not want to limit the speech of candidates, he has said, especially in smaller elections and those candidates who do not have the deep pockets of the major campaigns.

But critics, including the Biden presidential campaign, have argued that Facebook’s laissez-faire approach has dangerous consequences, with untruthful political ads leading to the spreading of disinformation and potential voter disenfranchisement. Some Republicans have argued that Facebook should not act as an arbiter of what can and cannot be posted in ads, and that the company’s intervention amounts to censorship.

The Biden presidential campaign lashed out at Facebook over its hands-off policy on political ads last October after the Trump campaign released ads on the social network that falsely claimed that Mr. Biden had offered to bribe Ukrainian officials to drop an investigation into his son. Since then, the Biden campaign has called for the company to fact-check ads from candidates and their campaigns.

Last week, Mr. Biden’s campaign also began an online petition and letter to Mr. Zuckerberg to demand changes to its speech policies ahead of the 2020 presidential contest. At the same time, the Biden campaign also spent $5 million in advertising on Facebook, surging past political ad spending by Mr. Trump on the platform.

By Mike Isaac

Sourced from The New York Times

Read More
By
In News

A Complete Overview of Social Media Advertising for Small Business

No Comments

By Anders Hjorth

Social media advertising allows businesses to reach users during their prime time and in pleasant, entertaining and engaging ways. Find out which platform suits your needs.

Social media has become a mass media, but a personalized one. Remember that scene from the film Minority Report where Tom Cruise walks through a shopping mall and the interactive ad displays address him as a different person, because they scanned his new eyes and took him for someone else?

Social advertising is moving in that direction: No user experience is ever identical to another on social media.

Each screen a user sees comprises numerous elements, that are all optimized by algorithms, which in turn feed on data the user has declared, and on behavior the social network has detected. Some of these elements are advertising. Personalized to the user’s profile, and designed to be a part of the experience.

Overview: What is social advertising?

Social media provides a useful and entertaining experience to its members for free. In return, social media platforms monetize user data by providing powerful digital advertising solutions to advertisers.

Advertising through social media takes the form of banners, posts or videos. Social media ads, many very creative, blend in with the context and appeal to the user.

Snapchat campaign for Bacardi

In a Snapchat campaign for Bacardi, branded filters were used to enable users to send branded postcard-like snaps to their friends from the music festival they were attending. Source:

Snapchat

Benefits of advertising on social media

One of the great benefits social media provides to businesses is the establishment of a direct relationship between you and the user. Advertising through social media creates, extends and activates these relationships. Let’s look at social advertising benefits for businesses.

1. Audiences can be precisely targeted

Users enter their data into social platforms: names, photos, job titles, location, marital status, friends, and much more. Social platforms monitor behavior and interest.

This data enables advertisers to reach the right audience and create targeted ads for it. If an advertiser has a well-defined target market, they can deliver it via social media advertising. Advertisers no longer target media channels, they target audiences via media platforms.

2. Social ads address “awareness”

The “hierarchy of effects” model, often used in marketing and advertising to describe the mental stages a user moves through before purchasing a product, contains three stages:

  • Cognitive (awareness and knowledge)
  • Affective (liking and preference)
  • Conative (conviction and purchase)

Social media advertising is good at addressing the cognitive and affective stages. This makes advertising on social media complementary to direct mail, search marketing, or retail media, which have their strengths at the conative stage.

3. Everything is measurable

Every social media ad impression leaves a digital trace. Every click can be tracked. User characteristics and user behavior can be related to each instance of advertising within a social platform.

So much data exists that it becomes challenging to figure out what is significant and what isn’t. Once advertisers choose the right social media metrics, however, this data will be easy to track and optimize via the social platforms.

4. Social advertising is scalable

Social media advertising costs for a campaign can start as low as $10, and the advertiser has control over timespan, targeting and creative. It can also cost $10 million and cover the globe. Between the two, advertisers have ample room to test, learn and adjust.

Marketers, mainly using social media advertising to boost and enhance their content strategy, can monitor and manage it directly through their favorite social media management tool.

5. Social ads can trigger actions

Whereas social media advertising is often used for building awareness, it can also trigger actions. It generates likes and follows, and can also generate clicks to your website and create leads for your sales and marketing teams.

There is even a rising social commerce trend, where social media advertising feeds directly into the conative stage: users can buy products directly on social media.

The 5 best social media platforms to advertise your small business

The Facebook Ads platform is dedicated to social media advertising, and the Google Ads platform also spans other forms of digital advertising. We will focus on the social media advertising aspects of seven digital advertising platforms.

Platform 1: Facebook Ads: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger

Facebook controls the most powerful advertising platform in the world, as it combines Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger together on the same infrastructure.

Most advertisers, however, will consider Facebook and Instagram to be two advertising platforms, and WhatsApp and Messenger to be additional features.

Characteristics of the Facebook ads platform:

  • Massive reach
  • Very powerful targeting
  • Innovative and adaptive ad formats
  • Machine learning used to improve performance
  • Most controversial use of user data

Facebook Ads by, itself, is probably the strongest social ads platform and is now also the backbone for advertising on Instagram. Depending on your campaign objective, the platform can activate one or more of its advertising channels.

Platform 2: LinkedIn Ads

The LinkedIn advertising platform stands out for its strong business focus. It’s increasingly integrating with the Microsoft Advertising platform and has access to a powerful technological backbone in its mother company, Microsoft.

Characteristics of LinkedIn Ads:

  • Clear business focus
  • Strong targeting of professional audiences
  • Maturing platform
  • Reputation for high cost

Platform 3: Twitter Ads

The Twitter advertising platform is not as powerful as the two above platforms, but Twitter has an interesting positioning as a great add-on for other social networks. The quality of its user data is not as good as the other platforms, but it is strong on topical and thematic targeting and for events.

Characteristics of the Twitter ad platform:

  • Lower volumes
  • Strong topical targeting
  • Specific communities and events
  • Reputation for low costs
  • Complementary to business activity on Twitter

Platform 4: Google Ads: YouTube and Google My Business

Google never created its own social network despite the efforts put into Google Plus and other initiatives. However, many consider YouTube to be a social media platform and the more recent Google My Business platform also has some social media resemblance.

Characteristics of the social media dimension of Google Ads (YouTube and Google My Business):

  • Massive video reach on YouTube
  • Low cost per view on YouTube and innovative ad formats
  • Strong integration with the Google advertising technology stack
  • Effective social-local advertising on Google My Business

Emerging platforms: Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat

The social media landscape is constantly changing. Recently the video-driven social media platform TikTok has entered the scene in a significant way. Its closest competitor, Snapchat, had experienced spectacular growth.

The emergence of new players like TikTok and Snapchat makes it hard for existing players like Pinterest or Twitter to keep growing because they are all fighting for the attention (and dollars) of the same audience.

Emerging social advertising platforms:

  • Pinterest: The creator of pin boards where users can gather images from around the web thematically and share with others, is still going strong. It’s finding itself a positioning on social commerce, as it has the power to inspire users for their purchases. If the platform can generate sales and connect to its advertising, it has strong arguments for attracting more advertisement.
  • TikTok is reaching a young audience massively and strongly influences this group. Its recent advertising offering is creative, including formats like stickers, filters, and overlays.
  • Snapchat has also seduced a large young audience which can be difficult for advertisers to reach. Its creative, innovative, and fun use of digital media shines through in its advertising formats.

Campaign on TikTok in Thailand

In a campaign on TikTok in Thailand, Colgate used an innovative ad format. They designed a clickable “branded effect” triggering a visual effect of exploding hearts when users made a “kissy face”. Source: TikTok

Social ads are a world of opportunity

Social media advertising is a mass media that can entertain, influence and seduce its audiences. Social media platforms provide powerful targeting capabilities and innovative ad formats.

Advertisers can start small and scale infinitely, but need to be very clear about their objectives, to reap the benefits of social ads. Finding the right social network and reaching the right audience can be challenging, but the opportunity is huge and the benefits can be significant.

By Anders Hjorth

Sourced from the blueprint

Read More
By
In News

A Complete Guide to Using Social Media for Your Small Business

No Comments

By Anders Hjorth

Social media has revolutionized human relations and transformed the way we communicate. It has created a new type of celebrity thanks to the power of personal branding.

And businesses are increasingly realizing how direct person-to-person relations via digital channels can be beneficial to their sales and marketing.

To master this new type of business communication, most companies could use a bit of social media advice and some digital marketing tips. So, we’ve gathered a collection of social media tips for business in this article.

They’re easy to understand, easy to execute, and should prove valuable for any small business social media marketing operation.

8 effective social media tips for your small business:

  • Learn about your audience
  • Choose your primary and secondary social networks
  • Use a mix of hero, hub and help content
  • Repurpose your content
  • Leverage inbound marketing and partnerships
  • Set up social commerce
  • Evolve your content from articles to video to live
  • Plan and automate

8 social media marketing tips for small businesses to try

Whereas social media marketing has become an advanced marketing discipline where experts compete for excellence and for outstanding results, it’s also a playground where any business — big or small — can make a difference for itself.

The following social media marketing tips can be implemented by practically any business. (Take special note of Nos. 4 and 8, which are our favorite social media tips on this list.)

1. Learn about your audience

One of the great benefits of social media is the access to market data it provides. Social media platforms are data-driven platforms designed to tailor advertising to their users. In the process, they provide access to some of that data to businesses.

As a business owner, you’ll get access to the social media metrics you need to steer your business, but you’ll also get insights into your audience that you can use for a social media audit or for defining your target market.

How to put your audience insights into action:

While running your social media activity, you’re constantly learning more about your audience. However, you can gather audience insights for a marketing plan in a more structured way.

  • Define your target: First, define what characterizes your target market. Perhaps you have several segments with different characteristics you can outline.
  • Estimate segment sizes: Go to Facebook audience insights and enter the characteristics for each segment to gather an estimate of the audience size.
  • Learn about their media consumption: Identify which publications your audience reads, what they watch, and who they listen to and follow on the internet by looking up their media preferences with SparkToro.

2. Choose your primary and secondary social networks

There are so many communication opportunities via social media marketing that you can easily spread your efforts too thin. By choosing one primary social network where you concentrate your efforts, you’ll get the biggest return on investment.

Other networks can be part of your small business social media strategy as secondary networks that you utilize in a more opportunistic way.

How to select your primary social network:

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to pick one social media network and stick with it. Here’s one approach.

  • Analyze the options: Analyze the user characteristics of the various social networks via information they share with you. Make a list of candidates for your primary social network.
  • Compare with your target audience: Compare and contrast the characteristics of the users on each platform with the characteristics of your target audience to find the best fit.
  • Evaluate your strengths: You probably have more affinities and more reach with one or more of the social networks on your list. Objectively evaluate your strengths on each platform.
  • Apply weights: Set up a simple spreadsheet where you can score each social network on attractivity, audience fit, and strengths. You can weight each score to account for the most important elements. Then pick your primary network, and mark the others as secondary. Build your social media strategy around this primary social network.

3. Use a mix of hero, hub, and help content

Google has a challenge. Its advertisers were brought up with search marketing but were not necessarily educated on how to use Google’s other great advertising channel: YouTube.

Google therefore created a conceptual framework for working with YouTube. This framework helps define the role of video content, which by nature is more expensive to produce and distribute.

Whether you plan to use video or not, the YouTube strategy playbook — which uses the three Hs of “hero,” “hub,” and “help” — can be of great use when planning social media activity for your business.

How to establish your content mix:

Creating a mix of content with the three Hs is very focused on the hero content, or the driving elements of your business’s storyline that you want your broadest audience to see. Let’s look at what you need to do to establish your content mix with this in mind.

  • Content audit: The first thing you need is an overview of your existing content and events that can be used in your content strategy.
  • Brainstorm: The fun part of the process is the brainstorming and idea-testing for your hero content. Aim to find a unique and remarkable content idea that resonates strongly with your audience and emphasizes your brand’s differentiation.
  • Plan around the hero content: Some of the other content you use in your social media strategy can be built around the hero content. Other content pieces act as “hubs” and will simply help your brand stay top of mind. And “help” content is more traditional company information that you place around and between the more story-driven hero content.
  • Build a content calendar: The three types of content come together in a social media content calendar, which helps you stay organized and share your content in a consistent and effective way.

4. Repurpose your content

If you’ve followed our second tip, you may be wondering how to best utilize your secondary social networks. You may also be overwhelmed by the thought of needing to publish content to your social networks multiple times a week.

This is why content repurposing is an important strategy. A publication has a limited life span on social media, and in order to generate a return on your investment in a piece of content, you need to maximize its usage.

How to thoughtfully and effectively repurpose your content:

The initial version of your content should be optimized for your primary social network. Subsequent versions can be formatted to suit other networks, perhaps using a more visual angle, a different perspective, or simply different text.

  • Optimize for your primary network: The first time you publish a piece of content, it should be optimized for your primary social network. Each social network has its own ideal mix of image, video, text, emojis, and hashtags.
  • Adapt to secondary networks: You will likely need to make changes to the format of your content when publishing it on your secondary social networks. Perhaps you’ll only use parts of the content you prepared for your primary network.
  • Republication: One piece of content can typically be presented several times to your primary audience. This is useful as you never reach 100% of your followers with one post since everyone is online at different times. Using different text and images for subsequent publications is a good way to make sure your content doesn’t appear stale or repetitive.
  • Repurposing: Content in which you have invested significant time or money can be repurposed at a later stage. Perhaps you can update a survey you ran, provide a new editorial angle, or redo the graphics. A good way to organize the use and reuse of content is to build a social media content calendar.

5. Leverage inbound marketing and partnerships

Inbound marketing is an approach by which you create and publish content that will drive interested users closer to your offering.

It’s a structured process using planning, scoring, and automation to manage long customer interaction processes. It’s a great approach to marketing for small business, especially in the B2B space.

How to put inbound marketing into action:

Inbound marketing is about using content to drive users to your offering without reaching out to them with advertising.

  • Analyze the user journey: Users travel through various stages before they become prospects for your offering. You first need to identify what questions the user is asking before they’re ready to move to the next step in the user journey.
  • Create and publish content: With the stages of the user journey in mind, create content that corresponds to each stage, and think of mechanisms that will bring the user to the next stage: Newsletter subscription, whitepaper download, webinar registration, etc. This is the stage where you’ll actually use social media platforms to publish your content and engage with your audience.
  • Automate the funnel: One of the aims of inbound marketing is to create an automated lead generation process. It uses content and publications on social media to generate interest and subsequently works like a content relationship management tool. You’ll need a technical solution such as HubSpot or Salesforce Pardot to pursue this approach seriously.

6. Set up social commerce

Users can be strongly influenced by social media but may not be used to buying products there. There is, however, a rising trend of social commerce on social networks like Instagram and Pinterest.

Facebook also recently launched its Page shops, adding e-commerce functionality to business pages on its platform.

How to use social commerce in your social media strategy:

Social commerce is a shortcut from social media to e-commerce. It can be an interesting opportunity for companies with strong social media activity and the possibility to sell online.

  • Prepare product information: In order to sell online via social media, you need the same information as for any other e-commerce activity: product titles and descriptions, images, prices, and an order fulfillment solution.
  • Choose your platform: If your primary social network has e-commerce functionality, go with that platform. If it doesn’t, consider trying one of the leading social commerce platforms: Instagram, Pinterest, or Facebook.
  • Build the e-commerce functionality: It’s fairly easy to set up social commerce. Products and prices can be entered individually or as a product feed so your shop is up to date.

7. Evolve your content from articles to video to live

When you first consider content for your social media marketing plan, you might think about articles and images.

But video content has become accessible to small businesses now that platforms like the Facebook Live Producer empower you to create professional-looking live video content. You might even want to make video your hero content, as we saw in tip No. 3.

How to make smart use of video:

All you need is a smartphone with a good camera to start producing live video. We also recommend adding a good-quality microphone or headset.

  • Plan your video content: For video content, you need to create a title, write a script, and find the right filming location with good lighting and an appropriate background.
  • Test-run your video: To overcome the fear of looking silly and get used to speaking to the camera, do at least one test run. A teleprompter software tool can be helpful as well.
  • Set it up as an event: You can create video content for later publication or create a live event. Whichever you choose, make sure to build awareness before publication to drive more views and more engagement.

8. Plan and automate

Running social media activities is about efficiently using resources. The best way to organize any social media activity is to plan ahead and automate as much as possible.

There are a number of simple social tools to help with automation that each perform specific tasks, or it can be done using a more complete social media software suite that covers all of your automation needs.

How to plan and automate your social media activity:

If you’ve built your content mix using tip No. 4, you may have started using a content calendar as the nervous system of your social media strategy. Now, all you need to do is connect your primary and secondary social networks to your content via automation.

  • Define your primary social network: As described in the first tip, you should first define your social network set-up and decide where primary content goes.
  • Build your content calendar: A content calendar is a key component of a social media strategy. Build your calendar by placing the hero content first and scheduling supporting content around it. You will likely have a regular flow of hub content, and the amount of help content you produce will depend on your business activity and commercial calendar.
  • Automate publication: Bring it all together with automation software that allows you to connect your content to your social media accounts. Schedule posts to each of your social networks in advance, keeping your content calendar moving like a well-oiled machine.

The best social media tools for small business

Social media automation tools will help your business automate the implementation of your content strategy. In the tips above, we’ve mentioned various tasks for which these tools are useful: in implementing a content calendar, automating publications, and planning ahead.

Let’s look at a few tools that work in different ways.

1. Later

The core functionality of Later is to build a visual content calendar and schedule image posts to Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Later’s visual overview of the calendar is one of the best we’ve seen.

Screenshot of Later Calendar View

The content calendar view of Later is visual and well adapted to planning Instagram posts.

2. MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar is great for getting the most out of your content. It’s the content repurposing, recycling, and automation champion.

MeetEdgar&#x27;s automatic post creation tool.

A unique feature of MeetEdgar is the automatic creation of post variations submitted for approval.

3. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is one the best and most complete social media management tools covering the entire spectrum of automation, management, research, and reporting functionalities for your social media activity.

Sprout Social&#x27;s reporting options

Sprout Social provides a wide variety of reporting options, including content performance across the social media channels you are using.

Learn from what you do and focus on where you win

Most social media activity only pays off in the medium to long run, which can be frustrating to businesses looking for quick wins or a rapid return on their investment.

But some of the above tips are sure to generate value for your business even in the short run as they can help you focus on what’s essential and what tasks are the best use of your time.

Focus your efforts, optimize your content output, plan ahead, and automate where you can in order to get the most out of your small business’s social media strategy.

By Anders Hjorth

Sourced from the blueprint

Read More
By
In News

Is Social Media Analytics Redundant Today?

No Comments

By .

Over the last decade, there has been an explosion in social media data, and at the same time, AI/ML models are also getting better at predicting people’s interests and purchasing habits. For example, social media data can be processed and analysed using AI models to find meaningful correlations to precisely target products and services to specific users.

Businesses can also leverage analytics models on data collected from social networks and use computational frameworks like Apache Hadoop for analysing large volumes of data.  A lot of companies have been using social media data from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram LinkedIn, Snapchat to improve their marketing ROI and target consumers by analysing users’ platform behaviour in relation to demographics.

But, there’s a caveat! While social media data provides great insights into the behaviour of users, they may also face user privacy-related issues.

Social Media Analytics Vs Privacy Violations

Ever since the Cambridge Analytical scandal and the introduction of regulations such as GDPR, it has become more stringent for companies to leverage social media analytics for targeted advertising. The impact of the Cambridge Analytica scandal was a catalyst in this regard when it was found that third-party applications on Facebook were mining users’ data for political campaign profiling.

In the past, third-party data aggregators scraped social media sites and collected personal sensitive data, which was then resold to companies. Now, with the introduction of regulations that prohibit that practice, will social media analytics become redundant or less effective for companies?

Events such as the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal, massive security incidents like Equifax breach, and later on GDPR paved the way to tighten the norms on how personal data is collected, stored, and processed. In the past few years, the lawsuits against these tech companies on privacy norms have only strengthened the trend. 

Companies around are therefore preparing to become more compliant with the regulations and what data they collect of users. Facebook, for example, has now become more transparent to users specifying what data they collect and what information they provide third-parties for their advertising campaigns.

Social media profiles have personally identifiable information and other sensitive data that can be used by data scientists to create models for specific products, which can generate more sales. The challenges with collecting social media data can depend on the kind of data collected (non-personal social data or personal data) and how the data is utilised. It also depends on the applicable laws and regulations in geography. For instance, in Europe, It will be more difficult for social media analytics companies to execute to their full potential using the data, versus Asian countries where privacy laws are less stringent.

Privacy Compliant Social Data Analytics

Without having to profile users using digital identifiers like IP or Mac addresses and cookies, there is still a lot which can be done. Companies are looking at GDPR compliant data processing on social media data, with proper consent and transparency for how personal data is collected and utilised for analytics. Here non-sensitive social media data is used for increasing sales or generating marketing insights with CRM integration, which is an appropriate use of social media ‘likes’ to achieve specific business goals. On the other hand, if sensitive personal data is mined to track users or survey their purchase habits, then that could be a violation at least in some global geographies.

For companies, it is important to be careful about the nature of data collected for analytics and ensure it’s not personal in nature, as it can attract penalties. To counter this, proper data governance programs have been put in place for analysing social media trends and making sure that there is no violation.

Even if there are fewer datasets available for social media analytics on personally identifiable data, social media analytics companies are expected to keep utilising non-personal data for sentiment analysis, sales trends, visualisation, and acquiring sales leads, all within the boundaries of regulations. For example, by monitoring social media, one can determine customer sentiment analysis on non-personal data, which can be converted into actionable insights.

The Roadmap For Social Media Analytics

The bottom line is that the collection and utilisation of social media data are complex, involving multiple sources and data management challenges. This is confusing for analytics professionals and social data analytics companies to identify the legality of collecting such kind of social media data.

This means that companies will continue to use popular products such as Google Analytics to track social media campaign performance, conversions, and ultimately understand the return on investment from social media marketing efforts. Other large companies like Salesforce, IBM, SAS have products for social media data analytics.

While social media analytics will continue to play a role in sales and marketing, other areas like risk management and fraud detection are also becoming more prominent. Here, law enforcement companies are leveraging social media analytics to extract and analyse the data generated from various data sources.

By

Sourced from AIM

Read More
By
In News

Brands can turn the tide during coronavirus by building new consumer journeys

No Comments

By Shawn Lim

Brands need to focus on hyper-localisation by connecting with consumers where they are, as Covid-19 has dramatically changed consumer behaviour and altered the path-to-purchase, according to Facebook and Boston Consulting Group.

According to a new report called ‘Turn the Tide’, released by Facebook India and Boston Consulting Group, the use of micro-targeting can help brands get the first-mover advantage. This is because countries are being divided into different zones, with distinct restrictions due to the pandemic, so they need to build social connections despite social distancing, by engaging with consumers in their context

To cope with pandemic lockdown, which has caused significant disruption for communities and businesses, people are spending more time on social media platforms. This means brands have an opportunity to build stronger dialogues and deeper connections with users.

The aim of the guide, according to Facebook India and Boston Consulting Group, is to guide brands to adapt to the pandemic and ensure business continuity.

Nimisha Jain, the managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group, says: “We are experiencing unprecedented shifts in consumer attitudes and behaviours as 80%+ consumers will continue to practice social distancing and are bringing the outside inside, over 40% of consumers are dialling up on health and wellness spends, e-commerce adoption has already advanced by two-three years, to name a few.”

“These aren’t just temporary surges, and many will last longer and become more defining traits. Our analysis reveals that only one in six companies emerged stronger in past crises. Players who show the agility to reinvent their value propositions, go-to-market plans and business models to address these demand shifts, will be the ones that set themselves apart from the pack.”

In addition, the report also shares actionable guidance for brands to build for the new consumer journeys in times of Covid-19 and beyond.

For example, brands can bring alive experiences through virtual launches and product demos as people turn to virtual experiences for every facet of their life. Facebook said it is already seeing more brands explore Facebook and Instagram ‘Live’ to connect with their followers and customers, with brands now thinking about using social media platforms for new product launches too.

Heeru Dingra, the chief executive officer at WATConsult tells The Drum the agency has modified its planning and strategy around the new consumer journeys, urging its clients to follow a simple mantra of ‘solve, serve and sell’.

She explains brands should focus on solving the problems their consumers face, serve their purpose and the result thereof could be the sale of services or products. She notes a lot of brands have understood this concept and have already started altering their approach to fit this mantra.

“We leveraged the power of gaming and re-created one of the most iconic games of all time, Ludo, for our client Tata Motors. Titled #SafetyFirst Ludo, this version aims to spread awareness about the importance of personal hygiene and social distancing amid the Covid-19 outbreak,” she says.

She also calls out work by Bajaj Allianz General Insurance called #CareWillOvercome, which salutes frontline workers, while a #ReconnectWithStarbucks campaign turned the act of baristas calling out people’s names into a digital phenomenon.

She adds: “These examples summarize how we integrated the need of the hour that is to maintain social distancing, continue to concentrate on personal hygiene and at the same time have our heartfelt appreciation for the ones who have been fighting for us day and night, into our brand approach in some way. This helps to amplify the brand message while being sensitive to the current situation, serving the purpose of extending the required communication and increasing as well as sustaining brand recall.”

The report also advised brands to look at their media mix models to drive growth by aligning to new media landscapes. According to the report, when brands, especially those with traditional product categories, start spending more online, they need to understand incremental outcomes, as well as cross-platform efficiency.

This would increase the need for digital measurement standards, such as custom mix modelling (CMM) by Nielsen, which Facebook said it had piloted last year.

Gautam Mehra, the chief data officer for South Asia and chief executive officer of programmatic at Dentsu Aegis Network observes the importance of moving away from traditional marketing metrics to real business metrics that can be measured and improved on an ongoing basis.

“With the impetus of commerce, CRM and digital transformation, I think, every company will now have a direct-to-consumer line of business and will want to bring themselves closer to the consumer, and rely less on the intermediaries,” he explains.

While most brands are dealing with huge change across many aspects of business, focusing on the changing customer journey is a good place for marketing to focus attention.

Feature Image Credit: the report also shares actionable guidance for brands to build for the new consumer journeys in times of Covid-19 and beyond.

By Shawn Lim

Sourced from The Drum

Read More
By
In News

How to Create a Social Media Content Strategy to Make Your Business Stand Out

No Comments

By Anders Hjorth

To make your content king on social media, you need a strategy. These are the steps required to create it.

Content is at the heart of social media. “Content is king,” they say, and it takes many forms: text, images, photos, videos, and emojis 😉💪🔥🙏🥇. But it’s not the individual components that give content a royal stance, it’s the story it tells and the emotions it generates in its audience.

That’s why you need a content strategy to define your brand’s storyline and ensure you fully reap the benefits of social media.

When building your social content strategy, remember that engagement is an integral part of how social media platforms work: The more your content resonates with your audience, the further it will be distributed on the social platform to be seen by more people — and if you’re lucky, it might even go viral.

There’s never a guarantee your content will go viral, but a structured approach to building your strategy will increase your chances.

Let’s look at the steps for defining a social media content strategy.

Here are 7 steps to develop a social media content strategy:

  • Define your audience
  • Audit your content
  • Define your themes and topics
  • Map out your hashtags
  • Create the story and the content mix
  • Set publication frequencies and goals
  • Build your social media content calendar

How to create a social media content strategy for your small business

To make your strategy successful, you should tell a story with your social media content, be ambitious, use automation as your invisible friend and creativity as your magic wand. And above all, maintain your rhythm and consistency throughout the entire process.

Step 1: Define your audience

Before we look at the content itself, we need to consider who it’s for. Your social media audience should correspond to your target market, but it doesn’t have to be limited to just individuals in that market.

Adjacent audiences, or those who can exert an influence on your target market, can serve as an entry point to your audience and shouldn’t be overlooked.

A great way to define your target audience for social media is by using personas. Personas are a simplified representation of your target audience with a name as well as geographic, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral characteristics.

A persona is like a sketch of a segment of your audience that you can improve over time.

Make sure to include motivations, interests, fears, and pain points in your persona definitions, and keep your persona(s) in mind every time you shape new content.

Persona Template

By formalizing your personas into easily understandable formats that can be put on posters on the wall and summarized with memorable names, you can keep them in mind during the entire content creation process.

Tips for defining your audience:

  • Use Facebook Audience Insights: Via your Facebook business page, you’ll have access to free audience insights from Facebook. This tool can help you further define and quantity your target audience.
  • Try Sparktoro: By querying Sparktoro with some of the key elements from your persona overview, the tool will identify audience characteristics such as what sites they visit or what influencers they follow.

Step 2: Audit your existing content

Keeping your audience in mind, it’s time to look at your existing content. This can be quite a challenging and time-consuming process as it involves identifying all of the articles on your blog, any historical publications on social media, and even content you’ve created for using offline.

If you plan to reuse some of this content, it would be a great idea to organize the content in a repository or a digital asset management tool.

Here are some ways to find your content:

  • Find popular content on your blog with Google Analytics: In Google Analytics, go to Behavior > All pages and select a long time frame (for example, one year back) to see the most popular pages on your website. Ignore the homepage and all the static pages on your site, and copy the list of all the popular articles on your website.
  • Find popular posts on your Facebook page: Go to Facebook Insights and select Posts to see a list of your posts organized chronologically. You can scroll to see pieces of historical content and extract the most successful posts if you haven’t already identified them elsewhere. (An easier way to do this is by using a social media management tool to extract and organize your posts on various social networks. We’ll look at those options in more detail below.)
  • Crawl your website from the outside: Content audits are often performed in relation with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and there are a number of tools available to help you with this. For a small website, the Screaming Frog site crawler is free to use (up to 500 URLs). It will allow you to extract all of the URLs your content represents so you can add the list to your content repository. Perhaps you’ve already done an SEO audit to gather some recommendations about your content that you can use as well.

Now you should be able to start identifying your highest-quality content, as the most popular content will be prioritized in the searches you do. However, you shouldn’t assume that your most popular content is also the best representation of your brand.

Keep in mind your audience personas as well as the values of your brand. Perhaps you’ve performed a brand audit or detailed the values of your brand in your social media marketing plan or your business plan. Look them up, and qualify your best-performing content against those criteria.

There’s also a fun way to audit your existing content: Let artificial intelligence (AI) have a look at your existing articles: “What does Walt think?” Analyzing your content with AI can help you understand how credible it is.

Walt uses artificial intelligence to analyze any article

The artificial intelligence (named “Walt”) from Fakerfact will analyze any article you submit via its URL and score it according to various content dimensions. Source: Fakerfact.org.

The ideal outcome of your content audit should be a complete overview of your existing usable content, which we will categorize in the next step.

Step 3: Define your content themes, topics, and channels

While auditing your content, you may have realized that most of it fell into natural categories corresponding to the themes you most often communicate about. In this step, take the time to define the full range of themes you want to cover.

Keep an open mind; you may discover content gaps between what you have and what you need, which will help you in the process of developing content.

You also need to define what social media channels you want to use in your content strategy and what their function will be. Define your primary social media channel as well as a few secondary channels, too, that can piggyback on your primary channel to increase the reach of your communications.

Don’t forget to define the role of your website in your social media content strategy, and create an overview of the themes and topics your content needs to address.

Step 4: Map out your hashtags

With your themes in mind, do some hashtags research. Hashtags are an essential component of social media navigation on Twitter and Instagram, and they have a secondary role on most other social media networks, too.

The four roles of hashtags:

  1. Drive discovery. When hashtags are used to drive discovery, as it is the case on Instagram, Twitter, and increasingly, LinkedIn, it’s important to choose related hashtags that are already being used by other social media profiles, as these hashtags can start to trend. If your post has used a trending hashtag, it can appear when new users are looking for content by navigating via that hashtag.
  2. Give context to a message. Hashtags are also used more generally to provide context for a message and thereby use fewer words. The hashtag gives context to the other words in the post: “How are we all doing today? #coronavirus” means something totally different than “How are we all doing today? #brexit.”
  3. Create an anchor. Hashtags can also be used for creating an anchor. If, for example, you’ve created a report about marketing on Amazon, and you post extracts and content from the report to drive awareness about it, you could use the hashtag #AmazonMarketingReport in all of your posts to create a way to anchor the different posts together as well as create a concept that spans multiple social media platforms.
  4. Reference events. Finally, don’t forget events hashtags. These can be used for yearly recurring events, such as #MayThe4thBeWithYou and #BlackFriday, or they can be associated with specific events such as a conference, like #sxsw2019.

Twitter&#x27;s trending events hashtag

If your post is visible on a trending events hashtag, you will have created significant visibility for your brand.

The next step is to associate various hashtags to each of the themes you identified in the last step. Focus on the ones that can drive discovery, and analyze the reach and consistency of each of them. You should end up with a prioritized list of hashtags you should be using for new posts on each topic.

To check the consistency of a hashtag, simply search for it and look at the results. Would a post from your brand belong in the search results? To check the volume of searches for various hashtags, here are a couple of free tools that can help analyze the amount of traffic on hashtags:

The social media management tool you’re using might be also able to provide this functionality. Keep a number of hashtags on your list so you can vary the audiences you target from time to time.

Use restraint with hashtags, though: A good limit to respect is 3-5 hashtags per post, allowing you to use events or discovery, context, and an anchor.

Step 5: Create the story and the content mix

Now that you know your personas, have identified your existing content, and have defined the themes that should be present in your social media marketing strategy, it’s time to take a step back and look at the big picture.

  • What’s the story for your brand in that context?
  • Perhaps you need some inspiration for outstanding content?

Use your newly defined content themes and hashtags to look at content that has stood out for the theme in the past using BuzzSumo, which is a database of articles that appear on blogs and social media sorted by popularity. What outstanding creative content do you need your story to wind itself around?

Next, consider content types. YouTube put the Hero, Hub, Hygiene framework forward in 2014, which defines three functions for the pieces in your content strategy.

  1. Hero: The main piece is the “hero” content that’s the driving element of your storyline.
  2. Hub: Around the storyline, you build “hub” content that can be curated from other sources and keeps your audience engaged with your main themes.
  3. Hygiene: Finally, the “hygiene” content — renamed to “help” by Google — consists of more practical information about your products, services, or offerings.

The creativity of your hero content can strongly influence the success of your content strategy. It is the “Don Draper” of your content strategy: Don Draper is the main character of the Mad Men TV series, depicting the advertising industry in the 1960s.

He spends his time looking for outstanding yet simple concepts that will connect end users with brands.

Take some time to build the concept for your hero content, and consider it the most important content element in your mix. Next, consider all the elements that can support the main hero content and how they can prepare and expand the main story element.

When building up the storyline itself, consider learning from Pixar in this online course. The framework won’t be directly applicable to your social media strategy, but it should inspire you to apply some of the same storytelling principles in your communications.

Content strategy outlined as themes and hashtags

The building bricks for a content strategy can be outlined as themes, hashtags, and content that apply to your personas via your main social channels.

Step 6: Define publication frequencies and goals

To make it all come together, you need to define a more detailed plan. Identify a top storyline and a list of themes to cover in your communications. Also, be sure to insert the calls-to-actions and promotional elements required for this strategy to serve your marketing plan as well.

The next step will be to define your publication frequencies.

  • What will your personas expect of you?
  • What is the natural frequency of news related to your hero content?
  • How can you fill the gap in a natural way?

A good way to define publication frequencies is to look at the strategy from the viewpoint of social media metrics: Calculate your reach on social networks, and compare this to your communication goals.

Your ideal publication frequency will derive from this comparison as you will need to reach your entire audience many times per month — and maybe several times per day — to meet your goals.

If you can’t reach your goals via a higher publication frequency, you’ll need to activate social media advertising campaigns to close the gap. You should, however, look into as many alternative digital marketing ideas you can find before investing in paid media.

Step 7: Outline your social media content calendar

You’ve now put all of the components of your content strategy together. In order to further materialize it, consider building a detailed content calendar of individual posts, themes, hashtags, and publication dates.

A content calendar helps you organize when and where each of your posts will publish, allowing you to optimize your content as well as each social media platform you use.

A content calendar is one of the best social media content strategy tools you have at your disposal, and one way to organize it is by using a social media management tool.

The best social media management tools to execute your content strategy

Your new social media content strategy is ready, and you may feel a little overwhelmed with the objectives you’ve set for yourself and your team. If not, go back and revise your objectives upwards: Social media objectives should be daring!

Beyond the strategy, you now need to address the execution of your strategy, and for this, a number of tools in the market can help you automate a wide range of the activities you need to undertake, including automatic scheduling, competitive analysis, and reporting.

We’ve looked at some of the best tools for social media management below.

1. Later.com

If your primary social media channel is Instagram, then Later might be your preferred tool. Its strongest functionality is the preparation of a social media calendar from an image repository and the automatic publication of posts.

In addition to Instagram, the tool also allows you to manage your Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest activity.

Later&#x27;s visual content calendar

The visual content calendar and its drag-and-drop functionality from an image repository is one of the strengths of Later.

2. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a longstanding leader in the area of social media management. With Hootsuite, you can cover four key aspects of your social media management: post scheduling, social listening, content curation, and analytics.

There is a further integration of direct management of advertising in Facebook and LinkedIn as well as project management for your social media team.

The basic Hootsuite plan is free for a limited number of social networks and posts per month.

Hootsuite&#x27;s Core Features List

Beyond the basic functionalities of social media management, Hootsuite also allows you to manage your team and integrate with a number of apps and external solutions.

3. Sprout Social

At the high end of the social media management tools spectrum, we find Sprout Social. The basic functionalities covered include social listening, post scheduling via a content calendar, centralized engagement management across various social networks, and analytics.

Sprout claims additional access to consumer research and influencer identification as some of its strengths. These more advanced features can be helpful in some of the stages of the content strategy process.

Sprout Social User Interface

Sprout Social has a great user interface with clear illustrations of the performance of your social media channels.

Content does not become king all by itself

The myth of viral content that suddenly becomes a worldwide phenomenon simply because it was outstanding has endured for many years. In reality, though, it is preparation that allows for great social media success.

Social media teams who have their finger on the pulse, who abound with creativity, who detect every competitor move, and who constantly optimize their presence on the various platforms are the most likely to generate success.

And at the very foundation of a social media presence lies a well-researched and documented content strategy, which will guarantee that your content resonates with its target audience so you can meet your business objectives.

By Anders Hjorth

Digital Marketing Strategist

Sourced from the blueprint

Read More
By
In News

The Many Benefits of Social Media for Small Businesses

No Comments

By Anders Hjorth

Social media can empower small businesses and provide access to markets, clients, insights and advertising capabilities you wouldn’t expect.

Social Media empowers small businesses and opens opportunities formerly reserved for large corporations. It can feel overwhelming and scary, but do you ever hear of a small business experiencing social media downfalls? Not really.

Social media for small business makes complex business processes accessible, gives you direct access to market research and opens up world markets for you. Let’s look at the advantages of social media.

Here are some advantages for businesses using social media:

  • Social media empowers your marketing
  • Events can be held online
  • Sell direct to end users with higher margins
  • Advertise at a lower cost
  • Get direct user feedback
  • Extend your business reach

Marketing benefits of social media

Social media empowers your marketing and puts you in direct contact with end users. You can reach out, you can interact with them, and you can collect their feedback. You get insights into audiences you are targeting, helping you build an effective social media marketing plan.

Let’s go through some of the advantages of social media for the marketing of your small business.

1. Build a community

Social media brings people together via direct relationships. Your social media presence creates a community of users around your brand or your products. And this community can create user generated content (UGC) and strong ambassadors for your brand.

Microsoft uses the community approach for end-user support on a dedicated technology platform, but using social media, you can start building a user community at no cost.

Microsoft User Community

Microsoft has created a user community as part of its support. Source: Microsoft

2. Word of mouth

A Nielsen report shows people trust “recommendations from people I know” at a rate of over 83%. With TV advertising, it’s a much lower 63%, and online advertising only 48%.

Word of mouth is more powerful than advertising and much easier to activate via social media. Your business can use the power of social media communications between people to be seen, heard, and observed online.

You don’t need a full-fledged social media strategy to enjoy these benefits. Just ask questions like: “What do you think of our product?” and “If you liked this, would you mind sharing?”

Blog on sustainable development

Suggest that people share a post on social media as in this blog on sustainable development. Source: ICLEI

3. Content marketing

Social media existed for a number of years before content marketing concepts and inbound marketing appeared ten years ago. Both are based on search marketing and social media.

With content marketing, focus on creating remarkable content which resonates with your target audience. It builds awareness and engages users.

Inbound marketing takes this engagement as the first step in a user journey that draws the user toward your commercial offering. Valuable content and experiences have that power. Social media is a key component in content marketing and allows you to market to your audience without advertising.

Tableau sign up form

Software sales often uses inbound marketing, as in this example. Source: Tableau.com

4. Advocacy

Your brand and reputation will exist in the market whether you are part of the conversation or not. According to Jeff Bezos “Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room.”

David Brier, a branding authority, puts it this way: “If you don’t give the market the story to talk about, they’ll define your brand’s story for you.”

A large part of this conversation happens on social media, where you must create that brand positioning story. Use one of the most powerful mechanisms on social media: advocacy, where a person talks favorably about your brand. Advocacy is used in two distinct ways on social media:

  • Employee advocacy
  • Ambassador advocacy

Employee advocacy uses employees’ personal voice and network to weigh in on a brand conversation. Employee advocacy testifies to a strong corporate culture and sense of belonging. It can be very effective and generate a lot of natural engagement.

When community members act as natural brand ambassadors, they can be powerful advocates for your brand and product. Brand ambassadors sometimes receive some type of free product, service or privileged access to information.

Majestic Brand Ambassadors

Ambassadors for

SEO software company Majestic represent a geographic region and act as spokespersons for the product. Source: Majestic

5. Social media influencers

Social media influencers are similar to brand ambassadors but are typically paid to present a brand or a product to their audiences. They come in many forms and shapes and can help access niche markets. Using them isn’t simple or straightforward, but can add social media power to a small business.

AspireIQ homepage

AspireIQ helps brands find influencers who fit their requirements and can increase their exposure. Source: AspireIQ

Travel destination promoters use social media influencers a lot. Inviting an influencer on a trip and having them share the experience with their audience makes the destination tangible, accessible and attractive. Search a travel destination on YouTube to see this in action.

Extended benefits of social media

Social media has expanded marketing by creating person-to-person communication, allowing your brand to enter into conversations with end users. Another dimension of social media disruption lies in dematerialization, or doing more with less.

There are no physical limitations on social media, and technology enables a business to do more at a lower cost, like creating live events or extending their business hours and international reach.

6. Live events online

Today, any company can stream a live event to their user base to showcase new products and services. They can even have one-to-one exchanges, at a low cost with tools such as Facebook Live or one of the many online conferencing platforms.

Jessica Uhl, Shell CFO

Dutch Shell Plc uses their chief financial officer to broadcast their quarterly reports. Source: Youtube

7. International reach

Social media has no geographical barriers so the world is your audience. Social media does, however, have language barriers. Your reach will be limited to the languages you communicate in.

Although automatic translation is improving, you probably need native language skills to persuade and sell products. Your international reach could be limited by local regulations and taxes, but once you cover them, you can market to the world.

List of Weber international sites

The internet lets you offer your barbecues worldwide. Source: Weber.com

8. Extend your business hours

Brick and mortar business and their owners have limited hours, but your social media profiles never sleep. They’re always open and make your business a 24/7/365 non-stop selling machine.

If you have an e-commerce business, your shop doesn’t close at night, and your audience is global. Program automatic responses and chatbots, and your social media profiles can be your customer service when you’re not available.

Eiffel Tower&#x27;s Facebook page

Book your trip to the Eiffel Tower on its Facebook page. Or you can contact it via Messenger. Source: Facebook

Advertising benefits of social media

The internet has had a powerful impact on the value chain in many industries: shopping centers are disintermediated by e-commerce, insurance agents are disintermediated by online insurance, travel agencies are disintermediated by flight sales and online hotel booking.

Social media has eliminated your need for an advertising agency for much of your promotional activity.

9. Social commerce

Social commerce combines capabilities of e-commerce with the human interactions of social media. Consider Amazon.

It integrates several media aspects into the user experience: user reviews and ratings, recommendations based on users’ preferences, and the possibility to find Amazon products on social media outside the Amazon platform itself.

At the other extreme, we have Instagram. It integrates e-commerce directly into social media by product tagging and direct checkout without ever leaving Instagram. Social commerce may be the future of shopping, especially impulse buys.

Instagram Shopping Post

Products that appear in photos on Instagram can be tagged with their price, and the user can click on the product and buy out without ever leaving the app. Source: Instagram

Social media is a great place to showcase your products, in the form of images, videos or descriptive texts. More than just a showcase, social media is a great place to advertise.

10. Powerful targeting

It’s easy to access Social media advertising, and you can use it in sophisticated ways. The first step for many advertisers is to simply “boost” a publication to get more exposure.

This multiplies the number of impressions of a normal publication. No need to do artwork or write ad copy, simply use what you have and expand the exposure of something that has already proven successful.

Facebook Ads offers incredible targeting capabilities because of the extensive user data it holds. Facebook lets you target users via geography, demography, interests, behaviors and more.

11. Scalability

You can scale advertising campaigns almost endlessly, reaching audiences across the world with complex ad sequencing and retargeting setups. This can be part of a wider social media campaign, spanning several social media platforms and reaching your target audience in different ways.

Use this scalability to your advantage, reducing risks while increasing profits.

12. Measurability

Social media analytics lets you measure almost all social media activity, especially advertising. Master the four basic social media metrics and you’ll be able to interpret and optimize everything you do on social media.

Social media process and metrics

Measure your performance on social media by looking at your input, engagement, following and reach.

Customer service benefits of social media

Social media profiles, always on and easily found, make it easy to contact a brand for after-sales service. Many companies use Twitter and Facebook for customer service. Users post direct feedback via reviews and post comments. Read and analyze their comments to tweak your marketing message.

13. Direct user feedback

With Twitter, you can allow any user to exchange direct messages with you, and Facebook has an inbox system to receive messages, feedback and questions from your users. Some social media management tools centralize messages from various social media platforms and post them in one place.

DHL&#x27;s Twitter account

DHL has created a dedicated Twitter account for customer service.

Chatbots are another way to initiate and extend the user feedback loop automatically.

14. Reviews and ratings

Users can review your products and rate your company on social media. Many companies worry that a few unsatisfied users could make their overall service look bad.

In reality, most reviews are positive, and they have a positive effect on companies who provide great user experiences, which will generate great reviews.

Cafe Zen Paris Facebook Page

User reviews reveal what users preferred and what they didn’t like. Source: Facebook

You’ll inevitably find some fake reviews on rating platforms. If you want to increase your reviews, simply solicit feedback from more users, and improve the things your users are unhappy about.

So many benefits but you can’t have them all

Limited time won’t let you plug into all these social media benefits. Social media is work intensive and results come from hard and consistent work. Not so different from the offline world, is it?

Be selective and invest in social media actions which offer the biggest payback for your business. Set long-term objectives and work consistently toward them to extract significant value from social media.

By Anders Hjorth

Sourced from the blueprint

Read More
By
In News

Building Your Personal Brand When The Coronavirus Has You WFH

No Comments

By William Arruda

Face time is valuable when you’re building your personal brand. Running into people at the company café or water cooler, popping your head into a colleague’s office, running into your boss on the elevator, and having an impromptu conversation with a decision maker are like valuable deposits into your personal brand bank. It’s not easy to replace those human, look- each-other-in-the-eye connections.

But we’re living in a time where handshakes are forbidden and we must stay at least six feet away from others. Of course, that’s if you even find yourself in the same physical space. For most people in the corporate world, the three letters that describe their current situation are WFH.

So when it comes to personal branding, the question is: How can I build my brand when I’m working in my living room and everyone I work with seems far away?

Well, not to worry. There are many ways to contribute value, get noticed and be acknowledged even when you’re socially distanced and feeling a bit isolated. These four actions will help you grow your personal brand no matter how isolated you are:

1. Leverage Social Media

When you use social media to build your thought leadership, you deliver value to others and become known as an expert in your field. That helps build your brand credibility both inside and outside your organization. Often, the external renown you create with your peers translates into power and influence internally. If you’re new to working from home, you were just given the gift of time. The minutes or hours you used to spend commuting can now be devoted to building your virtual brand. It’s time to start your own LinkedIn blog, YouTube channel or podcast. Choose the format that you enjoy and pick a vehicle that helps you reach the people you seek to influence.

2. Become A Video Star

When you use the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet to communicate, you’re truly limiting your ability to express yourself. In fact, according to Albert Mehrabian, words only account for about 7% of a communication. When you use video, you deliver a complete communication — including body language, intonation, and tone of voice, letting you deliver a more accurate and compelling message. So how can you make video your go-to personal branding platform?

  • Set up your makeshift at-home studio where you know the sound is good, the lighting is right and what’s behind you is not distracting. Then, make all your meetings Zoom, Skype or FaceTime meetings. If you’re the meeting leader, set them up that way; if you’re a participant, encourage the leader to make it a video meeting. Then, be your best professional self during meetings. Show up on time, look the part and don’t multi-task. Most people aren’t skilled at participating in video meetings, making it even easier for you to show up as the star.
  • Use video to stand out. When you have something to say that needs to command the attention—of, let’s say, your boss—send a video message instead of an email. We are bombarded with email so it’s hard to get your message noticed. When you use video, you cut through the clutter and send a subtle message that there’s something different about this communication. Sometimes, the medium is the message.
  • Create video updates for your team. If you want your people to pay attention to what’s going on, create regular team updates sharing the latest developments, what you see coming down the pike, and lots of acknowledgement for the great work of the members of your team. People are missing the human connection they experience in the office; a video message from you will be more connective and emotionally engaging than a boring email.

3. Appoint Yourself A Leadership Role

If some or all of your team is working from home, some for the first time, they’re likely struggling a bit to find their groove. Be the person who helps make it easier for them. Communicate what’s going on in the company, provide best practices for WFH, share a funny story—do anything you can to help make WFH more enjoyable, productive and fun. When you step up during unexpected and uncertain times and show yourself as a leader, you’re scoring a big win for your personal brand.

4. Be A Digital Brand Steward

When you become the person who engages in what your company is sharing with the world and become actively involved in making that content more visible, people take notice—people who count. Brand stewards move themselves outside the normal hierarchy of an organization. They become more aware of what’s happening outside their department or division, and they commit to making the company’s brand more visible to members of their professional community. It demonstrates your loyalty and shows that you’re a bigger, more strategic player who’s engaged outside your domain. And, it gives you some content you can use to stay regularly visible to your peeps. So share the relevant content your company is posting on their social channels with your community of connections, friends and followers.

Feature Image Credit: GETTY

By William Arruda

William Arruda is the cofounder of CareerBlast and author of Digital YOU: Real Personal Branding in the Virtual Age.

Sourced from Forbes

Read More
By
Load More