We are living through a transformational shift in the way the world communicates. The development of social platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, have helped to inspire that change. The traffic on these platforms is huge - 700MM daily active users on Facebook[1] and 100MM daily active users on Twitter[2]. Pinterest is driving more referral traffic than LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit & Google + combined[3]. This is obviously not a new trend; some brands like RedBull and CocaCola have been leveraging social platforms for years now. But, there are many brands that haven’t even begun to take advantage of what social media has to offer. For some, it’s the lack of resources. For others, it’s the lack of understanding of how social media can benefit them and drive key marketing objectives.Since 2007, we've spent spent years working with marketers in all phases of social media adoption. We've worked with brands who have active communities of 1MM+, and brands that are just starting to dip their toes in the social media water. Our goal at Socialtyze is to help marketers understand the true value of social media and to help them strategize and execute programs that align with their goals.Oftentimes, brands will try to cut straight to the social execution without doing any of the “pre-planning” work. It is important to remember that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to social marketing. Although we’ve seen success with specific ad types and engagement tactics across the board, we believe that it is extremely important to “pre-plan” for every objective. We suggest that brands follow this 5-step approach when determining their next move in the social space. You might be able to skip a few steps depending on how far along your brand is in the social media adoption process.
The first thing you need to do as a brand, is figure out who you are. This probably sounds obvious or idealistic, but there are some brands out there that haven’t come to terms with what their value is to the consumer or how they truly differentiate from the competition. A few questions to ask yourself during this phase of the process:
[1] http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2013/07/24/facebook-users-q2-2013/
[2] http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2013/10/03/twitter-says-it-sees-215-million-monthly-active-users-100-million-daily-users-and-500-million-tweets-per-day/
[3] http://mashable.com/2013/10/15/pinterest-referral-traffic/
As marketers, nothing makes us happier than when Facebook releases a new way to target consumers. Not too long ago we were limited to profile targeting, which restricted us to target users only by the information they chose to include within their profiles. However, in Fall 2012, Facebook released Custom Audience targeting, which allows marketers to find their offline audiences among people who are on Facebook via email addresses, phone numbers, Facebook user IDs or app user IDs. In addition, in Spring 2013, Facebook took a huge step forward launching Partner Categories, which enables brands to target users based on their activity outside of Facebook. Each of these targeting breakthroughs has helped marketers reach their consumer on Facebook more effectively.
However, amongst the glitz and glamour of these more advanced targeting techniques, you might be overlooking a key audience within your social campaign strategy. When it comes to conversions, no target group performs better than a brand’s own fan base. Here are a few examples of that methodology in action:Driving SalesThis summer, Socialtyze was challenged with helping a publishing brand drive magazine subscription sales. We targeted the brand’s consumers whose subscriptions had expired via Custom Audiences (email matching), Magazine Subscribers identified by Partner Categories, and the brand’s fans. As a result, we found that fans were nearly 2x less expensive at converting to subscribers than both Custom Audiences and Partner Categories.
Email LeadsIn another campaign, Socialtyze ran ads targeting Fans, Partner Categories (Magazine Subscribers), and Broad Categories (Magazines) with the intent of collecting email leads. Socialtyze found that fans were 4x more likely to submit their emails than the other targeted audiences.
Contest SubmissionsIn addition, we have found that fans are the most likely to enter contests and sweepstakes. In a recent Dairy CPG brand campaign, fans were 771x more likely to submit an entry into the contest than other targeting, including Likes & Interests, Friend of Fans, and Partner Categories.
For another sweepstakes campaign for a different vertical, the Fans’ sweepstakes entry rate was 1.27%, which was 4.5x higher than the strategic Likes & Interests targeting. Fans comprised of more than 60% of the sweepstakes entries.
Nonetheless, it’s still important to utilize a variety of targeting methods to reach your ideal consumer. Just don’t forget to leverage your biggest brand evangelists that are right under your nose – your Facebook fans!Want to know more about our unique Social Advertising methods? Contact us! Linda@Socialtyze.com
I recently attended the Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) Summit, and thought you'd be interested in the insight we gained into Facebook's latest direction as it relates to advertising. Of all the Facebook conferences I’ve been to, this one was by far the most enlightening. Without releasing any confidential information, here’s my list of the 9 core "take aways" for brands and agencies on how to think about Facebook in a different light that drives your businesses forward.
Facebook is moving away from focusing on social KPI's (Likes, PTAT, etc…) and has started to move toward measuring success based on KPI's that businesses care about, such as CPA, Video Views, Online Sales and Offline Sales. Socialtyze feels that the two can be worked together with a singular goal of stimulating long-term customer relationships and sales.
Currently, you can retarget your customers via "Custom Audiences" (i.e., website visitors, e-mail addresses and Facebook ID's). Without question, "Custom Audiences" has been the most effective marketing method in driving sales.So, what are the next steps?Our next step is to build powerful customer databases that are tied to Facebook. This can be done through apps; with authentication and the right privacy policy, you can build a powerful connection to millions of customers who you can reach out to with relevant messages, whenever you want, based upon engagement and purchase behavior.
By knowing and tracking your customers, you can close the loop between advertising, engagement and purchasing. You can then optimize, retarget, build loyalty and increase ROI.
With Facebook, you can target people, rather than cookies. Cookie blockers, multiple devices, and users turning off cookies make cookie targeting much less reliable.By targeting people, you can connect and track the same person across desktop, phone and tablet. 66% of digital users access the web through multiple devices and 30% delete cookies every month.What’s the difference in reach of a narrowly targeted audience? 38% online (cookies) and 98% Facebook (Nielsen, Aug 2013).
It’s worth working with a Facebook PMD, to align with third party data companies that will allow you to make the connection between your advertising and offline purchasing. In addition, we can create A / B testing to measure the effectiveness of your ad dollars.
Once you gather in-depth data on your best customers, work with a PMD to build new ones via look-alike targeting.
There is no question that Mobile is on fire. It now accounts for 49% of all Facebook revenue. FB's Mobile users were also up 40% to 874 MM in 3Q13 from a year prior.So what can you do as a brand?Shape your ad strategy with mobile in mind. Focus on building and/or upgrading your mobile apps to build your databases, engage/convert customers, then measure and optimize.
Advertising can be more about ADDING to life, rather than ADVERTING customers away from what they really want to do.Brands can, and should, be much more relevant in their messaging. Ads need to inform, entertain and engage users. Make an effort to truly connect with customers. Use smart data tools to help you understand what your customers care about most.Use copywriters and designers that know social and rely on advice from your data partners to create the right message and optimize to constantly improve.
Socialtyze believes in the power of social media, and we are particularly confident in the power of Facebook.Why? For all the above reasons I’ve listed, but also because:
"It is where you can find all the people that matter to you, where they find what matters to them."
In short, most of your customers and potential customers are on Facebook, and they are using it as a stream of information to gather updates on things happening in and around their lives. It shapes their opinions on what to do, who to see and what to buy. We want our clients to be an integral part of those updates, particularly for their best and most influential customers.In addition, by the numbers:
If you’re curious what our 10th take away is, reach out to us! John@Socialtyze.com.
If you’re a brand, and you’re thinking of dipping your toe into Facebook advertising - don’t do it. I’m not saying don’t use Facebook advertising - it works and it works really well. I’m saying don’t just dip your toe in. Social is not a place for the timid, and the earned media returns on ad spends give one reason to believe that Facebook’s algorithm agrees. Like any good Bouncer, if Facebook thinks your brand will spend a lot of money, it will reward you.Socialtyze looked at our internal database of communities that spanned across all verticals, sizes, and ad spend levels, and found that spending some money (ads reaching less than 100K people per day) provided a negligible impact on your ability to reach people in your posts (-5%). This finding was supported by Wise Metrics in their recent post on the subject. The communities in our sample spent roughly 80% of their time either not spending or spending lightly, so we don’t disagree with their results. What we’re more interested in are the outliers. Essentially, what we want to see is if Facebook can be bought - and it seems that it can be.
If you reached over 100K people in a day with your ads, or even better over a million people per day Facebook rewards you. Mid-level spends saw a 62% improvement over the baseline (which we normalized by both size and average performance for that size) and heavy spends saw a shocking 200%. But, there are a hundred ways to dice up those findings, so we’ll start with looking at them by vertical. When you look at just CPG’s organic reach, it actually dropped during periods of light spend, and then corrected at medium and heavy levels.
Entertainment was the most drastic example of this rule; although, it should be noted that there is a significant skew at work here. Studios are only going to spend heavy dollars right before a movie opens - when the Facebook page would be most active anyway. But, the improvement is shocking - +309% compared to baseline for heavy spend. It essentially justifies very heavy spending on opening weekend.
Segmenting our data by audience is where it got interesting. The graph below demonstrates how it makes more sense to spend heavily on pages that are male centric than female focused. The delta between female pages at medium and heavy spends was right around 20%. That same number for men was an aggressive 173%. Based on this data, it makes more sense to spend at the medium level, than the very high if the page targets women.
Finally, where the ad lives matters; the difference between ads on the right hand side of Facebook and in the Newsfeed is drastic. If you spend money promoting your post, Facebook offers organic incentives to continue spending. This is especially true at the medium level where native advertising far outstrips the right hand rail (the area to the right of your newsfeed)(+57%). The differences are less pronounced at the very heavy level, but that is rarified spending air. Basically, in terms of a creating earned media, the best ad units focus on the newsfeed.Want to learn more about our data research team? Email us! Jake@Socialtyze.com
The point of a Community Manager’s job is not about blasting marketing material left and right. Their role should focus more on helping the communities thrive, stay activated, and to continue their growth. Gaining a community’s trust isn’t easy; but unsurprisingly, great customer service is a sure fire way to build that relationship. We’ve got 9 tested and approved tactics for a Community Manager to best approach their customer service strategy:
Be prepared to respond in a timely fashion, but ready to take the actual discussion elsewhere. Take the conversation to a private message or email, that way you can provide personal attention to your fans, and not have to air all of your laundry out in public.
Responding and acknowledging an issue is all you can do without a solution. Your fans will appreciate being heard, and will know at least someone is looking into it. Being honest and sincere can actually pay off.
It’s easier for your fan to contact you on Facebook than to call your customer service team up; they’re looking for a convenient solution. If it’s easy for them to contact you and get a response, then the rest of the process should also be relatively easy. Don’t send them through 20 loops to receive a refund; strive to make their experience just as easy as it was to tweet you.
According to Ambassador, over half of all social users will engage with brands several times a month. That means they’ll notice your presence and witness your customer service in action. Expect repeat visibility next time you’re deciding whether or not to follow up with a customer; chances are it will pay off.
The middle of a crisis is no time to be deciding what needs to be done and who's going to do it and how. Have a step-by-step guide in place. Establish what is deemed a crisis, have an escalation process in place (a clear chain of command). When a crisis happens - monitor first, listen, locate the source and deal with them as calmly and positively as possible.
Get to know your fans - the ones that advocate for the brand (reward them), the ones that complain occasionally (help resolve the issue) and the trolls (keep a close eye on this bunch). Watch for seemingly harmless comments or posts by trolls that could spin out of control if left unattended. Learn to get a feel for when things need to be escalated and when they can be left alone. If in doubt, always escalate.
Even though you delete a negative comment, it is still online and could get re- posted elsewhere, further escalating the situation. So be prepared and have a strategy in place to deal with negative feedback. Be as quick as possible - unattended negative comments have a tendency to grow quickly and possibly turn into a crisis.
Show empathy, humor, stay positive and always be kinder than necessary. Even if your follower is rude or negative, resist the urge to fight back. You'll look like a bad guy every time.
Create a fluid “Customer Service / Best Practices” document for the brand you're working with. Capture all the practices and internal customer service procedures that work best for the social team and the brand.
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