Every Community Manager on Facebook makes three major choices when they create a post:1. What type of post should it be? Should it be a “Fill in the Blank,” a “Quote,” or a “Fan Appreciation Post?”2. What is my tone? Is it funny, professional, or promotional?3. When is the best time to post this?Really good Community Managers will tell you that there is no hard and fast answer to these questions. However, the best approach is to match your strategy to your audience. In the same way you would never speak to your daughter or niece the same way you talk to your boss, tone/type/time choices heavily impact the response a post gets.It was our goal to give Community Managers a blue print for reaching the audience they want to reach. Facebook has recently added more opportunities to segment who sees your posts, making actionable data about your audience more important than ever. For the purpose of this study, we will be analyzing ways to reach the most valuable audience on Facebook: females.
Socialtyze took a look at 200 posts in 9 different communities in the CPG category. These groups were selected based on similar size, a consistent posting strategy, and a lack of seasonality to protect against any skews.The first step in our analysis was to create a baseline of performance for every age. So we knew exactly how 13-18-year old females responded to posts vs. 35-44-year old females. Response was defined by PTAT by audience type.After establishing our baseline, we monitored how posts with differing tone, type, and timing performed in every age group.
Your strategy can drastically change your audience; in some cases, Socialtyze saw shifts of 200%. That’s why it is imperative that brands know exactly what to share with their fans. Before launching into the best performing posts, there are a few key points that should be highlighted:
As your fans get older, the idea of the “Thank You” economy starts to become more important.
The words and tone you choose are critical for reaching the right age group on Facebook. The big takeaway is that Facebook is meant to be a fun place. Just like any good party, no one likes it when someone is trying to hand out business cards.
Were especially responsive to tone, and leaned heavily (+295%) towards funny and casual posts. Keep this in mind with your copy. They want content that comes from a voice that is familiar and relatable.
Showed more tolerance toward posts with a promotional tone – as long as it stayed casual. Funny, cheeky posts underperformed with this group, at 52% below the average. Their expectations from a brand are clearly different. They aren’t looking for entertainment so much as deals.Below are some basic rules to live by when it comes to tone:1. Talk to your young fans like a real friend. Females under 25 were more likely to respond to posts written in a conversational form. These fans were 83% more likely to respond to these posts when compared to their average performance.2. Your older fans are far more receptive to posts written in a promotional and promotional-fun tone. While 13-24 year olds were 71% less likely to engage with such posts than other posts, Females 25 and up were 9% more likely to engage.3. Activate the moms: 25-34 year olds and 35-44 year olds are more likely to respond to posts written in a promotional tone than to other posts.Females 25-34 and Females 35-44 were respectively 9% and 29% more likely to respond to promotional-fun posts than to others.
As the chart below indicates, understanding how women spend their time on Facebook will help you capture the correct audience.
Are more active in the early evenings as they settle in and are ready to socialize with their friends.
There is a dramatic shift in posting times as females move into adulthood. Once they’ve effectively transitioned their schedule from the school to workday, their Facebook exposures move with them.Primarily, what our results indicate is how much age and work schedule are reflected in Facebook usage. The higher likelihood a demo is to have a job with a 9:00-5:00 schedule, the more likely they are going to interact with Facebook during lunch breaks and early mornings.To activate this information follow the table below to best reach your desired audience at the right time.
It is Socialtyze’s hope that with this information you will be able to optimize your posting like you optimize your Facebook ad buys. Keep your audience in mind when creating your posting calendar and strategy. Know when it’s the best time to reach them and how they want to be reached.
Community Managers constantly want to improve their page sentiment, but they have to look through a variety of factors first:
Does time of day play in sentiment? Does the topic of the post come into play? When is net sentiment highest? What about just positive sentiment? Should posting be concentrated on one platform over another?Having such an extensive list with these questions in mind, our goal is to build analyses that gives Community Managers and Brand Managers an indication of when their fans are most likely to engage positively.
Socialtyze analyzed 15 total brands across the restaurant, film, and CPG verticals. These brands were selected based on similarities in fan size and posting frequency.Our final sample included 2,500 total posts. These were then hand-categorized for positive, negative, and neutral sentiment.After categorizations, the posts were then sorted by sentiment changes by:- Topic- Time of Day & Day of Week- Platform (Facebook or Twitter)From here, we noted how certain variables trend by each vertical. Below we outline the above variables with the corresponding verticals.
Restaurant Brand Page:
Movie Brand Page:
CPG Brand Page:
Restaurant Brand Page:
Movie Brand Page:
CPG Brand Page:
Restaurant Brand Page:Closely monitor Twitter. Users were 1.5 times more likely to talk positively about restaurants on Twitter than on Facebook.Movie Brand Page:Movie pages featured nearly an even net sentiment split between Facebook and Twitter.CPG Brand Page:Users were three times more likely to post positive comments about CPGs on Facebook than on Twitter.
RestaurantsIf people want to talk about your restaurant, they will say they “want to go;” 16% of all restaurant mentions included that phrase. These fans say this throughout the week, particularly between 3 and 4 PM, and their affinity for your restaurant does not wane as the day passes – check-ins dominate later at night.Recommendations: Post coupons midday, monitor check-ins at 8 PM, and take advantage of Saturday’s high positive sentiment.CPGPeople are most likely to say how effective CPGs are at fixing problems, and they love them for that. Capture their attention between the 5 – 8 PM hours. Facebook is a cleaner platform to push content to your fans, where net sentiment is nearly 40% higher.Recommendations: Post frequently on Facebook. Ask questions at 5PM on weeknights. Use calls to actions to post recipes or utility content to simultaneously boost “love” mentions.MoviesThese movie-goers stay up late – make sure you capture the highest positive sentiment between the 9 and 10 PM hours. They also love references to specific movie lines.Recommendations: Saturdays have the highest net sentiment. Post movie references, quotes, and interviews at 3 PM throughout the week to build up that sentiment. Star power is huge – 26% of the posts on movie pages underlined the cast member interviews and news. Opinions run rampant between 9 and 10 PM; both positive and negative sentiment spike between those hours. Monitor feedback to ensure posting strategy does not foster negative sentiment.General TrendsWhen considering all three verticals, posting volume collectively increases as the day progresses, with a peak in positive sentiment at 7 PM.
Help create a relevant posting strategy by identifying what your audience talks about, when they are likely to engage, and which platform they post on. Supplemented with the capability to capture positive sentiment, Socialtyze hopes to help pages reach fans that engage positively.
I would just like to preface this by saying I do not condone cheating, but I thought of this as a “challenge” and not so much as “cheating.”A project I am working on required me to check-in to places on Foursquare that I was not currently near (or even close to). Now the answer to this was pretty simple - check-in through the API using the lat and long of the venue I was “supposedly” at. Boom. Worked without a flaw. Ok, I will admit, I am somewhat of a competitive person and, well, the Foursquare badges are so pretty I immediately started thinking about how I could check in remotely and collect them all. But surely, surely Foursquare must have some sort of catches in place that do not allow this. Because I was ever so curious to find out what they may be (…and how to get around them), I decided to try.
Let’s start with the authentication - if a user has not authorized your application or is not currently logged into Foursquare, (assuming you created an app in the Foursquare for developers dashboard) redirect them as follows:After authenticating, grab the authentication code Foursquare redirected the user with:$code = $_REQUEST['code'];Now start a session and save your access token to it. Now we can easily see if the user is an authenticated app user by checking the session variable. You can also save it as a cookie if you want it to last longer.session_start();
if (!isset($_SESSION['access_token'])) {
$app_token_url = "https://foursquare.com/oauth2/access_token?client_id=" . $client_id .
"&client_secret=" . $client_secret . "&grant_type=authorization_code&redirect_uri=" .
$redirect_uri . "&code=" . $code;
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $app_token_url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$foursquare_token = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$array_token = json_decode($foursquare_token, true);
$token = $array_token['access_token'];
$_SESSION['access_token'] = $token;
}
Ok, now you have your token and we can get into the fun part - winning at Foursquare! To check into a venue, you need to post the following parameters: venueId, ll (latitude, longitude), llAcc (accuracy of previous points), oauth_token, and v (version, which Foursquare takes in as todays date in the form “Ymd”).So, to make checking into various different venues easier, I decided the only thing I want to pass to this function is the venueId, v, and oauth_token. This requires making a function to return the lat and long of the venue from the Foursquare API.function getLatLong($venue_id, $v, $oauth_token) {
$venue_url = 'https://api.foursquare.com/v2/venues/' . $venue_id .
'?oauth_token=' . $oauth_token . '&v=' . $v;
$response = file_get_contents($venue_url);
$venue = json_decode($response, true);
$venue_response = $venue['response'];
$location = $venue_response['venue']['location'];
$lat = $location['lat'];
$long = $location['lng'];
return $lat . ', ' . $long;
}
Now, we can send this value into the checkin function:function checkin($venue_id, $v, $oauth_token, $latlong) {
$checkin_url = "https://api.foursquare.com/v2/checkins/add";
parameters = array(
'venueId' => $venue_id,
'broadcast' => 'private', //now i set this private, but can be public
'll' => $latlong,
'llAcc' => '1',
'oauth_token' => $oauth_token,
'v' => $v
);
$curl = curl_init($checkin_url);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $parameters);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$response = curl_exec($curl);
return $response;
}
The response will be in the following format:{
meta: {
code: 200
},
notifications: [
{
type: "notificationTray",
item: {
unreadCount: 0
}
}
],
response: {
checkin: {
id: "4d627f6814963704dc28ff94",
createdAt: 1298300776,
type: "checkin",
shout: "Another one of these days. #snow",
timeZoneOffset: -300,
user: {
id: "32",
firstName: "Dens",
photo: {
prefix: "https://irs0.4sqi.net/img/user/",
suffix: "/32_1239135232.jpg",
},
},
venue: {
id: "408c5100f964a520c6f21ee3",
name: "Tompkins Square Park",
contact: {
phone: "2123877685",
formattedPhone: "(212) 387-7685",
},
location: {
address: "E 7th St. to E 10th St.",
crossStreet: "btwn Ave. A & B",
lat: 40.72651075083395,
lng: -73.98171901702881,
postalCode: "10009",
city: "New York",
state: "NY",
country: "United States",
cc: "US",
},
categories: [
{
id: "4bf58dd8d48988d163941735",
name: "Park",
pluralName: "Parks",
shortName: "Park",
icon: {
prefix: "https://foursquare.com/img/categories_v2/parks_outdoors/park_",
suffix: ".png",
},
primary: true,
},
],
verified: true,
stats: {
checkinsCount: 25523,
usersCount: 8932,
tipCount: 85,
},
url: "http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/tompkinssquarepark",
likes: {
count: 0,
groups: [
],
},
specials: {
count: 0,
},
},
source: {
name: "foursquare for Web",
url: "https://foursquare.com/"
},
photos: {
count: 1,
items: [
{
id: "4d627f80d47328fd96bf3448",
createdAt: 1298300800,
prefix: "https://irs3.4sqi.net/img/general/",
suffix: "/UBTEFRRMLYOHHX4RWHFTGQKSDMY14A1JLHURUTG5VUJ02KQ0.jpg",
width: 720,
height: 540,
user: {
id: "32",
firstName: "Dens",
photo: {
prefix: "https://irs0.4sqi.net/img/user/",
suffix: "/32_1239135232.jpg",
},
},
visibility: "priviate"
}
],
},
likes: {
count: 0,
groups: [
],
},
like: false,
score: {
total: 1,
scores: [
{
points: 1,
icon: "https://foursquare.com/img/points/defaultpointsicon2.png",
message: "Have fun out there!",
},
],
},
},
},
}
So what I found was this:• You can check into 15-20 places in a loop without loosing points or disabling the chance to win badges, but then you have to take a break for a few hours• When changing locations over a vast distance (ex. Los Angeles –> San Francisco), you must wait the amount of time it takes to reasonably cover that distance before checking in, or else you will not be able to earn badges.With these in mind, I began earning as many badges as I could in as little time as possible. Once I was “in” a location area, I looped through a set array of about 15 venues. I made these arrays based off the places most blogs said you needed to win a badge. The expertise badges are easy: check-in to 3 different venues categorized as BBQ Joints, earn the badge. On Foursquare, the city badges all include a list of venues you need to go - hit five and you get the badge!$windy_city_badge = array(
'4b876c65f964a520e2be31e3',
'4b4e0d9ff964a520c0df26e3',
'4e1e0e65aeb75f77be667547',
'4e70c1aa814dd2cb962265cb',
'49dce128f964a520b65f1fe3'
);I would recommend conquering the city badges first because you will probably earn all the expertise badges in the process.Go get ‘em! Haters gonna hate, but you just dominated the Foursquare game.
A sensitive topic we've all grappled with as social media professionals is the subject of ethics in social media marketing practices, specifically: the proper uses of, often times, very personal data. The story is complex and one blog post will certainly not solve the many ethical dilemmas that data privacy presents. For example, there are ethical concerns about how social networks inform users of what their privacy levels are, how to change them and to what degree their data is deemed ‘public’. There are ethical concerns about the uses of data in complex political and legal situations in which people might be at risk if their identity is revealed. Lastly there are ethical concerns around the use of social media data for brand marketing purposes where the lines blur between ‘relevant’ and just plain old ‘creepy’. I want to specifically address this last concern.My position: I believe that brand marketing within social media is a positive step forward for the end consumer, but I also contend that there is a tremendous amount of progress yet to be made to fulfill on this positive vision.
As a forty something year old product of the modern world, I have spent a vast majority of my life utterly bombarded with marketing and advertising media. Every aspect of my life is permeated by messaging about how I should, could or, in some other better life, would live my currently less than optimal life. If only, I wane, I had product x, y or z and all my ills would be solved, all fears allayed, all dreams realized. Over time the messaging has dulled our senses and for a period the ads had to become more and more sensational just to get our attention at all. Then social media showed up on the scene.With the advent of social media the idea of understanding a person’s personal taste became a reality. The marketer no longer had to boil the ocean with a single idea. The marketer could move beyond analyzing the standard fare of demographic and psychographic data presented by a TV show advertising opportunity, a magazine buy or a website display ad for example. Now, the marketer can read the data of what people like, what their affiliations are, how they engage with the world online and begin to carve out whom their best audience really is. They can find the people that want to hear from them.
By knowing more about their audience and having a direct channel to reach them, brands can reach the right people - the people who truly want to hear from them. Secondly, when they do reach their target audience, they no longer engage in a ‘top-down’ manner; instead brands are able to listen and create truly engaging and more meaningful ways of interacting with that audience: from interactive applications that make people’s lives easier, to rich media campaigns that are relevant, entertaining and even at times cause based or political. The bottom line: The communication funnel is being reversed. The end consumer is now the one able to determine the landscape of their marketing experience and the brand is better off as a result.As I mentioned early on, it’s not all a rosy parade. Brands have a long way to go to get better at understanding how to use social media as a listening device that shapes their campaigns. Additionally, those engagements need to evolve beyond the contest, sweepstakes, give-away model to deliver a truly meaningful experience.The best way to explain my point is with an example: Oreo recently launched a campaign called the Oreo Daily Twist. Each day Oreo took a sometimes fun and at other times quite politically risky approach of visually refashioning their iconic cookie to be relevant to a news level topic of the day. The campaign was successful on many fronts: it was time relevant, it was news relevant, it was at times risky and political and it understood the nature of it’s social community and their willingness to support and engage with the effort. Additionally, the end consumers had a thoughtful and interesting experience, of the sort they had never experienced before with the brand. The singular nostalgic message of a childhood cookie and cup of milk was nowhere to be found yet the campaign succeeded wildly. The brand listened to the data, used it effectively and the end consumer had a relevant, engaging and thoughtful experience. Truly, what we call a ‘win-win’.
As Qu’s debut into polite society draws closer, the dance card fills with suitors emerging from brands and agencies, sales teams and C-suites. Above the pomp, one question rings loud – will the market love our product? The honest answer is I don’t know. I would love to say yes and I can say that early feedback has been terrific – but having the coolest new toy is not a guarantee that it will fly off the shelves.
What’s certain is that Qu was built deliberately and thoughtfully, from concept to launch, to be as user friendly as it is powerful. And in the mountain of Qu stories, there is one that best illustrates the energy and passion that went into our solution.
Qu had to solve the brand questions of what to post and when to post it. Brands had received that data in analytics reports and spreadsheets but Qu needed to go further. A truly intelligent solution would provide rich post syntax - after all, what good is data without a meaningful way to sort it - but we wanted to remove the middleman completely and bake post performance right into the tool.
Our first attempt simply improved the status quo by providing a post analytics dashboard. This wasn’t user friendly enough; Qu needed to guide users through post creation. Next we tried a posting “wizard,” presenting users with a series of menus that built posts one step at a time. This wasn’t flexible enough; community managers need to work quickly and they prefer their own workflows, not a “one-way” option.
Then we had a breakthrough idea – let’s add a gaming layer to the post creation experience. We could present our checklist for the perfect post, and as users began creating it, they unlock an icon with each successful criteria met. This was the perfect combination of smart, powerful and flexible. One question remained – when do users get the list? Our research concluded overwhelmingly that users wanted the list first but some of us disagreed. Our fear was that over time, Qu would homogenize community content. If a publisher was advised what to write, and built content around that advice, their posts would eventually become too similar. We wanted them to do the work first, come up with the creative content, and use Qu to perfect it. That workflow would require the checklist at the end of the creative process –the opposite of what our researched users preferred. Many loud and lengthy discussions at dry erase boards and over fish tacos ensued before we reached a solution. Draft a post, tell us what’s important to you, and before you send it out into the world, Qu will provide some final optimization guidelines. This method empowers brands and more importantly, it empowers community managers.
Now imagine - if the post recommendation tool had this level of thought and love put into it – how powerful must the rest of Qu be…?
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