From teenagers’ hype to an overwhelming background of everyday reality – that’s how Social Media has evolved recently. Nowadays it’s hard to find a spot on the web with no social media plug-ins or buttons such as: ‘Like’, ‘Share’, or even ‘“Log in with your account’…
Social media it’s not another search engine
Both social platforms and search engines have vast reach and enable paid promotion of goods and services. However, from a user’s perspective they work toward totally different goals.
A search engine is used for finding solutions to given problems, optimal offers or information on planned shopping.
- Facebook is the world’s largest personalized newspaper with a ‘social section’,
- Twitter is the fastest-updated news service,
- Instagram… is Twitter for pics,
- Snapchat is the world’s largest Speakers’ Corner,
- LinkedIn is the largest professional network,
- Pinterest is the largest database for inspiration,
- Quora is the broadest database of real people’s answers to real questions.
Most important Social Media figures
80/20
80% of educational and entertainment content vs. 20% sales content.
4-1-1
Every marketing post = 4 publications with valuable content from other sources + 1 post important for recipients.
Most important KPI for Social Media
Use the KPI system to:
- measure efficiency of your actions and find out which are to be changed or modified,
- identify most efficient actions,
- provide employees’ feedback on their work,
- spot problems,
- measure cost-to-effect ratio.
Most important metrics:
- amount of published content,
- amount of shares,
- amount of comments,
- conversion rates,
- clients’ reviews,
- increase in number of followers,
- mentions about the brand in social media.
Storytelling
- Showing a short movie about a product increases the possibility of its purchase by 85%;
- Visual content in social media increases engagement by 180%;
- Adding a photo to your Tweet results in an increase of 150% in the number of retweets;
- Articles with photos have 94% more views than text only;
- If a client clicks the photography of a real person, chances of conversion increase by 200%.
The attention span of internet users is gradually becoming shorter. While it was about twelve seconds long back in 2012, it changed into eight seconds in 2015. Therefore, it is way easier to reach the recipient by using visual content rather than written words only. Movies or pictures with instructions can show more quickly how to efficiently use a given product a lot faster than traditional instructions.
Storytelling is visual content that tells a story. Marketers can choose from various content types:
- memes
- video
- infographics
- pics
- microcontent
- slideshows
- user-generated content
Put together in the correct way they can help create a unique buyer’s experience Social media are perfect for sharing your story with a wider audience.
Crucial Social Media Platforms
MAU* – 1.86 bn
DAU** – 1.23 bn
Daily status updates – 55 m
Platform is available in 101 languages
MAU – 700 m
DAU – 400 m
Number of likes daily – 4.2 bn
1 hashtag increases user engagement by 12.6%
MAU – 328 m
DAU – 100 m
Number of tweets per day – 500 m
Accounts available – 18 quintillion
Global number of users – 467 m
MAU – 106 m
Average number of contacts for CEO – 930
41% of millionaires use LinkedIn
Facebook is undoubtedly the king of social media services. Also Facebook App is the most used app within each age group of mobile users. Facebook likes graphic content. A well chosen photo is half of a successful post. The blue platform also enjoys movies and starts them automatically for users scrolling the wall. Inspirational quotes and interesting statistics are also worth mentioning. Its content should be matched to fanpage users’ profiles. It is also wise to run themed cycles – Wednesday insights, Saturday fun story, Monday statistics, etc.
Frequency:
1 post a day
Best days:
Thursday & Friday
Best hour:
1:00 pm – most likes
3:00 pm – most shares
Facebook allows you to direct posts to a group of recipients based on the email database you have. This feature is called Custom Audience.
Twitter has tremendous marketing potential. It can be used both as a lead generator and a tool to build brand awareness. It is one of the biggest platforms and is mentioned as one of the leading (considering the number of active users) social media services in the world.
Most retweeted content:
- text tweets below 100 characters with a link
- funny pics
- how-to’s & Top X articles
- quotes, especially in graphic form
Hashtags are a crucial part of tweets – they allow you to increase the reach to potentially interested people.
Frequency:
1-30 tweets a day
suggested: 3-5 tweets a day
Best days:
B2B: Monday – Friday
B2C: Wednesday, Saturday, Sunday
Best hour:
5:00 pm, 12:00 pm, 6:00 pm – most shares (retweets)
12:00 pm, 6:00 pm – most clicks
Instagram is an empire. Used by over 400 million people monthly. It is just like the majority of North America suddenly started to post and like photos on this platform. The most important feature of Instagram posts is their aesthetics. Published content must be graphically perfect, original and eye-catching. It should also correspond to brand’s general image. Besides photos, it is worth to share videos and fan-generated content.
Frequency:
1-2 posts a day
Best day:
Monday
Best hour:
3:00 pm & 4:00 pm
LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network. People visit this service for work-related issues and reasons, definitely not social-related, thus it makes a perfect venue for publishing expert content. Posts you should publish on behalf of your company are mostly expert articles and content directly connected with professional development. Prepare a video as well – users tend to share videos way more eagerly than any other content. Make use of Influencers’ kindness and use cross-promotion – recommendations in a professional network are worth a lot more than in any other medium. Use groups wisely – share content and avoid places full of spam.
Frequency:
1 post a day
Best day:
Tuesday – Thursday
Best hour:
10:00 am – 11:00 am
Social Media Good Practices
Content recycling
Publish some content several times. You should share your blog posts a few times in same channel. “The more often you share content, the more likes you will get”,Neil Patel, who recommends sharing the same content several times. It does mean that you should post every hour (that still makes you a spammer and is pathetic!) Also, remember to change the text in the post itself whenever posting the same content (avoid mechanically copy/pasting the same post or tweet).
Plan your posts and Tweets
It will save your time and help you keep your content consistent. But don’t fixate over the calendar. Whenever you stumble upon a witty meme or a nice follow-up to some hyped topic – post it! You cannot entirely plan great ideas and one-day trends, so allow some freestyle and laid-back attitude to your post calendar and treat it flexibly. It also relates to interactions with your own audience: if you engage in a discussion it may turn out that it would be better to provide these people with information on a given topic that interests them at this particular moment rather than whatever else you had planned for that day.
Plan your social media time
Avoid situations when you are on Facebook, Twitter or other platforms 24/7. Don’t check the comments and likes every five minutes instead of doing your tasks. Constantly checking will only distract you from more important work. And all you’ll get will be vanity measurements and wasted time.
Useful tools
Graphics
When creating posts it is wise to focus on their visual side. There are plenty of free picture editors on the web that enable easy graphics creation. Canva (canva.com) is worth mentioning here – it serves for simple graphics and microcontent, Piktochart (piktochart.com) – will help you with more complex infographics while Place It (placeit.net) – can put screenshots onto pictures of mobile devices.
Distribution
Planning posts – as mentioned before – can save marketers’ time and triggers planned and cohesive communication in various distribution channels. When looking for a tool to plan posts, you should have a closer look at Buffer (buffer.com) or CoSchedule (coshedule.com). Both help plan the entire week and set up simple automation, e.g. tweeting about a newly-published blog post.
Analysis
As any other marketing action, social media publications also require monitoring of their efficiency, and analyzing what to modify, change or get rid of. You may find the following apps useful:
- LikeAlyzer – a free tool to analyze your fanpage and indicate its statistics.
- Cyfe – offers detailed analysis of social media, SEO, AdWords and mentions.
- Social Mention – monitors social media in real-time. Social mention indicates emotions that go with a certain phrase, the most active users, top hashtags and latest mentions.
SALESmanago solutions for Social Media
An interesting alternative is to combine the activities in Social Media with a marketing automation platform. SALESmanago offers the following solutions dedicated to the blue service:
- Social Media Monitoring – measure engagement of visitors using widgets on monitored websites (likes, comments, shares). Use this knowledge to better personalize marketing actions.
- Social Media Posting – save time: plan social media publications and generate the analytics on the same platform.
- Custom Audience – optimize ad spending – target Facebook ads according to individually monitored users’ behavior and reach people most likely interested in your offer.
- Facebook Ads Integration – reach a wider audience. Create & analyze complex ad campaigns and target groups from marketing automation platforms.
- Integrated Facebook Contact Form – expand your database – generate leads on Facebook and automatically import them to SALESmanago. Place a contact form on the fanpage as one of the tabs.
- Acquiring Leads Through Facebook – easily create promotional apps and automatically gather & send data of their users to CRM.
- Automatic Sales Chat – use the potential of artificial intelligence. A bot integrated with Messenger can recommend products, redirect users to specific subpages, or display buttons that when clicked will show item descriptions.
- Shoper – connect your online store with Facebook and sell through a fanpage as well as through Facebook widget in the store.
- FastTony.es – make good use of every dollar spent – precisely target your ads on Facebook. Connect Facebook advertising accounts with an intuitive interface and optimize the cost of each campaign.
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