The Top Social Media KPIs Marketers Can’t Ignore

The Top 26 Social Media KPIs Marketers Can’t Ignore

How do you measure social? If you’re a social media marketer, it’s pretty much guaranteed that your boss has asked you to provide results showcasing your efforts. You might have initially been baffled as to how you would measure values such as awareness, what your customers think of your brand, or how your efforts are impacting the bottom line, but thankfully this is where KPIs, or “key performance indicators,” come to the rescue. In recognizing valuable KPIs, you are able to track not only your successes, but campaigns that perhaps missed the mark.

Key Social Media KPIs to Track

In monitoring and measuring your KPIs, you are able to focus your attention and efforts in order to optimize all of your resources to those most valuable to your organization. However, it can be difficult to know where to start when wanting to zero in on your social media measurement strategy, so to help you know what to look for, we’ve rounded up a list of suggested KPIs you can tailor to suit your business goals.

Social Media Presence

The first area you want to examine and measure is your brand or organization’s social media presence. How prominently does your company appear on social? How many people are talking about your organization, product, or service? These questions can all be answered by taking a look at the following KPIs.

1. Followers and fans

These are the easily measurable numbers of social media users who have subscribed to your account so they can see your content on their feed. Instagram and Twitter see followers, where Facebook business pages will have fans.

2. Number of mentions

A mention is “the act of tagging another user’s handle or account name in a social media message.” In measuring the number of mentions your brand is getting on social media, you are able to not only monitor conversations surrounding your company, but get a good indication of your company’s overall reach.

3. Reach

As our 2015 Social Media Glossary explains, “Reach is a data metric that determines the potential size of audience any given message could reach. It does not mean that that entire audience will see your social media post, but rather tells you the maximum amount of people your post could potentially reach. Reach is determined by a fairly complex calculation, that includes number of followers, shares, and impressions as well as net follower increase over time. Reach should not be confused with Impressions or Engagement.”

4. Inbound links

This is in reference to the number of links back to your blog or website you are getting from quality references. As Vital explains, “Link building should be a cornerstone of your SEO strategy. When someone links to your website it means you’re building your street cred within your given industry.” Hubspot echoes these sentiments, explaining that marketers must “keep track of your average inbound links so you can keep tabs on the quality of your content (more important than ever in the eyes of Google) and thus, your inbound links’ impact on your search authority.”

5. Blog subscribers

As a key component of your content marketing strategy that goes hand in hand with your social media efforts, your brand’s blog offers a great way to track overall success. As Hubspot describes, “There’s a direct correlation between the number of email subscribers you have and the amount of email traffic you generate to your blog. If you haven’t put a lot of effort into generating email subscribers, you’re sitting on a gold mine of opportunity.”

Social Media Engagement

While numbers reflecting your social media presence are valuable, knowing how engaged your audience actually is usually says a lot more about the success of your social media campaign. The following KPIs offer insight into your engagement levels and will also reveal areas where you could possibly improve.

6. Retweets

Retweets are “your Tweets forwarded by people who follow you to their own network of followers. This gives you the opportunity to reach more people who may think your content is valuable. That new network of Twitter users who are exposed to your Tweets have the potential to become a part of your primary network if they come back and follow you.”

7. Social shares

Like retweets, shares “take your content to the next level by spreading it across networks that you are not directly connected to. This allows you to increase social media engagement and brand awareness.”

8. Comments

While pretty self-explanatory, comments are messages and feedback left by other users, and a great way of tracking your audience’s general sentiment and feedback.

9. Referral traffic

Measuring referral traffic is a way of monitoring the amount of traffic going to your website or blog from your social media channels.

Social Media Reach and Influence

If a social media post doesn’t get a single like, does it still exist? Your message could be the most beautifully crafted piece of content on the face of the planet, but if nobody’s there to witness or engage with it, you are missing out on great opportunities for growth and reach. The following important KPIs will help you measure these areas, and ensure that your content doesn’t go unnoticed.

10. Share of voice

Share of voice is a metric for understanding how many social media mentions a particular brand is receiving in relation to its competition. Usually measured as a percentage of total mentions within an industry or among a defined group of competitors.”

11. Net promoter

As our 2015 Social Media Glossary explains, “A customer loyalty metric that is based on the following question: “On a scale of zero to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend our company, product, or service to a friend or colleague?” People who respond with a nine or 10 are designated as “promoters”; a seven or eight as “passives”; and a six or lower as “detractors”. The percentage of customers that are detractors is then subtracted from the percentage that are promoters to arrive at the company’s NPS.”

12. Sentiment

“An attempt to understand how an audience feels about a brand, company, or product based on data collected from social media. It typically involves the use of natural language processing or another computational method to identify the attitude contained in a social media message. Different analytics platforms classify sentiment in a variety of ways; for example, some use ‘polar’ classification (positive or negative sentiment), while others sort messages by emotion or tone (Contentment/Gratitude, Fear/Uneasiness, etc).”

13. Number of social influencers

With a social media influencer being “a user who can reach a significant audience and drive awareness about a trend, topic, company, or product,” the number of influencers your brand has working with you is a good indicator of popularity and overall success. If people want to work with you and represent your product or service, there’s a good chance you’re doing something right.

14. Post reach

This is the number of users who see a specific social media post.

15. Potential reach

As defined by Facebook, potential reach is those who “match the audience you defined through your audience targeting selections.”

16. Video views

Thanks to the inherent qualities in many video hosting platforms, video views are an easy-to-measure KPI and usually can be seen and monitored by anyone. However, as Rocky Walls at Convince and Convert explains, “If you have a CTA in your video and its purpose extends past a viewer simply watching the video, then judging the successfulness of the video should involve more than simply checking the number of views you have.”

Action and ROI

Once your content is out there, it’s important to measure whether your social media efforts are resulting in your desired outcomes. What are the actions you want your audience to complete, upon seeing your message? What are your business goals and objectives? While having users see your message in the first place is half the battle, it’s imperative that you’re seeing tangible results from your strategy. These KPIs offer ways to measure whether your messages are making their mark.

17. Conversions

As our Social Media Glossary defines, “In social media marketing, a conversion is a positive action that is taken on a website by a visitor from social media. The action demonstrates that the visitor is “converting” into a customer. Sales aren’t the only type of conversion; many websites measure webinar registrations, newsletter signups, content downloads, and other important outcomes that ultimately lead to a sale. Tracking conversions is crucial to properly attributing revenue to social media.”

18. Sales revenue

It’s probably safe to say that one of your business objectives is to increase revenue, and it goes without saying that sales revenue is the way to measure this. It’s important to know how your social media efforts are affecting your bottom line, and sales revenue is a way to pinpoint this. Dylan Kissane at Doz suggests, “When you close a sale, find out how the customer found out about you: a TV commercial, a Facebook interaction, word of mouth, or some other way.”

19. Issues resolved

If one of your business objectives is to improve customer service through social media, a great way to measure the progress here is through the number of issues your organization resolves. As Visually explains, “More people are turning to social media channels for issue resolution than ever before. In fact, 72 percent of customers expect complaints made on Twitter to be answered in an hour. Collect data on how people come to you for help or troubleshooting to make sure the busiest channels are monitored and staffed appropriately.”

20. Cost per lead

With your business depending heavily on leads, it’s important to know how much each one is costing you. Klipfolio provides a thorough definition of the term, explaining that “the purpose of this metric is to provide your marketing team with a tangible dollar figure so they understand how much money is appropriate to spend on acquiring new leads.”

21. Lead conversion rate

Once your business has the leads, the natural focus is to turn these leads into actual customers. The lead conversion rate measures the number of leads who actually convert to executing the action you desired of them. Kissmetrics offers a great guide to optimal lead conversion , including the easiest way to track this metric in Google Analytics.

22. Customer lifetime value

Earning the trust and loyalty of customers can be one of the trickiest things for an organization to conquer. It also seems like perhaps one of the more difficult KPIs to measure. However, it’s important when evaluating your business to have a general idea of the revenue a customer will generate for your business in their lifetime. , Kissmetrics has an article that explains how to do calculate your customer lifetime value (CLV) in the simplest way possible.

Internal KPIs

While it may be tempting to concentrate on the KPIs determined by your customers and audience, your organization’s internal measurement tactics are just as important. Recognizing the output of your employees and business overall makes it easier to leverage your resources and keep track of where time and energy is being devoted. In having an overall perspective of what your content team is producing, you have a much better chance of streamlining the process and offering your audience both quality and consistency.

23. Blog posts

If a blog is a part of your content strategy, take a look at how many blog posts you or your team is producing per week. It’s important to take into account how many hours go into the creation of a single blog post, and how many of these your brand is posting per week. What are the returns being seen on each blog post? Consider all of these factors when determining whether your team is concentrating on the most effective strategies.

24. Videos

With video the social media trend to watch in 2016, and with “the number of video posts per person increasing 75 percent globally and 94 percent in the U.S,” it’s a smart idea to dedicate time and resources to making video a top priority in your social media strategy. However, the creation and editing of video can easily become a timely endeavor, so it’s especially important to track how many hours your team is dedicating to this. How many videos are you sharing through your social media channels per day? Is the ROI worth it?

25. Social media posts

The number of social media posts your brand is posting per day is probably one of your key internal KPIs. You want to keep this consistent so that you remain top of mind for your audience, but you definitely don’t want to overwhelm them with a barrage of constant posts. Finding the best number of posts for your organization may take some trial and error, but through keeping track of what works, and what doesn’t, you will quickly find a number that works for you.

26. Social media budget

This is probably one of the KPIs most important to your manager. You will obviously want to set goals and keep a close eye on how much budget you are setting aside for social media. If you find that you are spending more than you or your boss would like, our blog post on how to decrease your social media budget can provide some guidance.

Dream Baby Dream- Bruce Springsteen

Lyrics

Dream baby dream
Dream baby dream
Dream baby dream
Come on and dream baby dream
Come on and dream baby dream

We gotta keep the light burning
Come on, we gotta keep the light burning
Come on, we gotta keep the light burning
Come on, we gotta keep the light burning
Come on and dream baby dream

We gotta keep the fire burning
Come on, we gotta keep the fire burning
Come on, we gotta keep the fire burning
Come on and dream baby dream

Come open up your heart
Come on and open up your heart
Come on and open up your heart
Come on dream on, dream baby dream

Come on and open up your heart
Come on and open up your hearts
Come on and open up your hearts
Come on dream on, dream baby dream

Come on, we gotta keep on dreaming
Come on, we gotta keep on dreaming
Come on, we gotta keep on dreaming
Come on dream on, dream baby dream

Come on darling and dry your eyes
Come on baby and dry your eyes
Come on baby and dry your eyes
Come on dream on, dream baby dream

Yeah I just wanna see you smile
Now I just wanna see you smile
Yeah I just wanna see you smile
Come on dream on, dream baby dream

Come on and open up your hearts
Come on and open up your hearts
Come on and open up your hearts
Come on dream on, dream baby dream

Yeah I just wanna see you smile
And I just wanna see you smile
Yeah I just wanna see you smile
Come on dream on, dream baby dream

Yeah I just wanna see you smile
Yeah I just wanna see you smile
Yeah I just wanna see you smile
Come on dream on, dream baby dream

Come on and open up your heart
Come on and open up your heart
Come on and open up your heart
Come on dream on, dream baby dream

Come on dream on, dream on baby
Come on dream on, dream on baby
Come on dream on, dream on baby
Come on dream on, dream baby dream

Ah ah ah ah
Ah ah ah ah

Songwriters: Alan Vega / Martin Rev

Song Facts 

This song was originally written and recorded by Suicide under the title of "Keep Your Dreams," for their 1977 debut EP. The electronic protopunk duo remade the dark, electronic tune two years later under the title of "Keep Your Dreams," and released as a non album single. It found a fan in Springsteen, who transformed it into a warmer and more optimistic version, which he performed a solo keyboard version to close the concerts on his 2005 Devils & Dust tour. 

The track later resurfaced as the soundtrack to a video released in October 2013 as a thank you to Springsteen's fans for supporting the 2012 and 2013 Wrecking Ball tour and then was included on his 2014 High Hopes album.

Suicide have been recording intermittently active since 1970. A flyer the band circulated in November of that year was the first ever to use the phrase "punk music" to advertise a concert. Alan Vega's vocals were backed by a primitive drum machine and Martin Rev's fuzz organ and their nihilistic attitude and lack of guitars often aroused bewildered reactions amongst their audiences. Despite their lack of popularity amongst the general public, Suicide's albums of the late '70s and early '80s are regarded as highly influential by music critics, having helped shape the direction of indie rock, industrial and dance music.

Alan Vega commented of Springsteen's cover in an 2005 interview with Backstreets Magazine. "A lot of bands have done my stuff, Suicide stuff, and they basically try and copy and do it the way that you do it," he said. "He just - thank god! - finally somebody did their version of it. They interpreted my song, he did it his way, and such a great way, that I'm going to have to sing it that way, or not sing it at all any more!"

High Hopes producer Ron Aniello admitted to Rolling Stone that he didn't know this was such a well-known song. He recalled: "(Bruce) played me the thing and said it was an experience more than anything at the end of his Devils and Dust shows. It took a lot to get that experience on a record for him. We had to do that song probably 10 times – different versions of it – until he was satisfied it was the right version."

Aniello told Rolling Stone about the recording process for High Hopes at Springsteen's home studio. "Each day he'd give me a list of things and I'd write them down," the producer said. "When he starts talking, I start writing. Then I try to distil what his advice is about the song to make it work for him. We play the song again and get it to a place."

"Take the song 'Dream Baby Dream," he added. "I had some versions of the song and he was like, 'That sounds good, but it's not quite there,' or 'It's good. You're really close.' Then the next day he'd be like, 'Ah, it's terrible. Throw it out.' I was like, 'Come on, love this song. I gotta deliver this song for you.' We went over and and over it. You never know what he's thinking. It's not like when he was 21 and he'd go 16 hours in the studio without eating. He doesn't have to do that now. He has a home studio and it's quite comfortable for him.

Brand Certifications to Make You a Better Social Media Marketer

As new technologies are being introduced in the workplace, the skills needed to make the most of them are changing as well. Playing catch-up has proven to take a toll in the job hunt, as current employees and recent graduates struggle to find the skills required to stay competitive.

Nearly eight in 10 middle-skill jobs now require digital skills here’s what you can do to bridge the gap on your own.

6 online marketing certifications to help you get ahead

1. Digital Marketing with Udacity

When it comes to getting the digital skills you need, who better to learn from than the brands who shape these industries? Udacity partnered up with industry leaders like Facebook, Google, MailChimp, and us here at Hootsuite to bring you the Digital Marketing Nanodegree program.

The program is designed to get students hired in today’s job market. Udacity does this by covering platform proficiency for today’s most relevant marketing platforms. This means you understand the full digital marketing ecosystem—from content strategy to paid advertising and analytics.

For example, in their Display Advertising course, Udacity takes you through key marketing channels like mobile and video, how to purchase and sell ads, and how to set up your own display ad via Google Adwords.

With Udacity’s unique course format, you get a hands-on learning experience. You’ll run live campaigns on major marketing platforms, where you learn how to measure performance, and create a strategy based on these insights. When it’s over, you can add these projects into your digital marketing portfolio.

Courses include:

• Content Strategy
• Search Engine Marketing
• Display Advertising
• Social Media Advertising with Facebook
• Measure and Optimize with Google Analytics

Projects include:

• Market Your Content
• Run a Facebook Campaign
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Audit
• Run an Adwords Campaign

2. Social Media Marketing with Facebook Blueprint

Facebook’s certification program takes you beyond the basics of Facebook and Instagram marketing. As a leader in social media advertising, Facebook Blueprint teaches you how to best take advantage of Facebook’s tools so that you can meet your business goals.

Courseware includes case studies from real businesses, in-person training, and knowledge checks while you’re learning. It’s flexible, too—conveniently accessible on any device, anywhere, anytime—to fit even the busiest of schedules.

Courses include:

• Campaign Optimization
• Creative Best Practices
• Purchasing Ads
• Ad Targeting

3. SEO with Google AdWords

Not every company has an in-house SEO expert like Hootsuite’s Zak Ramdani. Some of us are mere mortals struggling to find the best keywords that will place us on the first page of Google.

Increasing the discoverability of your social media content means that it’s more likely to reach your audience, drive traffic, and meet your marketing goals.

The Google AdWords certification teaches you basic and intermediate SEO skills, ensuring your content ranks in search engine results. With this certification, you also learn how to best create, execute, and manage an ad campaign using AdWords by Google.

Courses include:

• AdWords Fundamentals
• Search Advertising
• Display Advertising
• Mobile Advertising
• Video Advertising
• Shopping Advertising

Along with your personalized certificate, you receive a Google Partners public profile page listing your certifications. Now when anyone looks you up in a search—they’ll see your Google Partners credentials.

4. Real-time marketing with Twitter Flight School

When Twitter first released Twitter Flight School to major marketing agencies like Starcom MediaVest Group, WPP, and Omnicon—it was a massive success. After over 15,000 agency employees enrolled, the social media platform decided to roll out its training program to the public.

With 10-minute training modules, the courseware will help you develop successful Twitter marketing campaigns by offering best practices and providing examples from real businesses.

Courses include:

• Twitter 101
• How to create and manage objective-based campaigns
• How to integrate Twitter into a TV campaign
• How to drive website traffic and conversions

Also check out Twitter Flight School’s downloadable resource library. It’s a treasure trove of tips for creating your next campaign and includes downloadable presentations to prepare for your next client meeting.

5. Pinterest Propel

Pinterest Propel differs from some of the other offerings on this list. Rather than coursework and exams, Propel is a 30-day program featuring one-on-one training from Pinterest’s ad experts.

The program focuses on building and managing a successful ad campaign, tracking sales and online conversions, and generating leads. It also offers expert tips, best practices, and access to Pinterest guides.
One of the coolest aspects of Pinterest Propel? You get access to Pinterest’s Pin Factory—where you can create custom Promoted Pins for your business.

Topics covered include:

• Setting up your business account
• More about Promoted Pins
• Creating and editing your ads
• Setting up Pinterest Tag to track conversions

Check out their success stories page to see how real businesses have used paid advertising on Pinterest to engage audiences, expand their reach, and acquire new clients.

6. Hootsuite Academy

You knew this was coming.

Hootsuite Academy has educated more than 200,000 professionals—and certified 30,000—on a variety of topics key to social media marketing success, ranging from introductory material to more advanced tactics like data analytics and measuring return on investment (ROI).

Courses are free and include lots of video content—making it a fun and intuitive learning experience.

Courses include:

• Social Selling Training and Certification
• Advanced Social Strategy Training & Certification
• Social Marketing Training

101 Patent Application Time Line ... some points to consider

Israel is the StartUp Nation and most startups make sure to file at least one patent application on their ideas. Given the many things an innovator has to do during the first years of a startup, when is the right time to file a patent application?

Many people want to catch the earliest date possible. This makes sense since one needs to be the “first to file” to win the patent over others who come up with the same idea.

The problem with rushing to the patent office is that there is a requirement to provide an “enabling disclosure” of how to implement the invention. Very few inventors know how to make their invention when they first have the idea. Often, an inventor has to build a prototype of some kind or generate a design specification in order to finalize the design.

But many startup founders fear that, in the meantime, someone may come up with the same idea and file a patent application first. This may be true, but if they don’t have the enabling disclosure, they can’t get a patent. It is not sufficient to have an idea; you have to know how to implement it.

There is another issue here as well, one most inventors don’t consider. Once a patent application is filed in one country, it starts the clock for a family of patent applications around the world. According to the Paris Convention, once a first patent application has been filed in a first country, “second” applications in other countries can be filed within 12 months from that first filing. These second applications will be based on, and take “priority” from, the first application. Otherwise, without that priority connection, the first application could be cited against the later, second applications.

Many inventors don’t have enough money to file in many countries at the 1 year point. Many of them take advantage of the PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) to gain another 18 months before having to file abroad. The PCT was created in the 1970s to help solve the problem of the lack of budget at the 1 year point. It is known as the “international patent application” and provides the same filing date for all countries signed on the treaty. Thus, if you file in the PCT on Jan 1 2017, it is as if you filed in all the countries of the PCT on Jan 1 2017.

Note that both the Paris Convention and the PCT set their deadlines according to the priority date of the first application. Thus, the timeline for actions, as well as the budget, is set by that very first filing.

The expiration date of a patent in a given country is also set by the filing date. It defined as 20 years from the filing date in that country. For some inventions, like those in fast-changing fields, such as software, 20 years is significantly longer than the life expectancy of the product.

But for other products, such as many consumer products, the product will still be sold 20 years later. And for still other products, such as pharmaceuticals, 20 years is too short. A pharmaceutical product takes 10 - 15 years from invention until the product is cleared to be sold to the general public and is still a viable product for many years after that.


Thus, depending on the type of product, I will consider the expiration date vs. when to file the application.

I will also consider WHERE to file the application, in order to optimize the expiration dates. This is because the expiration date of the first application is about 1 year before the expiration date of the second applications (those filed according to the Paris Convention as well as those filed in the PCT). Thus, the second applications expire about 1 year AFTER the priority application expires.

This fact disturbed the US pharmaceutical companies for whom each extra day at the end of the 20 years is worth a fortune. They invented the “provisional” patent application in order to shift the relevant filing date 1 year later. The provisional patent application lives for 1 year, after which the applicant needs to file a “utility” application based on the provisional application. The 20 years is calculated from the utility’s filing date.

Thus, for consumer products, pharmaceuticals and other long-lived products, we advise the applicant to file a US provisional patent application first, to gain the extra year of protection in the US and to align the expiration dates of the entire patent family.

As you can see, the timing of important milestones in the life of a patent family are defined by the filing date. Choosing a timing based on your objectives is an important part of your patent strategy.

Quick Tips for Creating Compelling Videos for Social Media

You don’t need a film degree to make an excellent social media video these days. Marketers with untrained eyes are creating great social video content with little more than a smartphone. And people are watching.

Facebook and Snapchat have both surpassed 8 billion daily video views and YouTube’s 1 billion-plus users are watching hundreds of millions of hours of online video every day. This trend is expected to continue and there are an abundance of statistics to back that up.

Experts predict that 74 percent of all internet traffic in 2017 will come from video and you can bet your competitors are already leveraging this powerful form of content. A 2016 survey by the Web Marketing Video Council found that 61 percent of businesses are using video as a marketing tool. In the previous year, 66 percent of those businesses were not using video at all.

It’s clear that companies are quickly recognizing the growing power of video. Do you like the sound of those numbers, but you’re still not quite sure where a social video campaign fits into your marketing plan?

Check out our handy guide to learn more about the medium. If you’re ready to create a social video, here are 10 video tips to help you make it a great one.

1. Plan ahead so you can tell a story



Thoughtful, emotive storytelling is the heart of any successful social video. When you want to motivate, persuade, or be remembered, start with a story of human struggle and eventual triumph.

Research published in the Harvard Business Review found that a neurochemical called oxytocin is released when we watch a “hero’s story” on video. When the brain synthesizes oxytocin, people are more trustworthy, generous, charitable, and compassionate. An association that can be beneficial to your brand.

To determine whether oxytocin is released during video stories, they tested if narratives shot on video, rather than face-to-face interactions, would cause the brain to make oxytocin. By taking blood draws before and after the narrative, they found that character-driven stories do consistently cause oxytocin synthesis.



Determine the beginning, middle, and end to your story, the setting and the conflict to be overcome. Write a real script. Use this video tip and you can capture your customer’s hearts by attracting their brains.

2. Keep the camera steady

You wouldn’t mail out a thousand brochures with a crooked logo, so why would you make a social video with a shaky hand? Investing in a tripod for your phone can help you make a more professional looking video.

There are many excellent tripod mount models on the market. If you’re shooting on a small mobile phone, the 3C Smart Octopus can steady your video. If you’re shooting on a larger mobile phone, the GorillaPod will keep your device still. When you’re ready to get real fancy, you can mount the phone on a rig like iOgrapher, just like a professional video camera.

Your audience will be able to better focus on the story if the video has a smooth picture quality.

3. If audio is key to the story, consider an external mic

Perhaps your video will feature a few witty bits of dialogue or the sounds of animals crooning in the night. Whatever audio effect you’re going for, your story will pack more punch if the viewer can clearly hear all the action.

The built-in microphones on most smartphones leave something to be desired. There are many inexpensive external mics on the market that you can add on to your mobile device. Significantly up the production quality of your video with external mics like the Rode SmartLav+ or a shotgun mic like the Mighty Mic. With a quality external mic, you’ll be recording quality audio with your video in no time.

4. Don’t use digital zoom

Though it sounds like a good idea in theory, when you use digital zoom, it can make for a very blurry video. Until technologies evolve, avoid the zoom and just move closer to the person or object you’re trying to capture.

5. Lighting is key

Smartphone cameras have small image sensors so if you try to shoot in a dark environment, it will give you grainy, low-quality video. Choose a brightly lit setting for your video.

Also keep in mind that the auto exposure on mobile phones is often slow to adjust when changing from one scene to the next, so be mindful when moving from dark areas to bright ones. Avoid backlighting and direct overhead spotlighting.Image via Wistia.

There are a few LED lights on the market that are small and easy to use for shooting in difficult lighting conditions.

6. Shoot for your intended platform

For most social video, landscape mode (horizontal) is best. Videos are almost universally presented horizontally. That’s how we watch them on TV and in movie theaters, so it’s natural that a landscape mode would be most pleasing to the video watcher’s eye.

When videos are filmed in portrait mode, the viewer must watch them with two large black bars on the side, instead of a full picture (unless, of course, they’re watching on a platform like Snapchat or Instagram Stories).

Remember, because each social network has a unique audience, social videos must be optimized for different channels. A video that works on Facebook may need a serious edit before it can work on Instagram. And you might have to take an entirely different approach to video on Snapchat or Twitter.

More social networks are rolling out native video, demonstrating its growing value. Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all have their own video features. And then there are the platforms whose main function is social video sharing, such as YouTube. For live streaming there’s Periscope, YouTube, and Facebook, which has updated its News Feed algorithm to favor Live video.

Facebook explained in a blog post: “Now that more and more people are watching Live videos, we are considering Live videos as a new content type—different from normal videos—and learning how to rank them for people in News Feed.”

7. Use an editing app to trim unnecessary stuff out

Perhaps the beginning of your video features the speaker preparing or hesitating. Maybe they stumbled over a few words or the audio quality was off. To showcase a professional looking video to your market, you’ll need to edit those parts out.

If your editing needs aren’t too complex—maybe you just want to compile a few clips together and then add some titles—iMovie, Windows Movie Maker, or the YouTube video editor will do the trick. But if you’re hoping to edit something together that is more dynamic, try a program like Adobe Premiere Elements, Final Cut Pro X, or Sony Vegas.

When you shoot the video, consider using interesting angles so that when you go to edit it later, you will have a variety of shots to choose from.

8. Consider using subtitles or on-screen text

Although we’d like to think that the bulk of video watching goes on during leisure hours, the reality is most people watch videos at work. If the message of your video is not easily communicated through the action alone, you might consider adding subtitles. That way, whether or not the sound is on, the viewer can appreciate the story you’re trying to tell

And let’s not forget how often videos are watched without sound on social media—on Facebook it’s 85 percent.

9. Aim to catch attention quickly

The first 30 seconds of a social video is what matters most, according to data from Wista. If you can hook your audience in the first 30 seconds of video, they are more likely to stick around and engage. So make it exciting, make it interesting, razzle-dazzle them.

10. Keep it short

A fascinating scientist giving an enlightening Ted Talk might earn hundreds of thousands of YouTube views with a 15 or 20 minute video, but for the most part, shorter is better. Twitter videos are capped at 30 seconds, Instragram has a 60-second maximum and Snapchat videos are capped at 10 seconds.


Once you get a handle on these quick video tips, you’ll be in business. Keep in mind, you need to be able to answer the question “why will people share this video?” before you ever start producing it.

A good way to answer that question?

Listen to your social media followers. See what videos they’re already sharing and analyze them. Let these successes inspire your approach to social video.

Measuring the Effectiveness of Social Media Campaigns in B2B for Internal and External Results

“You have to find something that you can measure,” said Brian MacDonald, Senior Manager of Digital Marketing, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, in the MarketingSherpa Summit 2016 Media Center.

“Fortunately for us, in the software business one of the big things that we can measure, especially for the audience I usually go after, is all about them trying software,” he said.

MacDonald explains that if someone downloads a software trial, that tells the team where the prospect is in the buying cycle: “We know that if they’re going to download something, they’re probably pretty serious about it.”

Brian and his team were able to actually link trial downloads people had made to actual social media campaigns that they had run.

“That was really the key — finding the call to action that’s linked to something that’s gated, and we know that they took action,” he said.

By including downloads at key social media touchpoints, Brian and his team were able to measure the effectiveness of social media campaigns.

Aside from just metrics, it was also vital that Brian and his team keep up a continuous feedback loop with customers.

“Once we nailed down the basic metrics and came up with our technique,” he said, referencing storytelling through using an infographic, “we started out with a quarterly cadence, just to start to get the information out there, and that was really effective.”

The teams that they were telling the social media story to wanted a higher frequency, Brian added, and they increased the cadence to monthly based off that feedback.

“We give them a bigger, broader send on quarterly, but on monthly, it allows us to then fine-tune the content and get to the things that they are seeing that they expect their customers to want, and what we’re seeing on our side as what people are actually interacting with,” he said.

In Brian’s full presentation onstage at MarketingSherpa Summit 2016, he detailed five steps he and his team took in order to see results and gain buy-in.

Step #1. Find your audience

One of the critical first steps, he said, is to understand your audience — “Are you talking to Sales? Are you talking to R&D?”

By knowing who they are, you can then understand what’s important to them and what content they might find the most valuable.

“One way to do that is to look at their business objectives,” Brian said. “You want to connect your story to those business objectives.”

Step #2. Build a story using data

Brian advises marketers to gather any data they can access that helps build the story around your team and their efforts.

More than just accumulating numbers on customers, marketers have to ask themselves: “What am I learning from those numbers? Looking at things over time, looking at correlation between things,” he said. “From there, take those insights and begin to connect them to those business objectives.”

The key metric Brian’s CMO cared about was pipeline, so Brian and his team researched how their efforts directly impacted that objective.

Step #3. Write with a goal in mind

It’s important to understand your end game, not only overall, but in each meeting or interaction.

“What do I want to get out of this thing? When I walk out of this meeting … what do I want out of it?” he said.

This focus will help you craft the story and gain internal buy-in. Brian wanted to use relevant, valuable content to gain recognition for his team internally that would spur further investment.

To help him achieve his end goal, Brian was inspired by movies and storytelling to get visual information across to his internal audience quickly. This led him to use infographics as an evolution of the usual presentation deck.

Step #4. Seek constructive feedback

“What I find most effective [with feedback] is ask for something very specific. Don’t just say, ‘Hey, give me some feedback on this stuff.’ People won’t take time unless you give them something specific to do,” Brian said.

After reaching out to experts for specific advice on areas they know well, you have to understand what advice is important to take. This means staying true to your story and understanding what will support it as well as what might ultimately undermine it.

Step #5. Publish with the audience in mind

MacDonald focused on three areas in this step:

Anticipate your audience’s questions. Either from previous experience presenting to them or from your research, have an idea of what additional information they might want to know and prepare for it.

Engage your audience. If your manager or other members of the team are present, you can use them to further emphasize a point in your story and demonstrate support from others.

Learn from the presentation and incorporate those insights into developing the “sequel” or next presentation.

RESULTS

“One of the key aspects of telling your story to your internal customers is connecting business insights — the things that you find in the data about marketing programs — to their business objectives,” Brian said.

By making those connections, people are going to care about the story, react to the story and want to be involved and engaged, he added.

After going through the steps, Brian and his team saw the following results:

• 2x increase in engagement metrics due to content owners creating better content
• 3x increase in amount of engagement with internal stakeholders
• 100% increase in members on the team

“Once they saw that I was actually helping them meet their business objectives, they then wanted to help our team,” Brian concluded.

You might also like…

See more speakers like Brian at MarketingSherpa Summit 2017 | Aria Las Vegas | April 10-13

Social Media Marketing: How a digital marketer doubled the size of his team with a five-step storytelling strategy

5 Inbound Marketing Hacks Your B2B Company is Missing Out On

Destroying the 7 Myths of B2B Social Media