Stephen Darori is a Social Media Expert,Author, Publicist,Finance and Marketing Whiz , Strategist ,Journalist, Editor Prolific Blogger. Editor. You can follow Stephen Darori on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and other Social Media Platforms.
Stephen Darori & Associates has led major Social Media and Digital Campaigns for wide ranging clients that have included Hilary for America, the Democratic Party ,Democratic Alliance ( South Africa), Fortune 1000 companies and Shabbat.com
Showing posts with label #ScialMediaFromZion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #ScialMediaFromZion. Show all posts
AdEspresso by Hootsuite allows us to do a number of important things with our ads. First off, we can run split test ad sets, which is key to running the most cost-effective campaign. Within a few days of the start of a campaign we know what ad copy and creative is performing best and why—allowing us to optimize the campaign.
In our ad dashboard, we get an overview of performance over time, top tracking metrics, total amount spent, conversions, and the best and worst performing ads. We can easily pinpoint ads that are not working for us.
AdEspresso also allows us to boost posts directly from the Hootsuite dashboard. This makes it easy to put money behind our best performing organic posts. Then we set up our ad campaign, select the ad account, run split tests, and manage the ad from Hootsuite. Evernote
We use Evernote to share notes about ads among our team. Whenever we make a change to an ad or refresh our plan, we add notes so that we can time stamp our decisions and the reasons we made them.
Evernote is also great during the planning stage of an ad campaign because we can set out a timeline, roles and responsibilities, and outline a draft workback schedule. It’s also easy for us to link to other docs like strategy decks or calendars.
Hootsuite Enhance
When we’re creating ads, we often need access to images that we can we can quickly customize and resize for social. Using Hootsuite Enhance, we can use effects, filters, and fonts to create images for social.
All images for ads on social need to have less than 20 percent of the image covered by text, so we test our ad images using Facebook’s Image Text Check toolbeforehand to make sure they’re going to work.
UTM codes
Every ad campaign we run includes UTM parameters. That way we know exactly how much traffic and how many conversions are coming from specific ads. It also helps us identify the source of social traffic, i.e. which social network the ads sent traffic from.
UTM codes also help us group ads by type. We set up different tags by broad themes like brand awareness or campaign type like social ROI. This allows us to group ad performance and make observations. If we see that a certain ad group is performing best on a certain channel, we’ll shift our budget accordingly. Slack
Messaging software Slack is awesome for cross-team collaboration. When we’re working on a big campaign, we can create a group, upload documents and resources, and get instant feedback. It’s an easy way for us to keep in touch with everyone who needs to know about our ad efforts.
We like the search box because we can go through our archives if we need to retrieve anything for reference, such as plans and notes from past campaign.
Facebook Blueprint
We run a lot of ads on Facebook, so having a learning resource like Facebook Blueprint is essential. It offers courses, guides, and training modules on the latest in social advertising.
It’s a one-stop-shop for all things Facebook advertising—whether you’re looking to try new ad formats, better optimize your ads, or refine your KPIs.
Unsplash
Searching for social media images can be time-consuming and expensive. That’s why having a handy list of free stock photo image sites can help speed up the process.
Our favorites are Unsplash and Kaboompics, because we can search by keyword for thousands of images in their database. This helps us narrow down our selection a lot faster.
Hootsuite Impact
Hootsuite Impact is a powerful measurement tool that allows us to report on all of our paid and organic performance. It helps us see the overall health of our channels and our return on investment (ROI).
It also offers recommendations on things like daily ad spend, geographic targeting, and approximate cost per action. This is especially useful when we’re running multiple campaigns and need to make sure that we’re consistent across all channels when looking at results.
When you’re running next ad campaign, get your toolkit in order before building out your plan. It will help you stay organized and properly track all of your campaigns.
There are many occasions in life where you will hear or be given the same advice over and over again. Often, this advice is conflicting and you feel as if you’d have been better off not hearing anything at all. The moment you get engaged, you’ll hear all of the reasons for having a large wedding, as well as why a small, more intimate gathering is best. Announce your pregnancy, and you’ll hear unsolicited advice on everything from whether you should find out your baby’s sex to whether you should use pain medication during the birth. As a social media manager or content marketer—yes, I’m comparing marketing to giving birth—you can probably relate to the feeling of trying to sift through an overwhelming amount of advice.
As someone who stays up to date on social media news and best practices, you have probably heard some form of the following pieces of advice. With a focus on staying critical of all popular opinion, I challenge these commonly shared tips. Success is measured by followers
One of the most popular topics in the social media marketing world (and the actual world) surrounds the number of followers one has. While there is a grain of truth to perceptions around an official social media account having enough followers to support their authority, if all you are concentrating on is the number of followers your brand’s account has, you are most likely missing huge opportunities for growth.
The success of your organization’s social media strategy should not be focused on the quantity of followers you have, but rather the quality of these followers. If you approach your plan with the aims of increasing engagement amongst your followers however, you will naturally see this community grow. I have too often heard people get worked up and obsessed with how many followers they have, or companies using this number as an indication of whether their social media strategies are successful. This is misguided, and can lead to not only missed opportunities for community growth as mentioned above, but to questionable practices such as purchasing followers. What’s more embarrassing for your brand—Having under a certain number of followers, or getting caught buying followers? The answer here is clear. Keep your accounts clean
When I was on the job hunt, one of the top pieces of advice I heard was to scrub my social media accounts clean. Keep everything super professional and conventional, unless you never want to find that dream job. As someone who was using my Twitter account to post ridiculous quotes from my dad, feminist and social justice articles, and countless photos of cute animals, my account wasn’t exactly working as a purely professional resume.
However, I was told shortly after being hired that my Twitter presence actually helped rather than hurt my chances of getting the job. In having an online presence that wasn’t super sterile, my future employer was able to recognize that I had a personality and a (debatable) sense of humor.
It’s also a widespread belief that when you actually have the job, your social media accounts should act as a reflection of your most professional self. Many imply the belief that one should not post anything that even remotely suggests you have a life outside of work. All that you do is think of marketing plans, KPIs, and content strategies, right? Obviously, wrong. Your followers know that your life is not 24/7 work, and to suggest anything otherwise comes across as inauthentic. Our own Ryan Holmes even wrote a comprehensive piece on the subject, Why employees shouldn’t have to sanitize their social media accounts, where he explains “People have private lives outside the office—lives full of family, friends, goofy selfies, bar nights, and all the rest. Why, then, do we insist employees’ social media accounts reflect some buttoned-down ideal of an office drone? Honesty in the workplace means moving beyond that and understanding that employees are people first.” Of course, I trust it’s understood this doesn’t mean posting a racist rant, sharing prejudiced beliefs, or inappropriate content on your accounts. As Holmes states, “There’s no reason a company or organization should tolerate racist or insensitive content shared by its employees.” Use your judgment, but let your personality and interests show. Delete negativity
While this advice is usually presented as common sense, it’s truthfully more of a knee-jerk reaction. Although it’s understandable that you may naturally feel that it is best to immediately delete or hide any kind of negativity aimed at your brand on social media, complaints or insults (when respectful and without offensive language or content) can act as a great source of information. If, for example, a customer complains that the flowers they had delivered arrived looking less than perfect, your company has a wonderful opportunity to showcase your stellar customer service skills. As we explain in our post about what not to do on social media, a negative comment enables you to: Make a customer happy in a very public place. Publicly address a problem within your business that perhaps you didn’t know about.
Here, when you reply to the negative comment and offer a remedy that goes above and beyond, you are publicly highlighting your organization’s dedication to their customers, as well as allowing transparency. If you saw a branded social media account or page that had only 100 percent positive and gushing comments or interactions, you’d start to get suspicious and probably not fully trust the sources. Through responding to legitimate complaints and fair negativity in a respectful and helpful way, you are adding value and authenticity to your organization. Be present on every platform
Fear of missing out, or FOMO, is a real thing and can be hard to ignore when you keep hearing about the newest and greatest social media networks. The truth is that if you’re looking to grow and nurture your social media presence, you don’t need to immediately jump on every social media network bandwagon. The quality over quantity principle rings truer than ever here, as it’s much better to have a consistent, reliable, and engaging presence on a select number of key social media networks rather than trying to do the same on too many and failing. As our previous post on how to manage your social media presence explains, there are three key ways that trying to be present on every platform can do more harm than good. Ignoring a social media network betrays your audience’s expectations
If someone follows you on Instagram or Twitter, they expect that you will be posting regularly and with valuable content. If your last Instagram post was 58 weeks ago, your followers will notice this and question the legitimacy of your accounts and the trustworthiness of your business. Ignoring a social media network can cost you online followers—and potential customers
With social media customer service becoming more common and expected by the day, if you aren’t keeping up to date and active on any of your channels, you are inviting the possibility of missing and seemingly ignoring customer inquiries. As we previously explained, “By ignoring your online audience’s feedback you risk not only losing those customers, but also failing to address the potential hurdles in your services or product development. Not paying attention to your online audience can cause you to lose followers on your social networks, and even potential customers.” Neglecting a social media network can tarnish your brand’s online reputation
As a result of these factors, you risk your brand’s online reputation being damaged. As we explain, “Decreased attention means a higher chance of committing one of many social media faux pas that could seriously threaten your brand’s reputation.” With the aim of an organization’s social media being to enhance a reputation and engage with customers, if you can’t satisfy these two key areas it might be time to rethink your current strategy.
With all of this said, my main piece of advice would be to question everything. I don’t mean this in a tinfoil hat-wearing way, but as a suggestion to always think critically about information you see, read, and hear and use your own judgment. All businesses are different, so test out various pieces of advice and find what works best for your specific industry and brand.
Imagine this scenario: You’re at work, hitting the 3 o’clock wall. To revive yourself from the slump, you navigate over to BarkPost, angling your monitor slightly more towards you to avoid being seen by your boss.
You find an amusing listicle—18 Signs Your Dog Has A Secret Second Family—and, wishing to confer with your dog co-parent, you copy the URL in the browser and paste it into an email message. Congratulations, you’ve just engaged in “dark social.”
We’ve all shared articles one-on-one through a means other than social media. Whether it was done to sidestep the no-social-media-for-personal-use policy at work, or because you don’t want the whole world to know you enjoy an article titled An Open Letter From a Corgi to the People Who Laugh at His Butt.
Thanks to the universality of the act, dark social has been reported to be responsible for 84 percent of outbound sharing. So what is this mysterious power, where does it come from, and—most importantly—how can your business harness it? Here’s everything you need to know.
Table of contents
What is dark social?
5 reasons why your company can’t ignore dark social
Why you should start measuring dark social (and how to do it)
What is dark social?
The term “dark social” was coined in an article written in 2012 by former deputy editor of The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal. Dark social is when people share content through private channels such as instant messaging programs, messaging apps, and email.
This private sharing is harder to track than content shared on public platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, so many social media marketers don’t realize how big of a slice dark social has of the social media sharing pie.
Some of the most common dark social traffic channels are:
Messaging apps—such as WhatsApp, WeChat, and Facebook Messenger
Secure browsing—If you click from HTTPS to HTTP the referrer won’t be passed on
In other words, dark social describes any web traffic that’s not attributed to a known source, such as a social network or a Google search. Referral traffic is usually identified by certain “tags” attached to the link whenever it’s shared.
For example, if I want to share this blog post on Twitter using the “Tweet This” button on the side, an action window will open, with the following tag attached to the end of the URL: “percent2F&source=Shareaholic&related=shareaholic”. This tag signals that the referrer of the article was a social sharing tool directly from the post’s page.
If you’re curious about a headline in a Tweet and click on the link, you will often be directed to a link with the following tag “&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter”, signalling that this referral originated on Twitter. This is a more common referral tag that you have probably seen in the past, it’s called a UTM code or parameter.
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Dark social links, however, don’t contain referrer data. Common examples of dark social include links copied and pasted into emails or instant messages, or shared via text message. These methods don’t automatically attach any tracking tags, unless the shared link was copied with the tag included (for example, if I were to copy the URL of an article that I originally found on Twitter, including the UTM parameters attached to it). If you’re watching your website’s analytics closely, you’ve probably wondered what all that “direct” traffic is. Well, at Hootsuite, we’re pretty sure thousands of people didn’t type “https://blog.hootsuite.com/quick-tips-for-creating-social-videos/” into a browser window. It’s labelled “direct” in Google Analytics, but it’s really traffic from dark social.
5 reasons your company can’t ignore dark social
Aside from the fact that The Atlantic article is a highly interesting and relatively easy read, no matter your level of familiarity with different engagement metrics, it also makes two very important points about dark social.
The first is the fact that the most important shareability factor in a piece of content is the content itself. No good content = no sharing, however sophisticated your optimization efforts may be.
The second point Madrigal makes is that the emergence of social networks didn’t create the social web, but only structured the existing channels by the act of publishing—and tracking—our social interactions.
If you’ve got the great content piece covered, read on for why you need dark social marketing to maximize its reach.
1. Dark social is everywhere
For the past year-and-a-half, the majority of responses (clickbacks) to dark social shares have come from mobile devices. Clickbacks on dark social shares coming from mobile devices are up from 53 percent in August 2014 to 62 percent in February 2016. The other 38 percent of clickbacks on dark social shares come from desktops.
2. Dark social has a huge impact on traffic
According to marketing firm RadiumOne, in the last year-and-a-half, dark social shares as a percent of on-site shares jumped from 69 to 84 percent globally.
Compare those numbers to Facebook traffic. RadiumOne’s research in February 2016 found that only 11 percent of site-originated mobile shares and 21 percent of mobile clickbacks happened worldwide via Facebook. In the same month, seven times the number of site-originated mobile shares and more than three times the number of mobile clickbacks happened via dark social.
3. Dark social is a spectacular marketing opportunity
Dark social data gives a detailed representation of consumers’ real interests. Familiarizing yourself with this information will allow your business to access a targeted audience of connections.
4. Dark social reaches unique demographics
According to RadiumOne’s research, 46 percent of consumers age 55 and older share only via dark social, as opposed to those in the 16 to 34 age group, where only 19 percent do so.
5. Dark social sharing is prevalent in many industries
For example, if your business is in personal finance, food and drink, travel, or executive search, more than 70 percent of social sharing is done through dark social.
Why you should start measuring dark social (and how to do it)
For anyone who publishes content online, it’s important to know where the majority of their readers come from. Whether dark social accounts for 60 or 16 percent of web traffic, marketers need to be able to track it.
Indeed, measuring dark social should be an essential part of your social media ROIframework. In this section we’ll look at some of the tactics and tools you can use to do it.
Shorten URLs
Use shortened URLs for outbound links in your content to get a deeper analysis of the engagement rates. Shorter links also look cleaner on platforms like Twitter.
Hootsuite’s built-in URL shortener ow.ly can be accessed via the Hootsuite dashboard or on the ow.ly site. This link shortener allows you to upload images, track real-time clicks (not including clicks from bots), and have the ability to post to your various social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Image via ow.ly.
You can also use the shortened URL in emails or on your website and use Hootsuite’s URL click stats to track how many clicks those links receive.
Make sharing easy
Thoughtfully arrange the share buttons on your website so that they are easy for visitors to spot. On some sites, users have to scroll to find the share buttons. Other sites don’t quite distinguish which are “follow” buttons and which are “share” buttons.
The sophistication of your share buttons should match the quality of your content.
Use dark social tools
There are many tools that allow marketing professionals to track dark social traffic origins and analyze their outcomes.
Po.st is a product of RadiumOne. The tool allows users to share content and provides publishers with revenue opportunities and unique dark social analytics tools.
ShareThis is an excellent tool that enables people to share any piece of content on the web through e-mail, direct message, or text message. The tool can be customized to measure copy and shares of your website’s URL.
GetSocial.io is a social media app store. You can create an account through their website or download their WordPress plugin or Shopify App. After you’ve created an account, paste the snippet of code provided into your HTML <head> section (the code is highlighted in red on top of the page). Once you’ve successfully inserted the snippet of code in your website, you’ll be one click away from tracking dark social shares. Find the Address Bar Tracking app, click Activate and you’re good to go.
Watch other social platforms
One of the things you can do to unmask the origin of dark social traffic is to check for a simultaneous spike in link traffic coming from Facebook or Reddit.
Major websites have also reported digging into user agent data, which includes a line of code users leave after visiting a website, which identifies their operating system and browser type. User agent information, while not always translated correctly by analytics software, can provide more details about the referrer.
Finally, as Madrigal pointed out, “There’s no way to game email or people’s instant messages. There’s no power users you can contact. There’s no algorithms to understand.”
The best way to ensure your content gets shared is to create interesting, informative, original material.
In the great marketing bake-off, social media takes the cake in terms of reach. With so many networks to choose from, and an audience of over 2 billion people, social media can be an effective platform on which all businesses can reach their target market. While that may be true, the reality is most B2B businesses struggle with how to incorporate social media into their marketing mix. To aid you, we’ve outlined several B2B social media tips below.
Before we dig into best practices, let’s look at how B2B companies are using social media?
Market research. Listen online, and find out what prospects and customers are saying about your brand. What do they want from your product?
Brand awareness. Expand what people know about you, and increase your reach. A strong online presence can bring you greater exposure.
Thought leadership. Position yourself as an authority in your industry by sharing your thoughts on social media.
Account-based marketing. Reach employees of target companies with ad campaigns specific to their company.
Hiring & recruiting. Use social media as a platform to attract potential employees.
Relationship building. Connect and build rapport with your customers through social media.
Lead generation. Identify and forge relationships with potential customers online.
Social selling. Sales teams can leverage their social networks to target prospects and drive sales.
Now that you know how B2B companies can use social, lets look at how can you build the best social strategy for your business. Check out these B2B social media tips to enhance your brand’s presence online:
Awareness. Make sure you have buy-in across the organization. Start with the CEO and work outwards making sure to manage expectations and find employees who shine on social.
Adoption. Make social a cross-departmental effort. Reach beyond Marketing, and get Sales, HR, Recruiting, and Customer Service involved.
Analysis. Use social data to your advantage, and gain valuable insights to see what content and posts perform best on social.
Accolades. Share all wins, regardless of size. Tell your stories on social to humanize your brand and connect with your customers.
While B2B marketers tend to be hyper-focused on led gen, it’s important to remember that social media is a great tool for relationship-building that can help your business gain traction and credibility with specific audiences.
To do it effectively, social media should be a company-wide endeavor, with everyone involved and actively contributing. Sometimes people think they have nothing to offer. Make it easy for them to distribute engaging content on their own social media networks by providing relevant company updates and news.
The key to increasing your digital footprint, brand awareness, and generating trust, is simple. Get your team to engage in conversations. This humanizes the brand, helps give the brand a personality, and gives a boost to any paid campaigns you are running.
Here are five B2B companies that are embracing these B2B social media tips and are excelling on social media:
GE
GE makes specific engineering topics feel relevant to their audience with interesting content like this video, which shows how 3D printing can be used for medical purposes. Through content like this, GE is able to spark interest and highlight how their products are applicable in other fields.
American Express
American Express uses social media to get feedback and input from customers. For example, they will create polls on Twitter like the one below to engage their audience and better understand their motivation.
Cisco likes to focus on current events. For example, for April Fool’s Day they posted an April Fool’s Day inspired post on Instagram. Similarly, during March Madness they posted their CEO’s bracket on Instagram. By utilizing this type of content Cisco has been able to have engaging conversations with its audience and, at the same time, make its brand more relatable.
Cisco April Fool’s Day Instagram post
Cisco March Madness Instagram post
Intel
Intel leverages its social media for recruiting by showcasing the company’s culture and highlighting how its employees are changing the world.
Novartis
Novartis uses its Instagram to showcase employee volunteerism in the community, which promotes its brand and builds a positive image of the company.
