Executive summary. Start amplifying your social media strategy today! Union Metrics unionmetrics.com

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2 Executive summary For digital marketers, increasing social media engagement is a never-ending quest. How can you increase your social footprint? You want to create amazing content your fans are eager to share, extending your social reach. You want to get your message in front of new, larger, relevant audiences. But how? In the following pages, we ll discuss how to optimize your social content and hashtag use to increase engagement across social media. Learn how to better incorporate hashtags into your content to encourage discovery. Get ideas for new, more impactful content you can share, no matter the social media channel you re on. Discover what works on channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr, from better visuals to more powerful text. Find out when and where to post. Start amplifying your social media strategy today!

3 Amplify Your Social Strategy 3 Everyone wants more engagement and more amplification on social media. It doesn't matter how long you've had a presence on Facebook or Twitter everyone wants a more engaged audience. It's incredibly frustrating to post day after day without seeing the rate of engagement you'd like. How can you drive more interaction with your social content? How can you spread your message - and your brand - further? In this guide, we'll discuss how to create more impactful social content and how you can make better use of hashtags to increase engagement with that content. Part 1. Hashtag Optimization No matter if your brand s social strategy focuses on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or Tumblr - or all of them - understanding hashtag best practices is crucial for driving social media engagement across channels. Hashtags are the key to discovery on social media. Think of the hashtag as a tool for social media call and response, a way to ask, answer and organize important questions about trends, communities and engagement. You want to implement hashtag strategies that get your questions in front of the best possible audience and get the best possible responses from them. Sound good? Read on. Create and iterate Hashtags are one of the best ways to share your social media content with new audiences; they re essential to getting your content discovered on most social platforms. A single hashtag can boost the reach of your post, unite users at events, and so much more. Let s dig deeper into some hashtag best practices. Think big and small. Use popular and general hashtags to add your content to a larger conversation, but beware of getting lost in the noise of new conversations around a popular hashtag. Preparing additional unique keywords that target a smaller but potentially more relevant audience helps. Shake it up. Try a mix of different hashtags to see what works best for your content, but remember it s not recommended to use more than three hashtags in a post (on Instagram go up to five).

4 Amplify Your Social Strategy 4 It s all about you. Personalized hashtags make the conversation around your brand easily searchable and shareable for future reference. Brands use them for local meetups, conferences, sharing internal events and company culture, and more. Keep it simple. When creating a personalized hashtag, keep it short, relevant and simple - fewer than 20 characters. If you use a really long hashtag, people won t have as much room to add their thoughts. See where you stand. Once you ve come up with a branded hashtag, do a quick search to see how or if it's already being used. Ask yourself these questions: Is this hashtag already being used? If so, you may want to create a new one. How it is being used and by whom? Is it used by people relevant to your industry? You just found a new group of people to follow and interact with! Do you see a lot of spam or unrelated posts? Definitely don t use this hashtag; you don t want to be associated with or flooded by a sea of spam. If it was in use but isn t anymore, you may be able to figure out who the creator was and ask permission to take it over, or simply test making it your own. Talk it out. Use your personalized hashtag to ask questions to followers. Pay attention to answers and conversations to identify key influencers, advocates, and fans in your space; these are people you want to follow and interact with. Don t take a one-size-fits-all approach to hashtags. What works in one channel may not work in another and what works for one brand may not work for another. Search and discover Each social media network has unique search functionalities to identify popular hashtags associated with your industry. Discovering and using industry-relevant hashtags can help increase brand awareness and drive impressions; hashtag search and discovery helps you listen to what people are taking about, and join in the conversation. Twitter: Use Twitter search to type a phrase or hashtag relevant to your industry and view a list of people who use those words or hashtags in their bios. Instagram: Use Instagram's newly revamped search to explore hashtags and find new photos and people to follow based on interests relevant to your industry.

5 Amplify Your Social Strategy 5 Tumblr: Visit the Tumblr Explore page to see dashboard-style view of all the posts that use a given hashtag Facebook: Give Facebook's search a spin to find photos and other content using hashtags and other keywords Using a channel's search and discovery functionality enables you to a) discover the right people and the right hashtags relevant to/popular within your communities, b) determine the size of your audience, and c) produce relevant content to drive comments, retweets, and reblogs. Don t be afraid to search hashtags associated with your own brand (and your competitors, for that matter)! Depending on what you find, you may want to: favorite or like positive posts to extend reach and brand awareness retweet or reblog interesting, funny or relevant posts answer questions or address concerns Trends and timing Once you ve used search tools to identify relevant hashtags and keywords, it s important to monitor what trends are emerging in your various social media communities. You may want to set up ongoing monitoring for key search terms and hashtags so you can keep up with the conversation as it occurs. This way, you can find new hashtags to test adding to your posts and new people to engage with. Social media moves fast really fast. And if you re interested in generating impressions and driving engagement, timing is everything. So it s important to think about both what and when to post and hashtag relevant content. The best time to post is going to depend entirely on when the people you want to reach are active. To learn when that is, you should look for trends in their activity rates on your content, your competitors content, and hashtags they are interested in. Don t neglect nights and weekends, either. Hashtag haste Hashtag popularity and usage changes over time. For example, pop culture topics fall in and out of fashion very quickly, and award shows or sporting events are always timesensitive; that means often there is only a small window of time where certain hashtag usage will be relevant and effective. Keep that in mind when planning a content calendar and overall social strategy.

6 Amplify Your Social Strategy 6 Part 2. Content Optimization You can work all you want to increase the discoverability of your content, but if the content itself isn't good enough, any audience that finds it won t stick around. To truly increase engagement, you need to create quality content that resonates with your audience. But that isn't as easy as it sounds. How can you optimize your social content to increase engagement? In its simplest form, content optimization is dependent upon three main things: what to post, when to post it, and how to keep it fresh. This is a little different on each platform, so we ve made some platform-specific recommendations. And remember, you don t need to figure everything out on your own. You can take advantage of social media analytics to measure and keep track of the impact and reach of your social strategy and presence, which will tell you what content is working and what isn t. What to post We no longer just think about Twitter for words, Instagram for photos, and Tumblr for GIFs. We're in a new world of social media where optimized content is a smart combination of words and visuals tweaked for each channel. Whether you re a social media pro or just getting started, there are a few best practices to follow for what content to post to get the best response from your audience. Picture success These days, visual content like photos and videos has power, but other visual content formats are also popular, like GIFs and increasingly cinemagraphs (similar to a GIF with only one section of the image animated). Arresting images and funny GIFs perform well, but don t feel like you have to post only cute or humorous content to be successful. Some of social media s most popular brands aren t what you might initially expect; GE, IBM and NPR all stay true to their brand voice while creating rich, often visual content. Note: Be sure you only post images you have permission to use, and that you attribute them appropriately. Use photos with a creative commons license or look into purchasing images you can use. If you re sharing community content, include a link back to that person s blog or account. Ok, so you want to be picture perfect. But how can you determine the right kind of images for your brand?

7 Amplify Your Social Strategy 7 Consider your industry. What is the purpose of your content? Are you selling a product? Generating brand awareness through likes, shares and retweets? Collecting leads? Depending on your industry, you will want think about posting visual content from different angles (literally). For example, fashion, automotive or beauty brands might favor single photos or photosets of lifestyle images in a beautiful setting. By contrast, e-commerce brands might choose a set of photos to illustrate multiple views of a product or product line. Different still, entertainment and youth-focused brands may get optimal engagement from posting animated GIFs, or short videos, which perform especially well on Tumblr. Try a combination of pictures, videos and GIFs to see what gets the best response from your audience Quality over quantity. Be sure to post high-quality photo and video content, no matter your industry. Remember that every social media platform has different best practices for image specifications and regulations, so do your research so that your posts are approved and optimized for the platform they appear on. For example, while filters and color manipulation can be visually arresting, no one likes, or shares or comments on a blurry, dimly-lit photo. And while it s good to keep up a steady flow of content (more on that later), don t bombard your audience with a noisy stream of irrelevant, low-quality imagery. Sometimes you can learn more from what s not working than from what is. Pay close attention to your lower-performing posts. What can you learn from them? What can you improve? Talk to your audience While visuals are important, engaging text isn t completely obsolete, so don t neglect your written copy. There are a few different ways you can use words to optimize your content to increase engagement and social sharing. Employ calls to action (CTAs). Whether you re stealthy with soft questions, or take a more direct approach, asking your audience to do something like comment, share or purchase might be the easiest and most effective way to engage them. Decide what it is that you want them to do and ask yourself why they would do it; form your CTAs from there. Have a contest. What does your brand offer that others don t? What services or giveaways can you provide that will cause social media stir? Determine the content that is unique to your brand and then share it with your followers in the form of a contest or give away. Hopefully they will share (or like or favorite) your content in exchange.

8 Amplify Your Social Strategy 8 Ask and answer. Fans love to talk to their favorite brand. Therefore, content that encourages participation is a great way to increase engagement. Be sure you've turned on the ask, DM or comment functions in your settings so you can start the dialogue and keep it going and don t forget to prep your social team to handle any expected increase in volume. It s okay to be human. If it makes sense for your brand, use a conversational tone in your posts. If you accidentally tweet a typo or broken link, correct it, apologize and move on. Your followers will understand. Own up to your mistakes and act like the human behind the account that you are. Even the largest brands are run by people. Don t be afraid to put yourself in your customer s shoes: when was a time a company communicated with you in a way that made you feel valued? What made you recommend them to someone else? Use that perspective to build your interactions on social media. Remember that communication is a two-way process; don t use social media as a megaphone from which you shout your marketing messages. You ll get a better response by talking, listening and responding. Be true to your brand. Develop a brand voice that is relatable, relevant, and that sticks to and communicates your brand values. Use this voice consistently in all communications: internally, in marketing broadcasts, and in interactions with fans and followers. Mix it up. While you want to stay true to your brand, posting a mix of original and reblogged/tweeted/posted content is a great way to engage your followers with new content while rewarding them by amplifying their own creations. Always strive for a mix of different kinds of posts. Posting too much promotional content will fatigue your followers, so interact and engage as much as you broadcast. Social media is about communication; show your audience you re listening as much as you re talking. Keep the conversation going. On social media, reblogs, retweets and shares are hallmarks of engagement. This downstream amplification spreads content to new audiences and helps it live longer. So, respect your community and post content they ll want to keep sharing. Be persistent. You will need to post a particular message or piece of content multiple times to be sure everyone has the best opportunity to see it. Try sharing it on different days and at different times to reach more people, no matter what time zone they're in and when they're online (more on timing shortly). Be wary of posting the exact same message, however; tweak it for each platform and for each time you post it.

9 Amplify Your Social Strategy 9 Stay on trend. Holidays coming up? Recent notable business merger? Big celebrity scandal? Keep your finger (or mouse, as it were) on the pulse of today and post content that is in tune with the trends and news of the moment. Social media moves quickly, so the most optimal content is the kind that can keep up. However: Only post about relevant trends and always be sure you know the whole story behind a hashtag or story before you post about it, or you could find yourself mired in a social media disaster. When to post Now that you ve decided what it is you want to say or share, it s important to develop a strategy for the optimal time to post your content. Unfortunately there s no single magic time to post to a particular social media channel, but producing a steady beat of fresh, high-quality content is a great way to keep fans and followers engaged. Here are a few best practices to follow for when to post content in order to optimize engagement and amplification. It s all about audience. The best time to post content is going to depend entirely on when the people you want to reach are active. Different audiences will be around and active at different times, and content will perform differently depending on a variety of factors in addition to time. To learn those factors, you should look for trends in activity around your content, your competitors content, and hashtags or search terms your audience is interested in. Setting up an extensive social media monitoring and analytics system can help you learn the habits of your community: whether they re early risers or night owls, if they like to check in and post during lunchtime, or anything else you can use to paint a picture from the data. Then, based on these data, there are a variety of takeaways and basic data benchmarks to use moving forward to build your content and social strategies. Platform matters. While these best practices apply to most social media, the way you share content on Twitter, Instagram or Snapchat will differ based on the functionality of that channel. So do the research to determine the best way to share your content in each place. Find a rhythm. In order to optimize your content and drive brand awareness, stick to a regular posting schedule. Exactly how often and how frequently you post will depend on your audience and your content availability. Since Twitter, for example, moves so quickly, it's perfectly acceptable even expected to post several times a day. In fact, it's fine to post multiple times per day on any social media channel, as long as you spread your posts out. Be careful not to oversaturate your followers' streams. Try to avoid posting a lot of

10 Amplify Your Social Strategy 10 public content in a row, unless you're participating in a short-term event or chat. Even then, it's appropriate to warn your followers in advance to give them a chance to temporarily mute you or a hashtag. Stay off peak. Here are two important things to know about social media: it s very active at night and on the weekends, and it s used all around the world. So it s a good bet to post outside typical U.S. business hours when possible. Take advantage of when users are checking their phones like after work or school, on the weekends, and before they go to sleep. If you re not around during these off-peak times, it's okay to schedule content in advance. And if you're directing customers to your account as a customer support resource, be sure you're clear about when someone will be around to answer questions. Keep it up. Once you've started a social media account, don t stop posting entirely unless you want to lose followers. A brand s follower growth can flatten or even decline just due to a lack of posting consistency. After only a short time with no new content, a brand may start losing followers every day, resulting in an overall decline. This doesn t mean you will lose followers if you don t post for a few days, but if you fail to post for weeks or a month at a time, your followers may abandon you for more active competitors. If you re going to start an account, be prepared to commit to it don t let it stagnate. How to keep it fresh Optimizing social media content and finding success is all about establishing a plan, testing it, repeating what works and testing again. On any social platform, you should ABT. Always be testing new content, measuring the response, and tweaking it for future posts. In essence, content optimization means finding the stuff that works and doing more of it. Employing tools that feature social media insight streams- actionable data-based insights built to help you identify important changes in activity will help you decide what steps to take next to improve your performance. By tracking things like follower growth based on top-performing content, you can learn about spikes in impressions or retweets, above-average follower growth, and the best time for you to post to get more engagement saving you time and improving overall responsiveness and performance. Ultimately, the best advice for any brand on social media is to be authentic while embracing each medium s particular characteristics, measure your efforts, listen to the community, and continue to improve your content strategy as you learn what works and what doesn't.