The Top Ten Reasons We Love Social Media

As brands, social media has been a way to reach and interact with consumers on a level that resonates with their behaviors on a day to day basis. They’re already there. They’re using channels they way they prefer. For example on Pinterest they’re planning and dreaming for their future; while on Periscope they’re getting an inside look; and on Instagram they’re building and sharing their own stories.

And as brands that is pretty great. It allows us to understand our target audience and provide content that will truly matter to them, where and when they prefer it. So instead of the 2016 lists we’re all about to read, let’s remember why social media is important to our brands, and why it still will be in 2016.

So as digital marketers we love social media. We love it simply because:

1. You can get content out fast

2. You are able to respond to consumers faster

3. You know what your competition is doing on the same channels

4. You can curate content

5. You can see what themes are trending to create new content

6. You can be involved within cultural phenomena

7. You are able to create a dialogue

8. You are able to see what content works right away

9. You will know what content to put paid media behind

10. Your brand can stand out

And that’s just part of the story. Your brand can also choose the channels that work best for success. Choose the content that will resonate deeper with your audience. And of course, finding the right paths to purchase, and helping consumers become loyal advocates through driving their followings to your brand as well.

Why does your brand, as a digital marketer, prefer to budget, spend, and invest in social media as a way to reach consumers?

Image sources:

Priority Media Plus

Business2community

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Hosting a Successful Networking Event

Whether you’re looking to grow your business or you have been in business for years, networking is the most efficient way of meeting like-minded business owners and increasing your contact database. Hosting your own event is the most efficient way of making networking work for you, ensuring the best outcomes for your business.

Cost
Whilst your business may have been up and running for months or even years, this may not be the case for everyone attending. Small business owners, and those who are just starting out may feel intimidated by having to spend a large amount of money attending an event. That being said, you want to ensure that you make a profit or, at least, break even from the cost of your supplies. To do this, it is important to keep your cost of entry low and reasonable, as neither you nor your guests will want to be out of pocket.

Venue

There is no point in choosing a venue that no one has heard of, guests will either decline invitations or arrive tense after struggling to locate your event. Where possible, hire a venue central to your town or city, a business capital like a meeting venue in London, or one that is clearly sign posted. Cost may be an issue here, but negotiation can stem from reassuring venue owners that their establishment will earn their own money from the event (from the sale of food, drinks etc.).

Refreshments

If you decide not to host your event in a location that serves its own food and drink, it is important to supply these yourself. The appeal of free food and beverages may entice visitors who may be unsure as to whether or not they should attend, and large tables serving food are great ice breaking locations. These need not be expensive, just enough to ensure guests feel they are getting their money’s worth for travel, accommodation etc. which was required to get to the event.

Entertainment

Whilst talking shop is a great way to gain insight into other business owners in your local area, repeatedly discussing your business goals can become monotonous after a while, particularly if your guests are attending after spending a full day at work. Use your event to entertain guests, as well as informing and connecting them. Look to local entertainment providers, such as bands or theatre groups, whose work is relevant to your business. Not only will this benefit the performers, it will also be a great way of getting guests to connect through mutual interests

Utilise what’s available to you.

Whilst not all business owners in your local area may work in the same industry as you, you still have a lot in common based on your location. It is important not to exclude certain business owners from invitations and guest lists, just because you don’t feel their work is relevant to your event. Whether you’re discussing cupcakes or conservatories, the underlying theme is still business! Get others involved, if you own a clothing company, include vintage clothing samples from local markets, or sell handmade confectionary, at food-based events. Anything to draw in as many business owners as possible. This also provides an opportunity to make a profit, as business owners are likely to be willing to share a portion of their profits in exchange for exposure.

Give back

Whilst it is important to increase your contact list and meet with like-minded business owners, it can also be beneficial to use your event to benefit others as well. Taking donations, or donating a portion of your profits, to relevant charities is a great way of raising funds and awareness for whatever cause you chose, and shows your philanthropic side in an environment that can seem purely business focused. Not only that, but guests may be more likely to attend if they feel the event is going to include an element of variety, instead of just being about discussing work with other business owners.

Hosting your own networking event may seem intimidating, especially if you’re only just starting out. But holding a small event can dramatically increase the number of people you are able to communicate and connect with, in both a professional and personal capacity. 

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Saving Time and Money: How Social Media Works for an Early-Stage Startup

There’s often a critical time (or two) in a business’s journey when it’s make or break and time is at a premium.

There’re often times beyond this, once a brand is established, where time is still scarce and efficiency is the name of the game.

The team at Smart Pension has felt both sides of this in the past couple years and has experienced the time crunch particularly on the social media side (sound familiar at all with your experience?). One of the UK’s leading insurance brand agencies, the Smart Pension team pulled through in an incredibly inspiring way.

Here’s their story of how they’ve come up with their social media strategy, saved time, and found the best tools to use.

Social media and an early-stage startup

Jack Saville, a marketing executive at Smart Pension, built his startup to be the go-to source for UK pension and auto enrolment. And one of the key marketing strategies he chose for traction was content.

One of the first jobs was to put as much great information and helpful content on the website as possible. However when we finished creating content, we also wanted to shout about it on social media.

We were churning out so much content in the beginning that logging and posting each article on each social media channel was becoming a real time consuming exercise. If we had had Buffer in the beginning we would have saved a great deal of time (and money) in the crucial start-up, make-or-break phase of our business.

Smart Pension made it through this early critical stage and is grateful to now be a more established entity. They’ve kept right on working.

The content team crushed it early on and put together the majority of the foundational, main topics needed to be a thought leader on pensions and enrolment. The next phase was tackling current news and changes, being more of a real-time resource for Smart Pension’s growing audience.

This shift to timely content also needed timely distribution, which is where social media marketing has really paid dividends for the team.

The news section is where we direct most of our efforts now. This is important, as investing a lot of time in your news section shows your customers that you are well aware of the changes in the industry, and that we know that the services we provide need to be altered and suited to the current market and the current pension laws. Social media is the channel in which we communicate our knowledge of industry changes to our customers.

Not a content creation problem … a content distribution one

In building out this news hub, Smart Pension ran into a slight problem:

We work so hard on making sure our news section addresses the current topics in the pension industry, that sometimes we finish a number of articles at the same time.

It’s a similar problem that might crop up for publishers, news organizations, online magazines, and others. It’s not that there’s any trouble coming up with content to share, it’s more a matter of knowing what to share and when to share it.

Jack and his team found the solution here with social media scheduling from Buffer.

Smart Pension spaces out new posts every few hours so that there’s room between each update.

The articles don’t all go up as a wall of similar-looking tweets and posts.

The buffered schedule makes it so that content hits the timeline at all times, helping to reach people who may be online at different times throughout the day.

And the beauty of it all: All this scheduling can be automated.

The scheduling function is also helpful to the work flow of the team. The team member who wrote the article can schedule the post for times of the day that we are posting less and then proceed to the next task. The team members do not have to try and remind themselves of when to post their articles.

Additionally, with the scheduling function we can then post articles at night and at weekends when team members would not necessarily be working. This means that we can have a round the clock presence on social media, without having one of our team members staying up all night!

Scheduling + Analytics

Lots of content to share and a set number of times to share it all: When do you get the most bang for your buck with social media sharing?

The Smart Pension team came up with a few experiments to test the best time to post for engagement.

Here’s an example:

To find out if it’s better to post extra content at night or over the weekends, set up a schedule for both and check the results.

After a few days, log into the Analytics section of Buffer and check to see which time slots have tended to perform the best. You can see this from the Analytics view with a quick glance and intuition …

… or you can export data from your past period of experiments, and filter the results for each different time.

Here’s a sample spreadsheet using data from my own sharing:

(Couple this with the takeaways from Buffer’s optimal timing tool to get even more confirmation for which way you’re leaning.)

Great content goes great with images

As we are a start-up, we cannot afford to have a graphic designer to create the imagery for our social media posts every time we need to post something. Pablo give us the ability to make our social media posts look interesting and exciting, whilst not having to pay for a graphic designer to design them and create them.

According to our most recent data here at Buffer, we’ve found that tweets with images get 150% more engagement than tweets without.

The takeaway: Test content with images!

We believe in this so strongly that we built our own tool for making this as easy as can be. The free image creator at Pablo makes it simple to create images for Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and more, all at the ideal image size, all looking beautiful—no matter your design skills.

Here are some that the Smart Pension team has used on their latest social media updates:

Click to read The Employer’s Guide To Auto Enrolment Contributions. https://t.co/9bUmJBNxA9 http://pic.twitter.com/El3z1lFPjU

— Smart Pension (@smartpensionuk) December 14, 2015

Click to read our guide on lost pensions. https://t.co/JwLXr8PQlg http://pic.twitter.com/BLJ0v3e7ar

— Smart Pension (@smartpensionuk) December 14, 2015

Click to read our guide on spotting the tell-tale signs of a pension scam. https://t.co/ZVRzn4DCwT http://pic.twitter.com/PAl8FdoV3s

— Smart Pension (@smartpensionuk) December 14, 2015

Working with a team on a social media calendar

And another key piece to the team’s workflow and system is keeping all this distribution organized. One of Buffer’s newest features works great in this case: the social media calendar.

Our content calendar is designed to make sure that we are regularly completing and posting content through buffer. We can all log into buffer and see what other people are planning, and then we can plan our content around the existing scheduled posts.

Want no-worries scheduling for your social media posts?

Smart Pension uses Buffer for Business to manage its social media profiles, share multiple times a day (without having to think about it), and work together to identify the content that works and what to share again and again.

Join Smart Pension and 5,000+ other brands and business with a free trial of Buffer’s most powerful social media features!

Image sources: Iconfinder, Pablo

The post Saving Time and Money: How Social Media Works for an Early-Stage Startup appeared first on Social.

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6 Ways to Improve Your Twitter Quality Score and Make Your Ads Profitable

Inbound marketing is all the rage these days, but that doesn’t mean that traditional outbound marketing (a.k.a. advertising) can’t still be effective.

In fact, it has a huge advantage over most content marketing efforts…

It’s fast.

Really fast.

With content marketing, the average campaign takes at least a few months to see any real results.

You invest money upfront, but need to wait for the return. 

With advertising, on the other hand, you spend money upfront, but you see the results almost immediately.

Additionally, there’s no reason why you can’t use both types of marketing.

That way, you get both immediate and long-term results.

I write a ton about content marketing. If you want to learn more about it, I’ve got you covered.

What I haven’t written about a lot is paid advertising.

In particular, there are a few advertising networks that provide you with a better opportunity than most.

One of those is Twitter.

And that’s what I want to teach you about today.

Twitter has a global advertising revenue share of 0.84%, which makes them one of the top 10 largest advertising networks on the planet.

You can reach just about any audience on the social network, and the ad platform is really simple to work with (and you can scale up easily when needed).

The cost of your Twitter ads depend mostly on one factor: their quality scores.

I’m going to show you how to optimize your Twitter ads’ quality scores, which will have a huge impact on whether or not your campaigns are profitable.

The key ingredient of a great quality score and how it saves you money

In case you haven’t used Twitter ads much in the past, let me give you a quick refresher on the quality score factor.

Twitter, like all businesses, has a great interest in making its users’ experience as good as possible.

On social media, this means engagement.

If users on Twitter find posts useful, they will favorite them, comment on them, re-share them, and click on links contained within them.

From Twitter’s perspective, the more users are engaging with posts, the happier they are.

Enter ads…

Twitter allows businesses to show specific Tweets to a certain audience even if that audience doesn’t follow them. All they have to do is pay. This is also known as advertising.

But as you and I know, most ads suck.

And while they are necessary for Twitter’s business model, they can have a negative effect on the average user experience—that’s a problem.

In order to encourage businesses to create ads that users actually like, Twitter introduced a quality score.

It’s a simple concept:

The more engagement your ad gets, the less you pay. The less engagement your ad gets, the more you pay.

Larry Kim revealed some interesting numbers from experimental campaigns he ran:

You can see the engagement rate in the picture right next to the cost per engagement column:

• a 68% engagement rate resulted in a cost of $0.01 per engagement 
• a 37% engagement rate resulted in a cost of $0.02 per engagement 
• a 21% engagement rate resulted in a cost of $0.03 per engagement 
• a 7% engagement rate resulted in a cost of $0.08 per engagement 

Those are big differences.

Those numbers show that an effective ad gets 8 times the engagement of a poor one.

In practical terms: You aren’t going to have a profitable campaign if your engagement rate sucks.

Got it?

That’s all you really need to know about the quality score.

While you can’t currently see what the quality score of any of your ads is, it is mainly affected by your engagement rate, so focus on optimizing that.

1. Always use Twitter cards when possible

If you’ve used Twitter much, you’ve probably noticed that some Tweets stand out more than others.

That’s because smart users have taken advantage of Twitter cards.

Here’s what a regular Tweet looks like:

And here’s what a Twitter card looks like:

Obviously, having images and videos embedded into Tweets is going to not only increase the attention they draw but the engagement as well.

There are a few different types of Twitter cards, all of which have their own purpose. For example:

• Summary card (optional w/image) - Typically used to share links. Shows a description, title, and thumbnail. You can also configure it to use a large image instead of the thumbnail.

• App card – You can promote an app on a Twitter card, and users can install the app directly from it.
• Player card - embed a video (like the first picture I showed you above)

There are few times where it makes sense not to use a Twitter card in your ad. But as a rule of thumb, always include one because it will improve your quality score.

How to make your own Twitter card: Regular users can create Twitter cards by including the right meta tags on the pages they link to.

For advertisers, it’s much easier (at least now it is).

When you first log in to Twitter ads and create a new campaign, you’ll need to select an objective.

Most often, you’ll want to use one of the first two: Tweet engagements or website clicks/conversions.

Once you select that, you’ll be taken to a page with four main sections where you fill out all the details of the ad.

If you scroll down to the Compose Tweets section, you’ll see a form where you can create a new Tweet to promote.

In this form, there is another form specifically designed for a “card”:

It’s pretty straightforward to use. You can customize the picture, headline, and call to action. The card description will be taken from your website if available.

Or promote an existing Twitter card: It’s also possible that you already have a Tweet (or Tweets) that you’d like to show to a larger audience.

To do that, just click the “select an existing Tweet” button to the right of the above form:

I’ll show you why you might want to do this later in the post.

2. How to use “tailored audiences” to only reach users you care about

It’s marketing 101: You need to show your message to the right audience in order for it to be effective.

It’s difficult to sell ice to someone in Alaska, but not too difficult in Florida. Same product, different audience.

More commonly, it’s called targeting in advertising.

Twitter has millions of users, and you don’t want to target all of them with your ad.

Instead, you want to show it—target it—to a small percentage of those users who are actually interested in your product.

If you’re promoting a local event, you want to show it only to the users interested in your industry who also live in your area.

This is something else that Larry Kim tested. Specifically, he tested an ad targeted to people who live in the South Florida area against an ad with no location targeting.

Not surprisingly, the one that was more targeted had an engagement rate three and a half times higher than the other.

That’s a big difference.

The more accurately you choose your ad settings, the higher the engagement rate (and quality score) you will get.

Targeting on Twitter: When you create a new campaign, you’ll be taken to a long page to set up your ads.

The targeting options are contained in step 2 of the process. At any point, you can see an “estimated audience size” on the right hand side:

As a rule of thumb, you want to target under 100,000 people with an ad. If your audience is much bigger, it probably isn’t targeted enough.

How do you decrease your audience size? You start picking different aspects of the targeting system.

For example, I specified that I only wanted to target users in the United States with my campaign. Instantly, the audience was reduced from 316 million to 66 million users:

In addition to the obvious targeting options such as location and gender, there are several other criteria you can pick from. Once you start adding them, the audience size will decrease further.

Knowing which options to pick is what separates beginner advertisers from experienced ones.

Here’s a hint: You don’t need to use them all.

Many beginner advertisers start by trying to use every targeting option available. Then, when something works well or doesn’t work well, they don’t know which targeting option actually helped or hurt.

Instead, keep it simple, and focus on the main things that separate your target audience.

Overall, however, this is one of the most difficult parts of advertising, so expect to get better at it over time.

One reason why this can be difficult is because ideal targeting options can (and should) be different for every business.

For example, if you sell a fitness course, you can target all of the main countries (US, UK, Canada, etc.). Location isn’t a big issue, but you still may want to filter out countries that you can’t accept payment from.

However, you’d probably want to start by adding an interest. You could browse the “health” section of the interests and then target users interested in weight loss:

In addition, you might want to target only followers of certain Twitter users who are in the fitness niche.

You can do some really in-depth targeting with the Twitter campaign creator. Invest the time upfront to explore all the different options so that you can find a way to describe your ideal audience.

Find more of your ideal users with a tailored audience: There’s one specific option that can take your quality score to the next level.

Under the “add interests” option, there’s one that says “add tailored audiences.”

When you click it, it will expand to give you two different options.

Tailored audiences can be really powerful. Essentially, they allow you to create a list of ideal users and let you target them on Twitter.

So back to your two options. For either one, you will need to have some sort of an audience already because you need those ideal users on your list. So, if you have a brand new business, you won’t be able to take advantage of this yet.

Otherwise, let’s walk through what you can do.

The list is pretty self-explanatory. If you upload a spreadsheet with the email addresses of people (probably your existing subscribers), Twitter will see if any of them are associated with existing Twitter accounts.

Then, you can add that tailored audience to your campaign settings and target them with specific Tweets.

Where might you want to use this? Well, say you’re in the process of selling a new product.

It would probably be useful to use Twitter (in addition to emails) to keep the product in your prospects’ minds.

Alternatively, and more useful in most cases, you can target your website visitors.

First, you click that second option, which will show you a screen like this:

Give it a name, select “site visit” from the dropdown menu, and make sure the tailored audience box is checked.

Then, save the tag and generate the code:

This tracking code can be pasted into the HTML of any page on your website. Twitter will check if a visitor is a user, and if so, they will be added to your tailored audience.

There are a few situations where this could be really useful:

• To spread your content – If you tweet a link to a blog post to a random Twitter user (interested in the subject), they have to first click the link (which only a small portion will do), and then decide to engage after. But if you target people who have already seen the content, they already know whether it’s good or not, and you’ll get a much higher percentage of shares.
• To improve conversions - You can also put the code on specific landing pages. Then, you can offer those users a different bonus (on Twitter) to get them to go back to your site and opt in to your list. This is very similar to remarketing and is a great way to get high quality subscribers for low cost.

Note that it can take a while to create a large enough list to target. If you have a low-medium traffic site, you might have to let it run for a few weeks.

Once you’ve created a tailored audience, it will be available under the “tailored audience” section of the main setup page.

When you have a tailored audience, you don’t need to use any of the other targeting options on the page because you already have a highly targeted audience. Aside from that, your tailored audience list size likely won’t come anywhere near a hundred thousand people.

3. Be selective and reap the rewards

It can be incredibly difficult to predict which of your Tweets will get a ton of engagement.

That’s why you might not want to just jump into creating new Tweets as ads and spending money on them. That’s because if they don’t end up getting much engagement, it’ll hurt your quality score and, therefore, your budget.

Instead, you can first test Tweets by posting them on your account and then use only the very best ones for advertisements (or create similar ones).

Once again, Larry Kim did a pretty cool experiment that shows how effective this can be.

He had a Tweet that was already getting good engagement with his followers. He then promoted that Tweet using Twitter ads. He ended up getting over 100,000 visits and 1,500 retweets from his advertising.

Guess how much it cost him?

About $250.

In practical terms, he was able to get 400 visits per dollar he spent.

Just about anyone can find a way to get this many fairly high quality visitors for that cheap.

So, if you have a few Tweets that have already gained some good engagement, you can choose “select an existing Tweet” in the campaign option:

4. Advertising to get more followers? Testing comes first

I briefly mentioned it earlier, but there are many types of ads on Twitter.

Most businesses will focus on just one or two of them.

One common type is an ad to get more followers.

This is good if you plan to continue to use Twitter in the future and would like to get more followers so that you wouldn’t have to pay to show them your content every time you tweet.

If you go with one of these ads, engagement still matters, of course.

When you post one of these ads, this is what users will see:

In the sidebar, there’s a section for suggested people to follow, and there’s a little “promoted” icon on it if you paid for your profile to be there.

Can you optimize this? Absolutely.

There are two types of reactions that users have after they see this type of ad:

1. I recognize that name or picture in a good way, so I’ll follow this person.
2. I’m not sure who that is. I’ll either ignore it, or I’ll look at their profile for more information.

There’s nothing you can do about the first one other than keep building your business and brand. Brand recognition will come into effect eventually.

But the second scenario brings up a great opportunity.

First, your image needs to hook users’ attention. If it looks spammy or uninteresting, the users aren’t going to bother learning more about you.

You should either use a really good-looking logo, or better yet (if possible), use your picture—people are interesting to other people. 

The big opportunity to raise your engagement, and quality score, here is to optimize your profile.

When someone clicks on your name, they see your profile, which consists of your picture, description, Tweets, and background profile picture.

Too many businesses ignore this area, but it can make a big difference in converting the users who visit your page into followers.

I’ll use Brian Dean’s Twitter page as an example of how to create an attractive one:

Of course, this will perform better than a run-of-the-mill profile page.

As I’ve pointed out in the screenshot, there are three main areas in your control:

1. The big background area – a chance to display your brand/logo as well as social proof (i.e., the reason why someone should follow you).
2. Your profile icon – which also shows up in sidebars.
3. Your description - a little bit about you and why someone might want to follow you.

You should optimize all three areas.

How do you do that?

You split-test.

Essentially, you change one part at a time, run an ad to get followers, and measure the conversion rate.

Then, you try a different description or picture, and see which one’s better.

For example, you use your logo as the small profile picture for one test and see that you end up paying $0.05 per follow.

Then, you use a picture of yourself, keeping the background image and description the same, and see that you only pay $0.03 per follow.

You can test whether you have a large enough sample size by using this simple and free sample size validator.

If you did have a valid sample size in that experiment, you could conclude that the picture of you was more effective. Next, you could test another element on the profile page.

5. How to study the competition and learn from them

Coming up with the perfect Tweet to advertise isn’t easy.

You basically have two options…

You can create Tweets from scratch and run them as ads, and if they aren’t working well, you stop them.

Or you can look at what is already working and create your ads based on that information.

The second option is far superior, and you’ll save a lot of money by finding out which ads work and don’t work before you create your own.

The next question is where do you find these Tweets to base yours on?

Well, you want to make sure that your advertisement Tweets will be well received by your target audience. Therefore, you want to look at the Tweets of your competitors.

They have largely the same audience, which is perfect.

If one of their Tweets is really popular, it would likely perform well as an ad. Conversely, if they get no engagement at all on certain Tweets, try to figure out why your audience doesn’t like them.

If you were running a blog on social media, one of your biggest competitors would probably be Social Media Examiner.

So, your first step would be to find their Twitter page, which you can do with a simple search on Google or Twitter.

Then, look through their past Tweets, and note down which ones have more shares, favorites, and comments than the rest. These are the high performers.

You’ll want to gather at least 5-10 popular Tweets in the past few weeks/months.

These will tell you three things:

• What types of Twitter cards perform best - i.e., videos, pictures, galleries, apps, etc.
• What topics perform best for your audience – The above picture clearly shows that the audience likes social media tools (which I would agree with from personal experience)
• Any particular format that works best - Some audiences like Tweets with questions, others like descriptions, yet others just like a good headline. Mimic the writing style of the most popular posts.

When you take those three factors into account, you’re much more likely to produce a Twitter ad with a high engagement rate (and quality score) than if you randomly created one from scratch.

6. On Twitter, everything moves fast (this affects ads as well)

There are many reasons to like Twitter as a user.

But one of the most common is that there’s always new content.

Even if you return to Twitter an hour after you visited it, chances are you’ll see a completely different feed.

Users on Twitter like this rapid state of change and expect to see new content constantly. If they see old Tweets or similar to old Tweets, they just skip them.

This has implications for your Twitter ads as well.

The first few days you run your ad, it will likely perform as well as it’s going to.

Then, it quickly goes stale, and your engagement rate continues to drop.

This is common on just about every advertising platform, but it happens even faster on Twitter.

If your ad is shown to the same person, it will often be ignored, which can have a serious impact on your engagement rate.

On top of that, the ads will be shown to the most active users in your target audience first. As you approach the last parts of your audience, the less enthusiastic members of Twitter, your engagement rate will, of course, be lower.

How often should you change Tweets? Twitter itself recommends using at least three different ads for a campaign to slow down the speed at which they go stale.

But even if you create several Tweets at the start, they’ll still go stale—it might just take a few weeks.

The only way you’ll know how often to create new Tweets is by monitoring the performance of your ads.

Once the cost per engagement of a specific ad reaches a level that you don’t think is profitable, stop running that ad.

Then, create a new ad.

Here, you have two main options:

• Immediately create a new, similar ad - You can create a new description and use a new image in your Tweet. Even though you’ll link to the same content, it’ll seem like a new Tweet to users.
• Switch to a different topic - You don’t want to show the same users the same content right away even if the Tweet is different. Instead, you can switch to a different topic and come back to promoting the first piece of content in the future.

The second option is better in most cases. If you target a similar audience you targeted with the first ad, some people who engaged with the first ad will also engage with the second ad.

If you show them the exact same content, you can’t blame them for not being very interested.

However, if you show them new content, they’ll be as interested as they were the first time.

Then, when you start promoting the first piece of content a few weeks later, it won’t be so fresh in their minds. They won’t mind getting a quick refresher and still might retweet or engage with your Tweet in some way.

Conclusion

Twitter is one of the biggest social media sites on the Internet.

It has hundreds of millions of users, which means it can be used to engage with the target audiences of almost any business.

And while growing an organic presence on Twitter is a good idea, it can take many months to see real results (traffic, shares, conversions, etc.).

Instead, you can get those results a lot faster by using Twitter advertising, which is a fairly well developed advertising platform at this time.

But if you don’t understand the effect the quality score of each of your ads has on the cost of your advertising, you’ll have a difficult time creating a profitable campaign.

If you understand everything I covered in this post, you should know enough to get started with Twitter advertising and be successful.

If there are any parts of the quality score that you don’t fully understand, just let me know in a comment below, and I’ll try to clear things up.

from Darlene Milligan http://ift.tt/1QLPdpk via transformational marketing
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Make the Holidays the Social Time of Year

It’s the holiday season and with it comes events and parties!

Time for cookie swaps, ugly sweater parties, office get-togethers and cocktails with old friends.

With social media, you can make your plans much easier and make sure everyone is included.

Whether you are hosting a fabulous party at your house or planning the office white elephant gift exchange at the restaurant down the street, jump on social media to make the most out of your party.

From beginning to end, social media will be your liaison in your party planning.

Here we go…

• Gather your guess list – You can use a Facebook page to plan your party and invite guests. Send out details here and let guests respond. Even if you are sending out traditional invitations or ones through email, social media is a great way to gather everyone’s most current contact information. Also, if you are missing someone’s contact information, someone else on social media is sure to have it;

• Invite – Send out your invitations via social media. It makes it easy on you and easy on your guests to respond. They can see who is invited and you can see who is coming. You can also send event reminders out as well as the date gets closer;

• Plan the party – If the party is at your home, you’ll want to decorate. Take a look at Pinterest or Instagram for inspiration and ideas of what you’d like your theme and decorations to be. Whether you want an elegant white winter theme or a tacky ugly sweater one, social media will help get your creative juices going.

• Post pictures -. During and after the party, you and your guests can post pictures from the party on social media. As the following article looks at, come up with a fun hashtag or two to use and make sure you are capturing holiday memories when you’re hosting. Social media makes photo sharing so easy, no more worries on getting pictures from your friends afterwards.

• Share recipes – If it’s a cookie party of anything else with shared food – post your recipes on social media. It beats making multiple copies of recipes that many people won’t really want or that they’ll lose.

Social media is your perfect party-planning buddy.

From the guest list to the invitation to the food and decoration and photo sharing, it’s all easier with social media.

So pick your platform and get started. This one can be an event to remember!

Photo credit: BigStockPhoto.com

from Darlene Milligan http://ift.tt/1ZlDJdR via transformational marketing
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Twitter Video: The Marketing Advantage No One Is Using… Yet!

5 Ways to Improve Your Facebook Page’s Organic Reach

I know you’ve noticed it…

Over time, your Facebook page’s reach has continuously gone down.

It’s not just in your head.

In just a few years, the organic reach of Facebook pages has plummeted:

And the stock price of Facebook just continues to go up.

Is it a conspiracy?

Decrease the organic reach in order to force businesses to pay for exposure?

Maybe a little bit, but there’s more to it than you might first think.

And while it’s obviously a bad thing to lose some of the reach, it’s not as bad as the numbers might make you think.

The current situation: Right now, the average page has an organic reach of about 6%.

The key word there is average.

Some pages get much more, some get much less.

Obviously, you want to reach as many of your fans as possible, so you want your page to be on the upper end.

And I can show you how to do that.

There are five main ways that you can improve your Facebook page’s reach.

I’m going to simplify them and walk you through the ways you can implement them to drive more traffic to your website and sales through Facebook.

What is your Facebook page’s reach based on?

Before you can attempt to increase your page’s reach, you need to understand what your organic reach is based on.

First, why do you think Facebook limits the organic reach of pages? Why not allow all users who have liked a page to see every single post?

There are two main reasons why Facebook limits organic reach.

The first we already looked at: it can help Facebook make more money because businesses with poor page reach will spend more on promoting posts through Facebook ads.

The second one is much more interesting to you and me.

Facebook wants to create a good user experience for everyone using the network.

What this means is every user needs just the right amount of new content in their feeds— not too much and not too little.

Too much, and they’ll miss important things. Too little, and they have less of a reason to return to Facebook.

As more and more brands hopped on Facebook, feeds started to get crowded.

By reducing the reach of pages, Facebook made sure feeds stayed within an optimal range.

This is going to be important throughout this article, so keep it in mind.

How reach is determined: Back in 2010, Facebook revealed the primary components of “Edgerank.”

1. Affinity Score
2. Edge Weight
3. Time Decay

At the time, Facebook used these three factors to determine whether a post should be shown to a user or not.

The higher the score, the more likely it was to be shown.

Say, 100 posts competed to be shown to a user who just loaded their news feed.

The posts with the highest scores would be displayed first. This means that if your page’s post isn’t in the top 20% or so, it’s unlikely to be seen.

Since then, the algorithm has grown to be much more complicated. It includes hundreds of factors now.

However, those main parts of the algorithm remain the same, with a few tweaks and additions.

All in all, the organic reach of one of your posts (calculated on a post-by-post basis) is determined by five main factors.

Factor #1 – A user’s previous interactions with page: If a user likes, comments, or clicks on every link each time you post on your page, it’s safe to say that this user loves seeing your content.

Therefore, Facebook needs to consider how a user has interacted with your posts in the past.

If they haven’t interacted with them often, your posts’ scores will suffer.

This isn’t perfect, but Facebook considers it a good indication of content worth.

Factor #2 – A user’s previous interactions with post type: In addition to preferring content from certain pages, users might also prefer certain types of posts.

If someone prefers videos, based on their past behavior on Facebook, videos that you post will get a higher score.

Factor #3 – The interactions from other users who saw the post: When you post something new on your page, Facebook shows it to a small group of people (maybe 25-100).

Then, if those users like the post (overall), it will give your post a higher score and show it to more of your audience.

Many businesses complain about having a poor reach while posting boring things. So even though they reach a small initial following, it never goes any farther because of this factor.

This feature can actually be really good for you.

If you see that certain types of posts or topics get a wide reach, you can post more of them.

Factor #4 – Any complaints or negative feedback: This ties into factor #3. When Facebook shows a user a post, the user always has the option to report the post (for inappropriate content) or say that they don’t want to see it.

For that particular user, Facebook will remember that in the future. They likely won’t see much more from your page.

In addition, if a new post gets a significant amount of overall negative feedback, its score is going to be lowered, and its reach will be low.

Factor #5 – When it was posted: Finally, this simple factor comes from the “time decay” component of the algorithm.

When a post is brand new, it’s likely going to be the most interesting that it’s ever going to be. Over time, the score of a post goes down as it gets older.

There’s no way to manipulate this factor; just be aware of it.

1. The best time to post probably isn’t what you thought…

Picking the right time to post on your page isn’t going to take your reach from low to high, but it can boost your reach by a few percent in some cases.

On most social networks, it makes sense to post when most of your followers are active on the site.

For Facebook, this is often not the case. Posting at peak times usually results in a lower organic reach.

Why does this happen?

During peak times, the largest number of your followers are likely online (it differs for some pages).

All the other pages that those followers “like” are also posting around that time, meaning that there is a lot of competition for news feed real estate.

If your content is consistently amazing and you’re beating all your competitors, this isn’t an issue. But that’s extremely rare and not even always possible depending on what niche you’re in.

So, when should you post? The first thing I recommend is checking your page’s analytics to see when your fans are online:

Facebook is nice enough to provide this data for all page owners.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to pinpoint which time will be the best without experimenting.

So for now, note down a few times:

• the peak time(s)
• the valley time (lowest point)
• the time in-between the valley and peak

This will leave you with 4 to 5 different times.

For the 40 to 50 posts you make (a few weeks to a month), post at different times (randomly) until you have at least 10 for each of these time periods.

At the end, average the reach you get from each time, and then post at the best time on a regular basis.

You can also continue to test times around your winning time to see if there’s an even better option (but the difference will usually be small).

Why non-peak times are usually the best: If you really want to save time on testing, it’s pretty safe to skip the peak times.

There are two main factors for this.

First is the competition. Fewer pages post during off-peak times, so you have fewer posts to compete against.

I’d rather reach a large portion of a small audience than a small portion of a large audience.

Secondly, just because you’re not posting during the peak time doesn’t mean your post won’t be visible at that time.

In fact, it can do better.

Posting before the peak time gives your initial small audience the chance to interact with your post. This gives your post the chance to get a higher score in the algorithm.

With this momentum, it’s more likely that your post will have a high enough score to top news feeds of users during the peak time.

2. Followers love one type of content in particular

I’ve said it loudly before:

people love transparency.

Yes, there are a few rules to using transparency effectively, but overall, showing your audience what’s going on behind the scenes is incredibly useful.

It’s more interesting and often more educating than regular content, which is why transparency is powerful.

But how can you be transparent on Facebook to increase your organic reach?

Here’s the general plan:

• post something personal, real, and interesting (transparent)
• get more likes, comments, shares (engagement) than usual
• that specific post will have a large reach
• that score will contribute to the scores of future posts, giving future content a larger reach than normal

This is why you should be regularly sharing transparent content since it has the most reach by far.

Buffer shared a great data-driven case study on this. They shared several pictures over the course of a few weeks from a trip to South Africa:

This is definitely transparent content. They’re sharing with their followers something personal about the people behind their business.

But it’s not even about social media—their main topic!

So, did this content have a good reach?

You bet. Buffer shared their results over that two-week period. As you can see, five of their top seven posts (in terms of reach) were about their trip (marked in orange):

This data shows you that reach is not always just about clicks and other forms of engagement although they are big factors. The second best performing post, for example, had a fraction of the clicks of the best post.

Transparent posts tend to perform better on all those other factors that determine your post’s overall score.

Example #2 – Don’t be afraid to show your face: Your followers want to know who the people behind your brand are.

The days of hiding behind a business name are gone as information about people behind companies can be sourced from a simple Google search.

But instead of making your followers hunt you down, give them what they’re looking for. It helps to build trust and relationships.

The best marketers today know this.

They share photos and videos that feature them so that followers can really connect with them.

A great example is Marie Forleo, who often shares videos on her page:

No surprise, these posts get hundreds of likes and shares and tons of comments.

Example #3 – Go behind the scenes at an event: Another way transparent content can be useful is if it reveals something exclusive.

Followers value unique content above all else, so when you reveal your personal processes or results of experiments, you give them something that no one can offer (because it’s specific to you).

I saw an example of this recently on the Marketing Profs Facebook page. They shared several pictures of their marketing manager at a rather large event—the B2B marketing forum.

As you can see, it got 11 likes.

And while that’s not particularly impressive, it is when you consider that the page usually gets 2-3 likes on a post.

As I mentioned earlier, improving the organic reach of individual posts on a regular basis (through transparency) can lead to long-term results. The key is being consistent with posting transparent content.

3. Use these 3 ways to encourage more interaction on your posts

Several factors that determine the reach of your posts are based on engagement.

To Facebook, if people like a post, they will interact with it in some way, whether that’s a “like,” share, or comment (or link click if an option).

It follows that if you increase the amount of engagement you get on your posts, you’ll increase your reach.

Ideally, you want to increase engagement on all posts, but even if it’s just every other post, it will still have a large overall effect on your organic reach.

There are three fairly easy ways to instantly start getting more interaction on posts.

Way #1 – Ask questions: One of the main reasons why people don’t contribute themselves, whether it’s on Facebook, your blog, or any other site, is because they don’t think their voices matter.

There’s a disconnect between what you think and what a huge portion of your fans think.

You love when you get comments and questions. It gives you a chance to interact with your followers on a more personal level and provide more value.

But the average follower thinks that you are some guru behind a business who doesn’t care about them.

Show that you care. One way to do that is to ask for their opinions.

Buffer regularly does this on their Facebook page, always generating several comments:

According to numbers published by Buffer, questions always reach an above average portion of their audience:

The key is to ask the right kinds of questions.

Don’t ask a general question like:

What’s the best social media tool?

It doesn’t work well because it addresses a crowd in general.

Additionally, it’s hard to answer. Who really knows what the best tool is? No one wants to look wrong on social media.

Instead, focus the question on something personal that only each user can answer. For example:

What’s your favorite social media tool?

Here, you’re asking for a personal opinion. Opinions can’t be wrong, so people are more likely to comment.

Also, you’re asking a personal question. Always include the words “you” or “your.” You want your readers to know that you care about what they think.

Bonus tip: Do this in any content even if it’s not on social media. I’ve written “you” or “your” over 100 times so far in this post.

Way #2 – Respond to comments: There’s something I often see that drives me absolutely nuts…

A business or marketer goes to all the trouble of creating good content and building a following on social media.

After a lot of consistent hard work, they start to get a comment on their posts here and there.

And then?

They don’t even bother to respond to the comment.

That commenter was probably one of your most loyal fans just trying to connect with you. By not replying, you’re basically telling them that they’re not worth your time.

They won’t be commenting again in most cases.

Not only that, but if other users see that you don’t respond to comments, why would they bother spending time and energy to leave one?

You can’t wait until you start getting several comments to start interacting.

Take any chance you get, and do your best to reply to every single comment:

I get it, you’re busy. But so am I, and I find the time to reply to hundreds of comments a day.

They may not all be lengthy, in-depth responses, but they’re something to show that I care about those who read my content and try to contribute.

Bonus tip: Try to tag people in your comments, which will give them a notification. They will be more likely to come back and continue the conversation.

Way #3 – Fill in the _____ (blank): Don’t be afraid to get creative with your posts to encourage engagement.

Instead of just asking questions, ask people to fill in the blank, for example.

For instance, you could post:

This Christmas, I want to get _______

Holiday-themed fill-in-the-blanks posts often perform best because there are a lot of emotions associated with holidays.

4. Organic post targeting can take your engagement to a new level

I understand that it’s frustrating to see your organic reach dropping.

It’s easy to say “screw Facebook” and move on.

However, I think that’s a waste of a great opportunity, at least for now.

And while the changes may have hurt some businesses, Facebook has also released a few tools that can help you combat the negative results.

The most important of which is organic post targeting.

What organic post targeting allows you to do is choose to what part of your audience you want to show your post.

This is incredibly useful, especially if you have a fairly large audience.

Here’s why:

When you can target a post to the most interested segment of your followers, it will naturally get a higher engagement reach. This leads to a higher overall organic reach immediately—and later, for future posts.

You target audiences when you run paid advertising because you don’t want to show offers to people who aren’t interested in them.

It’s a similar thing here.

If I’m promoting a post on the topic of social media, not everyone in my audience might care. But those who have demonstrated an interest in social media in some way (on Facebook) likely will.

The bigger your audience, the more it’s divided.

How to do it: Organic post targeting is really easy to do although it’ll take a bit of practice to figure out which targeting settings work best.

Start by going into your general page settings, and check the box to allow “targeting and privacy for posts.”

Now, when you go to post something on your page, you’ll see a little target icon on the bottom row of icons:

Click it, and it will let you pick from several different targeting options.

Depending on your pick, it should bring up a pop-up where you can enter your preferences:

Notice that as you add more targeting preferences, the “Targeted to” number changes.

Be careful not to target too obscure of an audience, or not enough people will see it. Keep your target audience as large as possible, as long as it’s composed of people you think will be highly interested in your post.

Let’s go through a few examples of targeting…

• Example post: “7 Ways to put on makeup better”
• Good targeting settings: Gender: Female; Age: Under 60

• Example post: “7 Ways get more shares on Facebook”
• Good targeting settings: Interests: Social Media Examiner, Amy Porterfield, Buffer

• Example post: “7 Ways to get more dates”
• Good targeting settings: Relationship status: Single

5. Go beyond basic images with these two types of highly shareable content

It’s not a secret that images and videos get the most attention on social media.

It’s important to stand out from the 20+ other things trying to get the user’s attention, and you just can’t do that with text.

But the type of image you use matters. You can’t just post a low quality picture of a lamp and get tons of shares.

There are two general types of media that work better than the rest.

Type #1 – Informational images: The problem with most social media advice is that it starts and stops with “use images.”

But news feeds are filled with images now, which makes it tougher for one to stand out.

One of the most effective ways to combat this is by posting informational images.

I’m referring to images that are more than pictures.

Here’s an example from Buffer, where the image clearly shows that the article involves social media and that it will lead to more social shares.

Having a relevant picture goes a long way.

But compare this picture with just a single Facebook logo that you could have used in its place.

It wouldn’t be nearly as attractive as the above example because it wouldn’t communicate extra information: that the post is going to be about using multiple social media tools together.

You get that just from a quick glance at the image, no reading necessary.

Here’s another example from the nutrition niche (from our case study’s Facebook page).

This post utilized two different tactics for increasing post reach at the same time.

First, it asked a question.

But beyond that, it added extra information to the question in an attractive image:

It shares an interesting tidbit about GMO products: they are restricted or banned in many countries but not Canada and the US—information that is highly related to the actual question.

This post received a ton of engagement and had a much larger organic reach than the average post on the page.

Type #2 – Videos usually get more shares: Those images are great, but videos can still crush them (if high quality).

The downside is that videos take longer to create in most cases and are often several times more expensive.

There are three main reasons why videos perform better than images in most cases:

The first is that they are less common. Look at your Facebook feed. Most posts consist of images, but only a small percentage have videos.

The rarer something is, the more it stands out. That’s why you should do the opposite of the masses.

The second thing is that people are lazy. You might already know this. You pour hours into creating content, and most can’t spend the time to read it.

But videos eliminate a lot of this problem.

With videos, the viewer doesn’t need to interpret what an image is saying—the narrator does that for them. All they have to do is click “play” and listen.

Finally, videos convey complex information as quickly as possible. Even though images are usually better than text, videos beat them by a large margin.

A short tutorial would take several images and still probably leave a few steps out. A video shows absolutely everything and takes a fraction of the time.

How you should use videos: I encourage you to, at the very least, test out videos. You don’t have to share them all the time, but start working them into your regular mix.

Videos are great in many situations, but in particular these three:

• connecting with your audience
• doing a quick tutorial
• educating (in niches like cooking)

There are certain posts that can help you build your relationship with your followers better than others.

Try to speak to your audience on topics that are especially important, controversial, or emotional on video:

As I showed you earlier, Marie Forleo excels at this.

The second option is to record a quick tutorial. This is great if you work in a niche that involves doing something on computers.

You can record yourself performing a task and creating a video in just a few minutes.

Finally, videos are a really effective way to teach people about complicated or boring subjects:

Everyone hates reading long pages of text, and infographics only work for simple topics.

With videos, you eliminate both of those problems. Videos are stimulating and entertaining, plus the visual imagery eliminates the boredom of having to read long technical content.

Conclusion

Your Facebook page’s reach is one of the most important metrics on your Facebook account.

The higher it is, the more of your following you can reach with your posts. This means more traffic, engagement, and ultimately sales.

I’ve shown you five different ways to increase your organic page reach.

Test and implement as many of them as you can. If you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed, start with just one or two.

There’s one last final important lesson I need to leave you with:

Numbers are useful, but care more about the connections you make.

Having deep connections with a small audience is much more important than having a large reach with shallow connections.

So while you should track your organic reach and try to improve it, don’t obsess over it. Pay more attention to whether you get positive and thoughtful comments.

Finally, I have a question for you.

What Facebook tactics have you had the most success with when it comes to increasing your reach? I’d appreciate it if you left a comment below.

from Darlene Milligan http://ift.tt/1QUzuCN via transformational marketing
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