April 2016

6 Social Media Time Saving Tips for Marketers

April 26, 2016/by Corey Padveen

When you find a few social media time saving tips, it can make a world of difference in your day-to-day management techniques.

Managing your social accounts can be a pretty time-heavy task. While auto-piloted processes can work in certain areas, attention needs to be paid to your brand’s online presence in order for it to generate the results you’re hoping for. These social media time saving tips, while useful, won’t mean cutting out the time devoted to social in its entirety, but you will find yourself generating just as much success on social, and less time needed to achieve that.

1. Use a Calendar

Why marketers haven’t all subscribed to the idea of using a content or editorial calendar is a mystery. Not only does it simplify the daunting task of regularly sharing fresh content, but it shaves hours off of your monthly management time. What’s more, with regards to the auto-piloting mentioned above, a calendar makes that easier (and limits any potential harm that may come from the practice).

A carefully laid out calendar provides marketers with a roadmap that can be closely followed (or loosely adhered to) over the course of a month and allows for more time to focus on other priority tasks within or out of the social sphere.

2. Scheduling

Whether you are using Hootsuite, SocialOomph, Sprout Social, another tool or Facebook itself, a calendar means scheduling (pretty far ahead of time) is a much more viable option.

Scheduling your content around a contest or event is easy, but day-to-day content and recycled material can be a little trickier. As noted above, once you have a calendar in place, you can begin scheduling your content accordingly, thereby saving you time once again.

3. Standard Reporting

Virtually every tool or technology (from free to enterprise) provides some sort of reporting capability. Reporting not only highlights your performance, but it is also a useful way to identify what items need your attention, and how to prioritize those items.

Automated reports (weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, etc.) are a great way to save yourself some time. If you’re using a piece of technology (see below) then having reports automatically emailed to you will allow you to create a management schedule to address issues as they come up (if they come up).

4. Take Advantage of Technology

Let me start off by saying that there is no one perfect tool for all marketers. Your ideal piece of technology will depend entirely on the objectives you’ve assigned to your efforts on social media. Once you have those, evaluate different tools in order to determine which one (or ones) will help you operate at maximum efficiency while saving time.

Every one of these technologies is referred to as a solution. That is because they have been designed to solve a problem. Know your problem areas, then find the solution that’s right for you.

5. Create Third Party Lists

Creating original content can be hard. With so much in circulation, it is only a matter of time before you start to feel like your content is going stale. In order to avoid that from happening, you’ll want to keep a list of third party resources from which you can borrow or share content on a regular basis. Of course, that is not to say that you should plagiarize anything, ever. But these resources can be used as sources of inspiration for new content, or you can share content from these parties directly from the source.

This is a major time saver and helps showcase to your audience that there is no bias for your content over someone else’s – you simply want to provide value to your readers.

6. Track Your Content Performance

Just as with those third parties, you’ll want to pay attention to your highest performing content. Why? Again, it will help in the optimization of your content creation process. As you see the content that outperforms the rest, you’ll be able to create (and re-share) that specific or affiliated content and avoid spending time on content that does not generate the results you are looking for.

Conclusion

There is no question that time will need to be devoted to your social efforts. There is no Amazon magic button or quick fix to drop your management time down to zero. But by following these tips and paying attention to the details, you’ll find that managing your social media does not need to be a full time commitment, and that you can generate great results with slightly less time devotion.

The Most Important News from Facebook’s F8 Keynote

April 19, 2016/by Corey Padveen

There is a lot to look forward to in Facebook’s future, as evidenced by the Facebook F8 keynote.

Last week, Mark Zuckerberg delivered the keynote address at the Facebook F8 summit and shed some light on what the future has in store for the social networking giant. (It should be noted that at this point Facebook is a giant in many – if not most – respects, and not only when it comes to social networking.)

The Age of Spiritual Machines

So maybe we haven’t yet reached that fateful period that Ray Kurzweil has prophesied, but Facebook has certainly taken a step in that direction by embracing bots (and a form of artificial intelligence) when it comes to brand engagement on Messenger.

The idea behind automated interaction like this is to improve the distribution and engagement with brand content (and other content from around the web). At first – as with all things that are unfamiliar to us – it will likely feel like an intrusion. As these bots adapt to your tastes and mold to your Facebook engagement habits (not to mention the improvements that will surely come) it will certainly reach a point where it passes a Turing Test.

Following the announcement, two big content distributors – Business Insider and The Wall Street Journal – announced the launch of their bots, and those brands using this service has only increased since then. We can surely expect to see brands (of all sizes) start to embrace this service in the near future, if for no other reason than to test its capabilities.

Sharing Text Just Got Easier

You’re reading a book, you see a quote that inspires you, it’s time to share. Now, that process (which was pretty easy to begin with) just got easier.

Now when you see text in an integrated app (Amazon Kindle will feature this soon) that you would like to share, you can simply highlight it and choose to share it to Facebook. Sure, the aesthetics of a beautiful sunset setting the backdrop for some inspirational text might still be preferable, but who knows where this option might go from a creative angle. That might be phase two.

For now, sharing text is a click away.

Streaming Coming Up in a Big Way

Facebook is making an even bigger play in live streaming content. In their ten year roadmap, their connectivity focus includes plenty of drone, 3D, 360 and live streaming elements.

There has been a lot of excitement and hype around the live streaming space. That’s exacerbated by the fact that Facebook has been putting plenty of weight on content that is live streamed in its News Feed algorithm. But if we were to imagine live streaming on the Gartner Hype Cycle (shown below) where would it fall?

Realistically, we would probably see live streaming between the Peak of Inflated Expectations and the Trough of Disillusionment. Yes, there are undoubtedly applications and yes it is an exciting new field as far as content delivery goes, but it still has yet to find a balance. That said, it is easy to understand why Facebook is putting a lot of weight behind it.

Better Bookmarking

Lastly (at least lastly for this article, but there is plenty more to catch up on) Facebook is venturing into the bookmarking space in a more robust way. Every day, more and more people are using Facebook to digest news content. A lot of what was discussed in Facebook’s F8 keynote was news-related.

Bookmarking is another way that Facebook is trying to extend its value to consumers. Bookmarking and better segmenting the content you see is an area where Facebook offers little right now. That’s going to change as they extend how bookmarking on the platform works, and what benefits there are to using it.

Conclusion

A lot was announced by Facebook, which is nothing new. Every day, there are plenty of great innovations coming out of the social networking behemoth. It’ll be exciting to watch how they approach (and adhere to) their ten year roadmap.

Understanding Attribution Models in Google Analytics

April 12, 2016/by Corey Padveen

Get a better understanding of attribution models in your Google Analytics dashboard.

As a marketer, one of the most important parts of the job is knowing what channels and media are leading to conversions on your website. Attribution models in Google Analytics make that job a whole lot easier.

In the latest video in our Google Analytics series in conjunction with the Social Media Strategies Summit, we cover the different types of attribution models that exist within your Google Analytics dashboard. We could easily spend a significant amount of time going over the intricacies of this component, and we will certainly be covering this topic in more detail, but in this first video we simply cover the basics of the system.

Enjoy!

Facebook is Strong and Getting Stronger [New Marketing Data]

April 5, 2016/by Corey Padveen

comScore recently released new marketing data reports identifying the strength of Facebook and the increasing growth of Snapchat.

It’s official: we spend 20% of our digital time on a social network. Take into account email and instant messaging, and we’re nearing a third of our time devoted to engaging with others in the digital world. As the report points out, “The strength of this [social networking], along with Email and IM, highlights that one of digital’s primary functions is for communication – now more so than ever with the rise of mobile.”

With so much time spent engaging on social media, marketers are left to wonder where exactly audiences are spending the majority of their time, and how best to reach them. Some of the more interesting data in this report has to do with the (still) unstoppable juggernaut that is Facebook, and how earlier rumors of its demise were quite exaggerated.

Facebook is Still in Charge

For quite some time, people have been talking about the ‘death of Facebook’ and claiming that younger audience (read ‘millennials’) are ‘fleeing’ from the network. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes, there has been plenty of expansion onto other networks. Snapchat has risen through the ranks quickly to become a fan favorite. (Though its value as a marketing tool remains to be seen.) But users spreading their time across multiple networks does not mean that the incumbent powerhouse is falling from grace.

As you can see in the two charts above, the comScore marketing data shows that in terms of reach, not a single player comes even close to Facebook. What’s more, the more narrow age breakdowns see Facebook holding a strong distribution. With a global audience hovering around 1.5 billion users, that means that you can find an audience for virtually any business on Facebook. While the same can’t be said about (virtually) anyone else, Snapchat does have something going for it in terms of audience makeup.

The Value of Snapchat

Again, we come back to the conversation about millennials. Prior to getting into the conversation about Snapchat’s hold on this coveted market, it should be noted that there are far too many misconceptions about the term ‘millennials’. Marketers think about the age demographic as moving in unison like a herd of buffalo. In order to effectively reach and activate this demographic, marketers need to think about them from the perspective of a personality, regardless of age. There are certain traits that define the term millennial that extend far beyond the age range. That said, what does this report uncover about Snapchat?

Of the 100 million+ daily active users on Snapchat, 76% of them are between 18-34 years old. In terms of the younger side of that group – namely audience members between 18 and 24 – 46.8% of Snapchat users fall into this age group.

There is clearly opportunity in terms of tapping the audience available on Snapchat, but whether or not that is an opportunity that will be afforded to the masses (and whether or not a tangible return can be calculated from this opportunity) remains to be seen.

Conclusion

The long and short of the story is that Facebook is continuing to see growth and dominance in the social networking (and mobile) markets, and it is still a very, very viable play for marketers. Snapchat still has quite a ways to go in terms of providing economic (calculable) value to marketers, but no one can doubt that there is something there.

There is lots of great information in this report, and it is certainly worth a read. You can download a copy of your own here.