Today, marketing and advertising is no longer just about brand recall or educating your customers about your products. No, in the era of social media, it’s about engaging with your audiences in a meaningful way that drive conversion and simultaneously builds trust and loyalty with your customers. If you’re a social media manager, you know that means brand awareness and engagement are your main focus. We’ll show you a 6 step formula for hitting these objectives and sparking meaningful interactions with your target audience, every time.
Key Takeaways:
Socialbakers Social Media Optimization Workflow
Marketers today are more responsible than ever for growth and achieving outcomes that are more focused on action, and less focused on fan/follower acquisition. Having a huge following doesn’t equate as directly to today’s business objectives as much as engagement does. No wonder e-Marketer found that social media engagement is the number 1 goal for marketers.
How Should Marketers Evaluate Engagement?
I have seen many shifts in social media marketing. With the advent of social media, marketers were first focused on fan acquisition. Next, it was about reach and then engagement, later organic strategies to 100% paid promotion, back to a 70/30 split of paid/organic, and now, the focus on quality content to achieve more. Overall, the goals are stabilizing on engagement – as engagement gives a quantifiable view that reveals actions from the audience – and these actions in turn spark more actions. Marketers need more quality actions to drive conversions, which at the end of the day is why we are here as marketers.
I believe we can all agree that our active audiences are a small percentage of our entire fan/follower base. Increasing activity among our audiences is key. The real success is building meaningful interaction with them. We can do this by creating more meaningful conversations, which will lead to more engagement, and lastly, leverage influencer marketing to help us reach new audiences.
While working here at Socialbakers, I’ve spoken to hundreds of social media marketers, and I discovered that their businesses have one thing in common – they compare their social activity to other brands. This means that they’re constantly competing against each other in terms of posting frequency trying to achieve higher interactions, but was my observation actually true? This led me to a theory. If the ‘name of the game’ is more awareness and engagement for marketers, why not just simply post more content and reach your goals faster? At Socialbakers, theories are only as good as the analysis, we have to look at the data. I didn’t want to look at the data, I just wanted everyone to believe my theory, but you know how that works #data-driven…So, let’s dive in!
Post More And Gain More
We analyzed 5,000 of the largest brand pages on Facebook by Fan Size, from January 2018 through April 2018. We also studied the impact of what happens when brands publish up to 10 posts per week (something that’s considered as “spamming” by brands) on their pages. We discovered brands that post more capture more interactions. More interestingly, this trend was almost linear. Interactions from the 1st post to the 2nd post doubled, and from the 2nd to the 3rd that trend continued.
Being that Socialbakers is a data-driven company, we cannot rely on one data set to prove a theory, so I had to look deeper. Over the years, we found that Media and Publishers were setting the example for brands time and time again by publishing an extreme amount of content every day. With that said, we looked at this type of extreme content and execution scenario. We ran the same analysis against 5,000 of the largest Media pages on Facebook (again by Fan Size). What we found was that large scale content publishing in a single week earned more interactions, a lot more! Furthermore, Media and Publishers are spearheading the way when it comes to capturing engagement.
Can You Scale Your Content Strategy?
Simple and straightforward, just post more quality content more often! Well not really,
audiences today are pickier than ever – they expect more from brands, from publishing relevant and high quality content with the right frequency. To meet your audiences’ demands, social media marketers need to keep
content intelligence ‘top of mind’. Content consumption is at an all time high; it’s readily available, it’s mobile, easy to consume, and customers are hungry! Also a
recent study from Acrolinx concluded that organizations lack the capacity to accomplish their content creation requirements.
Acrolinx are not alone in their discovery. The
B2B Content Marketing Report also finds that organizations face the challenge of bandwidth and volume to meet consumer demands.
However even if the resources are available, content professionals admit that they need to solve other more pressing challenges. Acrolinx found that 30% of marketers surveyed felt that lack of resources were the most common challenges among them.
It’s in these challenges that stymie quality content in quantity which are needed to reach their goals. They simply can’t keep up with the demand of their audience. By producing less content, they slow the vehicle to capture interactions, build awareness, and as a result audiences’ eyes wonder. In other words, failing in their goals.
How Can You Overcome The Challenges?
There are companies that are working to overcome the challenges. They are enlisting the help of agencies and consulting firms, they’re hiring more staff, but the lion’s share are turning to social media optimization technology.
Social media optimization technology helps companies and brands answer many of the tough challenges and questions they face every day. What questions do you need to answer when creating a campaign brief or a content strategy? How do you ensure the content you’re crafting will be relevant for your audiences? Are you aligned on the goals?
1. Who Is My Audience?
To answer this, you need to ask, what are their interests and demographics? Personas can be calculated in real-time and provide a deep audience insight to content creators. Knowing this helps to provide data-driven recommendations that save time, effort and allow more focus on the creative.
Screenshot Taken in Socialbakers Audience Analytics
