Brands Social
How To Scale Your Social Media Content Strategy To Increase Awareness and Engagement
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?
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.
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
Get Started With Your Free Persona Template Download Here
2. What Is Considered Great Content?
We can define great content by how well it resonates with your audience. Knowing the persona of your audience helps you provide very specific types of content based on engagement performance. Leveraging data-driven examples helps you inspire your content creation team in the right way, every time!
Screenshot Taken in Socialbakers Suite
3. When Should I Publish?
Timing is everything! You need to publish your content at the right time so your audience will be able to see it in their busy feeds across social media. AI-driven recommendations such as PrimeTime within the Socialbakers Suite help ensure your posts are seen by a higher percentage of your audience. They have to see it to interact with it.
Screenshot Taken in Socialbakers Suite
4. Where Should I Be Posting?
Posting on the traditional social media channels might not be enough. It might be time to use influencer marketing to help you drive awareness and engagement. Influencers can spark more engagement across new audiences you might not be unaware of or unable to reach. Take advantage of adding user generated content to the mix as well. Leveraging creativity from user generated content – be it that from your own community or your influencers’ audiences – adds to your content assets without taking the time of your internal teams. Influencer marketing will enable you to create new and effective social media content.
Screenshot Taken in Socialbakers Influencer Marketing Platform
5. How Much Should I invest?
It’s important to ensure you’re investing in the best content to earn the most engagement from your budget. By publishing more frequently and enabling a prediction algorithm to shine a light on content that will yield the best Return On Investment (ROI), you can maximize your spend and get back to what really matters.
Screenshot Taken in Socialbakers Suite
6. Why Should I Demonstrate ROI?
Most importantly, you will should be able to provide an overview of your social media activities and show the value of your content strategy. Rule based content labeling (or automatic content labeling) ensures and simplifies the analysis of content performance by a specific category or action. You become smarter in what works and what doesn’t. Make smarter decisions by understanding audience behavior of your best performing content and campaigns. Leveraging optimization technology and rich analysis (that proves it works), will position you as the hero. Additionally, it will provide you with the content intelligence to continue to craft high quality content and distribute it at scale more effectively!
Screenshot Taken in Socialbakers Suite
The Takeaway
Brands need to post more quality content to drive their objectives. However, they can’t always just create more – so they are looking to social media optimization technology to be smarter, to help them scale and be more effective. There are many companies doing it already – and winning. Is it you or maybe it’s your competitor? Don’t be afraid of posting more content, you will capture more engagement. Social media is the best source of content intelligence available. Utilize what you know about your audience, be creative, be relevant, and do it often. Then you can build awareness, create demand and get your audience to take action. Social media’s value and ROI resides in these goals and the metrics that define them.
