Social Media Strategy |

Category: Social Media Strategy (page 1 of 3)

Track Social Success: Unified Integrates awe.sm with Hootsuite

Normally, we like to shake things up in the social space — giving you new approaches to understanding and tracking the success of your social strategies.

Today, we’d like to focus on keeping things simple.

Rather than disrupt the tools and processes you’ve put in place to execute a killer social strategy, we’d like to shed some light on a recent integration we’ve set up to compliment them.

We know that much of the work that goes into your social strategy is the distribution of your content. We understand the time that goes into this portion of the process and the fact that the processes used here must scale as you increase your distribution. If you’re lucky, you’ve created a well oiled machine — with a team that’s innovative but also consistent. And in this case, incorporating new technology into the flow can be daunting… We hear you and as a result, we’re making it a point to integrate and deploy Unified’s technology throughout the social marketing landscape.

Our most recent integration is Hootsuite.

As one of the most popular social platforms used to distribute content, we put a focus on partnering with Hootsuite so that social teams are able to leverage Unified’s awe.sm technology to understand what content is driving results. The ability to learn and optimize is key when marketers are looking to take their owned marketing strategy to the next level.

Enterprise Hootsuite users will now be able to create awe.sm short links within their Hootsuite account — without interrupting their flow or adding any new steps.

The integration allows users to expand their social marketing activity by providing a holistic view of their social funnel, tracking analytics from the post to the on-site conversion. With the awe.sm integration, customers can optimize the return of their social media marketing investments by attributing real business results to their social activity.

Through the awe.sm integration in HootSuite, you can:

Create awe.sm links: Shorten, customize, and track social activity on the links you share across your social media channels.
Track conversions: Bridge the gap between social engagement and web analytics with awe.sm’s closed-looped system.
Identify content that resonates: Determine which of your posts make the most impact, what drives the most traffic and engagement, and what messaging starts the most conversations.
Discover top performers: Find out who is amplifying your message and sharing it with their followers. Gain visibility on what content they share, measure the impact they create, and connect with them directly.

For more on the integration, we invite you to check out the recording of our recent webinar:

The $65,000 Tweet: How to track social to offline and digital sales

The $65,000 Tweet: how to track social media marketing to offline sales

April 23, 2014 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

Welcome back to our ongoing series on building and optimizing a performance-driven social media marketing program.

In part 1, we discussed how to classify social media. In part 2, we evaluated how you can consider social media as a marketing funnel (and why you ought to). Last week, we explored the funnel of a customer whose conversions take place in a shopping cart. That brings us here.

Believe it, kid: crazily enough, there are, in fact, such things as offline transactions. Marketers use social media to drive these transactions, too — and, just like social flows that end in an online shopping cart, such transactions have a funnel and an ROI that marketers can measure and optimize.

But how?

What if my conversions happen offline?

Last week, we checked in on an awe.sm customer whose social funnel drives customers to make purchases — and, by taking a close look at sharing in every stage of the funnel, uncovered a new source of traffic and revenue. If you’re an online retailer, you absolutely should take a look.

For many more of our customers, there isn’t a shopping cart at the bottom of their social funnel, but something more amorphous — app downloads, for example; or lead-gen form submissions; or maybe even just pageviews. We can track those, too. We can track anything.

But about two years ago, awe.sm got to start working with a customer whose social funnel does end in a purchase — but one that doesn’t happen online. It was up to us to help connect the cyberspace top of the funnel with the meatspace conversions at the bottom. Here’s what that looked like.

Baby, you can drive my car / and maybe I’ll retweet you

Cars are huge on social media, and not the Pixar movies my godson has made us watch 479 times, but the real ones. Watch your Twitter stream during the Detroit Auto Show to see the volume of conversation that new models inspire, and scrub your friends’ profiles to see how long it takes before you find one of YouTube’s millions of my-new-car selfies.

But did you ever wonder how Tweets about cars actually translate into car sales? Our automaker friends did. So we took a look at their funnel.

Here’s an example funnel:

See the brand’s Tweets;
Engage with a Tweet by (e.g.) favoriting or amplifying;
Click from the Tweet into the dealer’s site;
____________________
Browse to a specific model;
Navigate content (a.k.a., activate salivary glands);
Enter car customizer;
Complete car customizer;
Search for a local dealer;
Schedule a test drive;
____________________
Test drive (a.k.a., re-activate salivary glands);
Negotiate;
Yahtzee!

Tracking this funnel may seem like a tall order — it spans social, web, and offline!… — but we weren’t starting from scratch. All the data needed for funnel analysis already is out there:

The brand’s dealers maintain impeccable tracking to understand the performance of each channel that drives customers into their showrooms — in other words, everything that happens in real life, below the red line.
Everything in the middle of the funnel — the steps between the blue and the red lines — happens on the brand’s site. Here, the brand’s own site analytics team pays close attention to site visitors, measuring and optimizing their acquisition, navigation, and conversion.
The top of the stack is the social funnel — and that, of course, is awe.sm’s wheelhouse⁴.

We authenticated awe.sm tracking on the brand’s owned social channels; instrumented awe.sm conversion tracking at important milestones in their website, like entering the car configurator; and matched up our metadata with the site analytics tags already in place.

By closing the loop and connecting all the dots from post to purchase, we were ready to learn the ROI of each Tweet … and it blew our minds.

When is a Tweet worth a car?

If you make it through step 6 of this funnel — if you finish configuring a car on the brand’s site — there is a 30% chance you will buy the car. Yes: if you make it halfway through their funnel, the odds are nearly 1 in 3 that you’ll finish it.

Holy moly.

So: if our customer can tweak their social funnel to get only three more people through the funnel, that’s a new car.⁵ Here, identifying which specific social posts perform at each stage of the funnel ceases to be academic or merely curious — and every optimization that increases reach, engagement, and traffic is serious business.

YMMV⁶

Does this mean you should organize your social media marketing exactly like an auto brand’s? Probably not — not even if you’re another auto brand, since each brand’s followers are unique. But our takeaways are these:

You don’t need e-commerce to track the ROI of your social media marketing;
You definitely can track the ROI of your social media marketing: it’s just a matter of closing the attribution loop;
… and you should: even if this is an extreme example, it’s inescapable that individual social posts can have a huge impact — so you need to understand the performance of each one.

What would it take to get you into this social media attribution platform today? … No, really. Let’s talk about this. Drop us a note, kick the tires, and let’s optimize your social media marketing.

____________________

² Ugh — totally unintentional. I really need to brake this habit. For wheels.³
³ I’m steerious.
⁴ Sorry; it happened again. Guess I’m just not firing on all cylinders.
⁵ Second prize: steak knives.
⁶ Oh, come on; you saw that coming a mile away. Don’t blow a gasket.

*Originally published on the awe.sm blog

Why we track what we track: the case of the mystery shares

April 15, 2014 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

This week, we’re continuing our series on building and optimizing a performance-driven social media marketing program by exploring some specific findings that this approach has revealed to marketers who practice it.

In part 1, we discussed how to classify social media. In part 2, we evaluated how you can consider social media as a marketing funnel (and why you ought to). Collect them all!

awe.sm: the hallway mirror of social media marketing

You know how you have that mirror in the hallway, right next to the bowl where you keep your keys, and it’s only there so you can check yourself on your way out the door and say, Lookin’ good, Cowperthwait?

We would take issue with why you call yourself “Cowperthwait,” but in general, we’re cool if you want to use awe.sm the same way. By revealing the child shares that result from your posts, awe.sm shows the true reach of your social media marketing. This tends to reveal that you’re more effective than you ever took credit for being — which justifies your social media marketing spend, and makes you look good to your boss.

But every once in a while, you pass the hallway mirror and something isn’t quite right. The tie’s crooked, you’ve got a dab of shaving cream under one ear, or, horror of horrors: black shoes, brown belt. Then, given the chance to see what’s going on, and make improvements, you’re extra glad it’s there.

Ooh la la carte

Among our favorite customers is the online marketing team for a beauty retailer. Even in our first chat, they immediately understood the value of full visibility into their social media performance; they took the lead in pushing to get our conversion tracking integrated into their shopping cart system; and they shrieked in unison when they discovered the secret corgis hidden throughout our tool. Our kind of customers.

When our integration team got them set up, we expected some powerful education — at last, the chance to see which posts rang the cash registers. But nobody was expecting what would come next. awe.sm’s earned-share tracking shed light on a source of engagement, traffic, and revenue that nobody knew was there.

Remember our example funnel for a retail site? To make the math simple, I used exaggeratedly round numbers — 10% of people who viewed an item added it to their cart; 20% of those would begin checkout; 50% of those would complete a purchase, and so on. They weren’t precise, but they illustrated the point: there’s some breakage at every stage — that’s why funnels are shaped like funnels, and not like cylinders.

Our beauty retailer friends have a pretty straightforward funnel: put things in a cart, review the cart, make a purchase. When they configured awe.sm, they installed earned-share tracking sitewide, including on each stage of that funnel. And it was through this tracking that we discovered something interesting:

Shoppers share their carts.

If you think about it, this actually makes sense. If I were out shopping with you in real life, of course I’d show you everything I’d picked out before we went to the counter to pay for it all. For a user to grab the link to her shopping cart page and IM it to a friend, or post it to her wall, is pretty logical.

But get this:

Shoppers share their carts a lot.

The second-most-shared page across this retailer’s entire site is the checkout confirmation page. It’s shared more than any individual item page, and trails only their homepage.

More importantly:

If you ask your friend to look at your cart, she will.

On average, each share of the shopping cart brings between one and two clicks. That may not seem like much traffic, but all of those clicks add up. This long tail is really, really long.

And here’s the kicker:

Your friend can’t see what’s in your cart, but she’ll look at — and buy — some of her own stuff, anyway.

This retailer’s site is pretty simple. The address of the checkout page is something like this:http://acmefashion.com/checkout/mycart. If I grab that link and email it to you, and you try to view it on a different computer, without my cookie, just you’ll see an empty cart.

Engineer types know why this is, but your average beauty consumer doesn’t (nor should she have to). But she also doesn’t seem to care. Upon being invited by her friend to check out the site, and landing on an empty shopping cart, the average clicker then views 3, 4, 5, or more additional pages on the site, and in a noteworthy number of instances will end up completing a purchase of her own.

Don’t leave money on the (hall) table

For every nine times a marketer has looked at awe.sm’s data and said, Lookin’ good, Cowperthwait! and done nothing, here’s that dramatic tenth time. Our retailer friends learned that their most-shared content wasn’t what they thought it would be; their customers’ expectation — that a shopping cart can be shared — didn’t match their site experience; and there was real money at stake. Imagine more shrieks in unison.

What a marketer does with this kind of knowledge is up to them. At a minimum, we would expect more design love on an empty shopping cart: Welcome! New here? Check out these sale items!… Depending on the scale of this phenomenon, perhaps an investment in savable and shareable shopping carts is worth considering.

At a minimum, though, you can expect the team to look into this all much more deeply, and they wouldn’t have known to investigate without seeing what’s being shared, who shares it, and what happens next.

Pretty awe.sm, huh?

Next up, we’ll be taking a look at another marketer’s funnel, but there’s no need to wait. If the suspense of wondering what secrets lie in your social media marketing funnel is killing you, get in touch, and let’s crack the case.

*Originally published on the awe.sm blog

Yes, Victoria, there is a social funnel (and here’s what it looks like)

April 11, 2014 / unifiedsocial / 1 Comment

As part of our series on building and optimizing a performance-driven social media marketing program, this week, we’ve been covering the basics. If you missed it, check out part 1, on how we classify social media.

If social media is a marketing tool (and it is) and it has an ROI (which it does), then wouldn’t it be nice to understand its performance in terms of the funnel down which it draws your prospects, leads, and customers? It would.

Funnels: not just for adding more coolant to your overheating 1996 Camry on the side of a Wyoming highway in mid June with no shade in sight¹

Surely you get the basic gist of a marketing funnel. Here are some example steps in a retail website’s funnel:

Search for “Acme Blue Cardigans”: 10,000 unique visitors
View acmefashion.com homepage: 1000 UVs (10% conversion)
Click hero banner to view sale items: 100 UVs (10% conversion)
Add blue cardigan (size 2) to shopping cart: 10 UVs (10% conversion)
Begin checkout: 2 UVs (20% conversion)
Complete checkout: 1 UV (50% conversion)

By identifying the important funnel stages, then monitoring the performance of each, a marketer can make informed ROI projections, and make meaningful optimizations.

Ceteris paribus, if a marketer with this funnel wanted to increase sweater sales 2x, she could figure out how to drive an additional 1000 visitors to her site… or she could make more subtle improvements to the funnel — improve the conversion rates of steps 3 & 4 to 15%, and step 5 to 25% — and achieve that same outcome with fewer site visitors.

Alternately, suppose sweater sales suddenly took a nosedive. She could panic and indiscriminately blame her ops team for having broken the site² — or she could observe all of her funnel metrics, identify that the new call-to-action copy on her hero banner was the pits, fix just that, and be back in business.

Yes, funnels are the best.

Meet the social funnel

Whether you’re discussing owned, paid, or earned social media, there is a funnel in play. At awe.sm, our ROI measurement and optimization methodology postulates that it looks like this:

The top of the funnel: engagement

How many people see your social posts? Of those, how many people react to them — by Liking or Favoriting, for example… — or amplify them?

When it comes to how you’d optimize this layer of the funnel, obviously you have the most control over your owned social channels and paid posts: you can endeavor to accumulate additional followers, and experiment with post copy that encourages more of your followers to amplify. But pay attention to your earned posts, too. Find commonalities in the content they’re sharing, and what they say, to determine what achieves the widest and most engaged distribution.

The middle of the funnel: traffic

Historically, there have been a glut of “social media analytics” vendors who concentrated on the top of the funnel, but a dearth of visibility into this second layer. That’s been unfortunate.

Without knowing how social posts perform at driving traffic to your site, you’re essentially flying blind. Why? Consider awe.sm’s corner bodega, a 7′ magnum of Cristal, and a bag of Cheetos.

What?:

If the bodega were to put a 7-foot-tall magnum of Cristal in the front of the store, I don’t doubt that plenty of people would stare at it. Have you ever seen such a thing? How expensive must it be! I have to Instagram that. Hold this so I can take a selfie. Great…

… but exactly zero of the bodega’s regular customers would actually purchase this 7-foot-tall magnum of Cristal. (We will, after our IPO, just to be ironic.) On the other hand, the bodega sells oodles and oodles of Cheetos. Multiple hundreds of dollars’ worth a day, the owner told me, when I absolutely wasn’t buying any myself.

You see where I’m going with this? The stuff people will superficially engage with isn’t the same stuff that people will actually consume. To get a handle on the ROI of social, you absolutely need to understand which posts actually drive traffic. And that’s not all…

Conversion (it’s where the money is)

Like snowflakes, all social posts which drive traffic to your site are not created equal. If you need to know how your social media marketing performs, then you need to understand which posts lead to on-site conversions.

These don’t have to be shopping-cart transactions (though that’s an easy goal to track): awe.sm customers have tracked everything from form signups to app installs, white-paper downloads to car test-drives. Whatever your business cares about — whatever reasons you run a website — can (and should) be measured, and your social media posts can (and should) be held accountable against those goals.

Set it up and get to work

Trust me, this is about to get fun. That which is measured is managed, so next week we get to take a look at some specific examples of what marketers have measured in their social campaigns — and what optimizations that’s enabled. Stay caught up, and watch this space.

Unlike taking the LSATs, skipping ahead to the next section is entirely welcome here. Want to kibitz about others’ social funnels and pick our brains on how to set up your own? Let’s talk.

____________________
¹ Purely hypothetically.
² Purely hypothetically.

*Originally published on the awe.sm blog

Your marketing is owned, paid, or earned — and so is social

April 8, 2014 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

This week, we begin a series of posts introducing the basics of measuring the ROI of social media marketing. We begin by making sure everyone’s on the same page, terminology-wise.

If you’re an awe.sm user, you’ve probably noticed that we distinguish between Posts and Shares — and if you’re new to awe.sm, or just checking out our demo, you’ll notice this soon. Here’s what we mean.

Social media is marketing — so describe it that way

awe.sm’s motivating principle is that, for businesses, social media is not a mystical being, it’s a form of marketing. Its technology and power are certainly revolutionary, and properly capturing its ROI requires purpose-built measurement, but ultimately social is just another form of marketing. This means you can classify it alongside the other tools in a marketer’s belt.

All media is owned, paid for, or earned

In simpler times, it was easy to categorize your marketing communications: advertising, public relations, and word of mouth. Here’s how you could sort those:

Your owned media — sales brochures, store signage, website copy, white papers, newsletters… — consist of content you produce, distributed on channels you own.
Advertising and PR — radio commercials, print ads, press tours, roadside billboards, late-night infomercials, leaflets dropped from helicopters… — are paid media. You might be amplifying some of your own marketing communications — like paying a publicist to pitch editors, paying a publication to run your content as an advertorial, or renting your neighbor’s building to paint a sign that’s bigger than what fits on your own shop — but if you have to pay for it, it’s paid media. If you stop paying your ad agency, your flack, and your neighbor, this media ceases to exist.
Word of mouth is the holy grail: free marketing for you! When people recommend your product to their friends; when bloggers and journalists discuss you; when your commercial gets free replays in the nightly news… — is earned media. It was that great; you earned it. (Go you!)

These are obviously deeply connected and interdependent — for example, PR agencies take your money on the premise that your paid media will “go viral” and become earned media. And like any classification system, it’s imperfect. But it’s simple enough.

Social is owned, paid, or earned, too

Owned: These are posts you make to your own social channels. Your Tweets; posts to your brand’s Facebook page; Pins to Pinterest albums. This is what most people think of first in social media marketing, and it’s the piece over which you have the most control — but it’s only one piece.

Paid: As social networks mature, they tend to roll out sophisticated advertising tools, and (by sheer coincidence) brands’ organic reach decreases, so paying to amplify one’s own posts, seeding social content with paid influencers, or sponsoring hashtags or discussion topics only continues to grow. From a tracking perspective, paid posts aren’t dissimilar from owned posts — but measuring their performance is even more important.

Earned: Any of your social posts and site content that your followers and visitors share — within a social network by amplifying (like re-Tweeting, re-Pinning, mentioning), or off your site via share buttons or tracked URL-bar sharing. Bang-for-buck, earned sharing is the most powerful form of social media marketing (users promoting your content… for you!) but too often is the least understood.

Measuring the ROI of traditional marketing requires understanding how all these different parts interact and combine. It should be no surprise that measuring the ROI of social media marketing requires a similarly holistic view. To help you optimize and create value, make sense of how your posts and shares perform individually, in aggregate, and in relation to one another.

Now that you have an idea of what we classify how, and why, you’re on your way to being awe.sm, too.

Coming up Thursday: the social media funnel. Too impatient to wait? Want to learn how specifically to optimize your social media marketing strategy? Schedule a demo.

*Originally published on the awe.sm blog

How #climate uses awe.sm to connect influencers with environmental orgs

April 3, 2014 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

In case you missed the news, we’re thrilled by this morning’s launch of #climate, a new tool that helps influencers harness their social popularity to spread the word for worthy environmental causes.

The tool is straightforward and really clever:

#climate researches and builds a list of environmental nonprofits working to combat the harmful effects of human-made climate change;
Influencers — including the NBA, Dick Costolo, and Al Gore — log into the #climate mobile app to browse potential causes to promote;
With a single tap, influencers can select an organization and promote it to their social followers, directing them to donation pages, petitions, and other opportunities for action.

The power visibility into performance is yours!¹

It seems like just last week we were rhapsodizing about the importance of understanding who’s influential — and here’s a concrete example of putting this knowledge to work.

Every social post generated by #climate contains a unique awe.sm tracking link, so that awe.sm can provide Josh’s team with powerful data. With visibility into how each influencer’s post performs, #climate is building an understanding of which causes, influencers, and social networks combine to accomplish the most good.

By applying this knowledge, #climate and its users can communicate smartly, not loudly. Optimizing messages for efficacy will maximize the power of this, you know, awesome tool.

Learn more

Interested in learning more about what #climate does? Check out their demo video and learn how to get in touch.

Do more

We’ve helped thousands of social media marketers, brands, agencies, and worthy causes understand the performance of their social media marketing, and how to optimize social activity for maximum ROI. Whether you’re an existing awe.sm customer looking to do more with your data or a marketing padawan looking to become an awe.sm Jedi, let’s get in touch.

____________________
¹ Did you know: “Captain Planet” was on the air before our youngest engineer, Cole, was born. How is that even possible?

*Originally published on the awe.sm blog

What content performs best on social media? (And why should you care?)

April 1, 2014 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

This is part 3 of an ongoing series exploring the experimental social media recommendation and optimization features being tested in awe.sm Insights. Collect them all!

Interested in participating in the experiment? Curious to see what optimizations we recommend for your social media marketing strategy? Reserve your spot to try it out.

Meet John Wanamaker. John was pretty much the founder of the American department store, and he was famously pessimistic about marketing:

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.

The bad news is that he’s partly correct: a lot of your content might fail, maybe even half of it.

The good news is that you no longer have to guess which half is which, because awe.sm Insights now identifies your best content. With this knowledge, you can shed a real-time light on your social performance across channels, optimize what doesn’t work, amplify what does, and succeed.

What’s my best content?

Some thoughts to consider:

There’s content which draws the most people to your site.
There’s content which draws people who then become the most deeply engaged with your site.
There’s content which your site visitors are the most likely to share.
There’s content which leads the most people down the funnel to a sale or other goal conversion.
There’s content which, when you share it, 1) attracts people to your site who 2) view the most pages, 3) share content with their friends, and 4) generate the most goal conversions.

Depending on your goal — traffic?, pageviews?, amplification?, transactions? — any one of those types of content could count as the “best” in some circumstances. Our goal is to inform you about success on every one of those metrics.

What is it?

This Insights section identifies the best (and worst) content, ranked on a number of key performance indicators.

How does it work?

In its default view, Best content displays a list of your all-time best performing content, based on our calculation of a number of factors:

The number of times it’s been shared — by you and your site visitors
The number of clicks all of those shares have received
The number of pageviews attributed to all of the visits on those shares
The number of goal conversions attributed to all of the visits on those shares
The total dollar value of all of those goal conversions, in the event that your goals have dollar values — like shopping cart transactions, for example

To switch to a raw sort of any one of these factors individually, just click its column header.

The good, the bad, and the ugly

Hate to break it to you, but if there’s a best, there’s also a worst — a sort of content yang to your content yin. If you dare, pull down the selector to switch to Worst content, and behold the turkeys.

There are a lot of reasons a piece of content just doesn’t do the trick. Perhaps you shared it at the wrong time of day; perhaps it went out on a social channel where your customers don’t actually hang out; perhaps people aren’t actually that interested in history lessons about Roman martyrs¹ — :*(

But it’s better that you know. By presenting all your stinkers in one place, you can more easily understand what they have in common, so you know what not to do next time. (And obviously, we’re paying attention to these factors, too, to improve our recommendations in a future Insights update.)

Why does it matter?

When you put all the pieces together, Insights can tell you when to post, whom to engage, and what to share.

By giving you visibility into what works — and why — awe.sm equips marketers to make informed optimizations, remove the guesswork, and use social media marketing the way a business should: as a powerful marketing tool with tangible results and measurable ROI. We’re not perfect (yet), but we’re confident that, when combined with a consistent methodology and common sense, we can help you maximize value and make you look good.

Now what?

Can’t say this enough: we need you!

If you’re an existing awe.sm customer, try Insights today and provide feedback on what you learn.

What? You’re not awe.sm yet? Climb aboard. Let us show you how to optimize your campaigns, put your social media marketing to work, and maximize ROI. There are still spots available in the Insights trial, so let’s get in touch.

Did you know: The Wanamaker’s flagship store used to have a monorail in the toy department. A monorail! No pun; just wanted to put that out there.

¹ Which is too bad, really. I thought “Fred” wrote some really classy jokes there.

*Originally published on the awe.sm blog

Who’s your most effective social influencer? awe.sm Insights does the math

March 25, 2014 / unifiedsocial / 0 Comments

This is part 2 of an ongoing series exploring the experimental social media recommendation and optimization features being tested in awe.sm Insights. Collect them all!

Interested in participating in the experiment? Curious to see what optimizations we recommend for your social media marketing strategy? Reserve your spot to try it out.

We’re here to take a word back: Influencer.

Too many consultants and tools have promised to locate these mythical beings. Unfortunately, their methods ranged from specious to farcical. “Influential” became synonymous with “popular” or “chatty,” and the word stopped meaning anything at all.

We think it’s time to take “influencer” back by revisiting what the term is supposed to mean:

The point of social media marketing is to foster word of mouth.
Within social campaigns, the most valuable people aren’t the ones who shout the loudest…
…They’re the people who’ve built a relationship with you, engage on an ongoing basis, and repeatedly amplify.
When these individuals discuss a brand or recommend a product, their friends are more likely to take the advice.

If only there were a word for people who influence others.

Let’s measure influencers

Help is here. Now, awe.sm identifies the influencers who are actually most important in driving business results. Below the fold on the current Insights screen you’ll find two lists: Top amplifiers and Most engaged.

What are they?

These Insights sections identify individuals who are highly engaged with you or particularly effective at amplifying your content.

How does it work?

In its default view, Top amplifiers ranks social media followers who, through a combination of their audience size and the frequency with which they retweet your posts, are your most influential amplifiers. To switch to seeing who has the most followers or who has retweeted you the most, click one of the respective column headers for a raw ranking.

The Most engaged section ranks followers’ engagement based on numerous factors. In the case of Twitter followers, we’re scoring a combination of their retweets, replies, favorited posts, and follower counts.

For Facebook followers, it’s similar: shares, comments, likes, and friend counts. By clicking on any of the column headers, you can sort by an individual criterion.

What’s a VIP?

It’s okay to admit this: even with lists of who’s actually influential, it’s still fun to see who your most popular followers are, too. VIP view lists your followers who have the largest follower count themselves. Want to get them more engaged to convert them into influencers? Doesn’t hurt to drop them a line.

Why does it matter?

Suppose my celebrity godson has 100,000 Twitter followers, while I have only 10,000. Which one of us is a more valuable follower?

Now, add in the fact that our boy wonder has given you one perfunctory retweet, while I’ve retweeted you a dozen times, and routinely reply to your posts.

His retweet brought 100,000 impressions to a single one of your Tweets. Meanwhile, I’ve brought you 120,000 cumulative impressions, and our mutual followers have seen my frequent engagement with your content, building their trust. So who’s actually more effective?

Social media isn’t strictly a popularity contest, and influence isn’t determined just by reach. By showing you who’s actually an effective influencer, we’ll give you the power to cultivate relationships and start conversations that drive more visits, pageviews, and — ultimately —higher ROI.

Trust but verify (for now)

Our tuning of the algorithms, and collection of additional signals, is ongoing. We warned you — this is an experiment, and it depends on your help.

If you’re awe.sm: Check out what Insights recommends for your social accounts, do a gut-check, and share your thoughts.
If you’re an awe.sm-to-be: The more the merrier. It’s not too late to join the experiment, see what Insights recommends, and learn how awe.sm helps maximize the ROI of your social media marketing. Contact us now to get started.

You’re well on your way to optimizing your social media marketing and maximizing ROI— and nobody can take that away.

Next: what content performs best on social media?

*Originally published on the awe.sm blog

Recent Posts

Categories

Recent Comments

Meta

Category: Social Media Strategy (page 1 of 3)

What if my conversions happen offline?

Baby, you can drive my car / and maybe I’ll retweet you

When is a Tweet worth a car?

YMMV⁶

awe.sm: the hallway mirror of social media marketing

Ooh la la carte

Don’t leave money on the (hall) table

Funnels: not just for adding more coolant to your overheating 1996 Camry on the side of a Wyoming highway in mid June with no shade in sight¹

Meet the social funnel

The top of the funnel: engagement

The middle of the funnel: traffic

Conversion (it’s where the money is)

Set it up and get to work

Social media is marketing — so describe it that way

All media is owned, paid for, or earned

Social is owned, paid, or earned, too

The power visibility into performance is yours!¹

Learn more

Do more

What’s my best content?

What is it?

How does it work?

The good, the bad, and the ugly

Why does it matter?

Now what?

Let’s measure influencers

What are they?

How does it work?

What’s a VIP?

Why does it matter?

Trust but verify (for now)

Archives

Tags

Recent Posts

Categories

Recent Comments

Meta