Tag: social media strategy

Track Social Success: Unified Integrates awe.sm with Hootsuite

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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

 

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

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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: advertisingpublic 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.Though my work / will barely show it / in my youth / I was a poet / Now I toil / on this blog / but that’s okay / I’m drunk on glögg

     

  • 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

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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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

 

5 ways to score with your social media strategy this Valentine’s Day

As everyone knows, February 14 commemorates the Roman Empire’s murder of Valentinus of Terni — twice: when Emperor Claudius Gothicus’ original sentence of death by clubbing and stoning somehow didn’t do the trick, he was re-sentenced to beheading outside the Flaminian Gate, and this worked. (That’s amore.)

Of course, if you choose to focus instead on St. Valentine’s work as a matchmaker this February 14th, then you know there’s no better time of year to review your social media marketing strategy through a romantic lens. Based on our work measuring and optimizing the performance of social media marketing for some of the world’s biggest brands, here are some simple steps to help you get your leads to say “I do” — without even overpaying for chocolates.

Go long

Just as with real life, there’s nothing stopping you from using social media to score some fleeting romance … but Mardi Gras isn’t for another month, and Valentine’s Day is more commonly associated with finding true love. The smart marketer aspires to acquire and retain customers for the long haul. Social can do more than generate interest for your brand: with proper planning and careful execution, your social campaign can actually lay the groundwork for a mutually fulfilling, committed relationship.

DTR

If you have only a fuzzy notion of what you want out of your social media marketing, you’ll get fuzzy results, so ask yourself in advance, What do I want out of this? Many brands stop at the mere flirtation of Likes and Retweets, but you can — and should — engage customers with an actual business goal in mind and an ROI to measure against. Your goal doesn’t have to be a transaction: it could be a coupon download, webinar registration, mailing list signup, or video view. But know in advance what you’re pursuing. This will guide you as you create your social content and plan your execution.

Emulate this guy

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Giacomo Girolamo Casanova planned his dates like you wouldn’t believe. Entire books have been written about the Casanova method: complicated plots, heroes and villains, and gallant outcomes, coupled with meticulous attention to small details, all engineered to overwhelm his beloved with excitement, gratitude, and infatuation.

First of all, think about that the next time you spend 4 minutes lining something up on OpenTable while concurrently brushing your teeth. More importantly, consider every element of your marketing funnel as part of a courtship to win over your customers.

Beyond the superficial charm of a witty Tweet, does your site’s user experience surprise and delight your visitors? Do your copy and interaction design help guide them to a more fulfilling conversion? Do your visitors find content worth sharing, and feel invited to engage more deeply? Like Casanova, script every element of your interactions to attract your prospects to commit. Nowhere does the old adage about failing to plan is planning to fail ring more true.

Pay attention

We don’t recommend going on a date without making eye contact — did he like the wine I picked?, is there something in my teeth?, was that story about my mom funny?… — and you shouldn’t fly blind with social media marketing, either.

When it comes to tortured romantic metaphors, think of social media marketing less like a flock of doves you release once and watch take to the sky, and more like a moonlit gondola which you continue to steer down the canals. The tools now exist to monitor every post from the moment it goes out, and not just the Likes or Retweets it gets out on the social networks, but the site visits, pageviews, and funnel conversions that result. Use this feedback to adjust and optimize over the course of the campaign.

If a given social network or a given style of content performs better, don’t be afraid to switch things up. On one recent campaign, an awe.sm customer launched with the intention of relying heavily upon influencer tweets, but less than a week in realized that earned social posts attracted more valuable traffic, so they quickly upped the size of their share buttons. Don’t be afraid to switch things up and do more of what works — just like those killer stories about Mom.

Be yourself

Keep your messaging true to your brand voice, and be transparent about your intentions. You can only truly love those who love you back, so pre-qualify your customers by accurately representing the value you provide. If you steer clear of gimmicks or gotchas, those who engage with your content, visit your site, and proceed down your funnel stand the best chance of converting into a life-long fulfilling relationship … or at least a happy customer.


Love is a battlefield, so suit up. This Valentine’s Day, you’ve got this, you old heartbreaker, you.

*Originally published on the awe.sm blog

How to use Sponsored Page Posts to reach your target audience in the News Feed

Despite Facebook’s News Feed algorithm (Often referred to as EdgeRank) that matches content with relevant users, plus the recent introduction of Page Post Targeting, it can still be challenging for Facebook Pages to reach their most important fans.

The definition of an “important” fan is different for every Page – for some, it’s the target demographic that is more likely to purchase the business’ product. For other Pages, like fashion and apparel brands, it might be the most influential consumers, whose tastes spread to a wider audience. These audiences can be defined by any parameters that are accessible in Facebook’s Self-serve advertising tool – demographics, precise interests, connections to other apps and pages, etc.

At PageLever we call these subsets of a Page’s audience the “target audience” – the portion of the Page’s audience that is most important to reach, because not all fans are created equal.

When a Page posts to all its fans, only a percentage of the total fans see the given post. Of these fans, an even smaller percentage are in the target audience. A post that reaches 10,000 fans might only be reaching a few hundred fans in the target audience. This is where many large Pages struggle to see ROI.

However, with a surprisingly small amount of money spent on Sponsored Page Post Stories, this is a completely solvable issue.

When used well, Sponsored Page Post Stories ensure that a Page’s content reaches fans in the target audience far more often than fans outside the target.

Let’s walk through how to create a Sponsored Page Post targeted to a specific subset of a Page’s audience:


1. Create a new Facebook Ad

sponsoredpagepostfacebookadstep1 How to use Sponsored Page Posts to reach your target audience in the News Feed

Create a new ad, select the Page you want to promote, and select the radio button “A Specific Post on Your Page” – then, instead of selecting a specific post, check the box to “Keep my ad up-to date by automatically promoting my most recent post” – this ensures that the content that you’re promoting is current, and eliminates the complexity of creating a new ad for each post. Larger Pages, or those appealing to multiple target audiences may want to run individual ads for each post.


2. Select Targeting Parameters

Just like any other Facebook Ad, you’ll want to define who you’re targeting – here’s where you’ll define who is in your target audience. This could be defined simply by age and gender, or it could be focused around a set of precise or broad interests – maybe small business owners are your target, or maybe you want to target only your fans who like the Pages of your competitors, to ensure they don’t switch.

Fans in your target audience are likely to be friends with similar people, with similar interests – small business owners tend to know others small business owners. This creates a chain reaction – as the users you’re targeting engage with your content, their actions will make your post more likely to be seen organically by other fans in the target audience, because of how Facebook’s News Feed algorithms work.

Make sure to choose to show the ad only to users who already like your Page:

Screen Shot 2012 08 17 at 10.43.18 AM How to use Sponsored Page Posts to reach your target audience in the News Feed


3. Use the Power Editor make your ads appear only in the News Feed

Facebook’s Power Editor is the secret weapon for making this happen. Only the Power Editor allows you to choose whether ads are displayed in the News Feed – this isn’t possible in the self-serve ad tool.

If you haven’t used the Power Editor before, make sure to read Facebook’s documentation – the process of downloading and uploading data is different from the Self-Serve Ad Tool.

Once you’ve downloaded data from your Account, click on the ad that you just created, and select the “Placements” tab. Here, you’ll be able to choose to show your ad in all placements, on Desktop Only (News Feed and elsewhere) or News Feed only:

Screen Shot 2012 08 17 at 10.16.27 AM How to use Sponsored Page Posts to reach your target audience in the News Feed


4. Be patient and reap the benefits

The click-through-rate (CTR) of ads in the News Feed is significantly higher than elsewhere, particularly for Page Post Sponsored Stories (the type of ad you just created). However, there is less ad inventory in the News Feed than in the sidebar – if the target audience you’re trying to reach is just 10,000 people, don’t expect to reach them all in one week. We’ve found that Page Post Sponsored Stories work best as an “always-on” solution.

The beauty of Page Post Sponsored Stories is that they amplify the posts that you create – if you post great content that engages your target audience, your click-through-rate (CTR) will be high, and your CPC will be lower. Facebook ads, when used best, augment organic distribution of great content.

Questions? Already running Sponsored Page Post Ads? We’d love to hear from you, drop us a note in the comments section below.

How big brands use social media (and you can too)

Content originally written by Jonathan Strauss and published on the awe.sm blog

Greg Shove, CEO of Halogen Media, had a great post yesterday on the paid, earned, owned (PEO) media model. This framework for integrated marketing campaigns isn’t new: I saw it mentioned on Darren Herman’s blog recently; Fred Wilson was the first I noticed applying the earned media term to social media back in 2009 (part 1part 2); and in a former life in electoral politics, I was first introduced to “earned media” (then applied purely to press coverage) way back in 2003.

Greg does a great job of discussing how a large brand can apply this integrated model by reallocating their substantial marketing budgets in ways that take better advantage of the amplification effect of earned media (see below chart from his post). And we’re actually working with Halogen right now to comprehensively measure the impact of the various components of an integrated PEO media campaign they’re planning for one of their brand-name clients. But what about everyone else?

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The PEO media model for the rest of us

What got big brands looking at social media to begin with were the early examples of exceptional success by independent marketers — Fred’s original earned media post was about @kogibbq, hardly a big brand. And what originally inspired us to tackle performance marketing for social media was its efficiency (what we call the word-of-mouth superconductor). We believe this efficiency is potentially even more disruptive than SEM in democratizing online marketing, because — at its best — social media enables small marketers to reach the right audience with the right message in the right way at minimal costs.

So, how does a smaller business that may not even have a robust website, let alone a microsite or a display advertising budget, take advantage of the potential power of the PEO media model? First, you have to redefine what each of the terms mean (in order of importance for smaller businesses):

  • Owned Media: There are 3 basic components of your owned media presence: blogging; email; and social media. The blog should be the center of your online universe — email and social media are essential in syndicating your content to wherever your audience lives and interacting with them when they engage with your brand there, but you always want the source of the content to be on the site you control. And you should be trying to turn every new visitor to your blog into a subscriber (and ultimately an evangelist) with a prominent Twitter Follow ButtonFacebook Like Box, and email subscribe form.
  • Earned Media: This is basically how the ‘evangelist’ segment of your audience is sharing your message with their friends, and it’s the levelest part of the playing field because earned social media basically works the same regardless of the size of your brand or your budget. And the smaller your audience, the more intimate (and thus stronger) your relationships with your evangelists can be — they are helping their friends discover something new that they love, capitalize on their passion. The basic value of syndicating your content to Twitter and Facebook is not so people can see it (because of the real-time Twitter stream and automatic Facebook newsfeed optimization, an email or RSS subscriber is much more likely to see a given piece of new content than a Twitter follower or Facebook fan), it’s so the people who do see it there engage with and share it in those contexts (i.e. reply/retweet on Twitter and comment/like on Facebook). You also want to give every site visitor the opportunity to be an evangelist by adding appropriate sharing calls-to-action to your blog.
  • Paid Media: For a lot of smaller marketers, this isn’t necessarily a must-have as long as you’re creative with your audience-building efforts through owned and earned media. Some relatively straightforward examples include: exclusive deals for Facebook fans; one-off contests and promotions to drive your existing audience to turn their friends into fans and followers; and adding more systematic recognition and rewards for your most effective evangelists (aka gamification). If you are going to buy ads, use Facebook’s engagement ad formats and experiment with their robust targeting to get the most bang for your buck. But keep in mind it’s not the quantity of fans that counts the most here, it’s the quality of fans you acquire. So don’t just optimize for acquiring the cheapest fans, try to figure out ways to quantify the LTV of the fans you acquire in terms of the effectiveness of their evangelism rather than just their own engagement.

Optimizing your PEO media funnel

As a smaller marketer, it’s all about performance — you can’t afford to waste your precious time and possibly money on anything that doesn’t have a positive ROI. I always find the best way to think about performance as a funnel, so let’s use the following funnel analogy to talk about the PEO media model in performance terms. You fill the top of your funnel with Visitors through interesting content on your blog (owned media), which helps with SEO, and is possibly augmented with some very targeted paid search (paid media). Your site is designed with clear calls-to-action and possibly incentives to become Subscribers in the form of Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and/or email subscribers (owned media), and you can potentially directly acquire Twitter followers and/or Facebook fans with ads (paid media). You activate those Subscribers to become Evangelists by syndicating your content to the places they share and through community management (owned media). And those Evangelists start helping you fill the funnel with new Visitors and Subscribers as they share your content and brand with their friends (earned media).

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The key to all of this is obviously the earned media component. As Greg says in his post:

“Earned media isn’t new, but nowadays it’s scalable, sustainable, and influential. Maintaining this earned media presence requires budget allocation, but it’s more ‘management’ than buying: creating an editorial calendar, monitoring the conversation starters, and consistent measurement (over months, not days).”

If I can get 1,000 evangelists to share my message with the right 10 of their friends, that is the most effective way possible for me to reach those 10,000 people. The key for a smaller marketer is making sure it’s also an efficient way to do so. And that takes data.

As Greg says at the end of that quote, the PEO media model is a marathon not a sprint. It’s about ongoing optimization of chronic marketing efforts, not trying to maximize the impact of a single acute campaign. The narrative nature of the human mind means we love looking for that one tweet by an influencer that gets 100 retweets and 1,000 clicks, but the reality is much less glamorous — success is built from a broad base of passionate evangelists who are likely only influential with their core network. So, the challenge ends up being more like how do you go from an ongoing average of 10 clicks per tweet by 100 evangelists to an average of 12 clicks per tweet by 150 evangelists rather than how do you get someone with 10,000 followers to tweet your link once.

The most valuable ways we see performance-focused marketers using data to optimize their efforts within the PEO media model are:

  • Optimizing your owned media: When it comes to producing and syndicating content on a regular basis, what your sharing, with whom you’re sharing it, and when you share it all combine to play a role in how it’s received and ultimately the results it drives. Only over time and repeated attempts will you be able to start seeing the patterns in the data that can distinguish the impact of each of those factors (think multi-variate testing). And because your fan and follower counts change over time (hopefully up :D ), we offer a metric we call ‘Efficacy’ that shows the results per 100 fans/followers at the time of the post so you can compare apples-to-apples. Other products that can help you with this specific use-case include Timely (powered by awe.sm :D ) and CrowdBooster.
  • Motivating earned media: The steps to building good game mechanics are deceptively simple: design the rules to channel individual motivation into the common goal; make the rules clear to all the players; and publicize the leaderboard. Whatever metrics you’re trying to drive through earned media, whether they’re visits, pageviews, new fans/followers, or signups and sales, you need to tie any recognition and rewards as closely to those results as possible. That’s why we offer trackable share buttons (including FB Like buttons) tied toreal conversion tracking.
  • Quantifying the value of your earned media: If you really want to close the loop, you need to be able to measure your CPA, which could be in time as much or more than money, of an evangelist against their LTV, which has to include the referrals they drive not just direct purchases. So it is important to tie any programmatic sharing by your evangelists to their identities where possible. Many of our customers make use of the ability to tag the shares of their registered users to be able to see the aggregate results each user drives (for example, that’s how we built VIPLi.st on top of the data we track for Plancast).

Why the agencies get the big bucks

Unfortunately for smaller marketers, social media marketing in general and the online PEO media model specifically are still so young that there are no turn-key easy answers on how to put these concepts to work. There are so many emerging use-cases that coming up with the right strategy with optimal ROI for your business is a hard and often times iterative process (and that’s why the services agencies like Halogen provide are so valuable to the clients who can afford them). But we believe data is the great equalizer in marketing and we’ve built awe.sm as a platform that can be tailored to understand the effectiveness of a wide variety of social media use-cases in the terms that matter to your business.

So if you’re interested in discussing your ideas on how to harness social media for your or your clients’ needs, drop us a line to info@awe.sm. And please follow @Unified on Twitter so we can practice what we preach ;) .

 

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