If you’re a TweetDeck user, get ready for a shock: Twitter is deprecating TweetDeck.
What’s the good news?
If you don’t know about Hootsuite already, you can set up a free account. Hootsuite is very much like Tweetdeck in its appearance and I would recommend migrating to that. You can continue to manage your Twitter conversations with Hootsuite, keep track of retweets and mentions, etc. You can also manage your other social media profiles with Hootsuite, like LinkedIn. And there’s the Autoschedule function which puts your Tweet in the queue to post when the majority of your followers are actually on and looking at Twitter so they’re more likely to see it.
Althought Hootsuite would definitely be an easy migration for current TweetDeck users, I’m a big fan of Buffer because you can set up schedules for when your posts go out. Also, they show you a graph indicating when the best time to post is using their Optimal Schedule (much like Hootsuites Autoschedule, but they don’t have a pretty graph). But you can’t manage conversations through Buffer just yet. They’ve come out with a Beta program called Respond which also looks a lot like Hootsuite but right now Buffer and Respond are two different social media management tools as opposed to Hootsuite, which is literally the two in one.
Besides that, they both allow you to connect a few social media profiles for free. If you went with either of them, it’s likely you would not have to pay for the service. But, really, check out Hootsuite, TweetDeck users, the transition will be smooth, I promise!
Return on Investment is incredibly important, and when it comes to soft marketing tools like Facebook and Twitter, it’s easy to think that putting up a link and a bit of text would get your followers from your page to your website and buying. But social media is, and has been, a marketing tool that requires just as much finesse as print, email, and other traditional marketing tools.
So, how can you get better engagement on Facebook and Twitter?
The latter half of this month we worked to promote an international conference held simultaneously in London and Sydney called the Change in the Age of Disruption. The conference was put on by the Change Management Institute, a global non-profit institute. The goal was: increase ticket sales using Twitter, Facebook, and email. Engagement was down and it was time to get them paying attention. Collectively, we came up with a marketing plan for post ideas. People love variety in their content and they love images. Your images should grab their attention enough for them to stop, read your copy (and make it short, because you don’t have a lot of time with them) and hopefully get them to click through to wherever you’re leading them.
For this particular conference, our one-two, one-two needed to have key elements to get followers to play along.
Ask questions to get the audience listening
Offer links to articles that related directly to them
Inform them about the conference, news from and about the speakers
Conference-adjacent information like local restaurants and hotels in the area
Ticket details
After having a bit of a soft start for the first week to make sure we had the right footing, we launched into putting this content up with images we felt could make the audience pause for a moment with us and, hopefully, be more aware of the brand. Once they were aware of the brand and felt connected to it, they would be more likely to want to buy tickets and attend the conference.
Within three weeks time, for Facebook and Twitter, followers increased by 7%
Below you’ll find the Twitter Analytics snapshot from September and October:
Our snapshot for a month-over-month view of Twitter Analytics reflects:
164% increase in tweet quantity
89% in tweet impressions (how many people saw the tweets)
189% increase in profile visits
128% increase in mentions (how many people were using the Twitter handle in their tweets)
94% increase in follower quantity from the followers gained the month before
Overall, the increase in posts and content type really helped to get people interacting, watching and paying attention. For Twitter, using applicable hashtags also helps to get new eyes on your content and this will help contribute to engagement increases in most cases.
Facebook Analytics are a little different and we’ll give a brief overview of just a couple of them. The below graph is a reflection of the increase in visits from September to October.
Visits translates to: someone goes directly to your page. This means whatever content you’re posting and is showing up in their feed (if they’re following you) is engaging enough to get them to come find you. Or, they come in from a Google search or from the social media buttons on your website.
With post reach, you would think that all your followers see your posts, which would be amazing, but in truth only a percentage actually do.
When you’re not boosting your posts, only your followers will see your content. So, when you follower base increases only a little at a time, you don’t see much of an ‘organic’ reach. Organic translates, simply, to the number of people you didn’t have to pay money to Facebook to get to see your content.
And as a quick overview, these were the statistics from Google Analytics for the conference website for September and October. As compared to the month prior, more visitors were returning to the site who had previously visited.
Whereas the sessions, or the length of time a visitor spends on a website, dramatically increased which meant people were finding the content there worth reading and decided to stay a while.
In the length of time spent for the conference, the overall engagement went up significantly!
Without having paid to reach more followers on Facebook or for Twitter ads, you can still see that the time spent creating more posts, using images and graphics, writing short copy and using hashtags with a well-laid plan can really get people paying attention to your brand. And if they’re paying attention to your brand, they very well may end up becoming a loyal, buying customer or advocate for it as well.
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https://creativeagencysecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CAS_Logo_1line_RGB.jpg00Creative Agency Secrets Teamhttps://creativeagencysecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CAS_Logo_1line_RGB.jpgCreative Agency Secrets Team2015-11-04 10:00:242015-11-02 15:28:25How to Get Better Engagement on Facebook and Twitter
We had a go at using Twitter’s “Promoted Tweets” service to advertise our upcoming marketing event on Facebook Ads Vs. Google Adwords, and found some pretty interesting results.
How It Works
Promoted Tweets on Twitter appear at the top of timelines for users matching a profile description you define…
What We Did
With a $50 budget set, we drafted up a single Promoted Tweet with a link going straight to our event registration page. The Tweet read:
Then we targeted the campaign to 4 specific locations within New Zealand and Australia along with setting particular marketing and business interests. You can also add ‘sample twitter accounts’ which the campaign models targeting from (pretty neat!).
How It Went
First, the campaign statistics:
$48 spent.
10k impressions made.
84 interactions reported (82 clicks on the ad, 1 reply to the ad, 1 follow from the ad).
So how did we feel about it? Overall, it wasn’t a wildly successful campaign, but then again neither was our budget. We got 13 clicks recorded on the link we used and since we launched the campaign we gained an additional 10 attendees (granted this was during our mailing campaign as well). It appears that the campaign made a ripple of interaction and engagement but in the end you may want a bigger budget to really hit your mark.
If indeed we did get 10 attendees from this campaign, and we then get a single client out of this free event, we will have made our money back and then some.
The blue icon opposite are part of our 8-Step New Business Development Methodology.
Click each icon to find more blog articles on the topic – educate yourself in modern marketing.
Facebook hasn’t replaced any newsletter (at least not yet but you never know what Facebook’ll do next). What Facebook has done is equal the amount of traffic driven to our website from our weekly newsletter. And helped us to recruit new opted-in newsletter subscribers.
Better yet – it’s all free.
Key things to note: Our weekly newsletter has over 4,500 subscribers. Our Facebook page had just 400 (over the course of this experiment we increased this to 550). Wow – that’s ten times fewer subscribers but they’re visiting and re-visiting the website.
Everyone knows the theory of email newsletters – their open and clickthrough rates so I won’t waste time here. We’re going to tell you how you can drive more traffic to your website from Facebook. Then invite visitors to join the newsletter.
What we were doing
We posted 3 times a day on Facebook, for Facebook – all of which was shared from other users and pages on Facebook. These posts were backed up by regular blog post entries (one every day) which were automatically fed to our Timeline. Very standard.
So what did we change?
There were 3 major changes.
The first was to do with posting amounts and timing. We increased the frequency of posting and changed what time of day we posted Facebook updates. This was increased to 5-6 times a day (effectively doubling our previous posting frequency).
The second major change is where we post from. We changed all sources of our posts to our website and then linked to them.
Our third major change was where we sourced our content from. It’s important to note here we hardly ever created original content – we either shared others or repurposed our archived content.
To facilitate changing the source of our posts to our website we installed new plugins. People will spend less time on our Facebook page because we are directing them to our website. As a result, many of the plugins we installed were to make sure our content is still shared (which often doesn’t happen once you leave a social media site). As we knew many of our visitors would also be arriving from a mobile device (Facebook’s App is becoming more widely used) we paid particular attention to how our site looks on mobile devices.
Step 1: Smarter Posting Times
Our audience is active at all times of the day. We were initially posting 3 times daily between 9am and 5pm – Not the smartest move when you look at the graph below of our visitor traffic over 24 hours.
Click To Enlarge
For this reason – we opted to post every 4-5 hours. Remember – we don’t want this to take up all our time and we definitely don’t want to be up all night so we chose to schedule our Facebook posts. To enable auto-posting of blog at all times of day we installed new plugins which I’ll discuss below.
Step 2: Make The Website The Destination
We want to drive traffic off Facebook to our website. This is marketing real estate that we control and manage. We’re not dependent on Facebook’s grace. Making most of your posts direct to your website is therefore logical. And remember our objective is to drive readers from Facebook to becoming opted-in newsletter subscribers.
This of course means publishing content designed for Facebook on your website. Whether you’re sharing an article or a photo, upload it to your site (add a link on the post to credit the photograph if appropriate). Don’t just link them straight to the original source, ideally you’re seen as the source of the content so they spend longer on your site and less elsewhere.
With our new plugins – photos are uploaded from our website to Facebook automatically. When a user clicks on a photo expecting it to enlarge they are instead redirected to our website (where there is a larger image front and centre). Bingo – we’ve just driven traffic from Facebook to our site. From here you have 2 challenges –
How can they share this with their friends?
What’s going to keep them from leaving your site?
The first challenge is easily answered – plugins which I will discuss later on. The second is to have an attractive website littered with quality content – this is discussed just below.
Step 3: Sourcing Quality, “Original” Content
To ensure our content is appealing, we need it to be socially shareable. While there are no guarantees, using already proven socially shareable content is a start. But you don’t want to appear a copycat. So how do you get proven socially shareable material while still looking “fresh” and “original”? The easiest strategy is to find content from sources other than Facebook. Pinterest was a great resource for me as pictures make the best Facebook posts and most photos came with a short description or piece of information – perfect.
Setting Up Your Website: Plugins Used
Below is a list of the plugins you’ll want to install if you’re on WordPress. I’ve described the types of plugins you want before stating what plugin we used. These plugins are all free and you may have your own preference.
New Automatic Posting To Social Media (Facebook/Twitter).
NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster [Hands down the best autoposter plugin. Fully customisable, plenty of social media options and looks like the posts were shared straight from Facebook. 2 great features of this plugin are that you can choose individual posts to be image posts or linked posts etc & Imports Facebook comments so your website appears popular]
A more simple “Like Us” button further up the News main page.
Facebook Social Plugin Widgets(This plugin installs widgets to be used wherever – we used them in the sidebar of our blog page [note page and not post])
When someone enters our site (for the first time) a like us on Facebook plugin pops up [This doesn’t interfere with our pre-existing Newsletter signup popup].
So what were the results of our changes? The graph below reveals all. With a simple change in the frequency and timing of posts our weekly reach exploded. This is most likely due to reaching more individuals as opposed to reaching the same people multiple times.
Click To Enlarge
Results of Our 2nd Change
The screenshot below is of our website’s referrals for the 2 week period before and during our Facebook efforts. As you can see, vast improvements. We basically received 1000 extra page views each week (remember, at the time we only had 400 people liking our page). I’ve highlighted the Twitter referrals as well (t.co) as although we designed this campaign for Facebook – using the NextScript Autoposter plugin we also published the same content to Twitter (although we changed the structure of the titles and links etc from within the plugin’s settings). You’ll notice the amount of referrals we got from Facebook Mobile (m.facebook.com). Good thing we had WPtouch installed so our page would look good on any device.
Click To Enlarge
Did Our Plugins Do Their Job?
I was initially skeptical when installing the Facebook Page Promoter Lightbox – no one likes popups. After 2 weeks though, we picked up 50 likes from external “Like” buttons. These buttons were only in 2 places, the first was in the sidebar on the blog page the second was the aforementioned lightbox. I’m almost 100% sure the lightbox is where we picked up all of those likes.
Click To Enlarge
Sling pic and both social sharing bars (vertical and horizontal) picked up a few extra “Likes” and retweets which was nice – nothing to write home about but every little bit counts. WPtouch can be attributed to the 13 mobile likes as although it means people liked our Page from Facebook (on a mobile device), the website must have been attractive enough to have convinced them.
Conclusion
The initial results are all very promising, only time will tell how good a long term strategy this is. The short term gains were an instant increase in likes going from 400 to 550 in 2 weeks, engagement going up and a large increase in unique visitors and page views. There were of course more minor, intricate strategic choices made during this period and still being made now – these will be discussed in a later post.
If you’d like any help setting these plugins up or want to discuss how this can apply to your online strategy get in touch by leaving a comment below.
Wildfire was one of the first apps we found to do promotions on the Facebook platform. Founded by cool Kiwi entrepreneur Victoria Ransom, they got bought by Google and have clearly been spending time refocusing their work onto large customers who can afford $2,500 per month fees. The little people will have to go elsewhere in future.
Here’s a list we curated on List.ly of Wildfire Alternatives. Please add your own favourites.
[listly id=”4KA” layout=”full”]
[read our interview with List.ly c0-founder, Shyam Subramanyan]
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https://creativeagencysecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CAS_Logo_1line_RGB.jpg00Rebecca Caroehttps://creativeagencysecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CAS_Logo_1line_RGB.jpgRebecca Caroe2013-04-17 15:56:402020-01-24 01:44:27Alternatives to Wildfire as they withdraw pay-as-you-go
Following up to yesterdays post, I’m now going to look at the top NZ brands on Facebook and compare them to our most engaging brands, our most trusted brands and the most engaging brands on Facebook in the US.
Interesting side note: The All Blacks were left off this list despite have 1.8 million fans. I guess rugby teams aren’t brands??? More on this later.
As you can see, there are stark differences between the top brands by numbers and the top brands by engagement with only Air New Zealand and Nutella (Aus & NZ) truly engaging with their large number of fans.
What does this tell us? Numbers aren’t everything! Just ask Barack Obama. If anyone figures out how to engage with fake Twitter and Facebook accounts , let us know.
To add a further factor of interest, not a single brand from New Zealand’s Most Trusted Brands list appears on either of these facebook lists. This shows us you don’t have to be the well known knight in shining armour to engage with people online, you just have to know how to do it right.
So lets focus on the most engaging brands on facebook as the more realist statistic on social media success. In the Top 10 most engaging brands in New Zealand we have four alcoholic drink companies, two foodstuff companies, two communication network providers, one airline and we can’t forget Persil NZ washing detergent.
Compare those brands to the most engaging facebook brands in the United States we see a huge difference. Leading the way are five television networks, followed by one sporting event (non US), one supermarket, one alcoholic drink company, one restaurant and one motorcycle manufacturer. Its safe to say that if Kiwis have a drinking problem then Americans have an even bigger television problem.
So we now know who is engaging the most with their fans. The next question is, how are they doing it??
Tomorrow we will put two brands from each list head to head in our ‘Battle of the Brands’ feature to showcase different ways to engage with your fan base. See you then.
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https://creativeagencysecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CAS_Logo_1line_RGB.jpg00Rob Lanehttps://creativeagencysecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/CAS_Logo_1line_RGB.jpgRob Lane2012-10-02 11:35:592020-01-24 01:44:25Fan Engagement - has a real ring to it doesn't it?
