Showing posts with label Algorithm. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Algorithm. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 20, 2025

Building YOUR Brand With Social Media?


We are sorry to say that if you aren’t using social media in your marketing plan, you are behind the times..

And if you are using social media, we are sorry to say that you are probably doing it wrong.



Although social media use is an extremely powerful tool in a marketing arsenal, it is not a cure-all and won’t be a viable source for direct bookings that you can measure. But it is vital to your brand and your online reputation.

For some reason, over the past several years social media has morphed from a fun, interactive tool to a trendy sales tool in the eyes of page owners and businesses—this is where the danger begins.



First, let’s think back to the birthplace of modern social media, Facebook.

Facebook was spawned from an invention of Mark Zuckerberg called Facemash, which was originally designed to rate fellow college students on their physical attractiveness (Yes, really). 

Over the years, Facebook has become an extremely engaging platform, even with the ability to market to users. But let’s not forget why Facebook was made in the first place—so people could engage online with one another on a personal level.

If you aren’t engaging your audience, you’re doing it wrong.

Think about this for a moment. You probably have 150 to 700 “friends” on Facebook. (Don’t worry about the business side, I’m speaking merely about your personal friends.) You’re popular, right?!?



However, do you have friends who hardly ever post? Maybe someone you didn’t really know, but who hit that “accept” button anyway? It’s not that they aren’t posting anything. It’s that you don’t hit their like button or comment on their stuff—ever. Facebook realizes this (through its algorithm) and filters out their content from your wall because you are clearly not interested in it.

Now apply that to your business page. If you have fans who never click “like” or comment on your posts, Facebook is going to show less and less of your content to them. It’s the algorithm!

If you post only promotional stuff and do not understand the algorithm, you’re doing it wrong.

People engage in social media for several reasons, and one of those is to maintain relationships. When we approach our fans with the mind-set of a relationship rather than a sale or a booking, we see more engagement, better reviews, and overall happier fans, both now and long term.



Here Is The ROI Issue

What kind of ROI can you expect from social media? That is a question that really should not exist. Yes, you can see the ROI in your social platforms; it does exist. However, asking this question means that you are expecting all your social touchpoints to result in bookings; it just doesn’t work that way. Social media bookings come from good branding, and good branding comes from patience and a well-organized plan.



If you are wondering where to start, ask yourself the following: “What sort of content do my fans like?”

You can publish various types of content and measure the results—count your likes and engagement. Facebook lays it all out for you in your admin panel. By promoting your brand in that fun, non-salesman way, you are giving your fans what they like. This leads to more engagement, which leads to much better brand recognition in the long run!

If you post more content about your company and products than destination-related info, you’re doing it wrong.

The Visual Experience

A popular saying is, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Actually, Fred R. Barnard said, “A picture is worth ten thousand words.” Either way, social media is a visual experience and visual content is forty times more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content (HubSpot). When you think about it, every social platform centers on visual content.

This is your opportunity to publish the funniest, coolest visual content you can, whether that’s photos, videos, GIFs, memes, and so on. Start producing content that amuses your audience, but remember, there might be a difference between what you like and what your audience likes. Again, test and measure.



If you don’t support your message with a nice visual, you’re doing it wrong.

Opinions Matter

One of the most overlooked aspects of social media is reviews. If there is one thing we know about the Internet, it’s that everyone has a loud virtual mouth. Reviews are a powerful tool and have the potential to help or hurt your brand image in a heartbeat!

So how do we use reviews? Actually, republishing reviews could have a great impact on your audience and makes for some fantastic content. This is what we call user-generated content and is considered by some to be the holy grail of the content world because, well, it’s real and from a trusted source—a reviewer.



There is no better way to build trust than to let your audience tell others how much they love you. A great strategy is to post reviews about a rental AND photos of that rental. You could even use this as a remarketing tactic with paid campaigns.

Speaking of Paid Campaigns

Yes, Facebook is a business. It enjoys collecting our money, too. But do the ads work in the vacation rental industry? Of course they do, but again, more for brand recognition than anything else. We won’t get into the differences in “like” campaigns and “audience” campaigns here, but your ads normally get many more impressions than they do clicks, which is why they’re great for promoting your brand.

Remarketing is probably the best tactic you can use on paid Facebook. It’s simple but effective. Remarketing ads on Facebook are ads that display on their Facebook feed after they have visited your website, attempting to hook them again. Again, think of engaging information here as well, such as reviews, or bringing them back to a page they may have missed.



Does Social Media Help with SEO?

To make a long story short, yes. A strong social media presence with interactions from users does help with search engine optimization. Search engines use “social signals” in their algorithms—yet another reason to have a good audience following. Of course, it’s difficult and time-consuming to be present on ALL social media channels, so at least make sure you keep up with the competition. If you and a competitor are running from a bear, you don’t have to be faster than the bear, just faster than your competitor.

What Now?

So now you know that social media for the vacation rental industry, whether on Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram, is about building a trusted brand, not making a sale. It’s about winning over an audience, not pushing them to book. We admit, there are a lot of moving parts when it comes to planning and executing content through your social channels. Writing all those steps down would turn this article into a book.

And don’t get us wrong—there is a place on social media for promoting your rental units, but do it in the paid channel portions, not the regular wall posts.

Just remember, if you use social media as a tool to build your brand as a whole instead of booking units, you’re doing it right.



What You Should Be Doing For Social Media -- TheBare Minimum

*Post three to four times a week to your Facebook Page.
*Post something fun 80 percent of the time and post something promotional 20 percent of the time to increase engagement and reach.
*Respond to your reviews (good and bad) and private messages on Facebook within an hour (a badge on your page displays your response time).
Spend money either remarketing on Facebook or boosting posts.

Great Ideas For Facebook ReMarketing Ads

*Drive users to a page on your website that they may not have seen before, or one that is normally hidden, such as “New Rentals” or “Why we rock as a rental company.
*Use a special Facebook-only coupon code and tease it in the ad to get visitors back to a page that has the coupon (you could also ask them to enter their email address to get the coupon code). Track the code so you know how many bookings you get.

Guest Authored By David Thompson & Paul Hanak. David Thompson is Social Media Director for Intercoastal NE Designs, Paul Hanak is Digital Marketing Director for Intercoastal NE Designs. Follow David Paul on Twitter.




Although social media use is an extremely powerful tool in a marketing arsenal, it is not a cure-all and won’t be a viable source for direct bookings that you can measure.

But it is vital to your brand and your online reputation..
  • Post Crafted By Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)
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Thursday, May 3, 2018

How YOUR Social Media Platform Algorithms Work?


This is exactly how social media algorithms work today..



Each social media network has a unique set of technical elements, intricate logic, and usage analytics that make up the algorithm that delivers content to its users.

Seen in the fluctuation of social media algorithms in the past, the biggest consideration -- or debate -- is balancing personal relevance with post timeliness.

These algorithms are managed by dedicated teams of software engineers, data scientists, content strategists, and more, so nothing you see is an accident. Here's a look inside the criteria and priorities that Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn use to surface content and updates in users' personal feeds and search results -- and what it all means for your social media strategy.



Facebook Prioritizes Meaningful Interactions

Facebook's latest algorithm update, which they announced in January 2018, now puts posts -- that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people -- at the top of your News Feed.

This means the content that receives the most engagement -- reactions, comments, and shares -- will be the highest.

Facebook keeps a historical account of your personal engagement with posts by friends and brand pages, and the Facebook News Feed algorithm also predicts what you want to see based on those past interactions with friends or brands.

Then, it aims to put similar posts upfront in your News Feed from the same people and pages and from those with relevant posts or profiles.



According to Facebook, it defines engaging content and "meaningful interactions" based on:

--Comment Activity: Back-and-forth comments on posts or a news article or video prompting lots of discussion
--Interactive Posts: Posts that you might want to share and react to, such as:
--A post from a friend looking for advice
--A friend asking for trip recommendations

As a marketer on Facebook, you should focus on engagement as the pathway to reach. Let Facebook's engagement metrics lead your measurement strategy: reactions, comments, and shares.

Although Facebook explicitly states that they will "show less public content, including videos and other posts from publishers or businesses," all hope is not lost for appearing in the Facebook News Feed. The more your page followers engage with your content, the more you will continue to appear in their feeds and the feeds of their friends.



Following the criteria above, create content and copy that triggers conversation—or even a healthy amount of controversy.

Facebook also calls out live video as a high-engagement format, getting six times as many interactions as normal videos.

Facebook admitted that with these changes, pages will likely start to see their overall reach, video viewing time, and referral traffic dip. However, pages that keep conversation going among friends will see less of a negative effect. Followers can also proactively choose to see page content first through the "See First" option instead of "Default" in your page's "Following" drop-down menu.

In its latest public announcement about Facebook Search in October 2015, Facebook explained its approach to search results. As you type in the search bar, Facebook predicts your complete search query in real-time, then includes posts and conversations shared publicly and from your friends' accounts.



Instagram Features Newest Posts First

After updating its feed algorithm in March 2016 to have "posts you care about most" appear first, Instagram reverted to a time-based feed in March 2018.

Why backtrack? Instagram states the change was the result of user feedback to make its feed "feel more fresh" through timely content. So it seems that while Instagram felt users would appreciate a more personalized feed based on interaction history, users actually care more about the most recent content.

To summarize the differences between the two updates:

--Relevancy Algorithm: Launched in March 2016, it reordered content in feeds based on the user's relationship (a.k.a. interaction history) with the person posting and the post's timeliness
--Recency Algorithm: Launched in March 2018, it places content in feeds based on each post's timeliness



Instagram's current time-based feed doesn't mean that post engagement isn't as important as before.

But it does mean that post times are more important to ensure your content appears in your followers' feeds at the ideal time.

While there might not be a silver bullet solution for the perfect distribution time, do pay attention to the peak engagement times (or time frames) of your followers—specifically to make the most of any action-oriented content.

Unlike its feed algorithm, Instagram's Search algorithm operates based on personal activity. The mix of photo, video, and story results depend on the people you follow and the posts you like. As your activity changes, so will your search results.



Twitter Puts Personal Relevance Before Timeliness

The current Twitter timeline algorithm, released in February 2016, places relevant tweets first based on your interaction history with the accounts you follow, presented in a section titled "In case you missed it."

These recommended tweets show up in reverse chronological order, meaning the most recent tweets appear first. The rest of the tweets that appear beneath them are also in reverse chronological order.

Twitter made this change so that you can "catch up on the best tweets from people you follow." Also, Twitter found that featured tweets get more live interaction to stimulate commentary and conversations.

Not a fan of Twitter's recommended tweets? You can also choose "See less often" right in your timeline or turn it off completely in your Settings by deselecting "Show me the best tweets first." So while your timeline defaults to personalization, you can have control over which you want to see first:



--Recommended Tweets: Tweets surfaced based on your personal interaction history
--Timely Tweets: Tweets surfaced based on post time in reverse chronological order, with the most recent posts appearing first

Of course, marketers aren't able to know the split of their own followers who do and don't use the recommended tweet timeline.

So when in doubt, optimize for engagement and time. It can only help to create interactive content and distribute it at the optimal times for engagement.

It's important to note that although Twitter's timeline is presented in reverse chronological order, the results of Twitter search are ordered according to relevance -- not time.



Twitter rolled out this search algorithm in December 2016 after much experimentation with balancing tweet and account results, managing the density of video and image results, and optimizing Twitter's machine learning model.

All testing had the goal of giving searchers diverse yet hyper-relevant results, using logic to tweak the relevance scoring and tweet positioning.

Twitter landed on the current search algorithm since the engineering team found that it yielded higher engagement, with people spending more time on Twitter and becoming more active.



LinkedIn Presents Updates by Individual Relevance

As of March 2018, LinkedIn's Feed algorithm focuses on understanding your individual preferences to give you relevant updates per visit. Upon every visitor session, the algorithm scans and ranks tens of thousands of posts in less than a second.

The thousands of signals used to present this content are grouped into three main categories:

--Personal Identity: Your individual LinkedIn profile, including your workplace, skills, and connections
--Content Engagement: The total views, total likes, update topic, post recency, language, and mentioned people or companies
--Personal Behavior: Your past likes and shares, interaction frequency, and time spent in your Feed



The overall mission of LinkedIn's Feed team is to help users be as productive and successful as possible.

Instead of evaluating relevance based on click-through rates, LinkedIn analyzes a variety of signals to measure your interest. These signals include time spent reading, insights from your LinkedIn social graph, and user experience research. Therefore, brand success on LinkedIn is largely determined by time spent with shared content, likes, and comments. Again, it seems that engagement is core to pleasing the algorithm.

Much like Facebook, LinkedIn's Search bar suggests search results as you type, whether for people, companies, or groups. For People searches specifically, LinkedIn's proprietary algorithm returns results through analysis of the searcher's activity and search history, resulting profiles, and other LinkedIn users who have performed similar searches.



What's It All Mean for Marketers?

With all the technical details considered, here's each social media network's default feed algorithm primary criterion (excluding custom user settings):

--Facebook: Relevance
--Instagram: Timeliness
--Twitter: Relevance
--LinkedIn: Relevance

Since relevance is the most common factor, let engagement metrics lead your social media strategy. Even though Instagram is all about post timing, you're more likely to appear in Instagram Search if your posts get a lot of likes and comments.

Guest Authored By Christine Warner. Christine is is a freelance writer and digital marketer with agency, brand, and non-profit experience developing integrated campaigns and content platforms for diverse brands such as Uber, Samsung, Walgreens, Victoria’s Secret, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Dignity Health. Her digital marketing specialties include content marketing strategy, customer relationship management, brand product marketing, digital media planning, social media marketing, and search engine optimization. Currently, she is the Senior Manager of Digital for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, where she oversees the digital marketing efforts for the various non-profit communities and ministries throughout Southern California. As a freelance writer, she contributes regularly to various lifestyle and marketing publications. Follow Christine on Twitter.





"This is the current state of social media algorithms, but you never know when the next optimization might come and change it all.

So follow each network's news and engineering blogs, and stay alert! -ChristineWarner


    • Post Crafted By:
      Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)
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    Location: Loveland, CO 80538, USA

    Monday, January 2, 2017

    2017 Social Media Marketing Tech?


    As we wind down the year and look back on 2016, we find that social media is on everyone’s lips - but perhaps for different reasons than we social media marketers would imagine or prefer. The discussion happening around social media at the end of the year is about responsibility and control..


    The outcomes of the EU Referendum in Great Britain and the American presidential election were no doubt influenced to a greater or lesser degree by social media, from President-elect Donald Trump’s insistence on using Twitter as an unfiltered direct communication channel with his followers and critics, to the soul-searching happening in some quarters about the role social media played in serving up news stories to the American electorate.

    Social media is also being mentioned frequently as the major news and polling organizations come to grips with the fact that their predictions did not see a Trump victory as a serious possibility, while those monitoring the two campaigns on social media, like our own Socialbakers analysts, saw how much support the Trump campaign was able to muster and how much Trump’s controversies galvanized his supporters rather than hindered his path to the presidency.


    In a world of abundance of distraction and entertainment all available on a supercomputer that everyone carries in their pocket - aka smartphone - user attention becomes the new currency of success. And companies that are active on social media (that’s nearly everyone these days) need new forms of support to make this powerful marketing channel work for them. Just thinking about the scale, Facebook alone has 26 percent of all attention in the U.S. through its platforms and Facebook Audience Network.


    Since social media has such a large share of online activity, companies are seeing social media as an important component of their digital marketing and wider marketing strategies. And it’s not limited to just marketing. Customer service, human resources (recruitment and employer branding) and other departments are taking a stake in social, too. This is helping to increase social media’s importance in the organization and spur hiring.

    According to research by McKinley Marketing Partners, digital marketing expertise has been leading the pack in 2016 for the most desired skill sets. McKinley found that 90 percent of all marketing roles required some digital marketing experience or analytical skills.


    Social media is a must-have nowadays, and not a nice-to-have. I predict that it’s going to become a business-critical function within the next year or shortly afterward.

    We’ve been seeing the social media channels themselves mature in terms of the kind of advertising technology they offer. The targeting, flexibility and media buying options available from major social channels is allowing advertisers to target and reach users with unsurpassed precision.


    The range of advertising options on major social channels is playing a pivotal role in helping to make 2017 a watershed year for marketing, when many expect that digital advertising spend will finally surpass TV ad spend for the first time. This shift will be driven to a large degree by the massive amounts of money flowing into social media channels. This influx is driven largely by a significant lag between the share of time users spend on social media and the overall share of budgets invested in this channel.


    As we look ahead to 2017, there are a few pivotal changes we expect to happen to take the industry forward and demonstrate how social media is, and will be, truly critical to businesses:

    Leveraging data to make the next best action with data-driven recommendations

    On social media more than on any other marketing channel, data has been part of the equation from day one, and understanding your data is mission-critical to both improving your performance and delivering greater value from social channels. In 2016, companies have their own platform data in one tool, competitor data in another, ads data in a third, customer service data in a fourth and so on.


    Data silos will need to be broken down and connected to one hub in order to create one cohesive ecosystem of data. Only then will it be possible to tap into all of the relevant data and move past time-consuming manual analysis. With a single ecosystem of data, powerful algorithms crafted by data scientists will pull all of your data together on their own, analyzing it on the fly to present companies with tailored recommendations for what is the next best action they should take.

    Tools to make life easier for customers

    Following on from the point above, it will be essential to create a single ecosystem of all of your data in one place. That means moving from using three to five tools to building one single robust, powerful tool. In 2017 we will see a continuing trend of tools moving toward a more open and comprehensive offer, combining the services of the most important disciplines for the clients and connecting through application-programming interfaces.


    In addition, we will see the now-fragmented industry continue being consolidated by larger players who “tuck in” many of the smaller, niche players.


    For the client, this makes a lot of sense. Only then will they be able to move past manual analysis of various data outputs (listening, competitor analysis, ads, etc.), decreasing both the amount of work they have to do and the number of tools they have to use to do it's working far more effectively and efficiently.

    We see a coming reduction in the number of tools but an increase in staff resources, as cross-product collaboration will further drive this consolidation.

    Automation will become a must-have feature of any consolidated tool

    As these new systems are able to have a comprehensive view of all of your relevant data and present analysis and recommendations from that data much faster, these machine learning algorithms will only continue to get smarter and smarter as you “teach” them by selecting the best among the best options they present you with. The next step is simply automation. It’s not too far off, and it’s not too hard to fathom.


    Having said that, everything starts with a clear definition of goals: What do I want to reach with my investments and how do I measure it? Only with clear goal definition and constant measurement can we allow algorithms to do their magic. In 2017 we will see a strong evolution of the “science/knowledge” of how to successfully maximize social return on investment.


    Once goals are defined, use cases can be programmed. Imagine that you create a performance threshold for automatic post promotion of your organic posts on Facebook: Any organic post that performs better than y in the first six hours after you post it should be promoted with a budget of x. Pretty simple, no? The instructions you give can be as simple or complicated as you like.

    Content will remain king

    Many people think that with the proliferation of the paid media model, the importance of content creation goes away. It might be counterintuitive, but content quality has never been more important.

    Why? Platform algorithms respond to content quality, as they want to serve content to the user that is not perceived as irritating or a distraction. So the price that you have to pay to place your content in front of your audience depends on how well the content actually resonates with the audience - culminating in a simple formula: Good content has much higher reach and lower price than content that is not appreciated by the audience.


    This is a fundamental change, and marketers will need to adapt.

    Generating and sharing content across different platforms and audiences is becoming key to success. This cries for machines to take care of the heavy lifting of timing, audience and budgets so that marketers can focus on generating great content for their customers.


    It’s not too difficult to imagine automation taking over many of the routine tasks social media teams perform today - from customer care to content creation, to ads placement and post promotion. In fact, it’s already happening, and there are engines and algorithms driving hundreds of thousands of different content variations and optimizing what works best.

    Automation is going to save you significant time, and it will only get better as you use it.

    The social revolution we have seen in 2016 - from the rapid growth in livestreaming and video, to the unprecedented social groundswell we saw in the U.S. elections - clearly demonstrates that social is a more and more pervasive medium in our lives.

    Guest Authored By Robert Lang. Robert is CEO of social analytics provider Socialbakers. Follow Robert on Twitter.





    Robert Lang doesn't need "a crystal ball to tell you that in 2017, social media is only going to become more important and influential, both in society and for marketers like yourselves.

    The key to taking advantage of this will be in the tools. Businesses will invest more and more in social and, as such, the tools they use will need to be smarter, more integrated and easier to use."


      • Authored by:
        Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at GetMoreHere.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Los Angeles, CA where I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)
      Follow Me Yonder..                     Instagram
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