YOUR Social Media Brand Engagement Data Science?

Too many organizations maintain a Facebook page, at times without much thought about strategy..

Small business and non-profit social media managers typically squeeze in posts around many other job duties. Still, I think much can be learned from those developing the art and science of social business goals, objectives and tactics.

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Brian Massey, founder and managing partner at Conversion Sciences, focuses on business website performance data analysis. “The Conversion Scientist” (complete with his lab coat seen in my recent interview and during an eMetrics Summit presentation last summer) explores the marketing funnel – from lead generation through the optimization of the conversion process.

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“Quality leads,” he says, allow marketers to “use a combination of user testing and A/B testing to prioritize and refine those ideas.” Improvement is defined as those tweaks that increase business revenue. It involves a constant process of innovation to respond to market changes driven by social media and other forces.

As I have noted in earlier blog posts, mobile smartphones are a location-based sensor constantly measuring contextual consumer behavior. From inexpensive content testing panels to big data pools, entrepreneurs are developing new tools to help marketers.

We’re talking about someone who understands how to evaluate data, how to collect data, how to make decisions based on the data they’re collecting, and integrate that into their design process.

Facebook target advertising offers social marketers access to millions of potential customers based upon demographic and psychographic filters. For businesses, that translates into qualified prospects. For non-profit and local government organizations, targeting is an efficient way to reach interested citizens, raise issue awareness, and spark new community engagement.

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Success on Facebook, though, requires advertising experiments and effective “landing experiences” on websites, Massey says. Instead of “spray and pray” blasts, “marketers have to embrace this experimentation culture.”

You may not be ready to wear a lab coat, but Massey makes a good point about Facebook targeting as, “interrupt advertising, as opposed to search, which is intent-driven based on the keywords that are entered.” A strategic campaign integrates words, site design and images, brand management and data. In short, we need to embrace granular, contextual data.

The beauty of testing is that it allows a creative team to respond to data by developing bolder campaigns, Massey says. “We can take those risks because we’re doing it with user testing and small experiments.”

A recent ObservePoint 2017 Analytics Summit made this clear. James McCormick, Forrester Research principal analyst, emphasized that strategic metrics should be coordinated through standards and best practices. Optimization of key performance indicators (KPIs), are grounded in digital intelligence platforms. Understanding “digital touch-points,” he has written, should lead to “optimizing and perfecting experiences delivered and decisions made by brands during moments of engagement.”

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Meanwhile, Massey focuses on site personalized visitor touch-points that locate someone at a place within the marketing funnel. It makes a difference, if a person seeks information, brand engagement, or price discounts. Artificial intelligence (AI) and the use of chat-bots work better for some functions than others. Massey asks, “What is the experience once they click?”

"These devices can be used to manipulate rather than persuade. We want to persuade, not manipulate. So, the more people we have that take on experience experimentation culture, the more diversity we have. I think it will ensure that we have a higher ethical bar of people who are using this data."

Massey says the data trend should not “scare you away from getting excited about the creative part of the job.” Social media marketers will need AI training to do the job five years from now, he adds.

Consider an email subject line. Data scientists can help marketers improve results. “I’ve got to sit down and use it on a daily basis to answer questions.”

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For now, email and Facebook continue to be the primary way to reach people. “Instagram is probably the next frontier,” Massey says. Likewise, Pinterest can be effective. Increasingly, Facebook and YouTube video also are in the mix.

To some extent, the traditional marketing approach distinguishes use of social media from effective Instagram and Snapchat brand influencer campaigns. These sites, along with Twitter, started behind Facebook in offering targeted marketing data. Massey also is keeping an eye on Amazon and its integration of products and user data. “Every campaign is an experiment,” he says. “If we can embrace that experimentation culture, we have the tools, we have the data. We just have to sit down and ask questions that we can answer with data.”

Guest Authored By Dr. Jeremy Harris Lipschulz. Jeremy is a professor in the UNO Social Media Lab, School of Communication, University of Nebraska at Omaha. He is author of Social Media Communication: Concepts, Practices, Data, Law and Ethics, second edition (2018, 2015). Dr. Lipschultz has published books and scholarly articles on media, law, new communication technologies, social media and education. He has been a frequent media source for outlets, such as WGN, NPR, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Omaha World-Herald, KFAB, and others. Follow Professor Jeremy on X.

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For now, Instagram, email and Facebook continue to be the primary way to reach people. “Instagram is probably the next frontier.

Likewise, Pinterest can be effective. Increasingly, Facebook and YouTube video also are in the mix.."

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  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Scottsdale, AZ. 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 ;)

YOUR Next Level Social Media Marketing?

Taking social media marketing to the next level -- Social media is so ingrained in today’s culture that we forget Facebook is already a teenager, while Snapchat has just graduated preschool..

Other social media — including LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and WhatsApp — have joined them to gain an impressive user base.

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In the second quarter of 2017 alone, 110 million people started using social media for the first time, increasing total users to 2.9 billion globally.

Beyond their initial role as vehicles for communication and social expression, however, each social media application has also become a revenue-producing engine. And marketers have been eager to pay for access to a social media audience that is not only growing quickly, but is enriched with data that enables targeting around individuals’ likes and dislikes, demography, affinities, buying behaviors and much more.

Even setting audience growth aside, Facebook could be considered the greatest data management platform ever built, because its users self-declare demographic and psychographic information on a daily basis. Every Facebook “like” and “follow” represents extremely powerful third-party data for brands to harness.

The impact of social media on top line sales is undeniable. A recent study shows that social media is now the primary driver of all website referral traffic. U.S. social commerce sales — purchases made directly from social media posts — grew from $3 billion in 2012 to $14 billion in 2015.

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The most up-to-date marketers are riding the wave, spending $31 billion on social media ads in 2016 — nearly double what they spent just two years ago.

And while Facebook continues to dominate the space, all social media platforms are advancing monetization strategies around their expansive user bases.

Most marketing executives have been scratching their heads as to how to take social media to the next level and show a measurable return on investment in it. Indeed, only 16.3% of CMOs report having the ability to quantitatively show the impact of social media on their business; in a seeming contradiction, they expect to expand social media spend by 89% in the next five years.

We’re now at that Holy Grail point where with social media, marketers can gain a measure of offline return on ad spend by taking sales data and matching it within Facebook to determine whether a product was purchased by someone who had seen an ad.

And where POS data isn’t available, geo-based targeting and tracking is an alternative optimization strategy. This scenario drives people toward in-store coupons pages, for example using geo-fencing to measure “directions to the store” page visits.

We’d like to share some additional ways marketers can optimize their return on the investment they make in social media.

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Targeting

An important recent innovation in marketers’ use of social media has been the ability to allow first-party data to be easily and inexpensively ingested in multiple ways. Examples of this capability include Facebook’s Custom Audiences, Twitter’s Tailored Audiences, and Snapchat’s Snap Audience Match.

It is possible to align campaign objectives by audience within these platforms, either by using offer ads to reintroduce a brand to audiences who have not made a purchase in the last 6 to 12 months, or by introducing new products and increasing purchase frequency with dynamic product ads.

Targeting has thus reached a level of granularity that is producing better results for every dollar spent.

A logical next step for marketers using social media for targeting is lookalike audiences — that is, prospects that have many similar attributes to your top customers.

Lookalike targeting isn’t a new concept — all platforms have their own methods of reaching “similar audiences” — but none of them seems to have extrapolated to having insights about the modeling and what is behind it. Rather than relying on one platform, marketers might consider leveraging a social ad-tech solution such as 4C Insights.

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There are two reasons why this is a good idea. First, there is no certainty that first-party audiences will match demographically with lookalike audiences, since factors such as age, gender and location may be equally weighted among likes and interests within the algorithms. Second, and more obviously, the platforms will sometimes inflate the cost-per-impressions on their lookalike audiences.

Brands need to make sure that they have the Facebook pixel installed on their website — something that may seem obvious, but in fact many sites don’t have this tracking code properly integrated. Facebook’s remarketing pixel can help target all site visitors for up to 180 days at a granular level, giving brands a leg up in their targeting efforts.

Measurement

Even with today’s data-driven approach to marketing, many brands are still using outmoded performance measures such as shares and likes, which do not translate into return on investment.

Now there are ways to report on actual business goals achieved through social ad spend — typically sales and/or in-store visitors. Measuring offline conversions within the social media platforms is relatively straightforward as long as analytics and tracking have been properly implemented and maintained.

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As mentioned above, Facebook and other platforms now allow marketers to connect offline transactions and events to their digital media efforts, providing a more objective measure of offline return on ad spend.

The importance and evolution of the social media platforms is nearly unparalleled in digital marketing. Until very recent years, businesses used social networks only to communicate to audiences that already knew them, or that may have been liked or shared by that audience.

With this new ability to ingest first-party data for targeting and measurement, brands can now reach current customers, and find new ones, more often. This, combined with the fact that social media is driving more direct sales, makes it almost a certainty that the power of social platforms will only continue to increase and multiply.

Guest Authored By Patrick Kuehn & Daniel Ripes. Patrick is senior VP, Sales and Marketing at ObjectWave Corp, a full-service provider of digital commerce solutions. Daniel is is VP of global partnerships at Rise Interactive, a digital marketing agency specializing in digital media, analytics, and customer experience. Follow Daniel on Twitter.

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“With this new ability to ingest first-party data for targeting and measurement, brands can now reach current customers, and find new ones, more often.

This, combined with the fact that social media is driving more direct sales, makes it almost a certainty that the power of social platforms will only continue to increase and multiply." -Patrick Kuehn & Daniel Ripes

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  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBr@nd.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 ;)