Optimize YOUR Facebook Social Media Strategy?

When Facebook released its second-quarter earnings report this year, it made clear that Facebook is running out of news feed ad space. This means simply that there is increasing competition among advertisers in the news feed..

As a marketer, how do you react to that? Does it mean that you have to invest less in Facebook?

Related Article: Important Social Media Network Updates?

No -- instead, you should make your social media strategy smarter by optimizing the segmentation and targeting of your audience.

Creating and promoting the content loved by your audience, by optimizing frequency, and by using advanced advertising options to further nurture your audience. Once you optimize, you can deploy with confidence the same budget or even more. In either case, an improved social strategy will lead to better return on investment.

But why a better content strategy? Because improved content quality leads to improved engagement, which leads to improved relevance score, and improved relevance score leads to lower cost per click (CPC).

Unfortunately, according to the Havas Meaningful Brands study, 60% of content created by brands is just clutter. Additional data gathered from a sample of purely Facebook ads posted by brands suggests that 44% of the content that marketers are putting their budget behind on Facebook is poor-quality content. This can not only potentially affect brand image but it significantly impacts advertising costs.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Sales Targets?

Cost per click is 10 times higher for ads with 1% click-through rate (CTR) than ads with a CTR of 2%. When looking at CTR of 5%, the difference in costs is more than 30 times. The click-through rate here can be considered as a measurement of how valuable the content is for the audience as it quantifies users’ motivation to interact with the ad.

Facebook made the measurement of ad success easier for marketers by introducing the relevance score metric. The score ranges from 1 to 10, representing the ratio of positive versus negative feedback on each ad, with 10 as the best possible score.

Related Article: YOUR "Innovative" Social Media Advertising?

If you take a look at the relationship between relevance score and CPC, you can see that ads with a very low relevance score have 40 times higher CPC.

All of the data we’ve reviewed suggests that optimizing your advertising strategy has a significant impact on costs, and therefore on increasing social ROI. But in the end, it’s about the potential customer and what impression an advertiser can make within their limited news feed.

But let’s look at a hypothetical situation and evaluate the estimated advertising performance outputs for two extreme situations: an extremely low relevance score compared to an extremely high relevance score given a certain amount of money spent, in this case, $100.

In the chart below, you can see the predicted performance gap for ads with these two different relevance score intervals. This gap demonstrates a potential return loss in the investment that is caused by the fact that the ad is not optimized well.

Related Article: Cost-Effective Social Media Advertising?

The horizontal line represents the $100 spent and the vertical lines represent the predicted output – number of clicks for a very low relevance score of one to two versus the predicted number of clicks for a highly relevant ad with a relevance score of nine to 10.

If the advertising space is getting saturated, there’s an opportunity for you to now really start focusing on better understanding your audience and what they want. It’s not about mass advertising and blanketing the news feeds with your branded content. Now more than ever, marketing is about understanding your audience's needs and wants, carefully creating content that will resonate with them and delivering it in a cost-efficient way by tying outcomes to business goals.

Related Article: 8 Social Media Marketing Success Stories?

Here are a few really simple tips to help you optimize the return on your ad spend and keep your ad costs down:

Post Relevant Content

Content is king and that has never been truer than it is today. If your content is not relevant to your audience, they will reject it and click it away. In turn, this will have a damaging impact on your Facebook relevance score.

Post Your Ads At The Time Your Audience Wants To See Them

Timing is key to increasing the exposure of your ad. Marketers always need to ask themselves, Am I posting my content when my audience is online and ready to view it?"

Target Your Ads

Since the relevance of the content is critical to the success of the ad, marketers need to make sure that they are targeting the right content to the right audience. When it comes to sharing content with your audience, it’s not a one-size-fits-all case.

Related Article: Promoting YOUR Social Media Content?

Measure Your Success

Once the content is created and out there, marketers need to measure its success in real time. If something about the content or the time of the posting isn’t driving engagement, it’s better to know and rectify immediately rather than wait for days to pass before making adjustments.

If you’re really strong on measuring and understanding your audience, in the end, you'll end up optimizing your advertising costs. Instead of sending your content to audiences who aren’t interested in it, you’re focusing your efforts on creating relevant content for the most relevant audience groups.

Social media marketing optimization is critical to preventing marketers from making mistakes and inefficiently deploying budgets. Marketers cannot resolve this on their own; they need to be equipped with social media marketing solutions that help them make smarter marketing decisions.

Guest Authored By Dr. John Malatesta. John is CMO and Executive Vice President at Socialbakers, a global leader in social media analytics and management. Follow John on Twitter.

Related Article: Facebook - Beyond Social Media?

“Social media marketing optimization is critical to preventing marketers from making mistakes and inefficiently deploying budgets.

Marketers cannot resolve this on their own; they need to be equipped with social media marketing solutions that help them make smarter marketing decisions.."

• 

  Authored 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 ;)

Powerful Social Media Success Metrics?

One of the most exciting aspects of digital and social media marketing is also one of the most challenging, since it's always changing..

Platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter constantly release new features, policy changes and algorithm updates that influence the way we approach our campaign tactics. The key to optimizing your social media performance is data.

Measuring your results from these campaigns is always a top priority. The main challenge is figuring out which metrics are most important and how to apply them. In other words, it's not just as simple as looking at "likes." Here are the metrics we deem most important for our clients based on campaign type for both organic, unpaid social media efforts and paid ad campaigns.

Organic Campaigns

Link clicks: In Facebook Insights, you can see overall clicks on your posts, but you can also break it down further to see specific link clicks. Link clicks are the most important, because they show the most relevant form of engagement. This tells you your audience is interested enough to learn more, and if they're on your own site, you can track their journey from there.

Related Article: YOUR Organic Social Media Marketing?

A client of ours once wished to boost a Facebook post (an uploaded photo with a link in the text above) for clicks. Initially, he was not pleased since the post received a high number of clicks but a low number of conversions on his site. It turned out that he was looking at total clicks and not link clicks, which required a different evaluation. Since total clicks were so much higher than link clicks, we were able to attribute a significant amount of page "likes" to that particular post. The difference helps you to attribute your successes (and failures) more efficiently.

Reach versus impressions: Reach is the number of people who see a post, while impressions are the number of times the ad was seen. For example, if an ad was shown to the same person twice, it would count as one reach and two impressions. If your campaign goal is to get your ad in front of a specific number of people or get the word out to as many people as possible, then reach would be the appropriate metric to look at.

If your goal is to have your ad shown a specific number of times to your audience to increase brand awareness, then impressions would be a suitable metric to look at. It all depends on what your goal is.

Related Article: Cost-Effective Social Media Advertising?

Platform engagement: Platform engagement here means likes, retweets, shares, comments, follows, etc., and while probably overrated in terms of its importance for driving ROI, it is helpful for appearance's sake in terms of interesting content. Though it's less reliable than link clicks, it can help increase reach and impressions when people interact with your content. For example, if you do work for a networking business where social media brand optics are important to its operations, Facebook reactions become legitimate metrics to keep track of in your campaign.

Paid Ads

Conversions: Whether it's a form-fill, a sign-up or an e-commerce buy, you must have a conversion goal in mind when creating ads. This provides a direct ROI for your efforts, which is crucial. Our first step when taking over a client's Facebook is installing the base pixel on their website, and then setting up the conversion event code that is relevant to them.

By using the pixel to track the journey from the Facebook sponsored post all the way to the purchase screen on their site, we can track people's digital paths.

Related Article: The Social Media Platform For YOUR Business?

Sometimes it's even simpler than installing a pixel code. On LinkedIn, you can use lead generation forms as the goal of your sponsored content campaign, and interested individuals can have a seamless path to contacting your business and becoming a lead. Whether it's ticket sales or lead forms, paid social media campaigns should provide ROI in a trackable way.

Button clicks: On Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram ads, there is oftentimes a call-to-action button, like "Contact Us," "Learn More," "Buy Now" etc. These are the best types of clicks to attain because they show the most direct intent.

In our experience, tracking button clicks is best in Facebook Ads Manager and Instagram for a specific B2B client of ours. Due to its high cost of conversion, we couldn't just use conversions as a metric. We first looked at just link clicks, and they were even across the board. We then looked at button clicks and saw that one ad had far more than others.

This told us that more people were expressing explicit intent to convert, which was effective because the ad with the most button clicks had the most conversions when the campaign ended.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Engagement Metric?

Relevance score: The relevancy score ranges from 1-10 (10 being the highest) and is the best way to see the bang-for-your-buck about how the ad is performing in the Facebook algorithm. It lets you know how effective the pairing of your creative is with your audience and can assist you with campaign optimization.

To test this system, we set up a campaign with three different ad sets, each with identical creatives but with different target audiences. This allowed us to gain insights into which audience was the most appropriate for our campaign goal based on the relevancy score each ad set received. We then targeted the audience that had the highest relevancy score and tested different creatives against each other to achieve the highest reach. There's no use speculating about what audience, creative or strategy might work best when you can just check the numbers.

Social media isn't just some vague, unmeasurable, slight benefit to your business. There are all sorts of metrics to use, and that data can be leveraged to ensure improvement, optimization and overall effectiveness of campaigns.

Guest Authored By Bob McKay. Bob is the the president and owner at McKay Advertising & Activation, digital media masters that help you put strategy first. Follow Bob on Twitter.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Success Metric?

“Social media isn't just some vague, unmeasurable, slight benefit to your business.

There are all sorts of metrics to use, and that data can be leveraged to ensure improvement, optimization and overall effectiveness of campaigns..”

• 

  Authored 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 ;)