Social Media Mistakes YOUR Company Makes?

Over 90% of medium and large businesses have used social media in their marketing for five years or longer. Yet the CMO Survey reveals that nearly half of marketers are unable to show the impact of their social media investments..

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Brand Engagement Data Science?

That’s why, no matter what your social media strategy is, it’s always a good idea to go back and make sure you have the basics covered. Your company may discover that it needs a strategic do-over.

Philip Kotler once said, “You should never go to battle before you’ve won the war on paper.” But countless businesses have done just that with social media. Although 97% of Fortune 500 corporations are on LinkedIn, 84% are on Facebook, and 86% are on Twitter, many brands entered the social media front lines without a clear strategy. Social was an add-on to existing plans —- another outlet to deliver the marketing message. Later, marketers found themselves working backward to connect their social strategy to business strategy, as managers demanded greater proof of ROI.

There are a few common mistakes that marketers make with social media. The first is to start with social media objectives. Marketers take a channel such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and then set goals for raising their numbers of likes, comments, and shares. This approach sounds like it makes sense, but it can trap you in a social media–only perspective. After all, how much is that like, comment, or share actually worth to your business? Unless you connect your social media actions to broader business goals from the beginning, ROI can be elusive, and social media becomes an end unto itself.

Related Article: 5 Top Brand Social Media Strategies?

The second mistake is to limit your brand presence to the most popular social media channels.

Success often depends on having a multichannel social media strategy. Yet only two-thirds of the Fortune 500 (66%) are using YouTube, under half are on Instagram (45%), just over one-third (36%) have corporate blogs, and one-third (33%) are on Pinterest. If you are not using these or other platforms, you could be missing out on valuable business opportunities.

For example, research has found that 93% of Pinterest users plan purchases on the platform and 87% have made a purchase after seeing a product they liked. Other platforms, such as Snapchat, may be the ideal place to reach certain demographics (say, Millennials). Instagram has played an integral role in helping to lift sales for brands including Gatorade. And businesses that have prioritized blogging are 13 times more likely to receive positive ROI.

So how do you ensure that your social media efforts are aligned with what matters to your company — and that you are positively contributing to the bottom line? Start by basing your social strategy on business objectives, then follow that by thinking about target market, social media platforms, tools, and metrics.

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Different organizational objectives and target markets may require very different channels and tools.

Don’t simply set goals for higher follower or engagement metrics in the brand’s current social media accounts. Those platforms may be wrong for your business objectives; channels you aren’t on may be better for what you’re trying to accomplish.

To identify the most meaningful business objectives, ask some questions: What numbers must you hit? How will you know you are successful? How does your boss judge success? What has changed recently that is challenging you? What do stakeholders care about most? Business objectives can vary wildly, from increasing sales, generating leads, or improving customer satisfaction to raising awareness, soliciting donations, or gaining volunteers. Thus your objectives should not be social media–focused, such as “Within six months, we should grow our number of fans and increase engagement on Facebook by posting a minimum of five times a week.” That’s a tactic, not a clear goal. A good objective could be “Increase awareness of the brand by 20% for people ages 18–24 within six months.” Hootsuite suggests that real business goals often come from business conversions, brand awareness, and customer experience.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Sales Targets?

When considering platforms, think carefully about which you should be on — and which you shouldn’t.

Remember that simply increasing your activity on current platforms may not bring you closer to meeting business objectives. Achieving a better ROI may require closing social accounts that are not aligned with business objectives, or even decreasing social action to focus on posts of more substance. Buffer Social, for example, recently got better results by posting less, not more, on Facebook.

Once you’ve identified your objectives and selected the right platforms, you have to create content that the audience will value. Solve a problem they’re facing, deliver a timely message, or just put a smile on their face. Stories that evoke emotion tend to perform better than straight sales messages. Even paid social media posts merely buy reach; the content itself must be engaging enough to draw action beyond a view. Plus, valuable content often gets shared, increasing your reach even further. And don’t simply post the same content to all your social accounts — customizing the content and scheduling for each channel will get better results.

Related Article: Creating A Powerful Social Network?

Yet content only gets you so far. Much of social media ROI is earned in responding to customers.

Sprout Social has found that brands reply to only one in 10 social messages that require a response. This is a huge missed opportunity, since helpful replies to even negative comments can improve your brand image, reach new customers, and increase the likelihood that customers will buy again. Depending on your industry, you may need the customer service department to get involved. Don’t forget, social is a two-way medium.

Next, ensure you have the right tools in place to manage your social media efforts. To measure success, brands need tools that can monitor, publish, and track the appropriate analytics. They also need to integrate social media across departments, since it is an increasingly important part of the strategies of many areas of the business. F

or efficiency, you may need tools that can bring together multidisciplinary social teams across department silos.

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It’s worth considering tools like Google Analytics, which can break down social traffic to see which efforts are working, ranging from website conversions from a direct sale to email subscription, event registration, or quote requests. Setting up goals with dollar values per conversion can help determine where to focus your time and money beyond followers and likes — connecting social media to the bottom line. Monitoring tools can also track analytics such as sentiment. Too many corporations have seen crisis situations where negative comments in social media led to sales declines and drops in stock price. There are numerous social media analytics software options. Spend some time researching which ones are right for your organization.

Once the right tools are in place, identify and track the metrics that will show the returns on your social media investment. Only when you have done the hard work ahead of time — connecting social action to business objectives — do vanity metrics such as likes and followers become more meaningful. Obviously, you can’t directly connect every social action to a business objective, such as an in-store sale. But you can get close by estimating values. For example, if you know that a percentage of customers who request information on your website purchase a certain product, you can trace the connections by looking at related social media posts and the number of visitors being driven to that call to action page.

Guest Authored By Keith A. Quesenberry. Keith is Assistant Professor at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, PA. An expert in social media and digital marketing, he is author of Social Media Strategy: Marketing and Advertising in the Consumer Revolution. Follow Keith on X..

Related Article: Why Study YOUR Social Media Analytics?

If you are struggling to link your company’s social media presence to business goals, you are not alone.

But it is never too late to (re)start at the beginning. Take a step back to ensure you are considering broader business goals and the target market.

Check that you are using the right platforms and are engaging in the right ways. Then make sure you have the necessary tools and metrics in place. It is a lot easier to prove ROI when you have a clear plan for meeting the business’s objectives — and are not simply increasing social action as an end in itself..

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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 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 ;)

Powerful Gen Z Marketing Tips?

Social media is one of the most effective marketing channels for companies of any size..

In fact, it works so well that more than half of U.S. small businesses are planning to increase their social media marketing budget this year..

Related Article: YOUR Social Media 2.5 Billion User Reach?

Generation Z is at the forefront of social media -- they are extremely active on social networks, with half of Gen Z connected online via their smartphones for approximately 10 hours per day. This generation loves personalized apps, and a poll from SCG notes that 88% of Gen Zers are primarily using Instagram and Snapchat. Because of the new ways in which Gen Z is using social media, they’re changing the outlets associated with these platforms as well, with music at the forefront.

Fabrizio Moreira, founder of recording company VIP Music Records, understands the marketing punch social media can deliver, when executed correctly. The company is expanding rapidly, and recently inked a long-term contract with The Orchard, a division of Sony Music.

However, their primary focus has been Latin America, where they now hold the top spot for music distribution in the youth market. As a global study by Nielsen notes, listening to music is a primary source of Generation Z’s entertainment, with 37% of respondents stating it was top choice. This suggests Moreira is on his way to making his label a household name across the globe.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Sales Strategy?

The fast growth of Moreira’s recording company and the success of its artists is a result of several factors, with a solid social media marketing strategy leading the way. I recently spoke with Moreira, and asked him for his top social media marketing tips for Gen Zers.

1. Test Multiple Social Platforms

According to Moreira, you aren’t going to know which social networks will provide value unless you test them. He says, “You have to think like your target customer, and determine what networks they are more than likely to be active on. Then you need to become active and put out a serious effort. It’s not something you can just play with for a day or two and expect to have a concrete answer.

It’s important to experiment with as many social networks as possible and think beyond just dollars when evaluating their value. “You might find that Twitter posts aren’t converting into immediate sales, but it’s a great source for driving new followers to your Instagram page, which does convert at a high rate,” Moreira notes.

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2. Measure Everything With Scaling In Mind

Moreira suggests that all social media efforts should be designed and executed with scaling in mind.

“Social media gives you the opportunity to connect with the world, and when you identify a winning strategy, it can easily be scaled as high as your budget will allow. This is why you read so many stories of startups quickly scaling to millions of dollars in revenue in a short period of time. Social media gives you that unlimited reach ability.”

As the youths’ behavior is changing on these platforms, advertisers need to integrate themselves into their lifestyle. Moreira says, “Consumers are becoming very savvy when it comes to social media, and they are becoming immune to ads and promotional posts that lack creativity. You have to offer something of value if you expect to capture even a second of someone’s time on social media.”

Related Article: The Exponential Growth Of Social Media?

3. Recognize Who Your Target Market Is

“Not knowing precisely who your target market is will lead to an epic fail,” according to Moreira. He suggests that you take the time to properly identify your target market and then utilize all of the targeting options available, with a focus on Facebook to start.

“Facebook has the most targeting options, allowing you to laser-focus your efforts. I see a lot of campaigns make the mistake of focusing on the reach rather than the target. Placing your offer in front of 1,000 highly targeted prospects is going to perform much better than showing it to 500,000 untargeted prospects.” Moreira notes that the smaller targeted audience will not only convert higher, but the overall ad spend will be lower since you are targeting a much smaller pool.

Though Facebook can be a great first test run for targeting, be wary of using it as your primary channel. According to the survey from SCG above, Generation Z’s usage is down, with only 66% using it daily.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Listening Power?

4. Realize That You Have To Spend Money To Make Money

This is the point that Moreira really focused on. “Far too many brands think that they can post organically and that the business should roll in. Social media has become a pay-to-play platform and anyone complaining about that needs to re-evaluate the situation. These social networks are no different than the companies using them -- everyone is in it to turn a profit.”

Moreira suggests starting with a small budget and then increasing it once you find ad copy and ad formats that perform well. “You also need to realize that it’s going to require a testing budget before you should realistically expect results. You can’t load up $20 and then become discouraged when you don’t find immediate success.”

Guest Authored By Deep Patel. Deep is the Founder of Owl Metrics, a serial entrepreneur, marketer and bestselling author of A Paperboy’s Fable: The 11 Principles of Success. The book was dubbed the #1 best business book in 2016 by Success Magazine and named the best book for entrepreneurs in 2016 by Entrepreneur Magazine. Also recognized as a top 25 marketing influencer by Forbes, He has worked with VC-backed startups to Fortune 500 companies. He's am also a contributor at Forbes, Entrepreneur, The Huffington Post and Success Magazine. Follow Deep on Twitter.

Related Article: Social Media Marketing Best Practices?

When marketing to Gen Z on social media, it can be tough to find the quantitative levels of success you’re after.

However, by sticking with a plan that is telling a genuine, relatable story, you can reach not just fans, but followers for years to come.

And if anyone knows how to do this, it’s the man who will probably have a bust of himself in Cleveland someday soon..

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  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 ;)

Best Time Of Day For Social Media Posting?

A study shows the best times of day to post to social media..

U.S. companies are expected to spend more than $37 billion dollars on social media promotion annually each year by 2020, representing 24% of the economy’s total digital advertising spend. It’s an astounding number, given that the vast majority of social media managers charged with getting customers to click on posts and through to their websites operate with little strategy beyond what we call “spray and pray,” an approach that litters social media with firm generated content in the hopes that one or more of those posts draw in customers.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Post Timing?

There is a better way. Our research on circadian rhythms suggests that content platforms like CNN, ESPN, National Geographic, and others can enhance their profit payoffs by at least 8% simply by posting content following the biological responses of their audience’s sleep-wake cycles and targeting content types to when the audience is most naturally receptive to it.

On the surface such an approach doesn’t sound difficult. But social media managers face innumerable possibilities for posting content. For example, a social media manager tasked with posting 10 stories in a day and with a budget to promote four of those stories can schedule the sequence of social media posts in over 7 trillion ways. By replacing rules-of-thumb and gut feeling with precise science rooted in biology, we believe social media scheduling can not only be more cost-efficient, but also be a strong part of content platforms’ profitability.

Related Article: YOUR Online Presence Monitoring Tools?

Putting an Ad Hoc Strategy to the Test

We interviewed social media managers from several major content platforms about how they decide what to post and when. Overwhelmingly, we heard that they made decisions using simple rules of thumb. For example, they would post between 7 am and 9 am and pace stories at least 30 minutes apart. In this time period, they generally focused on local and sports news but did not pay attention to whether the posts were meant to make readers angry or happy or surprise them.

Also, the managers typically had a budget for “boosting” posts. That is, they were able to pay social media platforms to advertise specific posts to broader audiences based on demographics, interests, and location, which potentially increased the click-through rate. Most of the managers we spoke with spent a bulk of their budget on boosting local and sports news, which they believed would match their audience’s preferences. Regardless of whether or not a post was boosted, social media managers had a specific goal: to attract a proportion of interested visitors to click-through to their website. Because advertisers featured on the content platform’s website are willing to pay for unique impressions, the impressions channeled through social media link clicks generate significant digital advertising revenue for the content platform.

Related Article: Maximum Engagement Social Media Strategy?

When we examined the link clicks of 5,706 posts on the Facebook page of a major U.S. newspaper, we found that, true to what social media managers suspected, morning posts had higher click-through rates than posts at other times of the day. Specifically, content posted in the morning attracted 8.8% more link clicks than content posted in the afternoon, and 11.1% more link clicks than content posted in the evening. But the managers’ ad hoc approach to “boosted posts” did little to bring in revenue, nor did their assumptions about when to post specific content types prove true.

Surprisingly, we saw that boosted posts in this data set earned $60,921 more in revenue in the afternoon than in the morning, and that while local and sports stories were popular, entertainment and lifestyle stories generated the most amount of link clicks. Most surprising to the managers we interviewed was our conclusion that social media content that made readers feel angry or worried led to more links clicks in the morning compared to posting content that elicited the same feelings in the afternoon or evening. In short, all else being equal, posting content with a negative slant in the morning, and boosting posts in the afternoon yielded overall higher click-through rates and better returns than what social media managers typically saw with “spray and pray.”

Related Article: Top CEO Social Media Strategy?

The Science Behind a Successful Strategy

We can explain why the negative morning posts and the boosted afternoon posts are most profitable for content platforms by considering human working memory, which is responsible for temporary storage and manipulation of information needed for our daily tasks. Human working memory exhibits inherent variation across time of day and is highest when we wake up in the morning, lowest in mid-afternoon, and moderate in the evening. Higher availability of working memory makes individuals alert and feel the need to seek information. This means that consumers’ desire to engage with content will likely be highest in the morning, lowest in the afternoon, and moderate in the evening.

Importantly, when working memory is more resource deprived, the brain prioritizes preferential information in order to stay efficient. When consumers are exposed to boosted content—which is required by law to look different from non-boosted content—on social media, the working memory picks up an external cue that this is important information. Thus, boosted content is most effective in the afternoon (when our working memory is low) and least effective in the morning (when our working memory is high). Consumers’ receptivity to content eliciting deep cognitive processing varies according to the availability of working memory, too. In our research we saw articles that required deeper engagement with ideas—think op-eds and science-based articles—were more frequently clicked on in when working memory was high.

Related Article: What Other Peoples Advertising Can Teach YOU?

As the working memory becomes resource deprived in the afternoon, it activates a natural mechanism that inhibits any information that creates emotional responses which hinder the function of working memory. This minimizes distraction toward focal tasks and in turn increases attention toward focal cognitive tasks, which results in higher engagement toward posts involving superior cognitive processing.

Using Biology to Gain an Advantage

Knowing how social media posts perform by time of day, content type, and boosting we built a prescriptive decision support tool to help social media managers decide which time slots to pick for each post, which posts to boost, and how many posts to boost in a day given a boosting budget. We also drew on two other important findings of our research: that the sweet spot for inter-post duration within our data lies in the range of 30-90 minutes and that while every dollar spent on boosting does increase link clicks, increased spending has diminishing returns. We calibrated our model parameters using Facebook posts from 355 days for a major U.S. newspaper and then used these model parameters within our decision support tool to predict profit-maximizing schedules for the next 10 days, constraining the budget for boosting to the one that the newspaper firm had allocated for those 10 days. When we compared the projected gross profit resulting from the proposed schedule with the actual gross profit realized by the firm during those 10 days, we found that the proposed schedule resulted, on average, in an 8% increase in gross profits.

Related Article: Crucial Social Media Strategy For YOUR Brand?

While the tool did make profitable decisions, many of our lessons can be implemented quickly and independently by any organization. For instance:

--All else equal, posting content in the morning results in higher engagement.

--Boosting posts is most effective when the target audience is experiencing low working memory.

--Assuming the majority of the audience start their day in the morning, it is ideal to post content conveying high-arousal emotion (i.e., angry or worried) in the morning and “deep think” content in the afternoon.

--A firm does not need additional boosting budget to increase gross profits. Simply rearranging the posts to match content preferences of target audience can do the trick.

--Increasing boosting budget does not necessarily increase gross profits. There is a tipping point where additional spending results in only marginal increases in gross profits.

Guest Authored By Vamsi K. Kanuri, Shrihari Sridhar and Yixing Chen. Vamsi is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business. Shrihari is a CED Professor of Marketing and Presidential Impact Fellow in the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University. Yixing is a Ph.D. student in Business Administration (Marketing) in the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University. Yixing holds an MBA from University of New Mexico and a Bachelor's degree in Finance from Southwestern University of Finance and Economics.

Related Article: Adjusting YOUR Business Social Media Presence?

"In this burgeoning and lucrative field of social media content scheduling, the aforementioned guidelines can and should replace “spray and pray.”

In 2017 alone, users worldwide consumed about 5.53 billion hours per day of social media content, up by 264% in the past five years.

With a real strategy, built from an understanding of WHY consumers engage with a firm’s social media content, content platforms have a chance at capturing more and more of that valuable attention and being able to monetize their digital content.."

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  Post Crafted By:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Salt Lake City, UT. 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 ;)