You think twice about sharing it, don’t you?

There’s a way for marketers to control the way their content displays as it shows up on social networks, including Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. You control the social media content your page generates through social meta tags.

For instance, if someone copies a link to the index page of the Tim Ferriss blog in their Facebook status update:

It looks like this:

What you see here has room for improvement. You want to compel a viewer to click, right? The problem here is that the image, headline, and description haven’t been crafted to get a click. People probably ignore or trash this post instead of sharing it.

Luckily, the title, description, and image that automatically pop up when a user shares a link on many social networks can all be specified by the content publisher. When you optimize your content to look good on social media, it is more likely to get a click.

Social share optimization is one of the tactics we prioritize with our SMM services.

Why? Well, aren’t you much more likely to click on the post if it comes across your feed looking like this?

Read on to learn how to customize the headline, description, and image of your pages using social meta tags. Jump to these sections with the links below, or read on for your guide to optimized social media content:

• Pro tips for crafting social meta tags
• Using WordPress? social meta tags in WordPress plugins
• Open graph tags
• Twitter card markup
• Schema for sharing on LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest
• Social Media Promotion with Meta Tags
• FAQ: How can I optimize my social media content using social meta tags to increase click-through rates and engagement?

Pro Tips for Crafting Social Meta Tags

The point of using social meta tags is to control the way your content is displayed in feeds rather than letting Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms generate the headline, description, and image for you.

• Adjust or recycle unused title ideas by using them as headlines in social media content.
• You may want to test different versions of an image. Use Open Graph tags and Twitter Card tags as a social media marketing testing ground.
• Tweak the image and content based on the network. Showcase images and text that will appeal to the unique interests of each network’s distinct audience.
• While Twitter is said to default to Open Graph tags if no Twitter Card markup is on the page, in our experience, you get a more controlled result if you include both types of social media markup on a page.

Using WordPress? Social Meta Tags in WordPress Plugins

If you’re using WordPress, several plugins make it possible to implement social meta tags without ever having to write a single line of code.

Some options include:

• WPSSO for social markup across the major social sites
• JM Twitter Cards for the full range of Twitter Card types
• WordPress SEO by Yoast for Facebook Open Graph tags and Twitter Cards

WordPress plugins for social meta tags are a quick and easy way to associate custom headlines, descriptions, and images with your WordPress posts and web pages on a page-by-page basis.

If you’re using different software to operate your site, the social markup for Facebook Open Graph, Twitter Cards, and the other major social networks is below.

Open Graph Tags

The Open Graph protocol is Facebook’s standard for implementing social meta tags. It has also become recognized by all the major social platforms, including LinkedIn and Twitter. This means that Twitter, LinkedIn, and other networks often pull the headline, description, and image indicated in the Open Graph tags.

The critical Open Graph tags are:

In order to have the Facebook shares that come from your webpages formatted with a headline (title), description, and image of your choosing, like this:

… here’s what the social meta tags must look like in the HTML code:

<meta property=”og:title” content=”The Always-Up-to-Date SEO Checklist from Bruce Clay Inc.” />

<meta property=”og:url” content=”https://www.bruceclay.com/blog/seo-checklist/” />

<meta property=”og:description” content=”Just getting started optimizing websites? Here’s a time-tested SEO checklist to keep on-hand during your projects.” />

<meta property=”og:image” content=”https://www.bruceclay.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/SEO-Checklist.jpg” />

<meta property=”og:type” content=”article” />

To make sure your Open Graph tags have been properly configured, use Facebook’s Sharing Debugger to view an error report and see a preview of how a shared URL will appear when posted to Facebook.

Pro tip: If you update a page’s OG tags, use the Sharing Debugger to force Facebook to do a fresh scrape of the URL, which will cause Facebook to pull the new social meta tag data. Otherwise, it might pull from the cache instead of showing your updated content.

Twitter Card Markup

Twitter Cards allow you to attach photos or videos to Tweets with a few lines of code. There are several types of Twitter Cards, but Summary Cards and Photo Summary Cards are most commonly used.

The basic markup tags for Twitter are:

So in order to get this:

… the Twitter Card social meta tags will look like this:

<meta name=”twitter:card” content=”summary_large_image” />

<meta name=”twitter:title” content=” The Always-Up-to-Date SEO Checklist from @BruceClayInc” />

<meta name=”twitter:url” content=”http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/seo-checklist/” />

<meta name=”twitter:description” content=”Just getting started optimizing websites? Here’s a time-tested SEO checklist to keep on-hand during your projects.” />

<meta name=”twitter:image” content=”http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/SEO-Checklist.jpg” />

Want to see what your page will look like when pasted into a tweet? Input a URL into the Twitter Card validator to see a preview and make sure you’ve configured your Twitter Card social markup correctly.

Pro tip: If you update a page’s Twitter Card tags, use the Twitter Card validator to force Twitter to do a fresh scrape of the URL, which will cause Twitter to pull the new social meta tag data. Otherwise, it might pull from a cache instead of your updated tags.

Schema for Sharing on LinkedIn and Pinterest

As mentioned, Open Graph tags are read by Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Most social networks recognize and support Open Graph as a default standard when it comes to social markup. But there is another solution for Pinterest and LinkedIn, which is schema markup.

To use schema markup to customize the title, description, and image associated with your LinkedIn or Pinterest, the social meta tags look like this:

<html itemscope itemtype=”https://schema.org/Article”>

<meta itemprop=”name” content=”Blog Post Title”>

<meta itemprop=”description” content=”This a description of blog post”>

<meta itemprop=”image” content=”https://www.domain.com/image.jpg”>

Again, this schema markup will go in the HTML code associated with your post right before the closing head tag, </head>.

You can validate your schema markup using the Google Structured Data Testing Tool.

Read more on using schema and structured markup to improve how your content is displayed in our technical SEO and schema markup guides.

Social Media Promotion with Meta Tags

Start thinking of your social media content, like social advertising. Strategic social markup for enhanced distribution is everything in today’s dynamic digital landscape.

The key to maximizing your social distribution is to control how your content is displayed in feeds rather than letting Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms pull content from the page for you. By optimizing the meta tags that control social media content, you can craft messages about your blog post geared toward the distinct audiences you have on each social network.

Much like page title tags and meta description tags help boost organic search engine rankings, social meta tags are elements in your HTML that boost social exposure, increase social media traffic and improve click-through rates.

For additional help crafting more informative meta tags, be sure to check out our advice on how to use keywords in SEO.

FAQ: How can I optimize my social media content using social meta tags to increase click-through rates and engagement?

Leveraging the full potential of your content goes beyond crafting captivating posts; it’s about ensuring your message resonates with your audience. This is where social meta tags come into play. These unassuming code snippets are key to maximizing click-through rates and engagement on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Social media is a bustling landscape where millions of pieces of content compete for attention. To stand out, you must provide users with content that speaks directly to their interests. Social meta tags offer a solution. By customizing your headlines, descriptions, and images, you can create a tailored experience that captures attention and entices users to delve deeper into your content.

Open Graph tags and Twitter Card markup are your secret weapons for optimizing content display on Facebook and Twitter. Craft a compelling headline that sparks curiosity, a concise description that delivers value, and an image that resonates with your target audience. This orchestrated effort ensures your content is not lost in the sea of posts but instead shines brightly on users’ feeds.

Don’t limit yourself to just Facebook and Twitter. LinkedIn and Pinterest also have their preferences. Schema markup can help you optimize the presentation of your content across these platforms, customizing titles, descriptions, and images to meet each platform’s target audience.

If you’re a WordPress user, implementing social meta tags becomes even more accessible. With plugins like WPSSO, JM Twitter Cards, and WordPress SEO by Yoast, you can streamline the process and effortlessly associate custom headlines, descriptions, and images with your posts and pages. This empowers you to maintain consistency across your digital footprint while ensuring optimized display on social networks.

Social meta tags are not just technical elements but the bridge between your content and your audience. By taking the reins and crafting how your content appears on social platforms, you enhance your chances of capturing users’ attention and driving engagement. Optimizing your social media content with social meta tags in a world where every click counts is a strategy worth mastering.

Step-by-Step Procedure:

1. Determine the social media platforms for which you want to optimize content (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest).
2. Familiarize yourself with the basics of social meta tags, including Open Graph tags and Twitter Card markup.
3. Identify the key content you want to promote through social meta tags.
4. Craft an attention-grabbing headline that encapsulates the essence of your content.
5. Create a concise yet impactful description highlighting your content’s value.
6. Select or design an image that aligns with your content and captures users’ interest.
7. Implement Open Graph tags in your HTML code to customize the content display on Facebook and other platforms.
8. Utilize Twitter Card markup to optimize content visibility and engagement on Twitter.
9. Explore schema markup options to customize content presentation on platforms like LinkedIn and Pinterest.
10. Choose the appropriate schema tags (itemscope, itemprop) and populate them with relevant content details.
11. To simplify tag implementation, Consider using WordPress plugins like WPSSO, JM Twitter Cards, or WordPress SEO by Yoast.
12. Install and configure the chosen plugin according to its documentation.
13. Access the plugin settings to input custom headlines, descriptions, and images for your content.
14. Use social media validators (e.g., Facebook’s Sharing Debugger, Twitter Card validator) to test and preview how your content will appear.
15. Adjust and refine your social meta tags based on validation results and platform-specific requirements.
16. Update your website’s code with the revised social meta tags.
17. Monitor the performance of your optimized content by tracking click-through rates and engagement metrics.
18. Analyze the data to identify trends and areas for improvement in your social media strategy.
19. Continuously iterate and refine your social meta tags based on user engagement and platform changes.
20. Stay updated on best practices and emerging trends in social media optimization to maintain a competitive edge.

The post What Are Social Meta Tags? How to Control How Your Content Looks in Social Media Shares appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Shopping on Instagram: Instagram storefronts and affiliate programs take hold. The online fashion industry is many billions of dollars, and visuals rule. Look for massive growth in the area of Instagram shopping.

Instagram is not just a place millennials go to post funny cat pics. There’s real money changing hands, influenced by the platform.

Marketers are taking note, recognizing Instagram as a potential direct response channel — especially with all the new ways shopping is getting easier on the platform.

So are you ready to add shoppable Instagram to your retail marketing mix? Read on to find out:

• If your target demographic is on Instagram
• How people are shopping on Instagram today
• What industries are embracing the social platform — and seeing ROI

Reason No. 1: Your Customer Is (Probably) Shopping on Instagram

Thirty-two percent of all online adults use Instagram. Here’s the demographic breakdown:

To a greater extent than the other social platforms measured in this survey, Instagram use is especially high among younger adults. Roughly six-in-ten online adults ages 18-29 (59%) use Instagram, nearly double the share among 30- to 49-year-olds (33%) and more than seven times the share among those 65 and older (8%). And as was the case in previous Pew Research Center surveys of social media use, female internet users are more likely to use Instagram than men (38% vs. 26%).

Over a third of Instagram users have purchased a product online from their mobile device, making them 70% more likely to do so than non-users.

Half of Instagram users use social media for product research.

On Instagram, half of users follow brands, making it the social platform where users are most likely to do so.

Plus, Instagram users are most likely to make a purchase influenced by content seen on the platform. A third of Instagram users bought an item of clothing they saw on the social network.

Instagram suggests that fashion brands are most likely to see direct response marketing success due to the segment’s high engagement level. Fashion fans check the Instagram news feed 15 times a day, post three times as much as the average user, and have 200+% more followers than the average user.

“Instagram is now the ‘look book’ for brands people love and the shop window for small businesses on mobile,” said James Quarles, Instagram’s VP of monetization.

Reason No. 2: Instagram Is Testing a Native Shopping Feature

In November 2016, Instagram announced it was testing a new shopping featureon the platform.

This new functionality allows Instagram to capture the entire consumer journey, from search to purchase — well, almost; the purchase still happens on the business’ website.

… 20 US-based retail brands including Kate Spade, JackThreads, and Warby Parker will share posts that have more depth, making it easier for Instagrammers to review, learn about, and consider the items that interest them. Each post will have a tap to view icon at the bottom left of a photo. When tapped, a tag will appear on various products in the post—showcasing up to five products and their prices. Once a tag is selected a new detailed view of the product will open. This functionality will bring important product information to the consumer earlier in the journey, all without having to leave the Instagram app to search. Then, if the consumer taps the Shop Now link from the product details view, they’ll go directly to that product on the business’ website, making it easier for them to buy the product they want.

Here’s an example of this in action:

Kate Spade from Instagram for Business on Vimeo.

According to Instagram’s VP of monetization, James Quarles, in an interview with TechCrunch, Instagram is not going to take a cut of the proceeds when purchases are made, and instead plans to monetize the feature as an ad type on the Instagram advertising platform.

While native shoppable photos are not yet available to everyone, there are third-party tools that retailers are using right now to allow followers to shop their Instagram feeds.

Take Scoutsee, for example. This app allows anyone to create a storefront linked to their Instagram account to “continue sharing what you love on Instagram and choose what you want to make shoppable.” (Full disclosure, Scoutsee is a client of Bruce Clay, Inc.)

Reason No. 3: Certain Industries Are Made for Instagram

In the middle of the media frenzy of New York Fashion Week, Instagram emerged as a breakout star.

Fashion and beauty brands are using Instagram as part of their strategic marketing efforts today.

Fitness brands are, too.

CMOs in these sectors are prioritizing Instagram this year. In the “2017 MarTech Wish List,” CMO Jen Lavelle of fashion brand Mizzen+Main had this to say:

“Our biggest MarTech-related need or wish for 2017 is to gain a shopable Instagram … It creates an amazing customer experience, and it’s something we hope to be able to offer in the near future. It’s an awesome way to let your customers buy something straight from Instagram without navigating away from the native application. Any time you can cater to your audience and make the mobile-online shopping experience an easy one is a win.”

Reason No. 4: Because You Can’t Afford Not To

The final reason may be obvious: Be where your audience is or slowly fade away.

In his book, “Engage! The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate and Measure Success,” Brian Solis reiterates the importance of your brand being on social media today:

New Media is simply a matter of digital Darwinism that affects any and all forms of marketing service. In a world of democratized influence, businesses must endure a perpetual survival of the fittest. Engage or die.

If you can become an Instagram influencer or collaborate with an influencer, imagine the possibilities of your brand’s reach and ROI.

Want to sell to Millennials, Gen X and even some Baby Boomers? Get on Instagram. Got a fashion, beauty or fitness product? You should be there. In fact, any retailer should consider Instagram in 2017.

Instagram is part of the new media revolution, and now more than ever, it’s allowing brands to monetize their efforts. If you don’t, your competition will.

So What Are You Waiting For?

With new features and apps that are making Instagram a more shoppable social platform, and certain multi-billion-dollar industries recognizing its purchasing power, we fully expect massive growth in the area of Instagram adoption and revenue.

Is your retail brand on Instagram? I want to know what challenges you’re facing. Let me know in the comments below.

Let us help you drive and track traffic to your website with integrated search and social media marketing solutions. Our strategies are tailor-made to match your business goals and audience.

Let’s talk about your 2017 ecommerce digital marketing strategy.

The post 4 Reasons Your Retail Brand Needs to Be on Instagram Right Now appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

If you’re a marketing professional, then you can’t ignore the power of social media. When used correctly, it’s an important tool to increase web traffic, brand reputation, and visibility online. But how can you be sure you’re using social media correctly? How can you get more out of your social media efforts?

The first question to ask yourself is what role does social media currently play in your marketing program?

• Customer service
• Lead generation
• Sales
• Data gathering
• Ad targeting
• All of the above

If you answered “All of the above,” then you’re an organization with digital marketing maturity and you’ve run out of low-hanging fruit. So what are you planning to add to your social marketing strategy in 2017? Is it to be smarter, stronger, and faster?

And how will you strategically integrate your social media strategy into all the other components of your marketing mix? After all, social media is just one part of an overall marketing strategy. Your marketing mix likely includes everything from SEO to paid media, social, mobile, content and more.

So, here’s your 2017 social media power play. This year, make it a priority to integrate your digital marketing efforts. You can make gains by applying what you learn from search marketing to your social media efforts and vice versa.

2017 continues to be a year of integrated digital marketing programs. Social media, paid search, display, SEO, content, PR, email — they’re all levers of a big-picture marketing machine.

In this article I will:

• Describe the effects of social media on search engine optimization — two marketing channels with a historically fuzzy relationship.
• Share valuable tips on how to be where your social audience is.
• Offer 5 ways to integrate data from social media marketing into other marketing channels like SEO and PPC.
• Share statistics of the impact of cross-channel marketing when organizations embrace integration.

The Relationship between Social Media and SEO

First, let’s tackle the conversation about how social media and SEO work together. Many misconceptions exist regarding the effects of social media on organic search rankings.

For years, people have been trying to figure out if, and how, social signals impact search rankings.

Back in 2014, former Googler Matt Cutts said social signals were not part of the ranking algorithm. Again in 2016, Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed it.

Meanwhile, Bing has stated that it uses social signals as ranking factors. From the Bing Webmaster Guidelines help files, we read:

“Social media plays a role in today’s effort to rank well in search results. The most obvious part it plays is via influence. If you are influential socially, this leads to your followers sharing your information widely, which in turn results in Bing seeing these positive signals. These positive signals can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.”

In addition to being a factor in ranking algorithms, we know other ways that social media marketing can impact organic search.

• Social media profiles and content can show up in organic search results. This gives you more real estate in the search results. Take Twitter, for example. In 2015, Twitter gave Google access to its firehose, which allows Google to index tweets so they show up in the organic search results. (Caveat: even with this access, one study showed that Google doesn’t index every tweet, but only those it deems worthy.)

• Social media mentions and activity can be a catalyst for organic search queries. This is about being top of mind, and growing brand visibility. Plain and simple: social media stimulates interest. A simple tweet or Facebook update posted by a brand, or someone mentioning a brand, can later cause a person to search for that brand and its products, services or target keywords on Google. And social mentions are important in helping search engines determine when people have interest in what your site is about or what your company is about. Social updates may not generate valuable links to your site, but they absolutely signal to the search engines that people are talking about your brand. We call this “buzz.”

And here’s something to ponder: it’s no secret that Google Analytics uses aggregated data across industries from companies that opt in to help you benchmark.

We can imagine a world in which Google could use the social referral data to see how much traffic is coming to a particular website from social, and make inferences about that brand.

I’m not saying Google is doing this or even has an interest in it, but the data is there for the taking, should they ever want it.

How to Be Where Your Social Audience Is

OK, now that we’re clear on how social media can impact organic search, let’s talk about evolving your social media strategy.

Much of that is going to depend on being where your audience is, and not trying to be everywhere at once — or be where you think you should just because your competition is there.

For example:

• If you’re a B2B, you likely have a captive audience on LinkedIn.
• If you sell a product, Facebook might be your platform.
• In fashion? Check out Instagram as a social community to put your efforts into.
• If your target audience is millennials, Snapchat may be where you want to go.
• If you’re targeting women, Pinterest is worth exploring.

If you’re not sure where to start, leverage the research of others. Nielsen and Pew Research Center have a fair amount of data on social media platforms and who uses them for what.

What if you sell toilet plungers or some other obscure product or service? Well, social media isn’t for everyone.

You don’t have to be on social sites to fulfill some digital marketing checklist. Go where your audience is. And if that’s a “Toilet Plungers of America” tradeshow and not Facebook, that’s perfectly OK.

Once you’ve refined your social media targets, test, test and re-test.

Test your presence on your chosen platforms on both the paid and organic side of things. Paid social advertising is usually going to let you see results faster (meaning, if a campaign’s messaging is working or not) and target better.

And know that every social platform has its own algorithms for surfacing content, like Facebook , Instagram and so forth.

Even Google has its own method for how it indexes tweets in its search results, so just like SEO, you want to get familiar with those social algorithms in the places you want your brand to be.

5 Ways to Integrate Social Media Data with Other Marketing Channels

We know that marketing efforts do not exist in a silo. Using data across your marketing channels will help create a more cohesive experience for your target audience.

Here are five ways to use social media data for your marketing efforts:

1. Discover web content ideas from customer service activity on social media. Knowing the real-world challenges your target audience is dealing with can help you create content that answers their needs.

2. Find web content ideas in social communities, comments and most engaged posts. What is your target market talking about in your various social media platforms? Use this knowledge to help inform your content strategy for your website, on your key landing pages and in your blog.

3. Get remarketing audiences from the website’s cookied users and similar audiences from the email team’s lists. You can use this data to do some retargeting advertising of the people who have already expressed interest in your brand, products or services, or who may be very interested in what you have to offer.

4. Use social media advertising results to inform search advertising efforts, and vice versa. Use best performing messaging in social media ads as test creative for search ads.

5. Derive link magnet ideas from trending topics on social media. The beauty of social media is that it allows brands to be a part of the real-time conversation. Find out what’s trending, and think about the content you can create right away to attract users to your site.

Success Stories of Marketers Embracing Social Media Integration

More than 5,000 marketers weighed in on the benefits of social media to their businesses in the 2016 “Social Media Marketing Industry Report” by Social Media Examiner.

The top two benefits cited included increasing exposure and traffic.

In fact, improved search engine rankings was a prevalent concept. From the report:

Improved search engine rankings were most prevalent among those who’ve been using social media for 1 year or longer, with 54%+ reporting a rise. At least 59% of those investing a minimum of 6 hours per week in social media marketing saw improvements in search engine rankings.

What type of social media involvement does it take on a daily basis to see an impact on web traffic? According to the report, it’s minimal:

A significant 79%+ of participants found that increased traffic occurred with as little as 6 hours per week invested in social media marketing. And those who’ve used social media for 1 year or more reported substantially better results (73%+ reported benefits), compared with those with less experience.”

Your Social Media Strategy Starts Here

Social media (and digital marketing in general) is a bit like fishing. And to catch fish, there are two things you must do: 1) Use the right bait and 2) Fish where the fish are.

And since social media is just one part of an overall marketing strategy, be sure to integrate social media efforts into other marketing channels in ways that make sense for you.

Evolving your social media strategy this year is really about understanding how much social plays into reaching your audience and into the other facets of your digital marketing strategy.

Once you’ve figured that out, you can determine how much effort needs to go into which social media activities in order to see a return.

I want to know your biggest challenges with social media marketing in 2017. Tell me in the comments below.

Let us help you drive and track traffic to your website with integrated search and social media marketing solutions. Our strategies are tailor-made to match your business goals and audience. Let’s talk about your 2017 digital marketing goals.

The post How to Improve Your Social Media Strategy for 2017 appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

• Using Snapchat
• FAQ: How can I unlock the potential of Snapchat for my business and connect with millennials effectively? 

Using Snapchat

Building a Strong Following: To get started on Snapchat, focus on gaining followers. Make a promise that sets you apart from others and deliver on it. Provide exclusive deals, updates, intimacy, and fun to attract and retain followers. Promote your Snapchat account through various channels using your username and snap code.

Embracing the Snapchat Style: Snapchat has its own unique style and language. Keep your content short, fun, and designed in the Snapchat style using stickers, filters, text, and drawings. Get familiar with Snapchat’s vocabulary by exploring resources like Urban Dictionary.

Sharing Exclusive Deals: Create a sense of scarcity, urgency, and exclusivity with your deals. As Snapchat Stories no longer play automatically, entice your followers to come back by offering exclusive deals and content.

Announcing Important Updates: Use Snapchat to drive awareness and store visits by announcing sales or new products. Leverage the platform’s reach to engage your audience and generate interest.

Elevating Your Visuals: Snapchat is a powerful video platform, rivaling Facebook in daily video views. Invest time in enhancing your photography and videography skills. Focus on striking visuals, contrast, and lines to create captivating content.

Mastering Snapchat Hacks: Explore the various hacks and features of Snapchat to make your content more engaging. Switch between front and back cameras with a double tap, zoom in and out while recording videos, and use a stylus or tablet for doodling.

Storytelling with Sequences: Overcome the 10-second time limit by creating a sequence of images and videos that connect to form a story. Save these sequences to your camera roll and repurpose them on other social media platforms.

Building Intimacy: Snapchat demands intimacy like no other social media platform. Foster trust and connection by spending time with your audience, having conversations, and sharing behind-the-scenes content. Involve your followers to deepen the bond.

Running Effective Ad Campaigns: If you have a substantial budget, consider sponsored campaigns on Snapchat. Starting at $100,000, these campaigns can yield positive results, such as increased purchase intent.

Hosting Engaging Contests: Drive participation and excitement among your audience by running contests on Snapchat. Offer coupons or prizes that incentivize engagement and create buzz around your brand.

Collaborating with Influencers: Influencer takeovers on Snapchat can be highly entertaining and engaging. Find influencers who resonate with your audience and collaborate to reach a wider demographic.

Creating Custom Geofilters: Leverage the power of geofilters to enhance brand visibility during events or at specific locations. Use cost-effective on-demand geofilters to create memorable experiences for your audience.

Embracing Authenticity: Break through the noise and stand out by being real on Snapchat. Share content that reflects your brand’s personality and values. Differentiate yourself by going against the norm and providing unique perspectives.

Gamifying Engagement: Snapchat incorporates a scoring system based on user interactions. Focus on building engagement and earn points by interacting with your audience. Use engagement metrics, such as unique views, story completions, and screenshots, to measure success.

Avoiding Third-Party Apps: Steer clear of third-party apps that offer shortcuts for posting content on Snapchat. These apps may violate the platform’s terms of service and result in temporary lockouts.

With a way to connect with millennials and their growing spending power, Snapchat is crucial if you’re going after a younger audience. By following the strategies we’ve outlined, your brand will build a strong Snapchat presence.

And don’t forget to embrace authenticity, innovation, and compelling storytelling to make a lasting impact on Snapchat and beyond.

Ready to unlock Snapchat’s potential and captivate millennials? Dive into these expert strategies now to elevate your brand’s presence and connect authentically in the ever-evolving world of Snapchat marketing. Contact us.

FAQ: How can I unlock the potential of Snapchat for my business and connect with millennials effectively?

Leveraging social media platforms is crucial for connecting with diverse audiences. If you’re wondering, “How can I unlock the potential of Snapchat for my business and connect with millennials effectively?” you’re not alone. Let’s delve into this inquiry with the expertise needed to navigate the vibrant world of Snapchat and successfully engage with the millennial demographic.

Understanding the Snapchat Landscape

To start, comprehend the unique features Snapchat offers. With its ephemeral nature, Stories, and interactive lenses, Snapchat provides a creative space for businesses to showcase their personality. Millennials, known for their appreciation of authenticity, are drawn to engaging and visually appealing content.

Crafting Authentic Stories

Millennials value authenticity. Craft your brand narrative through Snapchat Stories that resonate with your audience. Share behind-the-scenes glimpses, highlight company culture, and, most importantly, keep it real. Authenticity builds trust and creates a connection that transcends a mere transactional relationship.

Utilizing Interactive Features

Snapchat’s interactive features like lenses and filters can elevate your brand’s engagement. Create branded filters that users can apply to their snaps, turning them into brand ambassadors. Encourage user participation through interactive elements, fostering community around your brand.

Strategic Content Planning

Develop a content strategy tailored to Snapchat’s short-form, visual nature. Keep content relevant, entertaining, and aligned with your brand identity. Use a mix of product showcases, user testimonials, and interactive polls to maintain a diverse and engaging content calendar.

Leveraging Snapchat Ads

Snapchat offers targeted advertising options that can boost your visibility among millennials. Utilize the platform’s advertising tools to create visually striking ads that align with your brand message. Target your audience based on demographics, interests, and behaviors to maximize the impact of your campaigns.

Step-by-Step Guide: Unlocking Snapchat’s Business Potential

1. Create a Snapchat Business Account: If you haven’t already, set up a dedicated business account on Snapchat.
2. Define Your Audience: Identify your target demographic among millennials to tailor your content effectively.
3. Explore Snapchat Features: Familiarize yourself with Snapchat’s features, including Stories, filters, and lenses.
4. Craft Authentic Content: Develop a content strategy that reflects your brand’s authenticity and resonates with millennials.
5. Utilize Interactive Elements: Experiment with interactive features like filters and lenses to boost user engagement.
6. Plan a Content Calendar: Outline a consistent posting schedule and plan diverse content to keep your audience engaged.
7. Create Branded Filters: Design and deploy branded filters to encourage user-generated content.
8. Encourage User Participation: Foster a sense of community by encouraging users to share their experiences with your brand.
9. Explore Snapchat Advertising: Delve into Snapchat’s advertising tools to target your ads effectively.
10. Optimize Ad Creatives: Design visually appealing ads that align with your brand and resonate with your target audience.
11. Set Advertising Budgets: Allocate budgets strategically to maximize the impact of your Snapchat advertising campaigns.
12. Monitor Analytics: Regularly analyze Snapchat analytics to assess the performance of your content and ads.
13. Adjust Strategies: Based on analytics, refine your content and advertising strategies to optimize results.
14. Engage with Followers: Respond to comments, messages, and user-generated content to build a sense of community.
15. Collaborate with Influencers: Identify and collaborate with Snapchat influencers to extend your brand reach.
16. Stay Updated on Trends: Keep abreast of Snapchat trends and adapt your strategies to stay relevant.
17. Measure ROI: Evaluate the return on investment for your Snapchat efforts to ensure they align with business goals.
18. Adapt and Evolve: In the dynamic social media landscape, be flexible and adapt your strategies as needed.
19. Collect User Feedback: Solicit feedback from your Snapchat audience to continually refine your approach.
20. Celebrate Milestones: Acknowledge and celebrate milestones with your Snapchat community to strengthen brand loyalty.

Mastering Snapchat for Business Success

Unlocking the potential of Snapchat for your business and effectively connecting with millennials requires a strategic and authentic approach. You can cultivate a meaningful presence on Snapchat by understanding the platform, creating engaging content, utilizing interactive features, and leveraging advertising tools. Embrace the dynamic nature of this social media giant, and watch your brand resonate with the ever-discerning millennial audience.

This article was updated on December 11, 2023.

The post Unlocking the Potential of Snapchat for Business: 15 Expert Tips appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

The Facebook algorithm takes into consideration engagement, relevance, timeliness, and thousands of other factors in an effort to populate people’s News Feeds with more of the stuff they want to see, as inferred by Facebook.

Unlike sites where everything you post automatically shows up for every person who follows you, Facebook uses an algorithm to dictate what content appears in an individual’s News Feed. In Facebook’s official words, “The goal of News Feed is to show you the stories that matter most to you. To do this, we use ranking to order stories based on how interesting we believe they are to you.”[1]

In a sentence, the Facebook algorithm weighs factors to determine on a post-by-post basis whether a post is qualified to pass into an individual’s News Feed. And given Facebook’s impressive stats (1.71 billion monthly active users at last count[2]), it’s worth finding out how to extend your content’s reach organically on this platform.

What’s in the Facebook Algorithm?

Facebook calculates the authority and importance of Facebook Pages based on several factors — the most prominent of which is social interactions. The social site rewards engagement, so the algorithm considers the ratio of engagements to total number of followers.

The number of people “liking” your Page isn’t the main criterion. Content creators having real interactions with people, even if the audience size is smaller, carries more weight in the algorithm than an account with thousands of mute (and possibly fake) followers.

But that’s on the Page level. Individual posts have ranking factors, too.

The engagement cues that count in the algo include likes, clicks, comments and shares. But the social network also looks at the length of time spent viewing a post in the News Feed as an indicator of content people want to see more of.[3] The lesson here isn’t surprising — quality counts.

The News Feed filtration system — once called EdgeRank but now simply referred to broadly as the Facebook algorithm — takes into consideration as many as 100,000 individually weighted factors to deliver the most authoritative, relevant, and timely content to individuals.[4]

Of those 100,000 considerations, the three original EdgeRank factors — Affinity, Weight, and Time Decay — are still relevant and prominent ranking factors. In other words, EdgeRank hasn’t gone away. Its principles have simply been folded into a much larger, more advanced contemporary Facebook algorithm.

4 Factors the Facebook Algorithm Takes into Consideration

Facebook keeps adjusting its algorithm. It’s not just trying to find the right balance of ads and content, but also the right mix of shares from various sources.

1. Interaction a post is generating: Not just how much, but also what type — liking, commenting, clicking, sharing, or time spent viewing. Each of the interactions has its own weight depending on the amount of effort it takes to perform.
2. Who made the interaction: How directly connected is the user to the poster? It’s based on manual friendship designations, the user’s preferences, closeness inferred by interaction, and other factors.
3. When the post was made: Time decay happens because the News Feed rewards freshness.
4. Post popularity: If a post is losing the freshness edge because of time decay, but lots of people are still actively commenting on or sharing it, the engagement can trigger a bump that expands the post reach.

UPDATE 2/27/2017: Facebook announced today that it is “updating News Feed to weigh reactions [haha, wow, love, sad, angry] a little more than Likes” to help determine what an individual user is most interested in seeing.[5]

Also see 4 Ways to Optimize Your Facebook Presence.

4 More Factors Brand Pages Need to Know to Increase Organic Reach

Social sharing is a critical part of content marketing. But Facebook isn’t going to appreciate a business Page using Facebook just to promote its own content. Short of boosting posts with actual money, here are a few tips to help you keep your posts circulating through the network.

1. Don’t use click-bait: Facebook’s algorithm weeds out click-bait headlines, the kind that give little information about what the person will find if they click through.[6] So make sure to put enough description in your headlines.
2. Link the right way: Facebook favors links shared as link posts. The algo frowns on image and status posts containing a link in the text.[6] You’ll get even more reach if you leave off the link altogether! Sharing in a variety of formats is best, with and without links. With our own Facebook Page (see here), we get 10X more organic reach on posts without a link — probably because Facebook likes keeping people on its own site.
3. Mobile site load time must be fast: To improve the mobile UX, Facebook announced that “website performance and a person’s network connection” are considered when delivering promoted (paid) posts.[7] We can assume that how fast a page opens for a mobile user can affect the reach of organic link posts, as well. (Tip: Publishers can make sure their content loads fast using Facebook Instant Articles.)
4. Go for engagement: The social network’s tips for effective posts include: keep it short; use big, beautiful images; and respond to people’s comments quickly.[8]

Also see 4 Ways to Optimize Your Facebook Page for Search.

Want to boost your social media engagement? Our social media services may be the answer!

Sources:

1. http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2015/07/updated-controls-for-news-feed/
2. http://newsroom.fb.com/company-info/
3. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/04/news-feed-fyi-more-articles-you-want-to-spend-time-viewing/
4. http://marketingland.com/edgerank-is-dead-facebooks-news-feed-algorithm-now-has-close-to-100k-weight-factors-55908
5. http://mashable.com/2017/02/27/facebook-reactions-news-feed/
6. http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/08/news-feed-fyi-click-baiting/
7. https://www.facebook.com/business/news/improving-mobile-site-performance
8. https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/facebook-page-effective-posts

Editor’s Note: This is an update of an article originally posted by Chelsea Adams on Sept. 30, 2013.

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The post What Is the Facebook Algorithm? appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

Of course, you’ll want to find the right social media software that aligns with your needs and goals. In this article, I will explore the factors to consider when choosing social media tools so that your social media marketing strategy has the power it deserves.

What to Look for When Choosing Social Media Tools

As you search for the right social media tool, here are seven factors to consider:

• Cost and features
• Contracts
• Google Analytics integration
• Supported social networks
• User access
• Access to historical data
• White labeling
• Comparison of social media software options
• FAQ: What are the key factors to consider when choosing social media management tools? 

1. Cost and Features

The price range of a social media tool can vary from $50 to $1,600 per month.

Lower-priced options usually offer basic features like follower growth tracking and reporting. On the other hand, higher-priced tools provide advanced features like social listening reports, competitive analysis, hashtag tracking, and more.

(Some tools even offer free versions that give you basic functionality.)

Consider your budget and the specific features you require to make a cost-effective choice for your business.

2. Contracts

Most social media software providers require a year-long contract. However, some options like Sprout Social and Quintly offer month-to-month payment plans, providing flexibility for your business.

Be sure to carefully review the contract before signing so that you know what you’re signing up for.

3. Google Analytics Integration

You’ll want to see if your social media marketing strategy is actually bringing in traffic, so you may want to consider a tool with integrated Google Analytics.

Some social media tools generate reports similar to Google Analytics’ Social Referrer Report. Evaluate whether separate data platforms are acceptable for your reporting needs or if integration with Google Analytics is necessary for your business.

4. Supported Social Networks

Social media marketing is not a one-size-fits-all, so decide which social networks your target audience spends time on.

While platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook are typically included, some tools offer additional integrations with platforms such as Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, and more.

5. User Access

Different social media software packages allow varying numbers of user logins.

Assess the size of your team and the number of individuals who require access to the software. Ensure that the chosen tool offers adequate user access to facilitate efficient collaboration and management.

6. Access to Historical Data

Historical data can help you identify which messages and strategies resonate with your audience. However, not all tools provide access to data that existed before you started using the software.

Nuvi is an exception, offering historical data for X (formerly Twitter).

7. White Labeling

White labeling allows you to customize the software’s branding to match your company’s identity. This provides a seamless integration of the software into your overall brand experience.

While lower-priced accounts often lack this feature, higher-priced options like Nuvi offer white labeling at an additional cost.

Consider whether white labeling is essential for maintaining a consistent brand image across social media management tools.

Now that we’ve covered the key considerations let’s take a closer look at some popular social media software options and their associated features and costs.

Comparison of Social Media Software Options

• Nuvi: Nuvi offers packages priced at $600, $900, and $1600 per month. Their social media software provides advanced features, including comprehensive social listening reports with advanced sentiment analysis, competitor analysis, customizable threshold alerts, and content management capabilities. It supports multiple social networks, allowing you to monitor and analyze data across various platforms. Additionally, Nuvi offers white labeling at an extra cost for seamless branding integration.
• Sprout Social: Sprout Social offers a range of plans starting from $59 to $500 per month. The lower-priced plans provide basic features such as follower growth tracking and mentions. As you move up to the higher-priced plans, you gain access to advanced reports, Google Analytics integration, white labeling, and a message approval workflow. Sprout Social supports Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, ensuring comprehensive coverage of major social networks.
• Quintly: Quintly provides packages priced at $129, $299, and $479 per month. While Quintly may not offer Google Analytics integration or content management features, it does support white labeling. If having control over your software’s branding is a priority, Quintly may be a suitable option to consider.
• DataPine: DataPine offers packages priced at €219, €399, €699, and €799 per month. Their software includes features such as Google Analytics integration and white labeling. However, it does not provide content management capabilities. Evaluate your specific requirements to determine if DataPine aligns with your business needs.

To get the most out of your social media marketing, it’s obvious you need a tool. Be sure to analyze your target audience and what has worked in the past to identify which tool you need.

There are many options, and most offer free trials, so be sure to try out a few before choosing the tool that will supercharge your social media marketing strategy.

What’s your preferred social media software? Share your thoughts in the comments.

FAQ: What are the key factors to consider when choosing social media management tools?

Businesses and individuals must select an ideal social media management tool based on their goals and resources. Our guide explores key considerations to aid this decision-making process.

1. Purpose and Goals:

Begin by defining your social media objectives. Are you looking to increase brand awareness, engage with your audience, or analyze data? Your goals will dictate which features and functionalities you need in a management tool.

2. Platform Compatibility:

Consider which social media platforms you intend to utilize. Ensure the tool you choose supports the most relevant platforms to your target audience.

3. User-Friendliness:

User interface and ease of use are crucial. Opt for a tool that your team can navigate comfortably, as this will impact efficiency and productivity.

4. Features and Integration:

Evaluate the tool’s features. Does it offer scheduling, analytics, and monitoring capabilities? Furthermore, check if it can integrate with your existing systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM) software.

5. Cost and Scalability:

Determine your budget and select a tool that aligns with it. Additionally, consider scalability – can the tool accommodate your future growth without significant cost increases?

6. Analytics and Reporting:

Comprehensive analytics and reporting are vital for measuring the effectiveness of your social media efforts. Choose a tool that provides in-depth insights and customizable reports.

7. Customer Support and Training:

Assess the quality of customer support and training the tool’s provider offers. A responsive support team and accessible training resources can save valuable time when troubleshooting issues.

8. Security and Compliance:

Ensure the tool complies with data privacy regulations and offers robust security features to protect your social media accounts and data.

9. Reputation and Reviews:

Read user reviews and seek recommendations from peers in your industry. A tool’s reputation can provide valuable insights into its reliability and performance.

10. Trial Period:

Choose tools with free trials whenever possible to see if they suit you before making the commitment to subscription services.

Selecting social media tools that meet your goals and circumstances is paramount to improve social media strategy and productivity. When selecting an application, it should help enhance both.

Step-by-Step Procedure for Selecting Social Media Management Tools:

1. Clearly define your social media objectives and goals.
2. Select your social media platforms.
3. Prioritize UX design and make sure everything is user-friendly.
4. List the essential features and integrations required for your social media management.
5. Determine your budget and consider scalability.
6. Prioritize tools that offer robust analytics and reporting capabilities.
7. Investigate the quality of customer support and available training resources.
8. Ensure the tool complies with security and privacy regulations.
9. Research the tool’s reputation through user reviews and industry recommendations.
10. Take advantage of trial periods to test the tool’s suitability whenever possible.

Following these steps will enable you to evaluate and select social media management software that best fulfills your objectives and needs.

This article was updated on September 13, 2023.

The post Is Your Company Ready to Invest in Social Media Tools? Which Factors Should You Consider? appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

In the session “SEO & Social: Let’s Dance!” at SMX Advanced, speakers Jason White, Maggic Malek and Travis Wright will share the latest ways marketers can leverage the social world to help advance SEO, build brand awareness, and engage with prospects. From employee advocacy to remarketing ads, there are many options in the overlap between search and social.

Establishing an Employee Advocacy Program: Jason White

Jason White (@sonray), VP SEO & SMM for DragonSearch, starts to talk about distribution networks. Social media is a fascinating distribution network. As an industry, a lot has been written about the declining reach of organic. If you’re a small brand building an audience, it can be a really frustrating, slow process to see that your social media posts don’t get seen by many people naturally.

Employee Advocacy

#SMX exclusive –>@DragonSearch‘s @sonray on employee advocacy! Love it. #SEO @smx #socialmedia #smm pic.twitter.com/s8cblaeYOe

— Kristi Kellogg (@KristiKellogg) June 22, 2016

Employee brand advocacy (which White thinks is a silly name) describes the process in which brands get bigger reach through their employees’ social profiles. When the concept first was introduced to Jason, he found it creepy — but he can’t deny that it works. It works because it has greater reach than that of the brand in some cases. The influence that employees can gain for a brand can’t be ignored.

There are two main aspects to establishing an employee advocacy program. First, there’s the networks they’re on. Then there’s the mechanical aspect — what are you looking to deliver through their networks?

Optimize as much as you possibly can and find the wins. White says not to look just at social, but get these employee advocates to be blog authors. Their names matter. Build them up. A lot of people only look at employee amplification and leave it at that, but if you’re looking full funnel you see email, chat, forums, and other places where you can leverage that employee’s voice.

Available Tools for Employee Advocacy

• SocialChorus
• EveryoneSocial
• Hootsuite Amplify
• Dynamic Signal
• GaggleAMP
• Bambu Sociabble

Cultural Considerations

Some companies are collaborative, some are creative, some are competitive — and some are controlling. In a controlling environment, your employee advocacy strategy might be a little bit different. But it can still work.

Establish Goals (the first step of any program)

• Extend reach
• Build followers
• Drive traffic to the site
• Drive more leads
• Reach new or existing demographics
• Retain current clients vs. find new clients
• Testing
• Branding
• Improve brand sentiment

Important to Keep in Mind

Employees are brands in and of themselves. They should have the freedom to share and not share as they think fits their image/reputation. Not all messages should be shared by all participants, and that’s okay.

[Editor’s note: Companies also need to be sure that employees disclose their relationship when endorsing products/services. See the FTC’s endorsement guidelines for details.]

Timeline

Month 1: Get comfortable. Form a weak baseline.

Month 2: Require tweaks to the process and get deeper insights to form a stronger baseline.

Month 3: Hit your stride.

Gamify

People feed off competition. The prize doesn’t have to be crazy. People feed off competition. The reward could be a gift card or a half day off or anything. If the program is dying, a reward can get things going again.

Conversions that Change Hearts and Minds: Maggie Malek

Maggie Malek (@MagsMac), head of social media at The MMI Agency, says there’s a new consumer landscape — search and social can no longer be separate. Things have changed in the past four years:

• Written content is now graphic content.
• Social traffic is not guaranteed.
• Social engagement is a different ball game.
• Brands have to pay to play.

Identify moments that matter. “I believe that everything is better if you lead with the head and follow with the heart,” says Malek. The head is search and the heart is social. Both have to be constantly talking to each other and exchanging data.

• Start with data.
• Create conversations.
• Ignite data.

You must understand yourself as a brand and know exactly who you are conversing with. Define your spirit and stand for that spirit in every aspect of search and social.

Lead with the Head

What are people searching for in the privacy of their own Google search box?

What questions are they asking?

What trends are you seeing?

But Google isn’t the only place people are searching:

• Facebook open graphs
• YouTube organic search
• Amazon products and reviews
• Twitter search
• Instagram hashtags
• And on and on …

Let the Heart Provide Context

• What are people saying about your product to their friends?
• How are they interacting with your competitors?
• What customer service issues are they having?
• What content is getting the most engagement?

Metrics for Awareness vs. Conversion

Some metrics measure awareness: Reach/impressions, engagement, mentions, clicks/CTR, site traffic, brand awareness and sentiment.

Other metrics measure conversions, or reaching goals you’ve set, such as: leads, checkouts, conversion rate, average order value, cart abandonment rate, customer retention rate and customer LTV (lifetime value).

Pick Your Channels

Success looks different for every brand. What metrics will you be looking at?

Three Types of Content

Hero: Large-scale tent-pole events or “go big” moments designed to raise broad awareness.

Hub: Regularly scheduled “push” content designed for your prime prospect.

Hygiene: Always-on “pull” content designed for your core target.

Plan for Unbridled Success

1. Hire the most amazing writers as brand ambassadors. We as people don’t like to read crappy content.
2. Assign a dedicated team. There’s a lot going on in search and social, and it’s really, really hard to do both.
3. Identify collaborators on each team. Establish a cadence to data share.

Malek has a publication checklist you can check out here: mmiagency.com/smxadvanced (PDF)

Takeaways

• Know your brand voice.
• Chart your course with data, but let your heart lead the way.
• Rally around content that represents who you are.
• Develop a relationship on social media that allows you to glean even MORE data from your consumers to personalize their experience.
• Convert social sensations into content opportunities.

Enhance Your Marketing Strategy: Travis Wright

Travis Wright (@teedubya), chief marketing technologist for CCP Global, is up. He’s talking fast about the overlap of social with both organic search and paid search. He has a lot of slides to share!

Search and social is all about content. We have to create epic content. Content can be great, but it’s useless if no one hears it.

Diversify Your Content Types

Analyze your content via BuzzSumo.

Figure out who shared your content. Then make a Twitter ad campaign to target those people.

Use Remarketing Campaigns

After people visit your site, you want to track your prospect. When the prospect leaves, your ad will show up on another site. Use pixels.

Wright says organic reach is over. Marketers need to be prepared to use paid reinforcements.

If you do any type of email marketing, combine it with Facebook ads — email openers are now 22% more likely to purchase. When ads show up in multiple places, they think you’re huge. #Retargeting

Also watch my pre-SMX interview with Jason White and Maggie Malek for more insights on the opportunities between search and social.

Like our liveblog coverage of SMX Advanced? Subscribe to the BCI Blog and get new posts by email.

The post Set Your Traffic on Fire: Latest Ways to Amplify SEO, Including Employee Advocacy – #SMX appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

It turns out that the WordStream founder’s pyramid scheme is a real thing, and it’s not even shady! It’s just a memorably scandalous name for a cutting-edge social media advertising tactic. And he’s letting all of us search and social PPC advertisers in on it.

I had a chance to interview Kim in advance of his social hacks presentation at the SocialPro conference taking place today and tomorrow. We jump right in to his uber-powerful paid social advertising tactics that boast 20% to 40% click-through and engagement rates. (If you want a little background on social advertising first, check out WordStream’s Social Ads 101 guide and then jump back here.)

This interview is 20 minutes of action-packed insight on how to reach your target market through Facebook and Twitter — where the competition is low, the cost is low and the ROI is high, if done right.

Love this interview? Subscribe to this blog for updates from the SMX Advanced conference this week.

Interview Transcript

Virginia: SocialPro is coming up, and you have a solo presentation there on paid social hacks. When I first asked you if you’d chat with me a bit, it was based on conversion hacks you shared at Conversion Conference (read my liveblog coverage of Larry’s 10 CRO hacks here). But you have a whole new set of hacks to share at SocialPro.

Larry: We have a lot of these crazy hacks. We like to try to figure out the secrets.

Virginia: Secrets that you’re willing to share! Every time I hear you speak, I pick up a little bit more. I’m excited to absorb some more of your super powers in social paid advertising today.

Larry: I hope you can make it (to my SocialPro presentation). We’re talking a lot about Facebook and Twitter advertising.

I’m as excited about those two as I was about Google advertising 10 or 15 years ago. It’s so powerful, so transformative, so cheap, there’s not that much competition. It’s pretty remarkable in terms of what you can do compared to how you used to do it, which was not as good.

Virginia: You’ve been talking a lot about unicorns lately. What’s a unicorn ad.

Larry: I use the unicorn analogy in a lot of my content when I talk about CRO or AdWords or SEO. The idea of a unicorn is something really remarkable — like the top one or two percent. My point about these unicorns is they’re so rare and so beautiful, they’re not just a little bit better than everything else, they’re ten or 100 times better than everything else. I want to share some secrets on how to create these unicorns for yourself.

Virginia: At Conversion Conference you said you wrote a program for detecting unicorns. So what’s the formula for creating a unicorn ad?

Larry: WordStream has over 10,000 customers — that’s a good amount of ads that I can scan through programmatically and look for really high click-through rate ads. A couple months ago we did a deep dive on why do some ads have 40% click-through rate as opposed to some ads that have .4% click-through rate? That’s a big difference, like two orders of magnitute, or 100 times difference.

Of the things that stood out among these rare and beautiful unicorn ads, one of them had to do with the keywords. Going after keywords with high commercial intent, as opposed to going after keywords that are very informational in nature.

The other idea was the use of emotional triggers instead of dynamic keyword insertion. Dynamic keyword insertion is very safe. It will get you an above-average ad. But it doesn’t translate to being super remarkable. The ones that were remarkable had emotional triggers like fear or anger or happiness or laughter. They were effective in shocking you or scaring you or exciting you into clicking this thing, even if it ad didn’t include the keyword you were searching for in the headline.

Virginia: In your Conversion Conference presentation you crystallize four voices for ad copy. If you write an ad in the voice of the bearer of bad news, the hero/villain, the comedian or the feel-good friend — give that a try.

Larry: So many companies write ads as though the company is speaking to you. So like, some benefit or feature of the product or services they are offering. A far more effective copywriting technique is to come at it from one of those friend or enemy personas as opposed to the company speaking.

Virginia: You shared a preview of your SocialPro presentation with me. One of the slides is “Larry’s Organic & Paid Social Network Sharing/Posting Pyramid Scheme.” Can you share the pyramid scheme with me?

Larry: The pyramid scheme, it’s totally legal, you won’t get put in jail. It just sounds kind of scheme-y. It has to do with this idea of unicorn detection.

You and I, we both do a lot of blogging. We want to believe that every post we write is a unicorn because we’ve put all our time and effort into it. But in reality, only one or two percent will do really well.

The idea here is, how do you figure out which of your pieces of content are those rare unicorns among the average run-of-the-mill stories. Because in Facebook and Twitter, when you’re (paid) promoting content, you really want to go all-in on your best content, just promoting the ones that have 30 or 40 percent engagement rates because you end up getting tons of free clicks and paying very little for that exposure because people love it so much.

The idea is to audition the content by tweeting it. Tweet out your stories. If something, once in a while, is getting 100 retweets in an hour, then those are probably unicorns, and those are the things that, if they did well organically, will also likely do well in a paid way.

Virginia: A mistake that some companies make is boosting every post they have. You’re saying, use organic posting as the audition, and then find out what your top performers are, and those are the unicorns. Those are the ones you want to blast off into space.

Larry: The worst thing you can do is launch a donkey into space. They can’t withstand the rigors of space travel. You want to go all in on your unicorns. If you have $1000 to spend on posts in a month, and ten posts, the worst thing you can do is equally split the spend among all of your posts. You want to go all-in on you top post and you won’t get just double, you might get ten times the engagement, clicks and conversions.

It’s a bit like the Hunger Games, where they auditioned and had to battle each other out and figure out who will be the victor and only the victor was celebrated in the capitol. So maybe you have ten posts this month. You need to find the victor. Which is the one piece of content that will be promoted and celebrated this month? You have to battle them out in some organic way.

For example, posting them on Twitter, or email marketing — maybe you have email statistics from opens if you’re mailing out your blog posts. This might be an indication that content will do well on social media, because if things do well organically, they tend to also do well in a promoted fashion.

Virginia: It’s a good reminder. We all want to believe that everything we write is great, but we have to be self critical.

Larry: I’ve written over 1600 articles in the last six years. That’s a lot of content. But 50 articles of the 1600 articles produce half the traffic of the million-plus visitors to the WordStream blog. That’s three percent of them producing half the traffic. We’re really looking for those gems. No matter how good you are, I define unicorns on a relative basis. It’s going to be your top 1%. So no matter how good you are, only 1 of 100 is going to be your unicorn.

Virginia: Is this pyramid scheme still viable if you don’t have as many followers as you do. If you’re just starting out or you don’t have much of a following, you might not be able to get as much of a statistical significance.

Larry: What you do is you promote everything with very small budgets, like $5. With $5 on Twitter or Facebook you can get 2,000 or 3,000 ad impressions. That’s a good sample. Even if you have no fans organically, so no means to audition the stuff, you can still audition in a paid way by keeping the budget small. I’d argue that if you have 2,000 impressions and it’s not doing well — you don’t have a 20% or 30% engagement rate, if it’s like half that — then it’s probably not going to make it into outer space. Polling organizations can poll the outcome of a U.S. election based on 1,000 calls or something. Once you have 1,000 or 2,000 people seeing this thing, that’s a pretty good sample size. Very small micro-budgets of testing something out, and then tripling-down on the thing that came up on top.

Virginia: You’ve coined a new term: “super remarketing.” Remarketing is getting content shown again to someone who has been to your site, or been cookied, or are in an audience that you’ve preselected. And earlier in this interview you mentioned that social ads are better than search ads and I’m guessing that one of the reasons you say this is probably super remarketing?

Larry: Yes. This is not an official term, and if you’ve never heard it, it’s because we made it up. But basically why remarket when you can do super remarketing? You probably do remarketing; the conversion rate for these ads is probably 2% to 4% — that’s pretty typical for the industry. That still means that 96% to 98% are not clicking. With super remarketing, rather than remarketing to everyone who visited a certain page or section of your website, you can be more picky.

Instead of remarketing to every one of them, we pick certain behaviors and interests that are aligned with our target buyer. So maybe it’s, we only sell to people who work at Fortune 500 companies. You can actually target for that in Facebook Ads by looking at the size of the company where they’re employed. Or maybe they have certain job titles, like I’m only looking for people who are director and above or college degree education or who are super wealthy or who own a boat or who are leaning left in their political leanings or have an anniversary coming up.

If you can figure out who your target market is — and I hope you would have some idea of who the target market is, otherwise how are you still in business — if you can express that in terms of interests, demographics and behaviors, then overlay those characteristics over the remarketing audience, then that’s very powerful.

You’re not only remarketing to everybody who visited your site, you’re requiring multiple things. You had to A) visit the site and B) have a certain job title or certain interests in certain topics or certain purchasing behavior. By being more picky you can get a lot more yield for a lot smaller spend. You tend to get five times higher click-through rates and conversion rates as opposed to remarketing alone. In online marketing, people get excited about 3% increases or 5% increases, but this is like 300% increase or 500% increase. That’s why I’m calling it super remarketing.

Virginia: As an example of the results that this can yield, can you share a success story. On your own articles you have super remarketed to journalists.

Larry: That’s an example of “super duper remarketing” — it’s a custom list where you know the identity of the people you are trying to target, like if you know their Twitter names or their emails. Then you’re not basing it off of job titles, which is pretty good, but if you absolutely know the ten people or 1,000 people you are looking for, then just upload those names and target those thousands. For one thousand names, the most you could possibly spend is like $10 or $20 because it’s cost per impression and maybe $5 to $10 per thousand impressions.

If you’re targeting this very targeted message to people like journalists if you’re trying to get press coverage, this is a powerful way to get in front of these people and they tend to write about the things that they see.

Virginia: They do, and then you get lots of links, which gives you cross-over SEO value, as well as media mentions, and then you’re a columnist for the Huffington Post.

Larry: We’ve created global news cycles using this technology. Seeding stories to people at CNN and Fox Business, we’ve created global news stories with ten thousand or more press pick-ups, internationalized into 27 languages just by spending these very small remarketing budgets towards targeted lists. It’s pretty powerful stuff. You should look into it.

For Larry’s presentation and more decks from SocialPro, keep an eye out on Marketing Land’s SlideShare tag SocialPro.

If you liked this, there’s lots more great digital marketing content where this came from! Subscribe to our blog for updates from the SMX Advanced conference this week and interviews with top experts in digital marketing year-round.

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Together search engine optimization and social media marketing create a powerhouse effect that drives traffic to your site, builds buzz and creates brand awareness. And while both are worthy forces on their own, when combined they’re even stronger. Jason White, the VP of SEO & SEM at Dragon Search and Maggie Malek, the head of social at The MMI Agency, agree 100% — and next week, we’re all headed to Seattle to lead sessions at SocialPro and SMX Advanced.

But we couldn’t wait. We were ready to start talking about #RelationshipGoals when it comes to SEO & SMM. Listen in as we discuss:

• Why search and social are a match made in heaven
• Client success stories
• Livestreaming videos
• Artificial intelligence and virtual assistants
• Snapchat hacks

White and Malek will take the SMX Advanced stage in the the “Search and Social: Let’s Dance” session at 11 a.m. on June 22. If you’re headed to SMX, you definitely don’t want to miss.

If you’re not headed to SMX, however, you’re still in luck. I’ll be liveblogging key sessions at SMX Advanced. Subscribe to the Bruce Clay, Inc. Blog to get all the news coming out of SMX Advanced as it happens … for free!

The post VIDEO: Search + Social = ♥ | Take It to the Next Level #RelationshipGoals appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..

With so many choices, kicking off social media marketing can be overwhelming. To help you choose the best fit social networks for your business, we’re shining a light on:

• The primary user base of the most popular social networks
• What brands are doing to find success marketing on each
• Guidelines for determining if your business could be a good match for marketing, branding, community building or customer service on each platform
• And any special considerations to be aware of that engagement on the platform may require

These are the six social networks covered here:

1. Pinterest
2. Instagram
3. Google+
4. LinkedIn
5. Facebook
6. Twitter

You can jump to each section from the link above.

Criteria for Evaluating a Social Investment

Here are some questions to ask to decide if a social network is right for your business:

• Are my target users among this network’s user base?
• Does my business’s products or services fit the type of content that is popular on this network?
• Can I commit resources to an ongoing campaign to create or publish content that is popular on this network?
• What are the ideal actions a user could take from this network that would benefit my business?

Below you’ll find each network’s primary user demographics and the popular content types as well as an example of a brand that has built a loyal and engaged community of followers.

While the examples of brands making each network work for them provides a template of what your business might be able to do, what has worked in the past is certainly not the limit to what could work in the future.

It’s important to note that every successful campaign strategy begins with creative thinking about a business brand and the audience it serves. In other words, your brand story could break the mold and be the next case study of a business doing social right!

Pinterest: Visual Candy Collectors

• Popular content: Food, fashion, décor and DIY images that users find around the web
• Most followed brands are Perfect Pallet, Real Simple and The Beauty Department
• Established in 2010
• 100 million active users
• 85 percent of users are female

Pinterest users post images to the platform (usually images they came across while browsing the web, sometimes images or graphics they may have created or published themselves) sorting or categorizing them by theme or subject matter which other users can then follow or browse. Pinterest has become a hub of inspiration for creatively inclined people, 4 out of 5 of whom are women. The industry themes that thrive on Pinterest include:

• Wedding and event planning
• Home décor
• Recipes
• Fashion
• Crafting and DIY

A Brand’s Pinterest Success

Upscale cosmetic retailer Sephora joined Pinterest in 2012. The brand boasts more than 290,000 followers and 6,500 pins showcasing product lines, tutorials for how to use their products and beauty looks created with their products, in other words, their products at work.

Since Sephora began advertising on Pinterest, Pinterest became one of Sephora.com’s top ten sources of referral traffic. Not only is Sephora boosting its reach with Pinterest, but it’s also able to improve its offerings via the data collected through it. Sephora learns about their users and the products they are most interested in, along with other key marketing information, by mining their Pinterest data.

How new content will be used on Pinterest is a consideration of every new campaign. “When we create content for our site or emails, we think of additional ways that we can help the story along on Pinterest,” said Sephora CMO Julie Bornstein. “We use web analytics to look at top pins, test quote layouts from brand founders, and try different product shots — we spend time learning about what works and experiment often to get it right.”

Instagram: Public Diarists

• Popular content: Photos by celebrities and brands revealing what goes on behind the scenes and glamorous lifestyles
• Most popular brands are Nike, Starbucks and NBA
• Launched in October 2010
• 400 million active users and counting
• 80 million photos shared per day
• Men and women are rather evenly represented among Instagram’s young (18-29) user base

On Instagram, users publish photos and videos (up to 15 seconds) dressed up with filters, user tagging and hashtags. Brands that succeed on Instagram are those with stories to tell, drawing users into the lifestyle the brand is portraying through the vignettes and characters featured in their photo stream.

Here’s a photo from BCI’s Instagram account. That’s BCI’s content and media manager Virginia Nussey, me, and senior technical writer Paula Allen (left to right) showing some behind-the-scenes fun at the office on Flannel Friday.

A photo posted by Bruce Clay, Inc. (@bruceclayinc) on Mar 18, 2016 at 10:11am PDT

A Brand’s Instagram Success

The ice cream purveyor Ben & Jerry’s reached 9.8 million users on Instagram through a paid ad campaign on the network. The campaign consisted of 4 sponsored images of its ice cream disseminated among a target audience of 18- to 35-year-olds in the U.S. over eight days. The end result was greater top-of-mind recall, brand recognition and product demand.

“Since its launch, Instagram has provided us with an amazing platform to connect with our fans and tell our story visually. Ads on Instagram let us reach and engage with more fans about our flavors, fun and values,” said Mike Hayes, digital marketing manager at Ben & Jerry’s.

Also see 4 Reasons Your Retail Brand Needs to Be on Instagram Right Now.

Google+: Conversationalists Plus Max SEO Benefits

• Popular content: Articles on Internet marketing, business and technology – which is no surprise considering the top eight occupations among Google+ users are engineers, developers, designers, software engineers, web developers, writers, software developers and programmers. Google+ is also popular among photographers who use Google+ to showcase their work (and, fittingly, photographer is the ninth most commonly listed occupation on Google+).
• Launched in June 2011
• 300 million active users and counting
• 68% of users are male
• Special note to consider in a business’s evaluation for network investment: There are SEO benefits to Google+ including increased visibility opportunities for a business’s content to be displayed in search results, and a quick way to get content crawled by Google

Brands leading the way on Google+ include:

• Topshop
• TOMS
• H&M
• The Financial Times
• Cadbury
• Mashable
• Fitbit
• Flixster
• Hotel Tonight

Read brand stories and case studies for each of these companies.

A Brand’s Google+ Success

Like many other leading brands on Google+, British chocolatier Cadbury has leveraged Google+ to create conversations via Hangouts On Air.

“The thing that’s most different (on Google+) is Hangouts – you can’t really do it on any other platform. We’ve done three hangouts so far. The first one we created a chocolate version of our Google+ page. Then we did a second with Rebecca Adlington, one of the Olympians we’re sponsoring … We just met up with one of chocolate tasters and had an informal discussion on the basics of chocolate,” said Jerry Daykin, Cadbury’s social media and community manager.

“We spent quite a long time with our first Hangout thinking what will we do, when will we do what, and made it quite complicated in our head. And the reality was it’s as easy as having a conversation with someone face-to-face … My favorite feature about Hangouts On Air is the ability to have this really close connection to a small group of people but do it in a way that lets thousands of people see it.”

LinkedIn: Consultants, Personal Brands and B2B Reach

• Popular content: Professional profiles and resumes, business-centric news and articles, and job opportunities
• Established in May 2003
• 400 million members
• 3 million business pages
• Top company pages on LinkedIn include Mashable, HubSpot, NPR, Kellogg and AppleOne

Among LinkedIn’s users are many owners, presidents, founders and C-Suite executives – i.e., people with the ability to make change, hire companies and acquire new talent. If you are a B2B company, LinkedIn provides a golden opportunity to market your company in front of businesses who can hire you.

A Brand’s LinkedIn Success

One such B2B company advertising on LinkedIn is marketing software company HubSpot. HubSpot uses LinkedIn to distribute white papers, drive traffic to their own site, increase high quality leads, and reach targeted professional industries.

“With LinkedIn, we’re able to truly identify our core audience by going a step further and targeting by company, job title, job function and groups,” said Dan Slagen, head of paid search marketing at HubSpot. “This gives us the unique ability to tailor messaging and target the exact audience segment that we need.”

For HubSpot, LinkedIn advertising resulted in a lower cost-per-click rate than with search engine advertising. Slagen said that the CPC averaged at $3, “which is actually a fraction of the cost of paid search advertising … on traditional PPC search engines, we’ve seen average CPC rates that are … as much as three times higher.”

Facebook: Local and National Brands Alike, but Come with a Budget

• Popular content: Photos (including selfies), coordination of social plans, posts about what people are doing, likes and shares of content found on the web
• Established in July 2004
• More than 50 million business pages
• 1.65 billion active monthly users – with this many users, everyone’s on there, which is how Facebook has been able to grow its ad products that feature a high degree of audience targeting capabilities
• Special note to consider in a business’s evaluation for network investment: paid promotion is required for visibility

Facebook has been the dominant platform within the social media sphere for many years. It has the most users, and, speaking to its prominence users’ daily lives, 48 percent of 18-34 year old Facebook users check Facebook when they wake up. But when talking about Facebook as a marketing channel today, the discussion must begin with advertising.

If you’re considering investing in Facebook for your business, you should understand that you will likely need to dedicate an advertising budget for promoting your content on the network, even among your own fans. Without paid promotion, Facebook reportedly shows brand page content to a mere 1 to 2 percent of a page’s followers. In order for a brand page’s posts to show to its fans and followers, reach must be amplified by paid promotion.

Facebook points to the following industries as leaders in Facebook advertising:

• Automotive
• Consumer goods
• Financial services
• Gaming
• Politics
• Retail/ecommerce
• Technology
• Travel

A Few Brands’ Successes on Facebook

On Facebook, national brands and local retailers alike successfully pay to play with the social networks. Global retailer Michael Kors, for example, was able to use Facebook ads to drive more than one million view to its sneaker videos, increasing brand awareness and sales.

Sam’s Chowder House, a locally owned restaurant in San Francisco, attributed a 19 percent increase in guests and revenues to Facebook’s promoted posts. The day after their most successful promoted posts, they experienced 58 percent sales increase and 22 percent guest count increase.

Twitter: Build Awareness Through Fast Feedback

• Popular content: Users have 140 characters to broadcast commentary, links and images or converse with other users. The avenues of success on Twitter are broad and varied, with popular accounts ranging from musing celebrities (@ladygaga) to humorous shticks (@shitmydadsays) to businesses providing stellar customer service (@JetBlue) to food trucks tweeting the day’s location (@CurbsideCupcake)
• Established in March 2006
• 310 million active users on Twitter
• 83 percent of Twitter users access Twitter from a mobile device

Compete.com recently looked at the online habits of 2,000 consumers and found that 38.9 percent of users made online purchases from retailers whose tweets they had seen … compared to only 26.9 percent of users who made online purchases without being exposed to any tweets. A brand that tweets stands to gain a 37 percent increase in online sales.

“Consumers who see Tweets from retailers are people who, for one reason or another, are engaged in conversation about or with that retailer. These people prove to also be much more likely to shop and buy from retailers’ websites … The results demonstrate that more exposure correlates with more retail activity.”

Here’s a photo tweet by @BruceClayInc of me speaking on social media marketing at a recent event in LA. Photos are easy to post to Twitter through the mobile app, and tend to get higher engagement than tweets without images.

Branding on Instagram and Snapchat panel at Media Leaders Growth Summit #dgs16 https://t.co/eQoIi1Sr9H pic.twitter.com/OJIAn8zV92

— Bruce Clay, Inc. (@BruceClayInc) May 6, 2016

A Few Brands’ Successes on Twitter

As with Facebook, brands of all sizes and from all industries are using Twitter. Chicago bakery Whipped Bakeshop used a promoted account to increase followers in Philadelphia and attract new customer. The Barack Obama presidential campaign used promoted trends get keep voters informed in real time and gain record engagement in 2008. The American Red Cross used promoted tweets to drive donations (reaching 100% of its goal) and attract new volunteers.

Next Steps for a Social Media Marketing Strategy

Success in social media marketing is measured by the quality of interactions over the quantity of interaction. No matter how your business’s online social presence develops, it’s critical to determine and track metrics that align with your business goals so you can decide what’s working and what’s not.

As you’re deciding what social network to invest in, determine the metrics you’ll be tracking to measure your efforts. That way, when you’ve launched a campaign to build brand awareness, provide customer service, enhance visibility of your products, and grow loyalty, you’ll be able to tell if your efforts are making progress for your business and adjust your tactics accordingly.

Want Social Media Recommendations Just for Your Business?

If you’re interested in a free 15-minute social media review from me, BCI’s social media editor, and learning more about how we can help you build your online presence, let us know and we’ll be in touch!

The post Which Social Media Networks Should Your Business Invest In? appeared first on Bruce Clay, Inc..