Social Media Strategy Archives - Page 31 of 33

Previously I wrote about “Paid Social Media: Why You Need It And What Is Available.” In that post I discuss declining organic reach, the importance of adding native advertising to social media strategy and provide a guide to the current paid social media options. In this post I will discuss programmatic – a growing way to buy native ads or paid social media.

You may have heard about programmatic in terms of advertising media buying. Now 72% of U.S. online and mobile display spending is programmatic and it is moving into other media such as online video, TV, radio and even digital outdoor. So it should be no surprise that programmatic is also in social media like Facebook and Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest and LinkedIn. MediaPost reports that social advertising is the fastest growing programmatic channel ahead of display and mobile.

What is programmatic exactly? IAB says programmatic is automated buying and selling of media being sold by “one machine talking to another machine.” Marking Land says programmatic automates the decision process of media buying targeting specific audiences and demographics placed with artificial intelligence (AI) and real-time bidding (RTB). Programmatic media buying is in online display, mobile display, online video, social media advertising, and is expanding to digital outdoor, radio and TV.

Monica Lay of Adobe Social Advertising Solutions further clarifies that programmatic advertising has two distinct methods:

Real Time Bidding (RTB): Auction-based ad transactions based on real-time impressions in open and private marketplaces.
Programmatic Direct: Ads purchased via a publisher-owned application program interface (API) like Facebook and Twitter or an existing demand-side platform (DSP) like DoubleClick Ad Exchange or MediaMath.

What difference can programmatic make? More precise targeting and more efficient spending. Dean Jayson in The Huffington Post explains that Programmatic media buying can use online data (like browsing activity) and offline data (like loyalty card data) to laser target the placement of ads. Data brokers match offline data with online data and license data management platforms (DMP) to organize the data and use demand side platforms (DSP) to automate the execution of media buys.

This targeting based on data profile is different than targeting based on content. Jayson gives the example of a dog food brand buying ads on a cute puppy site. Many visitors just like looking at cute puppies, but may not have a dog to feed The marketer pays for impressions to the wrong target and the consumer sees an ad that is irrelevant. Programmatic is more precise by targeting consumers with a history of purchasing dog food (online or in-store).

Programmatic automation also saves marketers time. They set their target audience and forget it. The DSP finds the audience freeing up marketers’ time to focus on creating valuable and relevant content. Jayson says that programmatic data based targeting costs roughly half of content based targeting.

Programmatic brings these same benefits to social media channels. Ben Plomion, CMO of GumGum recommends programmatic in social because he says “to compete in today’s hyper-competitive online media world, you can’t sit back and wait for the traffic to come to you.” Social media marketers run more effective campaigns through automated buying and by reaching a precise audience with highly relevant messages. Plomion gives the example of Red Bull targeting videos to Twitter feeds of people who have viewed extreme sports sites.

Yet programmatic isn’t limited to buying ads and promoted posts on social media networks. Programmatic native advertising enables brands to place sponsored articles and videos directly through publishers like BuzzFeed, The New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Additionally a recent survey indicates native programmatic budgets are going to programmatic native platforms like Outbrain, Taboola, Sharethrough, Nativo and Bidtellect that place sponsored content across the web. These platforms boost brand content serving up links to sponsored articles with messages below publisher content saying, “you may also be interested in…”

Still programmatic social goes even further. Beyond social network ads and paid content marketing, influencer marketing offers programmatic ad buying. Adweek reports that ROI Influencer Media (representing 10,0000 influencers from celebrities to social media all stars) has partnered with programmatic platforms like Rubicon Project, PubMatic, OpenX, MediaMath and Google’s DoubleClick Ad Exchange. When buying programmatic ad packages, bundles of influencers appear as options where marketers pay for viewable impressions on influencers’ social media sites and walls. Authenticity is preserved through influencers still having final approval and control over their feeds.

Startups like Fanbytes are offering a programmatic Snapchat influencer marketing platform. Their dashboard enables marketers to bid on influencer ads programmatically buying branded content on influencer’ social media pages, blog pages, and websites. Not all influencers have to be mega celebrities. The startup Gnack offers programmatic buying of user-generated content from Snapchat and Instagram micro-influencers with less than 10,000 followers. These micro influencers can be very effective at reaching niche audiences based on campaign objectives, target demographics and preferred hashtags.

With increased content clutter and declining organic reach attracting an audience in social media can be problematic. But programmatic is an attractive way to boost reach and relevancy. How can programmatic improve your social media efforts?

To consider the bigger picture in social media marketing Ask These Questions To Ensure You Have The Right Strategy.

The Business Dictionary defines metrics as standards of measurement by which efficiency, performance, or progress can be assessed. In social media marketing the numbers behind social media efforts are very important. Yet, many get overwhelmed with amount of data and options of what can be collected and where. In this post I will cover the basics of collecting social media data, tracking social media metrics and identifying KPIs (key performance indicators). I also include a template to make sense of it all and link social media actions to business goals and marketing objectives for social measurement and optimization.

Click here for an updated version of this article and template.

First, we will take a quick look at some of the detailed social media metrics top social channels offer through their own analytics. Sprout Social provides a nice survey of the social media metrics that matter to marketers. They detail the comprehensive stats you can get from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. I have added Instagram and YouTube as additional examples.

Social Media Channel Specific Metrics:

Facebook Insights offers metrics on page posts such as likes (unlikes, organic likes, paid likes), reach, engagement, engagement rate, impressions, and demographic information for fans, plus additional people you have engaged with and reached. There are also detailed video stats including views for 3 seconds, 30 seconds or 95% of total video length.

Twitter Analytics offers similar metrics including total tweets, tweet impressions, profile visits, mentions, followers, tweets linking to you, engagement rate, link clicks, retweets, likes and replies. It provides demographic, lifestyle, consumer behavior and mobile information about followers.

LinkedIn Analytics provides metrics on post performance with metrics like impressions, clicks, interactions, followers, views, unique visitors and engagement. They include details on visitor demographics on business focused variables such as seniority, industry, company size and function.

Pinterest Analytics delivers metrics for profile impressions, daily viewers, pins, repins, clicks and favorites. In addition Pinterest provides demographic and interests insights for pin viewers.

Instagram Insights promises tracking metrics like top posts, reach, impressions and engagement data. It also delivers demographic data on followers such as gender, age and location.

YouTube Analytics provides data in different reports such as subscribers, subscriber status, traffic, traffic sources, views, watch time, earnings, likes, dislikes, comments, shares, favorites, devices, audience retention and organic versus paid traffic. YouTube also offers demographic information on viewers such as location, age and gender.

These are just six of the top social media channels. Other social channels offer their own version of metrics you can obtain along with many third party software tools. New ones include Yelp Metrics and Foursquare Attribution. For a list of over 50 top social media channels by category visit my post Social Media Update. All these options can be overwhelming and many marketers can easily get bogged down and distracted by the minutia of dozens of metrics and reports for each social channel.

Linking Channel Metrics to Marketing Objectives:

The key to making all this data more usable and actionable is understanding the bigger picture as it relates to your unique business goals and then linking the specific metrics for each channel as KPIs to marketing objectives. I have created the Social Media Metrics Template below to help organize and visualize how specific social media channel data and business/marketing objectives come together to measure the success of social media marketing efforts.

In this template you want to first go back and identify broader business goals making sure marketing objectives are quantified and time bound. A start up or business with a new product/service may be focused on building awareness among a certain target audience (views, reach, impressions, demographic data, etc.). Another company or organization may have issues with reputation and are looking to change perception (negative to positive sentiment). Or perhaps the business needs to drive leads or online sales (traffic sources, conversion pages, etc.). Maybe a brand needs to focus on retention of existing customers for continued sales and recruiting new customers via word-of-mouth (likes, comments, shares, etc.). An organization can also have all these objectives and more as long as they are quantified and assigned unique KPIs for each social channel.

A big help with linking social activity to business goals and ultimately proving ROI is integrating Google Analytics on websites with social media. The new Google Analytics Social Reports are especially useful in breaking down social traffic to know how and which social media marketing is working. The Social Conversions report shows which social networks lead to website conversions. Conversions can be anything from a direct sale to a download, an email subscription, event registration, quote requests, etc. Setting up Google Analytics goals with specific dollar values per conversion will show dollar values per social channel. This helps determine where to focus time and money beyond followers and engagement and connects social media to the bottom line.

Using social media monitoring, publishing and analytics tools such as Hootsuite, HubSpot, Radian 6/SalesForce, Sysomos, NUVI, Crimson Hexagon, or other tools like SocialMention, TrueSocialMetrics, Sprout, or Buffer can help you track and organize all these social metrics. Visit my Social Media Tools & Resources page for a more comprehensive list of options.

Social Media Metrics Categories:

For a broader look at metrics Buffer Social boils it down to the stats that matter in key social media metrics categories. One option comes from Jay Baer of Convince & Convert. He suggests four categories of social media metrics to measure success of content marketing efforts.

Consumption metrics are how many people viewed, downloaded, or listened to social media content.
Sharing metrics measure how relevant the social content is and how often is it shared with others.
Lead-gen metrics measure how often social media content consumption results in a lead.
Sales metrics measure if money was made from social media content.

The last category is often the most important, but marketers have known for decades that not all marketing action is directly attributable to sales. Traditional media advertising such as TV/radio ads, billboards or magazine and newspaper ads are seen as valuable contributors to metrics such as awareness, opinion, or recall, but don’t always lead to a direct traceable sales action. These contributions are often expressed in traditional marketing with the sales or purchase funnel. Here each category of marketing effort is seen as a valuable contributor to the progression of an important stage in the purchase process. You can think of these social media metric categories in a similar way – each is important and leads to the others.

Buffer Social’s article also points out another option first proposed by Google Co-Founder Aninash Kauskih in 2011. He suggests the following consistent social media metrics categories across all social channels.

Conversation rate is the number of conversations per social media post and channel. KPI’s are different per channel. For example, on Facebook and LinkedIn it is comments and on Twitter it is replies.
Amplification rate measures the number of shares per social media post and channel. Again KPIs are channel specific such as reshares for Facebook, retweets for Twitter and repins for Pinterest.
Applause rate accounts for the various ways users can promote a post on different networks. KPIs vary per channel from likes on Facebook and +1s on Google+ to hearts on Instagram.
Economic value is the sum of short-term revenue, long-term revenue, and cost savings. Here Aninash brings it all back to Google Analytics with a KPI such as Per Visit Goal Values. This can then be linked to source visits by social channel.

The number of social media channels, each channel’s unique metrics and social media monitoring and analtics options can be overwhelming. But if you take a step back and look at broader business goals, tie specific metrics (KPIs) to each marketing objective and then find the right tools to collect and monitor that data it becomes much more manageable and actionable.

To consider the bigger picture in measurement see Why You Need A Social Media Measurement Plan And How To Create One. To consider the bigger picture in social media marketing Ask These Questions To Ensure You Have The Right Strategy.