Today’s top influencers aren’t just content creators or media buys – they’re both.
According to Invesp, influencer marketing can drive 11 times the ROI of traditional digital marketing. And with 71 percent of marketers believing ongoing influencer ambassadorships are the most effective form of influencer marketing, finding the right influencer for your brand is an incredibly important part of your digital strategy.
Check out the tips below for how to find influencers that are a fit with your business.
Follow influencers
Seems obvious, right? But marketers often ignore the most important rule of sourcing influencers – to follow them.
With more than 200 million people worldwide blocking ads, following influencers allows you to consume content on the same level as a potential consumer. It also allows marketers to digest the content from potential partners and see if it aligns to the brand. Is the influencer’s tone in line with your brand voice? Does the influencer post frequently and with high-quality content? What is the influencer’s saturation rate of sponsored content to unpaid content?
Another perk of following influencers is that it also allows you to see who your competitors are using. With high-compete categories like beauty, following influencers helps you keep an eye on what influencers to reach out to that aren’t already partnering with your competitors.
Care about more than a following
When the New York Times dropped their fake follower exposé in January 2018, marketers shared a collective head nod of approval. Since revealing how the Devumi platform allowed influencers and “celebrities” to buy millions of fake followers, the service appears to have folded under the guise of “not accepting any new clients.” All Devumi social networks have also been deleted.
But for every failed fake follower factory like Devumi there’s a handful of other services that allow users to easily buy fake followers for pretty cheap. TweetAngels offers 6,000 Instagram followers for $67.96, along with 4,000 likes and the claim of 100 percent active followers. Marketers who are sourcing influencers need to objectively look at their followers and engagement rates. It’s often easy to spot fake accounts (no bio, only a couple updates to the social platform, leaving spam comments), but my number one tell is this: Does the influencer have thousands of followers but very few comments on their posts? Then they probably bought some of their followers.
Check your DMs
With fake followers being so prevalent, I urge marketers not to discount microinfluencers with authentic followers. Many up-and-coming influencers will reach out to brands via direct message to collaborate – don’t ignore this eagerness. While you should still check their accounts for fake followers and quality content, sometimes smaller influencers who reach out via direct message can become the most passionate ambassadors for your brand.
Develop these relationships early. Sometimes working with a hustling microinfluencer in their early days allows smaller fees as their followings grow later on.
Have a budget
According to Mediakix, more than $2.38 billion is projected to be spent on influencers in 2019. The days of comping an influencer with product and expecting they’ll share about it are essentially over. No one expects to get a billboard for free – so why do marketers so often expect influencer marketing for free?
Paying influencers is beneficial to both parties, if done correctly. If you can pay your influencers, you’ll have more of a say on their final content deliverables. And if you pay your influencers well, you’ll encourage long-term partnerships and potential deliverables outside of the contract guidelines.
While there’s no industry standard for what to pay influencers, Influencer Marketing Hub has a great tool that allows you to estimate post costs, engagement rate and ROI. The calculator is a great jumping point for negotiations and pay estimates, but shouldn’t be your “end-all, be-all” of influencer pay. At the end of the day, the best influencer for your brand is one your brand can also afford.
Over to you
Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear about your experiences with influencer marketing. What techniques do you use to find the best influencers for your brand?
If you try to do everything with your marketing strategy you end up doing next to nothing. Focus is key when developing new marketing ideas and exploring opportunities.
How and when to challenge your current assumptions and best practices on everything related to marketing.
Nine effective marketing ideas that don’t include blogging such as: podcasting, video series, live events, and tons more!
Join 18,000+ weekly listeners for the Buffer podcast, The Science of Social Media, where we bring you the latest and greatest in social media marketing news, updates, stories, insights, and actionable takeaways.
Hailley: Hi everyone! I’m Hailley Griffis and this is the Science of Social Media, a podcast by Buffer. Your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and learning.
Brian: Welcome to episode #118, I’m Brian Peters and this week we’ve got a ton of marketing inspiration on tap for you. We’ll be sharing 9 marketing ideas that you can try that don’t include blogging, which we can all use a little break from sometimes.
Hailley: We’ll also be sharing a strategy that you can use to help you identify new and exciting marketing opportunities for your business. Much of this episode was inspired by our good friends Hiten Shah and Susan Su, so a huge shoutout to them for their incredible work in the marketing space.
Brian: A warm welcome to the show everyone. Let’s kick it off!
Part I: How to focus and identify big marketing opportunities
Hailley: Let’s start with how to identify more marketing opportunities for your business. Because as we all know, there are a ton of opportunities out there, you just have to know what you’re looking for.
Brian: Exactly. As you said, Hailley, as marketers we have hundreds of channels to choose from. And within each of those channels there literally thousands of tactics you could apply.
As many of us might have experienced in the past, if you try to do everything with your marketing strategy you sort of end up doing… well… nothing. You tend to lose your purpose and overall goals. By keeping it simple and staying focused, you’ll ultimately drive more results.
Hailley: Keeping it simple can seem a bit, well, simplistic for a lack of better words. But if you think about the purpose of marketing, it is quite straightforward. The whole goal of marketing is to get more people to see your product and hopefully, eventually, they end up buying your product, whether it’s a physical product, digital product or, service, the idea is the same.
Brian: Exactly.
Let’s jump into talking more about those opportunities we mentioned.
A big shout out to Hiten Shah for this section as he has a really great blog post about focusing as a marketer and we’re using some of his examples in here:
And, fun fact, we also had the pleasure of chatting with Hiten on the podcast back in episode number 16 if you’d like to give that a listen. Throw back.
Hailley: Wow, that was over 100 episodes ago!
Brian: Wow, how far we’ve come. I’d love to know how many people were listeners back then that still listen now.
Hailley: That would be awesome. Well, regardless, shoutout to our listeners from the past and present.
Brian: Back to those marketing opportunities. We’re going to talk about web traffic specifically to start. First up, let’s talk about what to do with traffic to your website.
Hailley: Let’s do it.
And this is something we haven’t talked about too much here on the show, but if you’ve been doing everything we talk about each week on social and elsewhere, you should (hopefully) be seeing some traffic come into your website.
But a lot of times, we don’t think about what we’d like those visitors to do. Or what they should be doing on our website. And so the first strategy for identifying new opportunities is to challenge your current assumptions and best practices.
You may be doing things in marketing and have no idea why. Which is alright because we all do that, but the more you can question everything, the more opportunities you’ll uncover.
Brian: As Hiten Shah talks about in his article, at Crazy Egg, they originally used a “minimal homepage” because they figured that less information for visitors to consume meant less friction to sign-up.
By simply running some home page tests, they actually found the opposite to be true—in reality, they’re homepage was leaving visitors confused about the product.
What they found was that a long-form home page (20x the length of the original home page) lifted trial sign-ups by 30%.
Hailley: That’s incredible. And remember as we go through these best-practices, they don’t just have to apply to website traffic. They could apply to all sorts of marketing strategies like social media, emails, podcasts, and more.
For example, if you’re posting only links to your website on Facebook, but finding that you’re not getting the results you’d like, challenge your assumption about what kind of content people want to see. Experiment with videos, and GIFs, and infographics.
Brian: Great point, Hailley. There really is a SCIENCE behind all of this marketing stuff.
Hailley: I see what you did there!
Brian: But when talking about running experiments it’s important to run small, incremental tests, instead of putting all your eggs in one basket. That will de-risk you and help lead to compound growth over time.
For example, Hiten talks about how Kevin Li and Sergei Sorokin of the Yahoo Growth team managed to drive Yahoo’s mail app to the top of the App Store by running 122 tests over ten weeks. These small tests only led to 2-3% gains each, but together they compounded into a 1000%+ increase in the CTR:
Hailley: Such a great example.
It’s similar to investing, right? If you save and invest small amounts of money over time, say $20 per week, that’ll eventually become a large sum of money because of compound interest.
And so just because $20 doesn’t feel like a lot now, it adds up in a big way over time.
The same goes for marketing. Small improvements to your product, social media content, email content, landing page, and pretty much everything else, will result in big gains in the long run.
Brian: Love that comparison, Hailley. You’re speaking to my heart here.
I also wanted to quickly chat about another way to identify marketing opportunities for your business before we get into some fun ideas and that’s to optimize strategies you might have forgotten about.
One way to do that is to simply re-publish old content in new channels.
In other words, don’t let great content go to waste. Go back and look at all of the content you’ve published in the past and then republish and reshare it on new channels.
By taking old blog posts and getting them in front of a new audience on Medium, for example, we were able to increase traffic from Medium by more than 1,200%.
We apply this strategy to other channels as well. For example, we’ll pull a list from Google Analytics of posts we’ve written in the past that are still receiving some great traffic and simply update them.
New content, new graphics, a new look and feel completely.
And what we’ve found is that by updating old content we’ve been able to increase traffic to certain blog posts by more than 300% in just a few weeks. Multiply that by 50 or 100 articles and all of the sudden you have a brand new traffic source to your website.
Brian: Just like that!
Last thing is to remember you’re playing the long game.
It takes a long time to build up a social media presence and audience that engages with and shares your content.
Hailley: As Hiten Shah says”
“Content marketing is a long-term investment. When you start out, you’re trying to carve out a foothold by building up little islands of content and an early audience. Over time, as you load up on high-quality content your audience loves and shares, these islands start to group together and form continents on the internet that people land on.”
Part II: Marketing ideas that don’t include blogging
Brian: Next up, let’s talk about some marketing ideas that aren’t blogging.
We, of course, are big believers in blogging at Buffer and it has been a huge part of how people hear about Buffer, but, we also recognize that blogging isn’t everyone’s strength and it’s not what every audience is looking for.
There are tons of other marketing ideas you can run with that don’t involve blogging so let’s look at some of those.
1. Create offline experiences that you organize
Hailley: It’s true that so many marketing ideas revolve around blogging.
The first of nine marketing ideas we have for you is to create offline experiences that you organize, like a conference or event.
If you think of it, a conference is really just like in person content marketing. Except instead of sharing a blog post with your audience, you’re sharing a talk. And the scale of a conference isn’t the only offline experience available. I mean, you can do meetups, or even workshops, which I know you’ve done a lot of, Brian!
Brian: We’ve done several workshops at Buffer, always so much fun and really more of an intimate experience with the audience.
2. Start a podcast
On another note that involves speaking, a popular marketing idea is to start a podcast! Which you might already know because you’re listening to this one right now.
Hailley: This is one of the marketing ideas that has really worked for us and honestly plenty of other people as well.
One of the reasons is that podcasts are reaching people in different contexts than blogging and it is much more personal to hear our voices than read our words.
Plus, it’s so easy to listen to podcasts while doing other things like traveling, driving, walking, cleaning, so I think that’s one of the reasons that podcasts as a medium are a lot more popular.
Brian: Absolutely, and when you think about it, podcasts are kind of the best way to talk to your audience because you are speaking right into their ear, as creepy as that might sound!
The one thing to keep in mind with podcasts is that, like other types of marketing, it won’t perform for you if you don’t have a goal so mane sure to set up some goals and a strategy ahead of time.
3. Create a unique video series
Hailley: Another one of our favorite marketing ideas, and if you’ve listened to this show for awhile it will come as no surprise that we’re recommending this, and that’s to do a video series!
Brian: What a video series looks like is totally up to you. We have one every Thursday on Instagram by our teammate Bonnie who does a sort of trivia show. We’ve also put out an entire series on YouTube about small business marketing and have seen similarly great results from that:
Moving away from multimedia options for a minute, another marketing idea is to write a book.
4. Write a book
Hailley: It sort of seems really daunting but I bet it’s easier to write a book with your team that it is to do it all alone, but I could be wrong.
This is becoming a more popular form of marketing since it’s easier than ever to publish your own books. You can also go a little smaller than a full book and try creating a short e-book to start.
I’d love to see a Buffer book one day!
Brian: Me too!
A good example of a company that is rocking it at books and e-books is Intercom, so check them out if you need some inspiration.
5. Teach a class
Next up, this is something I’ve done several times at Buffer with wild success, and that’s to teach a class. We went through Skillshare and taught two separate classes on social media marketing, and we also have a class up on creating company values.
We’ve reached so many people through those classes and many of them new to Buffer because they found out about us through the class, which was a great benefit.
6. Host a webinar (or webinar series)
Hailley: Sort of on a smaller scale from teaching a class, but in a similar vein, is to host a webinar. It’s very easy to set up, again this is another great way to be in front of your audience on camera or through voice. Plus I think there’s a little less pressure thank like a YouTube series because you’re there to interact with the audience and not necessarily make it evergreen content to host forever.
Webinars are also a great opportunity to team up with other companies and introduce each other to your respective audiences.
7. Become a pro at Instagram marketing
Brian: Next in line in our top marketing ideas (it’s not blogging), but it’s probably the most content marketing type of social media that you can do, and that’s Instagram.
We’re huge fans of Instagram and we totally believe it can do wonders for your business and community when it’s properly leveraged. Check out episodes 84 and 99 for more on Instagram.
Hailley: Last but not least, let’s talk about what probably isn’t anyone’s first idea but it works, and that’s forums.
8. Share your expertise in popular forums
Places like Quora, or Slack groups (like the Buffer Slack group!), or other more traditional forums are really where content and community come together.
Brian: Forums are unsexy, and yet they still answer a lot of people’s intent-based queries — and, as long as they’re public, they are highly indexable.
Hailley: Don’t give up on forums just yet!
9. Bonus tip: Create shareable infographics
What more can you say about infographics? They capture everything you’re trying to convey in one, beautiful image.
Neil Patel presents a solid summary of the method and components of a great infographic including how to pick a topic based on keyword rank and shareability, how to find the data (since infographics are usually a visual presentation of data), and how to use Dribbble to find a professional designer.
Brian: Thank you so much for tuning in to the Science of Social Media today. The show notes for this episode are now available on the Buffer Blog at blog.buffer.com with a complete transcript.
If you ever want to get in touch with myself or Hailley, we’re always here for your on social media using the hashtag #bufferpodcast. You can also say hi to us anytime and hello@buffer.com
Hailley: Thanks for tuning into our show every single week. You make this fun and are the entire reason we do what we do so thank you! Let us know if you give any of our marketing ideas a try, we’d love to hear from you.
Until next Monday, everyone!
How to say hello to us
We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!
The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode. It’s our hope that you’ll join our 18,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!
Of course, it isn’t only about the size of the social media sites. It’s also whether the social media site is a right fit for your business and you. Does it fit your brand image? Is your target audience using that social media site? How many social media sites can you manage at once?
To make things easier for you, I did some research and compiled information about the 21 top social media sites in 2018. Some will be familiar to you, others might sound foreign to you. It might be worth reading more about the social media sites that might be great for your brand but that you have not explored.
(MAUs stands for Monthly Active Users, and MUVs stands for Monthly Unique Visitors.)
1. Facebook – 2.23 billion MAUs
Facebook is the biggest social media site around, with more than two billion people using it every month. That’s almost a third of the world’s population! There are more than 65 million businesses using Facebook Pages and more than six million advertisers actively promoting their business on Facebook, which makes it a pretty safe bet if you want to have a presence on social media.
Besides being the second biggest social media site, YouTube (owned by Google) is also often known as the second largest search engine after Google. (So if you want your brand to be on YouTube, I would recommend reading up on YouTube SEO.)
Finally, you can also advertise on YouTube to increase your reach on the platform.
3. WhatsApp – 1.5 billion MAUs
WhatsApp is a messaging app used by people in over 180 countries. Initially, WhatsApp was only used by people to communicate with their family and friends. Gradually, people started communicating with businesses via WhatsApp. (When I was in Bangkok to buy a new suit, I communicated with the tailor via WhatsApp.)
Messenger used to be a messaging feature within Facebook, and since 2011, Facebook has made Messenger into a standalone app by itself and greatly expanded on its features. Businesses can now advertise, create chatbots, send newsletters, and more on Messenger. These features have given businesses a myriad of new ways to engage and connect with their customers.
WeChat grew from a messaging app, just like WhatsApp and Messenger, into an all-in-one platform. Besides messaging and calling, users can now use WeChat to shop online and make payment offline, transfer money, make reservations, book taxis, and more.
WeChat is most popular in China and some parts of Asia. If you are doing business in those areas (where social media platforms like Facebook are banned), WeChat could be a good alternative.
6. Instagram – 1 billion MAUs
Instagram is a photo and video sharing social media app. It allows you to share a wide range of content such as photos, videos, Stories, and live videos. It has also recently launched IGTV for longer-form videos.
QQ is an instant messaging platform that is extremely popular among young Chinese. (It is used in 80 countries and also available in many other languages.) Besides its instant messaging features, it also enables users to decorate their avatars, watch movies, play online games, shop online, blog, and make payment.
I have to admit I don’t know much about QQ but Carrie Law from ClickZ has written a helpful brief introduction to QQ for marketers. It seems that while QQ, a desktop-native platform, used to be the top social media platform in China, WeChat, a messaging app from the same parent company, has taken over its place.
8. Tumblr – 642 million MUVs
Tumblr is a microblogging and social networking site for sharing text, photos, links, videos, audios, and more. People share a wide range of things on Tumblr from cat photos to art to fashion.
On the surface, a Tumblr blog can look just like any other websites. So many blogs that you come across online might be using Tumblr!
Qzone is another popular social networking platform based in China, where users can upload multimedia, write blogs, play games, and decorate their own virtual spaces.
According to several people on Quora, Qzone seems to be more popular among teenagers (while WeChat is more popular among adults). But the rise of mobile-based platforms like WeChat seemed to have caused a decline in popularity of desktop-based platforms like Qzone.
10. Tik Tok – 500 million MAUs
Tik Tok (also known as Douyin in China) is a rising music video social network. It was the world’s most downloaded app in the first quarter of 2018, beating Facebook, Instagram, and other social media apps.
My initial impression is that it looks like Instagram for short music videos (though I’m sure it’s more than that). Users can record videos up to 60 seconds, edit them, and add music and special effects.
Sina Weibo is often known as Twitter for Chinese users (since Twitter is banned in China). It has features similar to Twitter — 140-character microblogging, uploading of photos and videos, commenting, and verification of accounts.
Twitter is a social media site for news, entertainment, sports, politics, and more. What makes Twitter different from most other social media sites is that it has a strong emphasis on real-time information — things that are happening right now. For example, one of the defining moments in the Twitter history is when Janis Krums tweeted the image of a plane that landed in the Hudson River when he was on the ferry to pick the passengers up.
Another unique characteristic of Twitter is that it only allows 280 characters in a tweet (140 for Japanese, Korean, and Chinese), unlike most social media sites that have a much higher limit.
Twitter is also often used as a customer service channel. According to advertisers on Twitter, more than 80 percent of social customer service requests happen on Twitter. And Salesforce calls Twitter “the New 1-800 Number for Customer Service“. There are many social media customer service tools, such as Buffer Reply, available now to help you manage social customer service conversations.
13. Reddit – 330 million MAUs
Reddit, also known as the front page of the Internet, is a platform where users can submit questions, links, and images, discuss them, and vote them up or down.
There are subreddits (i.e. dedicated forums) for pretty much anything under the sun (and above). Subreddits, however, have different levels of engagement so it’s great to research to see if there are popular subreddits that your brand can be part of. For example, r/socialmedia tends to be pretty quiet so we are rarely on Reddit.
Baidu Tieba is a Chinese online forum created by Baidu, the largest Chinese search engine in the world. My interpretation of Wikipedia’s description is that Baidu Tieba seems to be similar to Reddit, where users can create a forum thread on any topic and interact with one another.
15. LinkedIn – 294 million MAUs
LinkedIn is now more than just a resume and job search site. It has evolved into a professional social media site where industry experts share content, network with one another, and build their personal brand. It has also become a place for businesses to establish their thought leadership and authority in their industry and attract talent to their company.
LinkedIn also offers advertising opportunities, such as boosting your content, sending personalized ads to LinkedIn inboxes, and displaying ads by the side of the site.
16. Viber – 260 million MAUs
On the surface, Viber is quite similar to major social messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Messenger. It allows users to send messages and multimedia, call, share stickers and GIFs, and more.
However, Viber presents many more opportunities for businesses. As a business, you can buy ads, promote your brand through stickers, engage your community, display your products in the shopping section, and provide customer service.
17. Snapchat – 255 million MAUs
Snapchat is a social media app that focuses on sharing photos and short videos (as known as snaps) between friends. It made the Stories format popular, which eventually proliferated on other social media platforms like Instagram. But the rise of Instagram Stories seemed to have hindered Snapchat’s growth and marketers’ interest in using Snapchat for their brands in general.
Pinterest is a place where people go to discover new things and be inspired, quite unlike most social media sites where engagement is the primary focus. According to Pinterest, 78 percent of users say that content on Pinterest from brands are useful (much higher than that on other sites). This gives your brand an unique opportunity to shape their purchasing decisions.
As Pinterest users want to be inspired to try or buy new things, having a presence on Pinterest could help put your brand on their minds. Here are some tips on using Pinterest for business that the Pinterest team shared with us.
19. Line – 203 million MAUs
Line is a multi-purpose social messaging app that allows users to message, share stickers, play games, make payments, request for taxis, and shop online. It is the most popular messaging app in Japan and is also popular in other areas in Asia.
Brands can create official accounts on Line to share news and promotions, which will appear on their followers’ timeline.
20. Telegram – 200 million MAUs
Telegram is similar to most social messaging apps and is often known for how secure it is as a messaging app.
There are several ways brands can make use of Telegram, besides providing one-on-one customer support. For example, brands can create chatbots for the Telegram platform or make use of Telegram’s channel feature to broadcast messages to an unlimited number of subscribers.
21. Medium – 60 million MAUs
Medium is an online publishing platform with a social network element. It’s free to publish on Medium and free to read most articles. Some articles are reserved for only paying members.
Besides publishing original content on Medium, it’s quite common for brands to republish their blog posts from their company blog onto Medium to extend their reach. (That’s what we’re doing here at Buffer.)
Regardless of the size of the social media sites, it’s most important to consider whether your brand’s target audience is active on those social media sites. That said, larger social media sites, like Facebook, tends to cover a wide range of interests and topics, which makes it suitable for most brands.
Which social media sites are your brand on? Why did your brand choose to be there?
P.s. Buffer Publish lets you schedule social media posts to six of these 21 social media sites — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. If you want to manage more than one social media accounts on any of these six, we would love for you to try it for free for 14 days and experience what it can do for your business.
—
Credit: The list of top 22 social media sites is compiled by Statista. The respective monthly active users number was taken from the following websites: Facebook (as of June 30, 2018), YouTube (as of July 20, 2018), WhatsApp (as of January 31, 2018), Messenger (as of February 1, 2018), WeChat (as of August 15, 2018), Instagram (as of June 20, 2018), QQ (as of March 2017), Tumblr (estimated as of July 2018), Qzone (as of March 2017), Tik Tok (as of June 2018), Sina Weibo (as of December 2017), Twitter (as of July 27, 2018), Reddit (as of November 12, 2017), Baidu Tieba (estimated as of July 2018), LinkedIn (as of July 2018), Viber (estimated as of July 2018), Snapchat (estimated as of July 18, 2018), Pinterest (as of September 10, 2018), Line (as of October 26, 2017), Telegram (as of March 2018), and Medium (estimated as of December 14, 2016).
If you want your business to have a presence on social media, Facebook is probably one of the first or the first social media platform you think of.
More than 1.4 billion people use Facebook every single day, and many multiple times a day. It’s almost certain that your potential customers are on Facebook and using it actively to connect with their family, their friends, and their favorite brands.
Whether you’re running a brick and mortar store, an ecommerce site, an agency, or a software company, you can use Facebook for marketing your business. In this guide, I hope to cover everything you should know to put your business on Facebook, to market your business, and to measure your results.
If there’s anything you wish to know that isn’t covered here, please feel free to tweet me @alfred_lua. I’m keen to keep this guide as comprehensive and helpful as it can be. Thanks!
Facebook Page: How to create a Facebook Page for your business
Having a Page on Facebook is similar to having a website on the Internet. Your Facebook Page is a place where people can find your business online, learn more about your business, and connect with you.
Creating a Facebook Page for your business is quite straightforward. Facebook has streamlined the process to make it super easy for businesses to set up their Facebook Page.
To get started, on any page on Facebook, click on the drop-down icon in the upper-right corner and select “Create Page”.
Here are the things to do to ensure you have a Facebook Page ready to share with your customers:
Fill out basic information about your business
Add a profile photo and cover photo
Add more information (e.g. description, contact info, location, etc.)
If you prefer to follow a step-by-step guide, we have a detailed Facebook Page set up guide for you. The guide covers things such as how to create your cover photo, what key information to add to your Page, how to customize your Page, and more.
Besides using a photo for your cover photo, you can also use a video or a slideshow. Our Facebook cover photo guide has the ideal dimensions for the cover photo and several cool examples from various businesses.
Facebook algorithm: How the Facebook algorithm works
Before we look at what to post, there’s a very important aspect of Facebook that you should know first.
The Facebook algorithm.
Long ago, Facebook used to show posts in the News Feed in a reverse-chronological order. The most recent post will always appear at the top of the News Feed. But as more and more people and businesses join and post on Facebook, there were so many posts on everyone’s News Feed that it became difficult to go through every post on our News Feed.
So Facebook introduced a system to help organize the posts we see on our News Feed. The system is often known as the Facebook algorithm.
The Facebook algorithm uses many different factors to determine how relevant a post might be to each one of us and shows us the most relevant posts at the top of our News Feed. The algorithm is always changing but here’s the core of how it works:
This means that not all the people who Like your Facebook Page will see all of your posts. On average, Facebook Pages are reaching about five percent (or lower) of your fans.
To reach more people with your Facebook Page, you have to post content that they care about and would interact with. We’ll cover that next.
Now that you’ve understood the Facebook algorithm, let’s go through what you can post on your Facebook Page.
Here are the five main post types:
Text
Link
Image
Video
Stories
Text updates are the most basic post type. It’s the easiest to create, though possibly the least visible on the News Feed. Generally, it’s better to attach a multimedia to make the post stand out. (Or you could go wild with emojis! )
Link posts (posts with a link) show a preview of the link attached, usually with an image, a headline, and a description. You can add text to go with the link (as seen in the example above).
Image posts can have one or multiple images. For single-image posts, the image will be resized to 500 pixels wide and the height will be scaled accordingly. (Learn more about the ideal image sizes for Facebook posts here.)
Video posts seem to be the most popular and most engaging format at the moment. Buzzsumo’s study of 880 million Facebook posts found that videos get twice the amount of engagement than other post types. But experiment with the different post types to discover what works best for your brand.
Stories is the latest post format on Facebook, which is also available (and popular) on Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. It is a vertical image or video that makes use of the entire screen of mobile phones, and it disappears after 24 hours. (You can now advertise with Facebook Stories, too.)
Pro-tips:
The best time to post on Facebook is not what you find in “best time to post” studies because your business has its own best time to post. Post when your data tells you and when it’s relevant to your audience. Here’s how.
How often to post on your Page is mostly dependent on the amount of time and resources you have. Our study with Buzzsumo found that five posts a day seem optimal for engagement. But you can definitely post more or less. Start with one per a day, increase the frequency, and monitor how your reach and engagement change.
Scheduling your Facebook posts with social media scheduling tools like Buffer lets you focus on the important aspects of your business — engaging your fans, creating a great product, etc.
Facebook Insights: How to measure your results
To help you understand how your Facebook Page is performing, Facebook provides a helpful, comprehensive analytics dashboard — Facebook Insights.
With Facebook Insights, you can get the following data:
Promotions (your Facebook ads)
Followers
Likes
Reach
Page views
Page previews
Actions on Page
Posts
Branded content
Events
Videos
Stories
People
Messages
In summary, Facebook Insights tells you how your Page is growing and how many people are engaging with your content (posts, videos, or Stories). You can also use it to see when your fans are most active on Facebook and what your top performing posts are.
My favorite is the Overview Report, where you can get a summary of your Facebook Page’s performance, see how your key metrics have changed over time, and find your top posts.
You can learn more about the Overview Report here.
Facebook ads: How to advertise on Facebook
Once you have mastered the basics of managing a Facebook Page (i.e. posting and checking your results), you might want to consider using Facebook ads to reach a wider audience.
With more businesses joining Facebook and sharing their content, it has been becoming harder to reach an audience on Facebook for free (though not impossible). A solution that many businesses have turned to is Facebook ads.
More than six million businesses advertise on Facebook to promote their products and services. Facebook advertising provides the most comprehensive targeting to help you reach the specific audience you have in mind. You can specify your target audience based on their location, their demographics, their interests, their behavior, and more.
That’s not all. Through the Facebook Ad Manager, you can create ads that’ll also show on Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network (Facebook’s network of publisher-owned apps and sites).
Running a Facebook ad is very straightforward. Here are the steps:
Choose an objective
Select the audience you want to reach
Decide where you want to run your ads
Set your budget (daily or lifetime)
Pick a format (Photo, carousel, video, slideshow, or collection)
The first time spending money on advertising can feel daunting. I know I was intimidated. I read countless articles even before I visited the Facebook Ad Manager. I would love to help reduce the anxiety with creating your first Facebook ads. Here are some resources you might find helpful:
The best way to learn Facebook ads is to dive right in and get started. Through experimentation, you can gradually learn what images and copy resonate the most with your audience, how to pick the right audience, how to budget your spending, and more.
Facebook Messenger: How to connect and serve your customers
Social media marketing used to be businesses simply broadcasting their marketing messages at their followers all day. It worked well back in the days when few businesses were on social media and people were still very receptive to marketing messages.
Nowadays, customers message businesses to find out more information, ask questions about their purchases, and request customer support. A study by Facebook found that the majority of messaging app users surveyed had messaged a business in the past three months — Brazil (85 percent), India (74 percent), UK (61 percent), and US (61 percent).
The easiest way to serve your customers through Messenger is to download the Messenger app (iOS and Android) or use http://messenger.com. With the app, you could receive and reply to your customers’ messages, just like you would with your friend’s messages.
If you manage multiple social media accounts besides your Facebook Page, we hope the best tool for you is Buffer Reply, our social media engagement and customer support tool. With a single tool, you respond to messages, mentions, and comments on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Pro-tip:
Besides serving your customers, you can also use Facebook Messenger for marketing. Here are seven ideas for your inspiration.
Facebook Group: How to build a community
The final thing you might want to experiment with is Facebook Group.
It is one of the easiest ways to start an online community for your brand advocates. Most of your customers are likely already on Facebook, and Facebook offers a ton of features for Facebook Groups to help connect people better. It is also great for increasing your organic reach on Facebook.
For example, Ahrefs, one of the best SEO tools, has a Facebook Group for its customers to discuss Ahrefs, SEO, and marketing. It has almost 8,000 members (one has to be a customer to join), and multiple valuable conversations happen in the group every day.
Starting a Facebook Group is as simple as clicking “Create Group” on Facebook and filling out some basic information. The challenge is growing the group while keeping members engaged. Here are four tips for you.
More Facebook marketing resources
I hope you found this Facebook marketing overview useful. If you would like to learn more about using Facebook to market your business, check out the following resources:
hr {height: 1px; display: inline-block; margin: 15px auto; background-color: #dedede; width: 100%;}
Thank How to Use Facebook to Market Your Business for first publishing this post.
What do all of your favorite social media accounts have in common?
Most likely they are consistent, and you can immediately recognize their style when they pop up in your feed.
To ensure this consistency, they’re probably following a social media style guide.
A social media style guide is your map to guide how your brand appears on social media. Your style guide will relate to and be part of your overall marketing brand guidelines. It should be a living document that can evolve over time.
But why do you need a style guide?
The importance of having a style guide
No matter your team size, a social media style guide is a must — even if you’re the only person posting on your brand’s social media accounts, you need a style guide.
Social media managers are often juggling many things, so having one source of truth for yourself to reference is important. Also, if you’re on vacation or someone has to step in and fill in, they’ll be prepared to keep your social media going without a hitch. Finally, in the case that you hire more folks, the onboarding process will be so much easier with a style guide in place.
So when should you create a style guide?
The answer: Before you think you need one!
Trying to remember all the components to keep your social media presence consistent is almost impossible. A guide that’s got everything in one place sure beats a bunch of post-its on your computer screen.
Let’s take a look at what goes into a style guide. I’ll also be sharing Buffer’s social media style guide. Feel free to use it as a reference but remember to keep yours unique to your brand!
The components of a social media style guide
Here are the eight key components of our social media style guide:
The style guide tl;dr
Voice and tone
Spelling, grammar, and punctuation
Formatting
Emoji usage
Hashtag usage
Multimedia usage
Breaking news
There isn’t one fixed format for a style guide. You can have as few or as many components as you like. Ours is just one example out of the many. In fact, what you’ll see below are sections taken out from our overall brand content style guide.
If you like the following style guide and would like to follow it (we’ll be honored!), here’s a free template for you. →
1. The style guide tl;dr
The first section of our style guide is a tl;dr (too long; didn’t read). We include this section so that if someone doesn’t want to read everything in the full style guide, they can at least come to this section and get the gist.
Here’s our tl;dr:
Buffer’s voice is relatable, approachable, genuine, and inclusive. Buffer’s tone varies, based on the situation. We let empathy inform our tone.
Write succinctly, for the most part. Experiment often.
Be thoughtful and intentional with the use of emojis, hashtags, and multimedia
Don’t alter the spelling or punctuation of words in order to reduce the number of characters. Don’t abbreviate beyond standard abbreviations (like “info” for “information”).
Never use first-person singular pronouns, unless you’re replying to someone (and your first name is included in your reply).
2. Voice and tone
Voice is the overall defining sound for your brand personality and that tone refers to the specific implementations of voice. Simply put: You have the same voice all the time, but your tone changes. There is lots of nuance to the distinction between the two, but we choose to see it in broad strokes. Voice and tone matter: they humanize your brand and let you take part in conversations naturally. When establishing your voice and tone, there are a few exercises you can try.
Buffer’s voice is relatable, approachable, genuine, and inclusive.
We speak with clarity. We strive for expertise. Our goal is to fully understand the needs of the other person (customer, user, reader, listener) and to deliver delight, assurance, direction, or love as appropriate.
Buffer’s tone varies, based on the situation. We let empathy inform our tone.
By default — and whenever appropriate — Buffer’s tone is friendly and positive. The way we speak encourages people to tell us more, and it invites people to get to know us. Because of this, we take a conversational tone with our writing: no big, dictionary words, just everyday talk that is easy to understand. We seek to inform rather than entertain. We don’t want to be the center of attention; we feel like our customers deserve the spotlight.
Here are some examples of the voice and tone of well-known brands:
Target – upbeat, playful, and celebratory
When you walk into Target and realize all #Halloween costumes are 40% off…
Nothing is more cringe-worthy than a spelling fail on social media. You’ll want to carry over many of your spelling and grammar guidelines from your overall content guide, but keep in mind you may want to modify for social media constraints.
Our north star: Write succinctly, for the most part. Experiment often.
In general, we choose to keep our social media updates crisp and to the point, which is partially a response to the character limits on social media and also a reaction to the way our audience chooses to communicate in these communities. We tend to approach social media updates from a conversational place by asking questions, using familiar words, etc. We want to clearly communicate our point while being engaging.
Here are our main grammar takeaways:
Always use an Oxford comma.
Use emoji on social and with emoji-loving customers.
Don’t use emoji as punctuation or as a stand-in for vocabulary.
Be aware when you’re writing about people. Labels are for boxes. Avoid gendered terms.
With so many different platforms, formatting on social media is especially important. Having a dedicated section for formatting will ensure you are consistent and make your brand recognizable.
Here are our formatting guidelines:
No title case in the updates
One or two short sentences. Then bullet emoji.
Conversational sentence case with a Twitter card. Place emoji before any hard return (not in the middle of a sentence)
Curious how to generate sales from Instagram Stories?
You’d be hard pressed to find anything that can inject as much fun and personality into your social media as emoji! With Buffer’s tone being friendly and positive, we naturally love emojis!
Overall: Place emoji at the end of a line (just before a hard return). Not in the middle or at the beginning.
Twitter: Use often and liberally in tweets and replies. Emoji can be especially great when used in place of bullets within lists.
Facebook: Use as needed in updates and replies. We are a bit more reserved with emoji on Facebook versus Twitter. Emoji will typically come at the end of the update text to add some visual interest and pop.
Instagram: Use at the end of your update text as needed. Use often in replies.
LinkedIn: No emoji.
Pinterest: No emoji.
Neuromarketing = principles of psychology applied to marketing research and strategy.
Part I: What is neuromarketing?
Part II: Neuromarketing in practice.
Part III: Running your own neuromarketing experiments. #BufferPodcasthttps://t.co/Mp3FwpT0jJ
You can’t talk about social media without talking about hashtags, they’re important for everything from campaigns to joining in conversations. These will be particular to your brand and personas and you can include a list of branded and campaign specific hashtags.
When and how we use hashtags:
Twitter: No more than one hashtag per tweet.
Facebook: No hashtags.
Instagram: No more than two hashtags in the body of the post. Up to 15 hashtags in the first comment on the post.
From photos to videos, graphics, and other visuals, it’s key to decide what feel is right for your brand and have all of your visual asset guides in one place. This can include the content, context, and style (informational, whimsical, etc.).
Here are our multimedia guidelines:
Overall:
Use available templates.
Try to make images of people as diverse as possible.
Follow brand guidelines for colors and fonts.
Twitter: Use Twitter cards when possible.
Instagram: User-generated content is appropriate.
Steps to a 5 Whys process:
1. Invite all affected
2. Select a meeting leader
3. Ask “Why?” five times
4. Assign responsibilities for solutions
5. Email your team the results
In today’s increasingly connected world, it’s imperative that your brand be mindful of how you’re perceived on social media, particularly in relation to breaking news stories. Having a strategy in place can keep your brand from looking tone-deaf or insensitive.
What we do with breaking news:
Be aware of what’s going on in the news when you’re publishing social media content.
Pause the queue for major breaking news events. If you’re unsure if the news is big/breaking enough, seek advice in Slack. When in doubt, default to pausing.
Looking to catch up on the latest social media news, but short on time? We have you covered! This week (episode #117) we’re chatting about all of this and more.
For those launching a new product or tool or even project, Product Hunt can be a serious game-changer in terms of awareness, traffic, feedback, and so much more.
Twitter is a great place to repurpose content. If you’re creating content of any form: videos, blog posts, podcasts, etc., repurposing it across multiple channels is a great way to get the most bang for your buck.
The most important 2019 Facebook trends that businesses should keep their eye on to make the most out of their social media marketing, including augmented reality, Instagram Stories ads, and more.
Join 19,000+ weekly listeners for the Buffer podcast, The Science of Social Media, where we bring you the latest and greatest in social media marketing news, updates, stories, insights, and actionable takeaways.
How to Launch on Product Hunt Like a Pro, Lessons from 17.2 Million Twitter Impressions, 4 Key Facebook Trends for 2019, and More! [Complete podcast transcript]
Brian: Hi everyone! I’m Brian Peters and this is The Science of Social Media, a podcast by Buffer. Your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and learning.
Hailley: Welcome to episode #117, I’m Hailley Griffis and this week we’re coming to you live from Nashville, Tennessee and we’ll be covering a ton of great updates and strategies in the social media world, including a channel that we haven’t talked about in the past here on the show, Product Hunt.
Brian: It’s awesome to be here with you in person, Hailley. We also have some fun insights from a Twitter Thread that was viewed over 17.2 million times and what it can teach us about the art of Tweeting, four Facebook trends businesses should know for 2019, new marketing campaigns, and more.
Hailley: Let’s kick off the show!
Part I: How to launch your product on Product Hunt like a pro
One channel that we haven’t talked about before here on the show, but one that can certainly be considered a social media channel among other things, is Product Hunt.
For those that have never used Product Hunt before, it’s a great community of creators, founders, developers, marketers, CEOs that curate the latest new products on the market, every day.
For those launching a new product or tool or even project, Product Hunt can be a serious game-changer in terms of awareness, traffic, feedback, and so much more.
Brian: Which is exactly why we figured we’d share some tips on how to launch your upcoming product, tools, or projects on Product Hunt with the best of them.
Getting into it, there are lots of things to think about with Product Hunt launches before, during and after the launch. Without going through every single one, we’ll focus on the most important here.
Brian: In other words, if the reviews, the upvotes, and the comments you receive are by very active users and followed on the platform, their specific weight will be greater .
So before you ever launch your product, it’s important to build relationships, participate in the discussions, comment on the products you find most interesting and make friends with the founder and/or Maker of the products that are published daily.
And of course, be honest and always available, both on Product Hunt and in the different groups.
Hailley: The next thing to prepare before your launch is all of the images, logos, and messaging that you’ll be publishing on social media, email, etc.
Like we mentioned before, it’s super important to respond to all comments on your product, and so worrying about other things like messaging during launch day will be a distraction.
There’s a big list in the article on our blog of everything you’ll need, but the essentials to launch your product include a really good tagline, the names of the Makers.
Quick note on Makers: Every follower of every Maker on the day of the launch will receive a notification, so definitely take advantage of this feature.
Brian: Including Makers and Hunters that have a solid following is really key in launching your project with a bang.
Which leads us perfectly to the next part which is what to do with all of the traffic that you will (hopefully) receive on launch day.
Hailley: On the day of the launch you will receive a lot of traffic from a good amount of targeted and interested visitors….
So why not make the most out of this opportunity?
Installing a few website tracking pixels will be more than enough to make sure you don’t miss out. First, we use Google Tag Manager to install Google Analytics on our website and landing page.
And then, of course, we have Facebook Pixels installed so that we can gently retarget users in the future.
Brian: Those are both must-haves in my opinion when it comes to tracking, but if you wanted to take it a step further, a tool like Hotjar or CrazyEgg will allow you to understand what works and what does not on your site and where folks are clicking.
Now you’ve got your tracking installed it’s time to think about what you want people to do from a marketing perspective once they’ve signed up. This includes things like thinking through your website and product messaging as well as your email onboarding flows.
Hailley: Super important part of the launch, for sure.
You’ll also want to loop in your support team (if you have one). Prepare them with some questions they might get on the day of the launch so that they’re ready to go.
And then finally, you’re ready to launch!
On launch day, it’s all about generating good publicity and management.
Personally message everyone you know. Ask specifically for upvotes on Product Hunt, make sure to personalize them, and get ready to answer a lot of questions and support tickets.
Brian: Love it yeah we can’t stress how important it is to take time to answer everyone’s questions and continue to build relationships even on the day of the launch.
Doing each of the things we talked about today will ensure a smooth and successful Product Hunt launch.
Part II: Lessons from 17.2 million Twitter impressions
Hailley: We recently published an article on our blog titled: “Do Twitter Ads Really Work? A Surprising Experiment: 17.2 Million Views From a Single Twitter Thread.”
Based on the reactions from our audience we thought we’d chat about a few important points from the article on Twitter ads and what makes for a really good Tweet.
Quick background on the experiment, JotForm founder, Aytekin Tank, wanted to know if telling a brand’s authentic story would be successful across social media and other channels.
Brian: Tank had found success telling Stories on Medium in the past, but he wondered if a platform like Twitter could product the same results.
He explained, “Apart from its character limit, Twitter isn’t any different when it comes to sharing your authentic voice, It’s blogging in 280 characters.”
Which I think is a great way to think about Twitter. It’s not just sharing articles to links. It’s telling the story behind that link or behind your brand.
Hailley: The plan was simple:
Repurpose a successful Medium post into a Twitter thread and boost it with Twitter ads to test the limits of Twitter as a platform to spread Aytekin and JotForm’s message.
Looking at the Medium data, he was able to see which articles had resonated most with his audience and tell a story that he was sure would connect with people on Twitter:
He chose to create a Twitter thread based on his post titled: “Don’t listen to those productivity gurus: why waking up at 6am won’t make you successful.”
Brian: And the results?
The tweet generated 17,177,432 impressions on Twitter. Which is incredible!
Now the part we haven’t mentioned yet is that he spent $24,000 on promoting this Tweet.
Which is a lot, don’t get me wrong. However, the Tweet generated more than 4,000,000 impressions organically, which is about 27% percent of the total reach. So still super impressive in its own right.
Hailley: There are a couple of lessons here from this experiment.
One is that Twitter is a great place to repurpose content.
If you’re creating content of any form: videos, blog posts, podcasts, etc, repurposing it across multiple channels is a great way to get the most bang for your buck.
But repurposing doesn’t just mean copying and pasting a link over to Twitter.
If you want to be successful, you need to think about how you can tell each story natively to the platform you’re publishing on.
Impressions and engagement are awesome — especially when you’re quite new to the content marketing game.
But when you use a Twitter thread, you’re able to feature multiple types of content within your tweets and achieve various goals.
For example, Tank’s tweet received more than 1.1 million impressions and over 35,000 clicks, helping to drive traffic back to the original post on Medium.
Hailley: And finally, number three, Twitter is a great place to start a conversation.
With any highly shared tweet, you’ll always get a few trolls pop up here and there, but if you look past this, you’ll realize that Twitter is still an incredible place to start a conversation and build relationships.
Following Aytekin’s thread, he received plenty of questions about JotForm and how the business operates. This enabled him to build new relationships with people he previously wouldn’t have reached.
Part III: Four key Facebook trends for businesses in 2019
Brian: We’re getting towards the end of 2018 which means you’re either one, ramping up to end Q4 off with a bang, or two looking forward to a big 2019. Or both. Either way, it’s a good place to be in.
And in that spirit, we thought we’d share some of the most important Facebook trends for 2019 that you should be keeping your eye on to make the most of your social media marketing strategy and results.
Starting with Augmented Reality Ads.
Hailley: In 2019, we’re going to see a shift to brands looking to build an even deeper connection with users by helping them interact with, and visualize, different products and experiences within the Facebook and Instagram platforms.
And Brian, this is particularly relevant as our marketing team has been experimenting with the Facebook Oculus VR headset over the last week or so.
I can absolutely see shopping in augmented and virtual reality becoming a huge success for brands that sell their products on social media.
Brian: I couldn’t agree more, Hailley.
I was a little hesitant before we started using the Oculus, but I have to say that I’m all in. I now understand why VR gets so much hype. I can’t wait for the future.
And another trend to keep an eye on for 2019, and we’ve talked about this one here on the show a bunch, are Instagram Stories ads. We’ve seen a ton of success, meaning high interaction rates and low cost per clicks.
Hailley: Facebook Stories Ads will really start to enable brands to create new experiences for via the platform’s Stories option.
And remember, Facebook Stories hasn’t taken off the way Instagram Stories has, but this type of full-screen creative is very popular right now, and Facebook Stories ads will provide more options to reach people across both platforms.
So definitely keep an eye on Facebook Stories moving forward.
Brian: Yeah I’m a big believer that Facebook Stories will be one of the hottest advertising channels in 2019 for brands.
Alrighty, another trend to know for 2019 are the Facebook Page Reviews being updated to Recommendations.
We talked about Facebook creating more features in-app for small businesses, similar to companies like Yelp and Google, and it’s important to take advantage of all of these.
Hailley: Exactly, so if you haven’t updated your Facebook page in a while, we highly recommend going into your settings and just making sure you have all of your information filled out and the bells and whistles enabled.
And another great trend, or more of an update from Facebook, is that they’re moving into helping businesses with their creatives more.
For example, Facebook recently launched a new Video Creation Kit which enables you to turn your existing photo assets into mobile-optimized videos. These easy-to-use templates include text options also.
Brian: That’s a good one.
Yeah I was creating an ad the other day and I saw that option in Ads Manager. It was super easy to use and I must admit, it worked pretty well.
So basically what we’re saying here as well is that video ads are absolutely still trending through 2019.
And that’s it. If you keep those four trends in mind you will be well ahead of the game as a business on Facebook and Instagram in the coming year.
Part IV: Buffer SocialChat and exciting new campaigns
Hailley: Totally.
Alright to end the show, we have a few fun updates for everyone on the Buffer front.
First, really excited to introduce a brand new free tool from us here at Buffer called SocialChat.
Buffer SocialChat lets your customers start conversations with you on your website, and continue them privately, right where they feel comfortable, via Messenger and Twitter DMs. It can be enabled with just a couple of lines of code. No software or other tools needed!
Brian: Super excited about that one. Lots of chat tools these days are so complicated and so we wanted to make it easy for businesses to get up and running without too much hassle.
We also have tons of fun campaigns coming your way in the near future. We’re celebrating Small Business Saturday with Mailchimp, Square, and WooCommerce, we have State of Remote Work and State of Social in early 2019 and, well, we might have one more surprise for you in just a few weeks.
Brian: Yes. I can’t wait to announce that Stories surprise here on the show. Stay tuned!
Hailley: Thank you so much for tuning in to the Science of Social Media today. The show notes for this episode are now available on the Buffer Blog at blog.buffer.com with a complete transcript.
If you ever want to get in touch with me or Hailley, we’re always here for your on social media using the hashtag #bufferpodcast. You can also say hi to us anytime and hello@bufferapp.com
Brian: Yup, we’d love to hear from you!
Wishing everyone a wonderful and prosperous holiday season in the next few weeks and months. It’s my favorite time of year and I know it’s a big one for businesses. We’ll keep bringing your shows that help you rock it on social media.
Until next Monday, everyone!
How to say hello to us
We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!
The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode. It’s our hope that you’ll join our 19,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!
Instagram is rumored to be building a standalone shopping app, IG Shopping. But what would a separate shopping app mean for the future of ecommerce on the platform?
Social media marketer, Thea Neal, investigates.
With more than 25 million Instagram Business profiles, and more than 2 million advertisers, Instagram is constantly evolving, testing new features, and experimenting with new ways to increase the value businesses can get from its platform.
For example, in June 2018, Instagram unveiled its latest standalone app, IGTV. The vertical video app was poised to be a challenger to YouTube, and positioned as a long-form video hub that would focus on creators and not on content found via search. Then, two months later, The Verge published a report that Instagram is developing an additional standalone app dedicated to shopping.
In this post, I’ll take a look at what a separate ecommerce app could mean for the future of Instagram marketing.
How IG Shopping could change ecommerce on Instagram: 3 Predictions
1. An opportunity for Instagram to increase conversions
The Verge noted Instagram’s shopping app-in-development will likely be called IG Shopping. Within the app, users would be able to “browse collections of goods from merchants that they follow and purchase them directly within the app.”
Instagram continues to grow by adopting features from other platforms, like its Snapchat-like Stories or the Pinterest-inspired “Collection” save button. Next, Instagram needs to find a way to harness the purchasing power of eCommerce giants like Shopify and Amazon.
As Instagram grows, so does its importance to Facebook’s bottom line, and Andy Hargreaves, a research analyst with KeyBanc Capital Markets told Recode that he expects Instagram to grow to about 30 percent of Facebook’s ad revenue in two years, as well as nearly 70 percent of the company’s new revenue by 2020:
In order to achieve these targets, encouraging more and more advertisers to invest their ad spend on Instagram will be essential — and one way to do this could be the rumored IG Shopping app. With Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger resigning from the company, we could also see Instagram adopt a more aggressive approach to monetization.
Shopping on Instagram features, that enable users to buy products featured in images and stories, have existed for less than a year, meaning consumers still need to learn they can shop on the platform securely and confidently on a regular basis.
Talking to Refinery29, Instagrammer and regular online shopper, Tamiracle Williams, says she would worry about the quality of products and trustworthiness of the merchants on an IG Shopping app:
“I believe the app would focus on quantity over quality. I used a third-party app awhile back to purchase my best friend a hoodie and it ended up being a Polaroid-sized print on a massive hoodie.”
But despite these worries, brands are definitely seeing success with the current version of Shopping on Instagram. Since the features rolled out, accessories brand Natori has seen a 100 percent week-over-week increase in revenue from Instagram. This could easily be translated to IG Shopping, if users are willing to shift their shopping behavior to the new app.
2. Decreased in-feed Instagram organic reach, but increased intent-to-purchase
If IG Shopping does make it to our phones, it seems likely that Instagram could take a similar approach by throttling business reach on the feed to encourage brands to move to IG Shopping. The only clear reason a brand would opt to use IG Shopping over Instagram’s feed (paired with shoppable posts) would be to grab eyes from shoppers who have a true intent to purchase, rather than intercepting them in their usual feed. On a platform where your brand isn’t competing with baby and dog photos, content could drive more conversions on IG Shopping.
But could IG Shopping reveal itself as a branded echo chamber? And how would paid ads work on a platform that exists for brands only?
3. Increased sales opportunities for influencers and DIYers
It’s our assumption that IG Shopping will require a business account to post on the platform. Since many influencers have business accounts already, ecommerce platform, Shopify, should be nervous about how this will make things much easier for influencers and small-scale DIYers who use their platform now.
If IG Shopping unveils itself as a highly-integrated ecommerce platform without requiring an entirely separate site to operate on, it almost certainly will steal business from other ecommerce platforms.
Do consumers want another standalone app?
Instagram’s vertical video app IGTV was released in June 2018, and as of August 2018, the feature’s launch partner’s recent videos received about 6.8 times as many views on their feed videos than they did on IGTV posts.
via Techcrunch
As Techcrunch noted, “if IGTV’s launch partners that benefited from early access and guidance aren’t doing so hot,” the platform likely has bigger problems on its hands. The standalone IGTV app has only peaked at #25 overall in the US iPhone app downloads.
How long will it be before Instagram Stories is a standalone app? Instagram Messenger? The future of ecommerce on Instagram relies on how easy it is to shop on it, but the continued development of more apps will likely contribute to the adoption rate of the platform.
After all, why would you shop on IG Shopping when you could keep shopping on the Instagram app you already have?
But however it’s executed — a standalone app or increased shopping features within Instagram’s main app — it feels clear that Instagram sees eCommerce as hugely important, and lucrative, part of its business going forward.
What are your thoughts on IG Shopping and ecommerce on Instagram? Let me know in the comments.
Want more content like this?
More than 45,000 marketers and small business owners subscribe to our newsletter to receive our blog posts and exclusive email-only content.
Influencer marketing is here to stay. Beauty, business, and tech influencers, among others, can help businesses to reach what can be difficult demographics.
Savvy brands recognize consumers want honesty and are using transparency and openness as a differentiator in influencer marketing campaigns.
Great influencer marketing campaigns include content that is compelling to your target audience, authentic to the storyteller’s voice, and delivers in-line with your overall business goals.
Join 18,000+ weekly listeners for the Buffer podcast, The Science of Social Media, where we bring you the latest and greatest in social media marketing news, updates, stories, insights, and actionable takeaways.
Let’s dive in!
Influencer marketing: The A to Z guide on getting started and calculating ROI [episode transcript]
Hailley: Hi everyone! I’m Hailley Griffis and this is The Science of Social Media, a podcast by Buffer. Your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and learning.
Brian: Welcome to episode #116, I’m Brian Peters and this week are going in-depth into one of the most popular and arguably effective marketing strategies for so many businesses – and that’s influencer marketing. And though influencer marketing isn’t new, it can be tricky to navigate and we hope to solve that for you today.
Hailley: Influencers have the potential to be both effective advocates for your brand as well as opportunities to tap into niche markets that can be difficult for your business to reach. I’m excited to chat about all of that and more.
Brian: As always, a warm welcome to the show. Let’s kick it off!
Long before the industry coined the term, consumers have looked to experts for guidance or inspiration.
Think about William Shatner for Priceline or Catherine Zeta-Jones for T-Mobile or Mark Wahlberg for Calvin Klein. All of these are influencer marketing campaigns in their own right and helped to drive millions of dollars in sales.
Hailley: Today, influencer marketing takes many different shapes and forms, especially in an era where social media stars are born overnight.
The term “influencer” encompasses a wide variety of socially savvy experts. Beauty, business, and tech influencers, among others, can help businesses to reach what can be difficult demographics.
Brian: One thing you need to know about influencer marketing is that it’s here to stay.
For business taking the wait and watch approach, we suggest that you reconsider. Consumers trust recommendations from a third party more often than a brand itself.
In fact, studies show that 70% of millennial consumers are influenced by the recommendations of their peers in buying decisions over brands.
Hailley: When you align with an influencer, not only do they bring their audience, but they also bring their audience’s network as well.
Because of the loyal nature of their audience, an influencer has the ability to drive traffic to your site, increase your social media exposure, and sell your product through their recommendation or story about their experience.
Brian: And it’s important to note here that we’re not necessarily talking about getting expensive celebrities like the Kardashians to endorse your brand.
Sometimes the best influencers are already in your community. They have a small, but highly-engaged and fiercely loyal following. These are the influencers that will make the biggest impact on your brand in the long run.
Hailley: A robust influencer marketing strategy will often include macro-influencers, micro-influencers, brand ambassadors, brand advocates, and even your employees (yes, they’re influencers, too!).
The right influencer marketing strategy will allow brands to understand and optimize the performance of the right group of influencers, at the right time, to meet their goals.
Brian: Which is a perfect segment into how to get started.
Part II: Getting started with influencer marketing
The first thing to know about influencer marketing is that it’s not about you, it’s about the consumer. And more importantly, about building trust with the consumer so that they buy from you more than just once.
As influencer marketing becomes a central strategy for brands, maintaining that trust requires authenticity and honesty.
Hailley: Savvy brands recognize consumers want honesty and are using transparency and openness as a differentiator.
Brands are doing things like social media takeovers with influencers for a more authentic experience. This removes the brand’s control of the content, but helps to increase performance of the campaign.
Brian: Exactly, so it’s essential that you start with an understanding of who your target customer is.
A common mistake brands and agencies make is to decide first the type of influencers they would like to work with.
Instead start with who your target audience is and then work your way back from there. Identifying influencers that fit into your ideal description.
Hailley: There are really 4 places to find influencers for your brand. Google, databases, networks, and marketplaces.
Google: A manual process of typing keywords, scanning webpages for contact info, and then keeping track of the info in spreadsheets. I would also lump social media into here – manually searching social channels and hashtags for relevant influencers for a given topic.
Databases: Do website scraping for you, pulling publicly available data. These are good places to start but be prepared to spend time vetting each influencer and communicating with them directly.
Brian:
Networks: In the middle of Google/social and databases. A network is like an agency that has relationships with the influencers, but will require that you go through them to reach out.
Marketplaces: A marketplace often offer the best of the four options by pulling in real-time information, along with avoiding the middleperson to connect directly with influencers.
Hailley: There’s no right or wrong way to find influencers for your brand. The key is identifying people that align with your values and customers. Which leads us to types of influencers.
So for the sake of this episode, we’re going to skip finding celebrity influencers and cover more realistic types.
First you have your macro-influencers who create a ton of content. They’ve attracted a sizable audience because they’ve gotten to know them during their process. These are great for reaching a large audience in a certain industry or vertical.
Brian: Just below macro-influencers, in terms of audience size, are micro-influencers.
Micro-influencers are great at getting the word out and have audiences that range in smaller sizes.
They’re great for spreading the word to a highly engaged audience and can help get your brand the attention you’re looking for. The scale won’t be huge, but you’ll be rewarded with higher-intent buyers, even if you don’t have a large budget.
These “brand ambassadors” naturally love your brand and can be found online talking about you already.
Pay attention to your social channels and invite them to share and create content. These people already love your brand and are willing to talk about what you are doing.
Referral programs are great for these types of influencers and will help incentivize them to spread the word.
And, of course, there are hundreds of varieties of expertise and specialties within each influencer category:
Brian: We’ve got our influencers aligned with our target customers. We’re set to go.
Now what?
Part III: The keys to every great influencer marketing campaign
The key to any great influencer marketing campaign is creating great content. Content that is compelling to your target audience, authentic to the storyteller’s voice, and delivers in-line with your goals. If one piece of this equation is missing, the content will fall flat.
Hailley: One fun way to look at creating great content is giving your audience something to talk about.
Everyone talks so much about optimizing content for search engines these days, that virality and sharing often gets lost in the equation.
One way this can be done is by giving your influencers an experience or brand immersion they won’t be able to stop talking about. Experiences provide the creative inspiration influencers crave, and also align nicely with your brand messaging since you control the atmosphere.
Which is actually interesting because it’s fun for the influencer to create content and for the audience to follow along with. There are definitely ways to get creative.
Hailley: Remember that a true influencer of your brand is passionate about your product or service.
Giving them access to your product to get familiar with and inspiring them to share engaging content is a great way for the audience on the other side to buy into the campaigns you’re running.
Brian: Exactly. And one of the great things about influencer marketing campaigns is that it doesn’t just stop with the content being posted on their site, or across their social channels.
A successful strategy includes extending the content usefulness to other aspects of your marketing. You can use influencer content in quotes and testimonials.
Or you can feature influencers in your social media ads or on your website. We recommend also including your content in a dedicated section of your business’ newsletter.
Part IV: Influencer cost, budgeting, and ROI
Hailley: Totally. You know one thing we haven’t talked about yet is cost and budgeting.
Great influencers will naturally want to be compensated, but the good news is that it doesn’t always have to be financially if you’re on a tight budget.
You can offer the influencer shout outs on your blog, website, or newsletter.
You can give them your product or products for free. I’ve seen some brands offer influencers a free supply of their product for a year in exchange for a certain amount of content.
Brian: And of course you can also offer influencers, like in a referral program, a certain amount of commission for every 1,000 people reached, or sale, or whatever your goal is.
There’s no right or wrong here and a lot of times influencers are willing to get creative with you in order to make it work. Especially if they like or believe in your product which is always better anyways!
Hailley: Alright, last but not least, as with any good strategy, let’s talk metrics.
Different metrics and methods for measurement can be used to define your influencer campaign success in relation to your original goals.
Instead of just talking about reach or conversions, we like to break it down into 5, more specific parts, of the buyer journey.
There’s awareness, consideration, activation, purchase, and loyalty.
Brian: It’s important to remember that not everyone who sees the content will purchase your product right away and that’s not necessarily a loss for your brand.
In the awareness stage you have things like reach and views.
In the consideration stageyou have metrics like clicks, content views, and comments.
And of course down the funnel in the activation and purchase phase you have things like sharing, follows, clicks to your website or product, conversions and purchases.
Hailley: Ideally we’d all start in the purchase stage, but don’t immediately skip all of the first stages in an attempt to sell your product. Those are all part of the trust building that we talked about in the beginning of this episode.
And then there’s the loyalty stage at the end. With any luck , followers of your influencers will become influencers for your brand in their own right.
That will look like even more sharing, referrals, and user-generated content which you can repurpose for your marketing channels.
Once you start to collect data on your influencers, you can start to use that data to optimize your influencer marketing efforts. You can rank your influencers based on output, what content resonates with your audience, and which of their social channels are best for distribution.
Hailley: Precisely.
And just recapping this episode before you go…
Technology and data are only part of the story. There is a reason influencers are often referred to as creators. Look for a partner that blends the science of data and technology with the art of experience, expertise, and content creation.
Brian: Well said, Hailley.
All of that will help give you a clear and customized picture of the real impact of your influencer marketing campaigns and strategies.
Thank you so much for tuning in to the Science of Social Media today. The show notes for this episode are now available on the Buffer Blog at blog.buffer.com with a complete transcript.
If you ever want to get in touch with me or Hailley, we’re always here for your on social media using the hashtag #bufferpodcast. You can also say hi to us anytime and hello@bufferapp.com
Hailley: Thanks for tuning into our show every single week. You make this fun and are the entire reason we do what we do so thank you! And thanks for telling your friends, family and colleagues about us as well. You are our very own Science of Social Media influencers and we love you for it.
Until next Monday, everyone!
How to say hello to us
We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!
The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode. It’s our hope that you’ll join our 18,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!
Today, we’re excited to launch, SocialChat by Buffer, a simple, free tool that enables visitors to start social media conversations on your website.
Each and every day, people visit your website to learn more about your business.
The problem is a large percentage of websites don’t really support visitors in helping them to find what they want. In reality, most website visits are simply ignored — that was excusable a couple of years back, but not so much now.
People in 2018 don’t want to have to search your website for a contact form or spend ages crafting an email request. In fact, they don’t really want to use traditional social media channels for communication.
Now, it’s all about private, 1:1 messages.
But don’t just take our word for it: Gartner forecasts that by 2019, requests for customer support through consumer mobile messaging apps will exceed requests for customer support through traditional social media.
SocialChat lets your customers start conversations with you on your website, and continue them privately, right where they feel comfortable, via Messenger and Twitter DMs. It can be enabled with just a couple of lines of code. No software or other tools needed!
We’ve been experimenting with SocialChat for a while and are excited about to share this tool with you for a few reasons:
1. The conversation doesn’t have to end when the visitor leaves your site. With SocialChat your website visitors can then easily send you a Facebook message or Twitter DM, and you can turn each visit into an ongoing relationship on social media.
2. It’s human and authentic. Chatbots are pretty awesome, but you just can’t replace the feeling of talking to another person. Chatting through Messenger and Twitter feels super personal as it’s a method used by billions across the globe to chat with friends, and family. A Conversocial study found that over half (59 percent) of people considered interacting with a human agent to be more important than being serviced by a bot or AI-driven resolution.
3. Business has always been social. As Facebook’s David Marcus told USA Today, commerce has always been social: “For so long, doing business was always conversational. Web (e-commerce) is truly an anomaly. It feels good to have a more human relationship when you’re buying things.”
Why social messaging is the new normal for customer engagement
When customers started turning to social media for support, it happened on Facebook Pages and public tweets. Now, however, for many brands, the majority of questions and conversations have shifted to private messaging channels.
Here are a couple of reasons for that change:
1. Messaging is convenient, familiar, and fast
Businesses tend to use communication channels that are familiar to consumers.
When a phone call was the number one way to keep in touch, businesses offered phone support and sales. When email took over as the default communication channel, businesses followed. Now that the majority or peer-to-peer communication happens over social messaging apps and products, businesses have again followed suit.
Social messaging is fast becoming the new normal for customer support and engagement. According to a Facebook-commissioned study by Nielsen, 56 percent of people surveyed would rather message a business than call customer service, and 67 percent expect to message businesses even more over the next two years.
By using channels that feel familiar, businesses are able to engage with customers and prospects in channels they feel comfortable with.
Messaging is also quick. Most consumers use a form of messaging app every day — multiple times per day, even — so replying to a thread with a business feels much more natural than heading to their email account.
2. Platforms are embracing private communication
On Messenger alone, there are more than eight billion messages exchanged between consumers and businesses every month.
And platforms are constantly taking steps to make it easier for consumers to connect with brands through direct messages. For example, it’s now very simple to add Messenger buttons to your Facebook Page and Twitter DM direct links to your profile, making it easier than ever for consumers to reach out and talk with your business privately:
And with SocialChat, you can take this one step further and add direct message links directly to your website:
We made it easy and 100 percent free to get started with SocialChat
We built SocialChat because we wanted a free and easy way for businesses to help start conversations with prospects and customers and turn those conversations into ongoing relationships on social media.
Here’s how to get up and running with SocialChat in three simple steps:
Step 1: Customize Your Widget
Go to buffer.com/reply/socialchat and customize the appearance and copy that will display within your widget.
Step 2: Add the code to your site
Copy your custom embed code to your clipboard and paste it into your website before the closing tag (or ask your website developer to do it for you.) If you’re using WordPress, check out this plugin to easily add your embed code to your website instead.
Step 3: You’re all set
You’re ready to chat with website visitors through Facebook Messenger or Twitter DMs. It’s that easy!
Here’s how the widget looks on this blog (it’s live on this page too so you can test it for yourself):
We believe that social messaging is the next frontier of customer support and engagement.
Agree with us?
We hope SocialChat will make it easier for you to reap the benefits of social messaging too, and we’d love for you to give it a try.
If you have any thoughts on feedback on SocialChat, please let us know in the comments. We’d love to hear from you.
Fortunately for marketers and small businesses, it doesn’t have to be. Neuromarketing is when the principles of psychology are applied to marketing research and strategy.
Understanding why people make purchasing decisions online and how they respond to various marketing strategies and tactics is a critical component in effectively marketing your own products or services.
This week on The Science of Social Media, we’re diving into the world of neuromarketing and how you can use it to get better results from your social media marketing for your brand or business.
Let’s kick it off!
Neuromarketing: Surprising Facts Businesses and Marketers Need to Know [episode transcript]
Brian: Hi everyone! I’m Brian Peters and this is The Science of Social Media, a podcast by Buffer. Your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and learning.
Hailley: Welcome to episode #115, I’m Hailley Griffis and this week we’re nerding out over neuromarketing and how you can use it to get better results from your social media marketing for your brand and business. And don’t worry, we’ll give you a better explanation of what neuromarketing is before we dive in.
Brian: We got such a strong response from listeners that loved hearing about psychology back in episode #107 so let’s get started going over another bit of marketing science.
Hailley: Honestly it does! I was a little nervous putting this show together but we’ve learned a lot about it and we’re here to break neuromarketing down for you and of course give you a few ideas and examples to incorporate into your own social media marketing.
Brian: I think the best place to start with any new concept is a strong definition. So here’s a quick definition for you. Neuromarketing is when neuropsychology is applied to marketing research.
In practice, this might look like studying a person’s cognitive response to viewing ads or product packaging.
Hailley: Exactly. The whole point is to understand the reasoning behind why people make the purchasing decisions that they do, and how they respond to marketing, and then of course use that knowledge to get better at marketing your own products or services.
Brian: If you haven’t heard of neuromarketing before, don’t stress. It’s actually an emerging field in marketing. The term neuromarketing was first published in 2002 but there is some research that goes back into 1990.
Hailley: You might be asking yourself why we need to jump on this complex scientific train and really there are a lot of benefits to neuromarketing for social media managers.
Marketing campaigns and strategies can become more efficient and effective, and ultimately you can align your marketing with the true needs and wants of your potential customers because you’re starting to understand how your customer’s brain works.
Part II: Neuromarketing in practice
Brian: One of the more traditional ways to use neuromarketing is when it comes to product design choices. Brands like Campbell’s Soup and Frito-Lay have used neuromarketing to redesign their packaging and make it more appealing.
Hailley: PayPal used neuromarketing to learn that their commercials that focused on speed and convenience triggered a significantly higher response than those that were advertising safety and security. PayPal wound up developing an entirely new ad campaign based on these results.
Brian: Let’s talk about how you can best leverage neuromarketing to be an even better social media marketer. Well, there are two ways to go about neuromarketing. First is to conduct your own studies on people that are your target audience, and second is to read and learn everything you can about general neuromarketing best practices that apply to most people.
Hailley: If you’re a team of one like many social media managers are, then we totally understand that you’ll probably want to stick with learning from others and applying the broad lessons. Whereas if you’re at a larger company and have a bit of budget, then maybe doing your own neuromarketing studies make sense.
Brian: Definitely! We’ll go over a little bit of both of these options for you today. Let’s start with what we can learn from big studies.
There a book all about neuromarketing called Brainfluence by Roger Dooley. It’s a great read if you like what we’re talking about here! We’re going to go over a few of the practical techniques he talks about for convincing and persuading customers.
Hailley: Well, in Brainfluence, Dolley shares experiments completed by the University of Michigan show that people truly can be affected by simple vs. complex fonts.
Brian: It’s wild how powerful a simple font can be! Now of course as social media managers we should all be aiming to share designs on social media that are in an easy to read font. Another
one to remember is for surveys.
I know a lot of social media managers who love surveys and it’ll be good practice from now on to make sure the instructions for the survey are simplified so you’ll have more people fill it out (hopefully!)
Hailley: Simple fonts are great for getting people to perform a task, but don’t give up on complex fonts just yet. It turns out that complex fonts help to boost memory recall! So if you use a complex font someone is more likely to remember what you wrote and it’ll likely be grabbing their attention visually as well.
Brian: Don’t go off the rails writing everything in complex fonts just yet though. This tactic is best used sparingly and for important information only.
Next up let’s talk about images. James Breeze, an Australian usability specialist quoted in Dooley’s Brainfluence studied how people view ads with babies and he learned that people who are looking at the ad will look at what the person in the at is looking at.
Hailley: If the baby is looking at a box of diapers then the person viewing the ad is also looking at the box of diapers. But this works for more than just babies. If you are using images of people, or even animals, pay careful attention to what they are looking at because that will more than likely be the focus of your customers attention.
Brian: Another good lesson from this book is something we’ve chatted about on the podcast loads before, and that’s trust. Trust if of course crucial to many parts of business and it turns out the key to obtaining your customer’s trust is to have them feel trusted as well.
Here are a few ways outlined in the book for making your customer feel trusted:
Offer a trial with few restrictions
Establish credit without long forms or a lengthy screening process
Provide confidential information without making a prospect or customer sign an NDA
Hailley: Last but not least, while we’re looking at learning from neuromarketing, is all about smiling. We talked about smiling and emojis in episode #107 so definitely go check that out if this sounds interesting to you.
The findings are sort of what you’d expect, if you use a photo of someone smiling then it is “mood boosting” for the person looking at that photo and that little mood boost can affect your customer’s willingness to spend money.
Brian: Love that, so next time you’re grabbing an image whether you have a bunch of photos of your teammates, which is what we have at Buffer, or maybe you use a site like Unsplash, be on the lookout for people who are happy and smiling to use in your marketing materials.
Part III: Running your own neuromarketing experiments
Hailley: Now that we’ve talked about what we can learn from general neuromarketing lessons, let’s talk a bit about what it’s like to do your own neuromarketing experiments. Now, there are a range of options here and they go from fairly affordable to extremely expensive medical equipment, so of course you’re in the best place to judge what level of neuromarketing you’d like to do.
Brian: Let’s start with the most affordable and then the prices will increase with each new method we talk about. So this first method is called eye-tracking, which is used to tell marketers where the attention of someone goes when they look at something.
The really basic method of eye-tracking is more like mouse tracking and it’s something you might know as heat mapping. This is when you are able to see a map of where people are primarily looking at when they look at your images or website.
There are tons of tools that let you do this pretty easily and they can be pretty affordable depending on what you’re looking for. A few options are CrazyEgg, Zoho, and MouseFlow.
Hailley: We’ve done some heat mapping here at Buffer, always neat to see.
So the other way to do eye-tracking involved more equipment. The idea is that you can team up with researchers who have glasses that have integrated cameras in them or screens that have eye trackers on them. Then the research is able to track the eye movements of the participant while they are watching an ad or looking at any other marketing content.
The idea here is that once you know where someone’s attention the ad is directed, you can change the way text and images are placed.
Brian: That can be so helpful because properly places attention really ensures that someone will remember your product or service.
Another type of neuromarketing research you can do is called facial coding. Again, this involves some equipment. Essentially you’d get specific software that assesses the movement of someone’s facial features to measure if they are reacting positively or negatively to what they are seeing.
Hailley: This is pretty cool because so much research shows that having either a positive or a negative ad, something that really evokes emotion, is bound to impact it’s effectiveness and as a byproduct your sales.
Of course something to mention with both this method and the eye tracking is that not only do you need the equipment and a researcher to do the study but you’ll also need to find a bunch of participants to do this, so it can be quite a bit of work.
Brian: Now, we’re at the level of neuromarketing where people go to a whole other level and start tracking the brain activity of their potential customers. So one of the ways to do this is using EEG or electroencephalography. (What a mouthful!)
EEG uses electrodes to measure electrical waves produced by the brain and allows researchers to track instinctual emotions like anger, excitement, sorrow, and lust. The one thing that EEG is critiqued for, however, is that it doesn’t grant researches access to the deeper parts of the brain where the “pleasure center” is located, and of course that could be a pretty big deal for your marketing.
Hailley: Okay last, but certainly not least because it is the most expensive way to do neuromarketing research, and this is using fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging.
Using fMRI means through the help of powerful magnet researchers are able to track the brain’s blood flow as subjects respond to audio and visual cues. This is where the pleasure center comes in because it allows examiners to access this deep part of the brain and lets marketers know how people are really responding to their work.
Brian: While this sounds like a dream for most marketers, fMRI is not only extremely expensive but pretty inconvenient for participants. The equipment is up to $1,000 per machine per hour to operate and your participants have to lie completely still in a the machine while doing the tests.
Hailley: That doesn’t sound like too much fun but it is in the name of marketing!
Brian: True! I don’t see us doing any fMRIs here at Buffer anytime soon but it was still super fun to learn a little bit more about this process.
Hailley: So much fun!
Thank you so much for tuning in to the Science of Social Media today. The show notes for this episode are now available on the Buffer Blog at blog.buffer.com with a complete transcript.
If you ever want to get in touch with me or Hailley, we’re always here for your on social media using the hashtag #bufferpodcast. You can also say hi to us anytime and hello@bufferapp.com
Brian: Yup, we’d love to hear from you!
And thanks to everyone tuning into our show every single week. I was just looking at a map of which countries our downloads come from and was super excited to see that we reach thousands of people in countries around the world. It’s an honor and privilege to be here with you.
Lots more to come in the remainder of 2018 so stay tuned.
Until next Monday, everyone!
How to say hello to us
We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!
The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode. It’s our hope that you’ll join our 18,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!
)
⠀ ⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ 
: @anniepwanderlust #buffercommunity
:
@revolve #revolvearoundtheworld
Marie Mary 