Social media marketing, both paid and organic, is what engages marketers at SocialPro. As the name suggests, the conference offers professional-level presentations on social marketing. The field is a fast moving one that requires a lot of strategy to stay on top of. But as keynote speaker Wei Kuan Lum, Facebook’s Head of SMB Business Marketing, reminded us, it has an “awesome future”.
Indeed, she offered a far-reaching vision of the future of Facebook, as the platform continually evolves from sharing thoughts in text and images to more immersive content. It’s not hard to see how Facebook’s investment in virtual reality fits into that evolution, with people having shared experiences in VR.
Facebook-owned Instagram has over 400 million monthly active users, and its strength as a social platform is hard to ignore. While “posting great content” seems straightforward enough, Union Metrics CEO Hayes Davis showed how you can use performance metrics to improve your posting effectiveness, like testing different post times, along with tips on things like how to avoid being a blatant hashtag stuffer. Check out his guide to Insta-Success here.
Likewise, Dave Roth of Emergent Digital promised tips on how to “crush it” on FB and IG. On Facebook, that can mean relentlessly testing short videos that are attention-grabbing in the first few seconds, and work with muted audio. It also means creating mobile-specific text ads and ensuring that they’re readable on your own devices — don’t trust preview tools too much.
On creating Instagram content, Roth counsels to focus on experiences, not products, walk the fine line between aspirational and authentic, and experiment with formats like carousel ads that mix images and video. For more on getting mobile right, check out Dave’s presentation.
When it comes to the interplay between search and social, Sana Ansari, General Manager of Accelerate at 3Q Digital, spoke about synergy that can create fantastic results. Those results require smart segmentation of your customer base, targeting similar audiences at the top of the funnel, and smartly retargeting as people move down the funnel. Video ad viewership data can be a powerful tool for remarketing. See Sana’s presentation here.
Inevitably, all this social media creates an overload of data. Just because you can track it all, doesn’t mean you should, according to John Lee of Clix Marketing. Instead, define what success looks like on each platform, and track that. In doing so, it helps to understand how different placements on different platforms, and how data can vary between them.
He recommended that social marketers let measurement guide optimization and segmentation strategies, noting that “device performance often follows demographics. CPC, CPM and CPA differ by placement, by device. 20 year olds don’t convert the same way 50 year olds do.” See why he believes tracking Facebook and Instagram ads should be one of the Deadly Sins in his presentation.
Is your organization looking to apply a more professional approach to your social media marketing? Give Kiosk a call – we’d love to help.