Yes, There IS a Science to Social Media Engagement! (Here’s How it Works)

Struggling with social media engagement and social referral traffic?

How about all the social media metrics out there?

I know I do.

Especially with so many different social networks, tactics, and channels. 

By 2016, 50% of businesses will rely on social media as their primary tool to reach new customers.1 As a (bootstrapped) startup, making the most of all marketing investments is critical.

I'm sure it is for you too.

In this post, I'm going to cover:

1. The online customer decision journey
2. The specific functions of social media messaging
3. Why engagement is the most important metric
4. The basic science of engagement to increase social referral traffic to your website

Caveat: For marketers and businesses that depend on social referrals to their websites.

Yes, There IS a Science to Social Media Engagement! (Here’s How it Works)

What are people thinking when deciding to buy online?

We're all familiar with the customer journey (the various factors and forces that influence typical purchasing behavior). David Edelman of McKinsey & Company does a great job simplifying it as the "Social Journey."

I like it and am going to run with Social Journey. This is the basic conversion path that turns prospects into buyers. Social media marketing - done right - is a complex process. It's one that takes time. It can lead to fantastic results and huge returns on investment for businesses of all sizes.

"Social Media across the consumer decision journey is not monolithic. There are four specific functions." -David Edelman

To help you better understand how the social journey impacts you and your potential customers, I'm sharing my own social journey with Stir.

To keep things simple, I'm going to use Facebook and Fan(s) in my examples below. 

What does the anatomy of a social conversion look like?

Consider: This may be the first interaction a social media user (user) has with your brand. For e.g. a Facebook post you shared. It's also the stage where you begin to build a relationship with them. 

• Your first goal during this stage is to get a new Fan.
• Demonstrating empathy early on is important as they learn more about your brand.
• You'll continue to nurture them with more posts. If you nail this, they'll move to the next stage. Be sure to have enough fun, insightful, and actionable content as possible.

How It Began - My Social Journey with Stir I first learned about Stir from a post shared by a friend on Facebook in late 2013. It was about the effects of sitting vs. standing at work. I was curious since I'm chained to my desk throughout the day. They had me when I read you could burn 30,000 more calories in a year just by standing more during work. The article resonated with me. I liked the Page. 

Evaluate: This is when your Fan checks out your product or service for the first time. You've established enough credibility and interest with them. The awesome content you're sharing is working. It's a tough nut to crack, but timing is everything if you're going to ask them. I prefer the subtle approach. Optimize your calls-to-action (CTAs) on your website and drive Fans there with great content.

• Timing is important. If every other post you share is an ask - you'll turn Fans off fast.
• There's a lot more going on in the Fan's head than you know. Remember that users are on Facebook to connect with people and brands they love.
• Push & Pull: Will this make my life easier? Do they understand my problem? Does this solve it? Am I satisfied that this new product will be better than what I have now? Push and Pull move a buying decision forward.
• Anxiety & Habit: The bigger the price tag the greater the anxiety. We're all creatures of habit. This comes into play a lot more than you think. I felt it recently when I got the notification to upgrade to El Capitan on OS X - which is free. Anxiety and habit can hold a sale back or kibosh it all together.
• Users will take more time to convince if you haven't done a good job building rapport and proving empathy.
• Remember how easy it is for them to get to a second or third opinion with just a few clicks too.

My Social Journey with Stir (continued) Stir posted occasional updates on Facebook via their Page. I ignored the posts about their accolades for a while. Then I saw an article about POTUS checking out the Stir desks. I laughed at the pun - he was "moved." 

Finally, I saw Robert Scoble's video of his Stir desk in my Newsfeed. While I knew that Stir wouldn't make it into the Oval Office, the video got me interested. It created enough desire for me to click the link to their website to learn more. Whoa! A $3,000 smart desk? I still needed more convincing.

 

I continued to Evaluate Stir over the course of eighteen months. They could have done a better job sharing posts on their Page that hit at the heart of my desire. Remember what I said about "empathy?" 

Their PR team made up for it though. "Sitting is the new smoking" was an article I read on Fast Company. Then another one on Business Insider which opened me up to the human side of Stir's CEO. Okay, they finally had me. I added Stir to my wish list. (A list I keep for purchases I reward myself with after exceeding personal goals).

Buy: The culmination of the efforts to date. That big payoff when your Fan finally becomes a customer. After all, this is the ultimate goal we strive for with all our marketing. But it doesn't end here.

• Users will go through the Evaluate and Consider stages before making a decision to Buy.
• The time they spend in the former stages depends on many things like what we discussed above.
• This conversion usually happens off social media on your website. Unless you have social commerce capabilities.

My Social Journey with Stir (continued) In mid 2015, almost two years since I met Stir - I took the plunge. I consider myself a pragmatic geek. I'd prefer to invest my money on tools that improve my performance. So instead of a shiny red F430 - I bought the Ferrari of desks which will arrive in a few weeks. I'll keep you posted on the story and the results.

Post-conversion, your goal is to continue to Lead your customers with messaging. You're seeking to gather Customer Input from them. Nurturing them through the latter stages of the Social Journey to grow your relationship:

• Experience
• Advocate
• Consider (again)
• And yes, Buy (again) 

How to nurture Fans on social media

Now that we understand the Social Journey, let's talk about tactics. You should focus your messaging on social media to each stage of the social journey. It should revolve around four specific functions which I'll get into shortly. 

It sounds a lot harder than it is. For the most part, it just means publishing posts that people want to consume. Knowing that your Fans will be at various stages of the Social Journey -- create a wide mix of visual content, status/text posts and evergreen content (or 3rd party links). 

First, a cautionary tale: I know a guy - let's refer to him as Guy. When we're together, he hogs the discussion and talks about himself the entire time. I'm usually bored by the second beer and switch to the hard stuff to raise my spirits. Pun intended. But, doesn't this sound familiar?

In my opinion, the same rule applies to brands with social media messaging. Stop talking about yourself so much.

How to target your social media messaging to achieve a desired outcome

McKinsey & Co. conducted a series of expert interviews and gleaned the following four functions of messaging:

1. Monitor: Keeping a close eye on brand mentions, trends, and insights. This function spans the entire Social Journey.
2. Respond: Handling inquires from Fans and customers is critical. Have someone on your team dedicated to this and act fast. 
   • Another McKinsey & Co. report suggests that 78% of prospects have bailed on a sale because of poor customer service.
   • People base 70% of buying decisions on how they feel they're treated
   • Marketing Metrics found a 60-70% probability of selling to an existing customer
3.  Amplify: Share the positive stories from customers. Showcase testimonials and case studies. Invite Fans and customers to share their experiences on social media. This leads to strong brand affinity in the latter stages of the Social Journey.
4. Lead: This is where your messaging strategy kicks in - big time! Use your social posting strategy to achieve the desired outcome for each stage. Here's where a wide mix of content comes into play. Organize it to the different stages of the Social Journey.
   • Consider: You're seeking awareness. New Fans and of course engagement (likes, comments, shares, and clicks). 
     • Posting strong visual content is excellent to start. You know - the cool quotes we've all seen. The amazing photos. The funny videos that Fans relate to. 
     • Mixing it up with status and text posts. Asking questions increases interaction. Sharing insightful and interesting facts. I like industry related statistics too.
     • Sharing Evergreen content from your Blog. When creating awareness you want to focus on wider topics. Ensure you're solving real-world problems with actionable advice. Remember the story about Guy.
   • Evaluate: You want to build on the previous interactions and establish rapport. The easiest way to do this is to continue to share great content. Your goal is to establish credibility and prove empathy. Signaled by engagement on your posts - usually your evergreen content. 
     • Elevate your visual content with more in-depth materials. For e.g. Infographics. You don't have to be a designer to make one these days. 
     • Short video content is also easy to create. My pal Scott Ayres swears by Blab. Here's a long one as an example - any length is fine - as long as it provides actionable information. Other live streaming apps like Periscope are pretty cool too.
     • Your status updates/ text posts should focus more on industry related facts. Quick actionable advice and questions related to problems your Fans can relate to.
     • Your evergreen content should mature in its context. Begin to focus on more precise topics and problems faced by your Fans. Keep providing actionable advice, plenty of real-world examples, and keep it simple.
   • Buy: Timing is everything. It's like asking someone you just met for twenty bucks for gas. 
     • The ask (CTA) should occur on your website - unless you have social commerce.
     • Put yourself in the shoes of the prospect. 
     • Make sure the CTA is clear. Headlines that address a specific problem resonate well. Focus on the struggling moment. The screenshot below is an excellent example. h/t Alan Klement for the image and advice.
     • Remember the anxiety I mentioned above? Defuse it! Don't hype your product or ramble on about benefits. Take a few moments to answer the common questions.

How can I measure progress on social media conversion paths?

That's a great question! There's a lot of debate on which metrics matter and what to track. I'm going to cut right to the chase. The one-metric-that-matters (OMTM) on social media is engagement (likes, comments, shares, clicks, retweets, favorites, +1s, re-pins, etc.). 

Why? I like to think of it in simple terms. There's a lot of smart people who agree with me. So when thinking about which metrics to track, I ask myself:

• What can I do with this information?
• Does it enable me to take action?
• Make a decision?
• Drill down to specifics?
• Run tests to improve performance?
• Contribute to my goal?

Indulge me for a moment. Page Like Counts and Reach on Facebook are two popular metrics tracked. We're in the Consider stage. We have 25,000 Fans and Reach of 79,679!  That makes me feel amazing but there's not much I can do with that information is there? 

Sure -- Page Likes indicate momentum and Reach a wider audience. 

But, it may not correlate to interactions on the posts I'm sharing. That's what I'm after.Engagement on my Page (Engaged Fans) and Post Engagement are metrics that I'd answer "Yes" to on the questions above.

Likes, comments, clicks, and shares on my Facebook posts send strong signals. 

• I get a clear picture of what type of content my Fans consume (likes and comments).
• I get precise data on the content my users advocate (shares).
• It helps me to decide what tactics to improve or drop.
• I can run A/B Tests on posts for optimization.
• It allows me to prove/ disprove my content strategy's hypotheses.
• It indicates the progression of my Fans along the Social Journey.

The difference between these two types of metrics are often referred to as Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics. The latter is what you should focus on.

On social media, the most important metric (OMTM) is Engagement.

It provides you with the clearest information you need to move Fans along the Social Journey.

Using engagement to drive social referral traffic to your website

Now having said all that, let me remind you that social media is a complex process. Engagement is the hardest outcome to achieve.

Businesses of all sizes strive for more engagement on their campaigns. Our friends at Buffer recently completed an analysis with BuzzSumo. They took a look at over 500 Million Facebook Posts. 

They set out to answer one question. How do the best performing Facebook Pages get all that amazing engagement?

The results were pretty awesome. h/t to Kevan Lee who did an impressive job summarizing their findings.

Key considerations:

• Keep the insights from the diagram above in mind when refining your messaging strategy. 
• Measure the engagement on each type of content you post.
• Ensure a strong variety in the type of content you post. 
• Use visual content and questions to increase engagement. Then follow up with relevant evergreen content to increase social referral traffic to your website. 
• If your page is new, focus more on engaging targeted users to convert to Fans. These are the folks whose problem(s) you solve.
• If your page is mature, hone in on the struggles of your users with your posts and evergreen content to drive traffic back to your site. This will help filter out the passive or lurking audiences. They don't lead to your end goal anyway - so don't worry about it.
• If sharing offers via your social messaging, drive social referral traffic to well planned landing pages.
• Measure engagement to analyze what's working in each stage of the Social Journey. 
• Increase the frequency of high performers.
• Use A/B tests to improve low performing posts by looking for trends in higher performing ones.
• Be consistent with a balanced messaging strategy for each stage of the Social Journey.
• Once you gain momentum, consider using technology solutions so you can scale.

I've spent most of my career working with conglomerate organizations and Fortune 100 companies. My mandate included leveraging their massive data sets with technology solutions to increase revenue.

Humblebrag: I love seeing Post Planner's engagement levels on par with some of the leading enterprise applications. 

According to Buffer, Post Planner users get 650% more engagement than popular social media tools! w00t!

It's a Wrap

Marketing on social media is difficult. But the good news is -- it doesn't have to be.

Understand the reasons your customers buy from you. Ask yourself, "What are their struggles?" 

Use that information to tailor your messaging along the Social Journey to nurture prospects.

Focus on increased engagement in each stage.

Don't forget the four functions of messaging and use a balanced approach within the Lead stage. 

Focus on the one metric that matters -- ENGAGEMENT.

Test, test and test some more.

Use technology solutions to scale your marketing once you have mastered the basics.

Share your progress and thoughts with us too!

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7 Social Media Search Tactics to Find People and Content

Finding it difficult to find the right people to connect with on social media?

…or…

Do you want to identify when someone talks about you, your product or brand on social media channels?

Do you sometimes struggle to find great content to share?

In this article, you’ll find some great answers to all these questions.

Here are 7 different ways to do an effective social media search.

1. Find mentions on social media channels using Brand24

There is a broad range of social media monitoring tools that allow you to track mentions across various social media channels.

Brand24 is one such tool.

In the image below, you can see that you can filter content from Twitter and Facebook.

It even finds images that are shared that mention what you are looking for.

You can also see, in the image above, that it tries to identify how influential the person is on Twitter. You can apply a filter to look at which influential people are sharing out the content.

You can also look at charts such as this.

People and companies sharing your content the most

This shows you the people with the most influence who are sharing your content, and the people/companies sharing your content most frequently.

You need to track both lists.

You need to look after the key influencers and best supporters and build relationships with them.

2. Use Google to search social media channels

When you are searching through LinkedIn, your search results are restricted based on the subscription that you have paid for.

But…

The majority of profiles are indexed on Google.

If you could just search on Google and find what you were looking for, would that be useful…?

Want me to tell you how?

On Google, you can use the site command to restrict a search based on a particular site.

For example, a search for “razorsocial site:twitter.com” (without the “”) will return mentions of RazorSocial on Twitter.

But there’s an easier way.

You can set up a custom search engine for Google that automatically filters out content.

Here is a custom Google search for LinkedIn.

If you log out of LinkedIn and do a search using this custom search engine, you get access to everyone’s full profiles with no restrictions!

Here is an example: when you click on each one, you get full access to their profiles, assuming they have not switched off any/all of their profile for Google indexing.

Search for LinkedIn profiles using a Custon Google search

Useful?

3. Find Most Popular Content using Post Planner

Post Planner is a social media management tool for Facebook and Twitter.

One killer piece of functionality with Post Planner is its content-discovery engine.

It finds the most-shared content across social channels and you can then pick links from this content to share out on your own social channels.

I recently listened to an interview on Kim Garst’s show on Blab where she talked with Josh Parkinson, founder of Post Planner.

He said that, when you share content on Facebook, Facebook will share this out to more of your fans and followers if this content has already proven to be popular on Facebook.

Of course, the opposite is also true.

Share something that is unproven and it’s more likely that Facebook won’t share it out to too many people.

With Post Planner, you can do things like:

• View a list of the most-liked images on Facebook for a particular category/time frame
• View the most-shared pictures on Instagram to reshare on other platforms
• View the most-shared updates from one or a collection of Facebook Pages that you add.

This is really powerful functionality so it’s well worth checking it out.

4. Use a hashtag-search tool

Hashtags are very popular on Twitter and Instagram but they are less popular on other platforms.

But, if you want to search social media for content around specific topics, then searching hashtags could be very useful.

There is a variety of hashtag search tools available but one of the most useful ones is Tweet Binder.

There are paid and free versions but you can get some cool information with the free version.

Here’s a list of the most active people that Tweet Binder found for the hashtag #blogchat, which is a weekly chat about blogging.

Here’s a filter of the tweets based on this hashtag.

5. Use keyword filters provided in Hootsuite or similar tools

Hootsuite is a social media management tool and it gives you the ability to set up a filtered view of content by using keywords (and also hashtags).

It’s not a very advanced search but it could be used to filter content based on your company name, personal name or certain queries you are interested in.

For example, if you ran a restaurant in Dublin, you may apply a filter for:

Restaurant Dublin ?

You’re looking for any tweet that has these words included in any order. The reason you use the question mark is because you want to filter out things that are not questions.

If you’re looking for a restaurant in Dublin, you are likely to say something like:

“I’m looking for a restaurant in Dublin for 15 people, any ideas?”

This search string will show you tweets that include both the words in your search, and tweets that include a question mark. These are most likely to find tweets that you could respond to and prove yourself to be useful.

6. Use a content curation tool such as ContentGems

ContentGems is a site that helps you to find relevant links and stories to share to your social networks.

By inputting some keywords and search terms, ContentGems curates a list of content, relevant to your search, that you can read, store or share socially.

In the example below, ContentGems auto-filled some keywords and search results. They are in a format that you will be familiar with if you have ever used any kind of advanced search capabilities, with words that can be included, words that should not be included, and words that must be included.

Here are the results we got:

You can see that there is a wide range of content from a variety of different websites.

At the bottom of each result, there are some icons. Let’s take a look at them:

Actions you can take on each article

On the left, there are icons for Hootsuite and Buffer. If you click on either of these, it brings up the relevant interface so you can share the article directly or add it to your sharing queue.

Next, there are icons for Instapaper and Pocket. If you want to save an article to read properly later, you can do it with these services.

Then, there is an envelope icon to share an article by email, and the final icon lets you share posts through ContentGems itself.

On the right, you can see how many times an article has been tweeted.

These sharing and saving options makes ContentGems easy to use alongside the tools you already take advantage of.

It integrates with some of the most popular services, making it a great option for finding and sharing relevant stories and links to your social media feeds.

7. Find trending content using BuzzSumo.

It’s good to know what topics are trending in your niche. If you share them on social media, it shows that you are aware of what’s going on. And it makes sure you don’t miss out on any industry news.

BuzzSumo is a tool we’ve talked about a lot in the past, and one of its features is very useful for finding trending stories.

In the menu at the top of the screen, choose Trending Now.

Next, you can choose whether you want to see trending topics for wide categories, or for your own search terms.

You can choose from the categories at the top or, like we have done, you can click the + symbol and add your own search terms. Unsurprisingly, we chose ‘social media’!

BuzzSumo then shows you the topics that are trending for your category or keyword.

If the results you see aren’t quite right, you can tweak them by changing whether the trending topics should be from the last two hours or 24 hours, or anything in between. You can also choose which country they should be from.

When you see a result that looks interesting to you, you can see the number of social shares that link has had. This can be a good indication of whether your audience will be interested in the topic.

Summary

There is a goldmine of information out there on social media.

But you need to filter the noise to find what’s relevant.

What are you doing to find the best information to share?

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

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We Have Smart Homes and Smart Phones – What About Smart Blogs?

This is a guest contribution from Larry Alton.

Automation has become such a pervasive feature in our day-to-day lives that we hardly even notice it anymore, and in fact, we even rely on it. From simple things like automatic doors at the grocery store to the elaborate functions on our phones, automation makes life as we know it possible. Still, there are certain facets of our lives where we still expect to have to do much of the work, such as on our blogs.

As it turns out, many tools exist that can help you automate your blogging life and transform your plain old blog into a smart blog. Employing these new tools can help make you a more efficient blogger, increasing your productivity and helping you to use your time wisely. It’s time to get out of the past and embrace the technology of the future. As a blogger at Housing.com points out, “We’re at the cusp of a decade where the impossible is starting to look very possible.” What an exciting moment in our technological evolution!

RSS Feeds and Creative Curating

RSS technology is a blog automation tool that may be more familiar than most. Many of us have personal RSS feeds that show us what’s new on our favorite sites and allow us to access this new content. But on the other side, as a blogger, how can RSS technology help you?

One way to employ RSS technology as a blogger is to create an automated RSS-to-email system. You can set up this system so that it sends updates to subscribers about new blog posts. To keep this from becoming overwhelming, one option is to set up this email so it shares monthly updates linking to your most popular posts. Readers opt in to the email and can then choose what content to read, and you don’t have to lift a finger.

Email Without the Effort

For many bloggers there are specific emailing tasks that have the potential to take up a lot of time. This is particularly true if you run a popular service-oriented blog or offer a submission feature. Whenever the content at hand can be reduced to a form letter, try setting up an autoresponder feature.

Autoresponder services work by sending preset email responses to particular addresses or because a message came from a pre-established site function, such as through your submit button. James McAllister from Help Start My Site uses autoresponders to effectively run his 7-day traffic building course. Because the course is always the same, he can preset the seven days of emails and have an autoresponder send those emails at the appropriate intervals, even setting follow-up emails for the next several weeks and months.

Managing Social Media Overload

If you’re a blogger, odds are good that you are also using a wide range of other social media sites, or at least you should be. In fact, well run social media profiles are absolutely vital, but as these sites proliferate, they can start to feel unwieldy. This is where Hootsuite Pro comes in.

What is Hootsuite Pro? Hootsuite Pro is a multi-function tool for managing all of your social media profiles from one place. Rather than having to move between sites and scroll through pages of updates, Hootsuite Pro brings your Facebook feed and Twitter posts and mentions, as well as any other social media sites you may use, all onto the same page. Even more than that, it allows you to schedule posts and messages in advance. This alone will save you hours of work trying to make your social media pages look appropriately active.

Set Up Submissions

One of the important ways bloggers publicize their content is by submitting posts to other sites that reprint or redirect to this material, such as Storify and Stumbleupon. Since this kind of syndication and submission should be a regular activity, automating this can be a valuable timesaver.

You’ll need some simple tools to do this kind of automating, such as IFTTT or Zapier. IFTTT stands for If This, Then That and it allows you to create a kind of recipe for your blog activities. By creating these recipes, your blog is able to carry out basic operations for you.

IFTTT not only handles submissions, but it can manage some of the same social media tasks that Hootsuite Pro manages. For example, IFTTT can be set up to change your profile picture across all social media sites.

These tools are just the start of an automated blogging future. It’s time to move beyond smart phones, and even smart houses, and embrace smart blog technology.

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