Social Media Win: Burger King Explains Net Neutrality

I always find it interesting when a company takes a stand on a social issue. Even more so when these social issues don’t seem to directly effect them. Recently, Burger King released a video attacking the repeal of Net Neutrality. It would seem, based on emails I received from my Congress people, that Burger King understands how the internet works and how important net neutrality is to business growth for everyone, not just for a few telecom companies.

The great thing about this is how social the video went. Because it was a hot social topic, news outlets and the vast majority of the internet who supports net neutrality, latched onto this great description of how to explain Net Neutrality to people.

 

It also led to long comment discussions which is great for the Facebook algorithm. So without an insane level of production or without spending a lot of money on advertising, Burger King dominated social media for this and created a huge win!

How To Respond to Facebook’s News Feed Change

You may have heard about the Facebook news feed change. Here’s the announcement.
The question for those of us who create social media content is: now what?
The full truth is we don’t really know. We’ll watch as Facebook implements their new algorithm to see how it impacts our organic reaches and watch our own Newsfeeds transform.
In the meantime, I believe there are several key items to consider as we create content:
1. The death of organic reach has arrived. Organic reach has been dying for years. This is why I have said for a while now that Facebook marketing plans without a budget is not sufficient/modern. For example, I don’t take social clients without a decent social ads budget. Organic reach has dropped a lot over the last couple of years and this might be the death blow. That doesn’t mean organic reach will go away all together. But I believe it’s safe to say that it will no longer be enough to depend on organic reach to get your content to your customers.
2. Bad content will further restrict your pages reach. The restriction of organic reach will most likely effect pages that produce bad content. I think those who don’t do a good job at social media will be hurt worse than the good players. I explained myself in greater detail in my previous blog regarding this announcement. Facebook’s goal is to keep more people on Facebook and that means providing the best experience possible. So if the Facebook algorithm detects that people don’t like your posts on a regular basis, you will be punished for it. I think this is also a reaction to the polarized political content and *legitimate* fake news. The danger of Facebook is that we are building houses on rented land. I think this will most adversely affect small businesses who do a bad job with social media or do not know how to use social ads effectively.
3. Ad costs will continue to increase. Facebook’s ad inventory on its newsfeed filled up last summer and they were looking for new ad revenue. Facebook will continue to place ads because it’s their revenue stream. The cost may go up to weed out some ads but overall I don’t see a change in this coming quickly. Over time expect ad costs to continue to rise. Remember above all else, create quality content so that your customers are excited about the value your posts give them.

Social Media #Win or #Fail: Gillette

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This month in social media #win or #fail: Gillette Razors. I am classifying it is as a #FAIL (But Gillette if you are reading this and would like to discuss why its not, please send me a tweet @k_adelsberger)

(Also full disclosure, I have a beard and very rarely use my Schick razor to trim up my beard.)

It all started one October morning, I opened up twitter and saw a promoted tweet from Gillette Razors. But it was not Gillette’s tweet it is was someone else’s: IMG_2595

 

The tweet from @jlkirbee was a really interesting. It read like ad copy but seemed to be posted from a real person. Here are a few quick take aways from this attempt at capitalizing on someones social media comments:

 

  1. Not written like a real person. It looks as if @jlkirbee is a real person. Active on Twitter, Medium and Facebook. Although Bas Collective does not have an online presence(I did send a request to interview him for this post but he did not respond). I am a big fan of testimonials for marketing. However, the tweet above is written like it was copy from a marketing person for a print ad.
    I think where the ad went astray was the shot at Harry’s and the “#power in #research”. These two lines cross over from customer preference to marketing effort. Now of course, @jlkirbee could have written this himself, but it looks like something written by Gillette. This make it appear to cross a line that the internet holds dear: honesty. Because of the way this tweet was worded and subsequently promoted by Gillette makes it appear to be fake. The internet responded in kind.
  2. IMG_2598 Gillette took it to far. Gillette reached out thanked @jilkirbee for the tweet. This was good social media marketing, respond and endorsing your customers. But when the tweet started to be sponsored on 10/9, the push back was palpable. People started taking shots at @jilkirbee and Gillette:
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3. Gillette opened itself up to competition. In fact Gillette exposed one of its customers up to a competitor because they promoted a tweet that featured them.

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Gillette took a sound idea for a strategy and failed on the execution. The strategy: find customers who like us enough to talk about us on social media and then leverage social media to promote that post. I think they took a misstep with the post that they promoted. I think the real winner here was Harry’s. The Harry’s customers came out and supported the brand and ultimately used the attack in their favor.

Harry’s was listening and replied to at least one of the tweets. Harry’s is doing smart online marketing with sponsoring podcasts and providing a product that is bringing real disruption to the market.

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A pound of cure in a bad customer experience (Pt. 2)

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In a pervious post I looked at what an Ounce of Prevention might look like in preventing a bad customer experience. (You can read it here).

Now lets talk about what to do when a bad customer experience happens.

  1. Do Not Take It Personally:
    I know a few small business owners who take a customer responding badly to their product or service after a failure really personally. When someone takes personally a bad review or a customer expressing their bad experience it can interrupt their logical thought process in trying to make amends.
    It is vital to remain emotionally distant from the situation so that you can respond in the proper way. Responding from an emotional position can end up escalating the situations and it will end up being more damaging to the brand. This also involves giving the customer the benefit of the doubt and not assuming they are just out to try and damage your business.
  2. Listen:
    Listen to what the customer is saying when they have a complaint to share. This is an opportunity to 1. Show empathy and 2. make a customer into a stark raving fan!
    Think about it! You have a customer who cares enough about their experience to tell you about how to make it better. There are those who are just out to try and get something for free but we should use this as a chance to become better.
  3. Finally customer may be entitled to some renumeration. If someone’s order was messed up, your product failed, or your service fell well below expectations you may need to reimburse the customer in someway. This is one step that can really make the client feel valued and could prevent you from losing a customer to getting at least one more chance to prove yourself to them.

If they comment on social media and the comment is legitimate, do not delete their post! Respond with kindness and an offer to rectify the situation. People will notice the response and generally reward you for it.

 

If you take this fail and do your best to turn it into a win a customer might end up having a great experience and you know what happens when a customer has a great experience? They tell people!

 

Everyday we have a chance to win and make stark raving fans. Make it count with every customer!

 

How we got 7k organic reach…over night.

Great content is the king of the internet. But by defining it as great means that it is rare. Do not expect to make great content everyday but be ready to take advantage when you do.

Making great content is hard to do and it can be even more difficult depending on your industry. This video started with an amazing story and we put the time into make it a professional production to create a huge PR coup for a small non-profit. Madison County CASA is a charity that I support and I was recently hired through a grant to create a new website and video for them.

Lets take a look at a breakdown of the stats:

The video did really well initially on its own. The organic reach was great! People were sharing, liking, and commenting organically. The key was amazing content that gets people emotionally invested. Screen Shot 2015-10-19 at 11.03.26 AMIn the first 24 hours the organic reach went up to 7,721! What amazing reach for a Facebook page with only 647 fans(before the video was posted). When I felt like the organic reach was starting to come off its highest point, I activated a $25 boost to fans and friends of fans of the CASA page.  As you can see below, as the organic reach dropped I used the boost to help increase its reach to the community.

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The result were 16,838 total reach with 6,753 of those being paid. Thats amazing! The difference: amazing content people wanted to see! Screen Shot 2015-10-19 at 11.00.29 AM

Now lets dig into the video statistics. Of that 16,838 people who saw the post there were 7,052 people who watched the video. 17% of those reached with the post watched some of the video. Now we can see through the audience retention panel that very few made it very far into the video. But the vast majority that made it 45 seconds in, made it to the end of the video. 7.15% of the 7,052 people who watched it at all is: 504. 504 people watched the entire video!

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Now in our context, the video was nearly 6 minutes long. It was a time investment for our audience to watch. This video was designed more for presentations than social media viewing. The story was too long to fit into an ideal :30-1:30 video. I feel like the 504 is a great number for completing the video.

We can also learn from the Facebook stats that the average watch time was 42 seconds. I also know that that if they made it 1 minute in, almost all of those watchers made it the rest of the way through the video.

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What other measurable things did we get? The page gained 32 new likes and the post had 418 likes in total. 101 on the pages post and 317 on the shares of the original post. This is an impressive number. There were also 63 shares. People loved the content. The content is king!

All of these measurable point to a marketing win for a small nonprofit that just had the chance to get in front of 16,800 people for a very small amount of money!

 

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Instagram releases new image size!

Instagram released a new image size a few weeks ago and did so by partnering with the new Star Wars move. This was a great marketing move as lots of people were excited about the movie and its popularity allowed it to skyrocket up the new style without having to directly point it out.

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This new perspective width gives you more letterbox format. This means that you can now take a photo in landscape mode on your iPhone and get the entire photo onto Instagram.

For more people this just means there will be more food in your Instagram feed but it will allow some more creativity in the Instagram space.

Now if we could just schedule posts in Instagram and have multiple accounts…….

Facebook now has stock photos!

Facebook is making strides to be more friendly to advertisers. From the inclusion of a support staff for questions to increasingly opening more and more analytics and targeting options, Facebook is actively striving to make the experience better for advertisers.

One step they have taken is to add free stock photos for ads on their page. More than just stock photos, they are from ShutterStock, which is one of the premier providers of stock photos on the internet. Even if you have a photographer or imagery this might help in a pinch.

For example: While working on a recent ad for my business, the option was given to me to use “Free Stock Images”.

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They also preload some images they thought I might like based on my product.

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This is a great product upgrade for Facebook. But almost always, photos of your product and service will be better that stock photos.

 

 

Land Rover’s Storytelling on Instagram

Land Rover took creativity on Instagram to a new level recently. It uses Instagram in a way I have never see or thought of before. It uses the grid of all the photos to make its own image composite image. It took a lot of planning to pull off but when you go to either of their two accounts: Solitude in Sawtooth or Brotherhood of Wonderstone (click for the weblink but it looks better on your phone) you can scroll continuously down through a seem-less image story. Additionally  there are videos scattered throughout that have different tips for wilderness survival and fun. Beautiful job Land Rover!

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Gender in Social Media Use

Gender effects social media use.

Another great chart from Marketing Charts. This one chronicles social media adoption in the general population and by gender. There is a lot of interesting information that comes out of this graph and some of it matches stereotypes. Pintrest is vastly more popular among females. This is not very surprising but if you are primarily marketing to women this means that you should really be using Pintrest!

I find it very interesting that there are only three social networks that comes in stronger for males than females: Google+, Linkedin and Vine. The running joke for a while was that only Google employees were on Google Plus and well Google has a propensity to hire males (83% are males). This could be the explanation or it might have to do more with cultural tendencies for employment. This article indicates that almost 2/3 of business owners and those who are self employed are males.

Google requires Google Plus pages for the business map pages. Linkedin is the business social network. This is probably not the only factor but it might help explain the disparity. I think these adoption statistics will change in the coming years as women become more empowered in our society.

It is also interesting that a 6% larger share of males ignore social media all together.

Facebook Local Awareness

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Man holding iPhone

Facebook is flexing it’s big data muscles again by introducing Facebook Local Awareness.

Facebook is now using your location to sell ads. Nothing new right? They could already place ads in front of people in your city but now they are taking it to the next level. By using the location system on your phone (that is my assumption, I am not sure of the technology behind the program) they are able to target ads within a distance as mile away from the brick and mortar location of a store/event.

With Facebook Local Awareness you can now target people driving past your store. From a marketing angle this is awesome. A few scenarios: being near a college campus and setting your food discounts to that area. Coffee shop in a business district? Send the ad to all the workers about a special on coffee.  Near the interstate? You can set your ad far enough out from your location to pick up the major gas stations.

There are several ways you can set the goals for the ad. I think the real trick here will be for “Offer”. This will allow retail and restaurants to help drive foot traffic. Other services such as a mechanic could use this to gain likes for the neighborhood they serve.

Local Awareness

As a consumer it might be a little scary.

Check out Facebook Awarenesss here.

I am going to try and do a case study with this new tool soon and will post the results on the blog.