Before social media, any company that wanted to become a brand name had to flood

the airways and that costs money. The world-famous, "I'd like to buy the world a
Coke ad from 1971, cost $250,000 to make and far more than that to broadcast on
every major television network, which was a staggering amount even at the time. But
now, any person with a cell phone camera, and a social media account can reach the
same number of people if their content goes viral. We couldn't teach you all about
social media marketing without touching on viral content. We all know examples of
posts that went viral, good and bad ones. But how does content become viral? What
makes people share content? Unfortunately, there is no hard and fast recipe for
going viral, but Jonah Berger, a professor at University of Pennsylvania, analyzed
thousands of pieces of viral content to figure out common themes between them.
Doing so, he found six ideas you should follow to maximize engagement. He wrote
about it at his book Contagious. Let's go through them. Berger identified six
common themes between posts that go viral. Posts should increase social currency,
have a sensory trigger that makes people think of your brand, evoke emotion,
represent a public brand identity, be practical, and tell a good story about your
product. We'll briefly go over each with examples. First, you should create posts
or ads that will increase people's social currency when they share them. Most
people on social media want to seem smart, cultured and ethical. You should give
them content that helps them do that. They may be more inclined to share that
content because it makes them look good. Take Toms shoes as an example. In 2014,
Toms launched a successful advertising campaign in which they promised to donate
one pair of shoes for every pair a customer bought. Because of that, being seen
wearing Tom's signaled to people that you were an ethical and conscious consumer.
Wearing them increased the buyers social currency and people flooded Facebook and
Instagram with pictures of themselves wearing Toms as the company achieved the
marketer's dream, having other people advertise your product for free. Second, you
should try to create a trigger for your product. This is something that makes
people immediately think of your product when they see, hear, smell, or touch it.
One of the most successful examples of a trigger in advertising history is Nike's
slogan, Just Do it. When most people across the planet here Just do it, they think
of Nike. Other famous triggers includes a line, Do You Know Where Your Children
Are? from New York City Public Safety Campaign. Budweiser's Whassup? line, which
signaled that drinking Bud meant it was time to relax. Evoking strong emotion is
also an excellent way to go viral. The emotion could be happiness, sadness, or even
anger. A good example of this is Johnnie Walker's 2015 Dear Brother ad. In the ad
to two 20 something brothers walked through breathtakingly gorgeous Scottish
highlands. They tracked through rolling hills and stop at ruined stone cabins,
sharing Johnnie Walker all the way until they reach cliff overlooking the ocean.
Then the ad reveals that one of the brothers was dead and the other went to the
cliff to spread his ashes. People immediately posted reaction videos of how the ad
made them weep after it aired. It's since been viewed over tens of millions of
times. Johnnie Walker successfully evoked strong emotion to create the most
successful whiskey commercial in history. Another good way to go viral is to create
a brand that maximizes its publicity. Adidas is an excellent example of that. Its
three stripe logo is so ubiquitous that most people immediately recognize it and
associated with the brand. It's also easily reproducible from a screen to a shoe to
sticker. Try to find a uniquely distinct brand logo and coloration that maximizes
your publicity. That way, people will know your product is yours whenever they use
or talk about it. People like to share content that's practical or immediately
useful. Valentina Lord created this video with a hack for peeling garlic and posted
it on Twitter. The video went viral and received over 24 million views. The plain
practical nature of this and the fact that this peeling garlic trick is universally
useful, made it something people wanted to share. Finally, as we discussed before,
people like stories. Ads and content that tell a story are more likely to be shared
and they can be even more powerful if they invite people to share their own story.
We touched on the legendary Dove campaign in our previous course. In the early
2010s, Dove discovered that only four percent of women worldwide consider
themselves beautiful, largely because of unrealistic standards created by
airbrushed advertisements. So they launched the viral Real Beauty campaign with a
collection of stories about women discovering that they were and felt beautiful.
Social media allows customers to communicate back to you. By turning the process of
discovering one's beauty into a story, Dove both created popular ad and used social
media to invite people to tell their own. This created one of the most successful
ad campaigns of the last decade. Creating viral content isn't easy, and you
shouldn't think that all your content on social media should go viral. I suggest
that you keep these six themes that Jonah Berger described in mind as you develop
your content. They may give you ideas for content creation and they may make your
content more engaging overall.

Using content calendar

Imagine you're taking a trip to the big city. You've always wanted to go and there
are a number of places you want to see and things you want to get done. You've read
up on all the cultural spots, restaurants, and historic sites, and you head in with
the mindset that you'll go with the flow and see where the day takes you. But at
the end of your trip, you realize you spent too much time at one museum and never
got to that other museum you wanted to see, didn't realize that historic site was
all the way across town, and couldn't get into the restaurant because you needed
reservations weeks in advance. It was a trip, but not the one you hoped for. If you
could rewind, you would have made a schedule for each day telling you where to go
and when, factored in travel time, and made reservations in preparation. Might've
taken more effort and planning, but your trip would have been the dream trip you
had hoped for. When it comes to your social media strategy, you could certainly
wing it and figure out posting content as you go, but it may not be the content you
or your audience wants, and it probably won't achieve any goals. If you want to
have a plan of execution, use a content calendar, which is simply a calendar where
you fill in upcoming events for your social media platforms, when they're going to
be posted, and where. Without a calendar, you'll be scrambling to post content in
real-time, racking your brain for something relevant, and unaware that it may need
to tie into previous posts or created campaigns. Is it really that important to
think carefully about what social media content to post when it may just be sharing
a link or uploading a photo? Posting on social media isn't independent from your
overall marketing strategy. As we mentioned in previous lessons, one of the primary
reasons to post on social media is for customer engagement, which furthers your
brand, increases trust, provides something of value for your followers, and turns
them into fans. If every post works together to build your customer engagement
strategy, you won't want to leave it up to chance. Just like how your planned trip
allowed us to go more places and do more things with less worry about how we were
going to do it. There are many benefits to having a content calendar for your
social media posts. The first is organization. By planning ahead on what content
you're going to post, when, and to what platform, you keep your upcoming posts
organized. It allows you to time to be more thoughtful about your posts, and to map
them as greater content strategy as well since you can see a few weeks or months in
advance. Having a content calendar will help you keep consistency in your brand
voice. Not only does it allow you to see multiple posts and how they fit together
to further your brand, you'll probably be writing multiple posts at once or
batching, which will guarantee they'll be written in the same voice. You will also
have the ability to review upcoming posts. If one doesn't align with your brand
voice, you can pull it, or revise it. Having a content calendar can also help you
plan for upcoming events, holidays, and special occasions. Mark major holidays, or
holidays that might be important to your industry, like National Ice Cream Day if
you're an ice cream shop, so that you can plan content around that day, and have
the time to create it well before it needs to go live. If something pops up that
you want to post about you know which posts you can be scheduled for another time,
and which need to stay to correspond with a specific date. Having a content
calendar allows you to fill in the gaps as well. Social media requires constant
posting to keep followers engaged. So, having a content calendar that shows what's
being posted when, will help you see any gaps you may have in scheduled posts, or
if there are too many posts in one time for instance. Finally, a content calendar
allows for greater collaboration across your team. Team members will be able to see
what social media posts are coming up and could make suggestions for posts of their
own, or add two posts already created. The team can staff social media channels for
replies and monitor call to action responses generated by the post. Additionally,
having a content calendar allows for easier vetting of posts if your team requires
a second set of eyes for approval.
Play video starting at :4:53 and follow transcript4:53
Ready to start filling in your content calendar? Before you do, take another look
at the prep work you did before. Remember how you specified your smart goals, your
target audience, and their customer journey? This information will come in really
handy as you start populating your posts. If you need a refresher, we went through
this information in course 1 of this program. Looking back at your goals will help
you decide what content you need to create when. For example, you may have a new
app you want followers to downloads, or a new product you want to share. Knowing
what goals you need to hit, like knowing which sites you wanted to see on your trip
to the city, allows you to create content that will get you there. Who is my target
audience? What does a typical customer journey look like for my audience? Knowing
your audience is key for many reasons. It will help you decide, which platforms to
use, and what posts to create for those platforms. What should you include in your
content calendar? You should include anything that's going live to your followers.
Like the posts contents, any images or videos that go with it, any links you may
include, and any hashtags you're using. You also want to include any information
you want to track, such as which platform it's on, whether it's an ad, or original
content, or a reshare, or curated content, and so on. And of course, you want to
include a specific date and time the content goes live. In our next video we'll
walk you through a template you can use to create your very own content calendar.
Of course, you can use any templates that you think will work best for you, or you
can rely on content calendar tools from companies like HotSpot or Hootsuite for
instance. The most important thing to remember is that the best content calendar is
the one you'll actually use.

Repurposing Content

Any business with a strong social media strategy knows that keeping the pipeline
full of content is key, but that doesn't mean every piece of content needs to be
created from scratch. There's no need to reinvent the wheel every time because
there's a lot of new content that you can repurpose from work you've already done.
We'll show you how. Repurposing content is simply the idea that no piece of content
is ever, "One and done." Your content is full of ideas, stories, stats, and
information that can be presented again in different formats, which can appeal to
new audiences and expand your reach. Repurposing content is not only a way to
stretch out the value of your content, but it's an easy way to fill in your social
media content calendar as well. How does it work? Let's say you've written a blog
post about the state of social media engagement today in your industry and you
share that with your audience. Is that it, move on to the next blog post? That's
what you might think, but there's still a lot more mileage you can get out of that
post. For instance, take some of the stats you found and create an infographic, or
a series of tweets, or pull a quote and make an image, turn the contents into a
presentation or an informative video. If your post has great insights, update the
data in the future, and share it all over again. Notice that repurposing content is
not just taking past content and republishing it, or promoting it again, in the
same way you would repurpose a tin can as a flower pot or a t-shirt as a
pillowcase. You want to actively think about how to use your content and its ideas
in new creative ways.
Play video starting at :1:55 and follow transcript1:55
Can you just repurpose every piece of content? Not quite. There are a few types of
content that you should look to first, as you begin to repurpose. The first type of
content that you should target when repurposing, is evergreen content or content
that is useful, interesting, and impactful year after year. It could be; a how to
guide, a report, or an overview of a certain topic or industry. This kind of
content is always relevant to your audience, so it's a great place to mine ideas
for repurposing. Opposite of evergreen, is timely or time stamped content, or
content that responded to a trend or a news cycle, like a guide to new tech in
2015, or new movies in 2018, which would now be outdated, of course. Because the
content is no longer relevant, you would stay away from these pieces and look to
your more relevant content for sources. But you can always use these kinds of posts
to inspire new posts like, new tech for next year, for instance. Second, seek out
your most popular content by taking a look at your engagement analytics. Because an
audience interacted with it before, is a good indicator they would interact with
that content again or that they are at least interested in the topic. Find your
social media posts that did well, the ones that got lots of likes and comments, for
instance and think about how you can repurpose them.
Play video starting at :3:31 and follow transcript3:31
Let's look at a few ways to repurpose content for different audiences and
platforms. You created a step-by-step tutorial for your blog on how to set up a
simple website and you share that link with your audience. What else can you do?
That tutorial could easily turn into slide deck, which you could post on LinkedIn.
Take the slide deck and add a voice over or use the texts from your blog posts to
narrate a screen cap and share that to YouTube. Take clips of the YouTube video and
share them as a teaser or lead generator on Instagram. Take the steps in your
tutorial and create a tweets thread with those steps on Twitter. Finally, make an
infographic to post on Pinterest. In each of these situations, you can also tweak
your caption for each platform to appeal to that platform's audience. For LinkedIn,
it could be how to create a website for your business. For Instagram, it could be
how to create a website for your creative portfolio. Repurposing content requires a
bit of a shift of thinking, doesn't it? Once you start seeing all the options for
repurposing content, you'll start to use this tactic more and you'll keep
repurposing in mind when you create new content as well.
Play video starting at :4:51 and follow transcript4:51
It may seem like just a shortcut, but there are a number of benefits to re-
purposing your content. As we've already seen, it stretches the value of your
content. You spend too much time researching and writing a blog post, article or
white paper only to share it a few times and move on. What you're trying to share
isn't a package of your article or paper, but the ideas inside. Start viewing
content in terms of ideas that can be communicated in many different formats. We've
already seen that different social media platforms highlight different formats.
Play to that platform's strength by re-purposing your content into different
formats. Like creating a presentation for LinkedIn, an instructional video for
YouTube, or an infographic for Pinterest. Repurposing content into different
formats also exposes your ideas and findings to an expanded audience who may not
consume content in one format, but may devour it in another. By spreading your
ideas through repurposed content, you're repeating and reinforcing the message
you're trying to communicate with your audience. Seeing your message in one place
may not make an impact, but repeatedly, seeing it in various formats will.
Repurposed content acts as an amplifier for your brand. Repurposed content gives
you more social media posts. More content means more frequent posting about it,
which can round out your content calendar. If your audience sees you posting pieces
of quality content consistently and frequently, it keeps you present in their feed
and top of mind. By re-purposing your content and sharing your message in many
different ways, you also position yourself as an authority in the space. By having
more content out to your audience, you can find out what format resonates with
them. Have you been writing blog posts, but find that your audience is paying far
more attention to a podcast created from that blog post, now you know where to
focus your future content creation efforts. Repurposing content also gives you
Search Engine Optimization advantages. Since repurposed content contains the same
keywords, you'll increase your brand's association with those keywords in search,
increasing the probability that your content will come up in search results for
those keywords. Additionally, if your content references other websites or studies,
repurposed content will increase your opportunity to link, which is another way to
improve your search rankings. Finally, yes, repurposing content does save you time,
in that you don't have to start from scratch every time you want to create a piece
of content. So don't reinvent the wheel. While there are times you still need to
create new pieces of content from scratch, know that there are many different ways
to repurpose existing content, so you can build your audience and your authority.

Building a following on social media

Building a following is the most essential part of establishing a business's social

media presence. Of course, in order to get people to follow you, you need to post
interesting and engaging content. It may take you a while to get an audience, but
there are few things you can do to help build up that following. We'll walk you
through a set of tips using one of our example businesses, Calla & Ivy. Calla & Ivy
is a flower shop based out of Amsterdam, it's predominantly web-based, and it uses
its physical store front as a showroom. Imra, the owner of Calla & Ivy, wants to
use social media to grow her business. Here's five steps she can take to establish
her following: The first thing Imra should do is turn her personal social media
following into a professional one. When you start your business presence, you need
to let people know about it. Starting with your friends will help you to get the
initial word out. Facebook gives you the option to invite your friends and family
to follow when you start a business page. Imra should do this and ask for close
friends to advertise for Calla & Ivy too. Once your friends and family follow, the
next step is to start posting valuable content. Posting valuable content is a great
way to grow your following from friends to strangers. If you post useful videos and
articles, your followers may be more likely to share them. That way, you get more
exposure and there's a chance people who see your posts start following you too.
For Calla & Ivy that could be a video that teaches people how to take flowers and
press them into bookmarks, for instance. Imra could also teach people seven easy
steps to keep your plants alive, among other flower relevant content. Hashtags are
a great way to connect with potential customers. They connect social media posts by
topic and aggregate them under a single word. Calla & Ivy should use hashtag,
flower, flowerstagram, flower photography, and other popular hashtags like that
with millions of posts underneath them to expose their business to a wider
audience. Then when people search for these topics, Calla & Ivy's, posts may come
up and people who see them may decide to follow. Using @mentions allows you to tag
other users. When you tag another user, they will be notified and they will see
your post. That may prompt them to share your post and it does expose your post to
the audience of the person or business you tagged. Calla & Ivy should @mention
anyone who buys or posts about their flowers, so those people can share Calla & Ivy
to their friends list too. You can get creative with @mentions. For instance, Calla
& Ivy could post a small table arrangement with a coffee and a croissant and
mention a bakery where they bought the croissants. Something like enjoying some
coffee and croissants time with @Molenbakker deliciousness. With a bit of luck the
bakery, Molenbakker, will share the posts with its audience. Social media
influencers are people who have large followings and will advertise your business
for you. They start at minimum 2,000 followers and usually charge for their
services. You can find the right influencers for you using software like Social
Beaker or Tagger, for instance, Influencer Kiera Madison advertised Wooden Shoe
Tulip Farm to an audience of over 10,000 viewers. Calla & Ivy could find someone
like this to talk about their flowers, which would give them a lot of exposure.
Sometimes smaller influencers will plug products they receive for free. It may be
worth it to send some free flowers to a few socialites in the hopes that they will
post the bouquets on Instagram and mention Calla & Ivy. Or they could send free or
reduced rate flowers to heavily photographed events like weddings in exchange for
@mentions on wedding social media posts. Finally, you can use advertising to
increase your following. All good ads start with a good story. For Calla & Ivy,
that means telling their founder, Imra's story with an introductory video and
Instagram post. Imra loved to pick flowers during long hikes as a child. She'd
braid them into crowns using Callas, her favorite flower and Ivy. She later went to
art school and decided she wanted to arrange flowers professionally, thus Calla &
Ivy was born. Imra's passion is authentic and makes for a great first advertising
campaign. It's a great way to introduce Calla & Ivy to social media. It also grows
your audience by getting people emotionally invested in your brand's story.
Building a following isn't always fast, but if you follow these steps and use tools
like friend invitations, hashtags, mentions, influencers, and advertising
campaigns, you'll be off to a great start.

Interacting and moderating on social media

Social media is all about interaction. Brands and businesses are invited to be part
of the conversation. But a conversation means that people can react to what you
share, and they will. People will comment and reply to your posts, and once you
have a social media presence, people may reach out to you with questions or
concerns. You want to make sure that people have positive associations with your
brand, and the way you carry on a conversation in social media has an impact. The
best way to create a positive brand impression is by responding to customers'
social media comments in a timely and polite manner. We're going to walk you
through a four-step process on the best way to do that. More than a billion people
follow their preferred brands on social media, per 2020 data from Sprout Social.
This means that good social media branding can make a company and bad branding can
break one. In this lesson, we'll focus on four engagement strategies to maximize
good branding. These include, always responding to customers within 24 hours,
engaging positively with brand supporters, engaging diplomatically with brand
critics, and moving brand criticism from the public to the private sphere.
According to a 2018 survey, 83 percent of social media users expect brands to
respond within one day or less. That mirrors the speed at which most regular users
respond to social media comments. To a customer, social media portrays your brand's
post the same way it does your friend's ones. This gives you the opportunity to
effectively portray your brand as a friend, you should capitalize on this by
responding to their comments, mentions, and tags at the same speed their friends
would. Be sure to monitor your social media pages for brands, tags, and mentions to
best do this. Another good way to establish a relationship with your customers is
to always engage with their positive feedback. Always like or favorite any of their
positive brand mentions, to let them know you see them and appreciate them. If
someone posts something complementing your brand, always respond with a comment.
The more personalized the better. In this example, a young bride named Claire
thanked Calla and Ivy on Instagram for doing her wedding's flowers. Calla and Ivy
demonstrated good social-media interaction by addressing Claire by name, specifying
the work they did for her, so Claire's Instagram followers can see it and thanking
her for her business. It's no secret that people on the Internet can be difficult.
They can be angry, rude, pointed, and critical. But that's why it's important to
distinguish between legitimate brand criticism and abuse. Abuse or inappropriate
comments are just not right, and you should hide or remove them. No need to react.
Criticism involves a legitimate grievance with your brand. In this example post,
DCB Cleaning installed a snack wall which led to rats. The DCB Cleaning
representative dealt with it the right way by apologizing, promising to compensate,
and then most importantly, moving the discussion to a private chat by direct
messaging the person. Never ever argue with the customer or be anything other than
professional on a brand account. It never looks good for you or your company.
Negative comments happen and they can be stressful. It helps to follow this pattern
when answering them. First, acknowledge the comment to let the customer know
they've been heard. Examples of this include, "Hey Bob, we hear you." Second,
apologize if it's appropriate. Remember, apologies are easy and free, and they
often make your brand look considerate and sympathetic. Third, solve the problem in
a private conversation. This is important if you're going to negotiate refunds or
complimentary services, you don't necessarily want those done in public. Following
these three steps should make responding to negative comments simple and easy.
Also, remember that nothing on the Internet is truly private. Any private message
can be screenshotted and reposted. So it's important to be as courteous in direct
messages as you would be in public comments. Some commenters, however, can't be
reasoned with. That's why Facebook, Instagram and Twitter offer hide reply or hide
comment features for their users. This moves these comments to a separate section
that other users have to click a button to see and most users won't. This feature
is useful for comments like the one Calla and Ivy's post got in this post or for
bots posting spam. It's important not to use this feature to hide legitimate
criticism of your brand though, as that will only upset customers. People
understand brands are run by humans. Admitting your mistakes and apologizing for
them in a professional manner is the next best alternative to not making them at
all.

Measure what matters

When you started your social media efforts, you had a goal in mind, so it's
important to check to make sure that your efforts are actually getting you closer
to your goal. That's where insights and metrics come in. They can help you evaluate
whether you're on track to reach your goal, and they can also point you to things
you can do, to improve your efforts. By the end of this video, you'll know what you
should look for when evaluating the results of your posts, and you'll know which
metrics to pay particular attention to.
Play video starting at ::36 and follow transcript0:36
In order to measure how effective your social media efforts are, you're going to
track what are called key performance indicators. Or KPI's, tracking a KPI simply
means, that you're looking at a metric or set of metrics that will show you how
you're progressing towards your goal. Basically, you're looking for indicators that
really reflect whether you are successful. Depending on your goal, different
indicators are going to matter more to you. For instance, if you're working on
building awareness, you will want to know whether your follower base is growing. If
you're working on engagement, you'll want to learn how many people are interacting
with your posts. And if it is your goal to sell products, you look at a number of
people that clicked on your post, and bought something. The large social media
platforms all come with their own metrics dashboard, that gives you insights into
how your follower base is growing, and how your individual posts are performing.
You'll find that when you go into these dashboards there are a lot of metrics. Some
will be immediately meaningful, and some not so much. And to be honest some of them
really matter, and some are more of a nice to have. Let me give you an approach you
can use to structure your thinking. Around all things metrics and find the most
important ones. Our marketing goals typically fall into three categories,
generating awareness for your company or your product, engagement, or the number or
type of interactions you have with your followers. Conversion, or making people
take the action you intended, like buying something for instance. Depending on
which category your goal falls into, your KPI's will differ. We can think of the
metrics, that we should evaluate as falling into this same categorization. The
first category is awareness. In order to generate awareness for your brand, you
want to get your message to reach as many people as possible. So the metrics to
look for here are metrics, that tell you something about how many people see your
messages. The first metric you will want to check is, the number of followers you
have, or how many accounts clicked a like or follow button to directly receive your
content in their social media feed. This gives you a good idea of the size of your
audience. The more followers you have the more people will get to see what you
post. And of course people who follow you are aware of you.
Play video starting at :3:22 and follow transcript3:22
Tracking the changes in your followers can give you insight into what strategies
are gaining you new followers, or losing them. Another important awareness metric
is total reach. Or how many people are viewing your content. This can include
someone viewing your post on their feed, but it can also include friends of that
follower viewing the post on their feed. If the first follower liked, or shared the
post, this metric is related to individual posts which gives you a good idea of how
many people are getting eyes on your content, and it's a great way to evaluate
which posts work well for your audience.
Play video starting at :4:6 and follow transcript4:06
Larger reach for a post typically means that more people have shared it or
interacted with it. So you may want to create more posts of the same kind.
Play video starting at :4:16 and follow transcript4:16
On some platforms you may find a slightly different awareness metric, impressions,
which is similar to total reach, but instead measures the number of times your post
was shown. Keep in mind that this metric doesn't count individual accounts just
times seen, so if one person saw your post twice, that would count as two
impressions. Both reach and impressions are going to help you understand the
exposure. Or lack thereof of your content. Ultimately, the metrics around your
awareness are going to give you insights into the extent to which your content is
getting out into the world. Having higher Total reach numbers may mean that your
content is valuable and helpful enough that it's being shared, for instance. And if
you see the number of followers spike just after you posted a particular piece of
content or maybe even launched an advertising campaign, it shows you that that post
or that campaign worked. Tracking reach metrics can present you with these kinds of
insights into how amplified your content is getting and how broad your audience is.
If you're not seeing the reach you desire, you now have the data to back new
strategies for growth.
Play video starting at :5:40 and follow transcript5:40
The next category of metrics we're going to look at focuses on audience engagement
or actions the audience takes to interact with your content. Yes, this is where
likes come in as they do tell us something about audience engagement.
Play video starting at :5:55 and follow transcript5:55
They're probably one of the simplest metrics to track, a like is tapping a button
to show you read or appreciated a post. This simple action shows that your audience
is doing something to respond to your content, so it's worth paying attention to.
Of course, I'm talking about likes here, but on most platforms likes have some
nuances. You can love something, show surprise, sadness and so on. Another
important sign of engagement is sharing content, so that's our next metric. Number
of shares, a share means tapping a button to share a piece of content with your own
audience. Along with likes and shares, tracking the number of comments is going to
be helpful as well. It not only shows that a follower took time and effort to
compose the comments, but can also give you some good insights into how your
audience thinks about your brand. Posts with more comments means that your audience
wanted to take the time to engage with you. Another signal of engagement is clicks.
This means that a follower took the time to click on a link you provided in your
post. whether to read an article you shared, to go to your website, to read a blog
post, or to find out more about one of your products. This tracks who's showing
increased interest in learning more about your business or products. Ultimately,
the metrics around engagement are going to give you insights into how actively
interested your followers are in what you have to say. Here are some of the
insights you could get from studying these engagement metrics. If you find that
you're getting a lot of likes and shares but very few comments then ask a few
questions that get your audience engaged. If you find that you have high engagement
but haven't been actively posting calls to action, go ahead. Your audience will
probably want to find out more about you and your products. Do you have a large
reach but low engagement? You probably aren't providing content that's resonating
with your audience.
Play video starting at :8:2 and follow transcript8:02
High engagement but low reach, maybe you're a niche brand, with a dedicated but
small audience. Or it may be time to focus on building your following a bit more.
Tracking engagement metrics can give you new insights into how interested your
audience is in what you're doing and the content you're posting. If you're not
seeing the engagement you want, you can now make a plan for improving the quality
of your content. Make sure to use these metrics to decide on what kind of content
you should create. If you see posts that have high engagement, create more along
those lines.
Play video starting at :8:42 and follow transcript8:42
You may have noticed that we've been looking at metrics that move along the
marketing funnel. We started looking at awareness which measures brand exposure.
Getting your message out and getting the right audience to follow you. That would
be at the top of the funnel. Then we looked at engagement, which is when your
audience begins to respond to your content. Finds it valuable, and takes action,
whether it be liking a post talking about you or clicking through to your website
to find out more. That would be the middle of the funnel. Now let's look at metrics
that center around conversions. Conversions happen when people take the action that
you want them to take after seeing your post, or a series of posts. Often
conversions are sales. You want people to buy your product. Sometimes you just want
people to come to your website or download your app. Those are conversions too,
because it refers to an action you want people to take after seeing your content.
Conversions could also be generating leads. A lead could be an email address, for
instance of a person that seems to have an interest in what you have to offer.
Remember DCB Cleaning? They provide cleaning services for offices. In their case a
sale or subscribing someone to Their service mostly happens over the phone, but
they use social media to encourage people to contact them so they can get an
initial conversation started. Once that initial contact is made, DCB has a lead
that can lead to an actual sale. One thing that's a bit different with conversion
metrics than with awareness and engagement metrics is that most of these
conversions won't actually take place within the social media platform. Often the
action you want people to take will actually mean people leave the social platform.
You want them to visit your website, download your app, buy your product, etc. This
means that when you're looking at metrics related to conversions, you often have to
go to other dashboards and analytics tools that are related to your website or app.
So what are the metrics that would matter here? Generating traffic to your website
from social media is often an important goal and thus tracking website visits from
social media can be a good place to start. Are you seeing a large percentage of
traffic coming from social media after you posted something new? Then you know that
you're doing something right. Or do you have posts that have gotten a ton of likes
and shares but you didn't get the traffic you expected? Maybe you have to formulate
a better call to action or think about different things you can post to get people
interested to check out your site.
Play video starting at :11:31 and follow transcript11:31
Another important metric to track is sales and more specifically sales that were
related to your social media posts. That can be a little trickier though, it can be
hard to prove the connection between your post and a sale. After all, people may
not buy immediately after they saw your post, they may buy later, and sometimes
they buy in the store and not on your website. We'll talk about tracking sales more
when we talk about advertising. But for now, I suggest you track the trend in sales
and try to understand whether you're increased social media activity seems to lead
to an upwards trend in sales. Tracking the number of leads like capturing an email
address resulting from your social media account activity can be another form of
tracking conversions. Conversions capture the actions you would like to see people
take as a result of your marketing. Those actions could be different things, so
different metrics can correspond to conversions and they may be a bit harder to
track within the social media platform itself. While they are of course very
important, I suggest that you evaluate your organic or free social media efforts
primarily by assessing how you are increasing awareness and engagement. Conversions
typically follow later and increasing awareness and engagement will ultimately help
you drive conversions as well. Finally, it's important to track these metrics to
see how they change overtime in response to your efforts so that you can benchmark
what's working and what isn't in your strategy. The goal is to have data based
information to work with in order to continuously improve your social media reach,
engagement and conversions.

Facebook page insights

You can't know how successful you've been with your social media efforts, until you
start measuring it. Facebook has a robust insights dashboard, to help you track
your KPIs, so you can benchmark your social media strategy. See where you stand on
meeting your goals and create strategies for the future. In this video, I'm going
to walk you through Facebook Page Insights. For this walkthrough, I'm going to use
this speech from Paco Chierici, he's an author. He wrote "Lyons of the Sky," and
action packed novel about fighter pilots. Having been a navy pilot himself, he has
many interesting stories to tell and footage to share on his Facebook page. That's
how he attracts readers to buy his book. Well Facebook provides many different
resources and tools to help you manage your page, we'll take a tour of insights,
which is Facebook's native analytics tool, and demystify it for you. After you
click "Insights," you land on this page. You'll see a long menu of items to explore
on the left. We'll start with the overview page, which is the default home page of
this dashboard. The Overview starts with a one-stop shop summary of your business
page, which is your businesses homepage page on Facebook, as opposed to individual
posts, within user's feed. It starts with actions on page, which counts any clicks
within your page. Page views is anytime anyone went to your page to take a look
around. Page preview, comes when users have hovered over your page name to see a
pop-up preview. Page likes are how many people have liked your page, which Facebook
breaks into organic and paid. These are the stats that can help you understand,
who's going to and engaging with your business page. We'll look at these expanded
metrics in a bit. Next, this overview gives data on your content, including post
and story reach. Post engagement, which is anytime someone likes or comments on
your posts and videos, which includes any place that last longer than three
seconds. This overview also shows you how many times followers recommended your
page, how many followers you have, and the number of orders you've received, if
your page is set up to sell. You can change the range of this data from the past
week to the past four weeks. You can also export your data into a report. Scroll
down and you'll find your most recent posts, that shows you useful data like when
they were posted, post type, your target audience, each posts reach, and total
engagement. Facebook also lets you add other pages that are similar to yours. You
can see how your performance stacks up, to comparable business pages.
Play video starting at :3:11 and follow transcript3:11
Your overview will tell you a lot already and give you a bit snapshot, as to how
your Facebook page is doing. But let's go deeper into what we can learn from the
dashboard on the left navigation. Ads is going to bring you to your ad center,
where you'll manage all of your page posts. Here you can create ads and track the
engagement on your ads. We will focus on ads in our next two courses. Your
followers section is going to provide you an overview of the number of your
followers, the changes in your followers, and where they're coming from. Drag the
slider in the first chart, to adjust the date range for your data. Total page
followers will show you your total audience. Click on a date to learn more about
where those follower came from. Click on total page followers on the right below
benchmark, to see your average growth. Page followers, allows you to view your
audience by organic and paid followers. Finally, this dashboard shows you where
users were in Facebook, when they followed you. The likes section of the dashboard
is going to show you similar data. Your total page likes with benchmarking, the
number of page likes with whether they were organic or paid, and where your likes
happened. Remember that this is engagement for your business page and not yet for
your individual posts. Reach is going to dig into how many different Facebook users
saw your posts, broken down into organic and paid. Scroll down to the bottom, to
find total reach, which is account of any user who saw anything from your business
page. Here you'll also find anytime someone recommended your page in a post or
comment, and your audience frequency of liking, commenting on or sharing your
content. Page views, is just going to be an overview of how many times your
business page, is being viewed. Here though, you can view analytics broken down
into what sections of your page people are viewing most, and also who's viewing
according to age, gender, location, and which device they're using. Finally, you
can see the top sources of where your views are coming from. Page previews, shows
you how many people have hovered over your name to view a preview of your page.
Again, it shows the total views and also breaks it down by age and gender. Actions
on page, is going to tell you who clicked a link and what link it was. The link to
your website or your businesses phone number or another action button you created.
This information is broken down into who clicked, what by age, gender, location and
device, so you can see who in your audience is seeking out more information?
Play video starting at :6:19 and follow transcript6:19
The post section is going to be incredibly helpful as Facebook's done most of the
work for you, in auditing your content. Here you'll find a list of all your posts,
when they were posted and how your audience engaged with that post. You'll discover
your reach as well, and Facebook even adds a handy guide to what type of post you
have and whether it contains a link, a photo or a video. You can also change your
reach filter and your engagement filters, to discover more about your posts. Use
this section, to help you see which posts are resonating the most, with your
Facebook audience, so you can keep creating great content for them. You can find
out when your followers are on Facebook, on this dashboard, too, which will help
you plan which days and times to post in order to maximize your reach. You can also
track the success of different post types and how other comparable page's posts are
doing as well? Events will take you to your events dashboard, where you can create
events, track engagement, and anticipate your audience. Videos will show you your
top videos and how long they were viewed for? Stories will give you insights into
your Facebook stories. The people dashboard, lets you discover more about your
audience, broken down by fans and followers. Here you'll find their ages, gender,
where they're from, and what language they speak. This data can let you know
whether you are indeed engaging with your target audience or if there are different
segments following you, that you didn't expect. The messages dashboard, will give
you information on who's contacting you through Facebook Messenger. Finally, the
orders dashboard will track any sales, if your setup for e-commerce. Facebook also
allows you to check insights individually for each post, simply click on "People
reached, or engagements," in the status bar beneath your posts. A window with at-a-
glance stats will pop up. You'll find reach, how many likes, comments, and shares
and any click-throughs. It'll also tell you any negative feedback your post
received. Like if someone reported it as spam for instance. You'll also find your
reach and impressions broken down by organic and paid, so you can track any
promoted or paid posts. As you start to interact with the analytics for your
business page, you'll become more comfortable with these dashboards and you'll
discover the best way you can use the data. Remember that analytics are a great
resource to surface, what's going well with your content, what to improve, and new
strategies to implement going forward.

Instagram Insights

Now, let's take a tour through insights on Instagram; their native analytics tool
that will help you discover who's seeing what posts and when, who's interacting
with your posts, who your audience is, and more. Open up your Instagram app and
navigate to your business profile Home. You'll find an Insights button here on the
page, or you can navigate to Insights by tapping the "Menu" icon here. While not as
robust as Facebook's Insights, there's still a lot to discover that will be helpful
to your marketing strategy. Insights breaks metrics down into three areas: content,
activity, and audience. Each section is broken down into further metrics. Let's
start with content, which is going to focus around what you've posted. First, it
gives you an overview of how much content you posted in the past week and what a
Delta is from the week prior. Note that these insights only cover the past week.
While they do show the change from the week before, there's not a way to pull up
customized dates. If you do want to track your metrics over time, you may want to
revisit Insights weekly to record the data you need. Next, the post section shows
what you posted this past week, along with its reach, which is the number shown
next to the eyeball icon, which is the number of times a post was seen by an
individual account. Instagram is going to order these by largest reach first, not
chronologically. Tap "See All" to see all of your posts, which is the only place in
Insights where you can go back further than a week. This screen is going to be
incredibly helpful to you as it's going to give you the ability to filter on post
format, dates, and your metric of choice. It defaults to ranking your posts by
reach for the past year. Change the filters at the top to look at only photo or
video posts. Change your dates from the past week to two years ago and change what
metrics you want to look at. Maybe you want to see how many likes or comments your
posts got, or which posts prompted people to follow you, or click the link in your
profile. This section is going to be your most helpful to surface what content your
audience engages with the most, and how. The next section is Stories, which we'll
show you the same data for the Instagram stories that you post. Tap on "See All" to
view all of your stories in the past 14 days, and filter by whatever metric you'd
like; Reach, Link Clicks or anyone who exited in the middle of viewing a story. The
final section of content is Promotions, where you'll find data on the posts that
you've turned into ads to target specific users. You can also tap "See All" to view
different metrics for each of your promotions as well. How can this data help you?
By knowing the stats on your individual posts, you can see what posts your audience
engaged with most, track your KPIs, and make a plan for future content. Which posts
had the most profile clicks? Did those posts contain a call to action? Maybe the
posts with the highest reach were posted at a certain time of day when more of your
followers were on the app. The goal is to uncover insights into your content
performance and make adjustments to better serve your audience.
Play video starting at :3:40 and follow transcript3:40
The next section of our Insights dashboard is Activity, which uncovers how people
are finding your content and interacting with it. The first section is Discovery,
which starts with Reach or the number of unique users who have viewed any of your
posts. This is like unique visitors in our web metrics. Even though a user may have
looked at your post multiple times, they're counted as one user. You can see the
change in your reach over last week as well. This dashboard also shows you
impressions, which is the number of times your posts have been seen. Since
impressions focuses on the number of times seen, you may have single users being
double or triple counted in this number as they may have scrolled by your post a
few times. You'll also see your impressions' week over week changes. These numbers
are going to show you how far and wide your posts are going, which can help you
track awareness and impact of your brand. The next section on the Activity is
Interactions, which is simply a measure of an action taken by a follower. Here,
Instagram measures profile visits, which is times a follower visited your profile
to look at your older posts or to find out more information about you. It also
measures website clicks or the times a follower clicked the link in your bio. If
these numbers are below what you want them to be, especially your website clicks,
take a look into how you're phrasing your call to action.
Play video starting at :5:20 and follow transcript5:20
The third section on Insights is going to tell you all about your audience. You can
see who's following you. Most importantly, you can see whether they align with your
target audience or whether they're entirely new segments. It's going to tell you
how many followers you have right at the top of the dashboard and the change from
the previous week so you can see how many followers you gained. Next is Top
Locations, which simply shows where your followers live, defaulting to city first.
You can toggle to countries as well for a global perspective. Again, you'll
probably see what you expect to see here in regards to your target audience, but
this section may uncover a regional or global audience you didn't know you had.
Next is Age Range, which shows the age of your followers segmented into
demographics. It defaults to all but toggle back and forth between men and women to
see if there are any differences to uncover in age ranges by gender. The next
portion is Gender, which shows you the breakdown of your followers. Again, use this
data to see if you are engaging with your target audience or if you have new
audiences that you need to be aware of. Finally, Instagram shows an incredibly
helpful chart when your followers are on the app by day of the week and by time
broken into three hour segments. This takes the guesswork out of when to post.
Simply post when you followers are there. While gives you a bit of data on
individual posts in that first content section, there are times when you may want
to drill down further into specific post. Go back to your Profile and click on a
post. Once there, click "View Insights". What first pops up is an at-a-glance look
at the insights for your post. The heart is how many likes it got, the speech
bubble is the number of comments, the paper airplane is how many times it was
shared to a story or shared with another user, and the bookmark is who favored it.
Beneath the at-a-glance header, you'll find a bunch of helpful information, the
number of profile visits it encouraged, which is restated in the Interactions
section right below it. It also shows your posts reach. In the Discovery section,
it will also tell you how many accounts it reached who don't follow you. That could
be someone finding it shared on a story or through a hashtag. The discover section
will tell you if someone found your post through a hashtag. If you promoted your
post, it will also give you details on your posts impact there as well. As you can
see, Insights is going to give you a lot to work with. But if you want more
expansive analytics, like having the ability to view customized timeframes, track
audience changes over time, and run reports, you might want to look into using a
third party app. Third-party apps can also fold in creation and scheduling tools as
well. As you look to engage more with your audience, drive traffic to your site,
track your KPIs, and grow your brand awareness, make sure to use all the tools you
have at your disposal, including Instagram Insights.

Iterating on content calendar

We've covered a lot of ground already on how to create great content. How to create
a content calendar, so that you can anticipate where and when your content will
post. How to track your metrics, and what analyzing your key performance indicators
can do to help you plan content for the future. Now, let's put it all together as
we help our friends at Inu and Neko iterate on their content calendar. In a
previous lesson, we created a content calendar for Inu and Neko. Where we planned
out posts to create based around holidays and events, which internal initiatives we
wanted to highlight to our audience, video and stories we could create and content
we wanted to share. We made a plan of what to post on which platform and when.
Then, we created our content using a mix of texts, images and video, good
storytelling, shared links, and calls to action, as well as curated content from
around the web, and from our customers. Then, we posted that content to our social
media platforms on the dates and times we planned out in our calendar. Remember, we
also kept track of all our content on different social media platforms in our
content audit. Fantastic job so far, but now we need to see how we're doing with
that content, and if our strategies being off. We've gone through our metrics
dashboards and analyzed our data, and across our platforms, our reach and
engagement has gone up overall. Our efforts are working, but we need to know more
about how our individual posts are performing, in order to make adjustments and
plans for new content. We can learn a lot by just tracking engagement, and total
reach for each one of our posts. Here's what we found for Inu and Neko. When we
looked at our Instagram insights, we found that our new weekly Throwback Thursday
posts, where we showcase photos of the Inu and Neko staff and community escapes
with their first pets, got a lot of engagement, especially in the comments section,
where our audience shared memories of their first pets. Because of the high
engagement and the field goodness about these posts, we'll continue. We scheduled
out a series of reminders for our services on Facebook, which were posts designed
to get our audience to click through the link, to learn more about our grooming
services at our website and hopefully book an appointment. But, in looking at our
metrics, we found that those posts didn't do really well on engagement or
conversions. Maybe we should think about bundling this call to action with a story.
I think the audience reacts better to that. We can see that the end of summer sale
promotions we posted, received various engagement. When we look further, we can see
that a general post, got a lot of click-throughs, than the posts about specific
products. Going forward, we'll know to post about specific products. Additionally,
our summer sale product post got most clicks on Pinterest, possibly because due to
Pinterest's shopping options, our audience there is much warmer and looking to make
a purchase. We discovered that the tweets with the highest total reach, were tweets
that contained tips and advice on pet grooming and health. They achieved that level
of reach because they were re-tweeted more than any other kind of tweet. If they're
being shared by our audience, It means that they are valuable to them, and they're
seeing us as an authority in our industry so let's keep sharing advice and tips.
And let's make a note to start including a link to our services with those tweets.
If our audience likes our advice, they may want to purchase our services. We can
also check to see how our advice and tips themed posts are doing on other
platforms. We decided to post some tips and advice geared towards specific dog
breeds and looking at those posts, we discovered a lot of comments and some good
conversation going. But in looking closer at our metrics for those posts, our reach
was really low. That actually tells us a lot that our niche posts targeted a niche
audience and got them talking. We could say, "oh, we didn't get much reach, so we
won't post those kinds of posts again". But, that's probably the wrong viewpoint.
We should schedule these kinds of posts into our calendar again, because even
though we only heard from small audience, they were highly engaged and know we care
about their interests. These are just a few ways in which you can use data to
understand the effectiveness of your social media efforts. Hopefully, you now have
a better sense of how much of an iterative process managing your social media
content really is. Creating content and posting it, is really only one part of it.
Running Social Media, involves using and understanding your metrics, and constantly
tweaking your content and format to continually discover what resonates best with
your audience and the discoveries we made this video don't mean that we figured
everything out in terms of our strategy, we'll make the adjustments we discussed,
and then we'll revisit them to see if we got better returns. If not, we'll make
another plan and try something new.