Part 2: Post like Ludlam.

Facebook is grading you. If you don’t engage with your audience effectively, they in-turn, won’t show your new posts or future posts to ANY of your fans. Their algorithm detects lousy content based on weak numbers. Facebook are in the business of holding onto users, and that means only showing good content in timelines. Trending content. Quality content. If Facebook downgrades your brand to ‘C-’ trash level, it’s very hard to have your future posts seen organically in the timeline at all, so recovery is unlikely.

You can visualise this grade easily with the commonly misunderstood “Talking about this” metric (see above). It’s an ineffable number spat out from the data Facebook have collected on likes, comments, shares. But equally as important as the big-three, it also measures how many times people click your images, visit your page, follow your links, join your events… etc. It’s a very useful number to assess the impact of your page over time, and that of other pages, by comparing the talking number with the total likes. The example above, local marketing guru S. Ludlam has almost unrivalled strength in his ‘talking about this’ ratio. You can’t do much better than that. Be aware that the larger your audience grows, the more difficult it is to maintain such a high ratio.

Take these hustlers for example. Unlike Ludlam (82% engaged), Coca-cola are shamefully going about their business with a ratio of 1.3% engaged.

What is Ludlam doing right?

What could Ludlam (local green) possibly be doing better than Coke (global beverage)? His marketing team knows how to contrive smart content and keep their demo narrow. How it looks, how it sounds, does it feel like it was targeted to you specifically? Is Ludlam reading my mind?! Above all else, they understand their audience. They manage to do that, because they built the audience they wanted from the outset, rather than an audience for the sake of having one. This is a very important difference to understand. Coke wants everyone in the world to like coke, Scott wants everyone who likes Scott to ‘like’ Scott. You still with me? There are countless ways to build an audience, but let’s look at one of Ludlam’s posts for lessons on building, then satisfying a strictly and reliably responsive audience.

830 likes in one hour. What they’ve done VERY right:

1. No caps. Mentioned in the last episode, this sends very casual, easy-going, ‘I’m spontaneously sharing’ vibes. Politicians are very smart to go for the spontaneous dollar. It’s a very big dollar. When the audience gets the sense that the content creator is actually on their phone, shooting out copy, reading replies… they’re much more inclined to hit like or bang off a little gag right back at you. You would read this post at face-value and imagine Sludders thumbed it out on his phone while waiting on a long mac. You’d never suspect that a team of young PR whiz kids at Greens HQ poured over the exact wording and structure for hours to distill the most ‘authentic Ludlam’, probably a day prior, before scheduling the post to fit strategically into their PR grand design.
2. I make good on my promises. What better bit of moral acrobatics to drop 24 hours before an election.
3. Pop-culture/locale piggyback. I’ve heard of hack, I like hack, and I am so authentically HACK. Also, we went for coffee at the same place you go. Ludlam is really the boy-next-door in this post. For example, I’m releasing this article today, of all days, because Ludlam-mania is at its peak. Isn’t that shamelessly tactical. Still, Facebook is all about brand association, even on the user level. A friend posts a Zach Galifianakis video because they want everyone to know that they get him. They’re in on the joke, and they have a sense of humour. Don’t be afraid to use the klout of others to your advantage, it looks very natural on this platform.
4. Hashtag. I don’t do hashtags, but I get them. They aren’t used for what they should be. Which is, Twitter, obviously. They still show up, because they are suggestive. What does “#greens” say about the Greens? They’re viral. Everybody is talking about them. So many in fact, that we need a hashtag to keep track. It may or may not be true, in all honesty nobody will care to check, but it can be a useful device if you want to give your audience the impression that you or your event are very hot shit. #lovefreo
5. It’s short and to the point (yay).

What was done badly?

1. It might look instagram, but it looks staged too. It looks uncomfortable. Unlike the copy of a post, which can be planned days in advance. The final ingredient, the picture, must happen then and there before it can all go live. Once again, a hasty attempt that didn’t succeed. A film lecturer could philosophise that the positioning of the viewer opposite the subject would give the feeling that they are themselves ‘in-the-scene’. But in this example, it simply begs the question, why are these two not sitting opposite each other? You have to be careful with this sort of thing. It takes a lot of thought and planning to look so casual.

What’s the lesson?

Be narrow, be small, forget about page likes. Focus instead on pleasing the audience you already have, and getting them to engage. Do you think Ludlam expected to attract new likes to his brand with this post? I doubt it. The post we looked at today, reads the mind of the audience. It takes all the admirable qualities Ludlam’s PR people know that the audience would love to project onto Scott, then offers it up in the form of a well crafted post.

Ludlam’s demo really wants to believe in a friendly, casual, in-touch with the people, has hack’s seal of approval, regular dude with regular tastes; who makes good on his promises and lives in their world. Whether or not any of this is true of man himself, it doesn’t matter, the audience had their expectations satisfied. They then responded in a huge way, and the word-of-mouth function of social media really kicks in.