Moving Beyond the Feed
The future of brand marketing on social, by Cassey Deveau
The year is 2014 — Pharrell Williams had us all feeling very Happy, Ellen gifted us with the greatest selfie of all time, and Kim K attempted to break the internet with an asset we had all likely seen before. In less exciting news, your organic performance was on the down-and-down. You found yourself constantly wondering why your page wasn’t getting as much organic attention as it used to. You try posting to your Facebook feed, and then wait nervously hoping it gets picked up, but chances are it didn’t. This was the first time that a platform wide decrease in organic performance was recognized, and it left marketers with a lot of questions on how to bounce back. Fast forward four years and that decline in organic reach you were feeling is about to come back in the form of unpleasant déjà vu.
In January 2018, according to Facebook’s Head of News Feed Adam Mosseri, Facebook began to “shift ranking to make News Feed more about connecting with people and less about consuming media in isolation.”. As a result, marketing content was set to take a backseat to content by friends and family — a value that Facebook says it originally had, and that it’s trying to return to. This was yet again a head scratcher for marketers globally, as clients started to put the pressure on to find ways to keep organic performance up, in spite of the challenges from the main platforms themselves.
Now to be successful on social, brands need to do much more than post organically to their Facebook feed. We’ve known this for a while now, but it’s taken some people longer to come to terms with than others. We can blame the decline in organic feed engagement rates on many factors. The rise of other social platforms means we have to spread our efforts over multiple spaces from Instagram, Pinterest, to Tinder (yeah they put ads in dating apps, and yeah they perform well sometimes). The mass amounts of content now shared every second online means an organic Facebook post is something akin to a needle in a haystack.
The changes in algorithms by most major social platforms mean organic feed content by brands is harder to get pushed to the top of people’s timelines. The removal of chronological order has thrown off timing, and sometimes you’ll see a post about a local event happening “tonight” for the first time, only to look down and realize that the post is from 3 days ago. It’s frustrating to try and get results on social without spending a ton of advertising dollars, and although boosting on Facebook is a great way to increase engagement, gain qualified traffic, and even drive conversions for certain campaigns, there are a lot of other creative ways to help drive the results you need to keep your clients, and you, happy.
No one tactic works alone for every brand, every campaign, every objective. In fact, to guide a consumer through the funnel, you’ll need to use multiple platforms, tactics, and creative. We’ve got a few out of the box ideas to shake up your social side of the marketing mix, so try and keep an open mind as we journey through some options you can use to create your comprehensive, multi-channel content marketing plan.
Forums
Forums can seem a bit like the wild wild west (cue Will Smith’s catchy tune) when it comes to marketing. The aesthetic isn’t as naturally pleasing as most social platforms, so they don’t tend to look as pretty or user friendly to non-avid users. At first glance it can seem like an intimidating free-for-all, but if you’re smart about it, forums can provide a very unique and personal connection to your audiences and offer great opportunities to showcase your brand as an expert in the industry.
One of the biggest online social forums is Reddit. With a tagline like “the front page of the internet”, Reddit is a good place to start when a brand is looking to get involved with forums because it has a thread for basically everything. You can find a conversation happening about anything on this smorgasboard of content, accompanied by upvotes, downvotes, memes, haphazard links, and infinite communities. Underneath all that there’s also a goldmine for marketers — a thriving and engaged community.
This isn’t the place for you to shout your self-promotional posts into the void, in fact nothing will get you kicked out faster. Reddit users, or Redditors, can sense inauthentic marketing from a mile away and they will not respond well to it, or to your brand if you use the same tactics you would use on a Facebook feed. Take the time to create a Reddit specific content plan, do your research, and be prepared to dip your toes in rather than dive headfirst. It’s important to adapt your message to fit in with the “rediquette”. A good strategy will earn you Karma, the currency on Reddit, which measures where you stand in the community based on the number of posts and comments you submit.
Sounds like a lot of work, I know, but I promise that when it’s the right fit, Reddit is worth all the hassle. With 330 Million users and growing, as well as more than 150,000 communities spanning over 217 countries, Reddit is a huge domestic and international player on the web. This platform has a global reach that can put many other platforms to shame. These are also highly educated and high income users; Pew Research Data highlights that 42 percent of Redditors have a college degree, and 35 percent make $75,000-plus per year (Barthel & Stocking, 2016).
How can marketers get involved? There’s a few different ways.
- Profile Pages: These are similar to profile pages on other social sites where your brand will have a feed of its own posts that users can follow. Users can also send messages to the profile manager.
- Posts: A Reddit post can consist of text, links, images, or video. Take the time to get a sense of the culture of subreddits you’re looking to get involved in before posting. There are a lot of nuances in relation to making posts on this forum, so know the global guidelines as well as the subreddit specific rules (most communities will have them listed).
- Sponsored Content: Your brand can run sponsored posts on desktop and mobile apps through Reddit Ads. This sponsored content uses an auction based system where you are able to set an upper limit on your daily spend to keep your campaign on budget with a daily minimum of $5.00.
Where to start? Once you’ve set up an account, set up a TrackReddit account so you can get alerts when chosen keywords or phrases are used on the platform. This will allow you to quickly jump in on conversations pertaining to your brands. Start by upvoting, and adding comments where you can contribute them before jumping in to posting. Check in frequently and find the general average time that top posts are submitted for your target communities. When you’re ready to start posting original content, create a piece solely meant for Reddit, not a post used elsewhere.
Quora
Quora is all about the questions. It might not be as well-known as Reddit, but nearly 775,000 people access Quora each month in the U.S. alone, which is still a significant audience. Quora is structured like Wikipedia, as pages can be created and edited by any user. So if you don’t already have a company page on Quora you can start by creating one. That’s an easy first box on the checklist handled.
Many marketers also use Quora as a means of market research which can help inform content themes, and proactively answer questions within content on your site. To take this a step further, we can use the forum for some content promotion as well. Quora is all about having the best answers, and asking the best questions. Your brand is a thing in which you have expertise and that’s where you could start. Begin looking for any questions directly relating to your company and answering them. You should then look at the area your company focuses on and provide answers to questions related to that area. Remember that Quora is not about self-promotion so keep the answers useful, factual, and concise so they don’t feel like spam or bragging.
It’s okay, and even encouraged, to link to external sources within an answer to a question, so this is a great opportunity to share a blog or infographic that you would like to get some more exposure on. Keep the answer short, but useful, and then point to your content for more information.
There are also a few advanced features that can be useful to some marketers looking to boost their organic content with Quora:
- You can target your question to specific Quora users, asking them to weigh in with an answer along with others in the community
- You can publish content on Quora
- You can search for specific questions or topics related to your business and follow these to receive notifications of new questions
- You can spend credits to get your question in front of more people
Alongside Quora’s team users are able to approve of answers through upvotes, disapprove through downvotes, and even report answers for a number of issues including spam, irrelevance, and improper content. Keep this in mind when interacting with users and make sure the content you’re sharing truly is relevant to a topic. If you’re not comfortable getting involved in the question and answer side of the platform, you can try publishing content on Quora. It works like LinkedIn’s publishing platform; at Quora, you can create a blog and publish stories. To get started, click on your profile and navigate to Blogs. You’ll be able to create a blog and customize its name, URL, and description. Just like LinkedIn content, these posts get circulated around the Quora network, and you can share your posts on social media to attract readers and followers.
Messaging Platforms
Some of the benefits to these “dark social” platforms are that there’s no algorithm, they receive a high open-rate, and they can be used for free. One way to utilize these platforms is to advertise on them, and I’ll touch on that as well, but there are ways to use messenger apps to your advantage without spending any cash.
The first way to utilize the Facebook Messenger app is through a bot. When someone clicks on your Facebook page, the messenger app will automatically pop up. Users then opt to begin a conversation with the bot, making it a great customer experience tool. The great thing about Facebook’s chatbots are that they’re super flexible! Here are just some of the ways you could use them:
- Provide content or product recommendations
- Offer support such as placing & editing orders
- Provide information on product offerings
- Curate customer feedback
Facebook Messenger is a great way to boost declining email marketing efforts, or to supplement them to reach new audiences. Facebook Messenger offers you an alternative to gated content that is then delivered via email to users who opt in. Instead of asking users to fill out a form to receive content via email, you can give them the option to skip the form and get the content via Facebook Messenger. A content campaign on Messenger has a 4x higher open rate than an email marketing campaign. According to Mailchimp research the average open rate for an email is 20%. Messenger, on the other hand, has open rates that are regularly in the 70%-90% range. Almost everyone opens their messages on Messenger!
There are quite a few ways to use messenger apps for marketing, but they tend to fall into 3 categories:
- Content delivery
- Lead generation
- Customer support
Some brands are also using Whatsapp to serve a role in their content marketing plan. It can be used as a method of sharing blogs or news updates. This content can be promoted in a similar way to how you would promote via newsletter.
You can create Broadcast Lists in Whatsapp. Go to the Chats screen > Menu Button > New broadcast. You can only have 256 members per broadcast list, so try to create segmented broadcast lists to ensure the content you’re pushing out is relevant to that particular audience. You can divide this content by persona, or in other categories that make sense for your brand. Another thing to be aware of is that you can’t broadcast messages to people who haven’t consented to it. So you’ll have to treat Whatsapp broadcasts similar to a newsletter sign up.
You can also create Whatsapp groups. Instead of selling your product, connect like-minded individuals with one another and offer support. You can add up to 256 members per Whatsapp group, so you’ll also have to keep the topic specific.
Another way we can use Whatsapp or Messenger is for campaigns themselves. Whilst a relatively new concept, there have been some really successful campaigns through Whatsapp.
Take Absolut as an example, they created an awesome PR campaign where consumers had to interact with a fictional bouncer to convince him to give them access to a party that Absolut was hosting.
Voice and Audio
Podcasts
One way to make audio a big piece of your marketing puzzle is to get involved in podcasts. There are currently over 550,000 active podcasts, over 18.5 million episodes, and content in more than 100 languages. Podcasts are gaining popularity at an exponential rate, and won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. One way to get involved as a brand is to create your own podcast. This is a great way to reach a new audience, or your loyal audience in a new way. Podcasts are relatively easy to make, and they are becoming easier to manage every day!
Another podcasting perk? The shelf life of the content can be extensive. Successful podcasts can be repurposed, whether as a blog, the topic of a white paper, a social posting, or (if filmed) a video — a single podcast episode can live on and on. One idea can fuel your content engine on multiple platforms. You can pull quotes, upload small updates on LinkedIn, create an Instagram story, etc., and have it all link back to the podcast. If creating a podcast doesn’t feel right, there are still other ways to get involved in this growing audio space.
Podcast advertising is a great way to reach a highly engaged, highly educated, and high-income audience. It’s also an excellent way to reach the “unreachable” audience of unplugged users who tend to avoid ads at all costs. 70% of podcast fans use ad blockers online. Podcast advertising leaves ample room for memorability. With 40% of people listening to entire podcasts and 45% listening to most of the podcasts, there are multiple opportunities to leave an impression. This medium is growing in the advertising space as advertisers are expected to spend $500 million on podcast ads in 2020. This isn’t surprising with 61% of podcast listeners making a purchase from a podcast ad. Podcasts generate 4.4x better brand recall than other widely-used forms of digital advertising.
Streaming Advertising
Another foray into the world of audio advertising is to look at placing ads on popular streaming platforms. We’ve seen that audio ads increase ad recall over traditional display ads by up to 24%. Platforms like Spotify, Pandora, and Waze can help you take advantage of this powerful format. They also offer other visual and sponsorship advertising options.
Spotify in particular offers audio, visual, sponsorship, and display advertising on the platform. Pandora (only available in the US) also offers sponsored listening, sponsored stations, and brand stations advertising on the platform.
Voice Search
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again. Voice 👏 search 👏 is 👏 here👏 and it’s on a mission to become your new favourite way to get information. Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri are becoming household names. Why? These assistants are ‘humanizing’ our interactions with technology, while simultaneously making communication more efficient because speaking often feels faster than typing. By 2020 50% of all searches will be voice searches, according to comScore. Voice search is most popular with individuals aged 18–34 years. Of this age group, 69% use voice technology on smartphones, 32% smart speakers, and 25% other devices (car, etc). If you want to learn more about the rise of voice search check out our blog on it here.
Google Actions and Alexa Skills are an out-of-the-box avenue to reach your audience. It’s definitely not for everyone, but for a particular campaign it’s something to keep in mind. The Alexa still remains the most used voice search engine, but the year over year growth for Google is much greater, suggesting a shift in consumer purchasing behavior.
Because Amazon opened up the development of Alexa Skills to anyone with their free Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) in 2015, anyone can create an Alexa Skill. Alexa uses Natural Language Programming (NLP), so those looking to build a skill don’t need to worry about complex speech recognition. The process is made fairly simple, even for unfamiliar users, and there are tons of Youtube tutorials that can walk you through it.
Actions on Google is the developer platform for the Google Assistant. By creating actions, brands are able to bring their services to the Google Assistant on Google Home. A key difference is that actions on Google do not have to be enabled by the user before they are functional or discoverable. The way that the model for Google Assistant works also creates opportunities for brands and publishers to make their actions and content more discoverable through voice-enabled SEO and deep-linking techniques.
Stories
Instagram Stories have taken off more successfully than a lot of platform updates in recent years. They’ve become a staple part of everyday social media use, spanning a wide age demographic. There are currently over 500 million people worldwide use them daily. According to Hootsuite, Instagram stories, when utilized well, reportedly see 2–3x more engagement than static posts. New features are being to Instagram stories at what feels like a constant rate. A lot of them are great for increasing engagement on the platform, and can catch more eyes than a classic feed post. Some of these features include:
- Poll & Emoji Slider
- Questions
- Quiz
- Join Chat
- Swipe Up (for Verified accounts and those with 10,000+ followers)
These stories can be utilized to beat the algorithm, and reach your audience with quick, timely content that they’re used to looking for in the swipe-able storyboard. There are a few tricks that will help guide you to 24 hour content success! Firstly, you need to keep content on this platform original. The audience is looking for content that blends in with their friends’ stories, so it should look in-the-moment. Avoid using heavily branded templates, and involve your community through UGC, and use the features listed above to keep them engaged.
Using video and sound will help set your content apart. This is a better tactic than overusing text. If you have a lot of information to get out, have someone say it instead of type it. You can even use moving captions with a voiceover if you still want the visual, so the text isn’t taking up too much space.
Snapchat
Snapchat is a platform not suited for every campaign. In fact it’s only suited to a few specific campaigns. Due to its user demographics skewing very young. 90% of Snapchat users are from age 13–24. Keep this in mind and make sure you really understand your audience before deciding to dive in with content in this space. One of the more useful features on the platform for brands is the stories. Video content tends to perform best on this platform and, even more so than Instagram stories, a focus on authentic in-the-moment content will resonate best with the audience. If you’re not creating for the channel, you’re wasting your time and money.
Snapchat in 2018 started offering Insights to users who are Official Stories creators, or users who have cultivated a large audience on the platform. Brands that can access it can use Insights to learn more about their audience and how they engage with content. It has also begun to offer the ability to put money behind your stories. Snapchat introduced Story Ads to serve as a way to amplify your stories to target audiences that don’t already follow you. They show up on the right hand of the camera in users’ discover feeds with a tile image, headline and a small “sponsored” badge that separates them from their organic counterparts.
Snapchat also offers brands the ability to create on-demand geofilters which you can target to a specific location. These work great to promote special events, or to boost reach on OOH campaigns (like a billboard in Times Square matched with a geofilter for example). These ads start at just $5, and increase in price as you choose a lager location radius.
Groups
Facebook Groups can have multiple purposes, but they’re primarily used to create a virtual space where like-minded people can connect, share content, and express ideas/opinions. In the case of B2C marketing, they can be leveraged as a tool that allows you to group audiences together where a core theme can be developed to tailor to that specific group of members. It can be a powerful and untapped tactic, that helps generates leads, deepen customer relationships, and drives conversions.
Any brand/user on Facebook has the ability to create a group. These groups are extremely customizable and can be tailored to your exact needs. Only creators and admins of the group will have the authority to invite additional members to the group. Groups are most valuable when it comes to networking and building niche markets. Those in your group are much more likely to turn into conversions as they are someone who has, at minimum, some interest in what you are offering. When it comes to managing specific audiences and building relationship-oriented networks, groups are a useful tool.
There are three types of Facebook Groups:
- Public: can be accessed on Facebook by any user via the search menu.
- Closed: users need permission from a moderator to join, but can find in the search menu.
- Secret: users to be invited by a moderator to join, and cannot find in the search menu.
You can use these groups to create a community of engaged fans, brand ambassadors/ influencers, or brand partners. You can create these groups around your business — kind of like an insider’s club — and share special promos for members. Or, you can make a closed group an exclusive site for loyal fans or repeat customers of a particular package. You can also make them a more open space with a focus on sharing good content, learning about the topic/your customer, and sharing knowledge and conversation.
Using Facebook Groups in your marketing will require creativity, and quite a bit of trial and error, so make sure you’re prepared to put in the work before you dive in over your head. Some tips for success:
- Be consistent, regularly share relevant information or content and engage with the group.
- Monitor the group and interact with others’ posts as much as your own, find other groups to be involved in and interact there as well.
- Invite quality members over a large quantity.
- Set goals to guide your measurements of success from the group.
- Be patient, you won’t see results overnight.
It might not be the first place you think of for B2C marketing, but Linkedin can provide opportunities for both B2B and B2C marketing. Instead of building huge public pages, more and more businesses are opting for spending time on niche closed communities, which can include a focus on industry partners, or a focus on a group of consumers connected by a shared interest or idea.
Having a topic that your customers care about will not only attract them to be part of your LinkedIn Group. It will also help keep the conversations in the group focused and make it easier for you and your team to manage the group. One you’ve picked a topic, you just have to fill out a form. Navigate to your LinkedIn Groups and click on “Create group”. Or you can use this direct link if you’re logged in: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/create.
The invitation process for LinkedIn groups is different than Facebook. To help ensure that your LinkedIn Group remains a trusted place for you and your members to gather, you can now invite only people whom you’re connected to on LinkedIn. To invite your connections, click on “Manage” on your LinkedIn Group homepage and select “Invited Users” on the left.
If you have other marketing channels, such as other social media profiles, email, or a blog, you could use them to promote your new LinkedIn Group. Alternatively, you could also share your LinkedIn Group on your personal LinkedIn profile and encourage your colleagues to do the same.
Promoting your LinkedIn group will take some time and effort, here are a few ways that you can find members.
- Optimize and edit your group information to include keywords that prospective members are likely to search for.
- Encourage group members to invite people.
- Advertise your group with LinkedIn Ads by clicking the Advertising link at the bottom of any LinkedIn page.
Remember that bigger doesn’t mean better, the largest LinkedIn groups are mostly just riddled with links, and it’s the smaller, better moderated groups that actually have the best engagement.
There are a few things you can do to help ensure the success of your group:
Spend some time creating your rules. Your group rules will help your members understand what’s encouraged and what’s not. Having your groups rules stated explicitly will also make it easier for you to manage your group and moderate conversations.
Setup some message templates. You can create custom messages that would be automatically sent to people interested in joining your LinkedIn Group. If you do not create a custom message, LinkedIn will send its default message accordingly.
Start discussions and be active in the group. Create a welcome post, and pin it to the top of the group. If you’re not sure what kind of conversations to start with, question answer type posts tend to get the ball rolling with members, encouraging engagement.
That was a lot to throw at you at once, but it’s just an idea board, not a roadmap. Remember that not all of these different platforms will work for your brand’s goals. Once you know who you want to target, you can narrow it down to a few key platforms, and then find unique and creative ways to use those platforms. The important thing is that you challenge yourself to do more, to think more, and to create more innovative content. Social media means so much more than just Facebook now, so shouldn’t our marketing plans reflect that too?
Cassey is a Digital Media Consultant with VERB Interactive — a leader in digital marketing, specializing in solutions for the travel and hospitality industry. Find out more at www.verbinteractive.com.
References:
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https://www.warc.com/newsandopinion/news/reddit_adapts_to_advertising/42440
WARC. (2019, August). What we know about marketing on Snapchat. Retrieved from
Whiteside, S. (2019, January). How smart speakers are changing consumer behavior.
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