How to Become a Winner with Vine

I am not a betting woman, but I am willing to make a wager you have probably heard about the latest and greatest social media platform—Vine. The fact that you have six seconds to provide relevant content to your brand’s fan base possesses both an upside and a downside.

On the up:

With all of the mumbo jumbo that surrounds us in this crazy world, it is no secret we have short attention spans, which I like to call the Squirrel Syndrome. Vine challenges us to provide a message and engage the intended target audience quickly rather than creating a five-minute-plus video that drags on and on.
Who doesn’t love a good how-to tutorial, behind-the-scenes sneak peek, or a before-and-after transformation? It all goes back to show and tell—we, as consumers, would rather be shown something versus being told something. Check out a few Vine videos from Lowe’s—every bit of awesome!

For all of you sweating over the challenge of creating relevant content in six seconds, do yourself a favor and relax. Lo and behold the Vine description section. Use this to your advantage by offering a brief recap about the video. This also gives you a chance to reinforce your key messages.

On the down:

If you do not have a clear vision of what you want to say, your message will never resonate with your key audience. There is a reason why I keep using the word relevant in this post: You have to offer pertinent content based on your brand’s image and your target audience’s interests. If they do not benefit from your message, you’re good as gone. General Electric does a fabulous job of providing great, relevantcontent to its followers on Vine. Take a look:
It’s OK to have surpluses of shoes, nail polish colors and pieces of pizza; however, you can have too much of a good thing. Some brands try to do too much in one six-second video, flashing what seems like a million images at once. If consumers cannot process what they are being shown, you leave them questioning what they just viewed. Sometimes simple is better.
You wouldn’t purchase a vehicle that did not fit your lifestyle needs, so why would you adopt a social media platform that doesn’t provide value to your brand? Before you make the grand dive into this new outlet, test the waters to see if Vine is right for your brand.

If you embrace all that Vine has to offer and do your best to avoid the common mistakes, there is no doubt you will hit the jackpot!

The Business of Pinterest

If you’ve been using Pinterest for business you’ve no doubt checked your home page to see who’s repinned or liked your pins. You may have checked Google Analytics to see how much referral traffic Pinterest drives to your website, or done an image search to see who’s pinning your photos. But until recently, there wasn’t an easy way to see all your Pinterest activity in one place. That all changed in mid-March when Pinterest introduced web analytics.

Pinterest Web Analytics are only available to verified business accounts. If you’ve been using Pinterest as an individual on behalf of your brand, you’ll first need to convert your existing account to a business account, then verify that account before you can use the new analytics. Fortunately, this is a quick and easy process. You’ll retain all the board, pins, likes and followers in your current account when you make the conversion. (For step-by-step instructions, check out this post from Social Media Today.)

Once you’ve converted and verified your account, Pinterest will automatically begin tracking activity. Just continue pinning as you normally would, giving Pinterest a few days to collect initial data. Pinterest Web Analytics are available any time from the dropdown menu that appears next to your account name on the top right corner of you Pinterest page. By default, analytics opens in the “Site Metrics” tab and displays four individual line charts that tell you, by day:

How many images were pinned from your website, and by how many individual pinners
How many pins from your website were repinned, and by how many individual pinners
How many times your pins appeared in the main feed, in search results or on boards (impressions)
How many people saw your pins (reach)
How many clicks and how many visitors Pinterest drove to your website

Beyond the charts, you can use the “Most Recent” tab to see what images users Pinned in the last 24 hours, and the “Most Repinned” and “Most Clicked” tabs to see activity on selected days. There’s also an option to export your data for further analysis.

If you’re managing a Pinterest account on behalf of a brand, it’s definitely worth the few minutes it takes to convert to a verified business account. Pinterest has rolled out several new tools and features just for businesses in the past few months, and their analytics offering appears to be just the most recent effort to ensure businesses get the most from their presence on Pinterest.

A Beginner’s Guide to Repurposing Content for Social Media

We get a lot of questions about populating social media channels. Regularly posting fresh material across several channels can seem like a daunting task. Even with a good social media strategy in place, content creation takes time that a lot of markets don’t have.

That’s why we need to make sure we get the most out of everything we produce for social media. Enter the Beginner’s Guide to Repurposing Cotent. Repurposing content should be a part of any good social media strategy. Using minimal resources, you can turn one good piece of content into a handful of tangibles posted over a long period of time. Click the infographic to see larger.

Author: Tyler Norris [Google+]

Facebook is Changing – Why isn’t your Social Strategy Changing too?

Some marketers will tell you, “You’re only as good as your content.” While this is true in many cases, it seems Mark Zuckerberg overlooked the memo. I don’t know; maybe it posted on his Super Wall.

A Social Sea Change

With Facebook focusing on profit, it’s becoming more difficult for brands to connect with current fans. The focus on brand reinforcement is shifting toward brand awareness. Statistics form EdgeRanker show that engaged users of Facebook pages dropped from August to September. An in-depth look at the pages we manage confirmed their belief. Fewer people are seeing posts from brand pages.

Over time, social media managers can see patterns in a post’s engagement versus its reach. The higher a post’s engagement, the more people see. This is because Facebook displays posts in newsfeeds based on the level of interest in the post. For example, let’s say you and three of your friends like the same page. If those three friends like a status from the page, it’s more likely to display in your newsfeed. At least that’s how it used to be. Now, regardless of engagement, posts are displaying to roughly the same percentage of users who like a page (roughly 15 percent).

A Necessary Evil

I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that reach dropped shortly after the advent of the promoted post. With the promoted post, you can pay $5 to $15 to have posts displayed to a much larger audience of fans and friends of fans – much larger than any organic post could possibly deliver. The fee won’t guarantee engagement – just create the opportunity.

So your choices are simple. Show your post to a small group of people for free or show your post to the world for $15.

A company that has always put experience first is being forced to focus on profit, and marketers are an easy target. We all want access to the Facebook population and $15 isn’t an unreasonable price tag.

Marketers understand Facebook as a tool for brand reinforcement; you find people who like your brand and you interact with them – easy. But with pressure from shareholders, the stakes are raised for the social giant.

And make no mistake- the stakes are raised for marketers as well. What if you went to a CMO 10 years ago and said, “I want to allocate a significant portion of our resources to a free service that we have little to no control over?” But that’s what we do with Facebook everyday. We are at its mercy because it has six billion things we want.

A Plausible Solution

Great content and interaction are no longer the key drivers of success. Content still plays an important role, but the entirely organic nature of Facebook is gone. A really great post will no longer maximize your reach. Now, it takes a really great post and $15.

Some brands are trying creative ways to outsmart the system. One page posted an update that propositioned users to favorite their page so they wouldn’t have to “advertise.”

Instead of jamming a square peg in a round hole, our social media strategies have to evolve with the service. You must develop strategies that target the new audience available through promoted posts or find ways to mobilize the people who are still interacting with your page. There’s no simple solution. The technology will continue to change. The best advice: Stay agile. Watch your Insights and be ready to adapt your strategy accordingly.

The super-secret, guaranteed effective guide to building engagement in social media

It’s unfortunate, really. I didn’t even want to write this post. But after endless conversations about the secret to building engagement, I realized it needed to be said. So here it is. Are you ready? Read carefully, the super-secret, guaranteed effective guide to building engagement in social media:

The super-secret, guaranteed effective guide to building engagement in social media.

Provide value to your audience

Oh, I’m sorry. Were you waiting for more? That’s it. That’s all you have to do. A lot of marketers will talk to you about social media engagement strategy like it’s a secret recipe for Sunday sauce handed down from their great grandmother. They’ll say you need one part education, two parts consumer spotlight, a dash of sales-oriented content and with a little love you suddenly have three-million comments, Likes and retweets.

Sure, there may be a certain mix of content that works for your brand, but only because you’re selling a particular product to a particular audience with a particular interest. That’s what they like.

You might think this is a bland recipe, but let it simmer. Think about it. There are two operative words: value and audience.

Audience

The folks in your online community are already customers, right? So you should know who they are and what they want (If you don’t know them, you have bigger problems than social media). Now, all you have to do is talk to them. Post things they want to see. If you were talking face-to-face with a customer, how would they respond to your latest update? Would they say “Wow, neat!” or would it be more like “Oh, I see.” Users were gracious enough to click that Like or follow button. Now give them something in return.

All too often, management wants to highlight moments that make management proud and make the organization look good. That’s fine – if you can honestly say your audience would find it valuable. Photos from your company picnic probably won’t do the trick.

The people in your online community are there because you share some common value. Don’t ruin that relationship by telling them to think, feel or believe something different.

Value

Value isn’t just education. It can come in a lot of forms and it’s completely dependent on your audience. For example, there is a little newspaper is my hometown (I’m convinced their number of Facebook Likes is higher than their circulation). Every day, they post a poll question. Polls vary from local to state to national issues. You can always count on huge numbers of people posting paragraph-long responses. So how is this tiny daily providing value? It gives local politiphiles a place to voice their opinions. If you’ve gone to the trouble of Liking your local newspaper on Facebook, it’s safe to say you like to discuss current events. And hey, why not do it with a bunch of strangers on Facebook where you’re less likely to offend any friends or coworkers.

Skittles is another great example of providing value to your audience. With all current events aside, Skittles knows its audience on social media. I chuckle every time I read an update from skittles. See the below image if you need an example. You might say humor isn’t valuable from a marketing standpoint. But at the end of the day, what is Skittles as a brand? Sure it’s food. But it’s not healthy. It’s not innovative. It’s fun – just plain old fun. Skittles are bright, colorful and easy to share with friends, just like their musings on Facebook.

So, next time you write a Tweet or click the “post” button, just ask yourself: Am I providing value to my audience? If the answer is yes, engagement shouldn’t be a problem.