Homework answers / question archive / Transcript: Lesson One Developing a Social Media Strategy Video 1: Why you need a social media promotion strategy Creating a promotional plan that takes advantage of social and digital technologies will help you shape the conversation about your business, build loyalty, and attract new customers and partners

Transcript: Lesson One Developing a Social Media Strategy Video 1: Why you need a social media promotion strategy Creating a promotional plan that takes advantage of social and digital technologies will help you shape the conversation about your business, build loyalty, and attract new customers and partners

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Transcript: Lesson One Developing a Social Media Strategy Video 1: Why you need a social media promotion strategy Creating a promotional plan that takes advantage of social and digital technologies will help you shape the conversation about your business, build loyalty, and attract new customers and partners. Social media shouldn’t replace other Inbound promotional methods like email, events or public relations, but instead, should augment them, offering another set of marketing channels for you to explore. There are many benefits to having a social media strategy. It will help you: Expand your other marketing efforts, so your content has the chance to be seen by a wide audience, and hopefully, the right audience. Build brand awareness. Gone are the days when your only way to build that same awareness was through billboards or magazine and television ads. With social media, you have the ability to bring your brand content directly to your customers, partners, and prospects. Now you can be where your audience already is. Social media is one of the most powerful ways to connect with your audiences. Sprout Social reports that “When consumers follow a brand on social, 67% of consumers are more likely to spend more with that brand, and 78% say they will visit that brand’s physical retail store. This is especially true among millennials: 84% said they were more likely to buy from a brand they follow on social media compared to a brand they don’t follow on social.” Social media helps you attract buyers to your products and services, and it gives you the ability to directly have conversations with those individuals at the time and place of their choosing. It sounds like a lot of opportunity, doesn’t it? In fact, social media is, in many ways, the ultimate way to do inbound marketing. That’s because it’s a one-to-one medium, which gives you and your company the chance to market in a direct, but very human way. Jason Hsaio, Co-founder and Chief Video Officer, Animoto “Well, social media, its impact on marketing, I think, has really been pretty profound. I'll give maybe two specific examples. One is, when you think about, I will say kind of old marketing, and I mean, this is still how a lot of us are thinking about marketing. The idea is that you're waiting for people to get to your website and your website is the Holy Grail, and you're doing everything you can to lure people to your website. But what's happened with social media is we don't have to actually sit around and wait for people to come discover us anymore. What's happening is we actually now have the opportunity to take our message, take our content, take our information, to where the Transcript: Lesson One Developing a Social Media Strategy conversation is already happening, and that's on social media. If you think about what else is happening, it's really completely leveled the playing field for businesses of all sizes. If you think about the fact that Click n Curl, which is a 10-person beauty company in the Midwest, that a post of theirs can be seen right next to Dior, an international powerhouse with $100 million marketing budget, that's crazy. In all other past forms of marketing, something like that has never been the case. So social media has really kind of changed everything.” That brings us to one of the most important parts of your social media strategy. It’s also the same thing that sits at the heart of your inbound marketing strategy: The buyer persona. A buyer persona helps you determine who your ideal customer is. Understanding who you want to reach will guide you in a variety of ways, from choosing the right social media platforms to use, to creating the best mix of content to share, to being able to target advertising to the right audience. Make sure you understand all the basic demographics about your buyer persona like age, gender, income, occupation, interests, motivations, and objections. But if you can, also go a few steps further and dig into their psychographics — which websites they visit, which online shops they frequent, and which social sites they like best. Social media gives you the ability to be more personal and really hone in on the right type of persona for your products and services, so the more you know, the better you can target social audiences. There is one other crucial piece of the social media promotion puzzle: Aligning your social strategy to your business objectives. Having business goals and objectives in place will make it easier for you to create social media goals that will transform viewers and readers into buyers. As with your business goals, you want your social media goals to use the S-M-A-R-T method: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely. As an example, if your company has a goal of building brand awareness among college students, one of your social media goals might be to develop videos with content that’s helpful or funny for college students, and set an advertising goal of reaching 250,000 college students by the end of the year. Even better, you can set a secondary goal of having the students interact with the content in some way — commenting on it or sharing it with their friends — thus increasing brand reach and giving you a direct way to measure if and how you’re meeting your goal. Being able to articulate your social media goals and plan the impact your goals will have on the company’s return on investment, or ROI, is also the key to securing executive buy-in and budget for your campaigns. Transcript: Lesson One Developing a Social Media Strategy Having your buyer persona and business objectives in mind will be helpful as you traverse your way through building your social media strategy. Bruno Cardinali, Head of Marketing North America at Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen “The components that go into our social media strategy, we basically look at four different things. The first one is paid social media. So, all the efforts that we're going to put out there to proactively talk to our audience. So, the second one is a community management. So, it's really a tracking the conversations and being on top of what's happening out there. Not only with the brand itself, but also with a pop culture. The third one is organic content. So, all the content that we are going to put out there, but not necessarily sponsored through a paid media. Then the last piece, which I think it's a piece that I like the most. It's really our reactive power from a creative standpoint to really respond as fast as possible to all the things that are happening in that channel. So how do we spot something and come back with a creative idea that talks and inserts the brand into that conversation?” To build your social media strategy, you’ll need to be able to: • • • • • Explain each social media channel and how each one is best used for social media promotion, Understand the impact of social listening and engagement, Develop a social content strategy for your social media plan, Identify ways that metrics are crucial to understanding the success of your digital efforts, and finally, how to Integrate social media into your other inbound efforts, including your website, conversations, and blog posts. There are a lot of moving parts in developing this strategy, but mapping out the actions you’re going to take will get you one step closer to achieving your business goals. Video 2: The Social Media Channels Explained There are a lot of options when it comes to choosing the right social media platform to use for your inbound marketing efforts. To help you decide which channels are the best fit for your social strategy, let’s walk through the basics and benefits of each of them. Let’s start with the giant: Facebook. You may have heard the adage that if Facebook were a country it would be the largest on earth. That’s because it currently boasts over 2.45 billion users — far more than the largest country, China, Transcript: Lesson One Developing a Social Media Strategy with 1.4 billion people living within its borders. It’s likely the majority of people you know are on the social platform. Facebook has faced controversy in recent years with its stance on political advertisements, on privacy, and the way its algorithm dictates what its users see. Additionally, Facebook has shifted to show users content that is more specific to family and friends, deprioritizing memes, brand posts, and many news outlets. Which is why it shouldn’t be surprising that RivalIQ reported in 2019 that engagement rates across Facebook had dramatically declined. Organic traffic and engagement on brand posts aren’t what they used to be, but that doesn’t mean the platform isn’t worth using. Millions of companies still use Facebook Business Pages to share organic news, events and talk to customers. But there are two other reasons to care about Facebook--their advertising tools are some of the best to target your ideal buyer, and their groups are an excellent way to build a captive audience, which in many ways may prove more fruitful than other ways of reaching your customers. This means Facebook may still be one of the most important platforms for your social media strategy. There are two types of Facebook pages: a personal page and a business page. You might have heard organic reach is better on a personal page, which is true, but there are several reasons you should use a Facebook business page for your company instead. First off, Facebook requires businesses to use business pages and can shut down pages that do not comply with their policy. Personal pages have a 5,000-person friend limit, whereas business pages can have millions of followers. Having a business page also gives you access to analytics, called Insights; the ability to correctly categorize your company for search; add a mission statement; a product catalog; awards; and give your customers the chance to give reviews. But the most important reason for you to have a Facebook Business page is for advertising. Facebook advertising allows you to hyper-target the audiences you care most about, including your own prospect lists so you can directly deliver content of value. You can also use Facebook Advertising across their other services — Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp. Adding a Facebook pixel on your website even helps you retarget those visitors with ads on Facebook. On Facebook, you can publish a variety of content including text and photo posts, carousel photo posts, and video posts. You can even do live Facebook videos and share “Stories,” microcontent designed to disappear after 24 hours, similar to Snapchat and Instagram Stories. And finally, of Facebook's nearly two and a half billion users, 400 million belong to a Facebook Group. Facebook groups help you build community, delight your audience, and help you reach fans that you wouldn’t normally be able to reach with organic posts. Facebook is putting more emphasis on Groups these days, and savvy businesses that are using them are finding that engagement is higher than other parts of Facebook. Mari Smith, Facebook Marketing Expert Transcript: Lesson One Developing a Social Media Strategy “Facebook groups can be really, really useful for companies if you're looking to start one. I definitely recommend starting with a clear purpose. Don't just start a group because someone said you should start a group. It could be a pop-up group. I've seen this be very, very successful. It might only be open for a week or 30 days. It might be for a specific challenge or to support a certain event. Certainly, you could have an ongoing group as a separate group, as a user group, a mastermind, a support group, many different ways you can use groups. Another great way is a testimony group so that you have existing customers just raving about the value that they get from your product or service and you can certainly bring prospects in there as well.” With over 2 billion users, YouTube is the second largest social network and, interestingly enough, it’s also the second largest search engine in the world — behind Google, of course. To give you a sense of its importance, more than 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute and almost 5 billion videos are watched on Youtube every single day. It’s almost mind boggling to think about! Google reports that 6 out of 10 people prefer online video platforms to live TV, which means, in many ways, you have the potential to reach an even bigger audience for a more affordable cost than on television. On mobile, YouTube reaches more 18-49 year olds in the US than any cable network. This is important, because television is a very different thing today than it was even a couple years ago. In fact, by 2025, half of viewers under the age of 32 will not subscribe to a pay-TV service When it comes to marketing on the platform, YouTube offers a variety of interesting possibilities. Remember how I mentioned it was the second largest search engine? That means not only does it help with SEO, but YouTube also has some of the highest referral rates of all the social platforms. Also important, the platform has high conversion rates when it comes to paid advertising. If you offer a complex product or service, having great videos can help sway prospects into a purchase. Creating video isn’t always easy or free, but the benefits and the statistics far outweigh the cost of not participating at all. So, what can you do on YouTube? Not only can you host original content and have channel subscribers, it’s a great place to syndicate content and to consider advertising, including interstitial advertising — short clips that appear before a video. Additionally, over half of YouTube users use the site to learn how to do things they’ve never done before, which makes it a great place to think about how you can develop interesting, educational material for your customers. I mentioned Instagram already, but let’s give it a longer look. It’s owned by Facebook, but the audiences and purposes are a bit different. With 1 billion people using Instagram every month, it’s the third largest social media platform and the fastest growing. Instagram is a photo- and videobased social network, and users follow individuals and brands to be delighted by interesting visuals. According to the Pew Research Center, the biggest demographic group are males Transcript: Lesson One Developing a Social Media Strategy between 18 – 24 years old, while 75% of all users are aged between 18 and 24. but even that is shifting as more and more individuals adopt the platform. While the primary functionality is sharing photos and videos, the most popular feature is Instagram Stories. Like the Snapchat platform, Instagram Stories enable the sharing of quick, “instant” photos and videos, often with fun filters and visual features. Stories disappear after twenty-four hours for viewers but remain stored in an archive for you to see or repost again. Over 500 million stories are posted every day and one third (1/3) of the most viewed Instagram Stories are from businesses. You’ll want to convert a personal Instagram account to an Instagram business profile to include a phone number and address in your bio and enable the “shop” button. And to do that, you’re required to have a Facebook Business page, which you will also need to take advantage of advertising on this channel. Instagram is important because it has very deep engagement, especially for brands.Over 90% of users follow at least one brand account. Instagram images get an average of 23% more engagement than their Facebook counterparts. That means advertising on Instagram is going to be even more successful for your business. Sounds like a great reason to use Instagram, doesn’t it? Nicole Votolato Montgomery, Associate Professor of Marketing at the McIntire School of Commerce, University of Virginia “Brands also need to think about going where their audience is and not getting wedded to a particular social channel. The New York Public Library has done a great job of this with their Insta Novels. They took classic works of literature and created a whole series of Instagram Stories to make these classic works more accessible to a new audience.” Let’s move on to Twitter, the popular microblogging network. Twitter is the ultimate by-theminute news network. It’s a place where you can see what’s happening in that very moment around the world, whether it’s someone feeling an earthquake in China or watching a football game in Boston. Users share messages of up to 280 characters, called “tweets,” which can include photos, videos, links, and animated .gifs. To give you a sense of the volume of information shared, there are more than 500 million tweets sent every day. Twitter is a fantastic place for you to discover what’s trending with your industry, customers, employees, partners, and prospects. You should be sharing content frequently — more frequently than on other platforms, in fact — and you should be engaging regularly with your audience.Twitter reports that 80% of their advertisers’ inbound social customer service requests happen on Twitter. It’s also a place where people frequently express both pleasure and dissatisfaction about products and services, making it a channel your business can’t afford to Transcript: Lesson One Developing a Social Media Strategy ignore. Twitter also owns Periscope, a live streaming video channel. Over 350,000 hours of live video are streamed on the network every day. There are several forms of advertising on Twitter, including ads in the news stream, with trending topics, promoted profiles, and a lot more. But one of the best uses of Twitter is the organic networking you can do directly with your audience, engaging in conversation that helps build loyalty and trust. LinkedIn is the platform most business-to-business, or B2B, marketers are familiar with. It used to be a network primarily used for recruiting, but these days it’s also becoming a platform to find the latest news and to stay networked with people all over the world. Now users can share status updates much in the same way as they do with Facebook, with photo or video posts that can be shared, liked, and commented on. There are several reasons to use LinkedIn. It’s a great way to look up individuals you might be meeting with, or to find out more about a prospect you’re interested in reaching out to. Additionally, it’s a great place to build thought leadership, to offer value through targeted advertising, to network in groups, and to share content that will drive links back into your website properties. Pinterest is a channel many people think of as only for business-to-consumer, or B2C, but there are a myriad of ways B2B companies can take advantage of the platform. If you aren’t familiar with Pinterest, it’s essentially a series of shared, often thematic bulletin boards where users can “pin” images, video, and links that resonate with them. What is unique to Pinterest is the average life of a pin is over three months, whereas on Twitter, a post’s life is a matter of minutes and on Facebook, maybe an hour. Pinterest pins build SEO with referral traffic — referral traffic that can directly turn into leads and sales. As of 2019, 79.5% of Pinterest users are female, according to Statista. The male audience share has also increased over time from 14% in 2013 to 20.5% in 2019. Note that women have up to 80% of the buying power in a household, so it’s an ideal place for many consumer goods companies to be. Chad Rogers, Co-Founder and CRO, Lemonlight “One of the social media platforms that I think is the most overlooked, and one of the highest trafficked is Pinterest. Pinterest has the fourth most traffic on the web. 98% of the viewers try to make or build whatever they see online. It is one of the most visual and best platforms to tell a story. So don't forget about Pinterest.” How can your company use Pinterest? Create a board with links to your products and services. Or a board with your blog posts. Or a board demonstrating your company’s thought leadership and awareness. Your HR team can benefit from a board detailing great things about working at your company. Consider creating boards for case studies, employee stories, white papers, or videos. The possibilities are truly endless. Transcript: Lesson One Developing a Social Media Strategy Snapchat is a channel that lost a bit of market share to Instagram when Instagram Stories launched, essentially copying the Snapchat business model. But with 210 million people, it still has a strong user base, and it’s investing in areas like augmented reality, which may have exciting applications. Like Instagram Stories, Snapchat stories disappear after 24 hours. There are a bevy of filters users can employ to liven up video and images. Today, brands can advertise with stories more dynamic and longer lasting than personal snaps. The Snapchat audience skews young, with its largest demographic between the ages of 15-25. And finally, there’s TikTok. If you feel like the app came out of nowhere, you're not wrong. It launched in early 2018 and already has 400 million users. The parent company, Chinese owned Bytedance, acquired Music.ly, an app for lip synching songs, and merged it into TikTok. The newest player on the social media field fills the gap left behind after Twitter purchased Vine and incorporated it into their Periscope service, stripping it of the popularity it had with its 15 second videos, which can be strung together to make viewing of up to 60 seconds possible. TikTok is a fast-paced app. The second you log in, you see a video at the top of a feed that's algorithmically curated around your interests. If you enjoy the video you're watching, you can follow, comment, and like the content directly from the video post. The average user spends 52 minutes per day on TikTok. And brands are starting to get into the mix with advertising and organic posts. TikTok now offers five advertising tiers aimed at big brands but if you have amazing content, there is still a lot of organic potential to gain from the platform. Samarah Daher, VP Media Operations at Refinery29 “Refinery has been on TikTok for a while. It was one of those channels that we played and experimented with a bit, and pulled back until we noticed that it was just exploding as a platform in general. And so then we started leaning into it again. A brand that I admire and aspire to be like is Chipotle. I think Chipotle came on the scene and really has dominated in TikTok, creating challenges that really captivate the audience. They had the lid flip challenge, and then the guacamole dance challenge, and they created these viral moments literally featuring their brand and their brand ethos.” Whew! There’s a lot to learn about all of the social media channels! Do you need to be on all of them? Maybe not, but consider that not everyone gets their news and information in the same way. You might read online newspapers while I am looking at trending topics on Twitter. Everyone consumes information differently, in the time and place of their choosing. You want to be found in as many of those places as possible. But the good news is that you can start small and focused, then build as your team builds and your resource pool grows. And don’t be afraid to create profiles and test out the channels! They can often seem more overwhelming than they are, and once you dip your toe in the pool, the water gets warmer and warmer. Transcript: Lesson One Developing a Social Media Strategy Video 3: Building the Foundation for Success - Setting Social Media Goals Brayton Ducharme, Senior Account Executive, Crayon “I think when somebody is starting out on their social media strategy, determining what they need to listen for goes back to setting a list of goals. What are you looking to accomplish? Are you trying to understand what your customers want? How your customers feel about a certain topic? Are you looking for content inspiration? Maybe ways to create contests and get engagement from your customers. It all goes back to what you're looking to accomplish.” Let’s talk about setting social media KPIs. Once you’ve created a buyer persona and mapped out some S-M-A-R-T goals, you can do a deeper dive and determine what key performance indicators, or KPIs, you should be targeting in your social media strategy. A KPI is a quantifiable measure used to evaluate the success of an organization, employee, or project in meeting objectives for performance. Knowing what your KPIs are from the start will help you make crucial decisions on content, advertising, budget, and other resources you may need. The main thing to consider is how you can develop actionable goals instead of goals of merely reporting a high result on a vanity metric . And what’s a vanity metric? Simply put, a vanity metric is a surface-level metric made up of numbers or statistics that seem great when viewed in a presentation but don’t correlate to business success. For example, follower count is probably one of the fluffiest of the various KPIs. Having as many followers as possible may look impressive, but if they aren’t the right people following you — the ones who will buy your products and services — then that follower count is essentially only a vanity metric. Jacqueline Babb, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Aurora University “Certainly, having followers and likes on social media are great. The real key here is having the right size. So for example, a national pizza chain is going to have a lot more followers and fans than a local pizza chain, but that doesn't tell you anything about a metric kind of beyond that awareness piece. And so the key is to have the right number of followers and make sure that you're giving them lots of ways to engage, lots of ways to create some user generated content, lots of ways to share, and lots of ways to engage with the brand and make a purchase.” To set the right KPIs, you need to go back to your business goals. If your goal is to increase sales, vanity metrics such as numbers of likes, shares, retweets, followers, and page views are not going to be the most important metrics for you to measure. Transcript: Lesson One Developing a Social Media Strategy But, if your goal is awareness, then those metrics may not just be vanity metrics. Followers, reach, and page views may be more important for you. Let’s break this down a bit further. There are four categories of social media KPIs, and most of your targets should fall within those areas. ? Reach ? Engagement ? Return on investment, or ROI ? Retention and Loyalty Let’s start by looking at Reach. These KPIs tend to be the most fluffy and they veer toward what many think are vanity metrics, but if your business goals are tied to company awareness and reaching as many qualified users as possible, then these may be the KPIs you want to measure. . ? Follower count: how many individuals follow your social channels. ? Impressions: how often your content is viewed. ? Mentions: how many times your brand is mentioned across social channels. ? Share of voice: how many people are talking about your brand vs. the competition. Engagement is next. These KPIs demonstrate how engaged your audience is and how they may be interacting with your content, which is usually a better indicator than reach when it comes to measuring the success of your campaigns. The following KPIs measure how people are taking action in relation to your brand:. ? Likes or favorites indicate that your viewers appreciate the content. This is a simple action and often one of the biggest vanity measures but useful to measure to determine if the content is of interest. ? Comments indicate direct engagement with your content. ? Sharing and retweets demonstrate that your audience cares enough about the content that they want to let others know. This also increases reach and awareness. ? Customer ratings and reviews demonstrate strong engagement and opinion. They are also one of the biggest indicators to other people that a product or a service is worth buying. ? Inbound website links from social media show that your content is interesting enough for your audience to click through to your site. Measuring social media ROI and garnering leads are goals that many salespeople and executives will gravitate toward. While often harder to drive, these are the types of KPIs that can directly affect the business’s bottom line. This means that executives may be more open to listening to proposals Transcript: Lesson One Developing a Social Media Strategy from your social team when it comes to asking for additional budget or headcount to meet these business goals. Some of these KPIs include: ? Direct sales revenue from social media, such as orders that come in from a coupon or links into your website that lead to purchase. ? Lead conversions from social media campaigns. This may vary from company to company but could include email signups, downloads of materials like an ebook, or activations of trial software. ? Support costs per customer. If your business goal is to reduce customer support call costs, for example, you may want to set KPIs for how many calls you can offset by helping them on your social media channels instead. ? Lifetime value. This is the projected revenue a customer will generate in their lifetime. There are a variety of ways to calculate this number, and how you acquire the customer — in this case, through social media, especially acquisition plays and customer touch points — will affect the lifetime value. Last, but definitely not least, is retention and loyalty. If your business goals are centered around customer service excellence or on retaining customers, then your social KPIs should be aligned to reflect this. Consider the following: ? Customer reviews and ratings - mentioned previously, these are a fantastic measure of how your customers think about your brand and products. ? Issues resolved demonstrates how well you’re doing (or not doing) taking care of your customers through social media. ? Another metric to consider in tandem is your SLA, or service-level agreement. In the social space the SLA usually refers to how long time passes between when a customer reaches out and when there is a response. Note that a response doesn’t always mean the issue is resolved--that might be another KPI to consider. ? Time to resolution: How long it takes for a question that comes in from social media to receive not just a reply, but a resolution. ? Customer satisfaction - it’s often tracked with a net promoter score (often called NPS), this gives you a sense of whether or not your social customer service efforts are working. ? Sentiment is a tricky metric to measure, but it’s important because sentiment tells you what people are thinking and feeling about your brand. Is it negative? Perhaps your KPI should be set to shift that balance to positive. Transcript: Lesson One Developing a Social Media Strategy And lastly, make sure to revisit your KPIs on a six month to yearly basis. Not only does the world of social media change — and fast — but your business changes, too. If your business goals change, then your KPIs probably need to be reworked as well. Now you have the foundation for developing KPIs that will help you prove the value of your social media efforts. Video 4: Structuring Your Social Media Team for Now & the Future It’s not easy to build a social media team, and if you’re a team of one, developing an impactful social media strategy may even feel more daunting. But you aren’t alone. A 2018 HubSpot Academy survey found that nearly 62% of respondents do social media on top of other duties. For those who are dedicated to social media, nearly 37% work on teams of five or fewer. But even small teams should consider how they plan to scale their team structure to drive their business goals. When it comes to structuring a team, as always, start with your business goals, be it sales, brand awareness, managing reputation, sales prospecting, recruiting, customer service, or something else. Knowing this up front helps you determine what channels you need, what content you need, your campaign possibilities, and the staffing you need to consider. For example, if your company’s goal is to provide stellar customer service, it means that you would put social goals and metrics behind responding to all customers in a certain timeframe, which in turn impacts how many channels you think you can manage, how many people you think you’ll need to respond to, and if you need an internal or external team to help. If your goal is accelerated sales then you would focus on channels where you can build a presence that supports advertising, where you can find interesting ways to collect email or deliver promotional offers. That helps you understand which individuals and agencies you may need to involve to develop content. Next you need to consider who your business stakeholders may be. What do they care about? Their needs may be your needs. Your PR team may want to connect to social media influencers while your HR team might need your help recruiting via social networks. Having their buy-in may be what you need to convince executives that additional headcount is needed. Next, are you planning for your social media efforts to be international? Do you need to consider how you’ll manage social networks such as Xing and Sina Weibo? There are different languages, social network preferences, and legalities that will figure into your staffing plans. Transcript: Lesson One Developing a Social Media Strategy The biggest challenge that most social media practitioners have is buy-in. Do you have consensus and buy-in from the decision makers in your company? If not, find an executive who can champion your ideas. Then, outline your social media roadblocks. What do you need to really do social well in your organization? What might get in your way? The most obvious roadblocks for an organization tend to be lack of time and lack of people. Once you know all of the above, you can create your social media roadmap. This roadmap is your future-state plan, or essentially, how you plan to grow your social media program. As you put it together, you’ll want to show how the various stakeholders in your business will benefit. Demonstrate how you see social media changing for your company in the next year, three years, or five years, and the impact it could have on the business. Once you understand your goals and KPIs, and what you would like the future of your social media program to look like, you can start thinking about how to build a team to get you there. There are several options for structuring the team. First consider the types of roles you need how they map to your goals. If customer service is a priority, you may need a community manager. If you are developing educational material, you may want to consider a graphic designer who can develop beautiful infographics, or a videographer who is great at developing live video. What if you don’t think you’ll have the means to scale the team in the manner you would like? The good news is that there are options beyond your internal team. Think about how agencies may be able to help you meet your needs, particularly if you are a smaller team. Agencies can be costeffective when compared to headcount. You might consider using a social or digital agency for a specialized type of role to extend your team, such as developing content or managing engagement. The structure of your team itself and how it works is also important. A few years ago, analyst firm Altimeter outlined five types of social media team models, and this model still holds up today. The Decentralized model is one in which no specific department manages or coordinates content and strategy. The team shares responsibilities and ideas. A decentralized model tends to be representative of organizations in the early stages of implementing social. A centralized team is one that stands alone and manages all activities. The Hub and Spoke model is common in growing companies, in which one team coordinates with Transcript: Lesson One Developing a Social Media Strategy other groups within the organization. The majority of companies use this model, including companies such as Red Cross and Virgin. The Multiple Hub and Spoke model, or “Dandelion” model, is one in which a main social media team works with smaller social media teams in different departments or business units. This is common for companies with international offices, such as IBM, Microsoft, or CNN. A Holistic model is just like it sounds — everyone is involved. Few companies will end up using the holistic model. It requires great trust and training for employees. Dell, Zappos, Accenture are a few organizations who have used this structure. Once you know which model you want to adopt for your team structure, you can begin to plan for the future. Design a plan that includes the following: • • • • • First, plan your business and social goals. Plan these goals 1-3 years out, and make sure to consider your stakeholders’ needs. Second, identify your possible social media roles based on those goals, then Third, develop a timeline for reaching those goals and building the team. With that complete, you need to allocate or advocate for resources, And finally, evangelize your plan throughout the organization. When others can see and believe your vision they will be more inclined to lend their support. And that’s how you build a social media team. It may seem daunting to think so big if you are a social department of one, but remember, having a vision for the future of your team is one of the first steps in building it. Video 5: Evaluating the best social tools for the job When it comes to managing your social media strategy, it is often helpful to go beyond the native social media sites and turn to various tools to make your job easier. This is true if you are a small team needing to streamline the amount of time and energy you are spending, or a big team trying to wrangle a massive amount of content and data. Let’s walk through the various kinds of social media software, apps, and services that can help you out. It’s not a small number. In fact, every year, Scott Brinker from Chief Martec and HubSpot puts together an insane graphic of all the marketing vendors in the space. The Social Media Marketing Transcript: Lesson One Developing a Social Media Strategy & Monitoring vendor chart is only a small subset of the larger infographic, but as you can see, there are hundreds of vendors out there. The trick is sorting through them and finding the one that is right for you. There are free tools that many small teams may find are entirely adequate for their needs, and larger, more robust services that provide an ROI on their cost by helping an organization save time, save money, or improve sales through their social features. Many of these tools do more than one job, so keep that in mind — a great social listening service may also have the ability to directly engage and manage your social audience, for example. First off are the social listening and monitoring tools. These tools can be channel specific or in some cases can aggregate networks to help you listen and monitor them all in one place. With these tools you can review comments and mentions, enabling you to follow the conversation about your brand, watch hashtags, and keep track of influencers, customers, and prospects. Here are some examples of companies who can help you in this area. If you do customer service in your social networks, a good listening tool is important. Another great reason to have a social listening tool is to be able to easily listen to and monitor your competition. If acquiring budget is an issues, you can do social listening with free tools such as Google Alerts, Hashtagify, Social Mention, or Twitter’s Tweetdeck. There are also a variety of paid social listening tools available, such as the HubSpot social media tools, which are available as part of HubSpot’s paid offering. Publishing and community management is another social activity that can be easier if you have a service or tool to help you manage the task. This includes: ? Managing multiple social services in one place (rather than going to each platform) ? Scheduling content ? Cloning posts for resharing ? Managing multiple users who need access and publishing rights ? Responding to posts and managing conversations The services you see here can help you manage, schedule, and publish content. Why should you use a service? If you need to manage many channels it will be helpful. Currently, Facebook and Instagram are the only networks that allow you to natively schedule posts, through Creator Studio, and only with a business account, otherwise you’ll need to work with a third party. Transcript: Lesson One Developing a Social Media Strategy In recent years, a number of tools like these have come to the rescue of social media marketers who need to create content for social media. No longer do you have to be a graphic designer to whip up a social post. Now you can design images and graphics with inexpensive services like those you see here. There are a number of services that also allow you access to free or low-cost photos, such as the ones you see here. If you use HubSpot, you can use the free Shutterstock integration to find images that will correspond to your posts. For video, the following vendors have great services that let you create on-the-fly screencasts that incorporate video or provide marketers with creative templates that allow you to create video without ever having to turn on a camera. Finally, there are the analytics tools. Each of the social networks has analytics that are accessible and free to use. However, if you want to pull all of those metrics into one location, there isn’t an easy option. But there are some tools that help you get a better sense of it all. As you saw from the earlier vendor chart, the services and software that I mentioned are by no means the only options. You’ll need to do a bit of research, but how do you decide between them? There are a few things you need to think about, and as I have often said, it all goes back to your business goals and what you want to measure. If engaging with your customers is the most important goal you have, then you should focus on a tool that will enable you to easily find the right people and facilitate ongoing conversation. You’ll also want the right tool to help you track the effectiveness of your engagement. On the flip side of that, let’s say you’re a company that’s just starting out and you want to really understand the landscape first. You may want to consider a social listening tool to see how people are talking about your brand or to monitor industry conversations and your competition. Most of the tools I mentioned are priced on a monthly or yearly basis and may increase pricing based on the number of social media channels and the number of employees you want to use the tool. Being super focused on your business goals will help you narrow down your needs. Determine what you want a tool to help you do to achieve those goals, and begin your research based on that goal criteria. Social marketing company, Buffer, suggests three tips to help you narrow down your choices of a social media tool. Transcript: Lesson One Developing a Social Media Strategy 1. Write down the 25 most important social media features that you think you might need. 2. Review the list and circle your top 5 features. 3. Use these two lists to evaluate potential tools. Once you have identified these features and how they could help you achieve your business goals, you can home in on a few different options for social tools and services that will help you meet those goals. Prepare an analysis of what you can do without the tool, and what you could do if you had the tool to help you do the job. Approaching it in such a fashion can help you justify costs to decision makers, especially if the price initially seems out of budget. Video 6 - Developing a Social Media Budget and Garnering Executive Buy-in When the world of social media first hit its stride, it was a fantastic — and free — way to capture the attention of an audience, and to find new prospects and to turn those prospects into leads and customers. But is anything really ever free? And that’s the case now. Free, organic reach from social media has greatly dwindled, and social media platforms have put a number of systems in place to make sure they are monetizing brand efforts to reach a wide audience and to capture click-throughs. That means you have to think about how you create more engaging content and how you advertise that content. Which means you’ll need a budget. But how do you gain the executive buy-in to fund that budget? Let’s dig in. A budget is best developed after you have your social media plan mapped out. Once you do, you’ll need to consider the following: ? What social content do you think you’ll need to create? ? Can you do it in-house or will you need to hire freelancers or an agency? ? What is your ideal mix of organic and paid advertising? How much advertising do you think you’ll require? ? Are you considering paying influencers to help you promote your products? ? Do you have the right staffing for your plan? ? Which services or tools do you think you need? How much will they cost? Next, gather industry data and competitive information to back up your plan. As an example, if you think that advertising is a solution to a business goal, to provide justification, you could look for data that shows how brands are being affected by Facebook’s organic reach. If you’ve been connecting your social media goals to your business goals, then developing an argument to sway your senior leadership should prove much easier. Transcript: Lesson One Developing a Social Media Strategy That’s because senior leadership in an organization may not think like a marketer does. They aren’t going to care about click-through rates, sentiment, or how many likes a post might have. What they will care about is a few core things: ? New avenues for revenue ? Cost savings and efficiency ? Competitive advantage ? Protecting brand reputation, and ? Customer satisfaction. Back in a 2009 TED talk, motivational speaker and marketing consultant Simon Sinek famously shared one of the secrets to this buy-in process that you need to embrace. He said, 1. People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. 2. The goal is not to sell to people what you have, the goal is to sell to people who believe what you believe. Then, Simon gave an example of this, in how Apple markets. They don’t tell you how awesome their products are. Instead they tell you why you want and need them. Instead Apple essentially says, “Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use, and user friendly. We just happen to make great computers. Want to buy one?” The Apple tagline for the iPad Pro, for example, is “Anything you can do, you can do better.” And who wouldn’t want to do things better? So, let’s think about this, because it applies not just to products but also to gaining buy-in for ideas. Senior leaders care about what will make them money or save them money. And you have a program that will help them do that. Rather than tell them WHAT you are going to do, tell them WHY your plan is going to help them achieve their business goals. Tell them why your plan will make or save them money. Demonstrate projected ROI. Show them statistics to back up your claim. For example, let’s say you want to build a world class social media customer service program. Perhaps you have determined that this program, to run optimally, will take new headcount, specialized software, and potentially the help of an agency that performs around-the-clock Transcript: Lesson One Developing a Social Media Strategy moderation. You’ve also calculated the cost, which is significantly higher than the budget you’ve been given. Start by looking at what you already know. Let’s say you have found that you can solve a customer service problem in social media by sharing a link to a pre-made video, or by answering questions directly on Twitter, and in a fraction of the time that a call into the call center might require. Calculate the deflection cost and then project that out for a year. If you can prove that your program might cost $200,000 but will save the company $1 million, that’s a powerful argument. But what if you have no idea how much money to spend? We asked Dennis Yu, CTO of Blitz Metrics. “Facebook would probably tell you as much money as you have. Our answer is whatever is the most profitable. But how do you know that until you test, and that's the chicken and the egg. We would like to start with a dollar a day. If you have nine pieces of content that you put in that three by three grid, then you're spending up to nine dollars a day as you're testing. If you find that it works, and it's generating you more profit, you can bootstrap that money into paying for more advertising, and small businesses know that if I'm making profit off of something, I'm willing to take that profit and reinvest it, but I'm not willing to willy-nilly put $10,000 into something sight unseen. So, you start with one dollar a day.” If you don’t have any program in place yet and you are arguing for the money to start the project, position it as an experiment or a pilot. Develop a plan that starts with the business goal, then your hypothesis on why social media can help meet that goal. Demonstrate how you will test that hypothesis and for what duration. Most importantly, explain how you will share the results with the leadership team. In this case, you may want to ask for a modified budget for the experiment to prove value first. Developing a variety of future scenarios can also be helpful. Create a plan that shows what you can do with current resources, a plan with some resources, and then your ideal plan. When you can demonstrate to executives the possibilities of social media to transform their business, they will be more likely to sit up and listen and to add a line item into the budget for you and your social program. Transcript: Lesson Three Building a Content Strategy Video 1: Introduction – Content: The Backbone of your Social Strategy Let’s talk about content strategy for social media. Social media is nothing without the content that makes it interesting for its users. Content truly is the backbone for all of the other activities that make up your social media plan. And having great content can make all the difference when it comes to having the best reach and engagement for your brand, which helps you build more loyalty and drive more sales. Nicole Votolato Montgomery, Associate Professor of Marketing at the McIntire School of Commerce, University of Virginia “Marketers now have less than three seconds to grab attention. And the reason is because we are constantly scrolling through content. And so, consumers are making decisions in a matter of seconds whether or not they want to stay with a piece of content and engage or continue to scroll and move on to the next piece of content. So, it's our job as social media marketers to try to engage them and grab their attention so that we go from this to thumb stopping.” If you’ve been marketing for a while, chances are you have a content strategy in place already that includes things like your email newsletter, blog posts, your website, and downloadable content like ebooks. Social content is different. It usually serves as the vehicle to get people to those longer pieces of content — or, to provide smaller, digestible bits of information that help expose your brand and your values to customers and prospects. The biggest difference between social content and traditional forms of content is that social content can be read and watched in the places and times that people choose. There are three main reasons why people use social media: They want to be informed, entertained, and connected. Social media helps people feel informed by helping them learn new things, stay up-to-date on topics that matter to them, and discover new ideas and trends. And although they are concerned about accuracy of news found online, two-thirds of Americans get their news from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and others. Social media helps people feel entertained by helping them find and keep up with entertainers, shows, and performances – and share and consume entertaining articles and videos. It’s no wonder there’s such an emphasis on video content on social: entertainment and video are key to keeping users engaged. Transcript: Lesson Three Building a Content Strategy Social media helps people feel connected by removing many of typical barriers of communication and allowing people to contact anyone in their personal or professional networks whenever, and from wherever. Social media helps people share, comment, and take part in a global conversation that goes beyond just the people they’re friends with. It’s up to you to determine which type of interaction your audience is looking for, and how you’ll provide it to them through the content you create. Video 2: Social Media Content: The Basics At HubSpot Academy, we talk a lot about content – and about finding ways to give value to your audience on an ongoing basis through meaningful content. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase that “content is king.” But in the world of social media, there are really two main things that matter: the content, and how individuals on the network interact with that content. There are a number of different types of content specific to social media, many of which can be used on a variety of channels. Let’s break it all down. Text used to be the mainstay of social media. Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn were pretty textheavy channels. But in recent years, they’ve shifted to becoming much more visual. In fact, Cisco reports that globally, consumer Internet video traffic will make up 82% of consumer Internet traffic by 2022, up from 73% in 2017. Think about that for a second, and think about how much video you’re doing already. Visual images include photos, infographics, animated GIFs, and illustrations. These days, you really only need a smartphone camera to take great photos. The possibilities are limitless. Product shots, office and team highlights, conference selfies, customer spotlights, and more. You can share more than a single photo in many cases. For example, on Facebook and Instagram, you can create galleries and use photo carousels. Twitter also allows for multiple photo uploads per post. Animated GIFs can take you one step beyond standard images. They can also help you demonstrate complex concepts quickly and easily, as in this example from SAP in which they explain how AI will change the world. Jacqueline Babb, Associate Professor and Chair of Marketing, Aurora University “The upside of gifs is that they're visual content. They're highly shareable and searchable. NASA actually uses gifs on their website to show weather patterns, so there's definitely a time and a place for gifs, but if your users aren't using gifs and if you're using gifs just to get a click-through rate, Transcript: Lesson Three Building a Content Strategy that's probably not the right reason to be using them. So be really intentional about using gifs to communicate a message and tell a story.” You can make animated GIFs in Photoshop or online at a variety sites. Giphy.com is the most popular. Video is the next big content bucket to consider. Did you know that marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users? Or that 59% of executives agree that if both text and video are available on the same topic, they are more likely to choose video? Chad Rogers, Co-Founder and CRO, Lemonlight “There is no better way to reach your customers, whether you have a service or a product, than video. You can speak to them in so many different ways. You can speak them directly to the camera like we're doing right now. You can educate them. You can entertain them. You can tell them stories. You can convey emotions like no other medium. Video is the only way to go.” Video can be used on every single social media site that I’ve mentioned. In short, you shouldn’t ignore it. Live video is also becoming more common, and you can broadcast instantly from Instagram, Facebook, Periscope (which is owned by Twitter), YouTube, and a variety of channels such as Livestream. Video is not always cheap or easy to create, but you would be surprised at how often it is. Consumers appreciate brands being authentic on video, and sometimes that’s easier with a smartphone camera than it is with an entire studio. Ai Addyson-Zhang, Founder of Classroom Without Walls “Live video is really, really important, and because we are doing businesses with other human beings, and live video really showcase the personality of a brand, and the best part of live video is live video gives our audiences lots of agency to co-create content with a brand. And the more time our consumers are spending with our brands, the more likely they are going to do the marketing for us. So you really want to leverage live-streaming to figure out a way to engage our audience, to give their voice, to share their stories, to even let them influence what we are doing, as our companies or organizations.” Short form video is popular these days with sites like TikTok, and the Twitter-owned clone of the once popular Vine app, called Byte. These sites allow for very short videos of 6-15 seconds. These videos tend to be entertaining and casual, full of lip sync videos and funny stunts. That brings us to the next type of content, Stories. In 2017 we saw the rise of Stories, which is a type of content that got its start with Snapchat and that Facebook copied for both its own Facebook platform and for Instagram. Essentially, stories are quick bits of content, both video and photo, often with fun filters and “stickers” that disappear Transcript: Lesson Three Building a Content Strategy after 24 hours. They’re less posed, more entertaining, more casual, and tend to be more conversational than other types of content found on those channels. And guess what? Viewers love them. 500 million people a day are viewing Stories on Facebook and Messenger, and 500 million more are viewing Stories on Instagram. Plus, Stories are a great way to reach more audience if you don’t have a lot of followers. A study by SocialInsider found that brands with less than 10,000 Instagram followers succeed at reaching more than 9% of their followers with Stories. Stories give brands the chance to share fast content that is often more economical to produce and delivers incredible brand awareness. When users view your story, they can choose to swipe up or down to “see more,” which can then take them to an offer or your website, so it’s a great way to drive traffic. Polls are also a fantastic way to drive engagement through Instagram Stories. Now let’s go over some other types of content that have the potential to help your business jump ahead of the pack. First, there are quizzes, surveys, and polls. You can engage your audience directly in Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter with polls. Check out this example from Evernote. This helps you build brand awareness and more importantly, affinity. Plus, along the way you’ll receive some valuable insights into your audience that can help you boost other marketing and product efforts. B2C companies in particular have embraced real-time marketing. Real time marketing is developing content on the fly for local, national, or global events happening online or offline. Doing so helps your brand be part of larger consumer conversations, boosting both brand recognition and engagement. You’ll sometimes also hear real-time marketing referred to as newsjacking, a term coined by marketing expert David Meerman Scott. Doing this kind of marketing requires a hyper focus on a specific event using social listening. You’ll also need to be able to generate content quickly, like Oreo and their marketing agency did for the Superbowl in 2013 when the lights in the stadium went out. Or when HBO accidentally left a Starbucks cup in its popular Game of Thrones show and Starbucks tweeted a witty response. In some cases, you can anticipate the content you need ahead of time and insert your voice into the conversation, such as sporting events, new television shows, holidays, or fun designated days such as National Friendship Day. This brings us to two types of content that you actually don’t generate yourself — influencer content and user-generated content. We love celebrities and give them enormous power to sway our opinions. And when they share content, people listen. Influencers are individuals that have huge, highly influential audiences. Transcript: Lesson Three Building a Content Strategy These influencers may have a global or national audience, such as a movie star or other celebrity. However, social influencers could be individuals who began as bloggers or content creators in a certain field or on a certain platform and built an audience around their amazing ideas and visual imagery to amass a huge following. More and more brands are finding that these types of content producers are more advantageous to work with than a celebrity — both from a cost and reach perspective. There are a number of influencer companies that will help you book individuals to develop or share your material. You can also build relationships with budding influencers who are creating amazing content and can help you stand out among the crowd. And finally, there’s the holy grail of social media content: user-generated content, or UGC. What is it, and why is it so important? UGC is content such as blog posts, tweets, posts, videos, images, or reviews developed by a fan of your company or your products and shared on a social channel. It could be a video unboxing a product, a photo of a fan interacting with your company swag or designing other kinds of content to show their adoration for your products or the work you do. It’s the best kind of social content for a reason. Stackla found that 79% of people say UGC highly impacts their purchasing decisions.They also determined consumers find UGC 9.8x more impactful than influencer content when making a purchasing decision. That means user-generated content might be more fruitful than shelling out thousands or millions to work with an influencer. Here’s a great example of UGC developed by the team at Interware in Mexico, sharing their excitement of completing a certification. We loved this photo and the enthusiasm of this team. But this photo does more than make us feel good — it shows others that these individuals appreciate and are excited about learning with HubSpot Academy. It’s a strong endorsement for our brand, one that potentially carries far more weight than any advertisement we could devise on our own. You can influence the creation of user-generated content by offering rewards, contests or giveaways, for example a photo or design contest. Or, create a quiz and have people share their results. And finally, you can get creative with hashtags too, like how Whole Foods encourages shoppers to share pictures of their carts with the hashtag #WholeFoodsHaul. Hashtags are helpful for search, but they also enable the curation of specific types of content. You can create a branded hashtag to track a company effort or specific campaigns. If you’ve never created a hashtag before, it’s simple, and you don’t need any tools to create one. Simply put the pound sign (#) before the word or phrase. Don’t use any punctuation, including spaces between words. For example, the HubSpot HR team uses the hashtag #HubSpotLife to showcase our fun culture. Samarah Daher, VP Media Operations at Refinery29 Transcript: Lesson Three Building a Content Strategy “One of the great things about living today is basically all the barriers of entry to create great content have somewhat been eliminated. With Premier Rush on your phone, you can edit a whole video and post it on social. One of Refinery's top performing assets was an intern who wrote an inspirational quote on a post-it note and started taking photos on her phone with it in front of iconic landmarks in New York. So today, everyone really is a content creator, and the audience really appreciates the imperfections. So, you no longer have to think everything has to be perfect. Also, social media in a lot of ways, it's so ephemeral, that I always tell my team, "Progress over perfection". Just do something, put it out there, learn from it, and we can get it perfect in the future, but we'll know more by actually doing than just by thinking of doing.” As things continue to shift and change in the world of social media, there’s bound to be new forms of emerging content. Don’t be afraid to experiment with content types and different platforms, and also with the best times to share that content. There are a million studies that point to certain times being better for different types of content than others. The challenge with all those studies, however, is that the algorithms for social channels change regularly. What works well one week might not the next. A better bet is to dive deep into your social analytics to determine what content is really resonating and to do A/B testing to fine tune your process. Now you know the basics to developing meaningful content for your social media audiences. Video 3: Developing Your Strategic Social Content Plan Let’s talk about developing your strategic content plan for social media. Adopting every social channel and publishing whatever content you feel like won’t deliver business results. It’s when you approach your social media content strategically that you’ll see the most success. Your success on social media depends on creating a sensible strategy for your content — one that fits well with your resources and your goals. This is especially important if you don’t have a full-time team of social media experts at your disposal, because with fewer resources, you’ll need to be even more strategic with what you publish and on which channels. So, how do you develop a strong content strategy for social media that will bring success to your business? Let’s go through a simple step-by-step process for developing a strategic content plan. The first step is to figure out what has worked well for you in the past. Which social media channels has your target audience engaged with the most? What types of content have performed best for views, click throughs, and comments? Conduct a content audit of your social media channels to understand what your audience responds to best. In your content audit, look at: Transcript: Lesson Three Building a Content Strategy ? social networks, ? content types, and ? which social campaigns are seeing a return on investment? To gather your data, you can either use a social analytics tool, like the ones we’ve listed here, which can aggregate all that data – definitely the easiest option. Or, you can manually pull the data from each channel’s analytics tabs and compile it yourself. Chad Rogers, Co-Founder and CRO, Lemonlight “Brands should always be thinking about who their target market is, where they live, and how they're consuming that content. So, whether you're a B2B marketer or a B to C marketer, thinking about what platform is best for you. Secondly, how are they consuming that content? Are they consuming it on the go? Are they consuming it while they're leaning forward, taking a break from work? Or are they consuming it when they're laying back at the end of the day and they're consuming longer form content?” To do your audit, use a spreadsheet to record how your content has performed so far, with a tab for each individual social media channel. Once you have your spreadsheet set up, go into each channel tab and record things like engagement metrics, publishing metrics, audience demographics, referral traffic, and any metrics that are channel-specific, like “retweets” on Twitter. Make sure you measure not just the raw numbers but also the percentage change from the previous month or year. To get an even better picture of what types of content performs well, look through and identify the top-performing posts for each channel. You can even take this a step further by categorizing these top posts by post type: educational and informational posts, video posts, LIVE video posts, image and GIF posts, promotional posts, and entertainment posts. That’s right – really dig in at the post level to figure out which types of content you should add to your plan for each social channel. If your video posts got the most shares on Facebook, for example, then you may want to experiment with publishing more video posts. If your promotional posts get more clicks and shares on LinkedIn than they do other social channels, then you might think about scaling them back everywhere but LinkedIn. If your competitors are seeing success with live video and you haven’t really tried live video yet, then you may want to test it out on different channels to see how your audience responds. Don’t be afraid to play. Emilie Lewis, Social Strategist and Bookseller, Belmont Books “So, our bookstore has three different social media platforms that we're on, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. We try to keep the same brand identity across all of those. We are a bookstore, we're about books, we're about customers, we're about readers and authors, but we do have different audiences and so we try to cater to that. Our Facebook is mostly concentrated on letting people Transcript: Lesson Three Building a Content Strategy know our upcoming events. That's where we can put the most information, you don't really have a word limit. It's not as visual though. So for Instagram we try to post beautiful images of the books. You don't want to judge a book by the cover, but sometimes we do, it is part of marketing. So that's a really good place for us to show off our store, and show off the different authors and customers who are coming through. For Twitter it's a pretty quick bite. We want to let people know upcoming events if something is happening off the cuff that we weren't expecting or to maybe respond to a publisher or to an author to get that interaction and keep our names out there. So we do try and keep a consistent image and at least a consistent identity across all of those, but we do understand that they take more time if you're doing a big visual presentation, whereas Twitter, it's easy obviously to just hop on and say, "Hey, this author's just dropped by the store to sign books. Come and grab a copy.” Knowing which types of content performs well on each channel will be key to understanding what you should be doing more of – and less of. If you’re missing any of these post types in your strategy, like live video for example, then think about how you can experiment with it in the future. Ai Addyson-Zhang, Founder of Classroom Without Walls “I love video, and the video makes a huge difference in our social media marketing effort. I think the best way to connect with others is face-to-face communication, nothing can replace face-to-face. The second-best way is video. Video really shows our personality in the social media, in the marketing space, we all prefer to do business with human beings. We don't just connect with the logo, we connect with others as humans. So video is a great way to humanize who we are, to humanize our brand, to humanize our message, and that human connection and level up the emotion, and many of our purchase decisions are emotional decisions. So really use video to humanize what you do.” Alright, now that you’ve done a full audit of your social content and channels, I want you to think carefully about your goals and your buyer personas. Start with your goals. What do you hope to get out of your social media efforts? Are you trying to grow your audience? Increase traffic to your blog or website? If you find that you don’t have any specific goals yet for social, then the audit you perform will help you establish a benchmark for certain metrics so you that can develop new goals and work toward them. Now, who are your buyer personas? How are they using each social network? What are they talking about? What are they interested in learning? Are you already engaging them in ways that resonate with them? If you don’t have your business goals and buyer personas in mind as you’re developing content and social campaigns, then you probably aren’t using social as effectively as you could be. So you’re creating your plan to achieve those goals and connect with those buyer personas. Transcript: Lesson Three Building a Content Strategy Next, do research on how your competitors are using social media. How many followers do they have compared to you on each channel? How is their content performing – from the metrics that you can see, at least? Which types of content are performing best for them? How are they engaging with their followers? By looking at your competition, you can get a sense of how you stack up and where you might have gaps that you’ll need to close in your own strategy. Building a sensible content strategy takes a lot of research and analysis of not only your social content but also your competitors’ content. Once you’ve done this research and analysis, you can start to piece together a plan. Next, consider your resources. Who’s writing and designing content for social media right now? Do you have a team dedicated to social media who can create great copy, images, GIFs, and videos? Or are your resources kinda limited, and you’ll have to rely on help from folks within your organization or a third-party agency? Who’s going to actually press “publish” on these posts? Samarah Daher, VP Media Operations at Refinery29 “At Refinery, when we're developing content, we try to develop more content that's evergreen and has a long shelf-life. We still address the news, but typically not in types of content that would require a lot of resources. Instagram stories are a feed asset that's just text onscreen is a really good place to lean into something that's super trending, because it's so quickly to just pull out and make on your phone. But content that requires a host and a studio and multiple cameras, we try to keep that content more in the evergreen space, so it has a long shelf-life. Even if it's something that is topical, like Thanksgiving content, or spring break content, we know we'll be able to use it every year if we invest resources into it to make it high production value.” Think about the size of your team. Your content plan will look different if you’re a one- or twoperson social media team than if you have a team of five or more people. If you feel like you’re strapped for resources, then you might want to prioritize your top social channels over the others. Think back to your content audit and identify which channels have performed best for you in the past – and think about prioritizing those channels. Finally, always be testing your content. But no matter how big or small your team is, testing and playing around with different messaging and content types is the only way to learn what really resonates with your audience. Make sure experimentation is ingrained in your strategic plan. Nicole Votolato Montgomery, Associate Professor of Marketing at the McIntire School of Commerce, University of Virginia “Some interesting things that brands can do to stay nimble are to experiment when new platforms come out. Brands like ESPN and the NBA and even The Washington Post are experimenting on new Transcript: Lesson Three Building a Content Strategy platforms like LinkedIn. I also think using a multichannel approach can be very beneficial for helping brands to learn what works. Casper is actually doing this. Casper Mattresses, they've developed a Casper Sleep Channel using Spotify and YouTube and IGTV. So continuing to test and learn is crucial to brands staying nimble in this changing environment.” Now, once you have a really good idea of which social channels you want to prioritize and which types of content you want to post on each channel, it’s time to build out a content calendar that you can use to prep content for the upcoming weeks and months. And when you actually go to create your content, make sure you’re following your brand guidelines for content creation if you have them. And finally, don’t be afraid to get creative with your social media content. One of the biggest challenges people face in social media today is that they have trouble being heard above all the noise, and creativity can help you stand out. Denny’s, a popular American restaurant chain, is a great example of a brand that could have blended in on social media but chose to stand out as part of their social strategy. There are a lot of brands out there like Denny’s that have figured out how to stand out and get creative in a way that really resonates with their audience. Building a social media strategy for each channel takes a lot of time, research, and careful planning. But the more you can base your content plan on what’s worked in the past, on your specific business goals and buyer personas, on competitive research, and on continual experimentation, the more your social media efforts will pay off. Video 4: Using Tone and Voice on Social Media Let’s talk about tone and voice in your social media content. Here’s the honest truth: Humanizing your brand is no longer just an option; it’s a necessity. Humanizing your brand is a competitive edge in a highly competitive online world. People like to buy from people – they like making connections, and they like to invest their time and money in people they can relate to. That’s why tone and voice in your messaging are so important: Having a distinct tone and voice that reflects your values can help you connect with your audience in ways that business jargon simply can’t. It also sets you apart from other businesses and gets your content seen, clicked on, and engaged with. In other words, tone and voice turn your business into a brand.. Transcript: Lesson Three Building a Content Strategy So, let’s back up for a second. What exactly are tone and voice? They aren’t quite the same thing. VOICE means the distinct and steady personality or style of your brand. For example, HubSpot Academy’s voice can be described as helpful, knowledgeable, empathetic, and friendly. And that’s always true, no matter what channel we’re using to communicate, or what situation we’re communicating about. To get this voice across on social media, we create content that comes off like we’re a knowledgeable and supportive friend. On this you can see an example of the Hubspot Academy Voice.We use positive and inclusive language that makes our followers feel comfortable and welcome, and we use clear language that reflects how human beings actually talk to one another. Essentially, HubSpot Academy creates content presenting us as a helpful, supportive friend. TONE, on the other hand, is a SUBSET of voice. It refers to the moods and attitudes of specific content pieces, which can change depending on the channel, the situation, and the audience. So, while HubSpot Academy’s voice is steady no matter what, our TONE can differ from post to post. Figuring out what the right tone is for a given post will vary depending on your audience, your message, and its purpose. A social media post letting your followers know that your website is down will use a different tone than one announcing an exciting new product, for example. But the voice of these posts should remain consistent no matter what. If your brand doesn’t have an established voice and tone already, how do you develop them? Here are a few tips. When developing your business’s voice, you’ll want to think about your brand personality. If your business was a person, how would they talk? Would they be open? Witty? Friendly? Authoritative? Passionate? Energetic? Edgy? There are a lot of different descriptions you can choose from such as these examples of voice. Choose a handful of personality words that describe your business best and reflect its values and record them in a place where others writing marketing messaging can find them easily. When developing your business’s TONE, context is key. For social media in particular, think about the different scenarios that might come up and what tone you’ll use to respond to them. See these examples of JetBlue’s Tone. What tone will you use when people compliment you? What tone will you use when responding to customer complaints? Christine Scarlett, VP Marketing Communications, Cotiviti “Social media for a B2B company versus a B2C company is different in my view. Because I think in a B2B, you don't have the opportunity to be as playful, to be as casual, to be as witty. It doesn't mean that you can't sometimes interject that into your posts, but as a B2B company we need to be a little Transcript: Lesson Three Building a Content Strategy bit more formal. But still yet approachable. We need to be able to convey our expertise within the healthcare industry, within the data analytics space. In order to do that, we have to make sure that the audience engages, feels like their engaging in what we're saying. And because of that, I feel like we need to be a little bit more serious.” When you consider the tone of a social media post, ask yourself these questions: ? What is the purpose of this content? ? Who am I writing to? ? How do they feel? ? What do they want to understand? ? Therefore, what kind of tone should I use? Put yourself in your audience’s shoes, and think about what their background, goal, and current mood might be when coming across the post. By using an established, consistent voice and tone throughout all your communications, including social media, you’ll build trust with your customers because you’ll feel familiar, reliable, and human. Video 5: Developing Social Media Content The idea of creating all the content that a social marketer needs can feel overwhelming. But it doesn’t have to feel that way. Let’s break down some of the things that you should consider when developing content for social. The big thing that you’ll want to do is to think about your overarching content strategy, which should be based on specific social media goals. Content across the social channels should vary in a few different ways. Ideally, you’ll want to optimize your content for each specific channel. To do that, it’s helpful to think in terms of campaigns. That way, you’re tying every post back to a bigger social goal, with the idea of developing similar, related assets to use on different channels, without posting identical posts on each channel. As an example, Chiquita Banana did a multi-channel campaign for the 2017 eclipse. It included live video shared on Facebook, a multitude of videos shared on YouTube and across other channels, with fun graphical treatments of bananas as eclipses shared in .gifs and images. Transcript: Lesson Three Building a Content Strategy Bruno Cardinali, Head of Marketing North America at Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen “I think the type of content that we develop for different channels has everything to do with the audience in those channels. So if you remember the memes that really made and were viral a few months ago where people were posting. So how they present themselves on LinkedIn, on Tinder, on Facebook or on Instagram. That's basically the same approach that we take here. We just tailor the content to the platform that we are engaging because of the way people consume content in those platforms. So it's quite different the way people consume content on Instagram, than Twitter, than Facebook and other channels. So we are really careful to think about the medium, the media that we're using first before creating the content so whatever we create is most relevant and most applicable to that specific channel.” There are several different components to think about when you are developing content: hashtags, text, call-to-actions, and tagging. Let’s begin with hashtags. Did you know that LinchpinSEO found that Tweets with hashtags have 2 times more engagement than those without, and 55% more retweets? Hashtags are used across most platforms but you tend to see them most on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. Hashtags are formed simply by using a word with the # symbol in front of them. They’re used to help anyone who does a search on that hashtag to easily find related content. They’re sometimes used ironically as well, and as a brand you can play with that. One thing to keep in mind is that you shouldn’t use too many hashtags. You can get away with more than two on an Instagram post but on other platforms, try to limit to two or three at best. Emilie Lewis, Social Strategist and Bookseller, Belmont Books “So hashtags for us matter most on Instagram, it is where you can put the most hashtags and that's the way that people find your posts. They can of course be following you, they can search for you, but it's going to be a brand new audience who's potentially searching for Boston or Massachusetts. If we've tagged ourselves in those, we will show up. So that kind of widens our opportunity for new audience members, for new followers. So we really do try to include a lot. There's also some consistent ones that we use as just part of our brand. We always have shop indie, shop local. We always tag our cafe if we're including businesses that are local and things to do in the Boston area. So for us it is really important. Of course on platforms like Twitter you are limited, Facebook it doesn't really have the same effect. In that case, it's probably more helpful to look at paid ads to get a bigger audience. For us it's just getting our name out there. Our bookstore is only a few years old. So especially for a young company, I think it's important to try and get as wide an audience as you possibly can and hashtags are really helpful with that.” Transcript: Lesson Three Building a Content Strategy Jumping on a hashtag bandwagon is a good thing when it comes to trending topics and holidays, but make sure you have content that is relevant. Hijacking an unrelated hashtag to promote your material is spammy. Instead, tie in a product with an event that makes sense. For example, let’s say your business is a restaurant. If you know that #NationalPieDay day is trending, you can share content with your audience that highlights the type of pie you make at the restaurant. It’s timely, interesting, and makes sense in the context of the hashtag as well as being relevant to your product. Next, the text you include on your posts is important to consider. We have a few tips for using text in posts. ? Check and double-check for spelling. ? Make sure you are considering your brand’s voice and tone. ? And think about the length of your text. ? On Twitter, with only 280 characters, you are forced to be brief but in general, across all the channels, the shorter your message is the better your chances of that content being seen and re-shared. A call-to-action, or CTA, is one of the most important components of any piece of social content. True, there are times when you may not need one, particularly for awareness campaigns or on channels such as Instagram where links aren’t allowed, but in general you should think about how you can make sure a call-to-action is included in your content. This could be a link to click through to a blog post, a coupon or asking your audience to respond in some way. Keep in mind that you need to make the benefit to your followers clear. For example, if you ask them to watch a video, what will they get out of taking that action? Your CTA should use active language. This includes words like download, like, buy, register, subscribe, donate, share, comment, secure (as in, secure your spot), and watch. If you can make this call-to-action time sensitive, that’s even better. We’re all familiar with these types of phrases, because they work. Some examples of time sensitive phrases include: “Today Only,” “Ends at Midnight,” “For the next 24 Hours.” You’ll also want to find ways to make this CTA stand out, either visually within the graphics you use, or finding ways to highlight the details in your text. Make sure you include a link so you can track the CTA. And finally, tagging is important. If you’re resharing content give credit where it is due and tag the person who originally wrote it or shared it. Tagging your posts can also be beneficial to help you extend your reach if your content is in conjunction with a partner, customer, or another brand. Just make sure that when you are thinking about tagging private individuals, particularly on Facebook, Transcript: Lesson Three Building a Content Strategy that you do so with their permission. Additionally, tagging photos on Twitter to merely alert someone about the content is considered spam. Now let’s talk about developing the content itself. There are a bunch of possibilities for creating content including creating it in-house to using a social content or social media agency. When it comes to creating content in-house, there are a number of free or low-cost content creation tools available, which I’ve listed here. Take a screenshot so you can remember them later. Fortunately there are also a lot of free photo sites available to content creators, which I’ve listed here. And finally, there are the video creation tools that allow you to quickly and easily create video content. Jason Hsaio, Co-founder and Chief Video Officer, Animoto “Probably one of the number one questions I get is where do I start? What if I don't have content? I don't have this crazy slick studio like other big companies have. What I love to remind folks, is that you probably actually have a lot of great content already. If you look on your website, if you look in your marketing materials, you've already invested in great images, probably great video clips somewhere, and you can really start leveraging that. Even stills, right? Images can be used within video. You can pair images and text to make great videos for social. But the other thing too, is honestly, the camera in your pocket, your phone, the camera on these are just as good, if not better, than a lot of professional cameras out though these days. When you think about, especially for use on the web or use on social, these screens are usually pretty tiny. So we're not blowing this up to a billboard size or showing these on theater, so the phone in your pocket is actually great.” If you are ready to take your content development to the next level, social media agencies are also an option that you can employ to help you do everything from creating and posting content to optimizing your digital social advertising content. Video 6: Demonstrating Industry Leadership Through Social Content Curation Curating content for your social media channels is a great way to consistently stay active on each channel with less content, demonstrate industry thought leadership, AND to build a community – all while saving time. So what is content curation? Content curation means gathering content that’s relevant to a particular topic or area of interest, and then sharing it with your audience. It doesn’t mean passing off someone else’s content as your own, so make sure you’re linking back to the original author’s Transcript: Lesson Three Building a Content Strategy content and giving them credit for creating something that was so good, you wanted to share with your community. So, why should you include content curation in your social strategy? For one, content curation saves time and money. You know as well as we do that creating your own content takes a lot of time. But when you turn to your community to see what they’re sharing and what they’re writing about that relates to your own business, you’ll discover an entire world of existing content and ideas that you can share on your own channels. Secondly, content curation builds industry connections. When you shine light on other people’s work by retweeting them and linking to their blog posts, you’re showing them that you appreciate their content and think it’s worthy of sharing, which is a great way to build your network. Building industry connections through content curation can also help you extend your social reach. Let’s say I’m a really big fan of a certain brand. If I find that your brand posts content from the brand I like so much, then I might check out your brand to see what you’re all about. This will lead to increased social influence, too. Sharing curated content also enables you to post a bigger variety of content. So let’s say your own brand tends to publish and share a lot of blog content but not as many videos. If you can curate and share some really great videos from other brands alongside your own blog posts, you’ll be giving your audience more variety so they aren’t just seeing the same types of stuff from you time and time again. Emilie Lewis, Social Strategist and Bookseller, Belmont Books “So we do like to share whether it's a retweet or if we're co-hosting an event on Facebook, we leave comments on Instagram. We really liked that interaction. If it's something that we feel perhaps an author or another bookstore has said it better, we want to share that voice and just let them speak it if it's already been done perfectly, we don't want to try and change that in any way. But for us it is also part of building relationships. It's that interaction, whether it's with a community member, a customer or if it's an illustrator who's happened to stop by and is trying to promote their work. We really do try to just pick things up as they come. We don't plan any retweets or any reposting. But if it comes up and we feel like it's definitely worth saying and worth getting out to an even bigger audience, we're more than happy to try and help that along.” Speaking of variety, if you’re sharing content from others, then your social feeds are going to appear more diverse to someone scrolling through. For example, if I know that your brand not only publishes quality content that you create but that you also publish industry news and other quality content in the industry, then I’m going to start looking to you as someone who really knows what they are talking about. That’s right, content curation shows your diverse knowledge as a thought Transcript: Lesson Three Building a Content Strategy leader. I’ll see you as the kind of brand that posts on social to create value for your audience, not just to promote your own brand. So, what are some tips for curating content effectively? First of all, make sure you establish a good mix of promotional content and curated content. People get tired of brands endlessly promoting their own products, which is exactly why progressive brands think beyond products of features. The relationship customers have with brands today goes beyond the product itself. When you’re posting on social media, we recommend an 80/20 mix: Only 20% of your social media content should promote your own brand, and the other 80% should be dedicated to content that really, truly interests your audience and engages them in conversations. For the most part, curated content will belong in that 80%. Try to be consistent with how many times you publish curated content versus your own content on a day-to-day basis, too. To figure out what content you should actually curate, keep your buyer persona in mind. Which industry thought leaders do they admire? Which publications do they trust to stay up-to-date on industry news? What other brands that aren’t your direct competitors do they follow and want to hear from? Use surveys and other methods to understand your customers. The best thing to do is to get on the phone with some of your customers who represent an ideal buyer, and ask them who they follow and who want to hear from on social. Knowing who your audience is interested in learning from will give you some great ideas for whom to keep track of and curate content from. Pulling from a consistent set of sources will also help you save time, but make sure you spread out posts from the same sources. There are a few content curation tools out there that can make things easier. I’ve included a list of good ones here – make sure you screenshot it and check them out for yourself. Before you choose the content curation tool you’ll use, make sure you really understand the role content curation will play in your social media strategy.A one-person marketing team should start simple. Begin with the free options. And then, as your business and team grow, content curation may play a larger role and require more powerful software. By now, you should have a solid understanding of the role content curation can play in helping you demonstrate industry leadership, post consistently, and build a community across all your social channels. Transcript: Lesson Three Building a Content Strategy Video 7: Tagging, Timing, and Testing Your Social Content To get the best reach and results on social media, you need to do more than just creating and spreading your social content. There are three parts to your strategy that need special attention: tagging, timing, and testing. First, let’s start with tagging. Tagging means using a social handle or username of a person or business in your post or your photo. When you tag people or businesses in your social posts, you’re identifying them and essentially linking them in your post. Don’t confuse tagging with hashtagging, which is a way of grouping together posts have all been hashtagged with the same words. So why is tagging an important part of your overall strategy? When you tag a person or business in your social media posts, your post may appear on their profile page, depending on security settings. This can be a GREAT way for your brand to get exposure to that brand or person’s audience. On Twitter, when you tag a person or business in a tweet, they’ll get a notification that they were mentioned. This tag won’t automatically appear on their Twitter feed, but if they retweet the tweet you tagged them in, then it will be shown to their followers, leading to more brand exposure. When you tag a location in your Facebook and Instagram posts, then your posts will appear in the feed of that location – and people do browse location posts, especially...