Social Media: People First, "Rules" Second (#MozCon 2016)
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You can follow all the “rules” about perfect post length, perfect time to post, perfect image size, and everything else and still not see any financial impact from social media. Dana doesn't think social media should always revolve around community building and group hugs. When you show the right people what they want to see, when they want to see it, you'll start attributing revenue increases to social media efforts.
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Social Media: People First, "Rules" Second (#MozCon 2016)
- 1. K i c k P o i n t @ d a n a d i t o m a s o S o c i a l M e d i a : P e o p l e F i r s t , " R u l e s " S e c o n d
- 5. #mozcon @danaditomaso#mozcon @danaditomaso I can’t wait to engage with my favourite brand on Facebook!
- 7. #mozcon @danaditomaso#mozcon @danaditomaso What works for your market?
- 9. #mozcon @danaditomaso#mozcon @danaditomaso Start with the market in mind.
- 10. #mozcon @danaditomaso Even our words are wrong.
- 14. #mozcon @danaditomaso Pay attention to the signal, not the noise.
- 15. #mozcon @danaditomaso#mozcon @danaditomaso What happened to social media?
- 18. #mozcon @danaditomaso#mozcon @danaditomaso Vertical video sucks.
- 19. #mozcon @danaditomaso#mozcon @danaditomaso (On YouTube)
- 21. #mozcon @danaditomaso#mozcon @danaditomaso We’re all turning digital.
- 23. #mozcon @danaditomaso#mozcon @danaditomaso Let’s go beyond personas and audience research.
- 24. #mozcon @danaditomaso#mozcon @danaditomaso Use attention research.
- 33. #mozcon @danaditomaso#mozcon @danaditomaso What makes good SMUX?
- 35. #mozcon @danaditomaso#mozcon @danaditomaso Start from a SMUX-first perspective.
- 40. #mozcon @danaditomaso#mozcon @danaditomaso Pick up the phone!
- 41. #mozcon @danaditomaso Ask unusual questions.
- 45. #mozcon @danaditomaso Separate strategic metrics from tactical metrics.
- 48. #mozcon @danaditomaso How much of your site traffic is via social media?
- 49. #mozcon @danaditomaso#mozcon @danaditomaso Analytics tools are part of the problem.
- 55. #mozcon @danaditomaso Does your Facebook page suck?
- 58. #mozcon @danaditomaso Use your brand voice.
- 59. #mozcon @danaditomaso Use your keyword research!
- 60. #mozcon @danaditomaso MozCon Speakers = 1190 posts
- 61. #mozcon @danaditomaso 29 “SEO” posts
- 62. #mozcon @danaditomaso 23 “search” posts
- 63. #mozcon @danaditomaso 9 “social” posts
- 64. #mozcon @danaditomaso 45 “content” posts
- 65. #mozcon @danaditomaso Are you inclusive?
- 68. #mozcon @danaditomaso Ask yourself why.
- 69. #mozcon @danaditomaso Consider all your interactions.
- 71. #mozcon @danaditomaso Is your intent even possible?
- 76. #mozcon @danaditomaso 20 seconds is a long time.
- 77. #mozcon @danaditomaso#mozcon @danaditomaso Everyone wants to play.
- 78. #mozcon @danaditomaso Play is more than creepy taco faces.
- 85. #mozcon @danaditomaso Challenge 1: Community Engagement
- 86. #mozcon @danaditomaso Challenge 2: Charity Engagement
- 87. #mozcon @danaditomaso Challenge 3: Showing Support
- 90. #mozcon @danaditomaso#mozcon @danaditomaso People first, rules second.
- 93. #mozcon @danaditomaso#mozcon @danaditomaso Let’s break some rules.
- 94. D A N A D I T O M A S O K i c k P o i n t @ d a n a d i t o m a s o
Editor's Notes
- Most social media right now is an old medium slapped onto a new product.
- A digital billboard.
- Because at the moment you hit post, it isn’t about the tactical implementation, it’s about what you’re trying to say and who thinks you’re worthy of their time.
- No one does this.
- Why does it take 14 days to remove you from a mailing list when you unsubscribe? Why do I have to call you to get information when frankly, I’d rather text?
- These are poor experiences because they’re based on a foundation of what makes sense for your company, instead of what makes sense for your market.
- We need to rewire how we approach social media.
- We need to stop starting our ideation process with a billboard and instead start with the person in mind.
- Even the words we use to describe social media metrics are all wrong.
- Audience, like you’re in the crowd and I’m talking to you but you can’t talk back.
- Impressions, as in it’s a TV ad and there’s no two way.
- Reach as in “how many irrelevant people scrolled right on by your post”.
- These aren’t strategic metrics — they’re tactical metrics. They steer us down the path of paying attention to the noise instead of the signal.
- Marketers have lost sight of what made social media so exciting in the first place and have tried to mold social media into forms with which they were already familiar. But that doesn’t mean that the opposite is true — that social media should only be group hugs and high fives. So how do you get away from that billboard and move into true social?
- First, I want you to consider how our brains are changing in this digital world. I have a story for you.
- A friend of mine needed to replace a light switch at her house so she brought one home and left it on the dining table until she had a chance to replace it. Her 6 year old came in the room and said "what's that!". She said "it's a light switch". He picked it up, flicked the light switch and said "it doesn't work?". My friend was about to say well yeah, of course it doesn't work it isn't connected. But then she realized that he didn't know that things had to be connected to work because he's grown up in an entirely wireless world. Would it have occurred to any of us in this room that a light switch couldn’t work without being "plugged in" to something? Of course not, because we have analog brains.
- Guess what? Facebook’s okay with it again! YouTube, on the other hand, still forces you to go horizontal with its video.
- It feels old and tired, an analog signal tossed into this digital medium. That’s YouTube’s call, not yours. It’s horizontal because the founders grew up in a horizontal world so of course all video should be horizontal. But vertical video is the most comfortable and easiest way to shoot a video on a phone…
- Count the horizontal phones in this video still. So you go ahead and market with your billboards and your 30 second spots to people who would rather turn their faces into a taco, or never ever turn their phone sideways even for Beyonce.
- Maybe the kids got there faster, but it’s happening. You need to rewrite your marketing strategy while you still can, before your competition does — they might actually be sitting in this room.
- We call this rewired approach — social media user experience, SMUX. SMUX is about knowing when and how your market wants to pay attention to you, and giving them what they want at that time.
- SMUX goes beyond personas and audience research — it’s about using data to build what we call attention research.
- SMUX goes beyond personas and audience research — it’s about using data to build what we call attention research. Attention research is looking at what actually gets your market excited.
- There’s a number of different ways to conduct attention research, to figure out what drives your audience, but here is one quick way to do it courtesy of RivalIQ. You may be familiar with RivalIQ, it’s a great way to keep on top of what’s going on in your competitive landscape. But instead of tracking companies, we’re going to be tracking Twitter accounts.
- But instead of tracking companies, we’re going to be tracking Twitter accounts. Try creating a landscape in RivalIQ, and the way it’s set up, it looks like you’re supposed to put in a company URL. But instead, put in someone’s Twitter handle.
- I created a landscape of the accounts of MozCon speakers. And you can do this for Facebook, Instagram, even Pinterest but we’re using Twitter for this example.
- From this, you can go into the Social Posts section of RivalIQ, and see what the top posts are in terms of different engagement metrics,
- What hashtags they loved (hint: #mozcon is a big one right now)
- I found a few interesting things at first glance — Thursday is a busy day, most engagement actually happens late at night, and while Saturday is a very quiet day in terms of posting, it’s slightly better in terms of engagement. Based on this kind of information, you can start to build a profile of your market.
- This attention research is the foundation of SMUX.
- Think back to that technically perfect post on Facebook. It’s a billboard. You might call it a post, but it’s a billboard. There’s an image, a call to action, maybe some supporting text. It’s not very SMUXy. Maybe you posted it at the right time and used the right hashtags, but that won’t be enough. You need more to make it have good SMUX.
- Okay, then what makes good SMUX?
- These six elements
- I encourage you to start your creative process from a SMUX-first perspective. Let’s stop pushing out billboards.
- you may be familiar with if you spend any time working on personas.
- Chatelaine did a segment called “This is 40ish”, where they interviewed Canadian women between 35 and 45. They asked them lots of questions including some super easy ones like “are you a feminist?” and “do you look good naked”. Here are the answers to “what makes you unique?”, so you can see the variety of responses.
- http://www.chatelaine.com/living/this-is-40ish-what-makes-you-unique/
- Your market isn’t a mass of people with the same characteristics. I know that you know this, but sometimes it’s easier to take the demographics route and hope that your reach encompasses the right person.
- Interview your customers
- And I don’t just mean “what are you watching on Netflix”, but “what kind of phone do you have”, “what kinds of things do you like sharing on Facebook”, “what is the last charity you donated to”. Ask them things that will get you under the hood and begin to truly understand your market’s motivations.
- For example, this is how we found out that a lot of nurses in Alberta are on Twitter just so that they can follow the accounts of food trucks and find out where they’ll be.
- Load up their accounts in RivalIQ and look for commonalities. Go back to your attention research and combine this with what you found out on the phone and what you find out from social accounts. You’ll be surprised what is capturing your audience’s attention.
- is where you separate out the tactical metrics from the strategic metrics.
- If you weren’t here in 2014, I would recommend watching my talk called Prove Your Value.
- Strategic metrics are the metrics that move the business needle and relate directly to your overall business goals. Things like “lifetime customer value” or “ticket sales” or “customer referrals”. Tactical metrics are things like “engagement rate” or “bounce rate”. Digital marketers are really bad at only reporting on the tactical metrics and not the strategic ones, because tactical metrics are easy. Engagement rate? Great, every social tool on the planet does that. Lifetime customer value? Now there’s math.
- Tactical metrics aren’t necessarily bad, they’re just given more importance than they should. It results in the myth in social media that if you post more, you get more, so poor social media managers get stuck on this hamster wheel of shoving out updates as often as possible, making sure that all their Buffer boxes are filled, and not being able to take the time to think whether or not that post will resonate. More posts! More engagement!
- And I say that’s a myth because we’ve seen it with clients who are stuck in that pattern. We had a client who was consistently top in their landscape for volume of posts and engagement, but their actual strategic metrics weren’t happening at all. In fact, only 5% of their website traffic could be attributed to social media. With a change in how they approach the platform, they’ve increased social traffic to their site by 280% over the past 12 months. What they did was make their posts SMUXier. They stopped focusing so much on the tactical metrics and considered the strategic ones.
- And I have to say, analytics tools make it damn hard for you to tie down a specific post to outcomes. In fact, I think that social media metrics are getting harder to measure, not easier.
- Look at the continued growth in dark social. We’re seeing dark social account for anywhere from 20% to 60% of a client’s direct traffic. So being able to analyse your results just got that much more important and sometimes there is no easy fix.
- is when you ask yourself where is the right place for this post?
- And I don’t just mean Twitter vs Facebook, but should it be an image, a video, a survey, a blog, some combination of the above? We need to ask ourselves better questions before diving into social media.
- For example, Channel 4 News in the UK has done exceptionally well on Facebook, growing their monthly video views from 5 million to 200 million. They provided good SMUX.
- If you go back to your market landscape that you created in RivalIQ and look at top posts, you can see what type of post it was. But don’t over-focus on engagement!
- Also, are you even on the right platforms? Please, if your Facebook page sucks, dump it. If your audience isn’t on Twitter, ditch it.
- Eat24 broke up with Facebook back in March 2014, and since then they got acquired by Yelp so clearly they’re doing okay. I want you to really think about what platforms are right for your market.
- This comes down to saying the right thing, in the right way.
- Not just for your and your brand, but also for your market. I spoke last year about brand and creating a brand voice, and you should be using that voice across all channels, including social media.
- But beyond saying what you’re going to say in your brand voice, consider the voice of your market. Back to RivalIQ, look back at those top posts. One of the fun things to do here is to search post content and see if they’re using the same language that you want to use. You know this from search marketing — use the words your audience is using.
- The MozCon speakers posted 1,190 times. This is what they talked about.
- Export this to a CSV and you can do some advanced analysis with the data as well, looking for trends and patterns. People like to talk to people who are like them, so how can your posts make your market feel comfortable?
- And beyond the actual “on-brandness” of your message, consider if the post itself is inclusive. Social media is about community — are you drawing people in or setting yourself apart with your language? And I don’t mean “like this if you agree” but it’s the difference between “get your tickets now” and “see you there”.
- Why are you doing this?
- Remember that hamster wheel? Your goal on social media shouldn’t be to hit your posting targets. If posting X number of times a day is a KPI for your job, come talk to me, let’s fix that. But for the rest of you, what is the goal here? I refuse to believe that the goal of every social post is higher engagement. What are you actually contributing to this noise?
- Ask yourself that before everything you post. Why are you tweeting out that link? What’s the goal of sharing that video on Facebook? Personally, I’ve been seeing a trend in articles lately about stepping away from the computer and thinking, and I would encourage you to do that as well. Take 20% of the time you spend composing a social post to step back and question the intent. Look at your personas, look at everything else we’ve discussed here, and just think about your goal. How will your post contribute to your strategic metrics, not just tactical ones?
- Another big part of intent is not just in the broadcast, but in the interaction. Consider how you handle customer service issues. Why do you make me take my complaint to a direct message immediately? Are you embarrassed that I’m mad at your company?
- AirBNB handled this problem really well.
- So if your intent is for people to say, enter your contest, is the link pinned, does the link take you to a place that builds enthusiasm in your brand voice and makes it easy to enter? Are people on mobile? Is your form nice? Does it have a dropdown of every country in the world? Are you making it easy for your market to carry out your intent?
- Intent is to get a buyer to take a physical hard good to social media, but you have to give them a reason to do it, there’s a hashtag Problem is they don’t comment or like on that tag, so the intent is there, but not the play. So hey barkbox, get on this massive engagement opportunity!
- Play is why Snapchat has more users than Twitter.
- Why would you hang around a boring place like Twitter when you can turn your face into a taco on Snapchat. Did you know that 224 million people turned their face into a taco, courtesy of Taco Bell on Cinco De Mayo?
- Did you know that more people used Gatorade’s Super Bowl sponsored Snapchat lens than actually watched the Super Bowl?
- And the average user plays with a Snapchat lens for 20 seconds? That’s a heck of a lot longer than your boring pre-roll on YouTube.
- At the very heart of marketing is emotion, and play carries some of the strongest emotions. It reminds you of childhood, it gives you permission to goof off, and of course we all know that brief play breaks results in better productivity at work. That’s how we justify our at-work Reddit time.
- Play may seem like the easiest element of SMUX to get right but it’s harder to be playful than you’d think. I’m sure many of you are thinking “I have no idea how to make my industry playful”. Let’s say you’re a funeral home.
- And that isn’t just a one-off. They are regularly fun, playful and respectful.
- This funeral home is located in an area that has a massive theatre festival for two weeks, it happens right outside their door, so this year they offered tours — if you were brave enough
- Not only did they have a great turnout for the tours, but they got local media coverage out of it.
- Now that you’ve got the 6 elements of SMUX down, I’d also like you to approach SMUX not from a Venn diagram perspective, but from a building block perspective. Some parts of this list will be much harder than others depending on what you market, and your brand voice and presence. Perhaps you have been zero play up to this point. Or maybe you have built-in play but you struggle with nailing down exactly who your customers are. Think of SMUX like a pyramid — there will likely be some things that you can look at and say “okay, we’re doing that now”, other things that you’ll say “we do this sometimes” and one thing that’s your “I don’t know how we’ll get there but we will”.
- When you unlock the achievement of getting your basic 3 SMUX elements accomplished on a consistent basis, then you get to look at the next level. You won’t walk out of here and immediately master SMUX. It’s a process and it will take practice.
- Here is an example of a client’s contest that they ran that hit all the SMUX boxes. The client is the Edmonton Community Foundation and if you’re not familiar with community foundations, they have endowment funds, basically forever funds for charities.
- First, community engagement since most people don’t think about endowment funds until they’re estate planning.
- Secondly, keeping the charities that they fund engaged outside of their regular granting cycles.
- And last, showcasing the wide variety of charities that they support in the community.
- So, they came up with this contest. They didn’t use a contest platform, it was a simple upvote contest. Charities were asked to submit a meme that explained their mission. Not every charity quite got what a meme was, but there were some real gems. They released it on April 1st as an anti-April fools joke, and the two memes with the most likes received $1,000 to support their programming. The best part was that one of charities who didn’t get what a meme was ended up being one of the winners. It didn’t matter.
- This was one of my favourites.
- When SMUX comes together, this is about empathy. Your customers become more than pageviews, they’re real people. When you talk about a 1% conversion rate, what you mean is that you failed 99% of the people who came to your site. How do you make that better?
- One of the most flat out fun Twitter accounts I follow is for a pharmacy in Halifax — @ScotiaPharmacy. They tweet in all caps, they break every single rule, and they are already a destination for my future Halifax trip. I love that account because they are just doing their own thing. That account is one of the most vibrant small business social media accounts I’ve seen. And they follow exactly zero “social media for business” rules.
- We see articles like this all the time, 19 rules for this and 21 rules for that. Put your market first, and rules second. The only rules you need to follow on social is keep it in your brand voice, do your research, and spend time being social. Let’s break the crap “rules” and do something that’s right for you and for your market. That’s where you’ll find your SMUX.
- Ready? Let’s break some rules.