Online marketers often find themselves to be puppets at the hands of a few internet giants who push and sway the everyday workings of each algorithm update. Though companies like Google and Facebook are known to update their algorithms frequently, most of it goes unnoticed by the crowd in general. That happens until there is an ‘announced’ update which sends us marketers scurrying back to our digital drawing boards to wonder how we should react to it, what we should be telling our clients and how our well-calculated strategy for the year will get affected. The latest among these announced updates came from Facebook this January when Mark Zuckerberg announced that there would be lesser brand updates on the Facebook feed. It was a way to say that their users came first. What does this update really mean? Let’s interpret a few essential sections from this update. 1. “The new algorithm will emphasize posts from friends and family over viral videos and clickbait headlines from Pages.” Remember that news item about “19 hilarious proposal fails of all times” stories that pop up on your feed? People seem to love it… a lot! Looks like some people may be complaining too (or so Facebook says). So if you don’t like such stuff much, there is a lesser chance you’ll see it in your feed. 2. “… recently we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content – posts from businesses, brands and media – is crowding out the personal moments.” Because and so-called click-bait posts worked, they started increasing in numbers. The reality is that our Facebook feed is easily filled with them since we tend to click such articles frequently. Eventually, the algorithm went to the extent of prioritizing these posts instead of those from friends and family. This meant that the power of content marketing raised its ugly head and started eating into Facebook’s revenues. Brands with inherently viral content started getting more eyeballs for free. Facebook decided to intervene to ensure that the balance was maintained and brands are forced to pay for getting their content visible. 3. “I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions.” Marketers can read between the lines. It means that you’ll have to work much harder if you have to get your brand content out organically. Otherwise, you can pay to find your way into your customer’s feed. How will a user’s news feed be affected? The statement provided by Zuckerberg can be best described as murky. It talks about “helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions.” Content cannot be meaningful without being relevant. But generic content can be relevant without being meaningful. So how exactly will Facebook’s ‘brain’ know what an individual finds relevant or meaningful? Let’s see you see an interesting DIY video. You watch the entire video and then move on. But if I don’t like, share or comment, Facebook may think that this video isn’t ‘relevant’. So even if you like to watch a certain type of video, your interaction will be key determining factor. We don’t like, comment or share everything we see so determining relevancy becomes a tricky business. What does this mean for your Facebook strategy? Facebook started its journey by encouraging people to accrue a ‘fan following’. When it realised that the power was slipping out of its hands because brands could directly talk to their community by being in their news feed, it started imposing algorithmic restrictions. Brands eventually had to pay to ensure that they could get a slice of their OWN followers’ attention. Today, when you choose to ‘boost’ you post, one of the clear options is ‘People who like your page’. This means that the number of followers took a back seat and engagement was put as the connecting metric between users and brands. This announcement from Facebook may try to put up a users-first ideology but if you read between the lines, all Facebook is doing is what it has done before. It is restricting a brand’s organic reach and pushing brands to pay to get user attention. Organic viral content may not be the key to trend on Facebook and, good ol’ money will do the talkin. For now, brands will probably continue to look for the next jugaad to circumvent such policies. Until there, here’s to optimizing campaigns, generating leads and tracking conversions. Want to read more check the curated list below. 5 top trends that are likely to be adopted for social media in 2018 Move over blogs, articles. Here are new content formats to consider 5 Indian Tech Companies Mastering The Art Of Content How To Start Your First Content Marketing Campaign: The 5 Must-Do Steps
Month: February 2018
5 top trends that are likely to be adopted for social media
We’ve reached a stage of online evolution where brands cannot afford to miss out on social chatter. You’ll see many doing the mandatory routine of posting on various social channels every day. The other end of the spectrum showcases case studies where brands are unlocking the true potential of social and becoming trailblazers for others. In a constantly changing scenario, it is difficult to differentiate between fads and trends. Every other day there is a new report on what brands must be doing, or not doing, on social. As online marketers, we are all too eager to experiment with what can work for our brand. With all the experiments we did through 2017, we discovered a few trends that are most likely to be adopted by social players in 2018. 1. Connecting social metrics to business outcomes When social media, and by that, we mean Facebook, took off, the biggest currencies that brands wanted to own was ‘fans’. Fast forward to 2017, everyone was talking about measuring engagement. Companies, especially popular ones, were spending millions to engage with their customers, connect and communicate with them directly. But was this translating to increase in business? In some cases, yes. But there isn’t a foolproof way to measure this for many brands who are into the service business or B2B sales. Social still is an indispensable part of digital. But companies are now demanding accountability from the dollars spent on social i.e. there is more emphasis on ‘Social ROI’. There is a lot social can do for a company. It can reduce customer service costs, attract talent, showcase product offerings and be used to narrate stories. But it is important to connect these aspects with business goals. How to work on your social ROI: Decide what business goal your social campaign will be aligned to. Then pick out the activities you can measure. From event attendance to direct sales, create your campaign keeping in mind how the outcomes will effect the business. Of course, engagement, following and traffic can be metrics that can be additional frills. 2. Move from being a publisher to broadcaster In the last couple of years, video took over all other forms of online content. The consumption on video within social feeds has also exploded. Because of this brands are slowly moving from being publishers to broadcasters of TV-style program. The advantage of such content is that it allows brands to use the power of storytelling (link) to help customers connect with them. Stories are the age old way that humans use to remember details associated with an event or thing. When brands use stories, they manage to engage customers with an emotional connect. It allows them to propagate benefits more than features. It is also true that not all companies can be broadcasters and this isn’t a one size fits all. How can you make broadcasting work for you: Both Facebook and Twitter offer Live videos. On the surface, this, in itself, is a great opportunity for brands to create a hype around short events. Once this is done, Facebook live videos are indexed by Google too. With the right keywords, the videos can continue to drive incremental views. 3. Rise of the planet of influencers Today is the LAST day to get your hands on the OnePlus 5T! Quickly follow @oneplus_india right now to be eligible! Tag your friends and share the love ❤️ Though customers subscribe to brands on social, they still consider social messages to be a type of advertising. To circumvent this problem, brands are now making use of social influencers. These influencers build a community and gather a following based on their profession, lifestyle and preferences. Now, when they subtly mention a brand or product without the overkill of an ad, it leaves an impression in the mind of the consumer without them even realizing it. Influencers aren’t just the ones that have a community following. They can be peers who have left the old ‘word of mouth’ technique and instead use social platforms to voice their opinion on products and services. In 2018, brands will need to work to identify such influencers and make sure they don’t do an ‘ad’ but a PR like promotion. How can you use influencer marketing this year: Find a way to identify influencers across a spectrum of community builders, customers, and even employees. Then work towards connecting your influencer campaigns with business goal metrics. Currently, influencers tend to promise eyeballs, traffic and brand mentions. But it is also important to analyse how these eventually connect with overarching business goals. Get a mix of social and Artificial Intelligence Ever since the discovery of AI, it has been propagated that it will take away human jobs. But the core part of an AI strategy has always been about being as close as possible to their human counterpart. There is a lot of discussion on how AI and machine learning will impact the future of digital. While things are a little unclear on this, you can go with tried and tested AI techniques for your social experiments. How to use AI with social Here are a few scenarios where you can mix social and AI: First level customer care with AI bots: Allowing intelligent AI systems to take on your first level of customer service may just be the thing needed to help your customer service executives improve their service levels. Serving content: Once you discover what content your consumer likes, use AI and retargeting give them even more content to binge on. Analytics: Facebook is using new predictive analytics to help customers discover insights faster. You too can leverage AI to gain insights before it is actually executed. Deriving insights from social data Brands will notice that each social platform gives out tons of data about customer interaction. From social mentions to comments, social data is valuable. But brands are still wondering how to connect the
Move over blogs, and articles. Here are new content formats to consider
The content marketing game is changing slowly but steadily. There are still hordes of blogs and content produced in the world but only a minuscule percentage of it manages to catch our attention, resonate, or go viral. While you may already have a solid content plan charted out for 2018, have you stopped to wonder how it is different from your 2017 plan? Have you factored innovative forms of content presentation into your strategy? If not, this is a great time to modify your plan a bit. There are two aspects to this plan: a. Great Content While we can’t fit in a universal definition for ‘great’, we all know that it is the type we all like to read with a cup of coffee, right until the end. It is filled with, data, insights, nuggets of wisdom, a-ha moments and the magical touch of humour. All of it together makes you believe that the piece was not written generally but somehow targeted at you. As far as this bit goes, nothing has changed. You still need to sweat it out, collect data, type, edit and then type some more until you get the desired result. b. Great Presentation We’ve spoken at length about the importance of imagery and the use of infographics before but the way we present content now is changing. It is not just headlines, text and images with highlights for quick scrollers. It is interactive and truly engaging where the user dictates how they want to proceed with the narrative. In this type of content presentation, the images literally bring the story to life helping you better imagine or understand the conversation in context. Going forward in 2018, your regular blogs must have great content but once in a few months, you’ll have to pull a rabbit out of the hat and create a mix of great content and great presentation. This will require everyone from a graphic designer to an animation specialist to a big data wiz to an expert wordsmith to come together and create a masterpiece. Are you up for the challenge? Here are bold new things to try out in 2018 1. Interactive Design We know that Parallax design has been around for a few years now. Yet, we see very little of it used for designing blog content. The fact is that you can package your content so well within the design that your readers would live to scroll until the end without feeling text-heavy. The the example of rehabs.com who created a page on the effect of illicit drugs on America. You can click on the first ‘shovel’ to ‘dig into the problem’ literally. The content citing statistics are equally compelling. Imagine that the USA has spent 1 Trillion dollars since 1971 to fight drugs and the war continues to only get worse. It leaves you in a bit of shock and awe to see the numbers multiply under ‘Lines of coke smoked in the U.S. while you were reading this’ section. As crazy as it sounds, for a second we contemplated jumping out of the article to make the numbers stop. The story here isn’t created in a standard blog format. It is neither a static infographic. Instead, if forces you to scroll wondering what to expect next. Last, but not the least, it makes an effective call to action (CTA) in favour of the content publisher. You can equate the publisher to not only be an authority on the subject but also as a crusader willing to fight the problem. 2. Face-averaging stories Most people think of themselves to be in an average bracket in life traits. They are average in school, college, at work, in skills and at life in general. This interesting reason propels the ‘average’ mind to check statistics about averages. Using latest technologies, you can average hundreds of facial images to show your readers what an ‘average Joe’ looks like. From criminals to celebrities to successful professionals, you can choose topics that have the inherent quality to go viral because the final picture will be something no one else will have. Want to check out how this works? Try FaceResearch.Org Wondering what the ‘average’ woman looks like? The Daily Mail blended thousands of faces of women from around the world to find the answer. This is what it found: 3. Playing on User Generated Content (UGC) Users love to share content. Sometimes they do it because they’ve either loved or hated your products and service. At other times, they do it for a small incentive. In either case, if you get your hands on a good collection of UGC, you can do more than a simple slide show. Several brands have taken UGC to reinvent their brands, create commercials and generate awareness. Even if you don’t have such agenda, you can still use UGC to create ‘different’ content. The New York Times, for example, created an interesting page featuring user photos of the 2017 solar eclipse as it moved across America. It makes you want to scroll down until the very end to see people’s reactions to the eclipse. In 2012, Ray Ban partnered with Breakfast to use a system that analyses people’s Instagrams as they are taken and builds a large scale mosaic out of them. This time-lapse video of it is quite captivating. 4. Cursor Tracking It is one thing to feel strongly about a particular topic. It is a whole different thing when you compare your feelings with others. Cursor tracking technology allows to track your mouse’s moments and clicks around your computer screen. It can show how people voted or felt about a particular topic or person. A similar technology is already used extensively in creating analytical heat maps. But a slice of this technology can be used in content creation too. From scales to graphs, you can use different ways to check user intent and then showcase how it measures against others who voted. See a cool live