Browse Category: Social Media Marketing

Different Ways To Increase Facebook Ads Performance

There are many social media platforms where you can advertise your business but Facebook is one of the best social media platform to advertise and to reach your audience. Approximately there are 1.609 Billion active users on Facebook and it has users from all age demographics, making it one of the most diverse social channels. There are number of ways to get your Facebook Ads work.

1. Targeting

Facebook’s advert targeting options allow you to build audiences of people who are likely to be interested in what you have to say and there are many ways through which you can do so:

  • Location: Target adverts by country, postcode, region or even the area around your business. You can reach your customers in the areas where they live or where they do business with you.
  • Demographics: The customers your business serves are on Facebook and you can choose the audience that should see your adverts by age, gender, interests and even the language they speak.
  • Interests: When people are interested in your business, they are more likely to take action on your adverts. You can choose from hundreds of categories such as music, film, sports, games, shopping and so much more to find right people for your business.
  • Behavioural and Connection: As you know your customers best, you can find your easily according to their behaviour or the type of phone they use.
Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads

2. Types of Ads

One of the most common purpose of Facebook Advertising is to generate traffic to your website. There are different types of Ads that helps brands in improving the awareness of their products. some of the types are:

  • Carousel Ads: The carousel format allows you show up to ten images/or videos , headlines and links, or calls to action in a single ad unit. Anyone who sees your ad can then scroll through the carousel cards by swiping on mobile phones or tablets or clicking the arrows on a computer screen. This format can support a variety of businesses and needs. Carousel Ads can also helps in:
  1. Showcasing specific products you sell or you own
  2. Showing details about specific products, packages or applications.
Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads
  • Dynamic Ads: Dynamic ads look exactly like other single image ads or ads created in the carousel format on Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network. It use your Facebook pixel or SDK to show ads to people who have already shown interest in your business by taking actions you care about on your site.  However, instead of individually creating an ad for each of your products, you create an ad template that automatically uses images and details from your data feed for things you’d like to advertise.
Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads
  • Offer Ads: Offer Ads encourages people to shop at your website, at you physical store or both. You can share offers that are discounts with your customers on Facebook and you can also design your offer to appear as a video or include up to 5 images that people can click through. 
Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads

3. CTR affects Ad quality 

Quality of an ad should be the first priority for the best performance of an ad and CTR is a most important to measure the quality of an ad. CTR or clicks through rate is a number of clicks received divided by number of impressions received on Ad. (If your ad received 10,000 impressions and 100 clicks then your CTR is 100/10,000 = 0.01%).

Facebook runs an algorithm to decide the quality score between your own ads and optimise to get the most value. When you launch a campaign with many ads, Facebook give all of them the same exposure in order to identify the CTR of every individual ad. Once Facebook realises which add is generating a higher CTR or have a higher quality score – these get more impressions compared to the less converting ones. Over time Facebook will stop showing ads with a lower CTR completely. The higher CTR you can achieve, the greater chance you have at winning auctions. If you create an ad in the carousel format, you can see the CTR for each carousel card within the ad. Generally, the first card in the series will get the most link clicks, but it’s not necessarily the best performing card. CTR takes into account how each card performs against other cards in the same position.

4. Retargeting

Retargeting is an effective way to increase and prove your conversion rates through Facebook ads. When someone visits your webpage say an online shopping, and browses through some pages but leaves the page without buying then the brand can retarget your customers  and can prompt the user through Facebook targeted ads. When you advertise on Facebook, you can target people who have an existing relationship with your business. This existing relationship is the basis for custom audiences, which are really remarketing or retargeting audiences.You can also create a personalized target audience through which you can retarget only a portion of traffic that has visited to your landing page earlier.

Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads

In order to start retargeting your audience you’ll need a pixel code on your website. When someone visits your website and takes an action, the Facebook pixel is triggered and reports this action. This way, you’ll know when a customer took an action after seeing your Facebook ad. You’ll also be able to reach this customer again by using a Custom Audience. When more and more conversions happen on your website, Facebook gets better at delivering your ads to people who are more likely to take certain actions. This is called conversion optimisation.

Photos: Digital Vidya Gallery

 

 

 

 

Top Social Media trends to look out for in 2018

With 2017 vying for an end, social media with its set of trends and surprises are ready for 2018. According to findings by We Are Social in 2017 social media penetration globally was around 37 percent i.e. 2.80 billion users. As you look ahead to 2018 and plan to strengthen your social strategy, it’s important to keep a pulse on trends. To help, here are some social-media trends you need to prepare for in 2018:
 

  1. Opportunities for personalized content arise due to robust social analytics:

    Everyone likes content relevant to them, which is especially true during interaction with a brand you have a rapport with. The only thing we want is a piece of relevant content that offers something unique to us as a member of that audience. In fact, only 25% don’t care about the content while rest get really frustrated with irrelevant content.

    Personalized content for audiences is a major trend in content marketing, and same goes for social media, too. As social media platforms evolve, their analytics tools and business-specific insights and features will become more important to brands. This kind of data means marketers will have the insights to craft better and more personalized content that speaks and engages audiences.

    The need for selectivity arises as platforms’ features overlap: –

    Timed videos and visual content were both features of Snapchat and Instagram, so the main points that differentiate them are the audience and reach. Compared to Snapchat, Instagram Stories has a wider reach and is more engaging. Daily opens with Instagram Stories of Instagram celebrities are up to 10 percent of their audience members, which is significantly higher than in case of Snapchat. On the other hand, Snapchat continues to entice younger demographics.

    As more platforms continue to offer overlapping features, brands and marketers will have to be more creative and selective about what to invest in. Take advantage of analytics and reporting features to identify which platforms could offer you the best return, and start there.

    Brands will be able to get through to audiences by social listening: –

    Mentions and what people are saying should be key metrics of comparison of social media performance between competitors and us.

    “Using web monitoring, we can collect an enormous amount of data on our company and our competitors that can be used in our marketing strategy. At Brand24, our research showed that in one month, 14,000 online searches started with ‘Can anyone recommend?’ and about 30,000 searches started with ‘Where can I buy?’ About 60 percent of these questions never received responses from companies; this is a huge opportunity,” says Magdalena Urbaniak, global communications manager at Brand24.

    Urbaniak says monitoring these social mentions can be an insight into the shared audience’s like and dislike, which can show how a brand can improve. Social listening can be the key advantage in social media strategy as they give you valuable information about your competitors’ performance and your own audience.

    Chatbots will be key to faster and easier customer service: –

    Instant connection and high internet penetration have prepared an adequate condition for brands to give instant feedback to the fast-growing impatient customer base. Unfortunately, this has prompted a lot of brands to do one of two things: respond so quickly that mistakes are made and service quality suffers, or freeze in their tracks because they’re not quite sure how to meet this demand for speed.

    Chatbots give you the chance to interact quickly and personally with your audience. Maybe that’s the reason why there are at least 100,000 monthly active bots on Facebook Messenger and over two billion messages per month are exchanged between brands and their audiences.

    Transient content will lead the pack: –

    Latest marketing buzzword ephemeral/transient content, in the coming years. Snapchat Stories and live streaming videos are some examples of ephemeral content today. This type of content has a short lifespan of 24 hours and then disappear. Thanks to Snapchat’s popularity this content has seen a steady rise.

    The Snapchat Discover channel of Cosmopolitan generated “more than 19 million average monthly visits.” It is interesting to note that the brand’s website generates “20 million unique visitors per month.” With 10 billion daily video views, it is one of the best platforms to reach millennials and generation Z. It’s a no surprise that Instagram and Facebook are also following the footsteps of Snapchat by providing services for distributing fleeting content.

    It’s a difficult time for marketers as it might sound scary that all efforts and money that went into creating the content which has become fleeting in nature. But the results may be quite outstanding provided content created is really interesting and have proper strategies for ephemeral content marketing. There are quite a few reasons why ephemeral content works:

    Fleeting nature of the content, like those raw clips and images available on Snapchat or Instagram, fills users with excitement and trust for the brand. A great way to show insight into forthcoming projects, showcase BTS content, offer promotions and other content that is supposed to be short-lived.

    Augmented Reality will gain more focus: –

    Apple announced the iPhone 8 and the iPhone X at the first-ever event hosted in the Steve Jobs Theater. Both devices incorporated a new chip that allows the phones to become augmented reality enabled and provide users with extraordinary experiences. While mobile gaming seems to be first affected by augmented reality, it is likely that social media platforms will find ways to incorporate the new technology as well.

    Similarly, brands could soon project their products into the homes of social media users through special filters.

    Social platforms compliance will become stringent:-  After a series of controversies that cropped up during 2016 US presidential election, social media platforms have adopted a far stringent way to govern the conduct on their respective platforms. Facebook recently turned over thousands of ads that seem to be connected to Russian meddling and has invested in new AI and human forms of monitoring.

    In 2017, Facebook and Twitter received a very wide criticism, it is likely that these platforms will embrace codes of conduct and governance policies that protect the brands from future criticism. Better compliance will not only promote better content but also safeguard the interest of the users.

Conclusion

Understanding these trends will present marketers with better opportunities to connect with the audience and create better content. These shifts are frequent, therefore understanding and staying ahead of the trend is of vital importance.

LinkedIn VS Facebook- From A Marketer’s Perspective

With the increasing number of social media platforms, as a marketer, we need to make a crucial choice of focusing our social media efforts on a limited number of platforms. This decision is vital to the existence of a brand and can make or break it as well.

In this blog post, we will discuss the difference between LinkedIn and Facebook and which platform will best help you achieve your goals and objectives.

A brief introduction of our two contestants for today:-

Facebook– People tend to spend more time on Facebook than on LinkedIn for the simple reason that it is perceived as a more ‘fun’ platform where friends are able to get together and share their thoughts and opinions over a casual post like a meme or joke. Facebook is clearly in the quantity win with over 2.07 billion monthly active users.

LinkedIn– LinkedIn, however, is a more serious platform where users log in for a specific purpose, be it recruitment, job hunting, connecting with colleagues or sharing their professional expertise on specific industry related topics. LinkedIn is far behind Facebook when it comes to the numbers game, with around 467 million members.

1. Audience Profile

Facebook– General consumers. Facebook is primarily a platform where friends and family get together to de-stress or connect with known persons. Marketers on Facebook need to keep their audience interests in mind, keeping the tone light and friendly. Create content which your audience would like to consume.

LinkedIn– Companies/organizations/businesses. LinkedIn allows users to create a professional, job-oriented profile, offering a variety of ways for a marketer to target based on seniority, job function, industry and more. Marketers on LinkedIn should keep the tone serious and professional, industry-specific and to the point. LinkedIn is primarily used by B2B businesses to connect with users in the same industry segment.

2. Analytics-

Facebook- Facebook provides real-time, built-in reports consisting data of the type of audience, their country of origin, and others ranging from likes, reach, visits, posts, people, events, videos, messages to a lot more. This data is very useful to a marketer as their job hardly ends after an advertising campaign is created. They constantly need to optimize it to achieve the best results at the lowest cost.

LinkedIn- LinkedIn does not provide extensive insights on page performance limiting to updates, interactions, clicks, impressions, reach, followers and visitors. This makes it difficult for a marketer to analyze and extract data on the performance of a LinkedIn campaign. 

3. Cost-

Facebook- Facebook gives the option to adjust how much you’re willing to pay per day (starting at Rs.40 per day), which corresponds to the number of users you reach out to. Overall, Facebook is a much cheaper option, with the average CPC of Rs. 5, being the lowest across all social media platforms. As a marketer, a lower cost is of vital importance in determining the success of an advertising campaign  

LinkedIn- LinkedIn offers a specific way to reach an audience but the cost is higher than Facebook’s. LinkedIn is said to be one of the most expensive advertising platforms in terms of average CPC of Rs.150. The minimum amount that LinkedIn will generally require you to allot for your CPC and CPM bids is Rs.100 (for either). And the minimum budget generally allotted by LinkedIn for your daily budget is Rs.500. The huge difference in cost from that of Facebook, shy away many marketers, making LinkedIn a secondary consideration. That being said, there a number of successfully launched campaigns on LinkedIn as well,  like the Volkswagen Campaign, where the results were far greater than the initial cost.

4. Branding-

Facebook- On Facebook there is a strong distinction between a user’s personal profile and a brand’s page. The content posted on a personal profile and a company’s page is completely different and unrelated. A marketer must build his company’s brand and his personal brand separately and simultaneously.

LinkedIn- On LinkedIn there is no distinction between personal and professional branding as it seamlessly integrates with each other in the form of a common profile. Through a user’s profile, it enables the audience to connect with the brand. Vice-versa if a brand posts valuable content then the employees of the brand are known as well. A marketer needs to be able to sell himself as well as his company through the use of one single profile.

5. Thought Leadership-

Facebook- Facebook is not a platform where users generally express their professional opinion but rather a light and casual conversation amongst friends. Marketers cannot hope to get their audience to pour out their expertise and insights into their industry or job.

LinkedIn- LinkedIn is the primary platform where users come together to influence others through their professional opinions. The most common place of thought leaders is LinkedIn groups where experts speak about their opinions with respect to a specific industry.

6. Marketing Objectives-

Facebook- As a marketer, Facebook provides a number of opportunities to achieve objectives such as Awareness, Consideration and Conversion but is more suitable for Direct Sales and Traffic. The level and detail of targeting on Facebook is world’s apart that of all other social media platforms, making it ideal for marketers to grow their brand.

LinkedIn- As a marketer, LinkedIn cannot be used to directly sell to your industrial buyers as users on LinkedIn login for their own personal and professional development rather than to outright buy a product or service. It will lead to a very low conversion rate and more often than not, a poor brand image.

Conclusion-

The controversy of which platform is better for marketing has been chewed over and over in the last years by marketers, entrepreneurs and bloggers.

Lately, Facebook is focusing on improving their paid marketing campaigns and continue to develop new and innovative features appealing to B2B companies and marketers alike, in a strive to reach above LinkedIn in the B2B space.

Having a deep understanding of who you are marketing to (your buyer personas) and how they use these platforms at each stage of the buyer’s journey, will enable you to become more customer-centric in your marketing.

Instead of focusing on which platform is better for your marketing strategy, simply being aware of how and when to use each on the potential journey your prospects go through before they decide to buy from you can make a dramatic shift in your marketing strategy.

 

Image Source- Hootsuite, Pear Analytics, Pinterest, Social Media Examiner.

5 Social Media Branding Strategies To Follow In 2018

Social Media Branding Strategies To Follow In 2018

Every company in today’s competitive world is after creating a long and everlasting impact on their customers. Every time we step out to shell out some bucks we look for a brand. We don’t like to compromise a brand for money. So, we can see how a proper branding of a product is so valuable for continuous growth of our business. Businesses are trying to figure out their target audiences and best fit products or services for their target audiences through various social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. Until 2017, in social media marketing, platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, WordPress, Tumblr played a major role in branding. There are few social media branding strategies needed in 2018 and brands should keep an eye on these while preparing marketing strategies.

Strategy 1 | Embracing Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality

Imagine a user experience where shoppers can try your products and make a buying decision without walking into the store. Have you experienced Lens kart’s augmented and virtual reality on their product landing page? Yes, they use both strategies to help users decide on their purchase by providing them a live experience about the product. In short, Virtual reality uses a 360- degree product view to move you from your current environment to a virtual world. On the other hand, Augmented reality adds digital insights to transform the current environment. Therefore, virtual reality replaces your sight, augmented reality enhances it. So, let’s look at some key facts which will help us decide to embrace these technologies.

  • 25% of the brands will embrace AR to enhance their end-user experience and it will record more spending starting from 2018 to 2022.
  • In 2017 end, 37% of world’s population is active on social media. In 2018, most of the giants and mid-level brands are going to incorporate AR to stay ahead in the market.
  • AR & VR users will hit 200 million by 2018 and 65% of the online customers will make a purchasing decision on the product landing page. AR advertising spending would be on the higher side than VR. Businesses, marketers should bet big on using AR on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and blogs.

Strategy 2 | Embracing Investment In Influencer Marketing

Social Media is all about influencing and attracting your customers towards your brand. Furthermore, businesses focus on influential people to influence potential buyers and influencer marketing is proven to be the best way of marketing in social media in 2017. It will continue to be a focus of smart marketers from the beginning of 2018.

Also, let’s find out who all are our mega, macro and micro influencers in social media. Mega influencers are the celebrities in social media and they have typically more than a million followers. Macro influencers are typically business professionals or famous product specialist or freelancers. They typically have approximately ten thousand to a million followers. And, micro influencer category has 500- 1000 followers because they are mini-celebrities in their own circle. Working with micro influencers can provide best results if the business is following a long- tail strategy. So, let’s dig down to the facts of influencer marketing and why it could be useful for marketers.

  • Influencer marketing delivers 11 times more ROI than traditional digital marketing. The need for Marketer interest in Influencer marketing increased 90x from 2013 to 2016. This has been drastically doubled in first nine months of 2017 and the same is excepted in 2018.
  • People follow and highly seek for influencers in social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook. To attract customers and promote products or services, most of the businesses decide to include influencers having thousands of followers. In return, the high demand Social media personalities increase the value of services.
  • Video content would be the biggest platform for influencer marketing in 2018 with a presence in social media. A report shows that videos are twice as effective to lead generation or drive sales as normal text-based contents.
  • 49% people depend on the influencers engagement on their purchase decisions.
  • Twitter users reported 5.2 times increase in purchasing decisions made when they are exposed to influencer contents.

Strategy 3 | Focus On Gen Z

According to a recent study conducted by Goldman Sachs, Gen Z is more valuable to any business. Did you know that from a span of 2018 to 2020, Gen Z will account for 40% of all consumers? The oldest Gen Z’s are avg. 22-year-old and businesses are planning to move their marketing strategy based on Gen Z’s need. 2018 will experience a big bet investment made in Snapchat or Instagram which are loved by Gen Z’s.

Gen Z’s represent a buying power of $44 billion and influence an additional $600 billion of family spending. This includes over 70% of family food choices and 80%- 90% of the items are purchased for them. Marketers need to make the video content more engaging and especially relevant, Gen z’s have an 8- second filter for any digital content. According to the research report, 9 out of 10 Gen Z’s watch YouTube daily, 70% prefer streaming over broadcast or cable TV.

Strategy 4 |Increasing Brand Participation In messaging Platforms

While approx. 2.5 billion people use various messaging platforms and yet, brands focus on connecting with consumers on social networks. It is high time that brands should focus on messaging platforms which comes handy for customers to use and communicate. It is likely that brands will invest more in 2018 in time and money to connect with consumers in messengers. Technologies like artificial intelligence, voice assistants, and chatbots will enable brands to offer personalized shopping experiences on messaging platforms like WhatsApp, messenger etc.

Strategy 5 | Invest In Popular Social Media Platforms Of 2017

Don’t you think this can be a great strategy to embrace the familiar social media platforms and make more investments to enhance them? Therefore, few points will help marketers take appropriate decisions.

  • There must be an increasing popularity of Instagram stories. Over 200 million people use Instagram stories each month, which is over 50 million more who use snap chat. As a result, half of the Instagram users will use stories at the end of 2018 and brands must take time to master their stories.
  • Expansion of live streaming is going to be a great way to capture the attention of the followers in social media. 2018 would be a booming year for more and more brands to introduce live streaming to their customers to enhance customer experience.
  • Twitter branding strategy needs rethinking. Twitter has failed to grow followers significantly in 2017, therefore, Twitter leadership will aim to rethink on the platform which includes revamping the Twitter advertising options.
  • Marketers need attention in the recent Facebook business strategy. Facebook is coming up with a new technology called “Spaces” which is designed to allow friends and followers to connect in Virtual Reality. Facebook will be the first successful VR social media platform for marketing.

In conclusion, marketers should be clear about the objective, target audience, a clearly defined outline to measure KPIs and last but not the least, make sure your goals are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Agreed-upon, Realistic and Time-Based).

Top Ways To Promote Private Businesses on Social Media

WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING?

Social media marketing is the method of achieving marketing goals for businesses through social media sites. It includes activities like text, photo and video updates.

WHY SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING?

It is a very effective and powerful way for businesses of all sizes to reach desired customers. Since social networks are one of the fastest growing industries in the world, social media marketing creates a platform to build a brand and increase a brand’s popularity, through building relationships and communicating with potential customers.

CHOOSING THE BEST PLATFORM FOR MARKETING

There are various SMM sites available nowadays and each SMM site requires a different approach. Allow us to illustrate how these different SMM sites can be used to achieve your marketing goals.

FACEBOOK

Facebook is the biggest social network in the world with an average of 2.07 billion monthly active users. Hence it only makes sense that one needs to be on Facebook to achieve results.
Here are some ways you can market of Facebook:

1. Create your company page

Pages are the simplest way to start marketing on Facebook. They are very easy to set up and moreover its free. Pages are similar to profiles, but its used to promote businesses and organizations. They do not have any restrictions on how many people friends they can have. A unique feature only offered in Pages is Page Insights. This allows the administrators of the Page to see what activity the Page has been receiving during a period of time, even in a graphical representation.

2. Create Ads

Facebook Ads are the best way to reach desired audience. You can create ads targeted at specific geographic areas, ages, education levels, and even the types of devices used for browsing. Unlike pages, Ads aren’t free on Facebook but provide powerful targeting parameters.

There are two ways by which ads can be run, pay per click or pay per impression. Facebook helps you decide a budget that is most suitable for your ad. You can even set daily limits so that you don’t end up blowing your entire budget.

3. Create Groups

Facebook groups acts like a discussion forum. It provides a platform for free communication between service provider and the consumer. Restrictions can also be placed on the groups to filter who all can visit the page. Groups are sometimes preferred over pages as it gives the audience the freedom to interact with the organization and get their queries and complains heard.

LINKEDIN

LinkedIn is a professional networking site. With over 106 million active users, it is the go to place to meet different professionals from different fields. It is more focused on b2b than b2c.
Here are some ways you can promote your business on LinkedIn:

1. Create your company page

Your LinkedIn company page is your business’s LinkedIn profile. Creating a company page and linking it to your profile helps you to add more content and information which in turn offers customers to learn more about the business, know about the people who work there and interact with relevant content.

2. Post great content

The main aim here is to attract the right audience. Thus, posting content that targets the right kind of people is key. Get colleagues to share and like posts. This helps posts to reach a larger audience.

It is also important to note that you don’t lose the interest of the audience. So, update frequently. Posts with great visuals go a long way since LinkedIn isn’t a very visual network. More clicks, shares and comments are great indicators of great content.

3. Groups

Creating a group on LinkedIn helps you to hold discussions with the audience regarding the services your business offers. This helps engage the people and it makes sure that the members know what your business is about.

It is also important to participate in other groups. This helps to identify new audiences, interact with new users and create new relations.

4. LinkedIn Ad campaigns

LinkedIn ads helps you find what you want. Be it target executives, influencers, or job seekers, there are numerous ways to advertise on LinkedIn through different ad types, including self-serve, partner programs, and other options.

The benefit of using LinkedIn’s sponsored content is that is helps reach a larger audience, attract more company page followers and increase clicks on various platforms like desktops, mobiles etc.

TWITTER

With 330 million monthly active users twitter is one of the best microblogging social networking site available online. People follow (subscribe) to your Twitter account, and you follow other people. This allows you to read, reply to and easily share their tweets with your followers (retweet).

Here are some ways twitter can be used to promote your business:

1. Showcase your brand

Your Twitter profile helps tell your business story to the Twitter community. Tweets help convey messages and to communicate with your audience. So, open communication is key. Respond to tweets about your business. You can retweet posts that are positive and address negative tweets in a respectful manner.

Even though Twitter offers us a 140-character word limit, it’s better to keep tweets short and sweet. The key is tweet often and not tweet long. An ideal length of a tweet would be around 20-25 characters. This encourages others to retweet or add additional content.

2. Mentions and Tagging

A great way to increase social ties with other businesses is to retweet their content. This will lead to others retweeting your content.

Another way of mentioning others in your tweets is by using @username. This is called tagging. Tagging is used when you want to include someone who was at a particular event, to give credit when credit is due or to increase the reach of tweets by encouraging others to share it.

3. Using Hashtags

#Hashtags is a way to organize your tweets around a specific events/keywords/topic. They act as hyperlinks to tweets associated with the hashtag. It’s also a good way to find prospects who may have an interest in your business, products. Be sure to not use more than 2 hashtags per tweet. Tweets with not more than 2 hashtags have 21% more engagement than those who have 3 or more hashtags.

3 Key Social Media Challenges Organisations Will Face In 2018

In 2018 patterns research study and also studies,  the 3 most significant social difficulties companies will certainly encounter following year. Continue reading to find out more concerning those and also just what you could do to resolve them.

1. Discovering lasting remedies to decreasing natural reach

Brand names should approve that natural reach is gradually decreasing and also quit depending on temporary techniques that utilized to function.Rather, services should begin constructing lasting approaches. This indicates being much more discerning when it concerns the networks you publish material on, as well as spending much more on social advertisements along with an influencer and/or campaigning for methods.

Both primary factors Boland pointed out for the natural reach decrease? Initially, there’s just excessive web content being released on Facebook, making presence current Feed progressively affordable. Second, Facebook is intentionally aiming to reveal individuals the web content that is most pertinent to them, instead of emerging all the web content readily available.

The bright side in all of this is that there’s a whole lot you could do to combat these modifications, like being a lot more careful concerning just what you release, taking note of when you release, as well as placing cash behind your articles (a.k.a. “increasing” them).

Extra Money = More Reach

As Facebook has actually advanced right into even more of a paid advertising and marketing system compared to a natural one, Page supervisors are recognizing they’re currently anticipated to spend for advertisements yet once again to get to those recently obtained Fans, also if those Fans have actually apparently chosen to see a brand name’s blog posts by liking their Page, to begin with.

From Facebook’s point of view, it’s merely not an excellent individual experience to flooding the News Feed with blog posts even if a Page has great deals of Likes and also is releasing prolifically.

Nowadays, Facebook is motivating online marketers to check out their fanbases as a method to earn paid promoting much more reliable as opposed to utilizing it as a totally free program network. In addition, Facebook claims you ought to presume natural reach will ultimately come to no. So, if you actually intend to reach your target market on Facebook, you’ll supplement your natural initiatives with some paid advertising and marketing.

In addition, Facebook suggests online marketers anticipate points to maintain transforming, and also oftentimes right. Facebook has actually never ever been stationary in regards to advancement, so no online marketer could identify a formula and after that stay with it for life.

That being stated, understanding exactly how Facebook presently surface areas natural web content current Feed could be useful for recognizing the more comprehensive Facebook advertising and marketing community.

2. Social video clip rises in advance– however, we’re coming close to saturation

Investing in social video clip advertising and marketing expanded 130 percent this year without an indicator of quitting.While the social video clip works, organizations have to ensure they’re producing web content that in fact shows their service purposes. If the social video clip your company generates cannot be connected to any type of genuine statistics or quantifiable service worth, it’s time to reassess your method.

Since Facebook started marketing autoplay video clip marketing in 2014, the various other significant social buildings– Twitter, Instagram, and also Snapchat– have actually ended up being similarly hostile at dating video clip online marketers. Because of this, social video clip costs is expanding rapidly, as checked out in a brand-new eMarketer record, “Video Ads in Social Media: With a Full Slate of Advertisement Products, the Social Properties Take Aim at the TELEVISION.”



In a February 2016 study from RBC Capital Markets as well as Advertising Age, 12% people marketing professionals had actually currently acquired autoplay video clip advertisements on Facebook as well as an extra 57% were most likely to in the following 6 months. Just 7% stated they absolutely would deny Facebook autoplay advertisements.

In a research of its customers’ advertising and marketing task on Facebook in North America, automation software program firm Nanigans discovered that costs on mobile video clip advertisements raised 26% in between Q4 2015 and also Q1 2016. For pc gaming marketers, specifically, 35% of mobile advertisement invest in Q1 2016 most likely to a video clip. Video clip’s share of video gaming firms’ mobile advertisement invests expanded 122% in between Q1 2015 and also Q1 2016.

Brand names like Citi, AT&T, and also Frito-Lay have actually involved recognize that the standard means of considering video clip– as simply a 30- or 60-second TELEVISION place– is dated. Customers are investing, even more, time with feed-based social atmospheres and also are expanding comfy with enjoying video clip on a mobile phone.

Generally, customers are watching a massive quantity of video clip on social systems. In November 2015, Facebook revealed that it had actually gotten to 8 billion video clip sights each day. In April 2016, Snapchat claimed it had 10 billion video clip sights daily.

” What we’ve seen during the last 2 years is a surge in the usage of a video clip on our system, which has actually after that produced a possibility to utilize video clip for marketing,” claimed Graham Mudd, supervisor of money making item advertising at Facebook.

3. Brands exhaustion from brand-new devices and also techniques

Exactly what I imply by brand name tiredness could not be just what others suggested by it. My worry about brand name tiredness is not that individuals come to be fed up with a brand name, yet instead that companies or nonprofits come to be too soon tired of their very own brand name discussion as well as, consequently, press to transform it prior to it has had the possibility to satisfy its objective and even completely sign up as well as develop power psychological of their brand name customers.If a brand name is genuine, real, and also well performed, if it displays brand name health and wellness, lines up with the goal and also worthy of the not-for-profit, or talks with the essential characteristics of business’ services or products, there ought to be no need to tire of it.

Throughout the study, usual grievance from consumers: They’re worn down with the unlimited checklist of brand-new methods, devices, as well as web content layouts.

In 2018, the application, as well as the reliable dimension of existing approaches, will certainly be more crucial compared to the intro of brand-new techniques.

While social media networks continuously introduce and also develop brand-new means to get to target markets, marketing experts are under stress to verify that their existing social methods quality proceeded financial investment. Future financial investments have to have a verifiable service effect past traditional vanity metrics.

Finally, by 2018 fads research study and also studies we covered the 3 greatest obstacles companies will certainly encounter in the coming year.

Image Credit: Pixabay 

8 Types Of Facebook Content To Drive Engagement

If You’re Not Putting Out Relevant Content In Relevant Places,

You Don’t Exist.

Gary Vaynerchuck, CEO, VAYNERMEDIA

Users only engage in content that adds VALUE to their lives.

Value doesn’t only mean improving the quality of their lives. Making users think, have fun, learn something, making them connect to people, relate to something, feel something- all this is VALUE.

8 Ways to Provide Value Content on Facebook to Drive Engagement are:-

1. The Entertaining Content:

Brands should produce content which is entertaining but also true to their core.

It need not be the most intellectual content that could ever be consumed, but we can pretty much all agree that, on occasion, looking at some adorable pictures of kittens can serve as a great intermission from our daily cerebral posts. 

Have you heard the news? India’s biggest sale – The Big Billion Days are back! Watch now! #AbMehengaaiGiregiKnow more: http://fkrt.it/6K3Gh0NN

Posted by Flipkart on 7 ಸೆಪ್ಟೆಂಬರ್ 2017

Flipkart is one of the brands that has been able to master the art of promotion through entertaining videos. In the above short video, Flipkart is seen promoting its ‘Big Billion Day’ sale through a humorous video where children behave like adults.

2. The Educative Content:

Brands often cater to a particular theme and the content of that brand revolves around that theme. Educative content is anything that provides knowledge or information about something to the reader or viewer. By providing interesting information to a customer, he or she eventually gets engaged and attempts to seek out more of such information or share it with his or her friends.

In this Facebook post, a provider of consumer-direct travel services in India, Yatra.com through its post, ‘7 Unbeatable Reasons To Honeymoon in Melbourne’ provides travel related information for those newly wed couples seeking a destination for their honeymoon.

3. The Content People Can Relate To:

The rule of thumb proves time and again that people are more likely to like, comment on and subscribe to a post to which they can relate to. It serves as a feeling of nostalgia which emotionally connects with an audience. The keyword here is Relatability, where one tends to cease everything midway and contemplate the unforeseen familiarity of the post.

All India Backchod (AIB) is a comedian group that is notorious for its sarcastic and hilarious posts which contradict and expose society and its customs. In the above image, the Panda represents a relaxed and procrastinate student who finds it almost impossible to gather the strength and fortitude of spirit to complete an assignment due the next day. The Bat represents an extrovert, gregarious party-animal who livens up the place. I’m sure most of us can relate to this.

4. The Emotional Content

It can be rightly said that a post has emotional content when it deeply connects you with itself and gives you a warm fuzzy feeling.

Happy Mother's Day from Practo!

While smiling or crying. While falling or hurting. You always remembered her. To the first doctor you ever called. Happy Mother’s Day. Watch our tribute to her and #CallMomNow.

Posted by Practo on 8 ಮೇ 2015

In the above video, Practo, a website that allows patients to search for the best doctors, released a video on Mothers Day which thanks all mothers for their continuous love and affection towards their children, calling a mother a child’s first doctor. Surely every child and every mother would be emotionally touched after seeing this video.

5. The Trending Content:

Trends are the most talked about topics at a particular point of time. Posts that are trending would get more traction than they would otherwise get, which in turn leads to engagement. Companies should make the most use of trneds and leverage it to their advantage.

Amul is said to be one of the pioneers of Trending Content. Amul has successfully created its entire marketing strategy revolving around trending topics.

In the above image, Amul has created a pun over the recent winner of Miss World 2017, Manushi Chhillar, where Amul’s mascot is seen handing over a slab of Amul butter to ‘Mahakhushi’ who is elated to receive the prestigious ‘Butter Award’.

6. The Humanizing Content:

Humanizing Content has a far larger impact in comparison to simply advertising the bare product. As people online are not able to physically view the product, humanizing it would enable them to perceive the product and position it in their minds.

Police Sunglasses is a consumer fashion brand that has posted a picture of a man wearing the sunglasses in a fashionable and stylish manner, communicating to users that they too could look the same if they were to be proud owners of these sunglasses.

7. The Inviting Content:

Inviting Content is a popular form of content whereby instead of simply posting a description of a product or service, companies provide a platform for people to interact with themselves and amongst each other. The users are happy to take a break from the usual lackluster article and share their views, thereby driving engagement.

For instance, Kotak Life Insurance, through this gif post, asks users to view it and comment in the comment section below with a screenshot right before the car and truck collide. Making users aware of the inherent threat of loss of life due to an accident, #LifeCanFlipAnytime, Kotak persuades users to consider Life Insurance.

8. The User Generated Content:

User Generated Content, also known as UGC, is one of the most interesting forms of content wherein the company shares a users post. Rather than hiring expensive actors and graphic design artists, the company leverages the content created by the user, making the user the advocate; which mind you, is more engaging, trustworthy and credible than scores of well placed advertisements.

In the image above, Lay’s, the famous potato chip brand, shares an image of a girl with a packet of Lay’s chips in her hand and encourages users to share their own ‘Lay’s moment’ in order to be featured on the official Lay’s page.

Conclusion

We are long past that phase where merely ‘selling’ on Facebook will generate and increase sale figures and units. Only when the content adds value to a user, will they like, comment on or subscribe to it; in other words, only then will the user engage with the content. And since engagement is the ultimate goal of every business, one should really consider providing this said value to their followers.

11 Social Media Marketing Ideas Used By ‘Baahubali’ Movie Franchise

★ About :
Baahubali - The Beginning
(Baahubali – The Beginning)
Baahubali 2 - The Conclusion
(Baahubali 2 – The Conclusion)

‘Baahubali’ (English meaning: The One with Strong Arms) is an Indian epic-historical fiction film filled with oodles of drama, action and visual art. The franchise had two cinematic parts namely ‘Baahubali: The Beginning’ as the first part which opened worldwide on 10th July 2015. The second installment in this series, ‘Baahubali 2: The Conclusion’ released on 28th April 2017.

This magnum opus feature film was directed by S S Rajamouli. Produced by Shobu Yarlagadda and Prasad Devineni, the film was initially shot as a bilingual in Telugu and Tamil but was later dubbed into Hindi and other international languages too.

Starring Prabhas, Rana Daggubati, Anushka Shetty and Tamannaah Bhatia in the lead roles, the other actors in supporting roles were Ramya Krishnan, Sathyaraj and Nassar.

The first film was made with a budget of ₹180 crore, which was considered the most expensive in India, back then. Both the parts were supposed to be produced on a joint budget of ₹250 crore initially. But according to one of the producers Shobu, the joint budget was later increased to around ₹400-₹450 crore range, especially for the sequel.

★ Business Objectives:

Business objectives

1) Right from the onset, the chief people linked with this project had a clear vision to have a massive pan-India release for the franchise.

2) They wanted to make a national film, instead of letting it stay restricted only to regional languages like Telugu and Tamil. Even at their first trailer screening event, the director talked about his deep emotional connect with epic works of literature like ‘Ramayana’ and ‘Mahabharata’ along with comic books called ‘Amar Chitra Katha’, which further gave him the inspiration to conceptualize the idea behind this film.

3) By integrating all the cinematic parameters with state-of-the-art technology, the makers wished to provide an optimum user experience on celluloid so as to win hearts of the mass audience.

★ Highly Effective Social Media Campaigns and Digital Marketing Strategies Undertaken:

Social media campaigns

Here is a curated list of how ‘Baahubali’ franchise dominated the social media game comprehensively.

1) WhatsApp –
As part of their promotional maneuvres, the film’s unit started with one of the most widely-used instant messaging platforms, WhatsApp. Months before the release of the first part, they announced a unique phone number (+918096755222) to give exclusive updates about the film to their fans who registered for the same, on 27th December 2014.

2) Facebook –
They ran various campaigns on FB to stay well-connected with their ardent fans. Be it the ‘Baahubali Profile Picture Frame’ contest, broadcasting ‘Live’ on Facebook by offering titbits about the film or the ‘Baahubali Comics’ using Facebook canvas (immersive and interactive mobile ad-experience purpose), each idea generated a lot of buzz. One of the noted campaigns was the launch of Baahubali-themed animated stickers inside FB Messenger app, which saw a sudden spike in its downloads within a week. Their official Facebook page has a fan base of more than 4.21 million till date and is still counting.

3) YouTube –
Just like the methods of storytelling in Bollywood have changed drastically in past few years, so have the techniques in social media marketing too. Their team unveiled short ‘Making-of’ and ‘Behind-the-scene’ videos on their official YouTube channel, sporting the film’s lead actors and actresses on their respective birthday occasions. This plainly kept the audience on their toes, every other month. Fans and followers were up for a visual treat after viewing numerous dialogue-trailers, which kept those anticipated subscribers captivated for a brief period of time.

4) Instagram –
Their official Instagram account also observed high engagement-rate from the audience all over the world, where every uploaded photo witnessed thousands of ‘likes’ each time. Currently, it possesses 496K followers on Instagram.

5) Twitter –
Since the movie took over the world audience by storm, such huge was the magnitude of its craze that quite many hashtags like #Baahubali, #BaahubaliOnJuly10th, #LiveTheEpic, #ReLiveTheEpic, #Baahubali2, #BaahubaliAtComicCon, etc. remained favourites of members of the Twitterati for months. Their team even ran ‘Baahubali Quest’ Twitter campaigns by cleverly asking their followers to follow the cast & crew’s social media profiles by using the hashtag #ADayWithBaahubali, in order to win lucky tickets for the movie. The film’s official Twitter handle has slightly more than 576K followers so far.

6) Website –
Possessing a self-hosted website is totally advisable for one’s brand, which can then rank higher in search engines if it is popular or generating huge traffic. And in the case of the official website of ‘Baahubali’ film franchise, it was no different.

7) Merchandise –
An array of merchandise including ‘Baahubali’ lifestyle accessories, gadget add-ons, costumes and film’s collectibles were made available on their website, thus allowing the film to generate extra revenue. Such post-movie-release game plan was bound to bear fruit because the film’s re-watch value escalated and so did the audience engagement rate.

8) Tumblr –
Fans from all over the world poured their enormous love and showed respect for their favourite characters in the film, undoubtedly! Exclusive and profuse amount of user-generated content was received in the time leading up to the film’s release. Thus the film’s back-end team decided to cash in on this opportunity by using a short-form blog to promote the multimedia and other forms of content. Traditional art sketches, digital artwork, unconventional materials and fan mails constituted this website in countless numbers.

9) Blog –
One of the many uses of possessing a blog is that it is nothing but a cost-effective form of content marketing. With a view to providing more insights on the worldwide success that ‘Baahubali’ franchise had achieved, their team kept sharing timely and relevant information on their official blog.

10) Official Game app –
The reliability and user engagement of ‘Baahubali: The Game (Official)’ app can be very well judged from the fact that it generated 10 million+ downloads from Google Play Store with an average user rating of 4.4 out of 5.

11) Official Movie app –
The makers of the film utilized Google Play Store platform not just to market their game app, but even for their movie app. Named as ‘Baahubali – Official Movie App’, it garnered 10,000+ downloads and received a rating of 4.8 on 5.

★ Reactions and Reception :

The mimic question “Why Kattappa Killed Baahubali?” grabbed the humongous attention of viewers on national and international platforms alike. In less than no time, the hashtag #WKKB went viral on social media platforms, almost like throwing gasoline on a fire. Every other WhatsApp forward message or Troll pages on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram had posts/feeds flooded with priceless memes around it, every other day. It made the audience laugh hard till their stomach hurt and this scenario continued for many months ahead.

Why Kattappa Killed Baahubali
(This scene technically happens just a few seconds before the ending of the first part of the film series, thereby ending in a cliffhanger)

Even a plethora of blogs and websites indirectly used various content marketing techniques to come up with special-dedicated versions of their comments/views on this movie – be it about its characters or music or VFX and what not. This further produced a ripple effect to encourage word of mouth, favoring the already released ‘Baahubali’ as well as for ‘Baahubali 2’ (which, at that time, was slated for an official release about 2 years later after the arrival of the first part).

All in all, it almost became a herculean task to handle the curiosity that had already been built up for ‘Baahubali 2’. It is learned that owing to the blockbuster success of the first part, the second part had already gathered enough limelight even months before its release.

This ultimately made the audience make beelines for the tickets counters of theatres/malls day-in and day-out, thereby setting the box office cash registers ringing from dawn to dusk (for both the movie parts).

★ Results Achieved:
Results

(a) Record-breaking movie ‘Baahubali: The Beginning’, the first installment in this movie series grossed a whopping ₹600 crore worldwide.

(b) In India, ‘Baahubali: The Beginning’ became the fourth Facebook’s most talked-about topic of the year 2015, after PM Narendra Modi, E-commerce Boom and late president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.

(c) ‘Baahubali: The Beginning’ topped the Google (India) ‘Trending Movies’ list of the year 2015 and also secured the second position in Google (India) ‘Trending Searches’ list of the year 2015.

(d) The official trailer of ‘Baahubali 2: The Conclusion’ gained 59.8 million views within first 24 hours across the world (YouTube, Facebook and Twitter platforms combined), when it released online on 16th March 2017.

(e) ‘Baahubali 2: The Conclusion’ is still having a historic run in theaters, at present. The results of their team’s vision and hard work have now come to such a point, that the film series is still earning crores of rupees as their net profit and it currently boasts as the 2nd highest grossing Indian movie in the worldwide collection. It became the first ever Indian film to gross over ₹1000 crore in all languages, by achieving this mark in simply ten days and has already collected ₹1706.5 crore globally till now. Touted as India’s biggest movie franchise, their other lists of national and international accolades are just endless. By breaking major box-office records, it set a new benchmark for the Indian Film Industry.

★ Key Learnings:

Key learnings

 • As part of the film’s well planned viral marketing and engagement marketing techniques, back-to-back ‘refreshed’ content kept emerging out one after the other systematically, to grow brand following. The team multiplied the content in the form of ‘Baahubali’ customized image posters, half-a-minute snippets, graphic novel books, animated web series, etc. that kept the buzz alive for literally four to five years, which was nothing less than a journey.

• For better clarity about the brand/business promotion on popular social networking platforms, innovative and out-of-the-box tactics need to be attempted constantly.

• The potential of digital marketing ecosystem in this 21st century is merely endless, as this industry is progressing at an ever-growing rate, not only in India but throughout the world. It is utmost essential to keep oneself updated about the latest trends and technologies in digital marketing from time to time (if one wants to sustain for a long time in this sector).

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

★ Source credits:

a) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baahubali:_The_Beginning

b) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baahubali_2:_The_Conclusion

c) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRUaXL3Jr3o

d) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fk2V3rxBFkc