Enlist Followers with a S-T-A-M-P
Without an audience, all of our marketing—not just content marketing—is a tree falling in the forest that no one hears.
—Jeffrey Rohrs
There is perhaps no better example of “What comes first—the chicken or the egg?” than new users of social media building their proprietary audiences. What comes first—content or followers? Just like hosting a party of your friends can easily go sour if there is no conversation or activities, having a lot of social-media followers serves no purpose without content or engagement. At the other extreme, even the best of open houses hosted with great food, tours, and fun activities serves no purpose if you have no friends. The same applies to great content simply waiting to be exposed. Without a social-media audience, great content ends up in a library.
To recap, let’s consider the resources at our disposal for spreading our stories. We have employees as a word-of-mouth advocates that could build our audience. And we have influencers that could lend us their huge audiences. We also have syndications and search engines described in Chapter 8 that will do their job exposing us to audiences interested in our topics. But how do we enlist new followers through our social-media channels that ultimately become a proprietary audience?
At a time when social networks are surprising us with poor organic feed results, brands are quickly discovering why they need their own audiences. Unless these audiences literally subscribe to our content, we have little control of messaging, targeting, and tracking the behaviors of our desired audiences. Content may go viral, but the ability to build relationships from it can only materialize if we capture their contact information for later conversations.
But in fairness to the social networks, these contact lists for e-mailing and texting messaging would remain small. After all, each fan, follower, and connection that touches your content has audiences in the hundreds on average. Consequently, when they provide an e-mail address—perhaps through some fan-welcoming incentive—your rolodex can fill up quickly. Ideally, we want to exploit social-networking channels for their reach and subscription incentives for proprietary audience development described further in Chapter 11.
Consider this as having to enlist followers with a S-T-A-M-P like the one shown later. Once we gain these followers, Chapter 10 will discuss how we keep them engaged. Chapter 11 will then explain how we escort them through the sales funnel.
Developing Strategies for Gaining New Followers
Enlisting followers on social media is no different than the steps we take to start and grow a club. We begin by tapping into our networks of hobbyists, faith followers, or school friends. We then let them know we are worthy of leading the group based on our expertise. But to expand our pitch, we may have to advertise our club and count on local media to highlight its goodwill contributions and impact on the community. Finally, we get our club enthusiasts to sign-up.
Similarly, in social media, we start with our social networks and build a case for our running the community based on our thought leadership and profile strength. We then bank on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter advertising to expand our reach while journalists, analysts, and others promote our press worthiness. Finally, we leverage this club membership stamp to start a dialogue with interested followers.
Building Social-Networking Strategies
A common perception of many brands and small businesses is to make their presence felt on every network. After all, customers now expect us to be where they are hanging out or have a customer service issue. But the level of attention need not be the same; for those with limited resources, being active on many social networks is like participating in all of your favorite community, hobby, and political clubs. You won’t be effective.
Before diving into strategies to get more followers and fans, therefore, it behooves us to know if we are actively involved in the right networks. Experts in the field consistently suggest that you base your choice of primary network participation on the following:
1. the degree of importance placed on SEO, brand awareness, customer communication, or traffic referrals;
2. what your website traffic and other analytics suggest is your current source of traffic;
3. what fits the style and tone of content and engagement preferred by your audiences;
4. where your competition, influencers, and industry have a dominant presence; and
5. the overall reach, relevance, and resonance of the channel.
As discussed in the next chapter, marketers tend to use social media for one of three purposes: marketing their offerings, serving as a resource, or providing customer service. To that end, the choice of social network should be based on the degree to which the network suits these objectives. For example, some networks are well suited for one-on-one customer communications but do not provide the brand exposure or web traffic results for brands to effectively market their offerings.
The choice of network emphasis should at minimum consider the importance of the network in making content searchable, boosting brand awareness, creating an atmosphere for responsive customer service, and referring traffic to a website. CMO by Adobe provides an annual evaluation of eight networks based on their ability to address these marketing objectives. Shown in Figure 7.1 is their 2014 Social Landscape downloadable at http://cmo.cm/1yhcN4M.1
Once deciding on your network of emphasis, getting the right followers and fans requires insights into the peculiarities of the networks if you want to court a target audience qualifying as a sales prospect. The unique aspects of each network, as well as the approached taken to gain followers, is covered next. This is followed in ensuing sections on ways to make connections through thought leadership and enlist subscribers through proprietary audience strategy. Common to attracting all of these joiners are strategies that tailor incentives to attract their membership. The differences lie in the expectations of each joiner. Audience expert, Jeff Rohrs, for example, suggests that2
• followers (including connections) seek information;
• fans seek passion; and
• subscribers seek convenience.
Understanding and Attracting Followers on Twitter
Figure 7.1 CMO’s Guide to 2014 Social Landscape
Twitter provides instant, worldwide distribution of content. Covering everyone from television personalities to industry experts, it is heavily used for brand awareness, customer service, and driving web traffic. As of this writing, over 500 million tweets are sent per day by nearly 300 million monthly active users; the bulk (78 percent as of 4Q14) of which are on mobile.
Although Twitter is limited to only 140-character tweets, rich media can be accommodated through Vine and Twitter Cards. Besides adding photos and videos, the latter allows you to embed lead generation forms and capture e-mails for a more straightforward sales conversion process than can be expected when directing traffic to a landing page.
Collectively, these platform assets make Twitter ideal for reaching out and directly engaging with others. Because of its frequent and succinct way of providing useful information, the platform is conducive to building trails of trustworthy content mentioned earlier. The platform, along with LinkedIn, is arguably the best source for identifying yourself as an industry expert. Klout scores, for example, can be shown alongside each member’s profile.
Twitter is also a great way to show the responsiveness and personality of your brand. As many companies elect to have their advocates represent their voice, brands become more likeable and human. This especially bodes well for those using Twitter as a customer service channel. Not only does the platform lends itself well to listening for brand sentiment, but it also provides a real-time channel for dealing with live customer issues. Other Others can then follow the brand’s reaction to service as an indication of its responsiveness.
Finally, Twitter offers one of the easiest and fastest methods to build followers. Retweets of compelling content have an immediate impact on reaching new potential audiences. And when your tweets of new content include well-researched hashtags, your visibility can reach a new and relevant audience that regularly research content parked under these hashtags. Tools like HootSuite and TweetCaster alert readers in a custom feed when new content is published for a given hashtag. And tools like hashtags.org and hashtagify.me can help you research the right hashtags. Finally, the brevity of your social nametag, or Twitter handle (@JimBarryJr), makes the advertising of your brand more memorable. This greatly simplifies the ability of this platform to attract followers outside of its network.
Understanding and Attracting Fans on Facebook
Despite Millennials and Gen Z jumping ship from Facebook to Tumblr, Snapchat, Whisper, and other social platforms, the platform Facebook remains the ultimate in community sharing and engagement. With an estimated 1.3 billion monthly active users, of which 1 billion include mobile users, it is still the largest of social networks. What’s more, nearly 800 million log in daily, making it the largest available audience served by any media in the world.
Where Facebook truly makes it mark is with a fan base seeking entertainment and highly personal engagement. It remains a platform of choice for discussing fun and trendy topics. And with its mobile photo-intensive style of engagement, fans can interact all day with just a few clicks on their smart devices. This entertaining and often inspirational style of engagement gives brands plenty of opportunity to share their stories and give their brand a personality.
Despite the constant surprises from Facebook on drastically changed feature and marketing models, Facebook offers some design advantages especially useful to B2C brands. Its custom interfacing allows a great deal of Facebook page versatility and consistency with brand messaging. Moreover, the overall effort required to build and maintain these pages can be scaled to the volume of content and fan engagement desired.
Known for its fan activation through “likes,” brands recognize the growing visibility each fan represents as the average number of friends per fan continues to rise. According to Pew Research conducted in 2014, the average number of friends among adult users is 338 with a median of around 200 friends. As described in Figure 7.1, however, this rise in friends is offset by a rapid decline in organically reaching them in their news feeds.
Herein lies the problem with brands marketing on Facebook. Most marketers know the real battleground on Facebook is in the news feed; it’s not on Facebook pages. Recent research shows that most Facebook users interact with page updates in their news feed rather than visiting Facebook pages. But now that the organic reach of pages is approaching less than 2 percent of their fans on average, brands have little choice but to “pay-to-play” for audience exposure. Why do this? There are 1.3 billion reasons why. Coupled with Facebook’s superior ad network and strong mobile presence, it’s a great way to scale your marketing efforts and globally reach a hypertargeted audience.
Gaining followers normally requires compelling content or an exciting brand story. Among the most popular ways to attract new fans is through contests or events hosted on Facebook. Described further in Chapter 10, the invite and event participation process is ideal for capturing new audiences. A photo contest, for instance, requires users to visit a custom tab on the brand’s Facebook page in order to upload the photo and submit a contest entry. A registration opt-in then turns these audiences into subscribers. This is where a fan becomes far more valuable than just a follower.
But to entice them, fans need bigger incentives. Knowing they risk your invading their news feeds and misrepresenting your brand endorsements to their friends, they expect exclusive content, valuable coupons, or inside privileges with their membership. A common approach taken by many brands is to allow access to a series of video tutorials on their welcome page in exchange for their fan acceptance and contact information. A challenge with keeping fans on Facebook, however, is keeping them stimulated. Unless, fans are continually provided with sensationalized content, it’s tough to keep their attention.
Once invited, fans on Facebook have perhaps the most comprehensive platform to have conversations with other fans while sharing picture, videos, and other content related to the brand. And with its acquisition of messaging WhatsApp, Facebook shows great promise in extending direct communications between fans and brands. Finally, Facebook’s foray into virtual reality through Oculus Rift will help this platform address the growing demand for richer brand experiences on wearable devices.
Understanding and Attracting Connections on LinkedIn
With over 300 million members worldwide and 187 million monthly unique visitors, LinkedIn remains the world’s largest professional network. In fact, an estimated one-third of world professionals are on LinkedIn. And their reliance on the network for B2B and overall professional correspondence continues to grow. Today, the average user spends 17 minutes monthly on this platform, and nearly 40 percent of its users check in daily.
What started out as a resume and Rolodex-oriented platform now rivals the best in community engagement. Like Facebook, it allows like-minded individuals to discuss topics of interest. Only LinkedIn relies on its 2.1 million groups to do this. These groups are becoming increasingly targeted, making them useful in building thought leadership with a relevant audience.
The endorsement features provide a way to validate your expertise and credibility and examine the credentials of the endorser. As a result, it rivals Klout scores as a measure of influence. And now with its publishing features opened to almost all members, LinkedIn is providing its users with an opportunity to create and share content while adding it to their professional profile. Companies now have a venue for owned media residing right on the platform. This avoids the updating of abbreviated and networked restricted references to content while boosting the visibility of quality content across the entire network.
Unlike the reach of Twitter that restricts the visibility of your post to followers only (until retweeted), updates on LinkedIn could potentially reach those beyond your first degree of connections. And for some, LinkedIn now allows you to build an audience of followers beyond your network of connections. Although you cannot message directly with these followers at the present time, you can share photos, images, videos, and presentations across the community. Now members have the ability to follow other members that are not in their network while building their own group of followers.
What makes LinkedIn stand out is its low signal-to-noise ratio and ability to let others find you. Updates of your content have a far greater chance of being exposed to your target audiences than what you can expect on Twitter or Facebook. And with the groups moderating meaningful conversations around specific industry topics, B2B audiences have a venue for discussing key business challenges without the distraction of leisure oriented conversations.
The key to getting connections is the quality of your invite and profile. Having a great deal of common connections, endorsements from well-respected individuals and a powerful resume is a great start. But the invite itself could make the difference. By explaining how you can enhance their own network or referencing some meaningful Linked In dialogues you shared, the request will likely be taken more seriously.
To attract others to extend an invite to you, having a well-optimized profile is key. LinkedIn’s own search engine provides professionals and brands an opportunity to showcase their expertise in the search bar. Listings under groups, companies, or individuals are ranked ordered much like that of other search engines. Key to achieving a high ranking is a profile well optimized around targeted terms as well as a large number of credible endorsements on skills associated with the term.
Understanding YouTube and Adding to Your Subscribers
With over 1 billion unique users per month, YouTube remains by far the most popular viewing site. And like Facebook and LinkedIn, content hosted on YouTube allows for community engagement in the form of likes, shares, and comments. But besides its popularity as a social network, it is also the second most popular search engine.
What was once a site reserved for video production experts is now used for content creation by almost every major brand. Today, more than 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute as a result of the 6 billion hours of video watched every month and the ease with which even amateurs can host quality content.
The embedding of YouTube videos on other platforms including websites makes it especially valuable for video blogging, social-media posts, and LinkedIn profiles. And just like the tools permitted to edit or enhance videos, the process of embedding videos takes little effort and expertise. But what makes this platform especially popular is its seamless support across every mobile platform.
Where YouTube falls short as a social network is in its approach to earning subscriptions. Channels unite people around targeted content and not around the engagement of channels like Facebook. Brand stories, dialogues, and community events have to rely instead on other channels to coordinate conversations across the brand. Moreover, subscriptions take time as viewers normally need to see several iterations of content releases before electing to subscribe.
The key to earning subscriptions is to demonstrate value in future episodes or in customer service. The latter in particular has been embraced by brands that see “how-to” videos coupled with comments from viewers as a helpful way of demonstrating solutions to recurring issues.
Understanding Google+ and Adding to Your Circles
After Facebook, Google+ is the second most active social-networking site in the world. As of this writing, it has 359 million monthly users active in the stream where users see updates from those in their circles. As of this writing, Google+ remains a male-dominated network, with an estimated 70 percent of users being men. But most importantly, it’s where social and search truly come together.
Given its similarity to Facebook in updates, engagement, and visual richness, a question often arises as to why someone wants to engage in one more network. A simple answer is “because it’s Google.” Google+ is not just a social network. It’s a social layer on top of all Google properties. You are essentially seeing all of your peers in each experience on the Google platform that includes Gmail, YouTube, Android, Google Glass, Google Maps, and most importantly its search engine. In fact, the reason why social is now the new SEO has a lot to do with Google+. Your search results have much to do with social shares especially from those having a high page rank measured by their own sphere of Google+ influence.
But there are some significant differences between Facebook and Google+. Facebook is built more around communities where folks connect with others they already know. It’s more about friends and family. Google+, on the other hand, is based more around activity- or interest-based networking. In this sense, Google+ is more like Twitter in that communities segregate and then group together under common interests. This provides a real benefit to brands that can now target their messages and market their offerings to those meeting a certain criteria.
What makes When used properly, Google+ has an unmatched advantage in search especially unique is its impact on search. But this takes more than a well-optimized profile; it takes an engaging platform, quality content, a +1 button on your web page, and a circle of influential followers. For example, research shows that receiving Google+1’s is more important from an SEO perspective than the number of backlinks.3 When someone of influence in your Circles hits the +1 button, for example, this authority can be transferred to your blog post in the form of a backlink. This is one reason having a few power influencers in your Circles is more valuable than having a lot of followers.
Besides its impact on search, a distinctive networking capability of Google+ includes its ability to host Hangouts, a capability especially appealing to the tech professions. You can connect up to 10 people in a Skype like video conference. These free video conferencing calls add a business-oriented dimension that keep professionals engaged in work-related matters. But as explained in Figure 7.1, Google+ has yet to capitalize on its YouTube assets or targeted messaging to interest groups (through circles) that make it a worthwhile platform for customer service.
Where this capability shows real promise is in its Hangouts on air (HOA) described in Chapter 1. HOA provides a unique medium for webcasting that can be recording for later retrieval. Moreover, by capitalizing on the video-editing features and public exposure of YouTube, Google allows these panel-oriented broadcasts to reach primetime levels of quality often rivaling that of talk shows.
Community building on Google+ amounts to adding folks to your circles where you can organize them into groups or lists for sharing. Like most other platforms, your followers see the content of your stream thereby making the choice to join you a matter of quality vs congestion. But since the overall signal-to-noise ratio remains relatively high on Google+, brands find the efforts to build circles worthwhile. Once the circle is created, specific private content can be displayed in the stream of that circle under a category designated by the user.
One way to gain new members in your circles is getting them to find your content by using the right hashtags or through search. For example, the longer a post exists, the longer it stays in the Google index. Consequently, the more folks search for and interact with the content over time, the higher it potentially places at the top of conversations and searches. More importantly, this content gestation allows brands to expose their entire storyline since the content lasts forever. Contrast this with Facebook fans whose interest often wanes over time; consequently, they have less opportunity to put the story pieces together. And brands have fewer opportunities to escort them through the sales funnel.
Joining the right Google+ Communities can also invite new members to your circles. Although you can join a broader audience and capitalize on more widespread dialogue through Google Communities, only those in your circles fall in the category of subscribers. You cannot e-mail those in your communities unless there are in your circles as well. Nevertheless, the more those in your communities see you as an influential leader of conversations of interest, the more likely they will follow and encourage others to follow you. Tools like CircleCount.com can help you identify the right communities. The key to getting these members to then join your circle is to first follow those that regularly engage and respond themselves. Then continually participate in their conversation as well as amplify their content. Like most networks, the more visual your content, and the more it is about your viewers, the more likely they are to follow.
Understanding and Attracting Followers on Pinterest
Pinterest is an aspirational social-media platform in that people use it to find things that they want. It now reaches over 70 million users, 40 million of which are monthly active, while accumulating 25 billion pins in just its first three years of existence. But despite its small size relative to the aforementioned networks, Pinterest drives more referral traffic than LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google+ combined. And according to Social-Media Examiner’s Industry Report, 50 percent of marketers plan on increasing their Pinterest marketing.4 Among the reasons for this growing demand is that Pinterest
1. caters to a visual audience;
2. is a female-dominated network more prone to spontaneous shopping;
3. lends itself to e-commerce; and
4. performs well in search.
As discussed in Chapters 1 and 3, the rapid migration toward visual content serves the higher population of visually oriented learners as well as the rapid adoption by brands of visual storytelling. And since visuals are at center stage, the average Pinterest user spends an average of 1 hour and 17 minutes per month on the site compared to 36 minutes on Twitter and 12 minutes on Facebook.
And with an estimated 80–83 percent of the network users being female, it’s no surprise that Pinterest now accounts for about 41 percent of e-commerce traffic.5 Women make or influence 85 percent of all purchasing decisions. They also account for 58 percent of all total online spending.6
But perhaps the most important reason why Pinterest has attracted the attention of most brands is its ability to drive sales. Despite its far smaller audience than Facebook and Google+, Pinterest accounts for more than 23 percent of all social-media-driven sales. Research also shows that an estimated 47 percent of online consumers in the United States have made a purchase based on Pinterest recommendations. Moreover, the average order placed by users of the platform is $179—compare that to $80 for Facebook and $69 for Twitter.7
Like many of the other networks, the key to growing and keeping audiences on Pinterest is to offer content that is useful, inspirational, insightful, or engaging. This obviously works better for brands that lend themselves to fun and aspirational themes. In fact, over 40 percent of pins are in the fashion, food, and home décor categories. But a surprising trend is the growing activity of brand categories outside of retail that have made headway with less than inspiring products.
These brands understand that success on Pinterest requires you to put your products in context. In essence, it has more to do with inspiring others with the lifestyles represented by their brand—not selling products. GE does this very well with their innovative design concepts or stories reflective of their culture. And like other successful brands on Pinterest, the company pins photos that inspire others to share their own experiences. Leading Pinterest expert, Cynthia Sanchez, suggests that brands imagine audiences saying “how can I . . . someday I want to . . . my favorite . . . that’s cool.” If they can envision their boards responding in this way, Pinterest can then serve more as an aspirational platform than a digital catalog.
Creating an engaging audience on Pinterest can take many avenues but a typical strategy involves attracting followers, earning re-pins, and driving traffic to your website. Gaining followers is a bit more straightforward than the complex search-and-amplify strategies described earlier for Google+. Among the most popular ways to attract followers on Pinterest are the following:
1. Partner with influential guest pinners: By collaborating on group boards, you can invite other users to contribute pins to a cocurating board; their activity on your board shows up in both your followers’ and the guest pinner’s followers’ feeds. If some of the contributors are super pinners, this could expose your pins to potentially huge audiences. Free services like PinGroupie can help you find these group boards that potentially attract influential pinners.
2. User-relevant hashtags: Using hashtags on pin descriptions that are trending will ensure that audiences find you and see the relevance of your pins to their interests.
3. Contribute to others’ boards: Commenting thoughtfully, and without spamming, on other’s pins will often result in a follow especially when the comments include names of others positively referenced or thanked in the comment. The same applies to tagging and liking. Together these contributions add to a spirit of relationship building.
4. Use rich pins: Rich pins allow you to add price and availability information. Pins with prices are known to get a third more likes. This further helps with subscription building as users will often gratefully accept e-mail notices of a product on sale.
5. Pin and share a lot of images: The more you share, the more other users will see your pins and its details, thereby encouraging them to view your page. Integrate your own content with the best of other people’s content. This helps build your reputation as a thought leader and a tastemaker. Remember social media is a multidirectional conversation. This ultimately attracts more followers as Pinterest will recommend your boards to those pinning the same image especially when you regularly pin images others enjoy.
6. Add buttons and widgets: Make sure your website is optimized for Pinterest sharing by including its buttons alongside your other social-sharing options. In addition, you can boost your sharing pinning activity by adding a “pin this” button to your visuals. But most importantly, make sure your site includes high-quality pinnable visuals that could really dress up someone’s boards. This way, Pinterest users can feel confident that your content complements their brand story. This should attract their followers’ interest in the pin leading to your site. This same audience could then be encouraged to follow you on Pinterest as well.
7. Host contest: As described in the Chapter 8, Pinterest is well suited to hosting contests that could attract new followers.
Understanding and Attracting Followers on Instagram
Instagram is a mobile app for sharing photos and videos. As the Facebook-owned photo- and video-sharing service, it is the fastest growing and arguably the most consumed social-media platform. The average Instagram user spends over 4 hours a month taking, filtering, editing, and sharing photos. As of this writing, it has over 200 million monthly active users that have accounted for more than 20 billion photos uploaded to the service since its inception. More importantly, almost 60 percent of these users rely on the social network on a daily basis. This has led to nearly half of the top 100 brands on Instagram posting daily.
What makes Instagram stand out is its direct messaging and extraordinary engagement with users. According to Adweek, Instagram is achieving three times the engagement per post when compared to Facebook. Research by Forrester shows it gets 15 times more engagement than Twitter or Google+. Much of this is attributed to its visual-centric orientation where inspirational images and 15-second videos create a strong bond across a community of like-minded followers.
But keeping these followers takes more than simply uploading photos. Like most of the aforementioned networks, success on Instagram requires you to be highly conversational often by answering questions or participating in discussions. Some great ways to keep this engagement on Instagram is to
1. invite engagement through behind the scenes content or getting followers to guess something about your brand;
2. invite user-generated videos or images that show the goofy or creative sides of followers often in exchange for contest prizes;
3. dress up your photos using filters and text-based imagery. Apps like Wordswag are a great tool for adding text to your imagery;
4. maintain brand authenticity and trust by consistency portraying the same brand theme or tone; and
5. stay on top of your comments, tagging, geo-tagging, and sharing of other people’s visuals and images.
Like Pinterest, the attraction of audiences on Instagram requires engaging with other’s content. Although Pinterest is used more as an aspirational media that attracts shoppers in need of something, Instagram caters to a younger generation who likes to feature themselves and engage daily for fear of missing out. In fact, its notoriety includes the birth of the selfie.
As a mobile app, Instagram enjoys higher viewership than Pinterest. And because of Instagram Direct and Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp, expect Facebook to exploit its direct messaging capability to allow for even more engaging interactions as well as one-to-one contacting for customer service. Pinterest, on the other hand, has no way to handle personal interaction like private messaging.
On the other hand, Pinterest Instagram lacks the sales conversion aspects of Pinterest. Direct links to a website are not possible at the moment, thereby making it problematic for e-commerce transactions. Consequently, Instagram serves more as a top-of-funnel brand builder or middle-of-funnel content source. The latter is made possible by the consumer endorsements represented when user’s share or comment on photos. Sales conversion, however, requires continuous cross-promotion of Instagram with other channels like Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail.
Among the most popular approaches used by successful brands on Instagram to grow their followers are the following:
1. Use hashtags: Using hashtag tracking tools like Tagboard or Keyhole, your content can be better grouped along conversations and ideas, thereby making it easier for others to discover you. A study conducted by social-media scientist, Dan Zarrella, concluded that hashtags on Instagram can also create a sense of community and build brand loyalty.8
2. Use analytics: Instagram is supported by great analytics tools like Iconosquare or Websta that allow you to monitor who is engaging and what they like. But it also allows you to examine your competition for what their followers like or dislike. This becomes an excellent source for reaching out to potential followers of your own.
3. Put the spotlight on your followers: The more you use real content created by your current followers, the more they are motivated to draw out more followers for you.
4. Create Instagram badges: The top social-media influencer, Kim Garst, points out that “adding a badge to your Facebook, website, or blog that links to your Instagram will be sure to gain you more followers.”9
5. Regularly post and interact: Like the other networks, Instagram audiences are built from liking and commenting on other’s content on a regular basis. The same applies to sharing. The more you share compelling content from your followers, the more likely they will share your content in return. To ensure you are posting at the right times, tools like Schedugram will help you schedule updates during those peak periods when your potential followers are likely to engagement.
6. Cross-promote: Given its isolation away from your website, it’s important to post your imagery and videos on other social channels as well. This raises your overall visibility while helping you gain new followers.
Understanding and Attracting Followers on SlideShare
SlideShare is the world’s largest content-marketing platform owned by LinkedIn since 2012. What started out as a repository of presentation slide decks has grown into a social-networking platform for serious professionals. Now enjoying over 60 million unique visitors a month, SlideShare is used to host presentations, infographics, videos, e-Books, white papers, and a variety of other PDF-formatted documents. And like the other mentioned networks, its suitability to image- and video-based content in mobile-friendly formats addresses the growing demand for visual content on the go.
Where SlideShare stands out from other networks is in its ability to
1. climb high in SERPs;
2. seamlessly accommodate almost any type of content in a slide-to-slide format;
3. address the entire sales funnel;
4. facilitate lead generation;
5. serve as a content hub;
6. contribute to LinkedIn profiles and updates; and
7. develop relationships with audiences seeking research and education on a neutral platform.
Because of the large audience of users, search engine results from SlideShare presentations typically outweigh what can be accomplished from a company’s own website. And because it can accommodate so many other platforms, it contributes greatly to building followers and boosting search results. For example, SlideShare presentations can be embedded in blogs and LinkedIn profiles that drive those followers to your SlideShare site where they can often follow you there as well. In the reverse, YouTube videos, webinar recordings, and e-Books can be hosted on SlideShare, thereby encouraging your SlideShare followers to subscribe to your blog or video channels.
However, where SlideShare has really made its mark is in lead generation. Major brands are now finding this platform to be the number 1 or 2 source of all their new leads. One reason for this is its broad applicability across the sales funnel. Slides addressing “how-to’s” and industry insights serve the top of the funnel. Embedded calls to action can then be used to earn subscribers as the platform introduces your e-Books, webinar recordings, and product reviews. Finally, price comparison sheets and other bottom-of-funnel content can lead to a qualified prospect or sale. And since SlideShare offers easy to fill lead generation forms, this whole process of lead nurturing can be well integrated into your CRM or marketing automation tools without having the user leave the platform.
Finally, much like the other platforms, gaining followers on SlideShare has much to do with your engagement with others’ content through comments and likes. And to capture their attention, you need high-quality visuals preferably aimed at education or insightful research. Fortunately, there are many tools like Canva, slideidea, and Haiku Deck that can help dress up your content. And with a premium account, you have ample analytics to gauge your progress in producing quality content as well as in attracting the right influencers.
Developing Thought Leadership Strategies for Audience Development
So far, we have discussed how social networks, advocacy, and content can set the stage for you to discover and engage with prospective customers. But a fundamental premise here is that these viewers are fascinated with what you have to say. In effect, they see you as a thought leader or someone they trust as an authority on relevant topics early in their buying journey.
Gaining this trust means less talking about what you do and more discussion around why you do it. Consider the thought leadership Dove developed in their Real Beauty series. Rather than touting their expertise in soap, their stories of women’s self-esteem made them more of an authority on intrinsic beauty. Results of their campaigns clearly show a lift in brand affinity and most likely led to stronger engagement and trust among a niche of women too hard on themselves.
Once you can identify the personas whose challenges resonate with your authority, social networking allows you to connect and communicate with them while shoring up your thought leadership stature in the process. But this takes more than a solid content strategy; it takes an understanding of your audience’s key questions as well as your assertion of leadership in the right venues.
Understanding the Right Content Essentials
Becoming a thought leader is a long-term, layered process that begins with a trail of trustworthy content a reader is willing to try out. Over time, you may become recognized as an authority on relevant topics if you resonate with what’s most important to your audiences. Depending on where your audience is in their buying journey, this authority is normally derived from audiences recognizing your visionary insights, new business models, or innovative solutions to business problems. These insights can come from benchmarking surveys, data analysis, or simply collections of perspectives from influencers.
What is important is for audiences to see you as consistently provide interesting, accurate, and helpful ideas. Here is where visuals like infographics play a key role. And the key to gaining a reputation for helpfulness is to make sure your content does not just reflect your unique perspective on a hot topic. It has to reflect your audience’s agenda since your level of authority is greatly determined by how well you answer their most important questions. This can come from blog comments as well as social-media group discussions discussed further in Chapter 8.
But content itself is rarely sufficient enough for anyone to earn the respect and reputation for being a trusted subject matter expert. Thought leaders are known to engage regularly with their audiences to the point where their followers become advocates. They also have a sizeable capacity for conducting in-depth research as well as hosting venues that showcase your business expertise. Simply curating the best of influencer content may posture you as a respected editorialist, but it’s not likely to posture you as an authority capable of shaping opinions or shifting industry paradigms.
Hosting Venues to Showcase Expertise
One way to assert your thought leadership is to host your own content or shows on topics relevant to your targeted audiences. And given that the primary purpose for developing thought leadership is to court prospects early in their buying stage, these venues should start small. Most of us have limited patience to digest middle-of-funnel content until a trail of bite-sized blogs or SlideShare presentations, for example, validates a perception of authority. From there, the following forums can be tapped as venues for building thought leadership:
1. hosting weekly podcasts, Google+ hangouts, webinars, or chats;
2. monitoring groups/communities on LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, or industry forums;
3. organizing virtual speaking events; and
4. guest blogging for leading influencers.
By taking charge of these events and forums, your brand has a sustaining platform in which to regularly engage your audience. And by taking the initiative to lead, you will likely elevate your brand’s perceived authority in the process. Moreover, you have far more opportunities to convey your brand story.
Developing Social Advertising Strategies for Audience Development
What may seem to run counter to the principle behind inbound marketing is the role of social advertising in boosting audience reach and engagement. Advertising in the social environment has been far better received by digital audiences than traditional display ads whose reputation for being intrusive has led to exceptionally low response rates. What makes social advertising unique is its highly targeted messaging to an audience that has already qualified themselves with their profile and engagement data.
With active monthly users of social networking now over 1 billion, it makes sense to attract their attention while on these channels. And now with Facebook, Twitter, and others forced to monetize their platforms, expect “pay-to-play” to be the only answer for capturing your audiences’ attention in their news feeds. This may bode well for small businesses whose time table to reach organic results is far too short. In the past, Facebook required an extensive presence and engagement on their platform to qualify for top spots in a fan’s news feeds. Over time, this exposure was dominated by big brands that had the staying power and resources to organically rise to the top. But with the cost of social ads often down to cents per click, small businesses can now afford to place a well-targeted ad that boosts their exposure among existing followers as well as reaches new followers of similar interests.
The popularity of these ads has reached the point to where it is dominating the media landscape. Shown in Figure 7.2 is a forecast of global ad revenues across social networks. The projected 28 percent compounded annual growth rate reflects the early success made by self-serve ad platforms offered by Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, and others.
As demonstrated in Table 7.1, Facebook clearly has the lead on versatility, analytics, audience development, and opportunities for boosted engagement. Twitter’s Promoted Accounts, Tweet, and Trends offer advantages in attracting new followers. And LinkedIn offers the best in hypertargeting. Newcomers Pinterest, Google+, and Instagram are still testing the viability of their platforms to the general public. Google+ has the distinct advantage of having the +Posts displayed across the entire Google Display Network. Instagram shows promise in providing a solid platform for both mobile and video ads. And Pinterest, like YouTube, has a bottom-of-funnel advantage with their Promoted Pins.
Figure 7.2 Social-Network Advertising (total revenues, $billions)
Table 7.1 Evaluation of Social-Network Self-Service Ad Platforms
Why Social Advertising is on the Rise
Social ads provide a unique way of conversing with ad viewers. Across all of the social-networking platforms offering ads is an engagement opportunity much like that offered by any post intended to reach audiences organically. Viewers can like, comment on, or share an ad. Without this boost in engagement, brands are at the mercy of news feed algorithms that are making it increasingly difficult to expose your content. As of this writing, for example, the opportunity for your content to reach the feed of your Facebook fans has dropped to under 3 percent. So even the best of engaging posts have practically no chance of reaching your audiences without a paid advertising boost.
What may have surprised many is the overall receptivity of audiences to social ads as they have become contextually relevant. The rich databases that support social-network targeting platforms can tailor an ad based on where you are; what interests you express in your profiles; where you have browsed; and what patterns of engagement you showed on a network. Although creepy to some, this big data insight can ensure that all of us see only relevant messaging.
Another key advantage of advertising in social networks is the many paths available to drive traffic to or promote something on your website. Ads are constructed to allow direct ordering right from the platform. In other cases, events and product launches are promoted through social ads so as to exploit the conversations surrounding the promotion. Similarly, social ads allow social networks to capitalize from web traffic. Facebook’s web custom audiences, for example, will identify and match visitors of your website to a Facebook ID where that same visitor can be subsequently retargeted with an ad on Facebook.
Trends in Social Advertising
Because of the huge insights social networks have on what people are doing, their databases far surpass the intelligence gathered on most other media platforms. As a result, ad network exchanges now center on Facebook and Twitter data. Moreover, mobile has essentially become social. Both Facebook and Twitter now dominate the mobile landscape of ads as their user’s access these networks more on mobile than on their desktop. And with these networks representing the bulk of their time spent when on mobile devices, it makes sense for mobile ads to be social in nature.
In recent years, these networks have tested out video, audience networks, and buying options similar to that offered by Google and other digital ad platforms. And as they compete with the larger digital ad platforms, their analytics offerings have extended to conversion tracking. Most are now embracing bid pricing and programmatic buys as well. Finally, Twitter’s use of Vine and Facebook’s use of Instagram videos have made the ad experience far more engaging than the traditional text, link, and photo options of the past.
Developing Media Coverage Strategies for Audience Development
In addition to the owned media and paid media strategies discussed so far, marketers have a number of earned media opportunities to grow their followers. One involves media relations, a field that has dramatically changed as a result of social media. Disappearing, for example, is the press release pitches to select reporters that PR folks employed as a tactic to get their product stories scooped up by the press. Instead, companies are communicating and collaborating with the media through social channels on subjects that are vetted for relevance.
Social-Media Changes to Media Relations Landscape
Among the major changes to this media relations landscape that impacts our content-marketing strategies are the following:
1. PR-to-media communications through social channels: Journalists, bloggers, and analysts often prefer communicating to PR representatives through Twitter and other social channels. A study by Cision, in fact, found that 25 percent of them now prefer this route over phone calls and e-mail.10
2. Urgent demand for quality content: The decline in traditional publications, shortened news cycles, instant broadcasting through social mobile technologies, and news migration to brand publishing puts all the more pressure on journalists to expand their horizons and broaden their networks for researching stories.
3. Searchable content: Newsworthy content can be readily discovered through search engines and social graphs, making it less required to pitch your content.
4. Searchable journalism: Numerous directories and story topic solicitors are available to help marketers find the right opportunities for parking their content.
5. Scalable content to assemble news: The transition from costly online newsroom repositories to scalable content across video, photo, and text libraries simplifies the job of journalists having to decipher what is newsworthy.
With the changing landscape calling for more relevant and expedient content delivery, as well as relationship building through social media, marketers have an opportunity to exploit what was traditionally the domain of legacy PR firms. These large agencies would regularly court select journalists and analysts often in preparation for press releases or damage control. Today, this news would be pre-empted by social channels way too fast for traditional media to respond. Instead, media has moved online while masses of brand publishers, bloggers, and small business marketers smother the social channels with real-time news. Attention, therefore, goes to the first to disclose credible and relevant insights. This means that your name recognition on social-networking channels and content recognition in search trumps the best of PR agency pitches.
Building Media Relationship Strategies
Despite the change in landscape, many aspects of engagement between PR representatives and their media counterparts remain the same. Journalists still have to be courted, pitched, and helped. Social media has merely expedited the process and broadened the horizons for media relations. Finding the right match between a journalist seeking stories on newsworthy topics and a marketer whose content resonates with that topic becomes more natural in today’s social settings. Prior to social media, PR agencies often exploited their personal relationships to force this connection.
Today, a number of directories and social networks have simplified this match-making discovery. Services like Muck Rack can help discover journalists by publication source and topic. Others like JournalistTweets curates tweets from journalists often as a way to sort them by industry topics. LinkedIn groups have been formed that huddle agencies, marketers, and media folks around common industry topics. Finally, services like Help a Reporter Out (HARO) will regularly solicit content on topics sought by journalists.
Once you discover the right journalist interested in your topics, you need to have the journalists discover you. The good news is that journalists and industry analysts are able to find you more than ever before as they comb through your photo galleries, executive bios, online press releases, webinars, case studies, and other content relevant to their story interests. This is where your company and personal profiles help. Make sure your Twitter profile, for example, reflects the topics for which you want journalists to recognize your areas of expertise.
Courting these journalists who now have you on their radar is much like that suggested earlier when courting influencers. Like influencers, journalists appreciate when you take the time to research their interests and respond to their own content. Simple responses to tweets and posts with thoughtful commentary could replace what the martini lunches accomplished on Mad Men. This further alleviates the need to pitch as the journalists will begin to follow you and potentially subscribe to your content. And unlike the “one-time” press release, your tweets could be posted more regularly and on a broader range of potentially relevant topics.
The key to staying on the radar of these journalists with your content is to make it easy to deal with you and your content. This is where social-sharing buttons, RSS feeds, and subscriptions help. But it is equally important to ensure your SEO strategy reflects the terms these journalists are likely to use in their own coverage of a breaking news item or themes they cover on a regular basis. In effect, your SEO efforts should extend to your entire online newsroom.
Once the connection is made and content is proposed, marketers have a great opportunity for publication if they see its value from the eyes of the journalist. With so many new faces arriving out of the social-media channels, journalists get inundated with irrelevant and overpromoted content often from unknown sources. Some steps taken by marketing pros to get their content at the top of the stack include the following:
1. Understand their agenda: Taking the time to understand a journalist’s perspective and story angles can go a long way in capturing interest. This means making your content more about the bigger story surrounding your offerings or company announcement than the announcement itself.
2. Simplify the delivery process: Since content can be atomized across video, imagery, and text, organizing your newsroom into manageable assets can simplify the job of story assembly. Many journalists are turned off to the e-mail attachments that attempt to cover all bases. A better approach is to abbreviate the story and show paths to embellishment on your social-media galleries or website newsrooms.
3. Use executive bylines: Allowing journalists access to your executives can go a long way especially when their quotes or commentary provide fresh insights.
4. Make it understood: Telling your story in rich media format like video invariably works better than the best of any textual content. Moreover, if the story is told in the form of a customer testimony, it will likely register more with a reporter seeking an intimate audience connection.
One of the most effective ways to attract new followers is through your own social-media profiles. Cross-promoting your social-media presence across all of your assets increases the chances that new visitors will join you elsewhere. And much of this is dependent upon the quality, consistency, and personality of the brand displayed in each of your profiles.
Although social-networking platforms may differ widely in their audience appeal, the profiles of high-performing brands typically have the following characteristics in common:
1. profiles are highly visual;
2. follow buttons and links are prominently displayed on each profile for all other channels where the brand is a participant;
3. profiles are consistently optimized around key word phrases assigned by the brand for high search results;
4. personal profiles are used to augment the reach of company pages;
5. social handles and links are included in e-mail signatures, website pages, and offline collateral;
6. accolades, endorsements, and recommendations are captured in the professional networks;
7. profiles are written around benefits gained from the company’s offerings; and
8. the design appearance of the profile theme is consistent across platforms while maintaining a form, fit, and function intended by each platform (Figure 7.3).
Figure 7.3 Summary Model of Enlisting Followers with a S-T-A-M-P
Notes
1. Table generated by and permission granted by CMO by Adobe.
2. Jeffery Rohrs. Audience: Marketing in the Age of Subscribers, Fans & Followers. New Jersey: Wiley. 2014.
3. Neal Schaffer. Maximize Your Social. New Jersey: Wiley. 2013. p. 96.
4. “2014 Social Media Marketing Industry Report” published by Social Media Examiner’s Michael Stelzner (http://bit.ly/1uPwOKL).
5. “30 Reasons to Market Your Business on Pinterest in 2014” by NerdGraph Infographics (http://bit.ly/1yjTwzu).
6. “Pinterest: How You Can Rock This Social Media Platform” by Heidi Cohen (http://bit.ly/1o9KRpB).
7. “8 Ways to Get More Pinterest Followers” contributed by Pam Dyer to Pamorama (http://bit.ly/1u7YTiH).
8. “Instagram User Generated Content Rocks Marketing Results” by Heidi Cohen (http://bit.ly/1uNgdbz) and “New Data Shows the Importance of Hashtags on Instagram” by Dan Zarrella (http://bit.ly/1oaur0j).
9. “6 Ways to Instantly Blow Up Your Instagram” by Kim Garst (http://bit.ly/1mnaJ5U).
10. “The Social Media Pitch: What Do Journalists Prefer?” contributed to Cision by Lisa Denten (http://bit.ly/1qznSE7).