Dan Sinder

Thursday, April 7, 2016

The Law of the Double-Peak: How to Maximise the Marketing Potential of Any Social Network

Over the past few years, social media marketing has shifted a great deal, and we've almost reached a point where what works to drive engagement and clicks on a social network one day, may not the next.

This fast paced movement and rapid change isn't an accident. It's an essential part of any social network's progression.

If you look closely at the evolution of the biggest social networks out there, a trend emerges and two clear periods of opportunity stand out for marketers. We call it the law of the double-peak, and it's a transition every social network goes through:

waves graph white@2x

The two peaks of opportunity on any social network

The organic peak

When a social network is emerging and growing towards mainstream popularity, the key opportunity for brands tends to be organic reach (Facebook circa 2009, Instagram in 2015, Snapchat in 2016).

At this stage, individuals and brands who want to build an audience are usually focused on figuring out the platform (what do users want to see? which metrics matter?) and creating engaging, unique content that carries their brand message.

During the organic growth phase business KPIs often focus on building an audience, engagement, and amplification (shares, RTs, for example).

The paid peak

As a social network matures, organic reach and engagement will start to plateau and eventually begin to drop. The tactics that helped you build an audience will become increasingly less efficient and what you have now is a system that works a lot more like Google Adwords, or any other more established form of advertising, where reach is paid for.

The transition from organic to paid is an emotional one for marketers, and it takes some adjustment. Not everybody gets to find you organically anymore, and the tactics you've honed to increase organic reach are no longer as successful. But when you take a step back, there's also an enormous opportunity to drive even greater value for your business through paid channels.

As networks transition towards the paid peak, business KPIs tend to become far more focused on driving clicks, conversions, downloads, and sales.

Here's the law of the double-peak in action:

Facebook: From Organic to Paid

From around 2009 to 2012, Facebook was the place to build an audience organically. With an understanding of what content people were craving and engaging with on Facebook; some creative ideas and brilliant execution you could build a substantial audience without directly paying for it.

That's not to say it was easy to build an audience organically between 2009 to 2012, but it was certainly doable, and a large number of brands had a ton of success with brilliant, creative content (and tiny advertising budgets).

Between 2011 and 2012, Facebook hit the organic peak. And starting around April 2012, Facebook's organic reach begun to plateau at around 16% as the social network began to edge brands into sponsoring posts to increase reach.

Fb-reach

From 2012 to 2014, as Facebook matured as a business, organic reach plummeted so much so that in 2014 organic reach had dropped to around 6% for all pages and for large pages with more than 500,000 likes, the number was just 2%.

The below graph from Social@Ogilvy's “Facebook Zero: Considering Life After the Demise of Organic Reach,” highlights this demise:

Organic-Reach-Chart-2

When reach hit as low as 2% in February 2014, Facebook had all but become a pay-to-play advertising platform and the below chart from Business Insider shows the rise of Facebook's desktop and mobile advertising revenue:

FB-ad growth

Now, in 2016, there are still tremendous opportunity to market your business on Facebook, but it's shifted from organic to paid, and those who have been maximizing the value of Facebook dark posts and the social network's other advertising products over the past year-or-so have seen significant results.

Based on a survey, 78% of social marketers told Forrester they're very satisfied with the value Facebook ads provide.

As with any advertising platform, Facebook will gradually become more and more saturated (there are already over 3 million advertisers on Facebook) and the late adopters probably won't see the same disproportionate success as current advertisers. But it'll still be one of the most powerful advertising platforms we've ever seen.

The 3 stages of social network growth (and the tactics you need at each stage)

waves graph white@2x

Early Adopters

When any new social network launches, it's first and most important challenge is to find product / market fit and at this stage, many of the users will be techies, marketers and the early adopters who jump on all the latest products and trends to test the water.

From a brand and business perspective, it's worth paying attention to, understanding the user behavior and experimenting with platforms at the early adopter stage ready for ~~when~~ if it hits the mainstream. But the vast majority of time and dollars should be focused on mainstream and mature networks where you can reach a larger number of your audience.

When a network is at the early adopters stage it'll usually go one of two ways: it'll disappear, or continue growth towards mainstream popularity. And it's only when platforms begin to march towards the mainstream that they're worth fully investing in (for example, how Snapchat has grown in the past 12 months).

Products at this stage:

Beme

Peach

Anchor

Key takeaway: When a promising new social network emerges, start testing the water to figure out how your business could use the platform if it continues to grow BlogThis!Share to X Share to Facebook Share to Pinterest

Cash for Brampton Beast hockey team 'inappropriate,' mayor says

Brampton council voted 8-2 recently to provide $1.5 million over three years for the ECHL's Brampton Beast hockey team.

Uninterruptible Power Supplies for Supervisory Controllers

Howdy,

Any of you have recommendations or specs on UPS's to protect Supervisory Engines? We lost 2 NAE's and 2 JACE's due to brownouts in our school district:eek2:. I put in Tripp-Lite UPS's afterword, but I've been reading up a little on AVR (Automatic Voltage Regulation) on some UPS's and bought one for my own home computer at a real decent price.

I need to spec these out for our school district. Any experiences with these out there for this application?

Thanks

Outdoor receptacle not working

In December, I went to plug in Christmas lights in my front outlet. It did not work. I have not had a problem with electrical before. The home was built in 1987 by Pulte. A few things to keep in mind

1. Outlet is not a GFCI

2. The subdivision is on extremely high water table.

3. Electric yard/landscape/pathway light control module used to be in outlet. During a thunderstorm seven yrs ago, home was struck by lightning. Outlet blew off of house onto sidewalk and air conditioner was fried.

An electrician repaired?replaced? outlet, and I haven't had a problem until December. I have not tried back outlets, but none are GFCI, breaker is not tripped.

Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Behind-the-Scenes: How This Agency Saves 40 Hours Per Week With Its Social Media Sharing

We've found it to be the case that with social media marketing, you're either a) doing social in addition to so many other roles, b) doing social for way more than one client, or c) doing social and wishing you had the bandwidth to try bigger and bolder things.

The solution? Having more time!

Of course, time isn't easy to come by, which makes finding a good workflow and choosing the right tools immensely important.

WebpageFX runs social media for hundreds of clients, and switching to Buffer has saved them over 100 hours in the content creation process. As the team grows, the savings continue to mount: WebpageFX shaves 40 hours a month off the usual time it would take to create, schedule, and analyze the content they send to social.

How did they find this significant savings? The team was gracious to share their insights on how they do social for their clients and the ways that they've found to optimize their workflows with social media.

WebpageFX team

A key agency workflow to save hours and hours on social

WebpageFX runs a full digital agency, with services ranging from SEO (their bread-and-butter) to web design to social media. As the agency has grown rapidly, so too has the client list and projects for WebpageFX's social media team.

As they grew, they found their previous workflows and tools weren't scaling in the same way.

Previously, the team was manually transferring all of its social media updates in bulk to their social media tool.

When the team switched to Buffer, it all happens in one smooth flow now.

The WebpageFX account managers connect with clients to learn what kind of content makes the most sense to focus on.

The WebpageFX team creates the content right within the Buffer dashboard, and the content automatically slots into the preset, custom schedule.

The client logs in to review the content and make any tweaks or edits necessary.

Done! The content goes out on schedule!

This in-app workflow has been key for WebpageFX and their growing list of clients and account managers. Here's how social media manager Katie Goodling describes it:

With our previous social media tool, we had one team member who was responsible for scheduling all of our social media posts through the tool, for all networks, for all clients. It was very crazy because we only had one account. So we had to use the bulk uploader. It just took her a lot of time with formatting the CSV files, making sure everything was accurate. It worked for a while. I would say she probably did that for like a year and a half.

Then as our team started to grow and we got new client accounts, we had to find something different. Uploading the content was just taking up so much of her time. Even for all of us to go in and learn how to use the tool, it just didn't make sense. I was personally very interested in finding a new solution. I tested a few things, a few different tools. Buffer happened to be one of them.

When I saw all we could do, I was like, “Oh my gosh. We have to do this.” …

Once we figured out Buffer would save us, at that time, 40 hours per month, we had to make the switch! That was back when we had half the accounts we have now. If we were still doing it that way, we'd have to have at least 5 people scheduling content all the time.

So we use Buffer. That's how we craft our content. If we're working on our monthly editorial calendars for our clients, we use Buffer. We'll go in there, we'll write the post, we'll recommend when we want it to be scheduled for: the date and time, upload any photos, videos, links, whatever it may be.

Our clients really love it because we can just send them a note and say, “Hey, your next month's content is up on Buffer. Go ahead and review it.” They have their own login. So they can log in and see only their networks and none of our other clients, which is really nice.

They love that they can actually just click on things and change things. Whereas before in our other social media tool, we really couldn't do that. We would be training clients to use the other tool, and it's a lot harder to use.

Buffer's really simple for them. They can just scroll down, click the post, and make a change. I would say all of our clients love it. Most of them use it. There might be one or two clients that would prefer to get it in a spreadsheet or something like that, but overall, Buffer has been the absolute best solution for us.

It's been a huge success. It's such a time-saver for us because we're showing the clients their content within the Buffer interface. It's clean, it's simple, it's easy for them to use. Our clients are our number one priority, so making their lives easier is very important to our team.

Since we joined Buffer almost a year ago, my team has saved at least 100 hours from the manual bulk scheduling we used to use!

– Katie Goodling, WebpageFX

How to measure ROI from every post

Once the posts are scheduled and published, the next step of the process begins for WebpageFX: Analyzing the results.

There are lots of different ways to gauge success, depending on which social media metrics matter most to you. For WebpageFX and their clients, there is always one North Star metric for everything goes out on social media: the impact on a business, the ROI.

I feel like we're a little bit different than a typical social media agency, in that our overall business at WebpageFX is very focused on marketing and ROI, not just impressions. We don't care about impressions. We care about action.

Are people going to the website? Are they spending a lot of time on the website? Are they converting? That's what really drives our social media team as well. Of course we want to have that positive relationship with our customers. We want to provide customer service for our clients, but ultimately at the end of the day, our goal is to improve their businesses.

We use URL tags to track each post, and then we pull them up the stats in Google Analytics. We have specific audience segments saved with the parameters we typically use for our UTM tag so it saves us time.

For example, let's say I'm posting on a client Facebook page. One of my clients, they do a lot of weekly promotions, so I'll have the campaign named “FB” and, if the promotion is giving away a car for instance, I'll have an abbreviation for that and then I'll put the date of the update that I'm posting. Then when I go in Google Analytics, I have a segment set up that I can literally pull anything that has “FB,” the promotion name, and the campaign name. It pulls it all up and it's in this long list. I can look at how many people visited, how much time they spent on the page, did they convert, things like that. We use a lot of custom dashboards and reports in Google Analytics.

Our reporting is very innovative. We trust our team members to do the best, so we all have different ways of optimizing, reporting, and getting amazing results. For me, to save time, I run most of my posts that I don't promote with ad spend to using the automated tags within Buffer. If it's specific promoted posts that I'm putting through Power Editor on Facebook and advertising, that's when I use the Google URL builder more. I also have custom dashboards set up in Google Analytics.

It's a brilliant process for tracking the individual performance of social media posts, social channels, campaigns, and dates. Here's a quick run through again of how WebpageFX has it all set up:

1. Begin with a UTM naming convention for the links you share to social media

UTM parameters are the extra bits that you can add to the end of a URL to help with tracking. You can turn a link like

https://buffer.com/agency

into a link like

https://buffer.com/agency?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=promocode

The link still goes to the same place and provides the same experience for the end user. (Google has a really quick and simple tool for building out these longer UTM links.)

In order to make things easy to track, you can work from a UTM template that includes the same names for the different variables. In most cases, a UTM string will include a “source,” a “medium,” and a “campaign.” You can sometimes bundle quite a bit of info into the campaign variable alone. Here's a sample UTM link with the different elements:

https://buffer.com/agency?utm_source=FB&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=cargiveaway

Source is Facebook

Medium is social media

Campaign is a car giveaway promotion (wow!)

And here's all that within a single campaign variable:

https://buffer.com/agency?utm_campaign=FB-cargiveaway-040216

2. Add your UTM parameters to your links

You can do this with the Google URL builder tool, or you can set this directly from within your Buffer dashboard (available on Business plans and above).

3. Share your update

4. Check Google Analytics to see how it performed

Within Google Analytics, you can spot your UTM performance in the Acquisition > Campaigns view. From within this view, the default is “campaign,” and you can switch also to see “medium” and “source.”

Also, the way WebpageFX has theirs set up is with advanced segments, which automatically filter the data according to UTMs. Here's a bit more info on how to set up an advanced segment.

(Even more) Stats that matter to clients

In addition to ROI, sometimes clients might like to see the standard social stats also. These include things like

Engagement

Clicks

Reshares

Followers

The good news is that most social media tools will offer this level of reporting automatically. Within the Buffer dashboard, there is a section for top posts, analysis, follower trends, and more.

Some of my clients like to see the top tweets, the most popular Facebook post, and things like that. It is very convenient for me to go ahead and show them how they can look at that on their own. Or sometimes we do include it in our monthly reporting.

Key challenges for agencies

It was amazing to hear about all that Katie and the WebpageFX team have figured out: time-saving workflows and actionable analytics are two huge elements of social media management.

And in working on a daily basis with the clients they serve, Katie and her team are well aware of the challenges that exist to bridge the gap between client and agency - and also the challenges that exist to keep creating content at such a big scale.

Challenge-wise… agency-wise, I would say staying on top of all the different businesses that you're servicing. For example, our client base is so diverse. We have heavy equipment dealers, we have casinos, we have tourism attractions, we have e-commerce stores. We're all over the place and I think one of the challenges we face is getting to know those businesses inside and out. We have it down to a science now but it's always a challenge, especially if you're growing, bringing even more clients on. We need to stay on top of it and we need to know basically everything, just like we would if we were an internal employee at those companies.

I think just that learning curve and the beginning of a campaign is very challenging and learning the style, the tone, and of course, what your client likes, what your client doesn't like. We welcome any feedback, any opportunity to learn really, we're open to anything.

I would also say just creating content is always a challenge, because at an agency, you only have so many resources. We aren't in-house, we can't walk down the hallway and take a picture of something cool that's happening on premise. That's another challenge.

We really try to do a good mix of evergreen content and things that are going on now for the business: deals, promotions, things like that. Also, custom images are very engaging - like I said we use Canva a lot. We try to keep it pretty interesting but that's definitely a thing that will always be a challenge for any agency because you're not actually on premise, but we make it work and we see great results for our clients!

The WebpageFX social media marketing stack

Our theory, or our belief, is to do more with less.

To that end, Katie keeps the tools quite simple:

Buffer for all things social media management

Google Analytics to see the performance of tweets and strategies

Canva to create beautiful, shareable images to go with the content

Want the smoothest social media experience for your team and clients?

WebpageFX and hundreds of other agencies use Buffer to manage social media profiles, content, analysis, and more for each and every client. With Buffer, you'll get straightforward pricing that scales along with your business, 24/7 customer support, and an agency-first approach to the features that matter to you.

Join WebpageFX and 5,000+ other brands and business with a free 30-day trial of Buffer's most powerful social media features!

Image sources: Unsplash, Pablo, Canva

The post Behind-the-Scenes: How This Agency Saves 40 Hours Per Week With Its Social Media Sharing appeared first on Social.

Lost electrical power after trying to start engine

I was about to start my 2000 Saturn V6 sedan the other night when the engine cranked a few times and stopped. Then it would not crank anymore.

The battery acted like it was totally dead. Not even the lights would come on after that initial crank.

From past experience, when the battery is weak, the engine would crank slower or the starter solenoid would just click. But none of that happened.

Checked the battery with voltmeter and I got 12.1 volts. Charging up the battery tonight.

Any ideas where my problem might exist? Is there a main fuse that can disconnect the battery to the rest of the electrical system?

Thanks.

TTC boss Andy Byford revels in the chaos: James

In a job that requires a public face, Andy Byford's is as public as it gets.