You Ask, I Answer: What's Working in Social Media Marketing? - Christopher S. Penn

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Paula asks, “What’s working in social media in 2018? What isn’t?”

In this video, learn the 3 things that aren’t working today and the more-than-half-dozen things that generate results in today’s social media marketing environment.

Let’s start with what isn’t:
– Broadcast only
– Unpaid only
– Automated only

What is working?
– Stronger points of view
– Somewhat unpleasantly, politics
– More broadly, a position or stance
– Algorithms favor engagement most
– Paid is an essential part, even if it’s just boosting posts
– Holistic approach across channels
– Source-level attribution analysis
– T-shaped media plan

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You Ask, I Answer: What's Working in Social Media Marketing?

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Machine-Generated Transcript

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In today’s episode, Paula asks what’s working in social media in 2018? and what isn’t really good question. This is a moving target. So this is being recorded towards the tail end of the year. But anything can change relatively quickly. So let’s start with what’s not working right now. Today, things that aren’t working or practices like being in broadcast only mode where you just dump your stuff out there and hope somebody notices it.

unpaid social media only is not working in 2018. It has been working in quite some time. Social Networks require you to invest actual dollars in them in order to get any kind of juice out of them and fully automated only social media also not working great that you can have partial partial social automation.

But you can’t do it all the way

you there’s simply no substitute for having a human doing at least part of the work in social media we can dig into that in a second. So what is working today number one in your social interactions in your social media work, stronger points of view matter

for good or ill we live in highly polarized very opinionated times and

as brands and companies are taking a position and having a very strong point of view does matter does get people to to engage with you and to remember you somewhat unpleasantly politics works really, really well being an active participant in the discussions that are happening it is extremely risky but if you want to if you want to have social working for you, it is some of the best stuff because it’s

The stuff people

don’t know if they want to talk about it, but they feel compelled to talk about it and participate in those discussions,

having a positions and stances in general taking a position on issues of the day, things that are topics on social good environmental,

social, and governance, the same things that are making people change, how they invest in the stock market are also things that

get people to participate with you on social media. So e s, g is the name of a particular some field of investing. Environmental social governance. People want to know the companies that they want to do business with are governed well and are using their money appropriately. They are paying attention to the environment and they are paying attention to core social issues.

that’s one of those things when it comes to what the algorithms are doing.

Right now, there is a tremendous focus on engagement, and particularly rich levels of engagement. So even take the three fundamental

actions people can take, like, comment, share, right? Whatever the like, or favorite fan or whatever you want to call that type of engagement. The little push the button is one. That’s the weakest signal of engagement. Because literally, your cat could do it. There is sharing, which is when someone shares your content. And then there’s competent when someone actually types out a response to you. All of the algorithms as of right now

tend to focus on foot to favorite commenting. And so

to the extent you can foster those discussions, you’ll do better I have seen particularly on LinkedIn the moment a post gets at least one comment, it starts to be seen by more and more people until you get a substantial amount of visibility

paid is an essential part even if you’re just boosting You know, one

host today you need to be doing something with paid social media. One of the better deals if Twitter is your network, one of the better deals Is there a $99 a month, you know, promote mode.

It’s not bad.

We’ve been testing at a trusted insights now for a couple of months and stop bad. It relies on you posting content that people will find valuable anyway, but

it does its job. And in terms of a consistent always on easy to manage program. It’s difficult to be only if your audience is on Twitter.

Your approach has to be holistic across channels. So one of the things that

is important to do is to set down what each channel is for mentally and then do that. So YouTube, which is where this video is posted is very much the video channels where people go to watch videos, LinkedIn, their video capabilities right now are excellent, but LinkedIn is where people go for professional information.

Facebook is where people go to connect with their friends and their communities in the groups that they ran. And so that’s

there’s there’s that functionality and to yell at each other about politics,

Twitter’s where people go for the news

Instagrams, where people go for images. So thinking about

the media you create, if you want social to be really successful, and you’re willing to invest a lot of time and effort into it, you need to take a piece of content and idea and be able to split it up into all these different formats and then put them in the appropriate format on the appropriate channel. Now,

I don’t do this personally, because I don’t have time

and me personally, I’m unwilling to pay somebody to do that for me. Right now. I am working on some machine learning stuff to try and

do that a little bit more. But for right now, I don’t do that unless if I was running this for a company.

would absolutely say, yeah, this is how you need to divide up your content and have the same idea, but have a taking approach across channels, optimizing for each channel as appropriate. If social was a key driver, which, by the way, brings me to another thing you need to absolutely, positively be doing strong attribution analysis of social channels. One of the things that goes wrong when people do attribution analysis as they do it to clustered

and what I mean by that is that they, they say, social media is a channel Okay, let’s, let’s figure out what’s working in social media as a part of like search and referral and email.

Social isn’t a channel every individual network as a challenge. Each network performs differently. So when you’re doing your attribution analysis, it’s really important to differentiate among the different channels. How does Twitter work for you, how does Facebook work for you? How does YouTube work for you? How does medium work for you and do it by source

Rather than social media, it’s too difficult to get an idea of what’s working from that broad grouping. So make sure you’re doing an attribution analysis correctly.

Finally, if you don’t have a ton of time, go for what I would call the T shaped media plan you’ve all heard in in in marketing the T shaped person who’s broadly good at a little bit of everything but focused on one thing for you

if you are if you don’t have time to be good at every channel, pick one and said that’s the one I’m going to be really really good here I’ll check the box acknowledging I get terrible results on the things you’re just checking the box on but I’m the one that you’re great on double down on that triple down quadruple down on until

you’re making stuff for that channel so my to that I focus on because the format favor that our LinkedIn video and YouTube video that’s where my focus is right now and I’m getting great results out of that.

We’re getting less good results out of things like Facebook, I’m getting almost no results. But I’m acknowledging I checked the box on it to make sure that I’m there in case somebody looks, but it’s not my focus. And as a result, I don’t get the results. So

lasting or leave you with is you unless you are dedicating a person to each channel, you cannot be good at everything.

Because there’s so much different about every single channel. And the channel has gotten so deep now that you need to have specialization, so you can’t be at the Instagram and Facebook star and a Google star and a Twitter star and a YouTube star, you have to be good at one place first, and then branch out as you have the revenue and to end the awareness to support it. So that’s what’s working and social media at the end of 2018,

your results may vary. And I guarantee you in three months this video will be out of date, but these are things that are

broader trends. So I would say most of them, particularly things like

engagement and that T shaped person or safe bets for at least a year. As always, please submit your questions below in the comments and subscribe to the YouTube channel on the newsletter I’ll talk to you soon. Take care want help solving your company’s data analytics and digital marketing problems. This is trusted insights.ai today and listen to how we can help you

You Ask, I Answer: What’s Working in Social Media Marketing?

Machine-Generated Transcript

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