Jen asks, “How important are conversations to social media goals?” It depends on the goal, and it depends on how conversations advance that goal. For example, if raw engagement is a goal, conversations with people – especially in public social media forums – may be very relevant. On the other hand, if website traffic from…
A friend recently asked what sorts of great B2B content marketing stuff I’ve read lately that I could recommend and I realized… I haven’t read any in a really long time. Not because there isn’t any to be had per se, but because who and what I read has diverged very far from marketing over…
Emily asks, "What are your favorite resources for social media strategy planning?" The overall strategy for social media planning is and should be tightly coupled to your overall digital marketing goals. What are you trying to achieve as a department or organizational unit? Demand generation? Lead generation? Ecommerce sales? That’s the starting point. On my…
Alexei asks, "What are the most essential steps to analyzing social media data with ‘engagement’ in mind?" The steps for measuring social media engagement are the same as any other digital marketing metric, and follow the 3 Whats: What happened? So what? Now what? Let’s dig into each of these steps. Social Media Engagement: What…
One of the pieces of advice I give frequently is to keep an eye on, to listen to your best customers. What are they saying? What’s on their minds? What do they care about, and how well aligned are you to it? For example, during contentious times, you may want to pause some social media…
What does it take to kill a community, especially an online one? I’ve been watching a community I’ve been part of slowly fade away, and one of the most striking things about this community’s decline is how little it took to disrupt it. Out of a crowd of almost a thousand, the thing that began…
Welcome to 2020 Rewind! In this series, we’re taking a look at the year that was and the wonderful shows and podcasts that had me on as a guest this past year. A fair amount of the time, I’d rather read than listen, but podcasts, live streams, webinars, and videos were how we made media…
Summary In today's episode, I walk through a real-world data science test of whether Instagram hashtags actually drive engagement by analyzing three million posts. Here's what this means for you. You get a practical playbook for validating bold marketing claims with rigorous data instead of taking them at face value. You'll also learn these concepts:…
Iain asks, “Fact or fiction. Using third party schedulers for social media posts get a kick shins as they haven’t come from the native platform tools?” Some testing has been done on this front, but none of the tests, from what I’ve read, have been done as rigorously as they should have been. Watch the…
Summary In today's episode, I tackle the question of whether third-party social media schedulers hurt your post performance compared to native platform tools. Here's what this means for you. You get a practical, statistically rigorous framework for testing this on your own accounts so your strategy rests on evidence rather than guesswork. You'll also learn…
