Category Archives: Social Media Strategy

Best time to post on Facebook

When is the best time to post on Facebook?

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Understanding when the best time to post can have a huge impact on your engagement rate and consequently increase the reach of your content. A recent study by social campaign management company OfferPop looked at approximately 500,000 Facebook posts by major brands using their platform, examining the day of the week and time of the post to look for how engagement levels were affected.

They found that engagement level – calculated by the number of fans who liked, shared or commented on a post – on a Friday was 64% higher than posts added on a Monday. Continue reading →

Twitter Archive

Twitter launches Archive function

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Today Twitter announced a fantastic new service that allows you to access all your old Tweets.

Your Twitter archive will be downloadable and allows you to view your Tweets by month, or search your archive to find Tweets with certain words, phrases, hashtags or @usernames. You can even engage with your old Tweets just as you would with current ones.

To get your archive, go to the Settings area and look for the new “Your Twitter archive” feature. You can then request to access your archive – due to high demand at the moment there is a bit of a back log so you might receive an error message first time around. As I said, this hasn’t rolled out completely yet and I haven’t been able to have a play but It’s promised to go global over “the coming weeks and months.” Watch this space!

Using Social Media for B2B

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I just came across this interesting infographic from based on the results of a survey of more than 500 B2B marketers conducted by Eloqua. The results highlighted that 64% of UK businesses use social media as a marketing tool, with the most popular reasons being for brand awareness (83%), encouraging social sharing (56%) and gaining trust and followers (55%). Less than a third (32%) said they use social for lead generation and just 16% use social to assess market perception of their brand.

In my experience using social media for B2B can be more of a challenge and requires an effective content strategy to ensure you are able to establish thought leadership or add value to what you are saying and gain the attention of your audience.

Eloqua have created a rather sexy micro site to show the results but the main one have been summarise in the infographic below. I thought it was interesting that 43% of companies still have no strategy in place for their social media activity. Come on now!

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Insta 2

Using Instagram to drive brand awareness and engagement

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Instagram is a mobile application that allows users to take a photo and apply a digital filter to it allowing the most amateur photographers to turn into a photography whizz in seconds. It recently grabbed the world’s attention in April when it was snapped up by social networking giant Facebook fora respectable $1bn a sure sign that it is something keep an eye on. It was originally available only on iphone but launched to Android users in 2012 which has seen its number of users grow from 15m to 80m since the beginning of the year, an increase of over 400% in just seven months.

The use of Instagram among top brands has also increased, with new data from Simply Measured showing that 40% of the brands on the Interbrand 100 now have an account on the mobile photo sharing service. Brands such as MTV, Starbucks, Burberry, Tiffany & Co. and Nike have a huge following with numbers topping or near half a million followers. This is unsurprising as it offers them the chance to generate user generated content with an edge that is far more likely to receive positive feedback. Econsultancy have highlighted some recent examples of how these brands have used it, although I would question the supposed creativity of what they have done.

Instagram should be treated like all other social channels and should be considered as an element in a holistic social media strategy. It has the means to build your brand, share news and engage in dialogues and it allows companies to engage with their peers and customers by sharing snapshots of their products, culture and people in an intimate and creative way. Pinterest has shown that image–based posting can be extremely valuable for brands, so it would be foolish to ignore such a readily available stream of content.

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Facebook and the science of sharing

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Facebook now accounts for 52% of the 4bn pieces of content shared everyday through social which means marketers need to work hard to understand how to make the most of this opportunity and maximise the exposure and engagement around their content.

Additionally, social “signals” on Facebook and Twitter, such as likes, tweets and shares, are now know to correlate “very strongly” to higher rankings in Google  search. The idea being that as more people share content on social networks it becomes a better indicator of the ‘best’ and most valuable content the search engines want to return.

The presentation below from the Facebook Marketing Conference 2012 by Nils Mork-Ulnes and Judith Lewis highlights the 7 types of ‘social sharers’, explains why and where they share and offers some explaination for how marketers can use this information to shape their content strategy.

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Social Media for Events – Tips, Tricks and Tools

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Social media is undeniably revolutionising the way event managers are having to plan, promote and review their events. Previously events followed a fairly static format – You would be invited via post, email or word of mouth, you would attend the event and be spoken at and then you would leave after perhaps filling out a quick questionnaire to let the organisers know how you found it.

Nowadays, there are a multitude of channels that you can find out about an event through Facebook, Twitter and other social sharing platforms, when you are at an event you can follow a live stream via a #hashtag to gain insight into how other people are finding it, pick up highlights and find and follow other attendees and most significantly you can vent any frustrations very publicly and in real time. All this means event managers need to quickly pay attention to these valuable and often free channels that can help them plan better events and understand what attendees like and don’t like about them.

This presentation is designed to help event organisers from the planning stages right though to monitoring the back channel and engaging on the day.

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