Social Media: Stop It With Pointless Metrics

From Martin McDonald:

We’ve all been there, sat in a meeting with your boss, or client, and they’ve said something like:  “Our competitors have got 40,000 Facebook likes and 20,000 followers on twitter more than we do, we need to double down on our Social Media!”.

Let’s be perfectly clear, tracking social media based on likes, or follower numbers, is a pointless metric. For a start, both can be easily gamed, but increasingly platform are moving towards more sophisticated content targeting which for many companies means their chances of getting an ROI out of social media is significantly reduced.

I couldn't agree more.  I remember when we were first launching our social media sites for our brands at a casino/hotel company I was working.  We were so obsessed with gaining followers, yet no one was really engaging with the content we were providing.  Gaining followers was important, but if we weren't producing relevant content, then the followers would not lead to any brand equity.  

The analytics that Facebook and Twitter are putting out are a good start:

Social media should never be considered a “broadcast medium” ,  its no longer suitable as a one to many distribution – it should be considered a discussion medium, where you can engage your audiences with your message, your brand and your personality.

Moving away from messaging and towards discussion and interaction reveals the true metrics you should be concerned with: Engagement rates!

Measuring Social Media Effectively

Thankfully, both Twitter and Facebook provide lots of metrics, and have robust, free, analytics platforms.

Twitter recently revamped their entire analytics platform and its accessible to everyone with an account just by going to http://analytics.twitter.com and it provides in depth statistics on a per tweet basis. 

Being able to manage engagement has always been something I have been very interested in.  Content is king and just broadcasting what you're selling or information that doesn't appeal to the many of your followers will result in ignoring your messages.  This is very similar to email marketing.  

The Content Marketing Paradox - TrackMaven

TrackMaven has put out a white paper documenting 13.8 million pieces of content from 8,800 brands.  With the massive amount of options to post content, are organizations providing relevant content to their users.  The key to digital marketing is providing relevant (targeted) content to customers to provide great customer experiences.  With that in mind, have marketers been using relevant content or is there still a shotgun approach.  

TrackMaven documents Pottery Barn on an initiative they had to increase their "engagement" on Pinterest.  The mistake they made, which a lot of marketers make when it comes to social media channels, is to increase the amount of content.  Increased content = increased impressions = increased engagement, right?  Not so fast.

Pottery Barn Engagement and Posts

What is happening in this example is the number of pins are increasing, however the average interactions per pin is decreasing at about the same rate.  So in effect, they are working much harder to engage the same amount of customers.  I love this chart, because it shows that more is not necessarily better.  In the database marketing world, my push is to always increase frequency, whether that be purchases or trips to a casino, etc.  But the key metric to look when frequency starts to increase, is does the worth of the customer per transaction decrease and at what rate.  

In this case, frequency of pins is increasing, but the engagement is not, so the content is not relevant, there's just more of it.  Pottery Barn isn't the only guilty party when it comes to this tactic.  As TrackMaven saw, a lot of brands were implementing the same tactics.

The good news is Potter Barn (using TrackMaven software of course) was able to identify this and change tactics.  Instead of focusing on content designed to sell certain items, more like an advertisement, Pottery Barn started to pin content that helped their customers make their home better.  Of course Pottery Barn goods were front and center in this approach, but they posted less and focused on relevancy to their customer to change the engagement equation.  So the new equation is:

More relevant content = increased engagement

Pottery Barn results with new relevant content strategy

Much better content has resulted in the end goal, more engagement through Pinterest.    

DIB Digital Trends Report 2015_EMEA Part 2

In part 2 of reading through the Digital Trends Report for 2015, The next part has to deal with the areas of digital related business.  The big surprise to me is how high social media engagement ranks on this list.  Multichannel campaign management is still not receiving its rightful mindshare in organizations.  At 22%, this area should be right up there with targeting and personalization, it is that important.

I find these next responses fascinating.  The difference in this year and the next 5 years, especially in the area of multichannel campaign management is perplexing to me.  This is the age of campaign management and the respondents are thinking 5 years out.  That boggles my mind.  I do like that respondents are thinking customer experience is the most important item, but that is more of a culture change compared to the other items.  All the other items support the customer experience.  The fact that customer experience is viewed as a tactic or strategy is why I think this item will be talked about for years to come.  Multichannel campaign management, personalization, big data and content marketing are items that will enhance the customer experience, so these items are all striving for the same goal, to deliver relevant content to customers to enhance their experience.

This part of the study is a little perplexing to me.  Organizations want to enhance the customer experience, but there very little is being done in the area of geo-targeting.  Only 24% have this in their 2015 plan or are already using this technology.  For brick and mortar operations, this is the most exciting technology to me.  Using this in conjunction with multichannel campaign management is the ultimate targeted marketing.  

Even if the uses of this technology are just to enhance the data about customers, organizations should be implementing this technology sooner rather than later.  The ability to understand the behaviors of your customers in store and communicate with them if they exhibit certain behaviors is no different than how a customer behaves on a website.  Digital marketers have been enhancing their strategies on customer buying funnels on the web for years now, but not enough are jumping at the opportunity to do the same thing in brick and mortar operations.  

A good sign is importance organizations are putting in the cross channel journey of their customers.  The top 2 answers are what make up a big part of the customer experience.  The clear, concise message, regardless of the channel is the key to the ultimate customer experience. 

This is probably the most concerning part of this survey.  Most companies want to make customer experience across channels their number 1 priority, however the data is still an issue with most companies.  Only 37% of the companies feel they have the ability and the infrastructure to capture and act on the data.  

In the new age of marketing, data is the first and most important step in the marketing strategy.  Without laying a data framework to capture and properly analyze, the ultimate customer experience will be nearly impossible to implement.  Companies to focus on the data as much as the culture of being customer centric.  These two items go hand in hand.    

Social Media Study: E-Mail 40 times more Effective than Facebook and Twitter

So, after all the excitement about Facebook and Twitter as communities and marketing panaceas, a recent study by McKinsey & Company reports something counter-intuitive: good, “old fashioned” e-mails prove to be 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined.

That is, if your goal is to acquire customers, and not just share the latest family news or travel experience.

I don't really understand why they say this is "counter-intuitive".  I have believed for a long time that social media was not a good channel for businesses.  It costs a lot of money to be in those channels because of the immediacy that customers expect, but more importantly these channels are not targeted whatsoever.  When posting on Twitter or Facebook, everyone gets to see what is being posted.  Whether those are the customers you are trying to target or not.  It is an even worse channel when it comes to current customers.

It’s a lot of work, but the the research sighted Williams-Sonoma which reported a 10% improvement in response rates by personalizing their e-mails, based on the customer’s on-site and catalog shopping preferences.

Another interesting comment.  Of course there is better response when the emails are targeted to customer behavior.  When customers get offers that are tailored to their behavior they spend more, it is just a simple fact.  When email is used as a simple newsletter channel, they will get lost.  Don't over communicate and keep the offers tailored.  Those are the keys to effective email marketing.

Instagram and Youtube

People aren’t using Instagram for photos, WhatsApp for text, Line for stickers... they’re using everything for everything.

Seems to be dominated by the younger audience.  I look at my younger cousins and see their behavior with the apps.  They post and interact with many different social networks.  Not my cup of tea as much, but I use Twitter for most of my social network interaction, I post photos on both Instagram and Facebook so the family can see what's going on.  I use Linked In for business.

Is FB going to buy Whatsapp, Snapchat, Line, Kakao and the next ten that emerge as well? Sure, some of those will disappear, but it doesn't look like FB will crush the competitors the way it did on the desktop. On mobile, FB will be just one of many. 

I think this is the interesting thing about mobile also.  It is much harder to dominate like the desktop.  Moving between apps is so much easier than going back and forth between websites.  I think this is why the Chromebook is a flawed strategy.

The Three Tribes of Social Shopping

Do people share what they plan to buy, or buy what they share?

That’s the question my colleagues and I had to ask after discovering that a significant number of Pinterest users go on to buy the items they have pinned.  As we reported in Harvard Business Review, 21% of Pinterest users say they have purchased an item in-store after pinning, re-pinning, or liking it on Twitter, and 36% of users under 35 said they had done so. Look beyond in-store purchases, and the numbers are even bigger:

29% of Pinterest users have purchased something (in-store or online) after sharing or favoriting it on Pinterest

22% of Twitter users have purchased something after tweeting, retweeting, or favoriting on on Twitter

38% of Facebook users have purchased something after liking, sharing, or commenting on it on Facebook

Very interesting article.  What they still didn't answer is the act of sharing a driver?  Does the customer share because it is available to share or does the share drive a purchase? And the outcome is to monitor and ask a lot of questions from people who share your products on social media channels.  Sounds pretty pricey.  

For marketers, the opportunity of social lies in the ability to reach and inspire the “thinkers” and “leapers” — to find and drive sales from people who might never otherwise move from interest to commitment.

First you have to identify these people.  The key is predicting who is not going to purchase and nudge those potential buyers, that will optimize revenue.  If you nudge everyone with discounts or more ads, you might have just spent money on people who were already going to purchase. 

Is Twitter the ‘end of the civilized world’

I love sensational headlines.  Of course it's not the "end of the civilized world".  I believe it is a changing of the way we consume news and information.  People who are in control of those industries are scared, not because of Twitter can do to the world, but because of what Twitter can do to their livelihoods.   

Marketers, Go Back to Basics

"There's so much that's sexy in social media and in mobile right now," he said. "Anyone who's bought a smartphone in the last 18 months is doing some things they hadn't imagined yet." When they read about a big company launching a cutting-edge initiative, they want in — but the economics usually only make sense for large companies that have experimental budgets. Instead, he says it often pays to focus on bread-and-butter marketing (like direct mail) or even on technical innovations of the past few years that are effective, but less novel (like mobile websites).

In the gaming industry, direct mail is still king.  In fact, it's not really close with a response rate of over 4X then email alone.  Yet, many marketers get caught up in the sexy new marketing trends.  Social gets more attention than direct marketing, even though direct marketing brings much more profit.  Likes are revered, yet direct mail is boring and so yesterday.  Sometimes whats worked in the past is what will work in the future.