Saturday, December 21, 2019

How Brands Can Leverage Pinterest To Make Sales

Did you know:

Pinterest is such a key part of the buying journey for its users that over 90 percent of weekly active Pinners use Pinterest to make purchasing decisions.

Talk about buying power!

Not only are Pinterest users making purchase decisions on the platform, 83 percent say they are making purchases specifically based on the content they’ve seen from brands on Pinterest.

Pinterest is no longer simply a place to save ideas and build dream boards. Instead, Pinterest has turned into the world’s largest visual discovery platform.

And there are a lot of opportunities for brands.

We had a chance to chat with the team over at Pinterest about some of their best practices for brands looking to increase sales. We’re excited to share those lessons with you!

Here’s what we learned…

How people are using Pinterest

According to one survey, “47 percent of social media users saw Pinterest as the platform for discovering and shopping for products—more than three times higher than those who cited Facebook or Instagram.”

Seventy-seven percent of weekly Pinners have also discovered a new brand or product on Pinterest, and according to Pinterest, “people actually want to see content from brands while they’re on the platform–78 percent say it’s useful.”

Pinterest might not immediately come to mind as a platform to invest in for many brands, but it should.

Pinterest lives in a unique space on the internet where users are discovering content related to themselves and their aspirations rather than focusing on others, and this has turned it into a powerful platform for users to make purchasing decisions and discover new brands and products.

Clearly, Pinterest is not one to be ignored when it comes to your marketing strategy. Here’s how you can use the platform to drive sales.

How to leverage Pinterest for sales: 5 tips from the Pinterest team

There are some really simple ways that you can start leveraging Pinterest to reach new audiences and optimize your pins and profile for sales. Some of these tips might be easy to implement immediately while others might play into later strategies, let’s dive in!

1. Brand your pins

A whopping 97 percent of top searches on Pinterest are unbranded, according to the Pinterest team. For brands, this presents an opportunity to stand out and gain brand recognition through the platform.

Pinterest recommends adding a small logo in one of the four corners of your pin, this can be done really easily in a tool like Canva. You can play around with the design, of course, and add your logo wherever it feels best. In this example from Quip, they went with top centered to fit with the rest of the text on their image.

2. Create mobile-first content

As with most sites, mobile is extremely important on Pinterest. Eighty-five percent of Pinners are using the mobile app, so it’s important that your content appeals to them while they’re on their phones and appears properly in their feeds. If you’re linking back to your own content, it’s also important that the page that you’re sending users to is mobile friendly as well.

A tip from Pinterest here is to tailor your font size to phone rendering to make sure your fonts are legible on small screens and to design for a vertical aspect ratio. The ideal dimensions are 600 pixels x 900 pixels.

3. Create a similar look and feel

Have you ever clicked on a beautiful image on Pinterest only to be taken to a website that looks nothing like the pin? I have, and it left me really confused.

According to Pinterest, the best practice is to make sure your pins and your website have a similar look and feel, and that doing this pays off. In an analysis from Pinterest, they found that “Pins that went to landing pages with similar imagery had a 13 percent higher online sales lift.”

This example from Ettitude is really great. The pin they are sharing fits seamlessly in a lot of home decor and design tags on Pinterest.

And although their website uses different photos, it still has a similar feel to the pin.

4. Time your campaigns

A big element to social media marketing and campaigns is timing. When are people online and when are people talking about the things you want to talk about?

Luckily in the case of Pinterest, they release annual ‘Seasonal Insights,’ which helps take away some of the guesswork. A report that contains more than a dozen specific moments that take place throughout the year.

For example, their 2019 report shared that users start sharing holiday content in June all the way through December and that content related to the Summer starts getting pinned at the beginning of February.
They also have monthly trends reports. Here’s their latest for December 2019 trends on Pinterest, it shares specific trends like the search term ‘peach green tea’ is up 320 percent YoY!

These are great free resources that you can leverage to start timing seasonal campaigns around when people are starting to make specific seasonal purchasing decisions. I would never have thought that people start looking at holiday content in June but that’s super-specific information that can go a long way to help with timely campaigns.

5. Set up your shop

One of the main ways for Pinterest to help generate sales is for the products you are selling to be easily available through Pinterest. Luckily, the platform makes this really easy for brands to set up and feature prominently on their profiles.

Every Business profile on Pinterest has the ability for users to create a “shop” tab.

The shop tab is just what it sounds like, a place where users can go to see all of the products your brand is selling. On the flip side, brands can leverage that tab to share pins that link directly to their sales pages for the specific product.

Pinterest makes this whole process quite easy, they even have a method for importing new products through Pinterest Catalogs. All you have to do is have your data source approved and then as you add new products to your website, they get automagically added to Pinterest as well.

We hope this guide helps you get started with or double down on your efforts with Pinterest. Let us know about your experience with Pinterest in the comments!

If you want even more Pinterest resources, the Pinterest team has created a free Pinterest Academy with tons of lessons in there.

Thank How Brands Can Leverage Pinterest To Make Sales for first publishing this post.

Sunday, December 15, 2019

The Best Instagram Stories of 2019

Instagram Stories was one of the most dynamic social media channels in 2019. So much happened with Stories — from new developments with the product to strong returns on Stories ads and organic reach.

Over 500 million people use Instagram Stories every day.

I’m definitely among that group.

And at Buffer, Stories has been a major focus in 2019 as well. Within the Buffer product, we debuted Stories scheduling to help you plan and manage your Stories content, and we released advanced Stories analytics to help you know what’s working.

Not to mention, we had a ton of Stories podcast episodes in 2019, which you can find in our archives.

So when it comes to picking some of the best Stories campaigns of 2019, we really have a lot of options. And it’s hard to choose.

The Best Instagram Stories of 2019

We’ll run through a list of our favorites. If there are any favorites of yours that we missed, please do let us know by using #bufferpodcast on any social media channel.

Let’s get right to it then.

1. Tastemade

Some of the best Instagram content is food content. And Stories is no exception! Especially the folks at Tastemade.

Tastemade is a community of food, travel, and design lovers. Their website is chock full of beautiful food videos and shows. They do a great job translating it to their Instagram Stories.

In particular, their “tap fast” format has been so fun to watch.

That’s right. Many of the stories on the @tastemadeuk handle use “tap fast.” These Stories piece together dozens of photos in stop-motion fashion — each photo just a slight movement ahead of the previous. And then you are the one who animates all the images into a moving picture by tapping quickly from one Story to the next.

Collectively, it makes a self-propelled stop-motion video of a biscuit baking or a cooking dunking. It’s awesome.

And it’s good for your Stories stats, too. There’s a ton of incentive to tap all the way through to see how the Story ends up.

2. Brooklinen

Along with food content, music is another big theme for the year. You’ve probably seen your friends and colleagues sharing what they’re listening to on Spotify. You can share your songs straight to Instagram Stories from your Spotify mobile app.

Another way that brands have taken advantage of this is sharing playlists through Instagram Stories.

Brooklinen, for instance, has a great series of playlists. They’ve even branded them with their own name: Brooklinen Beats. Each time Brooklinen shares a a playlist on Stories, they add a swipe up link that sends people to Spotify to listen. Brooklinen debuted a new playlist every week at the start of 2019, and they’ve saved all their playlists to their Stories highlights for people to check out anytime.

3. Burrow

Next up, one of the most creative Stories we saw this year came from the furniture brand Burrow.

They basically created a coloring page for their audience to fill in.

Yeah, the set of Stories was called Dream Sofa. Burrow asked its followers to describe their dream sofa — it could be as wild and imaginative as they liked. Then Burrow provided the sofa template. Burrow shared a drawing of a couch — just the outline in black, on a white background. They posted this to the Burrow Stories, along with instructions on how their community could download the picture and add to it. Then people grabbed the template, added their own stickers and colors, and shared to their personal accounts. Burrow was able to re-share the Dream Sofa Stories back to the Burrow account.Talk about great community engagement and incredible user-generated content!

4. Potluck

For our next top Instagram Story, we’re going back to the world of food. Cookware brand Potluck had a great campaign based on one of the neatest — albeit underutilized — features of Instagram Stories: custom AR filters.

Potluck created its very own Instagram Stories filter called Yes Chef. The filter adds a chef hat and mustache to any faces in the photo.

Many people in their community ended up using the filter on their photos and tagging Potluck in the Stories. The Potluck team was then able to reshare and collect these photos into their own Stories collection, which remains on their profile in their Stories highlights.

Each time Potluck shares a new Yes Chef pic, they give a shout out and an @mention to the person who originally made the photo, another great way to build community support for the brand.

I thought it was also really neat how Potluck did a Story educating people on where to find the filter. Worked great for getting the word out about it!

5. Pattern Brands

Cookware brands really had some awesome Stories this year. Our next pick is from another cookware brand, or rather, from its parent company.

Pattern Brands, which release Equal Parts cookware products this year, had a fantastic series of Stories content that told a really compelling brand story.

(Pattern is the brand featured in our new podcast series that follows the introduction of Pattern, going from nothing to a new product over the course of a few months. You can listen to this series by searching for Breaking Brand wherever you listen to podcasts.)

Pattern’s Instagram Stories campaign is quite simple in concept. They created wallpapers that their audience could download and use as phone backgrounds. We’ll share a couple examples in our show notes. They’re beautiful.

And what’s particularly compelling about how they approached this is that they told a larger story: the backgrounds are watercolors in a soft, calming palette, designed to promote a sense of peace when you’re spending time on your phone. This is right in line with the brand story that Pattern is telling.

6. Allbirds

Allbirds does a great job of bridging the gap between product promotion and customer service. Allbirds uses some of its Stories to share answers to frequently asked questions about its products.

This strategy is such a wonderful display of customer service and value. Allbirds takes these FAQ Stories and adds them to their Stories Highlights so the FAQ is always visible from their Instagram profile. This gives potential customers the chance to find answers to their questions quickly and easily, right from the profile page, without having to wait any time at all to hear back from an Allbirds person.

7. Monica + Andy

Speaking of making great use of Stories highlights, Another Stories campaign we love is the way that brands have built out almost an entire library of content within their Stories.

Take Monica + Andy, for instance. The kidswear brand runs its own podcast, and each podcast episode gets a shoutout on the brand’s Instagram Stories.

What’s particularly great is that each Story shoutout follows a similar template. There’s a photo of the podcast guest plus some nice typography and titles. What Monica + Andy do then is take these Stories and put them all into a Stories Highlights. When you tap on the Highlights, you can thumb through the entire podcast archive, one after the other, and all the images look great and on-brand.

8. Its Nice That

The online design magazine puts together a weekly newsletter to share on their Stories at the end of every week.

It’s a ton of great content, packaged perfectly for Instagram. Each story is its own slide, designed with a unique background and with strong headline copy. You swipe up to go to the Its Nice That website to read more. They’ll share about five to ten articles each week this way — the top content and news from the past few days in a very digestible format.

9. Instagram Story templates

And then one final Stories trend that we really loved seeing this year was the rise of Instagram Story templates. We referenced this a bit earlier with Burrow’s cool example of the Dream Sofa. 2019 introduced a whole cottage industry of Story templates for brands.

A Story template is simply an image with graphics and text that includes a number of blank spaces for people to fill in their answers. Picture a questionnaire or a mad lib.

The Hopper blog listed a huge number of different options of ways to use these templates, many of which we saw on several brand accounts in 2019.The list includes:

Trending topics, like a “follow Friday” template or a “Five Women who inspire me” on International Women’s Day
Current affairs, like sporting events, where you can run a guess the score template
and a personal favorite of mine — Fill-in-the blank emoji templates where you pick an emoji that describes, say, your current mood or the weather or what you did today

How to say hello to us

We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!

Heather-Mae on Twitter
Dave on Twitter

Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Facebook, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.

Enjoy the show? It’d mean the world to us if you’d be up for giving us a rating and review on iTunes!

About The Science of Social Media podcast

The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode. It’s our hope that you’ll join our 27,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!

The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.

Thank The Best Instagram Stories of 2019 for first publishing this post.

Monday, November 18, 2019

Brand Secrets for Standing Out in a Crowded World

These days, we live in a world of infinite supply…

In just a few clicks, anyone can start a business. Anyone can create products, build an online store, publish ads, and reach an audience online. This means that every market is becoming flooded with businesses offering similar products, features, and solutions.

So to stand out you need to have a brand that your customers connect with, and care about deeply.

In this post, we’ll be sharing some tips and strategies to help you to build your brand. These insights all come from our new podcast series — it’s called Breaking Brand and it’s out there for you to listen to right now.

What exactly is a brand?

Before we jump into some strategies and tactics for creating a brand your customers will truly care about, let’s first look at what exactly a brand is.

The word “brand” is used a lot in marketing today. But what exactly does brand mean? That question that might sound simple… but is actually pretty complex, and there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer.

David Ogilvy describes a brand as “the intangible sum of a product’s attributes.”

Marty Neumeier, an author and speaker who writes about branding and innovation, says “a brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organization.”

And Camille Baldwin, one of the Pattern Brands founding team, and star of Breaking Brand, says “brand to me is identity. It’s all of the things that make up identity, your values, your principles, who you are, your characteristics and your intention.”

Brand to me is identity. It’s all of the things that make up identity, your values, your principles, who you are, your characteristics and your intention.
Camille Baldwin, VP of Brand, Pattern Brands

So to summarize… Your brand is the identity of your business, and how it makes people feel.

Now, let’s dive into some takeaways from Breaking Brand to help you build a buzzworthy brand that stands out against your competitors.

4 Ways to build a memorable brand

1. Know what your consumers care about

Most people are really good at explaining the “what” and the “how” of their business. For example, say you’re an accountancy company, describing the what and the how is pretty simple…

What you do is you help individuals and businesses to ensure their finances are in shape.
How you do it might vary, but it tends to involve some form of account management where you assist with invoicing or balance the books every month or quarter.

And the thing that will help one accountancy company stand out from its competitors is moving from the what and the how to the why.

The “why” is what will make a potential customer choose your business over another. The “why” is your differentiator.

In general, consumers aren’t too fussed about how you do your work — the tools you use, your internally processes, and things like that. What consumers care about is “why does this business matter in my life?”

And to go back to the accountancy example — we already explained the what and the how — but the “why” might not be so obvious. For example, if an accountancy company mostly serves small businesses, the “why” might freeing up time for the business owner to spend with family and friends.

So how do you find your why?

Customer research is a great place to start.

At Buffer we often do research interviews with customers to learn how our product helps them, and to better understand how they describe the benefits of Buffer. We’ve even had teammates spend the day with customers at their offices to see first-hand how Buffer fits into their routines and workflows.

And in Breaking Brand, Emmet Shine, co-founder of Pattern Brands, talks about the importance of knowing the customer when it comes to building a brand consumers will care about.

Before starting Pattern Brands, Emmett helped over 50 businesses launch to market, and one of those businesses was Sweetgreen, a restaurant chain selling healthy salads and grain bowls.

When working on the Sweetgreen brand and trying to understand its customers, Emmett and his team spent countless hours at Sweetgreen restaurants. They would watch how the staff would prepare salads, listen to how customers would place orders and immerse themselves in how the company works.

Essentially, they were trying to understand every tiny detail about what made Sweetgreen unique and special.

This enabled the team to craft a brand that really emphasised what customers were looking for from Sweetgreen and helped them to find their “why”.

Now Sweetgreen has over 75 restaurants and reportedly generated in excess of £100 million in 2018. So they clearly have a brand that fits what consumers are looking for.

2. Find the technical, functional, and emotional benefits of your business

Once you’ve done your customer research, you can begin to think about the various types of benefits your business offers consumers.

In episode one of Breaking Brand, Pattern’s VP of Brand, Camille Baldwin shares how the brand pyramid framework can help you to define those benefits.

Brand pyramids have been around since the late nineties, but still play a key role in brand strategy. Pyramids help you to answer fundamental questions about your business and its place in the market. Here’s an example brand pyramid from Insead Knowledge:

Three of the key elements of any brand pyramid are the technical, functional and emotional benefits your business offers consumers.

Technical benefits

At the bottom of your pyramid, you’re thinking about the technical benefits of your brand (labeled ‘Features and attributes’ in the above image). Essentially this will help you to define what you do as a company. At this stage you’ll want to ask questions like: How is this business benefiting the consumers? How will it make money? What are we offering?

For example, at Buffer we might say the technical benefit of our product is to manage all of your social media content and profiles in one place.

Functional benefits

Then, with the technical benefits of your brand defined, it’s time to look at the functional benefits you can offer consumers. Functional benefits are essentially what your customers get when they buy your product or service.

Functional benefits tend to focus on things like how a product can improve your life, help you stay connected to others or help you to make forward progress.

At Buffer, a functional benefit might be not having to hit publish manually every-time you want to share to social media. Or in the case of a car: a big, spacious family car will offer the functional benefit of space for your whole family to travel in comfort.

Emotional benefits

Next up, are emotional benefits. And these are really what makes one brand stand out from another.

Emotional benefits are how your brand makes someone feel based on the stories you tell consumers.

One emotional benefit of Nike, for example, is that its equipment will make you feel like a professional athlete. And at Buffer we might say the emotional benefit of our product is peace of mind knowing that your content will be posted to social media platforms at exactly the right time every time.

As you go through everything you’ve learned during your customer research phase, start looking out for emotion-based words your customers, or potential customers, use to describe your company or the problem you’re solving.

Whenever someone says “I feel” or “it made me.. happy, relaxed, proud, or healthy”, for example, this helps you to identify the emotional benefits your company delivers.

3. Craft a simple tagline and message

Just Do It, Think Different, I’m Lovin’ It…

Those are all examples of great brand taglines. By saying just two or three words, I bet you knew exactly which businesses I was talking about. And that’s the power of being able to boil your message down to something simple, and memorable.

In episode three of Breaking Brand, Emmett Shine, co-founder of Pattern Brands explains: “The thing about branding and marketing, is you can do years worth of research. But if you can’t boil it down to this thin sliced tagline it doesn’t matter.”

The thing about branding and marketing, is you can do years worth of research. But if you can’t boil it down to this thin sliced tagline it doesn’t matter.
Emmett Shine, Executive Creative Director, Pattern Brands

But this isn’t easy to do.

It took the Patten Brands team months of ideating and back-and-forth to land on their tagline “Enjoy Daily Life”.

But now that simple statement acts as a guiding light for everything they do. From the content they post on social media to the products they sell.

Boiling your whole business down to one sentence, or even just a couple of words can be very tough. And you can’t force it. One of the best ways to craft the perfect tagline is to facilitate brainstorms and create space for idea sharing. Another thing the Pattern Brands team has done was to journal about their business and riff on ideas in private too.

And sometimes the best ideas will come to you outside of the office. So don’t be afraid to think outside the box, and away from your desk.

Communicating a clear message in just a few words is very difficult. One way we’ve found to come up with taglines at Buffer is to start long and edit down.

So to begin with, write exactly what your business delivers for customers in as many words as it take — this could be a paragraph or two, maybe even longer. And remember to think about the emotional benefits here too, not just the technical and functional benefits you offer.

Next, you’ll want to take what you’ve just written and edit it down to just one or two sentences. Repeat that process to make it one sentence, or just a few words. Then take that final piece of copy and play with a number of different versions: Rewrite it, change out words, and experiment with different lengths. This process will help you to distill all of the thoughts you wanted to share about your business into a short, memorable tagline.

Now you might be wondering: “Why is a tagline so important?”

From personal experience, I know I’ve never bought a Mac because their tagline is “think different.” But having that tagline in places means that Apple has a clear mission, and everything it does — from the adverts it makes, to its keynote launches — is guided by that vision.

4. Ensure your business lives and breaths your brand

To be successful, and for consumers to trust your message, you have to live your brand.

For example, Nike says its mission is to “bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.” And the company sees every single person as an athlete, not just the pros.

But Nike doesn’t just say that, it lives by it.

That’s why the company focuses on creating the most innovative clothing and footwear, and why its advertising revolves around inspirational messages and stories.

Nike’s brand is reflected in every piece of content it puts out on social media. Just before writing this, I jumped over to Nike’s main Instagram account, here are just a few posts I spotted:

An IGTV video with Saquon Barkley sharing where his NFL dreams started.
A photo of women’s marathon world record holder Brigid Kosgei with former record holder Paula Radcliffe.
A photo of Rafael Nadal sharing his ambitions as a child.

Of course, not all businesses will have the resources of Nike, or the access to global superstars for that matter. But it still serves of a great example of ensuring the essense of your brand shines through on every platform.

To go back to the accountancy example I mentioned earlier. If your “why” or emotional benefit is giving small business owners more free time to spend away from work, you could ensure all of your messaging and content supports this mission. This could mean Instagram posts with clients enjoying themselves away from the office or blog posts about disconnecting from work. It could even mean you rethink the imagery and copy you use on your website.

As I mentioned right at the start of this post, your brand is the identity of your business and how it makes people feel. So every single touchpoint where someone can interact with your business should represent what you want your brand to be, and how you want people to feel.

Thank Brand Secrets for Standing Out in a Crowded World for first publishing this post.

The Newest Black Friday + Cyber Monday Ideas for Your Social Media Marketing

The biggest retail dates of the year are just around the corner. Do you have your social media marketing ready?

We’ve researched some of the trendiest marketing ideas for Black Friday + Cyber Monday, including flash sales, messenger marketing, and UGC. In this blog post, we’ll cover a host of new ideas, tips, and tactics that can help you boost your already-planned campaigns or give you some inspiration for an upcoming piece of content.

Find out some of the numbers behind Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and see what the most cutting-edge brands are trying out this holiday season.

Holiday shopping begins for people all the way back in September! So there’s a wide window of opportunity to reach customers who are in the shopping mood.

According to the National Retail Federation, the average shopper is planning to spend $1,047 this holiday season, which is a four percent increase from last year.

Overall, sales in November and December are expected to rise between 3-to-4 percent, reaching more than $725 billion.

That’s a huge amount of spending. We’ll get into some ways to best position your products and promotions during this spending season. But first, we wanted to start with a couple of outside-the-box campaigns to get you feeling inspired.

Inspiring examples of Black Friday / Cyber Monday marketing

Outdoor apparel retailer REI has taken a rather unique approach to its Black Friday marketing. For the past four years, REI has chosen simply to not participate at all. They close their stores and send their employees home. Even the website has a giant takeover message. They want you to feel empowered to opt out of Black Friday and spend time outside. The hashtag campaign “Opt Outside” has been a hit.

And this year, they’re taking it one step further by not only encouraging people to opt out of shopping but also asking folks to spend their time cleaning up the environments around them of trash and waste.

It’s a really powerful message to send, and it’s been very effective for REI’s brand.

For another example of Black Friday creative campaigns, there’s this amusing one from the New York Public Library. The library put together some simple content to share on social, advertising a 100% off sale on all its books.

Of course, the joke here is that the New York Public Library is a .. well, library. All of its books are free to check out all the time anyway.

Nevertheless, it proved to be a very memorable campaign.

So with these fun examples in mind, let’s jump into some of the specific strategies and tactics you can take with your Black Friday and Cyber Monday marketing.

1. Conduct hourly flash sales

When researching this episode, we came across a really interesting case study of HostGator, a web hosting service, and how they approached Black Friday / Cyber Monday. Essentially, HostGator put together a spreadsheet with multiple sales at multiple different hours of multiple different days. It was fascinating!

Yes, their sales typically lasted one hour with some steep savings of 60 to 70 percent. And each hourly sale had its own coupon code so they could track the results.

It’s a really interesting strategy, especially when you think of how you can use it on social media.

That’s right. Think of all the possibilities for Stories content and social posts if you have multiple sales during the shopping weekend. Especially with Stories, you have things like countdown timers and reminder stickers that you can use to great effect. Each new sale gives you another chance to reach out to your audience in multiple ways — getting attention before the sale starts, holding attention during the sale, and teasing the next one.

2. Think beyond Black Friday and Cyber Monday

HostGator’s plan included sales for Early Access Black Friday as well as Small Business Saturday, and it’s a trend that many other businesses are emulating.

The Black Friday weekend is almost a four day affair, if not more. We have Gray Thursday, which is U.S. Thanksgiving Day, then there’s Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday, which some companies extend for the whole next week.

If you’re thinking of using multiple days for your marketing plans, you can consider some fo the unique behaviors of your audience on these days. For instance, on Black Friday, you might tie some of your marketing into some Buy Online / Pickup In Store specials (commonly referred to as BOPIS) and on Cyber Monday, you can of course focus on online sales. Shoppers spent $7.9 billion online for Cyber Monday last year.

Related to this, it’s also worthwhile to start, really, any time between now and the holiday weekend, if you haven’t already. Around 40% of consumers start their holiday shopping before Halloween. So shopping is definitely top of mind for your audience, even before Black Friday hits.

3. Update your design assets for each of the holidays

You’ve probably seen this with many of the brands you love. All their designs, photos, and graphics match the season we’re in. This might mean harvest colors in October and early November, short and catchy ads around Black Friday, and then holiday themes in December.

If you’re able to align all these creative assets across all platforms — Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, even your display ads — it can create a very powerful and memorable brand experience, which often ends up tying back to ad performance and sales!In fact, according to Twitter Business, ad recall is 60 percent higher if a brand does something as simple as placing the logo in a consistent spot. These little things – logo placement, color, font, hashtags — they make a difference!

4. Make the most of Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp

There are some really big opportunities out there for messaging platforms around the holidays.

The website Retail Dive touched on a bit of this in a recent blog post explaining the virtue of SMS and text messaging. Get this: During Black Friday 2018, there were reports of brands getting 2000% ROI from using SMS campaigns during the Black Friday weekend.

That’s an incredible number!So probably your mind goes next to, well how can I get this set up for my brand?

You can definitely go the SMS route. We think it can be almost just as effective if you think of applying this strategy to Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp as well. Either way, the workflow looks a little like this:
Step One: collect the contact information and the person’s opt-in consent.

This can happen at signup or with a special one-off campaign to collect contact info with the promise of special deals coming soon.

Then, you can apply some messaging strategies to the data. Send a discount code to subscribers. Follow up with an email with the same discount and more product offerings. For those who don’t purchase right away, send a reminder nudge.

You can even tie this into the hourly flash sales we talked about earlier. Just be careful not to overuse this messaging channel — you want to always uphold first and foremost a solid, genuine relationship with the person. Sending too many messages can be a turn-off.

5. Focus on user-generated content (UGC)

You probably have a lot of content to create around these busy holiday dates, so it can be quite a relief to get some help from your community by re-sharing the content that they’re already making.

This can take a lot of different forms like photos of your brand and product, or positive user reviews. It’s especially easy on Instagram Stories where you can reshare someone else’s post to your Stories with just a couple taps.

Some companies go the extra mile and create programs to incentivize users to create and share content about the brand. You can tie giveaways into this strategy — offer prizes to random winners who have used a certain hashtag or commented on a post. We recently added a Giveaways feature to our social engagement product, Buffer Reply, if you want to check it out at buffer.com/reply.

For some simple ideas for creating UGC contests, we quite like this list by G2 Crowd.

Ask your community to share a video or photo of them using your product
Ask your community to reshare your content
Ask people to follow you on social
Have people tag people in the comments, people who they think might benefit from what your brand has to offer

6. Craft a well-designed mobile experience, from social to your website.

For last year’s Black Friday / Cyber Monday shopping, Adobe Analytics found that mobile devices sent 58 percent of traffic to websites, which represented a 20 percent increase from the year before.

That means that more than half of your website visitors are likely coming from mobile. Is your website prepared?

it’s worth considering this type of user flow when you’re putting together your social media campaigns. Be sure that whatever you’re linking to — whether it’s from your social ads, from the Swipe Up in your Stories — that the page is well-optimized for mobile. It’s going to make a big difference with user experience and with conversions.

7. Prepare for product returns

People often turn to social media to get in touch with brands for product questions. You can expect that volume to be especially high around the shopping weekend.

Yeah, we thought this stat was really interesting: projections say that 77% of consumers expect to return some of the presents they get this year. And almost 20 percent of consumers say they’ll return more than half of their gifts.

Knowing this in advance, you can put together some workflows and some docs to help prepare your social media teams to handle these types of requests and this volume.

8. Stories, Stories, Stories

As has been the case in past years, Stories on Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat continue to be more and more important for showcasing what your company sells.

According to Facebook’s holiday marketing guide, Stories have become a hugely popular place to window shop. Last year, 63 percent of shoppers either watched or posted videos on Stories and more than a third of shoppers claim that videos were influential in choosing what to buy.

So whatever you do with your content plans this Black Friday and Cyber Monday, be sure that you’ve allocated plenty to Stories!

About the Show:

The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing strategies from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each episode. It’s our hope that you’ll join our 27,000+ listeners each week and rock your social media channels as a result!

Thank The Newest Black Friday + Cyber Monday Ideas for Your Social Media Marketing for first publishing this post.

Tuesday, November 5, 2019

A Crash Course in Custom Audiences for Your Social Media Ads

When you want to get your message in front of the right people on social media, where do you turn?

More and more, brands and businesses are turning to social ads and custom audiences. You can do a lot of awesome, targeted messaging by focusing on the right audiences with your ads — whether you’re talking to a group of customers, a bunch of website visitors, or a list of subscribers

In this post, we’ll talk you through ways to build custom audiences and lookalike audiences on all the major social media platforms, plus share a couple ideas of how you can put these audiences to the best use.

Best wishes for some well-targeted, highly successful ads!

An introduction to custom audiences

There’s a huge amount to cover with social media ads.

Since this blog post focuses specifically on audiences, let’s start there. In general, an audience is going to be the bucket of people who will potentially see your ad. This group can be customized based on a variety of factors, which we’ll get to in a minute.

A custom audience is a step beyond the basic demographic and psychographic audience filters. A custom audience can be based on an outside source like a set of emails or website visitors or on the social media behavior of users.

Types of custom audiences you can build within Facebook

And then you have lookalike audiences, which take one of your custom audience and expand it to a larger group based on the qualities that the custom audience has in common. For instance, if all the people in your custom audience are interested in augmented reality, use social on a tablet, and have master’s degrees, then a lookalike audience will include people who share these attributes, too.

How to create a lookalike audience for Facebook / Instagram

As you can tell, there are many ways to slice and dice this information to build some really unique audiences.

So let’s get dive into some of the details, starting with the biggest and most robust social advertising networks … Facebook and Instagram.

How to Create Custom Audiences for Facebook and Instagram Ads

Advertising for both Facebook and Instagram is combined into the Facebook Ads Manager. You can run all your ads from here as well as create and manage all your audiences.

Within Facebook, there are a handful of custom audiences that you can build. This list includes:

1. A customer list — also known as a standard custom audiences.

This audience is based on a list of emails, phone numbers, or Facebook user IDs that Facebook can then take and match to its list of users. Typically you’ll find that Facebook can match between 60 and 70 percent of the contacts on your customer list.

2. You can create a website custom audience.

With this audience, instead of uploading a list of customer emails or phone numbers, you build the audience based on traffic to your website. Using Facebook Pixel tracking, you can create an audience of people who have visited any specific page on your website during a set time period.

3. You can create custom audiences based on app activity

If you happen to have a mobile app or game, you can build audiences based on the actions that people take within your product.

4. You can use offline activity to build a Facebook audience.

This could include things like conversations that happen offline in brick-and-mortar stores or information you collect on a spreadsheet.

5. Build an audience from Facebook and Instagram engagement

These can be based on who engages with your posts, videos, events, and profile. You can even set the timeframe of this engagement so that you’re building an audience of people who recently engaged, like in the last 90 days, or who engaged anytime in the past year.

Strategy Ideas for Making the Most of Your Custom Audiences

Jumping quickly into the strategy of ads and audiences, we thought this nugget from a recent Jon Loomer blog post was really interesting. In the blog post, they shared that the most popular Instagram audience strategy is lumping all audience types and time windows together into one large chunk — like, everyone who engaged with your profile in the last 365 days, for instance.

As you might guess, there is so much more you can be doing with these audiences!

Let’s take a closer look at engagement audiences for instance:
With the robust filtering of Facebook’s ads tool, you can build audiences of engagers based on a huge number of different factors like who has visited your Instagram profile, messaged you, or saved a post or an ad.

When it comes to these custom audiences, we quite liked this tip from social media today:Building “warm” audiences of people who have engaged with your content within a recent timeframe. Video in particular is a useful engagement and attention metric. So, say you create a ‘warm’ audience of people who’ve watched a certain amount of video from your page. From there, you can create a Lookalike Audience based on the warm audience, which will allow you to expand your reach to include people who share similar behaviors to that initial, warm, engaged group.

The Jon Loomer blog has a few favorite audience tips, too, specifically around building engagement-based audiences. These include:

People who have engaged in any way with your brand on Instagram in the past seven days, the past 20 days, and the past 90 days.
People who have visited your Instagram profile in the past 30 days but who are not customers
and People who have viewed your Instagram Stories videos in the past seven days

Another way to work with custom audiences is through retargeting.

This gets at the custom audience type of pixel tracking and website / profile visits.

We’ve talked to lots of brands that start out with targeting anyone and everyone that visits their website in their retargeting campaigns. Needless to say that approach isn’t always the most effective.

Customers visit your website for lots of different reasons. They visit different pages. The pages they visit represent different buyer intents. Perhaps they’re not looking to buy your product at all. The key is to match your custom advertising audiences to those shoppers’ intents.
For example, if you’re an e-commerce brand and someone visits your website shopping for shoes, make sure that you segment those people into a custom audience labeled “shoe shoppers” or “footwear.”

Over the past year at Buffer we’ve created various audiences based on the subject matter our visitors are interested in learning about. We have a custom audience for traffic to all Facebook marketing pages, Instagram marketing, customer experience, case studies, etc. That allows us to be hyper-focused on what type of content we deliver, which helps to drive down costs.

We have a whole podcast about it if you want to check out.

How to Create Custom Audiences for Pinterest Ads

As you’ll find with all of these social networks, they’re not quite as robust with ads offerings as Facebook and Instagram. But that’s okay! There’s still plenty of customization you can do.For Pinterest, you have a few options for what to create when it comes to customer audiences.

You can build audiences

Based on visitors who went to your site
Through a customer list that you upload — like a list of emails
Based on people who engaged with pins that link to your website
With an actalike audience that behaves similarly to an existing custom audience that you’ve created

The visitor audience is based on a Pinterest tag, very much like the Facebook pixel. The Pinterest tag is a piece of JavaScript code you can install on your website to gather conversion insights and to build audiences that you can then target, based on actions taken on your site.

The Pinterest engagement audiences are really interesting, too. For these, all you need is to confirm your domain with Pinterest, and then Pinterest will be able to check to see which Pinterest users have engaged with pins that link back to your website. So for instance, if 1,000 people had saved a pin of Buffer blog content, we could build an engagement audience based on this.

Similar to the Facebook and Instagram engagement audiences, Pinterest gives you a handful of options to further customize this group. You can filter based on a specific URL, based on a pin category, or even based on the percentage of video that’s been viewed.

One interesting way that e-commerce brands can use this is to create audiences that are interested in particular product categories — people who click on certain links or certain Pins.

How to Create Custom Audiences for Twitter

With Twitter ads, you can build custom audiences based on

An uploaded list of contacts or customers
A collection of website visitors based on data you get from using a Twitter website tag
A list of your mobile app users
A flexible audience.

The flexible audiences feature is similar in nature to some of the engagement audiences we’ve talked about before. These audiences give Twitter advertisers a way to save combinations of audiences and subsets of audiences, based on factors like recency and frequency of interactions.

How to Create Custom Audiences for LinkedIn

You can build custom audiences on LinkedIn based on a list of contacts that you upload or you can build audiences based on website data, captured using a LinkedIn tag.

One interesting bit of audience customization that LinkedIn provides is with account-based audiences. Let’s say that you want to get a certain percentage of Fortune 500 companies using your product; well, you can upload this list of accounts to LinkedIn and build a custom audience that focused on the stakeholders of these companies.

Yes, there’s a lot of interesting things you can do on LinkedIn if you’re a business selling to other businesses. Then of course Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter are all great for selling your products and services direct to consumers.

That’s right, and before we go, we’d love to leave you with just a couple more ideas for how you can use these custom audiences in unique ways.

More Tips for Getting the Most out of Your Custom Audiences

I thought this tip from AdEspresso was pretty intriguing.They boost a lot of their content to a wide audience and then create a custom audience based on people who click that content and visit the website. This custom website audience, then, is made up of people who have already shown a lot of intent and might be more primed to start a trial.

Another exciting way to use custom audiences is to think creatively about what you share with a custom audience of existing customers. Typically you might think of ads as a way to acquire more customers. But what if you used this list as a way to keep existing customers engaged? You can build a custom audience based on people who have shopped with you in the past or used your product before, but it’s been awhile since they returned — a “sleepy” audience of sorts.

And finally, there are some neat things you can do with custom audiences of newsletter subscribers. You can segment the list into audiences of engaged subscribers and disengaged subscribers and deliver unique content to each group. For the disengaged group in particular there’s a lot of value in re-engaging: MailChimp ran an analysis of 60 million e-commerce purchases and 40 million email addresses from retailers and found that a single inactive subscriber is still worth 32% of an active subscriber.

About the Science of Social Media

The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing strategies from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each episode. It’s our hope that you’ll join our 27,000+ listeners each week and rock your social media channels as a result!

Thank A Crash Course in Custom Audiences for Your Social Media Ads for first publishing this post.

Friday, October 25, 2019

The Keys to Epic Engagement on Social Media

It doesn’t get much better than a moment of delight on social media.

We love the brands who deliver these moments to customers (as customers of some of these brands, we particularly love when it happens to us). And we aim to deliver delight on a regular basis when we interact with Buffer customers online, too.

Social media engagement seems like a slam dunk strategy. Everyone should be doing it, right? But it certainly comes with its blind spots and questions.

Should you be replying to everyone?

How can you make sure you capture all your mentions?

What are the best ways to respond quickly?

In this post, we’ll run through some of the reasons why investing in engagement makes business sense, and we’ll touch on the specific tips and workflows to master engagement on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

One of the quickest and easiest ways to set yourself apart on social media is simply to reply. If you reply to all your customers, all the time, with a helpful and happy response, then you’re really ahead of the curve.

That’s right, all it takes is engaging with the people who want to engage with you. You’ve probably heard this stat before: Eighty-eight percent of brands don’t respond to messages that need a reply. Really! You can be among that elite 12 percent, simply by engaging.

We’d love to give you some tips on how to do just that.

Before we get into the specifics for tools and workflows on the major social networks, let’s start by discussing some of the benefits and the “why” for social media engagement.

We want to help you get there. Here’s a guide on all things customer support and social media with dozens of tips that you can implement today and begin to delight your customers.

1. Social media engagement is public

With social media engagement, you will naturally amplify your brand’s voice and tone, plus you’ll have your interactions front-and-center before a larger audience.

(DMs excluded.)

Think about some of the private interactions you have with your customers, like with traditional customer care channels like email, which are private, 1-to-1 interactions. But with social channels like Twitter, these interactions can be public — at least to start. Same goes for engaging with your audience in Instagram comments or Facebook reviews.

You’re already wow-ing your audience in other channels like email and live chat.

With social media, the awesomeness you’re delivering is visible to everyone.

Those amazing audience interactions that create strong word of mouth marketing for you are now amplified to a much larger audience.

Existing and potential customers get to see first hand that you’re responsive and actively supporting your products or services.

2. Social media engagement is fast and focused

You can deliver delight very fast and in a focused way, chatting with your audience about specific topics and campaigns or helping solve particular problems that they’re facing.

With a focus on the short ‘n sweet, something magical happens:

The barrier to entry for your audience drops dramatically. They have an easy way to converse with you, anytime.
Focused and specific topics mean you can reply faster and engage deeper. We love diving into a marketing conversation with our audience members in a Twitter thread or helping answer questions in a DM
And one big factor that affects the bottom line — Faster responses equal happier customers, which equals more ROI. Research shows faster responses actually generate revenue for brands.

Because of its fast and friendly nature, social media is often preferred over other channels of getting in touch. And the more you respond quickly to your audience, the better they’ll learn that social media — Instagram, Facebook, Twitter — are great places to connect directly with your brand.

3. Social media is where your customers are. You can achieve a huge scale of engagement by being responsive on social media.

At Buffer, a vast majority of our audience is on social media throughout the day. It’s where they’re at and where it often makes the most sense for them to reach out and get in touch.

We have more than 1,000 conversations a week on social media!

We imagine that there might be a large volume of social conversations happening for you, too. People spend an average of nearly four hours a day consuming media on a screen. And a growing percent of that viewing happens on smartphones and apps.

That’s a lot of eyeballs on screens.

Social media channels provide an easy outlet for customers to switch from browsing to chatting at a moment’s notice. More and more those chats are pointed toward brands on social where customers are beginning to expect quick answers to their problems and authentic engagement with their conversations.

One of the best ways we’ve found to make sure you catch all these conversations is to use a social media engagement tool. There are a lot of great ones out there. We’ve built one at Buffer called Buffer Reply, which you can check out at buffer.com/reply.

Getting the most out of Facebook & Instagram engagement

The biggest social networks in the world live under the Facebook umbrella, and brands that make great use of their Facebook Page and Instagram profile can create wonderful experiences for their audience.

It all begins with getting set up correctly. Let’s start with Instagram.

1. Fill out your contact information completely

You want to show people that you are committed to being there for them on social, and one way to do that is to put in the time to create a complete profile. This includes the obvious bits like profile picture and description. By the way, we did a whole episode on Instagram bios just a couple weeks ago if you scroll back through our podcast archives.

But beyond those basics, we also highly recommend filling out the finer details like category, location, and contact information. This shows your audience that you’re willing to engage with them in any way that works best for them — whether it be through a DM, through a reaction to a Story, or through email or in-person.

The same advice holds true for your Facebook Page. Spend the time to fill out everything completely, including your profile picture, cover photo, and About section. But also making sure that all your contact information is listed.

As a bonus tip, if you’re actively engaging with people on these networks, then those interactions are likely to be quite easily visible whenever someone visits your page. You can see the replies to things like Facebook posts, and you can scroll through Instagram comments. If you notice that a brand is jumping into the comments to answer questions and share emojis, then you’re likely to leave with a positive feeling about that brand!

2. Take full advantage of social engagement features

The other major tip we want to share about engaging on Instagram and Facebook is to take advantage of some of the new features that both networks are rolling out to manage conversations even easier. There’ve been a lot of neat announcements recently. You might have heard about Threads, a new standalone app from Instagram that is intended for private, 1:1 conversations. It remains to be seen exactly how brands might use this tool, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.

What’s more immediately clear is the way that Facebook hopes to unite its messaging for businesses into a centralized inbox. Currently, you can manage Messenger and Instagram DMs through your Facebook Page, and Facebook has added even more functionality just this last week, including the capability of:

Adding labels to contacts, like ‘VIP’ and ‘New Customer’
Using saved replies to streamline responses for common questions
and Setting up instant replies and away messages, which you can schedule to be sent at different times

Also on the horizon: Instagram DMs might be coming to desktop soon. Currently you can only access these through the mobile app.

Getting the most out of Twitter engagement

Twitter is an especially effective customer support and success channel that can be scaled much easier than traditional phone or email support channels. It’s fast and effective for your customers, and it’s speedy and efficient for your social media team.

Like with Instagram and Facebook, it helps to get the profile set up completely. Specifically for Twitter, it can be great to add support hours to your Twitter account profileTwitter makes it incredibly easy to include your support hours directly on your Twitter profile. This helps set response time expectations with customers which is crucial.

Similarly, you can enable the‘Provides Support’ label to let customers know that your Twitter account provides support by quickly enabling this option.

One small tweak that we highly recommend making on Twitter is allowing anyone to send you a Direct Message. You can reduce friction by allowing anyone to send you a private Direct Message as opposed to the normal flow where a you and your customer must follow each other in order to DM. This would encourage more conversation with your audience.

Universal tips for social media engagement

1. Add team member signatures to replies.

Even if it’s just one or two people replying on your social handles, signatures are a great way to make your customers’ experience that much more personal. It can even help reinforce a sense of continuity of care.
You can add this manually into each message, or this can be automatically added if you use a social media support tool like Buffer Reply.

And if you’re not sure what to use for a signature, we’ve found that common conventions include appending first names or initials next to things like hyphens or carats.

2. Use a social media inbox

Ok, we’ve mentioned tools like Buffer Reply a few times now, and for good reason: when it comes to social media monitoring, it’s very important to capture all your brand mentions. Third-party tools like Reply can make this much easier.

Ideally, with social media monitoring, you’ll want to get all

@mentions`
all direct messages, of course
but also all the times when your brand is referenced on social outside of a direct outreach

By setting filters and searches in these tools, you can ensure that you capture it all and respond to every conversation that needs it.