Tuesday, May 28, 2019

What If Instagram Got Rid of Likes? Plus Even More Social Media What Ifs

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Thursday, May 23, 2019

10 Important Skills and Traits Your Social Media Manager Will Need

A decade ago, the role of a social media manager might not have even existed. Today, however, almost every company is involved in social media one way or another.

A quick look at Google Trends shows the rise in interest in the term “social media manager” over the years, and it seems that people have never been as interested in the term as they are today.

Google trend search for social media manager - interest in the term has been increasing since 2004.

But what does it take to be a great social media manager? What are the skills to master and traits to have? How can you work on those areas?

In this post, we’ll try our best to answer all those questions. We’ll share 10 skills and traits that are crucial to being a great social media manager and relevant resources to help you improve in those areas.

social-media-manager-skills

Skills vs Traits

Throughout this post, we’ll discuss the various skills and traits we feel are most important for social media managers. But before we dive in, I quickly wanted to share some of my learnings about the difference between skills and traits.

Here’s a great explanation of skills vs traits from Red Letter Resumes:

Skills are tangible factors that you actually bring to the table. Things such as HTML, PowerPoint, Tax Preparation, Medication Compounding, Social Media Management, Lesson Planning, Accounts Receivable, Contract negotiations, etc. They are things that require you to develop a certain level of understanding, productivity or efficiency to claim expertise.

A trait is therefore defined as, “a quality that makes one person or thing different from another”. These are the things that make you who you are, that are part of your personality: the things that make you different from other people. The difference is that these are subjective. One person’s definition of being hard-working is not the same as another’s. Traits come without a quantifiable or standard measure. They are often, but not always, amplifiers of how you do or complete something that is a skill.

Hard skills involve specific knowledge and abilities. Soft skills focus on attributes and personality traits.

(Image from The Huffington Post)

When it comes to finding your ideal social media manager, I feel you may be looking for the right mix of tangible skills (things like copywriting and analytics) and traits (such as curiosity).

In addition, we feel that the role of a social media manager these days owes heavily to the concept of a T-shaped marketer. We use the T-shaped marketer framework at Buffer to describe the depth of skills each of us has as well as the breadth of experiences and knowledge that we all hold.

Here’s a n example of how this might look for someone with a depth of skill in content:

Buffer T-shaped marketer diagram

7 skills top social media managers share

1. Copywriting

Copywriting is a fundamental skill for social media marketing (and probably all areas of marketing). Writing good copy is required in many areas of a social media manager’s role, from filling up your social media profile description to crafting tweets and Facebook posts.

To drive engagement and clicks, you have to fit a captivating story into your social media post and without great copywriting skills that can be difficult.

To enhance your copywriting skills, I’d highly recommend studying a few copywriting formulas to help you craft inspiring copy. Finding a copywriting formula (or two) that works for you can be a great productivity boost and also improve the quality of the social media content you publish.

One of our favorite copywriting techniques here at Buffer is the ‘Before – After – Bridge’  – you may recognize it from a few of our blog posts and social posts. Here’s how it works:

Before – After – Bridge

Before – Here’s your world …

After – Imagine what it’d be like, having Problem A solved …

Bridge – Here’s how to get there.

Example:

For more great tips on copywriting, be sure to check out Kevan’s great post: If Don Draper Tweeted: The 27 Copywriting Formulas That Will Drive Clicks and Engagement on Social Media

Resources

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2. Design (Graphics and Videos)

Research has found that social media posts with images receive more engagement and 43 percent of consumers want to see more videos content in the future.

43 percent of consumers want to see more videos content.

Social media evolved a great deal over recent years, and we have moved away from mostly plain text based updates towards visual content such as images and videos. Designing and creating visual content is becoming an essential skill for social media managers.

Resources

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3. Public Speaking (confidence in front of an audience)

With features and apps like Facebook Live, Instagram Live, and Periscope, live videos are becoming more and more important on social platforms. And marketers have noted this change, with 42 percent of marketers saying they want to create more live videos.

42 percent of marketers would want to create more live videos if they were not restricted by time, resources, or budget.

Why are marketers excited about live video? I believe the answer is two-fold: reach and engagement. Facebook Live videos are more likely to appear higher in the News Feed when those videos are live than after they are no longer live. From an engagement perspective, live content also provides opportunity for high-engagement and 1:1 interactions with audiences.

To tap into the live video trend, social media managers have to be confident enough to go live on social media to connect with their audience. Having public speaking skills will help you to present your ideas, interview guests, answer impromptu questions, and chat with your followers in real-time.

If you want to see our awesome Social Media Manager, Brian Peters, in action, you can find his live videos here. And below is a short clip of Brian discussing viral content:

Resources

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4. Customer Service / Community Engagement

Social media is the top channel people go to for customer care, but only 21 percent of businesses use social media for customer support. This means there’s a huge opportunity here to provide remarkable customer service experiences.

Social media is the top channel people go to for customer care

As the face of your company on social media and the person who is likely to be responding to at least some of the messages your brand receives on platforms like Twitter and Facebook, it’s important for social media managers to have conversational skills and empathy to help you customers on social media.

Community engagement is quite similar in many ways. A great social media community manager is able to ask the right questions to facilitate engagement and answer questions about the product, company, or industry.

Resources

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5. Behavioral Psychology

With data and analytics, you know what type of social media posts do well. Behavioral psychology tells you the why — for example, why are people attracted to certain posts? Why do people share certain posts?

Knowing the what allows you to spot trends and try to repeat past successes; knowing the why enables you to understand the underlying causes for those trends in order to try and create future successes.

For example, your data might tell you that your tweets with images are doing better than tweets with only text. Based on just that information, you might create more tweets with images. However, it could be that your followers prefer visual content. Without knowing the psychology behind trends, you might miss out on opportunities to create other types of visual content such as videos and GIFs.

You certainly don’t need a degree or high level of expertise in psychology to be a social media manager, but a keenness to learn and understand psychology at some level is an important skill.

Resources

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6. Analytics

The term, ‘Analytics’, is used quite broadly here, referring to both social media metrics (e.g. likes, comments, shares, etc.) and business metrics (e.g. traffic, leads, conversions, revenue, etc.). A great social media manager is able to understand both types of metrics and tie them together to give an overall view of the company’s social media performance against business goals.

A social media manager should be the guiding light in your business when it comes to measuring your performance across various social channels. As such, learning the ins and outs of social media metrics and judging which ones are meaningful for your business is essential for a social media manager.

For example, if your goal is to drive traffic from social media channels to your website and drive sales, being able to attribute traffic and conversions back to channels and even certain posts will help your team to understand what content is helping you to achieve your goals.

Knowing how to read and interpret data is now an important skill for social media managers.

Resources

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7. Budgeting

As a social media manager, you might be allocated a budget to work with. Apart from paid advertising, you might have to pay for things like a social media management tool, designs, images, or courses to improve yourself. Having some basic financial and budgeting knowledge can make you better on the job.

While you might not need to be an Excel expert, understanding Excel and knowing what you can do with it can be very valuable.

Paid advertising budget spreadsheet template

(Image from HubSpot)

Resources

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3 personality traits great social media managers exhibit

8. Curiosity

A curious social media manager would immerse herself in the social media world, staying up-to-date with the latest development and experimenting with new social media marketing strategies.

Brian Peters is an epitome of this quality. When we discovered that videos, especially live videos, are becoming popular on social media, Brian immediately started making more videos on Facebook and Twitter. When Snap Inc. launched Spectacle, Brian got it as soon as he could to try it out and figure out how marketers can use it in their social media strategy.

Snap Spectacles a Buffer Review

HubSpot VP of Marketing Meghan Keaney Anderson said this really well when she described her ideal social media hire:

“We really look for people who have their finger on the pulse of how social is changing. It is one of the most rapidly changing industries right now, and I want someone who is paying attention to it, who is enthralled by it and fascinated by it. … Things shift so fast. If you think about the social media channels that were dominant two years ago and the social media channels that are dominant today, it’s just a totally different world.”

Resources

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9. Adaptability

Adaptability complements curiosity. When you discover something new or spot a trend, being able to quickly adapt to it can keep you ahead of the curve.

For example, the most engaging type of social media content has shifted from texts to images to videos. In a Fast Company article, Mark Zuckerberg was reported to have said,

“Most of the content 10 years ago was text, and then photos, and now it’s quickly becoming videos,” Zuckerberg said, justifying Facebook’s aggressive push into the area. “I just think that we’re going to be in a world a few years from now where the vast majority of the content that people consume online will be video.”

A great social media manager is able to keep up with such changes and pick up the necessary skills (e.g. graphic design, video making, etc.). (Imagine when virtual reality becomes the most popular type of content!)

Resources

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10. Business Savviness

Being able to generate likes and shares is great; knowing how social media fits in with the entire business strategy is even better! A business-savvy social media manager sees the bigger picture and understands the role of social media in the company.

They understand which metrics are most relevant and crucial to the business and how social media can help to push them higher. For example, a B2B social media manager might focus on generating leads for her sales team while a B2C social media manager might focus on increasing customer purchases directly. This way, her impact goes beyond just social media but to the entire company.

Resources

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Skills and traits others think are important

To give you an unbiased view on this topic, I’d love to share the skills and traits that other companies and individuals think are important:

What the Best Social Media Community Managers Actually Do in Their Jobs by HubSpot

  • Content creation
  • Marketing analytics
  • News junkie
  • Customer service
  • Community management
  • Funnel marketing
  • Project management

Lindsay Kolowich of HubSpot also mentioned the necessary skills for each of these areas in this article.

10 Essential Skills a Social Media Manager Needs To Have on Their Resume by Jeff Bullas

  • Strategy planning
  • Tactics and execution
  • Community management
  • Understand how content works on a social web
  • Optimizing content and technology
  • Creative mindset
  • Writing skills
  • Be on top of the latest digital marketing trends
  • Analytical skills
  • Leadership and communication skills

How to Build A Social Media Strategy Dream Team by HubSpot and Sprout Social

  • Patience
  • Technical aptitude
  • Proactive
  • Daring
  • Passion
  • Level of Experience
  • Customer-first mentality

Over to you

While you might not need to be proficient in every single area mentioned above, being good at a few of them would make you a great social media manager and a valuable asset to your company.

What other skills do you think is important for a social media manager to have? Would you be up for sharing some resources for improving those skills, too?

Thank you!


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Wednesday, May 15, 2019

Why Brands are Turning to Spotify as the Next Big Social Platform

There are so many social networks to choose from today: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest. Maybe YouTube? Maybe Reddit?

We’d love to let you in on a secret one that’s flying under the radar.

Spotify!

We’ve spent time digging into the rise of Spotify as a social media platform, used by today’s hottest brands. The results have been fascinating. We believe that Spotify is fast becoming a core platform for engaging with customers — through paid ads of course, but also through an organic presence. We’d love to tell you how these brands are doing it.

A huge bonus – some of what we’re going share is easy to set up and free to experiment with!

Keep reading to see how the music streaming giant can drive your brand forward and present some unique and exciting opportunities to connect with your audience.

Where Spotify fits in today’s social media landscape

If you were to look at a chart of the online communities of the greatest size and reach, how do you think that chart might look?

Typically, the “biggest” social networks that come to mind are the ones that are top of mind for all of us: Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, which have billions of users.

Beyond those sites are some other familiar names:

  • Twitter and Reddit, which have over 300 million users
  • LinkedIn, which is nearing the 300-million mark
  • Pinterest and Snapchat, which are right near 250 million each.

There’s another community that is right on the heels of these social media giants.

Spotify has 217 million users as of April 2019, and if you were to include Spotify in the list of top social networks, it would fit snugly within the top 20 worldwide.

What’s useful to see here is that many brands and businesses want to be where their customers are. And with user counts like these, it’s obvious there are customers here!

We’re beginning to see, more and more, that the standard definitions for “social networks” are expanding. Brands these days are looking for places to reach their audience and connect. Spotify is clearly one of those places.

The music streaming service has been around since 2008, and it’s been a hidden treasure for marketers for several years now thanks to its deep audience insights. Slowly but surely, Spotify has been gaining critical mass as a must-consider location for brands to be. The website Distilled wrote about the Spotify trends in August of 2018. Many other websites have covered the advertising potential of the platform.

From our research, this trend will only continue to grow.

The way we see it, there are three pillars for brands when it comes to their presence on Spotify.

  1. Playlists
  2. Paid ads
  3. Podcasting

1. Spotify Playlists

Find organic distribution through branded, social playlists

Do you have a guess at how many Spotify playlists there are?

There are over two billion!

Now, don’t let that number scare you off.

Just because there are billions of playlists doesn’t mean that yours won’t get noticed. We’ll get into some distribution methods in a moment, but first let me share another fascinating stat with you:

One-third of all listening time on Spotify is spent on user-generated playlists. That equates to eight hours a week of listening. So clearly there is a lot of demand for playlists on Spotify!

What’s also great about playlists as a brand strategy is that they are easy to set up and free to experiment with … two of a marketers’ favorite attributes.

The barrier for entry is incredibly doable. Just as you create playlists for your personal Spotify listening, you can do the same for your brand. Let’s first walk you through how it works, then we’ll dive into some of the finer details about this strategy.

How to:

To get started, create a new Spotify account for your brand.

And as you would with any new social profile, fill it out completely with your brand name and logo. Some brands do a custom logo for Spotify, featuring different colors or music-related imagery.

Then, start creating your first playlists.

There are several ways to about this. Some brands organize their songs around themes, whether it’s a certain mood or feeling or perhaps a trending topic or event. For instance, McDonald’s has playlists for football and the Oscars.

Gymshark — an athletic apparel brand — partners with influencers to create branded playlists. Each playlist is inspired by the influencer’s music choices and is pitched as a training playlist. They’re quite popular, too. The Steven Cook playlist has 95,000 followers.

When it comes to choosing songs, Spotify recommends a few helpful guidelines to lessen your risk and avoid any implicit endorsement of artists.

  • Put at least 20 tracks on your playlist. The more tracks you have, the better.
    Variety counts, too.
  • No single artist should appear more than once on your playlist
  • Don’t include artists you might think would be opposed to your brand.

For the design of your playlist, you can use emoji in the title to make it stand out. You can also upload a custom cover photo to the playlist. This can only be done by downloading the desktop app; it can’t be done on mobile or on the web app.

The only considerations for your photo are that the file needs to be a JPEG and the file size can’t be more than four megabytes. You’ll also want to use a square aspect ratio. We like to use an 800-pixel by 800-pixel image, just as we do for Instagram.

How do you get people to find out about your Spotify playlists?

Fortunately, Spotify is quite well integrated into the other social networks, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter especially. There are a couple different ways you can get your playlist distributed here.

First, you can rely on your own promotion.

You can link to your playlist on any social channels to drive your audience to Spotify. For instance, you can link directly from your website footer or add a Spotify icon to the other social icons in your email signatures.

Another way to get the word out is to encourage participation.

Some brands create collaborative playlists that all Spotify users can add to. These crowdsourced lists make for a great content in a tweet or Instagram post.

The other way to go about distribution is with Viral promotion.

Playlists themselves are quite shareable as well. When a user likes a song or if they like an entire playlist, they can share them easily to major social networks. Instagram Stories has a direct connection to Spotify so that you can add your latest song directly to your Stories.

And one final playlist note: Keep your playlist updated by adding and removing songs regularly. Each time your playlist changes, the followers of that playlist will be notified.

2. Spotify ads

Experiment with targeted advertising, starting at $250 per campaign

There are a couple big advantages of going with Spotify for ads.

First, they are a younger ad network so you’re likely to get more bang for your buck. This has been true of all ad platforms initially: Facebook several years ago, Instagram Stories and Pinterest recently, and Spotify now. Putting your advertising dollars on younger ad networks is one of our favorite tips for maximizing ad spend.

Second, Spotify has a deeeeeep amount of analytics.

They understand their user’s listening behaviors to an incredible degree, and this allows for advertisers to create some really compelling audiences and storytelling. Consider these stats they have on how Millennials use Spotify:

  • 68% of streams happen on mobile.
  • Millennial listeners are 64% more likely to buy brands they see advertised.
  • Millennials stream on repeat more than they stream on random, and they’re 90% more likely to have the latest tech products.

And there’s these stats about how Tech Early Adopters stream on Spotify

  • They’re almost 900% more likely to stream on a gaming console than the average listener.
  • They’re 41% more likely to listen to music that feels defiant.
  • Early Adopters stream what they like more than they stream new finds, and they’re twice as likely to be brand conscious.

So if you’re thinking about getting into ads on Spotify, here’s what to know:

1. Understand the different ad formats.

Spotify offers audio, video, and display ads. You can fully create and manage your own audio ads through the Spotify Ad Studio. For video and display ads, you can get in touch with the Spotify team through the Spotify for Brands website.

Depending on your budget, you may end up going with one or more of these three ad formats. Initially, when starting out in the Spotify Ad Studio, you can run audio ads beginning at a minimum $250 budget.

Spotify has found that a mixture of ad formats works best. For example, mixing audio and display results in a 24 percent increase in ad recall for those formats.

2. Get to know the different ad segments

You can customize your ad for a host of different settings … Your options include: location, age, gender, platform, and whether you want to advertise across all Spotify music or just in certain genres or on certain playlists.

3. Focus on the experience of your listener.

We mentioned earlier that a variety of ad formats can be helpful. So, too, can a variety of targeting. Spotify is unique among other ads in that it has a strong storytelling element to its data. You can tell what kind of mood a listener may be in, based on previous songs. You may even be able to tell what they’re doing … for instance, if they’re listening to a workout playlist on mobile, chances are that they’re at the gym.

3. Podcasts on Spotify

Create a branded podcast to take advantage of the Spotify platform and Spotify search

(Did you know: Buffer’s Science of Social Media podcast is on Spotify?)

Spotify has made a major investment in podcasts on its platform.

You’ve probably noticed that more and more podcasts are popping up in the Discover tab and elsewhere in the interface. It’s for good reason. Last year, Spotify pledged to invest $500 million in podcasting.

Based on radio industry data, we believe it is a safe assumption that, over time, more than 20% of all Spotify listening will be non-music content.

We’ve already seen some of these investments being made public. Spotify acquired Gimlet Media, a podcast network, and Anchor, a podcasting app, spending hundreds of millions on the acquisitions.

Spotify is clearly making podcasts a priority from here on out.

So what can brands do to take advantage?

Step one is to make sure that your podcast is available on Spotify.

There are a few simple ways to do this.

For our podcast, like I mentioned, we use Anchor to handle all the distribution. Other tools like SimpleCast do this as well. You upload your podcast to Anchor, and they ensure it is published to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all other major podcast services.

Alternatively, you can manually add your podcast to Spotify by going to podcasters.spotify.com. From there, you’ll be asked to enter your podcast’s RSS feed and to enter information about your podcast.

Once your podcast is set up with Spotify, you can start thinking about distribution.

We’ve got a couple quick tips for you when it comes to distribution:

First, you can share your podcast to social media just like you would any other favorite music track. We tried this tactic with sharing our Science of Social Media episodes to Instagram Stories, and it works like a charm.

Second, you can capture some Spotify SEO opportunities. No one’s really talking about Spotify SEO yet, but it’s certainly worth considering when you’re coming up with headlines and titles for podcast episodes.

You’ve probably heard that YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine next to Google. Well, Spotify’s userbase makes it a large search engine as well. You can make the most of it by being strategic with the naming of your podcasts.

Recap

To recap, we’ve seen brands take advantage of Spotify’s social features in three key ways:

  1. First, with brand playlists.
  2. Second, with targeted advertising.
  3. And third, with podcasts.

We’d love to hear how the platform performs for your brand!

How to say hello to us

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

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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 Why Brands are Turning to Spotify as the Next Big Social Platform for first publishing this post.
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Sunday, May 12, 2019

Ugly Drinks’ Four Secrets to Disrupting a $392 Billion Industry

Great businesses see the future differently.

  • Apple made CD’s redundant, and gave us 1,000 songs in our pocket
  • Airbnb took travel, and made us all feel at home across globe
  • Netflix made video rentals a thing of the past, and disrupted the Oscars

And now, Ugly Drinks is creating a new, healthier future for the $392 billion soft drinks industry, challenging giants like The Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo and Red Bull head on.

From the outside, it may seem like a David v Goliath battle. But Ugly isn’t a plucky underdog. It’s a confident competitor with a different view of the world, and an unassailable belief in its mission.

Its product — a sugar, and sweetener free, natural flavoured sparkling water — launched in 2016, and has since built up strong sales, and a core of die-hard fans, on both sides of the Atlantic.

So, how has Ugly grown from a startup idea to challenging billion dollar brands?

Keep reading to uncover the four key steps Ugly has taken to build an industry-disrupting, global business in under five years…

1. Build a unique brand

Ugly believes that its audience is tired of ‘perfection’ and seeks a more sincere view of the world

Ugly’s founders, Hugh Thomas and Joe Benn, are no strangers to the drinks industry after working together at Vita Coco, and over the years, the pair had grown tired the way many soft drinks were marketed.

“The founders were sick of seeing brands selling sugar-filled products, made appealing by marketing that masked what you’re actually drinking,” Brittany Zenner, Ugly’s New York-based Social Media and Community Manager explained to me.

The belief that many brands are propped up by misleading marketing sparked the concept of the ‘Ugly Truth’, the brand’s mission to spread the truth about the world we live in.

So for consumers who are craving the truth, especially in the socio-political, fake news, world we’re in at the moment, we have positioned Ugly as a brand that tells every truth. — Hugh Thomas, Ugly Drinks co-founder

“Whatever newspaper you read, whatever news sources you’re getting, there is uncertainty on both sides, and I think that’s led to a lot of tension,” says Hugh Thomas, speaking to The Challenger Project. “So for consumers who are craving the truth, especially in the socio-political, fake news, world we’re in at the moment, we have positioned Ugly as a brand that tells every truth.”

Ugly doesn’t make any claims it can’t live up to: “No unobtainable lifestyles. No ridiculous promises. We’re not a dream, we’re a drink,” the brand stated in a 2018 advert.

Telling ‘every truth’ means that Ugly has to take a stand on topics outside of the drinks industry too. “The Ugly Truth started as a product message, but has broadened out to become about society. ” Zenner shared.

Ugly has partnered with Girl Up, a gender equality charity, to drive positive change and tackle global gender inequality. 1 cent of every drink purchased is donated to Girl Up’s leadership development program which trains teenage girls to take action for gender equality.

“The fact that we stand up for things can be divisive,” Zenner says. “Not every consumer supports the idea that brands should speak out about real life issues but we always try to stick to our values. Our mission, to expose The Ugly Truth, is something we all believe in passionately.”

2. Market where your customers are

Marketing to a young, rebellious audience means embracing social media channels for Ugly

Ugly’s customers are known as ‘GenZenials’ internally. “It’s a mixture of Gen-Z and millennials, 16-24 is our target audience range,” Zenner shares.

The brand seeks to connect with consumers who are socially engaged, and ‘a bit rebellious’. “But but not in a destructive way,” Zenner continues. “We’re more about positive rebellion, standing up for things and making changes in the world.”

Ugly, like many of its ‘GenZenail’ audience, was born in the age of social media, and when Ugly combined its unique brand message with social media channels like Instagram, it found a recipe for success.

“Social media has been an amazing tool for us to spread the Ugly word since launch,” says Thomas. “We are a high visual brand with a strong opinion and Instagram has been particularly successful for us in terms of building a following and engaging with our community.”

Ugly’s world view, and its focus on calling out the Ugly Truth guides all of its marketing from its tone of voice to the content it shares. “We call out marketing BS,” explains Zenner. “We’ll even make fun of ourselves if we’re using stock imagery or really polished videos. We poke fun at the brands that sell the dream and aspirational lifestyles. We’re about living at authentic life.”

But what does that look like in practice?

A great example of this is Ugly’s National Sibling’s Day post on Instagram. The playful copy, accompanying a professionally shot image, says: ‘In honor of #NationalSiblingsDay here’s a photo of two people who aren’t related enjoying some Ugly.’

“We try not to take ourselves too seriously. Even when we make announcements or tackle serious subjects we try to be lighthearted,” says Zenner.

Ugly tries to steer clear from perfection, something that Zenner sees as growing trend in social media. “We went through this period of influencer saturation, where everything was hyper-polished and staged,” she explains. Consumers, Zenner believes, are bored and have switched off from this type of content, instead craving reality again. “We’re now bringing social media back to real-life,” she says.

The content Ugly creates is a mix of memes the team produces internally and professionally shot images, but Zenner believes that the amount of money you spend on content creation doesn’t tend to correlate with results.

“Honestly some of best performing content are the memes that we’ve created internally. It’s really low-fi but it’s the kind of stuff you would share with a friend,” she says. “We’ll take a popular meme format or just an image we think is funny, and add our own text onto it. When we put that up on our feed or story it tends to get better engagement that the content we’ve spent a bunch of money on.”

Pro Tip: When it comes to keeping on top of ever-changing internet and meme culture, the Ugly team has a Slack channel where they share content they stumble upon online. The team also keeps a close on on Reddit for the latest memes and trends.

3. Encourage your customers to become advocates

Thanks to Ugly’s customer-centric approach, people love to share their experiences with the brand on social media (and beyond)

Ugly has a passionate community of fans and customers it affectionately calls the ‘Ugly Mob’, and this community has been key to the growth of the business.

In the company’s early days, co-founder, Joe Benn, realized that building a community of brand advocates would help them to spread the world about their alternative, challenger brand.

“Our fans love to be seen with the cans,” Benn explained to a UK business site last year. “They buy our merch from the website and they stick our stickers everywhere! This word of mouth excitement around The Ugly Truth platform has been our best marketing by far.”


Another aspect of the community that Zenner says is hugely important to Ugly is user generated content on social media, with the brand often re-sharing social media posts from its audience to Instagram stories.

“We want to feel like we’re part of the community, not just speaking to the community,” Zenner says. “By re-sharing photos and videos of people enjoying Ugly and interacting with the brand it’s showing people authentically engaging with the brand [and product].”

“We care deeply about our community in both the U.K. and the U.S. and use social media to speak to consumers on a 1-1 basis as often as possible,” says Thomas. For Zenner, this means focusing on engagement on social media: “We try to at least like every comment and we always reply if we feel like there’s something to reply to. We like to show people that there is someone real on the end of the content we’re producing and that we’re seeing their messages.”

“To us, comments and DMs are even more important than likes, because they allow us to open up two-way communication with our audience.”

4. Listen to your customers

Speaking honestly and transparently with customers has helped Ugly to shape its business and build a brand people love

“We’ve built our entire brand at Ugly around being customer-centric and digitally native,” Zenner says.

Ugly makes key business decisions based on the feedback it receives from the its community, the ‘Ugly Mob’, and it actively seeks out this kind of feedback across channels — from social media to surveys and email.

One example of this is how Ugly sourced its three newest flavors — Watermelon, Piña Colada, and Pink Grapefruit. “All three of these were top voted options in surveys we sent out to our customers via email and surveys we posted on Instagram Stories and in our highly-engaged Facebook Group,” shares Zenner.

Ugly has also used surveys and customer feedback to make decisions about the merchandise it sells — yep, a drinks brand can also sell merch — and the content Zenner and the team at Ugly produce.

It’s also incredibly valuable for Ugly team members to take the time to speak with customers in detail, outside of email, surveys and social media. “I personally have gotten on the phone with a select group of customers to discuss what they love about Ugly and what they would like to see us improve,” says Zenner. “Those conversations have been invaluable and have opened our eyes to possibilities that structured surveys might miss.”

Creating the future of soft drinks for a more health conscious generation

A Nielsen study found the majority of consumers are trying to ditch sugar and embrace healthier lifestyles, and Ugly is a perfect fit for younger, more health conscious consumers.

Further to this, a poll conducted in conjunction with USA Today reporter Bruce Horowitz which surveyed more than 30,000 consumers in more than 60 nations, revealed that younger consumers are far more concerned about healthy living that older generations. The study found that the most health-centric group of consumers is Generation Z, part of Ugly’s GenZenial market.

With healthy and clean eating and drinking on the rise, Ugly is ideally positioned to continue its growth across the globe — especially if it sticks to the four tactics that have served it so well on its journey so far:

  1. Build a brand: Ugly believes that its audience is tired of ‘perfection’. It seeks a more authentic view of the world, and shares the ‘Ugly Truth’ about its industry and other global issues.
  2. Market where your customers are: Marketing to a ‘GenZenial’ audience means that Ugly embraces social media, and channels where its audience hangs out online.
  3. Encourage your customers to become advocates: Ugly’s customer-centric approach, encourages people to share their experiences with the brand on social media (and beyond).
  4. Listen to your customers: Speaking honestly and transparently with customers has helped Ugly to shape its business and build a brand people love.

It’ll be a few years before Ugly reaches the heights of the soft drinks industry Goliaths like The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo, but the journey will be fascinating to watch.

———-

You can follow Ugly on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. A special thank you goes to Brittany Zenner, Social Media and Community Manager at Ugly, for sharing a ton of great insights for this story.


Thank Ugly Drinks’ Four Secrets to Disrupting a $392 Billion Industry for first publishing this post.
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Wednesday, May 8, 2019

How to Get (Real!) Followers on Social Media in 2019

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