Neuromarketing: Surprising Facts Businesses and Marketers Should Know

Neuromarketing.

Sounds fairly complicated, doesn’t it? 

Fortunately for marketers and small businesses, it doesn’t have to be. Neuromarketing is when the principles of psychology are applied to marketing research and strategy.

Understanding why people make purchasing decisions online and how they respond to various marketing strategies and tactics is a critical component in effectively marketing your own products or services. 

This week on The Science of Social Media, we’re diving into the world of neuromarketing and how you can use it to get better results from your social media marketing for your brand or business.

Let’s kick it off!

Neuromarketing: Surprising Facts Businesses and Marketers Need to Know [episode transcript]

• Part I: What is neuromarketing?
• Part II: Neuromarketing in practice
• Part III: Running your own neuromarketing experiments

Brian: Hi everyone! I’m Brian Peters and this is The Science of Social Media, a podcast by Buffer. Your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and learning.

Hailley: Welcome to episode #115, I’m Hailley Griffis and this week we’re nerding out over neuromarketing and how you can use it to get better results from your social media marketing for your brand and business. And don’t worry, we’ll give you a better explanation of what neuromarketing is before we dive in.

Brian: We got such a strong response from listeners that loved hearing about psychology back in episode #107 so let’s get started going over another bit of marketing science.

Part I: What is Neuromarketing?

Brian: Neuromarketing. Sounds pretty complicated, doesn’t it?

Hailley: Honestly it does! I was a little nervous putting this show together but we’ve learned a lot about it and we’re here to break neuromarketing down for you and of course give you a few ideas and examples to incorporate into your own social media marketing.

Brian: I think the best place to start with any new concept is a strong definition. So here’s a quick definition for you. Neuromarketing is when neuropsychology is applied to marketing research.

In practice, this might look like studying a person’s cognitive response to viewing ads or product packaging.

Hailley: Exactly. The whole point is to understand the reasoning behind why people make the purchasing decisions that they do, and how they respond to marketing, and then of course use that knowledge to get better at marketing your own products or services.

Brian: If you haven’t heard of neuromarketing before, don’t stress. It’s actually an emerging field in marketing. The term neuromarketing was first published in 2002 but there is some research that goes back into 1990.

Hailley: You might be asking yourself why we need to jump on this complex scientific train and really there are a lot of benefits to neuromarketing for social media managers.

Marketing campaigns and strategies can become more efficient and effective, and ultimately you can align your marketing with the true needs and wants of your potential customers because you’re starting to understand how your customer’s brain works.

Part II: Neuromarketing in practice

Brian: One of the more traditional ways to use neuromarketing is when it comes to product design choices. Brands like Campbell’s Soup and Frito-Lay have used neuromarketing to redesign their packaging and make it more appealing.

Hailley: PayPal used neuromarketing to learn that their commercials that focused on speed and convenience triggered a significantly higher response than those that were advertising safety and security. PayPal wound up developing an entirely new ad campaign based on these results.

Brian: Let’s talk about how you can best leverage neuromarketing to be an even better social media marketer. Well, there are two ways to go about neuromarketing. First is to conduct your own studies on people that are your target audience, and second is to read and learn everything you can about general neuromarketing best practices that apply to most people.

Hailley: If you’re a team of one like many social media managers are, then we totally understand that you’ll probably want to stick with learning from others and applying the broad lessons. Whereas if you’re at a larger company and have a bit of budget, then maybe doing your own neuromarketing studies make sense.

Brian: Definitely! We’ll go over a little bit of both of these options for you today. Let’s start with what we can learn from big studies.

There a book all about neuromarketing called Brainfluence by Roger Dooley. It’s a great read if you like what we’re talking about here! We’re going to go over a few of the practical techniques he talks about for convincing and persuading customers.

Hailley: Well, in Brainfluence, Dolley shares experiments completed by the University of Michigan show that people truly can be affected by simple vs. complex fonts.

Ultimately they discovered that if you need to convince a customer to perform a certain task, you should describe that task in a simple and easy to read font.

Brian: It’s wild how powerful a simple font can be! Now of course as social media managers we should all be aiming to share designs on social media that are in an easy to read font. Another
one to remember is for surveys.

I know a lot of social media managers who love surveys and it’ll be good practice from now on to make sure the instructions for the survey are simplified so you’ll have more people fill it out (hopefully!)

Hailley: Simple fonts are great for getting people to perform a task, but don’t give up on complex fonts just yet. It turns out that complex fonts help to boost memory recall! So if you use a complex font someone is more likely to remember what you wrote and it’ll likely be grabbing their attention visually as well.

Brian: Don’t go off the rails writing everything in complex fonts just yet though. This tactic is best used sparingly and for important information only.

Next up let’s talk about images. James Breeze, an Australian usability specialist quoted in Dooley’s Brainfluence studied how people view ads with babies and he learned that people who are looking at the ad will look at what the person in the at is looking at.

Hailley: If the baby is looking at a box of diapers then the person viewing the ad is also looking at the box of diapers. But this works for more than just babies. If you are using images of people, or even animals, pay careful attention to what they are looking at because that will more than likely be the focus of your customers attention.

Brian: Another good lesson from this book is something we’ve chatted about on the podcast loads before, and that’s trust. Trust if of course crucial to many parts of business and it turns out the key to obtaining your customer’s trust is to have them feel trusted as well.

Here are a few ways outlined in the book for making your customer feel trusted:

1. Offer a trial with few restrictions
2. Establish credit without long forms or a lengthy screening process
3. Provide confidential information without making a prospect or customer sign an NDA

Hailley: Last but not least, while we’re looking at learning from neuromarketing, is all about smiling. We talked about smiling and emojis in episode #107 so definitely go check that out if this sounds interesting to you.

The findings are sort of what you’d expect, if you use a photo of someone smiling then it is “mood boosting” for the person looking at that photo and that little mood boost can affect your customer’s willingness to spend money.

Brian: Love that, so next time you’re grabbing an image whether you have a bunch of photos of your teammates, which is what we have at Buffer, or maybe you use a site like Unsplash, be on the lookout for people who are happy and smiling to use in your marketing materials.

Part III: Running your own neuromarketing experiments

Hailley: Now that we’ve talked about what we can learn from general neuromarketing lessons, let’s talk a bit about what it’s like to do your own neuromarketing experiments. Now, there are a range of options here and they go from fairly affordable to extremely expensive medical equipment, so of course you’re in the best place to judge what level of neuromarketing you’d like to do.

Brian: Let’s start with the most affordable and then the prices will increase with each new method we talk about. So this first method is called eye-tracking, which is used to tell marketers where the attention of someone goes when they look at something.

The really basic method of eye-tracking is more like mouse tracking and it’s something you might know as heat mapping. This is when you are able to see a map of where people are primarily looking at when they look at your images or website.

There are tons of tools that let you do this pretty easily and they can be pretty affordable depending on what you’re looking for. A few options are CrazyEgg, Zoho, and MouseFlow.

Hailley: We’ve done some heat mapping here at Buffer, always neat to see.

So the other way to do eye-tracking involved more equipment. The idea is that you can team up with researchers who have glasses that have integrated cameras in them or screens that have eye trackers on them. Then the research is able to track the eye movements of the participant while they are watching an ad or looking at any other marketing content.

The idea here is that once you know where someone’s attention the ad is directed, you can change the way text and images are placed.

Brian: That can be so helpful because properly places attention really ensures that someone will remember your product or service.

Another type of neuromarketing research you can do is called facial coding. Again, this involves some equipment. Essentially you’d get specific software that assesses the movement of someone’s facial features to measure if they are reacting positively or negatively to what they are seeing.

Hailley: This is pretty cool because so much research shows that having either a positive or a negative ad, something that really evokes emotion, is bound to impact it’s effectiveness and as a byproduct your sales.

Of course something to mention with both this method and the eye tracking is that not only do you need the equipment and a researcher to do the study but you’ll also need to find a bunch of participants to do this, so it can be quite a bit of work.

Brian: Now, we’re at the level of neuromarketing where people go to a whole other level and start tracking the brain activity of their potential customers. So one of the ways to do this is using EEG or electroencephalography. (What a mouthful!)

EEG uses electrodes to measure electrical waves produced by the brain and allows researchers to track instinctual emotions like anger, excitement, sorrow, and lust. The one thing that EEG is critiqued for, however, is that it doesn’t grant researches access to the deeper parts of the brain where the “pleasure center” is located, and of course that could be a pretty big deal for your marketing.

Hailley: Okay last, but certainly not least because it is the most expensive way to do neuromarketing research, and this is using fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Using fMRI means through the help of powerful magnet researchers are able to track the brain’s blood flow as subjects respond to audio and visual cues. This is where the pleasure center comes in because it allows examiners to access this deep part of the brain and lets marketers know how people are really responding to their work.

Brian: While this sounds like a dream for most marketers, fMRI is not only extremely expensive but pretty inconvenient for participants. The equipment is up to $1,000 per machine per hour to operate and your participants have to lie completely still in a the machine while doing the tests.

Hailley: That doesn’t sound like too much fun but it is in the name of marketing!

Brian: True! I don’t see us doing any fMRIs here at Buffer anytime soon but it was still super fun to learn a little bit more about this process.

Hailley: So much fun!

Thank you so much for tuning in to the Science of Social Media today. The show notes for this episode are now available on the Buffer Blog at blog.buffer.com with a complete transcript.

If you ever want to get in touch with me or Hailley, we’re always here for your on social media using the hashtag #bufferpodcast. You can also say hi to us anytime and hello@bufferapp.com

Brian: Yup, we’d love to hear from you!

And thanks to everyone tuning into our show every single week. I was just looking at a map of which countries our downloads come from and was super excited to see that we reach thousands of people in countries around the world. It’s an honor and privilege to be here with you.

Lots more to come in the remainder of 2018 so stay tuned.

Until next Monday, everyone!

How to say hello to us

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

• Hailley on Twitter and Hailley’s Website
• Brian on Twitter and Brian’s Website

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 18,000+ 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 Neuromarketing: Surprising Facts Businesses and Marketers Should Know for first publishing this post.

Do Twitter Ads Really Work? A Surprising Experiment: 17.2 Million Views From a Single Twitter Thread

As the New Year approaches, many of us find ourselves in a reflective mood. And that’s exactly how JotForm founder, Aytekin ‏Tank, felt as 2017 was drawing to a close.

As he walked along the Embarcadero, one of the liveliest and most scenic areas in San Francisco, looking back on the year, he was a little zoned out to everything happening around him. Meditative. Introspective. Contemplative.

He had many things to celebrate: JotForm had grown to a team of more than 130 people across the globe, it had more than 3.2 million users and its revenues continued to climb every month. It’s also worth noting that all of this happened without taking a dollar in outside funding — a not-so-common story in Silicon Valley these days.

But despite all the good news, there was something that didn’t quite sit right with him.

“Our competitors were super loud on the internet and their user numbers weren’t even close to ours,” he explained to me. “They were announcing one investment round after another, ending up on top of TechCrunch, and we were just quietly going about our business.”

During these moments of reflection, Aytekin realized that, like his competitors, he also had a story to tell.

So he decided to do just that — share his story. But in his own unique way.

Building a brand through stories

The first order of business for Aytekin was simple:

Write stories to share the JotForm journey.

With autonomous teams around him , he was able to dedicate his time to whatever tasks he felt would impact the business the most, so going all-in on content was an easy decision for him.

His first post — How NOT following my dreams enabled me to build a startup with 3.2 million users — was published in a popular Medium Publication, The Startup, and reached over +50K pageviews almost overnight.

His second post — Time off or the top of TechCrunch? — was equally as successful.

“I published these stories on December 18th and 26th respectively”, he explained. “Given their traction and how they resonated with a huge audience, I made my mind up. I was going to get serious about writing in 2018.”

Aytekin had found his niche.

His authentic, honest stories resonated with startup enthusiasts and he decided to write at least two posts per week throughout 2018 to share his journey as founder and CEO of JotForm.

Embracing Twitter: A $24,098 Twitter ads experiment

After his initial success on Medium, Aytekin was keen to share JotForm’s story across multiple channels in order to reach new audiences.

In July 2018, he decided to experiment with Twitter. Specifically, he was curious:

1. If Twitter could be a great platform to repurpose content
2. How Twitter ads could help him amplify his content.

After all, Twitter and blogging aren’t really too different:

“Apart from its character limit, Twitter isn’t any different when it comes to sharing your authentic voice,” he explained. “It’s blogging in 280 characters.”

As a platform, Twitter may not have changed too much since over the years — except increasing the character limit from 140 to 280 characters.

But what has changed significantly is the way people use the platform.

Twitter used to feel almost like an RSS feed, full of people sharing links and hashtags, trying to hijack every ounce of attention possible. But now, as Nathan Bashaw pointed out, things are changing:

Interesting example of how internet culture has evolved:

In the early days of Twitter, people used to just share links and headlines all the time. That basically never happens anymore. Now you have to say something in your own voice when you share something.

It’s better.

— Nathan Bashaw (@nbashaw) May 11, 2018

Some of the best performing tweets nowadays are those that tell authentic stories.

For example, Rodolphe Dutel’s recent tweet about workplace culture really resonated with his audience (and beyond), picking up 31,265 retweets and 134,655 likes.

Dear tech companies,

Employees don’t need ping pong tables or beer fridges at work.

Employees need flexibility to do their best work and enjoy life. For instance, working remotely.

Please offer trust, not toys.

— Rodolphe Dutel (@rdutel) September 15, 2018

Would it have been as successful if Rodolphe had simply shared an article link and headline? Probably not.

Kicking off the experiment

Having seen various tweets and threads succeed like Rodolphe’s, Aytekin set out to reverse engineer a “viral” tweet of his own.

The plan was simple:

Repurpose a successful Medium post into a Twitter thread and boost it with Twitter ads to test the limits of Twitter as a platform to spread Aytekin and JotForm’s message. 

In order to craft the Twitter thread, Aytekin used his Medium analytics for inspiration:

With this data, he was able to see which articles had resonated most with his audience and tell a story that he was sure would connect with people on Twitter.

He chose to create a Twitter thread based on his post entitled: ‘Don’t listen to those productivity gurus: why waking up at 6am won’t make you successful’.

Here’s a link to the thread:

1/ Don’t listen to those productivity gurus.

 Waking up at 6am won’t make you successful.

A thread

— Aytekin (@aytekintank) July 16, 2018

The results: 17 million impressions

The aim of this experiment was to test the limits of the Twitter algorithm, and the power of Twitter ads, so Aytekin decided to spend as much as possible on this ad: $24,098 in total.

The tweet generated 17,177,432 impressions on Twitter.

Here are the results in full:

Aytekin didn’t jump right in and spend $24,000 overnight. In fact, when the experiment started, the plan was to spend a maximum of $5,000.

But as the tweet began to take off, the budget was raised accordingly.

“We started this experiment by saying we wouldn’t exceed $5K in spend,” he explained. “But we kept a close eye on the Cost Per Engagement and Impressions, and raised budget accordingly.”

As the advert was seeing super high engagement rates (over 20 percent at times):

And low Cost Per Engagement:

Aytekin continued to ramp up the spend until results started to diminish. In the end, the experiment ran for over a month in total (between July 15 – August 24).

Due to the high engagement, the thread also received plenty of organic reach on Twitter.

Out of 17 million impressions, 4.7 million were organic — so in other words, 27.4 percent of reach was free vs 72.6 percent paid.

Some key takeaways from this experiment follow…

Lessons learned from this Twitter experiment

1. Twitter is a great place to repurpose content

If you’re creating content of any form: videos, blog posts, podcasts, etc, repurposing it across multiple channels is a great way to get the most bang for your buck.

But repurposing doesn’t just mean copying and pasting a link over to Twitter.

If you want to be successful, you need to think about how you can tell each story natively to the platform you’re publishing on.

For this experiment, Aytekin could have simply shared a tweet linking to his blog post and boosted it, but I’m sure that wouldn’t have performed anywhere near as well as the Twitter thread.

By using a format native to Twitter, Aytekin was able to share his story in a way that Twitter users would respond to and be happy to engage with.

2. A Twitter thread can help you to achieve multiple goals at the same time

Impressions and engagement are awesome — especially when you’re quite new to the content marketing game.

But when you use a Twitter thread, you’re able to feature multiple types of content within your tweets and achieve various goals.

For example, in the fifth tweet in the thread Aytekin included a link back to the original article on Medium:

This tweet received more than 1.1 million impressions and over 35,000 clicks, helping to drive traffic back to the original post on Medium.

The sixth tweet in the thread mentioned @JotForm and 4,346 people clicked from this tweet to JotForm’s profile to learn more about the business:

Aytekin also picked up 5,752 followers from this thread.

When it comes to planning an experiment like this of your own, try to think about the goals you’d like to achieve:

• If it’s all about impressions and engagement, you could tell the whole story on Twitter.
• If you want to drive traffic, add a link back to your website.
• To increase your following, @ mention your profile.

Remember: It’s important to tell a great story in a native format, so ensure you use your first few tweets to get people hooked into your narrative before including any links.

3. Twitter is a great place to start a conversation

With any highly shared tweet, you’ll always get a few trolls pop up here and there, but if you look past this, you’ll realize that Twitter is still an incredible place to start a conversation and build relationships.

Following Aytekin’s thread, he received plenty of questions about JotForm and how the business operates. This enabled him to build new relationships with people he previously wouldn’t have reached.

So, do Twitter ads really work?

This experiment was designed to test the limits of Twitter ads and the results speak for themselves:

• Over 17 million impressions
• 35,000 visits to the original article
• 5,752 followers for Aytekin
• 4,346 profile views for @JotForm

But that’s not to say everything was perfect.

Due to the way Twitter ads work there’s no real way to tell exactly how many unique people saw the ad and many people reached out to Aytekin to say they’d seen the ad multiple times.

And for every great conversation started by this thread, there was another slightly negative reaction. It seems that some Twitter users don’t quite accept ads in their feed like they do on Facebook or Instagram, where ads are more ingrained within the platforms.

Overall though, Aytekin sees the experiment as worthwhile:

“Even though the initial cost was high, the 5,000 followers we gained from this experiment are permanent,” he explained.

“Every time I publish a new post, I get clicks, likes, retweets and comments from these followers. So the results are compounding over time. I can’t be sure if they will become long-term, highly-engaged audience members, but they seem to stick around for now.”

And the great thing is that you can replicate this experiment yourself with a budget of any size.

Simply take a piece of content that’s been successful for you on another channel:

• A highly-viewed Facebook video.
• One of your top podcast episodes.
• Your #1 blog post.
• A copy of your email newsletter.

And repurpose that content into a succinct story on Twitter.

Even if you don’t want to invest any budget in it, repurposing content to Twitter is a great way to connect with your audience and share your stories to another platform.

Have you used Twitter ads? Do you repurpose content from other platforms to Twitter? I’d love to chat about your thoughts and experiences in the comments below.

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Thank Do Twitter Ads Really Work? A Surprising Experiment: 17.2 Million Views From a Single Twitter Thread for first publishing this post.

How Ahrefs and Buffer Drive 300K+ Sessions Per Month with Evergreen Content and Social Media

• Learn how we drive the growth of our blog here at Buffer using free, organic traffic strategies.
• Understand how to amplify blog content by reverse engineering social media videos that your audience will love.
• See how we generated more than 30,000 clicks to to our content using paid acquisition channels, and how we optimize ads to lower CPC while simultaneously increasing CTR.

Building your website traffic in 2018 is no easy task.

Today, businesses are faced with an ever-increasing amount of online content as well as ongoing changes from search engines such as Google, and constant algorithm updates from platforms like Facebook.

But, if you’re in a competitive industry that is dominated by established sites, all is not lost.

You can still get tons of website traffic with a resourceful content marketing strategy that revolves around producing quality, evergreen pieces of content.

We recently teamed up with Tim Soulo, head of marketing and product strategy at Ahrefs, to discuss what the most successful businesses are doing to generate quality website traffic in 2018.

Prefer video? Check out our webinar below:

Generating quality website traffic

Did you know that more than 90 percent of website pages generate no organic search traffic from Google? In fact, if you look closely, less than 1 percent of website pages drive the majority of organic traffic online:

That’s why it’s critical to have a content strategy in place that incorporates well-researched, evergreen topics that will drive long-term traffic to your website.

The Buffer blog, for example, gets about 1.3 million visits every month, and more than 80 percent of our website traffic comes from people searching for social media marketing topics on Google and finding our blog posts. This 80 percent is also known as organic traffic and is the most scalable and reliable traffic source for most websites.

We achieved this with having only two content writers for most of the past seven years. If we can do it, you can, too!

Here’s how we approach traffic growth:

Write about evergreen topics and promote them regularly

This first chart shows the traffic of most blog posts written nowadays. The blog post gets a nice spike of traffic from social media and email on the day of publishing. But the traffic fades away over time because the blog post doesn’t rank well on Google and isn’t being promoted on marketing channels anymore.

Now, compare that chart with this second one:

This blog post also had a nice spike of traffic on the day of publishing. But the traffic didn’t drop over time. In fact, it continues to grow and grow. After three years, this blog post has been viewed more than two million times.

There are several ways to generate evergreen content ideas, but Soulo recommends two proven tactics to consistently increase your success rate.

1. Find popular search terms

Using a tool like the Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, you can search for a single word or phrase related to your product or service:

Not only will you be able to view the search volume around the term entered, you’ll also be able to view all related keywords and search volume – providing you with even more content ideas.

2. Research your peers and competitors

Another way to generate keyword and content ideas is by research your peers and competitors.

We particularly like this strategy because it helps to provide even deeper insights into the exact pages other businesses in your industry are ranking for. In other words, you can discover exactly what problems and challenges potential customers are trying to solve.

Ahrefs Site Explorer provides you with an in-depth look at the organic search traffic and backlink profile of any website or URL:

Of course, you should never rely on organic search volume alone to help generate evergreen content ideas for your website or blog, but performing the two steps above is one of the best places to start when planning your content for the month, quarter, or year.

“It’s all about studying. Studying what people search for in terms of the topic that you are targeting. If there are a lot of searches, you might want to create an article that would cover most of them. If there aren’t a ton of searches around a particular topic, then there isn’t much opportunity to have your page rank for several keywords and bring you a healthy amount of search traffic.”

Tim Soulo (@timsoulo)
Head of Marketing, Ahrefs

Besides choosing the right topics to write (through keyword research) and promoting the blog posts regularly (which you’ll learn more below), we also consistently update our blog posts.

Updating and relaunching your blog posts

Another thing we do is to regularly update our old blog posts to ensure that they are still relevant and useful to our readers.

In the social media space, many things, such as social media image sizes, can change frequently. Many of the blog posts that we write would no longer be helpful to our readers if the information is outdated.

Updating your old blog posts not only keeps your content relevant to your readers but it can also help you rank better on Google and get more sustainable traffic. For example, when we updated our social media analytics tools blog post last year, the number of daily page views more than doubled!

Here’s what we did with that blog post:

1. Update the content: We added new tools, moved dysfunctional tools, and updated screenshots.
2. Fine-tune the writing: We re-wrote certain parts to make them read better, added a section on what’s social media analytics, and added anchor tags to make navigation easier.
3. Relaunch the blog post: Then we updated the published date within WordPress and promoted the blog post on social media and via our email list.

“A good way to look at generating sustainable traffic (or organic traffic) is to think of it as creating helpful and relevant content for your target audience. What topics are your audience always searching for? Write a blog post to help answer their questions. Are your blog posts becoming outdated? Update the content so that your audience will still find it useful.

We have a blog post that goes into more details about how we grew our readership to over a million visits per month. If you are interested in learning more about the intricacies of SEO and generating organic traffic, I would recommend following Ahref’s blog and Moz’s Whiteboard Friday.”

Alfred Lua (@alfred_lua)
Growth Editor, Buffer

But even with the most quality content in the world, potential customers won’t visit your website unless they know the content is there.

That’s where social media, particularly video and advertising, can help boost the results of your evergreen content strategy above.

Here’s how.

Amplifying content success with social media video

Video is one of the most compelling ways to reach your audience because video is the preferred way people consume information in 2018 and will be for the foreseeable future.

Here is a simple formula for amplifying the success of your content and boosting website traffic.

1. Create video topics from what works

Video is not a whole new type of marketing  – video is a way to amplify your existing marketing strategy.

Start by sorting your most visited blog posts or pages from the previous 90 days in Google Analytics. To access this information, head to Google Analytics > Behavior > Site Content > All Pages:

Sorting by Pageviews gives you a precise look at what people are most interested in learning about from your business. It’s a good indication of what sorts of content will make for an engaging video topic.

Next, we create a list of possible video topic ideas based on our most popular website content in Excel:

Feel free to “make a copy” of the above Excel spreadsheet template for your own use!

This strategy has helped us create well-liked videos such as this and this on social media as well as drive additional website traffic (traffic we would not have gotten without video content).

2. Create video topics from scratch

If you don’t have a ton of existing content to amplify, that’s alright! You can still drive traffic to your website by creating compelling video content ideas from scratch.

There are lots of great (free and paid) tools available that will help you to uncover popular topics. Here are two of our favorites:

• BuzzSumo

You can use BuzzSumo to find the most shared content from any URL – instantly allowing you to determine what content has worked for your peers and competitors. You can also find the most shared content for any topic.

For example, let’s say we were interested in driving website traffic based on the topic of social media marketing. We’d simply enter that search term into BuzzSumo and the results would look something like this:

Discovering relevant topics using search terms and website URLs are my favorite way to use BuzzSumo.

• Ahrefs Keyword Explorer

Another great way to generate a list of video ideas to drive quality traffic to your website is with a keyword tool such as Ahref Keywords Explorer.

Keywords explorer can allows you to identify thousands of keyword and topic possibilities in a matter of seconds (and which topics are most popular based on search volume!)

For example, let’s say you’re interested in driving website traffic focused on healthy juices. Simply enter your search term into Keywords Explorer and Ahrefs does all of the work:

The best part is that the tool provides “alternatives” for your selected keyword and related topics that might be useful for your business.

Other great tools for generating engaging video topics:

• Facebook Pages to Watch
• Reddit
• Quora
• YouTube
• Twitter Lists
• Slack communities
• Facebook Groups

3. Create videos to promote your content

Once you have a list of video topics, it’s time to create the content. There are plethora of great marketing tools to help you create video content, but to help dwindle it down, here are a few of our favorites:

At Buffer, we regularly use Animoto  to create short, engaging blog post summaries that we can share across social media to drive website traffic back to Buffer.

There are tons of best-practices that help to make videos on social media engaging, but quite possibly the most important factor is video length. Keep in mind that people are often browsing social media from their mobile phone and so quick, compelling videos will perform best.

For a complete guide on creating engaging short videos for social media, check out our in-depth blog post where we cover everything you need to know.

Amplifying website traffic with social media ads

Social media advertising has been an effective way for us at Buffer to boost website traffic around top performing blog posts, strategic marketing initiatives, landing pages, and even our podcast.

When comparing Facebook and Instagram advertising to other options such a PPC, we realized that we could generate hundreds of thousands of visits at a fraction of the cost (often less than $0.10 per click).

The best part is that it’s extremely easy to get started. Here’s our simple approach to social media advertising.

Boost your top-performing content

A straightforward way to drive traffic to your website with advertising is to boost your top performing content on Facebook and Instagram. Here’s how:

1. Start by posting your content organically to Facebook and Instagram
2. Check your analytics to see which posts have a high engagement rate (engagement / reach * 100)
3. Use Facebook Ads Manager to create a custom audience that is likely to interact with your content
4. Create a custom “Traffic” campaign in Ads Manager or use the “Boost” button to promote your top posts
5. Generate social proof by regularly responding to comments and interacting with your audience

For example, we posted an article to Facebook about “how to grow your Instagram account” and it immediately received higher-than-normal organic interaction.

In order to promote the post, we created a new traffic campaign and ad set, targeting folks interested in topics such as social media marketing, social media manager, and Social Media Examiner.

We then set a daily budget of $20 and promoted the post. Here’s what it looks like:

To date, this ad has generated more than 125,000 visits to the Buffer Blog for right around $0.06 per click, which has led to thousands of trials and hundreds of customers.

Create social media advertising content from scratch

Naturally, there will be times when you’ll want to promote content, initiatives, and projects that aren’t necessarily classified as top-performers.

We wanted to increase the number of downloads to the Buffer Podcast, for example, and looked to social media advertising as a means to do so. Today, we’ve generated more than 30,000 clicks to the Buffer podcast on iTunes, resulting in a 65 percent increase in downloads in less than six months.

Here’s how we did it:

• We set up a Custom Audience targeting all traffic to the Buffer Blog and buffer.com knowing that brand awareness would increase our CTR and decrease our CPC.
• Next we added an additional targeting filter to only deliver ads to iPhone, iPad, and other iOS devices and linked directly to the episode on iTunes (rather than the show notes or podcast landing page). This reduced the friction of going from podcast ad >> podcast subscriber.
• We chose the most popular episodes from the podcast and started there — $10 per day using the “Post Traffic” campaign option in Facebook. We keep a close eye on CPC and whenever it creeps above $0.25–0.30 we shut it off and start a new ad.

“Social media advertising has been an effective way for us at Buffer to boost website traffic around top performing blog posts, strategic marketing initiatives, landing pages, and even our podcast. In the past year alone, we’ve used Facebook and Instagram advertising to generate more than 100,000 unique targeted visits to our website for less than $0.25 per click, which has resulted in thousands of leads and hundreds of new customers. Plus, it has had a huge impact on brand awareness and word-of-mouth marketing.”.

Brian Peters (@brian_g_peters)
Digital Marketing, Buffer

Social media advertising best-practices:

• Test images, captions, and headlines until you find the right combination
• Look for a relevancy score of 8-10 on brand awareness type content
• Increase budget with successful posts (immediately shut down others)
• Keep an eye on frequency rate (try not to exceed 2.0)
• Evergreen content can run as long as you want!

If you’re just getting started with social media advertising or you’re looking to build upon what you already know, we have a brand new Skillshare class all about advertising (we’re happy to offer you a free month of Skillshare Premium)

Over to you

We hope you enjoyed our webinar with Ahrefs and all of the content included in this post!

We’d love to hear from you as well.

What tactics and strategies have worked for your business to generate lots of quality website traffic? Feel free to drop a comment below!

Learn more about how Ahrefs can help your business here or check out more of Tim Soulo’s work here.

Want more content like this?

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Thank How Ahrefs and Buffer Drive 300K+ Sessions Per Month with Evergreen Content and Social Media for first publishing this post.

How Companies Like Bored Panda, REI, and Vox Are Growing Their Organic Reach on Social Media

Instagram’s Co-Founders Step Down, Vertical Video Gains Momentum, Facebook Launches Stories Ads, and More!

Looking to catch up on the latest social media news, but short on time? We have you covered! This week (episode #114) we’re chatting about all of this and more:

• Instagram’s co-founders are stepping down from their positions at Facebook, sending a shock through the industry. We’re covering what this critical change means for social behemoth.
• Vertical video is gaining momentum and now is the time for businesses to jump on board with this trend. Vertical video is quickly becoming the preferred method of content consumption online.
• Facebook launches a powerful new ad format – Stories Ads. Stories are a great way to reach your customers on social media and this ad format is an exciting opportunity for businesses everywhere.
• Facebook will now allow Facebook Pages to join Groups as a Page. This exciting announcement gives businesses a brand new way to connect with their community on Facebook in 2018 and beyond.

Join 20,000+ weekly listeners for the Buffer podcast, The Science of Social Media, where we bring you the latest and greatest in social media marketing news, updates, stories, insights, and actionable takeaways.

Let’s dive in!

Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, co-founders of Instagram. Photo: Instagram Press

Instagram’s co-founders step down, vertical video gains momentum, Facebook launches Stories Ads, and more! [complete podcast transcript]

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation between Hailley Griffis and Brian Peters.

• • Part I: Instagram co-founders step down from positions at Facebook
  • Part II: Vertical video gains momentum and popularity with brands
  • Part III: Facebook launches powerful new Stories Ads format for Pages
  • Part IV: Facebook will now allow Pages to join Facebook Groups

Hailley: Hi everyone! I’m Hailley Griffis and this is The Science of Social Media, a podcast by Buffer. Your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and learning.

Brian: Welcome to episode #114, I’m Brian Peters and this week we’re breaking down what is quite possibly the biggest social media news story of the year. Instagram’s co-founders are stepping down and we’ve got the inside scoop for you on what’s next for the social giant.

Hailley: We’re also taking a look at vertical video and how it continues to gain momentum on social networks (in both usage and effectiveness). Plus, two big announcements from Facebook, including Stories ads and Groups, and more.

Brian: As always, a warm welcome to the show. Let’s kick it off!

Part I: Instagram co-founders step down from Facebook

Hailley: I guess there’s no better place to start than with one of the biggest social media stories of the year.

The founders of Instagram, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, are leaving Facebook.

Now there’s a bit of speculation around what actually happened, but according to Bloomberg, it’s at least partly due to growing tensions with CEO Mark Zuckerberg over the direction of where Instagram is heading.

Hailley: As many of you might remember, Systrom and Krieger, have been at the company since Instagram’s acquisition by Facebook in 2012 for $1 billion.

That 1 billion turned out to be an incredible investment for Facebook with Instagram now valued at more than $100 billion.

Systrom said that they’re planning on taking some time off to explore their quote “curiosity and creativity” again. And that building new things requires that they step back, understand what inspires us and match that with what the world needs.

Hailley: Of course, Zuckerberg praised the Instagram founders in a statement and said that he wished them “all the best and I’m looking forward to seeing what they build next.”

However, it does raise some questions about what the true reason for the founders’ departures was and what the future holds for Instagram.

Facebook continues to face a ton of criticism. For much of the past two years, critics have accused Facebook of things like being careless with user data and for not preventing foreign interference.

Brian: Exactly and those issues have started taking a toll on Facebook’s business and stock. Facebook shares fell about 2.2 percent after the news broke on September 24th.

This news certainly raises some questions about what’s going on over there. Many publications like the New York Times and Bloomberg are speculating that the Instagram co-founders weren’t happy with the direction that Zuckerberg was taking Instagram.

Saying that it’s going in a direction that goes against their original vision for the company.

Hailley: I can totally see that.

As a public company, Facebook has their shareholders to take into account, which means that generating revenue is often a top priority when it comes to product decisions.

I think that Systrom and Kreiger leaned more towards the organic “community” side of things rather than the revenue generation side of things. Which isn’t necessarily good or bad either way, they might have just come to a natural end to their time at Facebook.

Brian: Agreed, Hailley. Sounds a bit like what we went through here at Buffer over the last few years, though we ended up on the organic community side of the spectrum.

But it’s worth noting there that from a product and business perspective, Instagram continues to be a major opportunity.

In fact, Instagram is on track to provide Facebook with $20 billion in revenue by 2020, about a quarter of Facebook’s total revenue.

Hailley: Instagram continues to attract a younger cohort of users who are critical to Facebook’s growth.

And they’re spending a ton of time on the platform as well – with users averaging about 53 minutes per day.

Plus, Instagram is rolling out lots of great shopping features in the feed, Stories, and explore making it a great platform to be on for ecommerce brands.

Brian: All-in-all, and I might be alone here, but I think that the departures of Systrom and Krieger create a unique opportunity for Instagram moving forward.

The decisions they make on who to hire to replace them and where to take the product over the next few months will be critical in determining the longterm viability and success of Instagram.

I don’t know about you, but I’m very excited about what’s in store.

Hailley: As always, we’ll keep you posted on all of the most important and breaking news here on the Science of Social Media.

Part II: Vertical video gains momentum and popularity with brands

Brian: If you do a quick search online for “vertical video” you’ll quickly uncover hundreds of blog posts — even whole websites — telling you to stop shooting video vertically.

It’s no secret that people love to hate on vertical video.

But for businesses, it’s time to reconsider because vertical is the new default.

Hailley: The reason vertical video isn’t going anywhere and why it’s the new default is because smartphones are driving the trend and as more content is both created and consumed on mobile devices we’ll see increasing amounts of vertical video.

It’s not hard to imagine a day where the majority of time spent online browsing, reading, and shopping is done on our phones.

Brian: For creators, vertical is a compelling new storytelling format that can help you connect with your audience in new ways and is yet to be embraced fully by marketers, leaving you a great opportunity to start today.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube all support vertical video and studies show that it produces more engagement and converts better than traditional landscape video.

Hailley: Just this year Instagram reported that more than 40 percent of its users said they’re more interested in a brand or product after seeing it in an Instagram Story.

But more important than vertical video converting customers and driving sales, which is obviously important, is that vertical video helps brands to look and feel authentic on social media in feeds filled with friends and family.

Brian: Great point Hailley.

And just to elaborate on that further. Think about what types of videos everyday people are creating. Are they creating highly-produced landscape videos or are they shooting with their phone in vertical mode?

I’d guess the latter. And so brands that can make their content look and feel like a real users’ content are the brands that are going to succeed.

Vertical video’s secret weapon is that it feels like it’s coming from a friend, even if it’s coming from a brand.

Hailley: The vertical-first stories format is incredibly versatile. For example, Netflix designed a mobile-exclusive stories format for movie trailers.

It looks just like the button you’d see on Instagram to launch a story, but offers a new way to breeze through movie trailers.

And by the way, if you want to see this Netflix example, or read about how your business can succeed with vertical video, we just launched a brand new 4-part email series. Check out our Blog for details.

Brian: The series is super good. Definitely go check that out.

Anyways, what can be intimidating for many of us is actually making the shift to creating vertical-first content, and adapting that across your social channels.

Despite being years into the video-first world, many businesses are afraid of the format: The skills required to produce or edit a video are difficult to find, and it requires a sizable investment.

Hailley: However, filming vertical is easier than you think, and it might even make it less scary to take your first video steps.

Because vertical video is native to mobile devices and the majority of vertical-first content is filmed on a smartphone already, the expectation of your audience is dramatically different than in the past.

In fact, The Guardian invested heavily in Instagram and found that “heavily produced” videos with scripts, studios, or professional editing weren’t worth the effort when analyzing the data.

Brian: Instead, they discovered that quick explainers and even static graphics were more popular and made it more likely that a viewer would stick around until the end.

News UK found similar results, saying that vertical video had “increased interactions sixfold,” and it plans to experiment with them for other intents, such as advertising items for purchase.

Hailley: The key, if you’re excited to jump on this vertical video trend, is to remember that watching vertical videos is almost synonymous with being on-the-go, meaning that your viewers are likely to be interrupted by their surrounding, notifications, or just their arms getting tired.

Attention spans are getting shorter, particularly as you grapple with being alongside the user’s friends, filling their screen

Brian: The arm getting tired is real!

But what that means for video is to get to the point quickly, and give the viewer the hook almost up front — bite-sized, instant content means that they’ll consider continuing into your feed and end up seeing more of your content than they would on a 5-minute explainer.

Mercedes Benz has some great examples of getting the balance between content and length right, where it successfully reached more than 2.6 million people with short ads that crammed in lots of information, quickly, by using the format in a new way

Hailley: Again, you can check all of this out and more on our blog now on our Blog!

Part III: Facebook launches new Stories Ads format for Pages

Alright a few quick, but important updates on the Facebook front before you go.

First is that Facebook has officially announced that it’s rolling out Facebook Stories Ads to advertisers globally.

More than 300 million people now use Facebook Stories every single day, and as is tradition with Facebook, they’re now offering businesses a way to tap into that massive audience base.

Brian: Ads everywhere!

But you know they are working.

A survey from Ipsos discovered that 62 percent of people said they became more interested in a brand or product after seeing it in a story.

And Facebook says that “brands testing Facebook Stories ads are already seeing results”.

Hailley: We’ve done a little experimenting with Stories ads as well, right?

Brian: We have for sure and I must admit they are working really well. Right now we’re driving traffic to lots of Buffer pages for less than $0.15 cents per click, which is pretty awesome.

Hailley: Lots of brands are seeing similar results, Digiday found that the flight-booking service Hopper has seen both Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories ads performing better than ads in Facebook’s news feed and in Instagram’s feed.

In fact, the results for Hopper have been so great that the businesses has been quote “prioritizing designing ads for the Stories format, then adapting them to the other formats”.

Brian: Facebook Stories ads have been rolled out globally as of the recording of this show.

To get started with Stories ads, head over to Facebook Ads Manager and create your ad, then when it comes to selecting ‘Placements’ you’ll see the option to include Facebook Stories.

We’re going to be running lots of tests over the next few weeks so stay tuned!

Part IV: Facebook will now allow Pages to join Facebook Groups

Hailley: Last but not least, and I thought this one was really cool, is that Facebook will now allow Pages to join Facebook Groups.

Image: Social Media Today

Supposedly a spokesperson at Facebook told social media today that they’ve heard from lots of businesses that a “more intimate setting” can be meaningful for brand building.

Facebook previously launched the ability for Pages to start Facebook Groups so they can engage with their communities, but now they are testing the ability for Pages to join existing Facebook Groups as well.

Brian: As usual the new option was spotted by Mari Smith and shared by Matt Navarra and it could be another way for businesses to offset some of their losses in Facebook organic reach as a result of platform’s algorithm shifts.

And so as of right now, the ‘Allow Pages to request to join as group members’ is active by default, so unless a group admin has chosen not to let Pages join, Pages included in the test pool should be able to join most groups.

Hailley: Of course, this isn’t necessarily a game-changing function, and it probably won’t bring back most of the referral traffic you’ve likely lost as a result of Facebook’s algorithm changes.

But it is another interesting consideration for businesses and marketers, and another learning opportunity to help generate more attention for your business on social media.

Brian: Thank you so much for tuning in to the Science of Social Media today.

If you ever want to get in touch with me or Hailley, we’re always here for your on social media using the hashtag #bufferpodcast. You can also say hi to us anytime and hello@bufferapp.com

Hailley: A huge shoutout to you all – the more than 20,000 people that tune into our show every single week. You make this fun and are the entire reason we do what we do so thank you! And thanks for telling your friends, family and colleagues about us as well.

Lots of great shows coming your way in the next few weeks.

Until next Monday, everyone!

How to say hello to us

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

• Hailley on Twitter and Hailley’s Website
• Brian on Twitter and Brian’s Website

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 20,000+ 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 Instagram’s Co-Founders Step Down, Vertical Video Gains Momentum, Facebook Launches Stories Ads, and More! for first publishing this post.