What a Real-Life Social Media Style Guide Looks Like (and How to Make Your Own)

How to Launch on Product Hunt Like a Pro, Lessons from 17.2 Million Twitter Impressions, 4 Key Facebook Trends for 2019, and More!

Looking to catch up on the latest social media news, but short on time? We have you covered! This week (episode #117) we’re chatting about all of this and more.

• For those launching a new product or tool or even project, Product Hunt can be a serious game-changer in terms of awareness, traffic, feedback, and so much more.
• 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.
• The most important 2019 Facebook trends that businesses should keep their eye on to make the most out of their social media marketing, including augmented reality, Instagram Stories ads, and more.

Join 19,000+ 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!

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How to Launch on Product Hunt Like a Pro, Lessons from 17.2 Million Twitter Impressions, 4 Key Facebook Trends for 2019, and More! [Complete podcast transcript]

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

• • Part I: How to launch your product on Product Hunt like a pro
  • Part II: Do Twitter ads really work? Lessons from 17.2M Twitter impressions
  • Part III: Four key Facebook trends in 2019 for businesses and marketers
  • Part IV: Buffer SocialChat and this year’s exciting new campaigns

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 #117, I’m Hailley Griffis and this week we’re coming to you live from Nashville, Tennessee and we’ll be covering a ton of great updates and strategies in the social media world, including a channel that we haven’t talked about in the past here on the show, Product Hunt.

Brian: It’s awesome to be here with you in person, Hailley. We also have some fun insights from a Twitter Thread that was viewed over 17.2 million times and what it can teach us about the art of Tweeting, four Facebook trends businesses should know for 2019, new marketing campaigns, and more.

Hailley: Let’s kick off the show!

Part I: How to launch your product on Product Hunt like a pro

One channel that we haven’t talked about before here on the show, but one that can certainly be considered a social media channel among other things, is Product Hunt.

For those that have never used Product Hunt before, it’s a great community of creators, founders, developers, marketers, CEOs that curate the latest new products on the market, every day.

For those launching a new product or tool or even project, Product Hunt can be a serious game-changer in terms of awareness, traffic, feedback, and so much more.

Brian: Which is exactly why we figured we’d share some tips on how to launch your upcoming product, tools, or projects on Product Hunt with the best of them.

We really do believe that Product Hunt should be a central part of any marketing strategy moving forward. If nothing else, it’s a great platform to connect with other folks in your industry or niche.

I’ve heard of countless stories of collaborations and even acquisitions resulting from relationships formed on Product Hunt.

Hailley: We pulled a lot of these tips from a great article written by JotURL.

Getting into it, there are lots of things to think about with Product Hunt launches before, during and after the launch. Without going through every single one, we’ll focus on the most important here.

First is that Product Hunt is a community and it’s based on an algorithm.

Brian: In other words, if the reviews, the upvotes, and the comments you receive are by very active users and followed on the platform, their specific weight will be greater .

So before you ever launch your product, it’s important to build relationships, participate in the discussions, comment on the products you find most interesting and make friends with the founder and/or Maker of the products that are published daily.

And of course, be honest and always available, both on Product Hunt and in the different groups.

Hailley: The next thing to prepare before your launch is all of the images, logos, and messaging that you’ll be publishing on social media, email, etc.

Like we mentioned before, it’s super important to respond to all comments on your product, and so worrying about other things like messaging during launch day will be a distraction.

There’s a big list in the article on our blog of everything you’ll need, but the essentials to launch your product include a really good tagline, the names of the Makers.

Quick note on Makers: Every follower of every Maker on the day of the launch will receive a notification, so definitely take advantage of this feature.

Brian: Including Makers and Hunters that have a solid following is really key in launching your project with a bang.

Media wise, including a project video is highly recommended as well as photos, screenshots, and a thumbnail GIF. That’ll help your project to really pop.

Which leads us perfectly to the next part which is what to do with all of the traffic that you will (hopefully) receive on launch day.

Hailley: On the day of the launch you will receive a lot of traffic from a good amount of targeted and interested visitors….

So why not make the most out of this opportunity?

Installing a few website tracking pixels will be more than enough to make sure you don’t miss out. First, we use Google Tag Manager to install Google Analytics on our website and landing page.

And then, of course, we have Facebook Pixels installed so that we can gently retarget users in the future.

Brian: Those are both must-haves in my opinion when it comes to tracking, but if you wanted to take it a step further, a tool like Hotjar or CrazyEgg will allow you to understand what works and what does not on your site and where folks are clicking.

Now you’ve got your tracking installed it’s time to think about what you want people to do from a marketing perspective once they’ve signed up. This includes things like thinking through your website and product messaging as well as your email onboarding flows.

Hailley: Super important part of the launch, for sure.

You’ll also want to loop in your support team (if you have one). Prepare them with some questions they might get on the day of the launch so that they’re ready to go.

And then finally, you’re ready to launch!

On launch day, it’s all about generating good publicity and management.

Personally message everyone you know. Ask specifically for upvotes on Product Hunt, make sure to personalize them, and get ready to answer a lot of questions and support tickets.

Brian: Love it yeah we can’t stress how important it is to take time to answer everyone’s questions and continue to build relationships even on the day of the launch.

Doing each of the things we talked about today will ensure a smooth and successful Product Hunt launch.

Part II: Lessons from 17.2 million Twitter impressions

Hailley: We recently published an article on our blog titled: “Do Twitter Ads Really Work? A Surprising Experiment: 17.2 Million Views From a Single Twitter Thread.”

Based on the reactions from our audience we thought we’d chat about a few important points from the article on Twitter ads and what makes for a really good Tweet.

Quick background on the experiment, JotForm founder, Aytekin ‏Tank, wanted to know if telling a brand’s authentic story would be successful across social media and other channels.

Brian: Tank had found success telling Stories on Medium in the past, but he wondered if a platform like Twitter could product the same results.

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

Which I think is a great way to think about Twitter. It’s not just sharing articles to links. It’s telling the story behind that link or behind your brand.

Hailley: 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.

Looking at the Medium 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 titled: “Don’t listen to those productivity gurus: why waking up at 6am won’t make you successful.”

Brian: And the results?

The tweet generated 17,177,432 impressions on Twitter. Which is incredible!

Now the part we haven’t mentioned yet is that he spent $24,000 on promoting this Tweet.

Which is a lot, don’t get me wrong. However, the Tweet generated more than 4,000,000 impressions organically, which is about 27% percent of the total reach. So still super impressive in its own right.

Hailley: There are a couple of lessons here from this experiment.

One is that 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.

Brian: Absolutely.

Two is that 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, Tank’s tweet received more than 1.1 million impressions and over 35,000 clicks, helping to drive traffic back to the original post on Medium.

Hailley: And finally, number three, 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.

Part III: Four key Facebook trends for businesses in 2019

Brian: We’re getting towards the end of 2018 which means you’re either one, ramping up to end Q4 off with a bang, or two looking forward to a big 2019. Or both. Either way, it’s a good place to be in.

And in that spirit, we thought we’d share some of the most important Facebook trends for 2019 that you should be keeping your eye on to make the most of your social media marketing strategy and results.

Starting with Augmented Reality Ads.

Hailley: In 2019, we’re going to see a shift to brands looking to build an even deeper connection with users by helping them interact with, and visualize, different products and experiences within the Facebook and Instagram platforms.

And Brian, this is particularly relevant as our marketing team has been experimenting with the Facebook Oculus VR headset over the last week or so.

I can absolutely see shopping in augmented and virtual reality becoming a huge success for brands that sell their products on social media.

Brian: I couldn’t agree more, Hailley.

I was a little hesitant before we started using the Oculus, but I have to say that I’m all in. I now understand why VR gets so much hype. I can’t wait for the future.

And another trend to keep an eye on for 2019, and we’ve talked about this one here on the show a bunch, are Instagram Stories ads. We’ve seen a ton of success, meaning high interaction rates and low cost per clicks.

Hailley: Facebook Stories Ads will really start to enable brands to create new experiences for via the platform’s Stories option.

And remember, Facebook Stories hasn’t taken off the way Instagram Stories has, but this type of full-screen creative is very popular right now, and Facebook Stories ads will provide more options to reach people across both platforms.

So definitely keep an eye on Facebook Stories moving forward.

Brian: Yeah I’m a big believer that Facebook Stories will be one of the hottest advertising channels in 2019 for brands.

Alrighty, another trend to know for 2019 are the Facebook Page Reviews being updated to Recommendations.

We talked about Facebook creating more features in-app for small businesses, similar to companies like Yelp and Google, and it’s important to take advantage of all of these.

Hailley: Exactly, so if you haven’t updated your Facebook page in a while, we highly recommend going into your settings and just making sure you have all of your information filled out and the bells and whistles enabled.

And another great trend, or more of an update from Facebook, is that they’re moving into helping businesses with their creatives more.

For example, Facebook recently launched a new Video Creation Kit which enables you to turn your existing photo assets into mobile-optimized videos. These easy-to-use templates include text options also.

Brian: That’s a good one.

Yeah I was creating an ad the other day and I saw that option in Ads Manager. It was super easy to use and I must admit, it worked pretty well.

So basically what we’re saying here as well is that video ads are absolutely still trending through 2019.

And that’s it. If you keep those four trends in mind you will be well ahead of the game as a business on Facebook and Instagram in the coming year.

Part IV: Buffer SocialChat and exciting new campaigns

Hailley: Totally.

Alright to end the show, we have a few fun updates for everyone on the Buffer front.

First, really excited to introduce a brand new free tool from us here at Buffer called SocialChat.

Buffer SocialChat lets your customers start conversations with you on your website, and continue them privately, right where they feel comfortable, via Messenger and Twitter DMs. It can be enabled with just a couple of lines of code. No software or other tools needed!

Brian: Super excited about that one. Lots of chat tools these days are so complicated and so we wanted to make it easy for businesses to get up and running without too much hassle.

We also have tons of fun campaigns coming your way in the near future. We’re celebrating Small Business Saturday with Mailchimp, Square, and WooCommerce, we have State of Remote Work and State of Social in early 2019 and, well, we might have one more surprise for you in just a few weeks.

Hailley: We won’t say too much now, but we will say that we’re excited about the Stories format.

Very excited.

Brian: Yes. I can’t wait to announce that Stories surprise here on the show. Stay tuned!

Hailley: 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!

Wishing everyone a wonderful and prosperous holiday season in the next few weeks and months. It’s my favorite time of year and I know it’s a big one for businesses. We’ll keep bringing your shows that help you rock it on social media.

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 19,000+ 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.

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Thank How to Launch on Product Hunt Like a Pro, Lessons from 17.2 Million Twitter Impressions, 4 Key Facebook Trends for 2019, and More! for first publishing this post.

3 Predictions For IG Shopping and the Future of Ecommerce on Instagram

Influencer Marketing: The A to Z Guide on Getting Started and Calculating ROI

Introducing SocialChat by Buffer, the Easiest Way to Start Conversations With Website Visitors

Today, we’re excited to launch, SocialChat by Buffer, a simple, free tool that enables visitors to start social media conversations on your website.

Each and every day, people visit your website to learn more about your business.

The problem is a large percentage of websites don’t really support visitors in helping them to find what they want. In reality, most website visits are simply ignored — that was excusable a couple of years back, but not so much now.

People in 2018 don’t want to have to search your website for a contact form or spend ages crafting an email request. In fact, they don’t really want to use traditional social media channels for communication.

Now, it’s all about private, 1:1 messages.

But don’t just take our word for it: Gartner forecasts that by 2019, requests for customer support through consumer mobile messaging apps will exceed requests for customer support through traditional social media.

This is why we built SocialChat.

SocialChat lets your customers start conversations with you on your website, and continue them privately, right where they feel comfortable, via Messenger and Twitter DMs. It can be enabled with just a couple of lines of code. No software or other tools needed!

We’ve been experimenting with SocialChat for a while and are excited about to share this tool with you for a few reasons:

1. The conversation doesn’t have to end when the visitor leaves your site. With SocialChat your website visitors can then easily send you a Facebook message or Twitter DM, and you can turn each visit into an ongoing relationship on social media.

2. It’s human and authentic. Chatbots are pretty awesome, but you just can’t replace the feeling of talking to another person. Chatting through Messenger and Twitter feels super personal as it’s a method used by billions across the globe to chat with friends, and family. A Conversocial study found that over half (59 percent) of people considered interacting with a human agent to be more important than being serviced by a bot or AI-driven resolution.

3. Business has always been social. As Facebook’s David Marcus told USA Today, commerce has always been social: “For so long, doing business was always conversational. Web (e-commerce) is truly an anomaly. It feels good to have a more human relationship when you’re buying things.”

P.S. Check out SocialChat and get started for free here.

Why social messaging is the new normal for customer engagement

When customers started turning to social media for support, it happened on Facebook Pages and public tweets. Now, however, for many brands, the majority of questions and conversations have shifted to private messaging channels.

Here are a couple of reasons for that change:

1. Messaging is convenient, familiar, and fast

Businesses tend to use communication channels that are familiar to consumers.

When a phone call was the number one way to keep in touch, businesses offered phone support and sales. When email took over as the default communication channel, businesses followed. Now that the majority or peer-to-peer communication happens over social messaging apps and products, businesses have again followed suit.

Social messaging is fast becoming the new normal for customer support and engagement. According to a Facebook-commissioned study by Nielsen, 56 percent of people surveyed would rather message a business than call customer service, and 67 percent expect to message businesses even more over the next two years.

By using channels that feel familiar, businesses are able to engage with customers and prospects in channels they feel comfortable with.

Messaging is also quick. Most consumers use a form of messaging app every day — multiple times per day, even — so replying to a thread with a business feels much more natural than heading to their email account.

2. Platforms are embracing private communication

On Messenger alone, there are more than eight billion messages exchanged between consumers and businesses every month.

And platforms are constantly taking steps to make it easier for consumers to connect with brands through direct messages. For example, it’s now very simple to add Messenger buttons to your Facebook Page and Twitter DM direct links to your profile, making it easier than ever for consumers to reach out and talk with your business privately:

And with SocialChat, you can take this one step further and add direct message links directly to your website:

We made it easy and 100 percent free to get started with SocialChat

We built SocialChat because we wanted a free and easy way for businesses to help start conversations with prospects and customers and turn those conversations into ongoing relationships on social media.

Here’s how to get up and running with SocialChat in three simple steps:

Step 1: Customize Your Widget

Go to buffer.com/reply/socialchat and customize the appearance and copy that will display within your widget. 

Step 2: Add the code to your site

Copy your custom embed code to your clipboard and paste it into your website before the closing tag (or ask your website developer to do it for you.) If you’re using WordPress, check out this plugin to easily add your embed code to your website instead. 

Step 3: You’re all set

You’re ready to chat with website visitors through Facebook Messenger or Twitter DMs. It’s that easy!

Here’s how the widget looks on this blog (it’s live on this page too so you can test it for yourself):

We believe that social messaging is the next frontier of customer support and engagement.

Agree with us?

We hope SocialChat will make it easier for you to reap the benefits of social messaging too, and we’d love for you to give it a try.

If you have any thoughts on feedback on SocialChat, please let us know in the comments. We’d love to hear from you.

Thank Introducing SocialChat by Buffer, the Easiest Way to Start Conversations With Website Visitors for first publishing this post.

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!

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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 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.