If you’re like them and trying to dive into the world of Snapchat – we’ve got you covered. But first, remember the most important rule of social media: choose your brand’s channels with care. You need to be able to truly invest in new channels. If you don’t have the resources, be it time, money, or personnel, don’t waste the effort. You’ll be bound to disappoint your fans.

Snapchat has over 383 million daily active users – skewing heavily to the under-25 crowd, which makes up around 60% of its user base. When I started researching this article, I asked brand managers who weren’t utilizing Snapchat – why not? Other than those who reasoned that they didn’t have the resources to do it well, many reasoned that Snapchatters don’t want to see brands on the platform.

They’re wrong. Snapchatters enjoy following brands, using branded lenses and filters – what they don’t like are ads. So just as marketers have to engage and provide relevant content on Facebook & Twitter, it’s the same for Snapchat. If you want your brand to be successful on Snapchat, you need to provide relevant and relatable content.

When it comes to posting brands on Snapchat, you’ll find similar dynamics as other channels. Brands can create Public Profiles that showcase their public Stories, Spotlight Snaps (Approved Snaps that can be seen by the public in a TikTok-like feed), Filters, and Lenses. If you want to get your customers and fans to subscribe to you, you have to provide engaging content. That means telling an interesting story.

Here are six ways you can use Snapchat to tell a great story:

Try-Ons and Tutorials

Snapchat is a great platform for showing users how to do things, from applying makeup to cooking a new recipe. Try-on filters, like the ones by Too-Faced below, allow users to virtually try on makeup, clothes, and other accessories, while tutorials can teach them how to do everything from tie a tie to dance the tango.

Don’t hesitate to use humor, storytelling, and other techniques to keep your viewers engaged. Try using filters and stickers to make your tutorial more visually appealing. Also, keep it short and sweet. Snapchat is all quick and instant communication, so make sure your Snaps are no longer than a few minutes.

Behind the Scenes

Take your audience behind the doors of your office, production, or even an event. Giving them an insider’s perspective gives you the opportunity to showcase the personality of your team or even how you make the magic happen. Snapchat’s own brand channel does this by allowing its subscribers to experience a bit of their office culture. They don’t just share news or updates about the app. Instead, you get to know the content team, who showcase Snapchat’s features the way they’re meant to be used — as a way to have fun and connect with others.

Influencer Take Over

Influencer marketing is a powerful way to reach new audiences and build brand awareness. Have an influencer take over your Snapchat account for the day. This gives your subscribers a chance to see your brand through the eyes of someone they trust and admire.

Here are some influencer takeover ideas you could try:

• Have an influencer show your subscribers how to use your product.
• Take your subscribers on a tour of your headquarters.
• Attend an event with an influencer and give your subscribers a behind-the-scenes look.

No matter what you decide to do, just make sure it’s relevant to your brand and that it will appeal to your target audience. With a little planning, influencer takeovers can help you reach new heights with your Snapchat marketing efforts.

Live Events (and Recaps)

Take your fans along for the ride during a live event. Whether it’s an industry conference, a festival, or a sporting event – give those who can’t be there a taste of what they’re missing. Take it a step further to share a recap of the events. The NFL does this well by highlighting the best moments that happen throughout a week in the season.

Limited or Exclusive Offer

Take advantage of the short life of a Snapchat Story by offering your subscribers a limited-time or exclusive deal. This could be an exclusive discount code, early access to a sale, or a free gift with purchase. By creating a sense of urgency, you can encourage your subscribers to take action and make a purchase.

Extend Offline or Digital Campaigns

Prolong the life and reach of an offline or digital campaign with Snaps. Share images of billboards, snaps of live engagements, or even new products in-store. Think about offline campaigns in new ways, and it’ll work for Snapchat. For instance, Khloe Kardashian, who co-founded the fashion brand Good American, regularly shares their campaigns and promotions with her massive following on Snapchat.

For those who follow Khloe or Good American on Instagram Stories, the post likely looked familiar. In other words, you’ll find that Snapchat is not too different from other channels. Just as with those platforms, the best brands on Snapchat don’t have to be media companies. You have an opportunity to carve out a new home for your brand and your subscribers with Snapchat.

Just keep these Snapchat marketing best practices in mind:

Be relevant: Share Snaps that will interest your audience.

Have fun: Snapchat isn’t about being straight-laced and all business. Show some personality and have fun and your subscribers will follow suit.

Promote your profile: Snapchat doesn’t make it easy to find friends – let alone brands. So make sure to use a handle that makes sense, and promote your profile across other channels.

Be consistent: Post regularly to stay on your audience’s feed. Daily is not required, but post too infrequently, and your subscribers will lose interest.

Embrace raw and uncut: Part of the appeal of Snapchat is the rawness. Users aren’t worried about perfect sound or rehearsed shots. Fit in by keeping your brand’s snaps untouched and approachable.

If you must advertise on Snapchat, use Geofilters: As mentioned earlier, Snapchatters aren’t fans of the video ads within Snapchat. So if you’re looking to advertise within Snapchat, it’s better to go with sponsored filters. Sponsored lenses get pricey – which is why big brands have exclusively used them. A more affordable approach is to use geotargeted filters, known as geofilters. Geofilters are a Snapchat feature that works by letting people or businesses create a filter for a particular location. Snapchat users can only use that Geofilter if they are in that area. Geofilters allow your brand to hit a targeted audience without breaking the bank. Use these at an event, like a festival your brand sponsors or as part of an in-store promotion.

As with all marketing activities, it’s important that you understand your audience, and speak to them appropriately. And that social channels change and their audience ages – just ten years ago, only college students had Facebook. For now, Snapchat serves up to the under-25 crowd well, and if done right, expands your brand’s story. Dive in and have fun.

Does your brand use Snapchat? Tell us why or why not, and share your handle too!

This post was originally published in 2017 and has since been updated.

The post Snapchat Marketing: 6 Ways To Tell Your Story appeared first on Rival IQ.

Want to check out the latest benchmarks?

See all-new 2019 benchmarks now

Clearly, we’re fans of social media benchmarks. They’re incredibly helpful, giving you a way to measure and compare your own social media performance — it’s core to what we do here at Rival IQ. It’s why we publish our Social Media Industry Benchmark Report annually AND why we’re returning to the 2018 report to give you even further insight.

Our founder, Seth Bridges, first shared this work via a webinar in June 2018. The feedback from the audience was so positive that we decided to produce this written version. You can watch here, or head to the original for the full transcript of that presentation.

The work we’re discussing in this report isn’t a rehashing of the 2018 study, so if you’re not familiar with 2018 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report, I recommend reading it first. Before we dive into the new numbers, let’s cover the basics of our methodology and recap the overall performance.

Methodology

For this breakdown, we expanded our analysis of the 2018 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report. Using Rival IQ, we analyzed the data from the report going month by month — in total, 5 million social posts from 10 industries across the top three social channels, Facebook, Instagram & Twitter. Our goal was finding trends and shifts, so we looked at changes in engagement and posting frequencies throughout the year.

As a reminder, we define engagement as measurable interaction on social media posts, including likes, comments, favorites, retweets, shares, and reactions. Engagement rate is calculated based on all these interactions divided by total follower count.

Get the full details of the methodology from the original report including brand inclusion criteria, industries, and more in the original 2018 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report.

How does that data break down by channel?

Before we get to the month-over-month trends for each channel and examples of top performers, let’s recap the overall performance.

5 million social posts broken out by channel including activity and engagement

Across the three channels and the 5 million social posts we analyzed, just over half were tweets. Interestingly, Instagram posts represented only about 12% of all the social posts but blew the engagement totals through the roof.

On a per company basis, the average posts per day and the engagement rates for each social channel.

You’ll see in the chart above that the average company posts on Instagram about 5 times per week while posting just a hair more than once a day on both Facebook and Twitter. Despite having the same the average posting levels, the per-post engagement rates for Facebook and Twitter are miles apart. But that distance compares little to the engagement rates we see on Instagram.

I’m sure you experience, like most industries, seasonality which in turn reflects not only in social media engagement but also your content pipeline. And of course, with many industries feeling the pain of decreasing average engagement rates, we wondered “how did engagement and posting frequency change throughout the year?” Using Rival IQ, we took a look at the month-over-month trends for each industry in our study on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Of course, we didn’t stop there. Using Rival IQ, we went down another layer to find compelling examples of good performance to help you improve your brand’s social engagement. For each social channel, we analyzed a top performer—their content, tactics, and overall strategy. With these case studies, you’ll get insight into what helped them excel at social media. Let’s dive in.

Facebook engagement trends down

Organic reach is declining—it feels practically gone. Does declining organic reach for business pages also mean declining engagement? The short answer is yes. When we examine the average per-post Facebook engagement of across all companies in our study, it shows that the average per-post engagement rate on trended down month-over-month throughout 2017.

Average engagement rate per post on Facebook trended down almost every month in 2017.

In this month-over-month chart above, we see a very slight lift in July before heading down even further to below 0.1%. It dropped off about a third from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. If you saw your Facebook performance declining throughout the year, you were not alone.

Average engagement rate per post for 10 industries on Facebook for every month in 2017. Red line: Food & Beverage

In the graph above, we’ve broken out the month-by-month engagement data by industry. For each, you’ll note a general downward trend throughout the year. Looking at Food & Beverage, we see the performance was generally flat for the year, with a slight dip in May and a downward trend after peaking in August.

Average company post per day on Facebook, by month

One question we always have when examining engagement data is: how did posting volumes change throughout the year.

In the graph above showing the average Facebook posts per day across all companies in our study, we see that the numbers didn’t shift much, remaining at 1.1 for the majority of the year. In December, we see a slight decrease in posting as well as a small dip in the middle of the year.

So, is everyone experiencing declining engagement? No.

Are most brands experiencing declining engagement? Yes, absolutely.

Hi-Chew masters Facebook engagement

Let’s look at an example of a brand that grew their Facebook engagement last year, Hi-Chew. (If you’re not familiar, this is an addictively, delicious, chewy candy that comes in a variety of flavors.)

Hi-Chew averaged 0.35% engagement rate over their 205 Facebook posts in 2017

In 2017, Hi-Chew posted 205 times on Facebook (less than once per day) with an average of 0.35% engagement rate per post. As a reminder, the Food & Beverage industry averaged 0.24% engagement rate per post, and the overall average was 0.16%.

As the year progressed we can see their engagement improved. So, how did Hi-Chew get such high engagement rates?

These 12 Facebook posts received the highest engagement for Hi-Chew in 2017

Reviewing their top Facebook posts by engagement, it’s easy to see a consistent coloring and visual presentation. And, it’s consistent with their packaging and the actual candy. Aside from the first two posts, which are out of place comparatively and likely boosted, the remaining posts feature tightly-cropped shots of their product.

These 12 Facebook posts received the lowest engagement for Hi-Chew in 2017

To give us some perspective, let’s flip our analysis around to look at Hi-Chew’s least-engaging content, and the difference is stark. It’s almost as if these are two different brands (or different social media managers ??). This collection of posts include people, have minimal product placement, and even include a few lower quality images.

This example Facebook post received the 3rd highest engagement rate for Hi-Chew with over 2.65k engagements.

In the top performing post shown above, Hi-Chew highlights a new product, their Sweet and Sour Mystery Mix. And, it’s also promoting a contest, which we all know can dramatically improve engagement (though not necessarily other important metrics ?).

But, Hi-Chew isn’t simply relying on contest posts to drive their Facebook engagement. In fact, only 10% of Hi-Chew’s 205 Facebook posts were contests (compared with 7% of posts, on average, for Food & Beverage companies). For Hi-Chew, of their top dozen posts, only 3 were contests. The rest of their posts are fun and light-hearted with a product focus.

Many of these light-hearted product-focused posts are user-generated content (UGC), including many that Hi-Chew sourced from Instagram. Their UGC is consistent with their original content, focusing on brightly colored tight product shots like the example below.

UGC drives some top-performing content for Hi-Chew

Ultimately, we see that Hi-Chew is successful on Facebook for several reasons. They drive engagement with consistently bright product-focused content—sharing photos from users and occasionally running contests.

Learning from Hi-Chew, keep these points in mind:

• Consistent brand look and feel matters
• Your audience follows you for a reason
• Give your audience a reason to engage

Download the 2019 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report

See all-new 2019 benchmarks now

Instagram engagement trended down with end-of-year lift

Navigating and finding success on Instagram isn’t as easy as some would like. While Instagram boasts higher engagement than Facebook or Twitter, there’s stiff competition to get eyeballs and engage your audience. The competitive vibe felt amplified last year as engagement rates trended down throughout the year.

The average engagement rate on Instagram trended down for the majority of 2017.

As you can see in the graph above, most brands experienced this decline during the year and didn’t see any recovery until November.

Most industries experienced the Instagram-wide downward trend during 2017.

When we broke down the the month-over-month number by industry, we still see the general downward trend with few exceptions. But, we also found that almost every industry here saw an engagement bump up in November and then flat through December. Of course, Higher Ed stands at the top, trending upward and ending the year at over 4% average engagement rate. You can read more about Higher Ed dominating social media in our 2018 Higher Ed Engagement Report.

The average posts per day on Instagram only shifted slightly throughout 2017.

From a posting frequency perspective, the average posts per day bounces about the 0.7 per day mark, which translates to 5 times a week. Digging in, it turns out most companies only posted during the week.  with many fewer posts on Saturdays and Sundays. That makes makes sense, since scheduling capabilities for Instagram only released January 2018.

Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise dominates Instagram

To understand more about Instagram performance, let’s dive into a strong example from the Hotels & Resorts Industry, Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise. This boutique hotel in the Fairmont family is located in Canada’s Banff National Park. Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise, over 100 years old, is open year-round and boasts over 500 rooms. It’s estimated that up to 15,000 visitors grace its lawn each day in the summer.

Fairmont Lake Louise had great performance on Instagram in 2017.

Fairmont posted 326 times on Instagram last year—almost once a day. This is slightly more than the overall average, but not excessively so. Their average engagement rate was 4.2%, better than the average College or University, the industry that receives the highest engagement rates on Instagram. Reviewing the engagement throughout the year shows it was mostly flat, with a dip in March, and the October bump. So, how did Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise get such high engagement rates?

These 32 Instagram posts received the highest engagement for Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise in 2017.

From reviewing their top Instagram posts shown above, they’re certainly taking advantage of the beauty surrounding the chateau. The images are stunning, high-quality shots with consistent colors. Most don’t include people, and there’s a repeated viewpoint looking across the infamous Lake Louise toward the Plain of Six Glaciers. A few are even from within the chateau from “the window” or “that famous window.”

These 32 Instagram posts received the lowest engagement for Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise in 2017.

Contrast those posts with the least engaging posts shown above—it’s a bit of a jumble, right? The first noticeable difference is the number of people and how they are the focal point over the landscape. Even with these posts, the engagement rate is still 1.5%, below the industry average but not abysmal.

This example post below is actually user-generated content (UGC) from DelJay Photography. On the original post, the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise commented “Incredible! ? We’d love to repost with credit!,” and the author responded with “I’d be delighted for you to repost.” Turns out this is a composed shot, the author explains in the original post, “I must admit that this is a sky replacement as it wasn’t dark enough to capture the stars.” But it still looks amazing. When Fairmont reposted it, you’ll notice they included the camera emoji ? giving photo credit to DelJay Photography.

This example Instagram post received over 5k engagements for Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise.

It turns out reposting is common for the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise as 78% of their posts last year were UGC . This is drastically different from the industry, which had an overall average of only 18% UGC. Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise’s UGC posts averaged a 4.6% engagement rate, just slightly higher than their overall engagement rate of 4.2%. They benefit from the strong travel vibe in Alberta with hashtags like #ExploreAlberta and #TravelAlberta that help drive not only engagement but provide a steady stream of potential UGC for Fairmont.

Ultimately, we see that Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise is successful on Instagram for several reasons. They drive engagement with user-generated content—sharing photos with stunning landscapes, dramatic views, and iconic experiences.

Learning from the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise, keep these points in mind:

• Post regularly and frequently
• Capitalize on iconic images
• User-generated content (UGC) works

Twitter Engagement Constantly Shifting

Twitter gets credit for breaking news, harnessing the power of revolutions, and connecting people on a global scale. But, with over 300 million monthly active users, it can be hard for brands to stand out — which may explain why brands like Wendy’s, Netflix, and Merriam-Webster have chosen to sprinkle the snark (or shade if you prefer) throughout their tweets. When the overall average engagement rate for Twitter is 0.046%, who can blame them?

In 2017 the average engagement rate on Twitter trended downward for most months.

As we can see in the above chart, engagement on Twitter appears to trend downward for most of last year.

But when the engagement rates are broken out by industry, the numbers are all over the place (see image below). Not every industry trended down and, unlike Instagram and Facebook, there’s no clear trend at all. The spikes for industries can be attributed to a variety of reasons like current events and trending topics, industry seasonality, and even the weather. Knowing how your industry and your own brand’s engagement shifts throughout the year is helpful in explaining the constant fluctuation. Ups and downs are some of the few certainties on Twitter.

The industry engagement rates constantly shifted on Twitter in 2017.

Looking a bit closer at how nonprofits were performing on Twitter in the chart above, we see the average engagement rates slightly mimic the overall averages with a dip in part of the first quarter, running flat into mid-year. Nonprofits deviate from the average with a slight lift in September, but then back to a downward trend as the year ends.

Average posts per day on Twitter slowly declined as 2017 progressed.

We can see in the chart above that from the first half of the year into the second half, there’s a downward trend in the overall average posts per day. At one point the average posts per a day exceeded 1.3 but fell down to .9 by December. With a bit more sleuthing, we discovered that a clear dip in post volume that happens around Christmas. Considering Twitter is primarily about conversations, there are plenty of potential reasons why this happens. But, my assertion is that even social media managers take time to spend the holidays with their families.

If you’re asking yourself the question, “Is Twitter even worth it anymore?” — you’re not alone. Here’s what I like to remind brands: if you’re able to have a real conversation with the customers that matter to you, the engagement rates aren’t the ONLY metric you need to watch. Twitter is provides an opportunity for one-to-one conversations and personal interactions. Likes and retweets (which help increase engagement) are certainly nice to have, especially if you want to drive awareness with Twitter. But if you want to impact your customer, building trust and a relationship, a low engagement number is to be expected. Is this time-consuming? Yes. Is it nice to go viral? Yes. But unlike your call center, support email, or any private messaging, Twitter conversations are public. A positive interaction with a customer on Twitter has the potential to reach thousands of people. And of course, the best part is you’ve strengthened your customer’s loyalty.

Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta drives 4 times the engagement on Twitter

A great example of how to do Twitter well is Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the children’s hospital in the Atlanta metro area. Their Twitter engagement rates don’t look anything like the industry averages — they’re much higher.

The monthly Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta Twitter engagement rates for 2017 were mostly consistent with a big bump in August. Their 205 tweets averaged a 0.32% engagement rate.

Children’s tweeted 205 times throughout the entire year (fewer than one per day), retweeted 226 tweets, and sent 94 replies. Overall, that’s 525 tweets, retweets, and replies. As the graph above shows, their engagement pattern doesn’t mimic the nonprofits trends throughout the year. Their average engagement rate is 0.32% (astronomically higher than the average of 0.055% for nonprofits) but as the graph shows, Children’s hovered around 0.2% for most of the year with a pop in August. So, how did Children’s get such high engagement rates?

These 12 tweets received the highest engagement for Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta in 2017.

As you can see in Children’s top tweets shown above, most of their top-performing content has a visual element centered around people (many of them famous). These tweets are also not linking out to any off-platform content. Rather, they’re thanking members of the community who give their time and voice to the hospital and its patients.

For the year, their top two tweets included professional wrestlers from Ring of Honor. These tweets caused that August spike (see the graph above), reaching engagement rates of 4%!

This example tweet received the 2nd highest engagement rate for Children’s with over 1.7k engagements.

The first tweet, shown above, includes a photo of nearly a dozen wrestlers visiting a patient. The tweet mentions Ring of Honor which is followed by over two hundred thousand accounts, apparently including former President Barack Obama ?.

Beyond those top two posts, there’s a recurring theme with Children’s tweets: over 50% of their top performing content included a mention. In fact, out of their 205 tweets throughout the year, 73 include a mention, or 22% of their tweets. This percentage is slightly lower than other nonprofits, which include a mention in 30% of their tweets. Children’s mentioned local and national celebrities, sports teams, and other nonprofit organizations, which helped them double the engagement compared to their tweets without a mention.

Ultimately, we see that Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta is successful on Twitter for several reasons. They drive engagement with relevant, engaging content—mixing photos with mentions of celebrities, using mentions to create conversation and awareness, and only tweeting when they have something to share.

Learning from the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, keep these points in mind:

• Conversations matter
• Less can be more
• Mentions widen your audience and drive engagement

To improve social, keep these tips in mind

Know your platforms

Each platform draws a different type of audience, not only in demographics but also in how they engage with content and why they follow a brand. I often repeat, “know your audience,” and it’s for good reason. But, this should be the baseline for marketers. We should already know our customers and what they want. To maximize our audience’s experience, we need to know why they’re on each social platform and what they want from our brand.

Leverage each platform’s unique strength

Each social channel uses different algorithms, prioritizes different post types, and allows you to use unique tactics to engage your audience. Take the time and effort to understand how you can utilize these unique strengths to serve you better.

Always be testing

Every post is an opportunity to test a new idea, hashtag, post type, and more. Keep testing, measuring, and identifying what works (or doesn’t), and improve with each social post.

Each of the brands highlighted here clearly approach their social content with a strategic focus. The best brands on social are intentional, prioritizing high-quality content that speaks to (and therefore engages) their audience. To accomplish this, they’re investing resources into planning and executing their social media strategy. This isn’t a new concept, and I’d hazard to guess you already know this. But, if you’ve found yourself questioning (or being questioned on) the value of social media, these examples can help you. They stand as proof that engaging your audience on each social channel is possible with time, content, data, and above all, strategy.

The post Breaking Down Our 2018 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report appeared first on Rival IQ.

This report ranks the top schools on social media overall and across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Higher Ed institutions compete in more than just college sports, and this complete ranking honors the best in social media.

Along with the social media rankings, you’ll also learn which universities stayed at the top and which are moving up in the social media world. New this year is “The Biggest Leap Award”, which is given to the university with the greatest ranking improvement.

In this article, you’ll find the overall top 10 rankings and channel-specific winners for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Plus, we’ve added bonus content including best practices and lessons from top universities and a look at consistent top performers from the last three years of this report.

See how your university stacks up in the 2018 Higher Ed Social Media Engagement Report.

Download the full report now

Methodology

We gathered data from 338 Division 1 institutions and analyzed their university-level account posts from June 2017 to May 2018. We used cross-channel performance, which is determined by engagement on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

We define engagement as measurable interaction on social media posts, including likes, comments, favorites, retweets, shares, and reactions. Engagement rate is defined as the total engagement divided by audience size. For our study, we compute the average engagement rate on a per post basis for each university on a channel-by-channel basis. Rankings were then computed using a weighted score of audience, activity, and engagement (with a strong bias toward engagement).

Using this data and weighted formula, we generated an overall engagement ranking for each university. The top-ranked universities have high engagement rates with average or better audience size and posting volumes.

Understanding benchmarks for Higher Ed

Improving your social media performance is important, but how do you know if the numbers are good or bad?

This is why we benchmark. By incorporating benchmarks into your social reporting you can compare your performance to similar schools. We’re fans of directly comparing yourself to competitive schools, schools in your region, or even schools of similar size to establish context. But it’s also a good idea to benchmark yourself against the industry as a whole. Comparing your performance to the rest of your industry gives you the yardstick to measure whether it’s good or not.

Higher Ed earns high levels of engagement across social media channels, leading over other industries for the last two years and counting. With each social network relying increasingly on algorithms that favor engaging content (engagement begets engagement), colleges and universities are well-situated to remain at the top of their audience’s feed. Higher Ed marketers—and their budgets—can appreciate the opportunities to connect without paying to play.

In our 2018 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report, the performance difference for Higher Ed is eye-popping. On average, these institutions outperform the industry average on each channel we studied. The most notable difference is on Instagram, where the average engagement rate per post of 3.39% is almost double the average of 1.73%.

The chart below shows the comparisons for each of Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

The rankings: Overall and by channel

Our overall social media rankings for these institutions comprises their rankings on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. In the following section, we review the overall rankings, then dive into each channel.

Overall Top 10

The top performing university on social media in this year’s report is James Madison University in Harrisonburg, VA. Though they didn’t top the ranks for any single channel, their top 10 performance on each individual channel catapulted them to the top of our overall rankings.

The rest of the top 10 universities also had consistently high performances across each channel.

Facebook Top 10

The University of Iowa topped the Facebook rankings in this year’s report. They published almost 600 Facebook posts during the period we studied, and earned over 660K reactions, comments, and shares on those posts.

Colorado State, UVA, Jackson State, and Georgia Tech were our top 5 on Facebook.

Facebook standout: The University of Iowa

Success on Facebook can feel out of reach and as the algorithms continue to shift, the median engagement rate of 0.16% can leave you feeling deflated. While Higher Ed sees a slightly higher average at 0.19%, it’s certainly not much of a comfort. Let’s look to one university who has broken from the pack to establish an average engagement rate of 0.87%, The University of Iowa. Jumping from #31 overall last year, they’ve moved 28 spots to claim #3 overall.

The University of Iowa consistently drove engagement this year on Facebook in several ways. From Hawkeye pride, to campus happenings, and of course, stunning campus photos, their social media feed is practically a best practices dream. But what stood out as a major contributor to this year’s success was The Wave.

The University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital overlooks the Kinnick Stadium field, with a space on the 12th floor that allows patients to watch all of the game day festivities. On home game days, they’re able to catch all of the action on the field, the marching band, and the crowd. At the end of the first quarter, the crowd faces the hospital and waves at the patients. This is The Wave, and it’s delighted Iowa fans.

The University of Iowa captured and shared their newest tradition, The Wave. The reactions, shares, and comments flooded in — leading to a whopping 10.5% engagement rate.

Iowa rode that Wave (what? I had to.) all the way into the #1 spot in this year’s Facebook ranking. In the post shown above, we see The Wave in all its glory through video. Garnering over 13,000 engagements for an incredible engagement rate of 10.5%, this was only the beginning.

In another top post from Iowa, they celebrated the The Disney Spirit Award that was bestowed upon The University of Iowa during the College Football Awards Show. The video from the ceremony received 38.2% engagement rate — and for a good reason. You’ll need tissues for this one (and lots of them).

What started with Hawkeye fans caught the eyes of college sports fans across the nation, culminating with The College Football Awards Show on ESPN. The University of Iowa, and the Hawkeye Nation, were honored with The Disney Spirit Award for The Wave.

The University of Iowa drove steady engagement with video, averaging an engagement rate of 1.55% throughout the year.

The University of Iowa captured the hearts of fans nationwide with videos of The Wave, and they used video consistently to drive an average engagement rate of 1.55%. With almost 2 Video posts each week, this is similar to the overall Higher Ed average. You might be wondering why posts with the type of Status Update generated their highest engagement (I certainly was). It turns out, one status update gave the school year an impressive start.

A thoughtful status update with a reminder to new Iowa students led to a 3.87% engagement rate.

This status update is a wonderful example of how good content can stand on its own — no need for a flashy video, jaw-dropping photo, or celebrity endorsement. Post something that will strike a chord in your audience; they’ll engage.

Here are a few best practices from Iowa that you can try:

• Capture your audience’s hearts
• Capitalize on video
• Create thoughtful, meaningful, and timely content

Compare your performance against top colleges and universities.

See live Higher Ed benchmarks

Twitter Top 10

On Twitter, The U.S. Military Academy topped the rankings at #1 this year, and the social team there is no stranger to this report. They’ve ranked in our Top 10 Overall for the last three years! You’ll note that a few other overall top performers from this year’s report appear in the top 10 for Twitter, too.

Twitter standout: Brigham Young University

Twitter can be hard to crack for some social media managers. They personally abhor it, find the deluge of tweets overwhelming, or it may simply not resonate with them. Personal reasons aside, the numbers can have people scratching their heads. With a median engagement rate across all industries at .046% and Higher Ed just slightly better at .062%, it’s led some people to assume it’s a dying social media network.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Case in point, Brigham Young University, who last year had a Twitter ranking of #5 and this year stayed in the top 10 at #7. Their performance caught my eye, as I noticed that for the last two years they tweeted just under 600 times. But most striking to me was that their replies are almost one for one with their tweets.

It’s easy to forget that Twitter is about communicating, often one-to-one. Here, we see that Brigham Young University not only tweets relevant content but also replies to comments and mentions. As one of only 4 institutions that remained in the Twitter top 10, this strategy is certainly working for them.

One well done reply can do a lot of good. Like this example that drew .76% engagement rate.

Brigham Young University had a few breakout posts, like the initial tweet above that topped their year’s engagement at 6.81%. But their average engagement rate of 0.33% isn’t solely the result of breakout tweets. (Remember, that’s impressive compared to the Higher Ed average of 0.062%)

Examining the hours of the day that BYU gets engagement on Twitter, late night gets lots of action. Are you surprised that those “late-night” tweets drive the most engagement? Yeah, neither am I. When your primary audience is young college-age students, evening tweets make sense. Tweets in the 10 o’clock hour drive almost double the engagement at 1.95% compared to 1.02% during the 6 o’clock hour.

Overall, Brigham Young University approaches their Twitter with a rounded mix of professionalism and levity. Their posts and replies are direct, engaging, and when appropriate, use a little humor. It’s not off the wall like Wendy’s (or my personal favorite, Mt. St. Helens), but they do give an air of nonchalance when they see fit.

Here are a few best practices from BYU that you can try:

• Prioritize conversation over promotion
• Tweet when your audience is active
• Inject personality with a sense of humor

Instagram Top 10

For Higher Ed, Instagram is the channel that really shines, with average engagement rates (on a per post basis) topping 3% on average.

In this year’s report, the University of Vermont claims the top spot, with their 7.6% engagement rate average over the 296 posts during the reporting period. Again, we see JMU and Loyola of Chicago appearing here in the top 10.

Instagram standout: The University of Vermont

Instagram is where universities shine the most on social media. Unlike other industries that have a median engagement rate of 1.73%, Higher Ed outpaces with a 3.39% engagement rate. This may be why institutions like The University of Vermont have focused their social strategies on Instagram.  As many of us know, sometimes you can’t win them all – so focusing on where you can invest resources and be successful is the best route.

For The University of Vermont, which moves up from #4 in 2017, there are several Instagram strategies they’re utilizing in tandem. From stunning campus shots that include breathtaking sunsets, gothic buildings softened by a blanket of snow, and even rainbows over field hockey, The University of Vermont shows their campus in the best light. But this effort isn’t theirs alone.

Each photo above is user-generated content (UGC) and garnered impressive engagement.

Over 84% of Vermont’s Instagram posts are attributed to other Instagrammers, including current and former students, faculty and staff, and visitors. Each of these user-generated content (UGC) posts include a ?(camera emoji) followed by photo credit, along with the hashtag #instauvm. The hashtag alone has over 9,000 posts.

Is there a “best time to post”? For The University of Vermont it seems that any time is the best time to post.

It’s rare to find a social profile that doesn’t have dips in their engagement related to posting times.Digging into when the University of Vermont posts, they have perfected their content to the point of practically guaranteeing high engagement. The only dips we see in the above graph are in the hours they don’t post at all.

Here are a few best practices from Vermont that you can try:

• Leverage user-generated content
• Post consistently high-quality content

Want even more benchmarks? Check out the 2019 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report.

Download the report now

Three-Peats: Our most consistent performers

This is the third year we’ve created this report, and quite a few of the institutions in our report have appeared consistently near the top of the rankings. Though we didn’t include this particular award category in our full report, we wanted to recognize the social media teams that have performed reliably well since 2016.

These 23 Universities have been in the top 50 overall each of the last three years. Only two of them have held their honors within the top 10 overall, #1 James Madison University and #5 U.S. Military Academy. But my eyes are on #4 Xavier University and #9 Southern Utah University. These two institutions have continued to climb the rankings each year.

From a learning perspective, it’s useful to ask: What do each of these three-peats have in common?

While each institution has unique reasons for their continued success, there are a few commonalities that bubble up. If you want to ensure your social media accounts consistently draw engagement keep these tactics in the forefront.

Here are some best practices from our three-peats that you can use to improve your social performance:

• Post daily, consistently
• Mix branded/custom and related hashtags for discoverability
• Leverage high-quality images and videos
• Use post types that regularly drive high engagement
• Pinpoint the content that works for your audience

Where does your university rank?

If you’re curious where you ranked in the 2018 Higher Ed Report, access the full rankings on Tableau Public.

To get all of the report details, download your copy of the full 2018 Higher Ed Social Media Report.

Live social benchmarks for Higher Ed

If you’re interested in social media benchmarks throughout the school year, check out our live Higher Ed social media benchmarking landscape. Here, you’ll find activity and engagement benchmarks, top posts, and more.

Universities in our Live Benchmarks

The post The 2018 Higher Ed Social Media Engagement Report appeared first on Rival IQ.

You’ll learn how to:

• Adding & removing companies or profiles to your landscape
• Find the data you need and start analyzing
• Design custom dashboards and scheduling reports
• Manage the emails you receive
• And much more. . .

This training is part of our ongoing training program. You can check out past and upcoming training sessions in the Rival IQ Learning Center.

If you have more questions, reach out to us on Twitter or via email!

The post Getting Started with Rival IQ, a Training Webinar appeared first on Rival IQ.

With our brand new Posted URLs Analysis tools in Rival IQ, he illustrates how you can improve your social content curation by bringing together the best of your social strategy and that of your competitors. You’ll learn how to analyze and use these insights for content curation and promotion.

Seth dives into:

• Finding top performing content from influencers and competitors
• The power of ongoing promotion of successful content
• And much more…

Download a copy of the presentation.

See Posted URLs Analysis in action with this webinar to walk you through the basics.

This training is part of our ongoing training program. You can check out past recordings as well as upcoming training sessions in the Learning Center.

If you have more questions, reach out to us on Twitter or via email!

The post Follow That Link: Insights for Better Content Curation with Rival IQ, a Training Webinar appeared first on Rival IQ.

Tiffany shares how Posted URLs Analysis helps you:

• Align your content promotion with your audience’s engagement
• Refine your owned and curated content mix
• Learn what works for your competitors
• And much more…

Join Seth Bridges on Wednesday, August 1st for our next webinar, Follow That Link: Insights for Better Content Curation. He’ll present a variety of case studies from high-performing brands where he follows their content and links to uncover successful social strategies using Posted URLs Analysis in Rival IQ.

This training is part of our ongoing training program. You can check out past recordings as well as upcoming training sessions in the Learning Center.

If you have more questions, reach out to us on Twitter or via email!

The post Analyzing Your Content Promotion on Social with Rival IQ: A Training Webinar appeared first on Rival IQ.

To answer this question and more, we turned to an expert. Our guest in this installment of The Data-Driven Marketer is Patrick Dillon, Director of Marketing for Xavier Athletics. Patrick and Seth Bridges, our co-founder, dove into what it takes to manage it all, stay ahead of the competition and knock social out of the park. When you’re creating a social strategy for college sports it requires a deep understanding of what you want to accomplish and identifying the data to get you there. Patrick shares how his team manages social profiles for over 16 programs, increasing their engagement and outranking the competition.

In this session Seth & Patrick cover:

• Social media strategy for college sports
• Understanding audience’s needs & interests
• Identifying and prioritizing content
• Examples of successful social media strategies & tactics
• And so much more…

Full Transcript

Seth Bridges: Hey. Good morning everyone. My name is Seth Bridges. I’m one of the founders here at Rival IQ, and I’d like to welcome you to the latest edition of The Data-Driven Marketer. Before we get in, this is being recorded, and we will send out the recording afterward. So don’t worry, you don’t need to take notes. We’re going to talk quickly, cover a lot of area, but we’ll send it out. No worries, share it with your team. Ask questions as we go. Our guest, Patrick Dillon, is excited to answer your questions. I’m excited to ask questions. One of my teammates is here feeding me anything that you’re putting into that question panel as we go. If it’s pertinent to what we’re talking about, I’ll stop right then. We’ll get into it. Otherwise, we’ll definitely save time at the end.

So, enough of logistics. My pleasure today is to introduce to you Patrick Dillon. He’s the Director of Marketing at Xavier University in the athletic department. He is responsible for everything from advertising, to game presentation, co-managing social media, along with some other folks in their communications department. There are a lot of teams, 18 teams, men’s and women’s athletics across a variety of sports. There’s a lot to do, and I think we have a lot to cover today, so Patrick, welcome.

Patrick Dillon: Thank you.

Seth Bridges: Let’s jump right in. We had a pre-conversation, by the way, everybody, a couple weeks ago, and I could talk about this all day, but I’m not here to talk. I’m here to just listen to Patrick talk because it’s super exciting. So, let’s kick off with a little bit of baseline for everybody. Can you walk us through just a little bit about how you approached social media, particularly, at Xavier, knowing that you have so many teams, handles, and profiles to cover, with seasons, and the school year, and the university. There’s just a lot going on. Can you just set the table for us in terms of what your challenge is?

Patrick Dillon: Sure. So managing social media for an athletic department is obviously no small task, like we talked about. We’re a single department within that larger university setting, but we also have 16 unique programs. So, the department, we’re kind of like a P&G, a Proctor and Gamble, but we have a bunch of these individual teams, their brands, like your Tide, your Bounty, your Febreze, so I kind of liken it to that a little bit. So with that, we have these 16 individual brands under our bigger umbrella of athletics, and each team has their own set of social media accounts.

So for our teams, they all have a Twitter, and an Instagram account. Many of them have their Facebook accounts. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a major team effort. You even mentioned it’s a comanaged effort. No single person really could manage the 40 to 50 accounts we have for all of our teams alone. So with that, there’s also some imperfections that come into play. We try to put a strategy into place, provide graphic templates to promote consistency, and things of that nature, but it’s definitely a little bit of a beast to handle.

Seth Bridges: You mean just 40 or 50 handles, right? It’s not a big deal.

Patrick Dillon: Sure.

Seth Bridges: I mean, most brands struggle to be on just four, five, or six channels. So, can you tell me a little about the team? Obviously it’s not just you doing the work, so what is the composure, and what are the skill sets of the folks that you have dedicated to some of these tasks?

Patrick Dillon: Sure. So like I said, it’s kind of a co-managed effort between communications and marketing. In our marketing department there’s two of us that produce content, but I have to say that our communications team, there’s four of them, with having 16 individual programs. They each have their own responsibilities in there. We do have a little bit of a social point person among them. I try to play a social point person from a marketing perspective.

They’re each kind of responsible for their individual teams, and then on the marketing side, we’re kind of focused on the teams that we try to promote in terms of getting people to their games, selling tickets, things of that nature. So, it’s a little bit of a beast there, trying to deal with a team that big, and everybody has their own responsibilities. One thing that also can get hectic at times is there’s individuals on coaching staff that like to produce content as well, sometimes not up to the standards we might like, which can create a challenge sometimes, but then we have coaches that say when they’re on the road, they want to provide content to whoever’s following them, whether it’s their student athletes’ families and friends, whether it’s prospective student athlete recruits.

So, there’s a lot of people producing content, and we’ll probably talk about this at some point. We also get asked to produce sponsored content as well, so there’s a lot of different people with their hands in the money drawer there.

Seth Bridges: So to that end, if you had to sort of state the primary goals of your social media efforts, how do you enumerate them? I mean, you went through recruiting, revenue, behind the scenes. What are the primary drivers, or what’s your primary mission in terms of what you’re going for?

Patrick Dillon: Sure. So, in terms of prioritizing content, we’re really trying to do two things. We’re trying to drive awareness of our teams, our brand, et cetera, and we’re also trying to drive engagement. We want people to be aware of what’s going on, and we also want them to be engaged with our content, engaged with what’s going on. We try to create content, and fortunately we have games.

So, having 16 sports, they all have some level of contest, so that right there, in and of itself, provides us with content, from previews, to recaps, to the stuff that actually happens within the game. Beyond that, we get awards from different organizations, whether it be the conference, or media outlets, so we have content that is naturally going to occur, which is good. What we try to do is also try to supplement that with additional content to help drive awareness for some initiatives that we might have, trying to drive attendance to games, trying to develop fans, really, and really try to get engagement.

And we can talk more about this at some point, but shareable content is one of our focuses for beyond the game day content on game day a little bit. So, at Xavier, men’s basketball is our biggest thing. So, while we have 16 different programs, men’s basketball kind of drives the ship for us. That’s where our fans our most engaged. That’s our best opportunity to connect with alumni, and just friends of the university, and the general public. So, we try to produce shareable content at those times that are key around men’s basketball games, coverage of games, and we can talk about that a little bit as well. So, I don’t know if that 100% answered exactly what you were looking for, but that’s a little bit.

Seth Bridges: No, absolutely. So, let me follow up a little bit. I’m particularly curious about the year-round nature of what you do. I mean, there’s almost a sport in season all the time. How much are you really prioritizing being in season on social when the sports are in season, and which sports can you just not play that way, you’ve got to be year-round?

Patrick Dillon: Yeah, so obviously that’s a challenge, because each sport has their own season, and like I mentioned before, the individuals that are managing a specific sport, and the communications for that sport, when their fall sport is done they’re onto their winter, or their spring sport. So, it’s hard to be consistently producing content for something that’s maybe out of season. So, I’d have to say for our non-basketball sports, it’s probably a little less of a focus to have content all the time for them, more producing content when we know there’s stuff to talk about, when we know there’s stuff to produce. Basketball’s a little bit of a different story, especially with the way that their recruiting calendar is, just the nature of trying to keep Xavier, and Xavier basketball relevant to fans, and alumni of the university. It’s now a year-round thing.

We’re producing content on pretty much a daily basis to keep Xavier top of mind 365 days a year. Yeah, it’s nice when you’re in season. You’ve got some built in things, but out of the season you’ve got to think about okay, what are you doing? So for basketball, for example, right now, we’ve been doing kind of a photo rewind, some biggest moments over a number of years. We can talk about a number of different reasons like why we’re doing that. Some of it’s from a recruiting perspective. This time of year is a heavy recruiting time for 16- and 17-year-olds who will eventually commit to us, and sometimes even younger.

If it’s their first time following @XavierMBB on Instagram or Twitter, it’s their first chance to learn about, okay, what is this program that’s really looking into me? Where is this potential future place to go to school, and play basketball? So, we would be doing ourselves a bit of a disservice if we didn’t have content all the time. Something we’re doing on our main accounts right now, fortunately in our main accounts we get to curate a little more from those 16 different programs.

This July marks our fifth-year anniversary of entering the Big East, back in 2013, so we did a little bit of a rewind of 25 of the best moments of being in the Big East conference, and taking photography from those events, and utilizing those on multiple platforms to keep us semi-relevant, at least. And there’s a little bit of storytelling along with it, which is something I know a lot of people talk about. It’s storytelling, and what really is that? The year-round nature is obviously a challenge. We have to be strategic out of season about what’s important, what’s relevant, and what are we realistically capable of?

Seth Bridges: Do you find that that recap content really tends to resonate with people, as they remember those big moments over the last? I think all of us remember our big sports moments for programs we care about, long, long past when they actually happened. Is that something you find continues from an engagement perspective on social?

Patrick Dillon: Yeah, engagement has been pretty decent on some of those things, but we fight the Facebook algorithm for content we put on there, as I’m sure you’re aware of. On platforms like Instagram and Twitter, we’re doing just fine with those things, because we know it’s being delivered to our fans. Especially our basketball content, it’s stuff that our fans are most interested in, but it’s really kind of cool for us to get something out about maybe a big thing that happened for our men’s soccer program, or our women’s tennis program, because a fan of us might not have seen that when it actually happened. So, it’s kind of cool to be able to utilize, and I guess refresh that content again.

Seth Bridges: Yeah, for sure. I was reviewing some of your best social content here just last night kind of preparing, and I noticed you re-surfaced a moment from 2010 when somebody from Xavier was shooting over a Pitt Panther, which is my alma mater, so I didn’t particularly appreciate that post, but it did well, so the eight-year-old flashback to 2010 still performing. Maybe it’s just Pitt was there. I mean, Pitt is not even the Big East anymore, but you know. 2013, five years in, seems like it’s been a big run for you, providing plenty of content.

So the recruiting thing, I’m particularly interested in this, because as a University, and as an athletic department, you have a constituency and audience that is very broad. You’ve got current students, past students. You’ve got alums. You’re thinking about donors. You’re thinking about ticket sales. I mean it’s so broad, but if you don’t have the talent to continue to play at a high level, it’s hard to continue all those things. So recruiting, obviously, is a big deal. Everybody, particularly the younger generations, social media is a big deal. Instagram is a big deal. Being an influencer is a big deal. Like all of the things, we won’t even debate the positives, or negatives, or social impacts of all these things, but it’s a thing, and for you, what’s the one channel where you’re putting the most energy toward recruiting? And how much of that is sort of behind the scenes? How much of it is trying to show students, or prospective students, and student athletes, this is what you’re going to look like. This is you next year. This is you in two years. Is that part of what you’re trying to do there?

Patrick Dillon: Yeah, so kind of taking all of that. So, when we’re producing content, and thinking about what channels we’re really playing on, we really have to think about our audiences, like you mentioned. I like to put them into four different buckets, our alumni, fans, and donors are one. Current and prospective students are another. Friends and family is a very individual program, the third, and then the media really the fourth one. But current, and prospective student athletes, specifically prospective ones, recruits, that’s what our teams really want to focus on. That’s why they’re really on Twitter and Instagram. Some of our teams actually have a Snapchat account too, but that is kind of few and far between.

In terms of what is the most important platform there, I think it’s Instagram, but in basketball specifically, Twitter still has a really huge place. We find that those 15-, 16-, 17-year-olds that are playing AAU basketball, and doing all of those other things on the recruiting trail, they’re all on Twitter. That’s how they see they can promote their brand. That’s how we can reach them, but Instagram obviously still has a huge presence. So, I’d say those two, in terms of recruiting.

As an athletic department, we want to promote our brand, generate revenue, and that’s why we’re on Facebook in addition to Twitter and Instagram. And obviously, there’s other platforms out there, but at our size and scale, we made a conscious decision to do well on a few platforms, rather than do poorly on all of them.

Seth Bridges: An intensely good strategy.

Patrick Dillon: Exactly. So, from the athletic department perspective, which I’ll talk about a little bit different from a team perspective, Facebook’s long been our primary platform because of its reach, and specifically reaching those with buying power. But the challenge we face is that continued push away from organic, and more toward the pay to play model. Because of the real-time nature of Twitter and Instagram, and the younger demographic there, those platforms are kind of where we’re actually focusing more of the content, and starting there. Facebook maybe has become a little more of a repository for information for our plans, especially maybe our older demographic of fans, but Facebook’s also really powerful for us because of the targeting capabilities we can do with some of our advertisement.

But in terms of going back to the recruiting nature of it, and what kind of content goes there, that’s why some of our teams want to have somebody embedded with the team producing content when they’re on the road, or they’re at practice, and things like that, to give recruits, prospective student athletes, an inside look at hey, what is life like as a Xavier Musketeer? I’d say our basketball program probably does the best job of that strategically doing something, showing off the team at their yoga workout, strategically showing when they are doing recovery with cryotherapy, when they’re on that private charter plane what that’s like.

That’s that behind the scenes that the recruits want to see, but the thing that we all have to fully agree on, but I think is true, is that whatever concept we’re delivering to our recruits, our fans want to see that too. And I think there’s a couple of schools that have done a great job with that, and everybody will point to Clemson, and I’m going to do it too. They do a great job of saying our content is focused on recruits. If our fans like it too, awesome. And I don’t want to put words in their mouth with that, but I think that’s a little bit of the approach, and sometimes I think we need to do that a little bit more often here at Xavier, but that’s not a bad way to approach that.

Seth Bridges: Got it. So you just talked about how you think about four different audiences. We’ve got at least three different primary channels, maybe a fourth, or fifth, depending on how you’d throw in Snapchat or not, but you talked about the real time kind of engagement nature of some of these platforms as being a big deal. But at the end of the day, you talked about small team. We’ve got co-management. We’ve got team handles, university handles, athletic department handles. How are you using data to actually prioritize what goes where, and when you should stop doing things, and when you should start doing other things? How does that work for you?

Patrick Dillon: Yeah, so it’s funny. We started looking at data a few years ago and how it related to social. We were doing some silly things five years ago. We were selling sponsored content posts that were like, “Like this post if you recycled today, brought to you by Rumpke,” who’s a local vendor for recycling here in Cincinnati. And we tried to reimagine that, because we looked at it. First it didn’t pass the feel test, like hey, should this be what’s on here, but it also didn’t pass the numbers test when there were two likes on it.

So, we started to really use the numbers to prove our point on some of those things, and Rival IQ has been really helpful for us in tracking that, and we try to compare ourselves to how our peers are doing too. So, us personally, we compare ourselves to our peers in the Big East conference, right? Other member institutions like Butler, Georgetown, Villanova, just a couple of them. And what we try to do is strive to be in the top three in terms of total engagement among that peer group of nine other institutions.

So out of the ten of us, we want to be in the top three consistently. Rival IQ has actually helped us do that, and kind of how we ended up getting connected originally. Let’s just see kind of how we’re doing relative to those schools, and identify what we can do better. See if we’re seeing something that someone’s taking advantage of that we’re not in some specific situation.

So for example, earlier this summer I noticed we were doing decently in terms of engagement, but we were getting absolutely crushed on Instagram. Part of it was some of the other athletic departments. It was what they were posting. They had some cool things going on that we didn’t necessarily have, but part of it was also the fact that we posted three or four times over the course of 30 days on our department’s main account, and I said “wait a second, that’s got to be something there.” So, when we’re looking at that, and we’re looking at the numbers, I wouldn’t say we’re diving a ton into the data.

We’re more looking at some of the general trends we’re finding out there, like okay, how are we doing compared to our peers? And if we’re behind somewhere, why are we behind? What are they posting? Because at the end of the day, there are 10 institutions are very similar. 9 of the 10 are private, Catholic affiliated institution athletic departments where the primary sport is basketball. We have a lot of similarities, which means there’s probably a lot of things that we could do the same way. So that’s really where we’re looking at it.

We’re looking at those trends, and those things like that. So, I talked about basketball game day, and trying to produce shareable content around that. What we really saw was that our game update content was just not as engaging compared to some of our color commentary related content. So, we’ve decided to push our basketball game day coverage towards more of a color commentary situation, less of a hey, here’s the score, and here’s how much time is left, because in our situation there’s beat writers that are doing that. There are media outlets that are putting that out. No, not every school is going to have that same situation, but we’re fortunate for our men’s basketball program being on national TV as much as they are. We have these outlets that are providing that.

We have been acting more like we’re watching the game with our fans, and really it came down to the three retweets and second likes on what the score was, versus did anyone see that? With the nice little gif of the actual dunk, and that gets 35 retweets and 78 likes. Well, which of those things is better? So, that’s where we’ve really been using data to identify what makes sense for us to be producing? What doesn’t make sense?

Seth Bridges: So before we were getting ready for the call, it sounds like you’re sitting in your little social media war room there for game days. Is that right?

Patrick Dillon: Yeah, so it’s funny. So from where I am, when I look up, I can look down and see the arena right now. I was sitting at my desk, and I was like, I need a different place to talk to Seth. So, we have this little social media suite. Our social media team is called the Barracks, as you can see there.

You can see some of the social channels up on the wall there. But yeah, this is a place where on game day, is kind of our social media headquarters for basketball. It lets us see what’s going on, but also have the TVs around us, have the hardwire, when you’ve got 10,000 people in the arena stealing all the WiFi from you. So, this is kind of our headquarters for all of that on gameday.

Seth Bridges: So here, I’m thinking about a social media team for the University, for the athletic department. Now you’re talking about live commentary. Is everyone on your team an absolute sports fan, sports nut?

Patrick Dillon: Yes, but they can’t just be an absolute sports fan. Everyone likes sports, and that’s one of the biggest challenges. So, we rely on student help to help us on our game days. We talked before about how big our staff was. I mean, we’re not the biggest staff out there, so we rely on student help for that. Where was I going with that again?

[Laughter]

Seth Bridges: Just you’re sports fans. Do you have people that are thinking about data, marketing, social strategy? But at the end of the day, they have to actually be able to say we can write this observation about what’s happening on the court, and have it be engaging, smart, make sense. Like you do not want me doing, I’m trying to think about a sport I don’t know anything about. I love all sports. I don’t know, women’s field hockey. Sorry, my mom was a ref, I should know more, but like—I wouldn’t have a lot of color commentary for you. Is it students?

Patrick Dillon: Sure, so it’s kind of hard, I’ll admit. It’s funny. We have a sport management program here, and we have a lot of students obviously interested in working in sports, and one of the things we run into is that they’re in that program because they like sports, and they get here, and they’re like wait, there’s actually work involved. So, we’ve actually had some more success with our advertising and PR majors, because they kind of get it a little bit, but they also like sports. So yes, that is a piece of the puzzle, but I’d rather have the non sports fan that is kind of interested than the hardcore fan that is only kind of interested in the social media aspect, the working aspect of it.

Seth Bridges: Pro-tip for everyone out there. Having people interested that work for you, that’s a good strategy I find. So, questions kind of coming in. With respect to the actual piece of augmenting your team with students, and I think you can even answer more broadly than this with respect to other coaches, players, et cetera feeding behind the scene content, but with the students particularly, how do you manage what they’re posting? Like do you have an approval, a guideline, or a bar? How do you measure before it’s like yeah, post?

Patrick Dillon: Yeah, so in the beginning they don’t get the post themselves. We’re fortunate that we’ve been able to get some students that we’ve had for multiple years that we are training them to an extent. So on game day, there’s kind of a central person who kind of disseminates everything, that is the final yes, the final on all of those things. I won’t say that every piece of everything we put out ends up going through that on a game day, because we get to the point where we have a student who’s been with us for three years who knows what the heck they’re doing that we build that level of trust.So it’s really important.

I would suggest in the beginning that there is a level of approval process, but just like anything, we have to trust them. I actually had a conversation with a coach recently about how we can maybe provide a little bit more coverage of a practice one or twice a week, and I brought up the idea of our students coming out, spending a little bit of time, 30 minutes at the end of practice helping grab some content, and publishing it. And the coach said I think I really want to see that before it’s going out, and I said you’ve really got to worry about the x’s and o’s of managing a group of 30 women out on that field right now.

Trust us. We’re the experts on this. We’re not going to put that student in the situation. I’m not just going to pass a student off to you that doesn’t know what they’re doing. So there is an education process. There is a little bit of a training process to get them to the point where you can trust that they can do it, because if every piece of content that you’re putting out has to get approved by one singular person, it’s not going to be in that real time. It’s not going to do exactly what you want it to do, so there’s definitely a training component to that.

Seth Bridges: But the trust building is probably the biggest, and it takes time to build that, but once you build it, it really unlocks people to run freely.

Patrick Dillon: It does. And it’s funny. When we bring in new students they’re always timid, like what do I say? And what do I do? And I say I don’t know. What do you say? What do you do? Social media is a blank slate. You’re now a content creator. Go do, and if you’ve got this great idea, bring it to us. Nine times out of ten we might say no, but it’s that one time when it’s really darn good, and we say yes, that it’s going to be awesome. So we try to push the envelope a little bit on that.

Seth Bridges: Yeah, I mean it’s not like this is whoever’s managing the Wendy’s handle, and they clearly have carte blanche to run. Do you build the trust, and hopefully can get some less saucy, but totally on point, without having to approve every step.

Patrick Dillon: For sure.

Seth Bridges: I mean, I think all of us, like we obviously have a team of people that do social for a variety of channels, and me, as someone who is responsible for that, if I had to read every tweet and post we just wouldn’t get the job done. So, you build that trust, and you say you understand how our brand talks. You understand what our audience expects. You understand the bar. You understand what things are totally off-limits. Go. Go, I trust you. It takes time.

Patrick Dillon: Yeah, the same way you don’t want to micromanage every person that’s working for you, you can’t micromanage every interaction on social, because you just can’t do it all yourself, and that’s why we have to have kind of the team approach to that.

Seth Bridges: Yeah, but you don’t want to get into that worst nightmare situation where somehow, something goes out that’s going to have you retracting, and having someone much higher in the organization than you having to apologize for something.

Patrick Dillon: And it’s a process to get to the point to actually trust individuals to do that. I guarantee you the UMBC athletics person, as they were beating Virginia, the first 16 seed to do that back in March, he wasn’t asking for permission. He wasn’t doing that as he did it, but he had built up that level of trust of ‘hey, this is what I’m the expert in. I’m going to do this.’

Seth Bridges: Yeah, I think that’s a good lesson for all of us as sort of managers of our brands, and of people to remember that. I mean, that trust has been instilled in you from the athletic director, and from the deans, and from the provost. It comes all the way down, and so it’s nice to be able to know that that can get connected from top to bottom, and you can leverage that student energy, which is going to be different. Like you work there great, but you’re not a Xavier alum, right?

Patrick Dillon: Just my MBA.

Seth Bridges: Just your MBA. Well that’s right, we talked about you have lots of variety of education. That’s good. I like it. I have more fire for the institutions I attended. I do. Like I don’t know, it’s just a thing. So, going back to the data and kind of figuring out what channels and platforms, one of the things you talked about was sort of Facebook maybe as a repository, maybe it’s targeting that older demographic. Maybe that’s a good place for you to maintain brand awareness from a giving perspective, but the question that came in is when you’re going to spend. Like we all know that if you want to get any appreciable reach on Facebook, save a few megastars, you’re going to pay a little bit, or a lot. How do you decide where to put the dollars that you put into Facebook, like the kinds of content you’re going after? What is the biggest driver, and how do you make those decisions.

Patrick Dillon: So, this may seem a little counterintuitive. There’s two reasons. There’s kind of two purposes when we’re going to promote content or do some Facebook ads. When we promote content, sometimes it’s because we know it’s good content, and we know it’s going to do well, and we want to accelerate that.

Seth Bridges: But how do you know? When you say you know, because you’ve done it before, or because it’s a gut, or both?

Patrick Dillon: Okay, so when Xavier beats crosstown rival Cincinnati by 15 points at home, there’s really great photography or there’s a great highlight clip from it, and you’re posting that right after the win, that’s it. Like you just know. There’s no rule. It’s a feel thing, and we run into that with our sponsorship team. They’re like well, when are you going to promote this, or do this? Again, you’ve got to trust us that we kind of know what we’re doing in that situation. So, we’ll promote stuff that we know is going to do well, because we can take something that maybe would have had a 50,000 reach, and it can be 250 by just adding a little bit of money to it, because it’s like fuel on the fire, and then we’ll also promote content that kind of needs to reach someone, but we’ll make sure we’re doing it where we’re actually targeting it.

So, if there’s something we want to put out, and we know it’s not going to do well on Facebook, but we need a certain audience to know that information, or we want to try to target a certain audience, we will spend the dollars but make sure it’s at least targeted. When we’re doing the hey, this is going to do really well because it’s great, shareable content, we’re going to add fuel to the fire, we’re a lot less targeted with that, but when we have a specific method. Go ahead.

Seth Bridges: Is making sure that your first and most engaged audience is the local community, the physical geography there in Ohio?

Patrick Dillon: It’s our alumni base though. Our alumni base is big in Cincinnati, Chicago, Indianapolis, Cleveland, so I wouldn’t say it’s just Cincinnati. But we try to be targeted. The people we want to make sure are engaged kind of are those four buckets we talked about earlier. On Facebook, it’s really that alumni, donor, and fan category, more than it is obviously not the recruiting, and not the media. They’re getting it their own way.

Seth Bridges: Sure, absolutely. I think knowing that you can spin up a real fire around stuff that’s already good, and be ready with that budget, and be ready with the timeliness is impactful. In lots of conversations I have, it’s a little bit watch and wait if there’s not a timeliness to it. Like you have the win. I know you want to get out there on it, but you’ve obviously experienced that before that. Like you setup the scenario. It’s a big win with good video, with good photo. It was a nail-biter.

You came out on top. Any of those things clearly have an emotional aspect to them, and when you’re just layering on it’s local, it’s rivalry, et cetera you’re ready to go with it, but obviously you’ve watched that, and I’m sure when you go back and look at your numbers you see yeah, of course, surprising big wins, or surprising wins, or wins generally is good content. How do you get all of the video content? Do you have a deal with the local TV, or national TV, or whoever is doing distribution there?

Patrick Dillon: Sure, so we kind of have a mix of video. We do not have a video team. The University has a videographer that helps us out a bit. Again, we rely a little bit on students to help us get in arena highlights. Fortunately, we have a deal with Fox, being on Fox Sports One, and other of their national channels throughout the year. They have tool that allows us to cut and utilize highlight clips.

There’s a limit to the number of real time ones, but then we can put together highlight packages from the game, for a certain player, for a certain thing that happened during the game. We can turn them into the gifs that I talked about and made you chuckle about. So, we’re not necessarily producing a ton on a game day. We’ll produce our own internal highlight package, but some of the best stuff we’re doing is actually cuts of the TV feed.

One of the other things we did last year was in arena we have a video board, and we have been able to actually cut video board stuff to use on social media. So like if there’s a really cool dance cam, or the flex cam or something goes super well, or whatever it may be, we actually have the opportunity to cut that and utilize that. We had a hall of fame induction ceremony at a halftime. We cut and used that. We have the frisbee dogs. Everyone loves dogs. We know that, right? That is a halftime ad. We cut that, and we’re using that on social. It’s all part of that fan experience, so that’s kind of how we’re cheating the system a little bit, on having a lot of videos, specifically on Facebook, because I think many people know how that how that algorithm works is the more video it has, the better everything’s going to do.

If video is only 2% of your content, you’re going to be skewed the wrong direction. So we kind of cheat that system a little bit, and we’re putting out a ton of video, but it’s broadcast footage a lot of times, or it’s things that are already happening, behind produced, that we’re just cutting and utilizing.

Seth Bridges: Got it. So now, I’m thinking about universities that don’t have Fox Sports at their back, and also, like you, are small, don’t have necessarily a video team. What do you do for all the sports for which you don’t have that? Like I’m thinking anything that’s not men’s basketball at Xavier.

Like how do you end up getting that video content, or doing that content creation? How much of it’s UGC? How much of it’s student volunteers? How do you get it? Because clearly it’s still going to be a big piece of success if you can do it well.

Patrick Dillon: Yeah, so we do that just on a different scale with our other sports. So, our other on campus sports, soccer, volleyball, women’s basketball, baseball, with all of those sports, some of those games are televised or streamed on the Big East digital network, and we can still utilize that same flipping tool. At soccer and volleyball, we kind of select certain games throughout the year when we can have a student there to do highlights, and utilize that. We do internally broadcast and stream certain games. Do we do it perfectly? Absolutely not.

So, there definitely is less content that we have  available for some of those other sports simply because we don’t have the video. One thing that I have kind of pushed a lot is every event that we have on campus that doesn’t have a photographer at it is kind of a disservice to ourselves, because photo content is still really powerful, at least in my opinion, and where photo content is actually super, super powerful is in the hands of our student athletes.

And we’ve been able to do that for basketball, and we’re working on what that looks like for some of our other sports, but being able to supply our student athletes with their photos from the game, that they can go and use on their social media, if they post it versus us, they’re going to get three, four, five times the amount of engagement that we would. And that’s just one of those brand building type of things. There are built in influencer marketers.

Seth Bridges: So what are you all doing? Do you have any programs structurally to help you do that right now? And if not, is expanding that, and making it a little bit more systematic a part of what you hope to do?

Patrick Dillon: So, we’ve had to jerry rig it right now, where our photography is literally in a DropBox. We take the best, put it in a DropBox, and give the link to the players via text message, and they can go into the DropBox app on their phone, save it, put it on Instagram. Done, right? We have had conversations with opendorse. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with them, but I’m a big fan. There’s also a little bit of investment involved, but they have been doing a great job with that, in the collegiate athletics place, in the sports place, in the influencer space they’re doing a great job with being able to deliver specific content to influences to promote on their channels.

Seth Bridges: Yeah, no, certainly we work with a lot of different action adventurer, outdoor adventurer kind of sports or sports agencies, and the thing I’ve heard a lot from them is very similar to you, which is two parts. One, sourcing the content from the field when it’s often being taken by lots of different photographers, or by these sort of influencers, or athletes, or their athletes teams themselves, and if you’re a Mountain Dew, or a Red Bull, or whoever, how do you get that content back?  And then the curation and the best of? At least for you, it’s like you’re the source, and now you’re doing the dissemination, and then it’s sort of how are you making sure that it’s as easy as possible for these athletes to amplify your message on their own channel.

Patrick Dillon: Right, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that it was a little bit of a struggle though, because you struggle to create enough content for yourself. Now you’re going off and creating content for other people too, and providing them with all these assets. So, there’s definitely a balance of figuring out what is the right amount of that? What is important? How much can you realistically do?

Seth Bridges: Yeah. Do you all ever use user generated content, either from athletes or from your fans back out on your channel?

Patrick Dillon: Yeah, so probably the number one way we send it over the past couple of years is after each men’s basketball game, we will do a social media recap, where we will pull the best of from our fans throughout the game, by either using a hashtag, or checking our location, or using the terminology that we’re following, and we’ll compile a social media recap of the best posts from our fans throughout the game, or from media outlets and things of that nature. We had been doing that through Storify. RIP. Storify has gone away. But there are other solutions out there for that (i.e. Twitter Moments or Wakelet). But we were taking that, and we were putting that on our website.

We were promoting that through our social channels, like hey, check out the best from social media, and it was actually helping the spread of stuff after the fact, as people were seeing the cool, fun, great pictures et cetera from the game. So yes, we were doing that a little bit. We also play in the Big East tournament in New York City each year, and we’ve done a fun campaign the past few years. A little play on words, X in the City. So Xavier, X in the City, having fans give an X somewhere in New York City, whether it be at Madison Square Garden, or Central Park, wherever it may be, posting it using that as a hashtag, and compiling that at the end, and spreading that, and rewarding fans for participating. So yes, we are doing a little bit of that as well.

Seth Bridges: That’s another smart way that you are leveraging the fact that you have a small budget, you’re being creative, and now you probably get a ton of content, and probably a ton of good content that I’m imagining also those fans are also back reamplifying, and repromoting, particularly when you’re sharing content on your site.

So, I’ve been kind of feathering in questions as we’ve gone here, but I had one more question for you, kind of returning back a little bit to the broader scope of the Big East, and thinking about if you can come up with an example or two of places where you’re looking at what a lot of those other schools. You did a nice job of describing how similar many of the institutions are within the Big East.

Examples of places where you found yeah look at Butler. Look at Nova. Look at some of these other universities who are having success in the way that aren’t, and where you’ve said let’s try doing that our way, and find success. Can you think of any examples where that’s been true for you?

Patrick Dillon: Yeah, so prior to being at Xavier, I was at Georgetown in DC, and they do a pretty good job at keeping fans engaged on their main athletics account, on Instagram and on Facebook. They’ll do things such as hey, let’s see how many different states we can find a Hoya fan in, and they’ll post a picture of the United States, and people will comment. That’s a treasure trove for comments. And then you can post an update and say hey, we’re just missing these six states. Are you from this state? Or tag somebody who you know who is.

That’s something that Georgetown did recently that I think is really good, and I want to copy, but I’m not going to copy it yet, because that’s a little too obvious, and I would tell my counterpart there that. I’ll say Georgetown also does a great job of utilizing some of their famous former student athletes that played in the NBA, whether it be Allen Iverson, or someone of that nature. They also have a number of celebrities that end up wearing the brand. So, Bradley Cooper is a Georgetown alum.

They’ll post a picture of Bradley Cooper a dozen times a year wearing a Georgetown hat, or a Georgetown shirt, and trying to figure out how that applies to your institution is how you make that happen. So, in our situation, George Clooney did a movie at Xavier a few years ago. We might pull out the George Clooney with the Xavier hat photo every once in a while, get people excited. Things like that (like Bill Murray?). It’s finding who are those people that matter to your audience? What are those things that can get people, like in the state example get  people commenting? Something that I’ve seen on non-Big East accounts recently, you see it a lot in the NBA, hey, you have 15 dollars to build team.

Here’s five tiers, how much each tier of player costs. Build your own team. I’d love to do that for Xavier at some point, like hey, here’s 15 alums. Build a starting lineup. So, little things like that, just looking for those inspirations, and trying to apply them back to your situation, because while we are similar, we’re all different in that sense. But there’s some things that you can beg, borrow, and steal, and adapt to yourself.

Seth Bridges: Yeah. I mean copying and inspiration are not that far apart as it turns out. And yeah, we have a lot of customers in higher education. Every year we do a big study on higher ed, which is coming out in a few weeks, and one of the things I’ve noticed in doing that study now for three years in a row is that first of all, comments highly viral. The more we get commenting, the more we end up with expanded reach, but alums particularly just love to reflect on their times in school, whether it was 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, and if you really, really want to get a lot of comments going, post something that really tugs at that for some alum, and the comments just flow.

I remember in ’56. I remember in ’78. I remember in ’95. I remember in whatever, I was at that same place doing this thing that these kids are doing now. Yeah, hurray world. It’s great. I do it too. You heard me talking about Pitt. I graduated from Pitt a fairly long time ago. It’s all good. We have that emotion, and it sounds like for athletics, finding places that can drive that kind of chatter. I do like the idea about the kind of engagement from now like a hurray, or high five, but yes, I would like to build my thing. I would like to enter this. Effectively, it’s a contest, right? Like why do I think these five players are the best ever, and here’s how they can go together, people really love that. And if you’re going to reamplify it, that’s the prize, right?

Patrick Dillon: Right. And going off of what you just said, getting people commenting, getting people sharing. If you can get people excited, then they’ll help you spread your message, and then they’ll tell their own story about their relationship with you. So, in our situation, people are telling their story about Xavier as they share some post, or as they comment on some post, and that can be really powerful, like you talked about.

Seth Bridges: Yeah. I mean, we all have our experiences, and at the end of the day, the more something you’re doing on one of your channels kind of pulls at my emotion, or my being around that, the more likely I am to like it, share it, comment on it, et cetera, and when you find that pattern, or that magic, every campaign can’t be like that, but of course you try to do it as many as you can.

Patrick Dillon: For sure.

Seth Bridges: Hey Patrick, we are about out of time. We ran through a number of questions from folks, and I really appreciate you spending your time here with us today. I’ve learned even more. I could chat with you about this all day. There were a handful of questions that I think went unanswered, and so, we’ll follow up with you and try to get some final answers on that. For everyone who’s watching, keep an eye out. Our higher ed engagement report comes out in just a few weeks, and we’re very excited to share the results of that with you all. We will send this recording out, and you’ll get a chance to sort of rewatch, and share with your teams as you want. Patrick, I hope you have a great rest of the week, and thanks for spending the time with us today.

Patrick Dillon: Awesome. Thanks Seth.

Seth Bridges: Great. Have a good one. Bye, everybody.

Patrick Dillon: Bye.

The post Slam Dunk Social Strategy for College Sports appeared first on Rival IQ.

This question can be especially important for agencies, who are dealing with a barrage of data on behalf of each of their clients. Our guest in this installment of The Data-Driven Marketer is Lee Odden from TopRank Marketing. Lee and Seth Bridges, our co-founder, set out to answer this question and many more in this recorded webinar session.

TopRank Marketing is a data-driven digital agency that helps start-ups and established brands alike connect with and convert customers. Lee walked us through how his team data to help his clients understand their current performance and where they can focus their efforts to engage and widen their audience.

In this interview conducted by our very own co-founder, Seth Bridges, Lee shares:

• How to determine the kind of data to use
• Ways to use industry level research
• Which metrics to prioritize
• Examples of strategic uses of client data and industry benchmarks
• And so much more…

Full Transcript

Seth Bridges: Hey, everybody. Good morning. My name is Seth Bridges, and I’d like to welcome you to the most recent episode of the Data-Driven Marketer. Today, I’m really excited. Our guest, Lee Odden, is the founder and CEO of Top Rank Marketing. They’re a digital marketing agency in the greater Minneapolis, Minnesota area. He is gracious enough to come spend time with us before he takes off to his next big speaking gig in India. And you’ll see him later this year at Content Marketing World in early September as well. So, Lee, I’m really excited to have you. Thanks for being here.

Lee Odden: Thanks, Seth. I’m excited to be here, even though it doesn’t look like I’m here.

Seth: Yeah, sorry, everybody. A little technical difficulties. The internet is not exactly working today, but you’ll see…

Lee: It’s all good. It’s all good.

Seth: But imagine with me. And yeah, we’re recording this. So, even if you’re not able to or have friends and colleagues who aren’t able to make it today, the recording will absolutely go out on our blog with the transcript and questions. Please ask questions as we go. One of my teammates has got Slack up, and she’s going to be aggregating questions and trying to feed them into me as we go. If it makes sense, we’ll jump right in, and I might even interrupt Lee and have him answer some of the questions. If not, we’ll definitely save the time at the end to do your questions. So, please keep them coming. This is a very smart individual who knows a lot about what we’re going to talk about today, which is how to use data to improve social strategy, content strategy, and your digital marketing in general. So, Lee, are you ready to get going?

Lee: I’m ready, Seth.

Seth: All right, let’s do it. So, one of the things that you hear as a phrase in life is data-driven. So, data-driven marketing, data-driven sales, data… Fine, we’re all guilty of that. But I think data matters. But from your perspective… You’re the one out working with a broad array of clients. How important is data in the work that you do with any and all of your clients?

Lee: That’s a great question. And I think there’s just a little bit of irony to the fact that it’s actually due to data and information overload that consumers are facing on a daily basis that data has become even more important for marketers to stand out, to be more relevant. I’ve seen some… I don’t know if you know, but I saw a stat from a university. In America, in the United States, we are confronted with an average of 64 gigabytes of media on a daily basis, which is amazing to imagine. And that’s like a paradox of choice at scale.

Because people are tuning out and so on and so forth. So, really in order for marketing to be successful, it’s not just about creating useful content that informs buyers, because good luck contenting with them because they’re a thousand other messages as well. It’s got to be even easier for those customers to find the content in all the right places and for that content to deliver a combination of utility and experience. And without data insights about customer preferences, it’s really difficult to deliver on that. And we do some work around tailoring data.

There are a number of factors that kind of fit into that, and it really depends…how much or how little depends on the sophistication let’s say of the client and the approach follows. And an agency that primarily creates content to help clients solve marketing problems, we use a customer empathy model. And that focuses on the relationship that prospective customers have with information during the buyer journey. So, it’s a simplistic three-tier model. And the data fits underneath each one of those segments of information that represents sort of a mini buyer journey. You know, “How do they discover content or solutions content? What are their preferences for consumption? And what the triggers that motivate action?” And we can go light or deep depending on the situation. And it’s all about the data.

Seth: So, depending on that… You were kind of talking about where a particular customer is with their either organizational maturity or the maturity of the marketing organization within a larger organization. It sounds like data…using data to focus and prioritize content in any part of this journey is important. But do you actually tailor how much data you bring or data insights you bring to the client versus what your team is using internally? And does that change as a function of that maturity?

Lee: Yeah, the magic of that sort of three-tiered model allows for simplicity or sophistication according to the client’s situation. So, when clients have customer segments and even things like personas all sorted out, we can get very specific and very sophisticated because we’ve already got a lot of that utility and emotion all wrapped around who is that best customer, and what do they care about. If they don’t have that, then we usually use a phased approach, and we grow with the foundation of what we can trust, and we grow from there. We built on, we optimize, we elevate our understanding as we complete our understanding of who the buyer is and what they care about.

Seth: If you take that sort of more simplistic end… Because I know…I’m sure there’s a range of viewers right now from sophisticated to simple or serving clients who are also from sophisticated to simple. Can you give an example of an engagement where you step in, and there’s not a lot of established content and/or the client’s maturity with respect to either content creation or persona understanding is somewhat simple. What do you do? What does that look like in terms of getting to a place where you feel like, “Aw, this is where we need to be.”

Lee: So, what we’ll do is some primary research there. If there’s a lack of data, CRM data, analytics data… It’s not always a lack of data, sometimes it’s a lack of access because IT loves to keep the gates closed. So, we’ll do some primary research. We’ll do some surveys with stakeholders within the organization, and we’ll ask them questions that help reveal their understanding of the buyer’s preferences according to discovery consumption and engagement. And there’s an example I’m thinking of, an IT service management company that…

There’s actually a report that we generate, we call it a rhythm report because we want to get the rhythm, I guess, of that target customer, what’s the rhythm. So, what we’re trying to understand there is things like search keywords, social conversations, and topics, what publications they read, what…who influences them and what influences them. That’s all in the discovery bucket. And so we did that. And this is for a CTO, chief technology officer, that would be most prone to be the buyer of IT service management solutions. B to B enterprise sort of offering.

And so by collecting that information through a combination of primary research to get things started, asking questions about… “Yeah, what publications do your customers actually read? What do they subscribe to? Who do they listen to? What people are tasked on the buying committee to make recommendations?” Stuff like that. Also asking questions about content preferences like, “What devices do they use? iPhones, iPad, desktop? Are they reading white papers or not?

Are they looking at eBooks, infographics, videos, and so forth?” And then as far as triggers that motivate action, we take a look at early/middle/late stage. So, things that surface, an idea or a solution, just as it’s first entree into the conversation to consideration like, “Who’s the best?” And the kinds of things that motivate them to actually make a decision. We ask those questions during that sort of initial survey, and that then helps us create this rhythm report that articulates the go forward for constructing a content plan.

Seth: And what are some of the…? If you have an engagement where, again, it’s sort of a clean slate, obviously if the internal team understands the customer…is spending enough time with a customer, understands the business where you can actually do that survey, great. What do you use in terms of data sources to analyze or to understand, “Cool, they’ve told me that they read these ten periodicals, or journals, or online newsletters, magazines, whatever.” Where do you go from there in terms of understanding what that content is, how it resonates with these audiences, etc.?

Lee: So, we do take…I don’t want to say with a grain of salt…something like that. We do understand the inherent bias in the individuals that are answering these surveys, you know, the stakeholders inside the organization. We understand this is just a relative measure. But what we’re looking for is points of interest that we can then use to validate. So, in particular, we’re looking for individuals that represent that ideal customer. And so once we understand an entity or an individual identity, then we’ll be able to use tools to find out where they’re interacting publicly on the social web. So, obviously we’re a customer of Rival IQ, but we also use tools like BuzzSumo, because we do so much with influencers, we actually use a couple of tools. One is Traackr.

Another one is Analytica. And this is all public information, of course. So, we have no access to their private information. And so we’ll poke around there and try to get an understanding of the places where they’re spending time, the publications that they’re referencing, siting, and sharing, where is there engagement for that ideal customer. And so if we get 10 or 20 of these ideal customers, these are actual customers, or they’re actual prospects, then we can model some insights around what we find about those people and their behaviors and their intent. And that helps translate or augment the…translates into a component of the rhythm report that then is used to architect a content plan.

Seth: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I’m glad you mentioned BuzzSumo and Traackr. But I was thinking about BuzzSumo particularly once you’re able to identify sort of places where you know these target personas or target customers spend time, because then you can actually go figure out content resonance, some of the influencers who are sharing, and understand a little bit more about who these people like to engage with. So, yeah, that’s awesome.

Let me take this survey thread and pull it and kind of go more broadly. Great that you’re able to have access to the team and do surveys there. Are there industry level surveys or…? I know we produce annually for higher ed, and for social media benchmarks, and things like that. But obviously… And I’ve read a lot of the writing of your team. You all obviously consume a lot of industry level benchmark reports and guidance reports. Can you talk a little bit about how that kind of broader level survey data feeds into some of the actions that you take as well in these sorts of engagements?

Lee: Yeah. Especially with a situation where we need to create some validity, some third party validity, around a recommended solution or approach, this is not unusual. Obviously, everyone does this. But this is the most common thing we’re doing is sighting third party statistics. So, if we’re trying to convince someone that… And we’re really not in the selling business. It’s just when we’re working with actual customers that we’re trying to decide a course of action of some sort, we’ll leverage industry stats to support that…a particular direction.

So, like a blog. Like if someone was resistant to a blog… I just saw this stat on CMI. After reading recommendations on a blog, 61% of US consumers made a purchase. That’s interesting. [Laughs] And so things like that, we’ll all go, “Hm.” They’ll make that executive or that decision maker go, “Oh, that’s interesting.” And of course, we try and augment. I have to say this is where the magic happens. It’s not just adding third-party statistics to an argument posed by the agency or the internal marketer, but it’s when you…it corroborates other hypotheses that are formed by some private data. That’s where the magic happens. Or makes it a lot more powerful.

Seth: Sure. I think it’s interesting… you talk about that as… It seems maybe obvious, but if you’re working with a team who needs broader buy-in and is part of your job as the agency to help them make the case that these investments are worth it, that absolutely seems like kind of a masterful bit to use that.

Lee: Yeah, and actually there’s a lot of value, too, in the third party industry statistics in a lot of different ways. In fact, one of the things I would share…this is like a content tip almost. I have someone who’s doing curation for us every day. They’re just doing curation and sharing, and managing social channels. What I have them doing is when they find industry statistics that are germane to our business, they save them in a spreadsheet, and they tag them with keywords. So, over time, we have this huge library of…a great taxonomy of industry statistics that make it super easy to then go find that stat for that obscure scenario that client XYZ really wants to get some third party data proof about something. And this is a habitual sort of thing that can really scale up to something really useful for an organization.

Seth: Can you give me an example of an actual big win where it wasn’t…not that it wasn’t going well, but, “Man, I pulled this stat about the blog,” or something from a social perspective where you’ve gotten that resistance, but you came through with a…a stat corroborated?

Lee: I think… So, there’s a fuzzy and a specific example maybe. A fuzzy example is one where someone was reluctant to invest in a strategy. And I don’t have the exact stats off the top of my head, but it was a very inverse proportion where from a content marketing study that showed the percentage of companies that had a documented content marketing strategy achieved this significant proportion of results and effectiveness compared to those who did not. And that led to an investment, a financial investment into some research and answering the question of why as opposed to just executing on production. Because a lot of companies think, “Well, we just want you to make blog posts. We just want you to make eBooks, and videos, and infographics. Just go make them.” As opposed to really connecting them to solving a problem for the customer. Yeah, imagine that.

Seth: Imagine that.

Lee: [Laughs] Maybe a more specific example is…well, we have… We’re a many service digital agency, so we’re doing ads and organic sorts of things. And so we’ve had… I’m thinking of a particular client that was very focused on doing nothing with content or inbound really. They’re only focused on ads, targeting ads. And there was a stat, content marketing generates over three times as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less. I remember that because that was pretty compelling. And that changed some minds, again, about investing in a different way. And investing in a complementary way. We don’t play this mutually exclusive game at all, because of course what matters is the customer. And so if a customer, a percentage of customers, respond to ads, and a percentage of customers respond to organic visibility through content and inbound efforts, hey, that’s fantastic. Right?

Seth: Yeah. And is this…? It seems like this is a place wherein a mixed…kind of…hopefully, everyone has lived in a somewhat mixed world where you’re augmenting some of your inbound with some paid, paid media, PPC, whatever. But obviously you can produce, and test, and distribute your organic content, and whoever comes, sort of comes. And the people who are already on your site and who are already in your CRM who you’re pushing this content… Like this webinar. We do this webinar series because it gets a lot of engagement with our existing customers, with our prospects, and drives new demand. And we see that because of the data. That makes it a lot easier for me, for example, to go decide to do paid media to attract even more people to these programs…

Lee: Absolutely.

Seth: Is that something that you’ve found as well where you can kind of…back and forth?

Lee: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. So, the DNA of that idea for us is through search, because we started pretty much as a search agency many years ago. And so using paid media to do test campaigns, have hypothesis’ about keyword segments and topics, and kinda throw that digital spaghetti against the wall, collect some data, and then use that to inform organic initiatives has proven to be something that is very translatable to lots of other types of media and content or channels, I should say. So, if a client has a popular blog or has a certain threshold of visitors to a blog, we can post content on that blog, and there’s already a subscribed community that’s paying attention. There are things that we can find out there organically that can actually reverse inform some of the paid media that we might do on social or other means to attract attention to that topic.

Seth: And do you find yourself using social at times in a similar manner where you’re able to use that as the digital spaghetti as it were?

Lee: Well, it’s so available. Of course. You’ve got the firehose of Twitter data and the public data of a couple of other places, and that makes it very appealing because it’s so available. And it may not represent the totality of the social web, but it’s such a volume that you can tease out what’s useful. So, yes, absolutely. Both organically publishing content on social and then using information from that experience to inform paid and vice versa. Yes, absolutely.

Seth: And I’m going to jump for a second. I know you do some work obviously with B to B clients and thinking about the struggle, I think, that many B to B clients have with social media generally. How much do some of these content proof points, industry sort of benchmarks, etc.…do they work equally well whether you’re servicing a B to B client or a B to C client when it comes to the social media aspect particularly?

Lee: That’s an interesting question. Because this generally… And this is a sweeping generalization of course. But B to C companies tend to be a little more hip to the social because they see what their competition is doing. They see…the live it. In a consumer world, social, product evangelism, and promotion is a lot more rampant. Rampant is a negative word. It’s a lot more present. And so they come to the table with a lot more feeling of credibility towards social and consequently, social statistics and that sort of thing to validate points of view than in B to B.

That’s not to say that B to B isn’t certainly warming up generally to social. It certainly has. But that would be a point of differentiation I guess is that you have these predisposed notions or experiences that are very different. And you still have people in B to B still playing the white paper game and the case study game, and things that are a little more traditional than, oh, something like we just published for Content Marketing Institute.

So, we helped market the Content Marketing World Conference, and we just published a series of videos that were like Mario Brothers kind of animations including influencers. And it’s like that’s just not common. And so social…the amplification of that, of course, occurred almost exclusively through social. Or for an accounting client, financial planning and accounting. You’re not finding a lot of Candy Crush-themed microsites quizzing you and having all kinds of fun bells and whistles, and all the things that Candy Crush does for you.

That’s another example that is primarily amplified through social. Those are B to B solutions, and they stand out because a lot of people aren’t doing those sorts of things. So, it’s like we’re all consumers. So, while I said that B to C is predisposed to social, well, those people that work at B to B companies are humans, too. And they’re on a personal level predisposed to social. And so what’s interesting about doing interesting things through social for B to B is that it does really stand out.

Seth: Yeah, I think it gets back to understanding the persona, understanding…if who you’re trying to reach or who is your buyer actually is one a particular social channel. Probably not all of them but knowing where to be and then understanding that Candy Crush probably actually does resonate with the right demographic for financial planning, for example. Because everyone-ish plays Candy Crush, present company excluded.

Lee: Me, too. Same here. Don’t invite me. Don’t invite me to play Candy Crush. No, don’t. Don’t do it.

Seth: So, look, if industry reports, and benchmarks, and things… This is at the high level. This is like there’s no private data, maybe I don’t even have this client, maybe I’m pitching, or maybe I’m working on an audit, but I’m fighting with IT to get the data. That’s up here. But at the other end of the spectrum, we’re talking about GA, Omniture, Facebook, Facebook Insights, Ads accounts, Search Console. We have it all. Of course, there’s less competitive. There’s less context from a competitive perspective or from an industry perspective. But wow, man oh man, from top to bottom, we have all the data. I’m assuming you…IT problems aside, you’re typically working with your clients, all their private data that you can get. True?

Lee: Yeah. Yeah. Yep, all your data…

Seth: When you are… Oh, go ahead.

Lee: No, I was just going to be silly and say all your data belongs to us. All right.

Seth: Funny story, I had that as a headline at some point on our website, and a former boss, VP of marketing, she said, “I don’t think you understand your audience because I don’t get it.”

[Laughter]

Seth: So, I wrote a really nice blog post about not understanding your audience, and that blog post did really well. How ‘bout that?

Lee: There you go.

Seth: Marketer failures, all your base.

[Laughter]

Seth: When you get down to that level of data, where do you find particularly for a content, or social media, or kind of both engagement…where do you find yourself spending the bulk of your sort of analytics time? And is it because of…? Well, that’s question A. Question B is is it because it’s just hard to do the analysis, or is it because it’s that important? Or both?

Lee: Well, it’s dictated by the nature of the engagement. So, if the strategy calls for us to do… Well, we’re almost doing it in content. So, it’s content and then like an equalizer, we’re doing a certain amount of effort with search, and social, and influencers, and some conversation rate optimization. Which those are our equalizer bars, basically. And then paid spend. Then we’re going to look at the private, if you will, analytics for each one of those.

So, their social advertising program, their paid search or Google AdWords program. Google Analytics is probably the most common source of data that we’ll have access to or given access to that we can go in and find out what’s the current situation, what’s the truth in terms of what’s actually happening and to the degree that we can discover why. And we can reconcile that against some of the goals that are outlined in the strategy. And that’s what helps drive the go forward recommendations in terms of the tactical mix. So, if that helps answer your question.

Seth: It does. But the reason I’m thinking is because so many of… I guarantee so many people in the audience and certainly, our customers are social media marketers, maybe just content marketers, maybe both. But we all flex and do lots of work. But I would say that in general that there is less comfortability, less familiarity with the richness of what you can learn beyond the basics from Google Analytics and how that actually can be so informative to both strategic as well as the execution of some of these things. Do you find that your agency being really sharp when it comes to understanding the impact of transforming web analytics into action is either a differentiator for you or a place where you’re bringing a lot of value for the clients?

Lee: I think it is. I really do. We have some phenomenal resources internally in terms of data analytics. And we actually have created our own dashboard that is based on a business intelligence platform. And so we’re pulling in disparate data sources. So, including Google Analytics as well as some social and other CRM data to provide or create these custom dashboards for our clients. And some of it is public, some of it is just available to our account managers and the internal folks. But that is absolutely a differentiator. In fact, we’ve had clients say, “This is great. I don’t even have to look at GA anymore. I don’t have to look at these five other things anymore. I can just go look at your thing, and this is so convenient for me.” And it’s actually convenient for us, too. So, yes.

Seth: I find personally that… Obviously, I love competitive benchmarking. I do love seeing how other people succeed in the market and using kind of competitive SEO tools, and looking at SEMrush, and Moz, and some of the other tools that make that available as it pertains to content. But at the end of the day, knowing that there are certain pieces of content that just kill every time and that we can’t do those pieces every month, but when we do, it’s okay to invest because you see that the payoff has been there in the past and almost certainly will be there in the future. And that comes from GA. That comes from your funnels. That comes from chasing it down and saying, “Yep, dollars go in, dollars come out. And we all like dollars.” Whatever your currency may be.

Lee: Absolutely.

Seth: A question just came in. It’s a little bit of a rewind, but I want to jump into it just because I think it does get to this analytics and persona question a little bit. Somebody asked, “How do you…? What do you recommend as an approach when you really have either a broad array of personas or personas that are just very different in terms of what they’re looking for from your company in terms of utility or purchasing?”

Lee: Well, I try to use outcomes at the prioritization schema. So, what is your best customer in terms of revenue opportunity? Or where is the white space customer? And by that, I mean the customer where they represent the greatest opportunity and the least competitiveness. That’s what I mean and closing the gap there. Because ultimately, revenue answers all questions for you. The people you answer to will be very interested in whatever revenue outcomes, no matter what else is valuable and business valuable that you may communicate as a result of having worked with different personas and targeted customers.

But ultimately, it is revenue. So, who’re your best customers? Who represents your ideal customer relative to some of your primary business goals? Obviously leads, and sales, and revenue, and sales cycle…shortening sales cycle, increasing order of volume, order of frequency, things like that are very, very motivating. So, if you can identify specifically which customer segment or two represent those opportunities, that’s what I would focus on. That’s how I would simplify and prioritize.

Seth: Got it. But to simplify just for… So, it’s not water things down. It’s not go after everyone. It is find where the dollars are coming from and focus?

Lee: Yes, your unicorn customer as Larry Kim would say.

Seth: Okay. There are always ways to get more of them. And lots of us serve different constituencies. But it’s tempting to find the commonalities and try to market to the commonalities. And you can probably do okay, but I don’t think you can kill it with your priority persona if you’re doing that. And I’m curious as to your opinion.

Lee: Well, I think the idea is that you document your success and then duplicate, meaning get really focused and specific on that profitable opportunity customer and become successful serving them. And the things you learn about that apply to other customer segments or other personas that you’re after. Because then now you’ve got something behind it to justify the actions. You’ve got data. And they’re not the same person, of course. But some of the things that you do, the way you approached solving those information and content problems can be applied to those other customer segments in their own way.

Seth: Yeah, and I think it’s funny because some of these things…I think they feel obvious, but I don’t know that they are obvious all the time. And it seems like it takes someone else stepping in and saying… And this is the role that you play probably in a lot of your engagement, which is like, “I’m going to kind of state this obvious, but we’re going to help you take a step back, isolate what’s working, figure out how to map it over here, and kind of do that until we make money.”

Lee: Right. And you’re right, that is a role that we play in that is to provide leadership and confidence for the direction to be taken. Because it’s amazing how often, how frequent companies just need confidence. Or it’s the people that are on…their reputation, their position is on the line for making the right decision. And so they just need the confidence to make the right decision. And it’s amazing how many optimization or marketing performance optimization opportunities exist simply by understanding and executing well the fundamentals.

Seth: Do you find that…? I find this a lot. People end up making these decisions…they get the confidence, they do the thing, and then they get very excited about doing the thing and forget to go back and kind of measure up and check in. Is that something that you find in a lot of your engagements? Failure to go back and kind of check in with the data?

Lee: When they don’t have an assigned account manager from an agency that is responsible for following up and managing the success of a program ongoing, yes, there is shiny object syndrome within brands, too. Because… And It’s not always shiny objects in the sense that a marketing consultant will find a new technology or something, but it might be other responsibilities that’s being added onto them, and so they get distracted, and they don’t follow up. They don’t follow through. Not because they don’t want to sometimes, it’s just because they’re tasked with so many different things, and they don’t have the resources to do the job.

Seth: Do you all have a cadence to how you do these more kind of retrospective kind of both backward and forward-looking? Is this something you do with clients on a monthly basis, on a quarterly basis, less frequently than that?

Lee: Sure. Well, at some level…there’s always opportunistic sorts of reflection or surfacing as it happens. But there are pretty larger reviews… There’s a certain review that happens roughly on a monthly basis but definitely on a quarterly basis. And then about three months before a client renewal is coming up, we start to…we have a sequence of activities that fit that category as well.

Seth: So, there is the nugget of wisdom from Lee Odden right there, everybody. It’s not the month before the renewal. It’s not a week before the renewal. Three months before the renewal.

Lee: Absolutely.

Seth: Because it turns out it’s hard to cram that stuff in at the very end. I don’t care what you’re selling. We sell software. Doing the renewal a week out is not a good idea. It’s not about data. I can tell you, it’s about data. Don’t do that. I’ve seen what happens. Client level data obviously is the place where you know everything. You know what went in, you know what comes out. We started out talking about industry level benchmarks. But… Not even but.

And I know because of the business we’re in and the customers we work with like your agency and so many other agencies and brands, there’s a lot of value from competitive data as well, particularly when maybe your customer is on the more simplistic end, and you don’t have a lot of those proof points. Can you share with us a few examples…? I know you’re a Rival IQ customer, so that’s all I have to say about that. But how you use competitive data, whether it’s again, social, SEO, some of the ways to either…well, to drive your engagements and sort of what role it plays.

Lee: Sure. Obviously generally we like…we start with broad-based comparisons for things like…to understand share of voice, overall footprints, share of topics, share of influence, and ads, and that sort of thing to really understand what we’re up against, what the weaknesses and strengths are so we can identify opportunities. And that manifests in a couple of different ways for each of the channels that we work in. So, SEO obviously. We want to understand the share of search for a particular category and where the keyword opportunities or keyword/topic opportunities are so that we can find an ideal ratio target.

So, I think I mentioned something about this before where demand is high, but competition is low. An ideal ratio situation there… And we’ll use competitive research. So, SEMrush is beautiful for a thing like that to identify some of those opportunities. Moz, I think, has a keyword difficulty tool that adds some insight around that as well. So, we’ll look to understand who the competitors are in the first place according to keyword, and then we’ll drill down from there from an SEO perspective. On the SEO side, competitive… This is what I love about your product, too, is the landscape. So, when thing spike, I get notifications.

And it’s great to see what people are doing that’s really standing out. And it’s not just about, “Oh, I changed a title tag,” or something like that. But it’s like, “Oh, look, they’re getting 5,000% more engagement.” Then I go and look, and I see they only post once a month. Okay, that’s moot. It’s a moot point. Most often, what it is is, “Hey, we’ve got hundreds of percent higher engagement,” and they did this really cool thing. And we see that pattern repeated very easily across a portfolio of competitors. I’m just saying that this is why I’ve been using the tool for so long. And it makes it super easy to see what’s going on from a social perspective across this whole group of companies. And then you can see patterns. You can understand consistently what kinds of things are actually working with competing companies in your category. And you can learn from that.

Seth: And are you able to use those as proof…? I’ll give you a few examples, and you can… I know you do a lot of work with influencer marketing particularly.

Lee: Yes.

Seth: I know that we just did our big benchmark study back in April. And last week, I just did a big follow on looking at a little bit of trends over time, and we dove into a few examples. And one of the things that popped out really strongly was user-generated content, particular Instagram, for midsized brands who maybe don’t have the budget to produce that level of quality content, but they absolutely have the reach and the brand. And so sourcing from a community of influencers around them absolutely turns into what could be a mediocre Instagram profile into something that seems pretty epic. Do you find that taking proof points from a competitor or someone that maybe you admire, respect, we can show you how they’re doing these techniques…is this something you do either using our tool, using any of the tools to figure out how to convince them that, “Hey, this is working.”

Lee: Well, yeah, of course. We’re using the motion of pride to be persuasive. And maybe sometimes fear of loss as well, just saying, “Look how the competition is kicking your butt. And here’s evidence of how they’re doing that exactly. There are things we can learn from this. In fact, we might even be able to do it better now that we see what they’re actually doing.” So, yeah. As a persuasion tool, yes.

Seth: Go ahead.

Lee: No, I was just going to be persuasive, showing those examples of what the competition is doing plays a very specific role in the argument. And in combination with other things, very, very powerful.

Seth: Are there particular strategies or techniques that you find using these kinds of proof points are super valuable? I’m thinking about things like influencer, UGC, video, contests, just a range of activities. Do you find there are places where you’re saying, “We need to be doing this,” but it’s a harder one? But then kind of the data comes back and helps?

Lee: Well, certainly it does happen where we something that… There are some things where the activity manifests through social channels, and so you think you know all that’s going on because of what’s visible, but there may be more going on than that. And I guess we’re guilty of doing that sort of thing. So, where we have multilevel purpose content marketing programs, and it looks like we’re just doing a simple influencer list, but we’re doing five other things besides that, and there’s no way you can tell, but we’re generating the benefit from it.

So, I think there are things that we have found that looked…or there was a hypothesis that a certain direction would make sense, and there was pushback in that, “This would be too difficult,” or maybe we don’t expect it to return value proportional to the investment, and then finding an example of that, of a competitor actually doing that thing, has been helpful in making the argument. Without performance information, it’s kind of hard. You can get obviously high level like top of funnel type of visibility, impressions, views, that sort of thing. But without ROI data, it’s kind of hard to make the totality of an argument to go a particular way. But you can inspire more confidence.

Seth: Yeah. I will tell you, we produce a lot of data based reporting, like industry level or particular case studies, industries, but it all comes from we have data on hundreds of thousands of companies, and so why not use that data. But that wasn’t necessarily always something we invested a lot of time in. And we stepped back, and we analyzed a bunch of our not even competitors. I don’t consider Moz, and HubSpot, and BuzzSumo… These are not competitors, they’re just awesome companies in the space.

But when you step back and study some of the things that they’re doing that earn a lot of attention, particularly in channels like Twitter as you said are so measurable, it stood out that all of them were getting the most love for example in our space doing studies based on private data about their business or about… Take BuzzSumo, Steve Rayson. He does these, “We have a billion posts. Let me tell you what we find when we aggregate data from our product.” It’s like they’re the ones who can do that. So, that’s kind of what we do with our data as well. Holy moly, that’s where I learned it. You see how much that blows them up, and you realize, “Oh, maybe I should try that. I should have the confidence to try that.” And then you…

Lee: Absolutely. Absolutely, yeah. And that’s a great example. That is a great example. And you mentioned BuzzSumo. Actually, when Rand was with Moz and certainly with Steve, they also have very unique skills at making the most out of that kind of content. One thing that Steve shared with me is that he reached out to journalists and asked them, “What kind of data would you like to see? Here, I have a hypothesis about doing this study. And I’m wondering what kind of data you would like to see out of a study like that.” And they gave him feedback. And of course, when the study was published, they were more than happy to write about the report. Brilliant guy, right?

Seth: Yeah.

Lee: So smart.

Seth: Absolutely. And of course… I was trying to think of one of their most recent big pushes they did. I don’t remember the exact study. But he did all of the things. He did the work. He got pre-feedback from folks probably like you, and Ann Handley, and Ian Cleary, and a bunch of people who are big kind of speakers in the space, and got pre got their feedback, so he could include that. And then he did a little paid, it took off. The got those people to amplify. And then the next week, he wrote a post of, “How I crushed it.” And then that post crushed even more than the first post. And you’re like, “Okay, you know what you’re doing. This is fantastic.” But it’s such a good learning for everybody in the space. I don’t care what you do, you can learn from, frankly…it feels like generosity, but really it’s just good marketing from his perspective as well.

Lee: I think there’s a lot to be said around collaboration and participation in marketing. And there’s even a phrase I throw around once in a while – participating marketing. And I’ve spoken about this recently more often in that it’s a democratized approach to content creation. If you include the very community that you’re trying to market to in the content creation process itself, that investment and effort in creating something for the greater good of the industry will motivate them in incredible ways to promote and help make that content successful. And when you have a genuine approach, meaning you have genuine interest in making the industry a better place, it’s amazing how much that comes back to you in terms of good old-fashioned ROI.

Seth: Yeah, it’s like life. You have to give a little bit. You might get, you might not. But you just have to do the right thing. And usually, goodness will come back to you.

Lee: Yeah, you have to be smart about, right?

Seth: Yeah, don’t be wasteful. Don’t be…

Lee: Naive.

Seth: Well, that’s the problem with naivety. You don’t know when you’re doing it. So, I have a couple more questions that came in, but there’s a couple that kind of bundle up here around when you don’t have that ROI data, how…? One of the specific questions is how do you, Lee, or you with a client…how do you decide how much to invest when you that confidence, but you don’t have the data? How big do you go? How much of it is…how much do you put into it before you feel like both in terms of time, dollars, energy, however you measure it…how do you take that bite without feeling you’re making a huge bet?

Lee: My ideal is…well, for us, personally, we have a fairly popular blog and social network, if you will. So, we have a substantial organic audience to throw things out there. And there’s really no cost to it because it’s an on-demand sort of channel. So, for us to collect data confidence and then make decisions about investment. On the client’s side of things, pilot…doing a pilot is my favorite sort of thing because we can create a business case around further investment out of the data from the pilot. There are other metrics of course that you can try and correlate.

So, if I… It’s a bit fuzzy, right? But if you can create some equivalency between something that you don’t have a lot of ROI data around and something that you do have some ROI data around, you can develop like I said some fuzzy hypothesis about, “Well, you know, when we’ve done email or when we’ve done a paid search, we achieve these KPI’s. And the result is this ROI. Maybe there’s a little bit of correlation between that and social. And so let’s do a pilot with that hypothesis in mind and prove it out or disprove it. And then we can make some choices about investment based on that.” That would be how I would go about it.

Seth: So, like all things, trying to find an adjacency, mapping it in. So, yeah, somebody just went and asked the questions, and Cassandra fed it through here. So, I’m going to ask you. You can do with this what you will. But when it gets down to social specifically, how do you think about measuring ROI on social activities?

Lee: Well, I see… So, I can’t imagine ever executing on a social only type of thing. Social is part of an overall type of marketing program. So, to the extent that social engagement…social content discovery, consumption, and engagement matters to our particular target audience, we will leverage social for amplification of content. So, the ROI comes from the success of the content. The ROI of the… I don’t know that there’s an ROI of the social itself unless we have tracking URLs that actually show that discovery and action actually occurred all on a social channel.

And therefore, that investment in social was actually able to yield a transaction if that makes sense. So, it depends on how you go about it. And in my case, my experience is more around that idea that social is everywhere, and it plays a specific role as part of an integrated campaign. And so, therefore, the ROI is around the campaign, not about social itself. There are certain KPI’s that indicate success or not, specifically social of course. But ultimate revenue ROI comes from the campaign.

Seth: So, you get more granular. It has to be about a particular initiative, it’s not about social generally. The thing that I always find funny… Tell me what you think about this. So, we’re a B to B company. We maintain all of our social channels. But I think about our Instagram where we try to feature our team. It’s a lot more about, “Here’s who we are as people, the human beings that are trying to make everyone else’s life better. Here’s what it looks like to be here.” It might only serve for recruiting. I’ve got somebody who wants to come work here, and they spin through our Instagram. Like, “Oh, you seem like nice people. That looks fun. I’d like to do that.” What’s the ROI of that, of finding a person who’s a good cultural fit in half the time? It’s pretty high.

Lee: Exactly. Exactly.

Seth: Pretty high. But it’s hard to measure. It’s actually hard to measure.

Lee: It is. I actually wrote about this in a book called Optimize that I published, God, five, six years ago now.

Yeah, I just wrote a book. And so what we talked about in calculating ROI is people search for a lot of different reasons. This applies to creating content. Companies create content for lots of reasons, including talent acquisition. So, when you look at the cost of hiring recruiters…if you can create content that’s really easily found either through search, or through social, or whatever, you can actually reduce costs or increase efficiencies on things that you’re already investing in. Same thing for customer service, same thing…content that can be easily found, or public relations and obviously marketing.

So, I think that talent brand investment through Facebook and Instagram especially yields both the, “Wow, I might want to come work there,” kind of outcome, but it’s certainly prospective customers look at that stuff, too. They look at your culture for sure. In fact, there was an interesting study about millennials. So, that’s what, up to 30 years old. These are decisions-makers.

The first thing that they’re looking for on a B to B content website is the company’s CSR activities, their corporate social responsibility, they’re benevolent, they’re altruistic types of endeavors. That’s the first thing they’re looking for. And so when you publish the fact that on Instagram or wherever the fact that your team is out building a house somewhere, that’s actually not just showing what a good group of people you are and how fun the culture is from an employment standpoint, but it’s also something that’s extremely important to a very large group of decision-makers in both B to B and B to C.

Seth: Yeah, this is… I will tell you, we have a big website. The page where we organically get kudos is our about page. That’s one of the most top visited pages on our site, because it turns out that people actually care who the people are behind an organization.

Lee: Yes.

Seth: And Cassandra, one of our product marketing managers, she went around and interviewed all the founders in the leadership team recently and asked kind of, “What do you hope people could know about the business?” Because this is the storytelling that we do. And unanimously…we did this separately…we all answered the same thing. Like, “We just want our customers and our prospects to know that we’re people. Just we’re people working in an office here in Seattle to make good software to make their things better. And try really hard.” But not everybody gets that, which is why I think we… Sometimes you get frustrated. So, if communicating that through social is the way that we get there, then we should invest.

Lee: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Seth: We got time for about one more question, and then we’re out of time. But this one has come… Okay, this is a little bit less about data, but we have you here, and you have a lot of experience sort of running an agency building teams to serve clients. And obviously, you’ve been doing that for a very long time. So, how do you think about kind of developing your bench and bringing up staff? Because you got to find people who are analytically minded. You also have to find people who are good copyrights and good strategic thinkers. How do you do that and do that well over time?

Lee: Yeah, that’s something I’ve been practicing for 16 years. And I don’t know if I’ve found the perfect solution to that yet. Obviously, I have really talented people on my leadership team that are tasked with that specifically. We do make a very concentrated effort to create some clarity around what roles are, and how teams are structured, and what the career path, if you will, within different groups might be, and that sort of thing. So, we’re still small in the scheme of things.

We’re a boutique-sized agency at 30-some people. And I wish we had ten more. I wish we had 12 more because of the specialization that we’re involved with. But I think having… So, one part of the answer is around clarity around specific what the job is, and what the role is, and how it interacts with other people. And so what are the resources an individual needs in order to be successful, and is there a feedback mechanism in order to give them the information they need to know where they’re at? And there’s that sort of individual level and also team level feedback.

There are goals and feedback mechanisms to help that happen. And at the same time, there’s a cultural aspect, meaning we just went through a purpose initiative in fourth quarter last year to identify what is our purpose. Outside of a business, what are we trying to achieve? And we’re trying to leave a legacy of clever, courageous, and brave marketers. Something like that. That’s horrible. I should not be pausing on that. Anyway, the idea is that there’s something bigger than just driving of revenue and having successful clients.

It’s like, “What are we trying to actually create?” And so that effort helps with recruiting obviously. It helps with the why – why am I here, what are we after, what gives my work meaning. You know what I mean? So, there’s this very specific and tactical sort of thing. And then there’s this sort of loftier aspirational element that helps develop the team.

Seth: And obviously investing in…bringing in folks who maybe don’t…who are more junior…maybe not necessarily junior but just don’t have all of the experience or all of the depth in each of these sort of focused areas that you need to be successful in digital marketing today… When you’re thinking about investing in these folks and bringing them up, do you get kind of granule and like, “We’re going to work on your analytics skills,” or, “We’re going to work on your content mapping.” Or is it more like project-based, and they’re sort of leveling up across the board as they go?

Lee: It would be…especially initially during their first year, it’s going to be very specific. And so the role delineation has capabilities identifies very specifically. And so their upstream supervisor is going to work with them on those things. And so also we have a new VP who’s really pretty much just focused on optimizing the way we do our work, and project management, and that sort of thing. And so sort of like a counseling sort of role. And so… And then as someone matures, of course, it gets a little more… Someone might see themselves moving into another role, or we might give more cross-functional training to that person. The bar is high. The bar is high because our clients expect that.

Seth: Sure, you have to be the expert.

Lee: And the good news is that there’s plenty of people who’ve gone through that journey, that first year, second year, and the teamwork for bringing someone up isn’t just…it’s not just up to their supervisor. It’s a team effort. And so I’m very happy how helpful my team is at supporting each other and being excellent, and knowing that we’re in this together to win for our clients.

Seth: Yeah, it sounds like…again, it feels like we’ve had a lot of like, “Hey, state the obvious, do the right thing by your people. Support them with a team.” But again, if it’s not top of mind, then it’s not stated. And it’s awesome that you took the time last year to actually set forth the purpose so that people can reflect back and make that be apart of your organizational culture. I’m sure it’s one of the big pillars of your success.

Lee: Absolutely.

Seth: So, Lee, we’re out of time. I really, really appreciate you coming and sharing some of your wisdom with us. I know everyone who asked questions…hopefully, we got you answers as we went along here. Anything that got unanswered we’ll try to collect up some answers and make sure that we publish that long with us. But the recording will go out today or tomorrow. And Lee, where are you off to next? You’re off to India soon?

Lee: Yes, I’m off to Mumbai to go talk about how to create more influence for marketing in the boardroom. And I’m excited about that, yeah.

Seth: I’m jealous. A little travel. A little warm weather travel.

Lee: We’re looking to it. First time traveling there. And I really appreciate being on. You’re a joy to talk to. And you know your stuff. And love the product. And so I hope everyone…as you said…has had their questions answered. If not, please fire them off, and I’m sure we’ll find a way to get them answered.

Seth: Absolutely. Cool, Lee. Well, safe travels. Thanks so much. And we hope to see everybody here for the next Data-Driven Marketer. Bye.

The post Leveraging Data to Transform Your Social Media Strategy appeared first on Rival IQ.

This year, we not only expanded the industries included but also decided to do a deep dive webinar into the 2018 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report.

During this webinar, Co-Founder and Head of Product, Seth Bridges, analyzes the report pulling out key insights. Of course, Seth went even further and also provides brand NEW insights that didn’t make it into the original 2018 report.

During the webinar Seth:

• Explained key findings and all NEW insights that didn’t make it into the report
• Dived into top-performing brands and campaigns
• Shared what’s working and how you can make it work for you
• And much more…

Additional Resources:

Download a Copy of Seth’s Slide Deck: New Insights and Examples

Read the full Social Media Industry Benchmark Reports:

• 2019 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report
• 2018 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report
• 2017 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report

Full Transcript

Seth Bridges: Hey, there. Good morning, everyone. My name is Seth Bridges. I’m one of the founders of Rival IQ, and I am really excited to have you here with me today. As all of you know, we published the 2018 social media benchmark study back in April, and now it’s been a few months. All of you, I presume, have gotten a chance to read it. And many of you had questions for us in terms of more – how else to think about it, how else to look at it, how else to dive in. So, we went back and did a bunch of additional research, dug in. I’m really excited to share all of that with you today. So, before I get going though, I am recording this. And I’m sharing my screen, so you can all see my slides. I’m made that mistake before. And I got the questions panel up here, so please do ask questions as we go.

I’ll save some time at the end to talk about your questions. But of course, ask you go. And if it makes sense to even interrupt where I am, happy to stop and answer then as well. Already a question – will I be sending out slides. Yeah, I will be sending out slides afterward, so don’t worry about taking notes. There will be some links that I’ll mention here as we go. They’ll come out in the email. They’ll come out, so don’t worry about that. One other housekeeping note – this webinar…think about as a preview or a warm-up for next week’s Data-Driven Marketer webinar where we’re featuring Lee Odden. I’ll be interviewing Lee, talking about how he and his team at TopRank Marketing use data to elevate the social media strategies and execution of their clients.

Should be a great webinar. Lee really knows his stuff. He’s a wonderful interviewee, and I’m very much looking forward to that as well. And if you haven’t gotten to read the social media industry benchmark report, it is live on our blog. There’s no gating. The whole thing is there. Go get a copy, search for it on our site. It will come up, no problems. That is going to be the basis to what I’m talking about today. But I’m ripping through the report. Don’t worry. You can go read it. I trust that everyone does a good job reading. We’re going to go deeper today. We’ll barely touch on some of the slides that are there, and we’re going to look at all new content. So, stayed tuned. Again, the slides will come out.

So, I want to just set the table, talk a little bit about the background, the methodology, what are these companies, how many, what are we talking about, kind of get the statistical baseline out of the way. I’m going to talk a little bit about the industries like how they compare. And then where we’ll spend most of our time…I want to dive deep a little bit, look at some new analysis, look at some time series. So, how do these numbers change across the year? And then I found some real-world examples from some of the top performing industries on each of these channels. And I want to look at a few of these sort of micro case studies with you and see…

Hopefully, that will spur some ideas about how to improve some of your own social media marketing. So, let’s jump right in. Background and methodology. So, this year, we did 10 industries with 150 companies per industry. Last year, we only did six. So, this felt like a big improvement, looking at a broader swath of the world. Obviously, we track over 150,000 companies in our database. So, what we wanted to do was find companies that have at least 25,000 fans on Facebook last year, up to a million. So, we’re not doing on the smaller end, and we’re not doing the massive.

This is somewhere right in the middle. We also made sure that all these companies had an Instagram presence for the entire year and had a Twitter presence for the entire year. And that they were active on all those presences. So, this is not necessarily meant to be representative of every business. This is active businesses on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter pulled from our system. And here are the industries – higher ed, nonprofits, media, hotel and resorts, sports teams, fashion, food and beverage, health and beauty, home décor, and public figures or influences.

You’re going to recognize a lot of these logos. Some of the places where some people have had questions like, “Oh, I don’t see X, my favorite sports team.” Yeah, million cap from the Facebook fans really was one of the criteria that we used to select these companies. So, you’ll recognize a lot of those logos, the Sounders, Avalanche, Oakland A’s, the Buffalo Bill’s, for example, as well across the board. But just keep that in mind as we’re thinking about who exactly all of these companies are.

The entire data set that we’re looking at was about 5 million social posts, and a total engagement of about 2.3 billion. So, this is the observable public total engagement that you would see, for example, in our product in the social benchmarking section. This is like likes, reactions, comments, shares, retweets, etc. across these different platforms. And that is the data set. Now, how does that break down? Facebook was about 1.7 million of those posts. Instagram only 600,000, so about .6 million, and Twitter about 2.7 million tweets. Now, I know a lot of people think about Twitter as this high volume platform. There are no replies in here. We don’t count your retweets.

This is just owned tweets going out for each of these brands. And not everybody is into the automation and scheduling ten tweets a day. It turns out maybe that’s less of a thing these days. But you can see the ratios of how sort of activity goes across the data set. But in terms of the interactions, the engagement, Instagram, the overwhelming contributor to that 2.3 billion with about 1.6 billion comments and likes from the posts from the 600,000 posts. We’ll do the math here in a second just to see how that breaks down. But these are the totals. Now, remember, media was one of our industries. Media an activity producer through the roof.

So, the average isn’t necessarily the average across all companies. We’re very concerned with medians here, trying to sort of deal with some of the skewness of the data. So, the average company in this study with about 1.1 Facebook posts a day, about .7 Instagram posts a day. So, that’s about once a weekday. And about 1.1 tweets a day as well. So, if… You’re already saying, “What do I do for my social media?” This is the median company, the middle. 50% do more, 50% do fewer. But right there is what we’re talking about. And from an engagement rate perspective, the platforms are different.

The audiences are different, the way in which you engage the…the UX around how you engage, it’s different. Why you engage is different. So, not to be surprised, Facebook’s average engagement rate is about .16 per post. So, this is interactions divided by followers, we’re trying to normalize out how big your audience is. We’re also doing that on a per post basis. So, if you post a lot, it’s not like we’re adding up all the engagement. We’re normalizing followers and posts, trying to give us a comparable way to look at this. Instagram clearly much, much higher engagement. Order of magnitude higher – 1.73% on average. And Twitter down at about .046%. So, we’ve got an order of magnitude in either direction, Facebook in the middle, Instagram on the high end, and Twitter on the low end. That’s our data set. Those are just some really high channel comparisons.

Spend a moment looking industry by industry. So, where I’ve stolen just a few slides out of the actual report itself. On the X axis across the bottom, posts per day on Facebook. On the Y-axis, the average engagement rate. Every little dot is one of the industries. So, you’ve got a clutter over there on the left. And I want you to note the one outlier on the far, far right, media. Almost ten Facebook posts a day. But dead last in terms of average engagement rate on a per post basis. So, you can see even if we exclude them, there is not really a strong correlation between posting more and more engagement on a per post basis. This makes sense. We know how the algorithm works generally in that pumping a ton of content out there doesn’t matter. Right?

It’s all about producing high-quality content. And so not surprised to see a lack of correlation here. You can note though that food and beverages influencers, hotels, among the top all producing in that one to two posts a day. Higher ed, one of our generally top social media performers is up there in that kind of top section as well. On Instagram, you see that the posts per day are much more narrowed down. Obviously media, not a big outlier here, not a ton of content being put out on Instagram from the same media companies that we see on both Facebook and in a second Twitter. Sports teams, however, look a lot like media. They produce from an activity perspective, from a post perspective way more posts in general, particularly on Twitter than some of these other folks as well.

But their engagement is much, much higher. I think in general, we see that higher ed, which is our top at over three percent… That’s almost double. In fact, it is double the average industry here. That’s a whole special topic that we’ll talk about in other webinars. Higher ed is just an amazing community. But sports teams…people love their sports teams, and it appeals to a broad set of folks. And you see that here even though they produce a lot more content on average, that engagement rate much higher. Notice though nonprofits, hotels, food and beverage, also still kind of on the upper half of our performers as well. And then Twitter. So, this is where we see, again, media, really high production outlier.

Same with sports teams, but they are much, much higher…more than two X. In fact, they’re kind of measuring up at the bottom of the other industries that we looked at — beauty, fashion. But again, look at hotels and resorts, food and beverage, higher ed, nonprofits. All those industries just kind of keep floating up independent of which of these channels we’re talking about. And so today as I dig in more, I’m going to make sure to pull some examples from some of these more top-performing landscapes. I see a quick question here. Let me check. Make sure it’s not something horrible like my screen isn’t sharing. Okay, does food and beverage include restaurants. Food and beverage…these are broad.

So, they could be producers. They could be restaurants if they’re large enough to have 25,000 or up Facebook fans, depends when we look at restaurants that are kind of…particularly if it’s a multi-site situation like a nationwide chain for example. You’ll often see one kind of global handle as well as some local handles. We have a mixture in this data set. It’s also not US specific or even North American, or even English specific. And so we’ll often see outposts of particular hotels that do really well in a particular place in Canada, or in Asia, or in somewhere. Those kinds of companies will end up here as well. We tried to sample without bias from the data set that we have because we wanted to get a clean look at how the channels are performing on average.

And didn’t really want to introduce selection bias in that way. So, that’s our industry by industry comparison. Again, if you want to get to your industry or dive in on all the specific post type metrics, hashtag metrics, etc. on an industry by industry basis, that’s…you definitely want to go look at the report and go find those specific numbers there. I’m going to spend the next…rest of our time together going through Facebook, and Instagram, and Twitter. And I want to ask a question or look at some of the…how these numbers have changed over time, and then try to pull a little bit on that and figure out are there examples of things that are bucking the trend, or aligning with the trend, where we can learn something.

So, on Facebook, what’s the conversation been for a long time? Maybe we’re even done having this conversation. But okay, organic reach declining, gone, not gone exactly but declining. And does that mean declining engagement? I think everyone out there is going, “Yeah, yeah, okay. We’ve heard this. Yes.” But we didn’t include any time series information. We didn’t show any trends over the year. But here, we went back and did additional work to be able to bring you some of this data. So, Facebook, average engagement rate per post… This is one data point per month through the entirety of 2017. So, we’re starting at over .16%. And then month over month, trending down.

Just a slight little lift in July before we headed down even further to below .1%. So, we saw a drop off of about a third from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. And if you saw your Facebook organic performance declining throughout the year, obviously you were not alone. Again, this is representative of the median company. And so the question you might be asking is like, “Well…a couple question…why? Are people posting less, posting more? Did that have any impact? And then are there any companies that are perhaps bucking this trend?”

So, the first look I want to give you is, again, something that we’ve never published before. It’s apart of the study. But let’s break that time series down by industry. And I sort of faded out most of the industries here. But if you just kind of squint through for a second, you get a general feel that yes, they are all down and to the right, which is generally never a good word to hear. I did highlight food and beverage as one of the companies that performed near the top of all of our industries. And you’ll see that everybody is going to have some noise.

But generally actually flat through the year, maybe down from the summer a bit. But in general, flat, flattish. Which when the global line looks like this, hey, sometimes stable is a good thing. So, were people posting less because of this? And on average, the answer is no. We see that 1.1 posts power day, generally consistent throughout the entire year. A little bit quieter in the winter, particularly in December. Also a little bit of a blip there in July as well. And again, this is across 1,500 companies. This is a thing that in the summer, there are just maybe five to ten percent fewer posts on a monthly basis, at least in the middle of the summer there. At least in the northern hemisphere.

So, as we saw, is everyone declining? No. Are most people declining? Yes, absolutely. I went on a hunt. Pick one of the top performing industries like food and beverage and try to go find companies that saw either flat or growth throughout the year. And I will tell you, it was a little bit of a hunt. But my job is to find you examples that sort of buck the trend. And let’s see what we can go learn. Hi-Chew. How many of you are familiar with Hi-Chew? This is some chewy, taffy, sugar candy thing. My gym has these.

It seems very contrary to fitness and then eating kind of sugar bumps. But they’re delicious. My kids love them. I love them. And I was happy to find them here that they were, A, in our study, and B, that they were one of the companies bucking the trend. So, food and beverage, they make…this is a processed candy in a bag. You buy it at the grocery store or Walgreens and Target as I learned from their social media. They published in the entirety of the year, 205 Facebook posts. So, well less than one per day. And they saw on average a .35% engagement rate per post.

Remember, the industry average was much, much lower on the order of .16. So, these folks are doubling up. But look at the time-series graph pulled straight out of Rival IQ here on a month by month basis. They’re actually up, up and to the right. And yeah, it’s noisy. But again, everything is going to have noise in it. Over the year though, the latter half of the year versus the first half of the year. They’re definitely, definitely up. And now we’re going to go and dig into why or why I think why.

And I always find it instructive to go look at the top performing content for the company and just ask a few questions – what are they doing. So, visually is a great place to start. And thee are the top performing posts from Hi-Chew for the year of 2017. You’ll notice very consistent from a coloring perspective. Obviously, it’s very heavily influenced by their actual packaging. But I can tell you the color of the actual candy. The upper two left posts were boosted almost certainly. They do not have a… They have lots of engagement, which is why they’ve risen to the top. Our system noted them as flagged. When you inspect it, it certainly seems like they were promoted, which is not the right mix of engagement on those posts.

But they also don’t look anything like the rest of these posts, which feature product, tight crop, pretty well produced, and good consistency. Whereas if I… And we look at those posts, and they’re like thousands of thousands of engagements on a per post basis. Now, I went and looked at the worst. Like, show me their worst content for the year. Just pause and look at that for a second. It is different. In fact, it doesn’t look… It’s like two different social media managers were in charge of the best and the worst – consistent, tight crop, featuring the product… These are not that. First of all, there are some people in there. I like people, but clearly, these are not the people shots that people resonate with.

There’s stuff that’s not product. There’s a Christmas… Whatever. It doesn’t even look the same. And we’re talking single digit engagement on a bunch of these. And it’s not like these at the beginning of the year or these were… These were spread throughout. And so okay, visually we can see there’s a difference. But let’s go jump in a little bit more. So, here was one of those top performing posts. “We are falling for new sweet and sour mystery mix…” Okay, so they have a new product launch. They clearly have an engaged generally just on the average. But read down on the copy a little bit. “Try the mysterious flavor and take a guess to when the ultimate Halloween hookup…”

Okay, and they have a link that takes you to a place where you can register for this contest. And okay, I’m not surprised. Contests are a thing that some companies do on social media to drive engagement, particularly when you can do things that drive virility like comment and share. And clearly, the audience here likes to do that a lot. So, you might think, “Oh, well, they’re just doing all contests. I don’t want to do all contests. That’s not my thing.” But it turns out only about 10% of the posts of those 205 posts that Hi-Chew did were contest posts. And on average, the companies in food and beverage were at about 7%.

So, yes, Hi-Chew is doing almost 50% more content posts than the average company here in our food and beverage landscape. But it’s not like it’s all their content. It’s not even half their content. It’s not even a third. It’s 10%. I can tell you though they do the post and announce the winner later. Those are horrible. They don’t get any engagement. So, if you’re running contests, maybe trying to get the win on the contest part is a good thing. So, Facebook, Hi-Chew, contests. I don’t know if you’re running contests. Think about it. The way that I do a lot of this analysis… Again, we’re either in Rival IQ or Tableau from Rival IQ. And I’m out looking for words like win, guess, comment, tag, comment, winner. These sorts of words are good keywords that you can start to use to filter down and find those contest posts as an example.

Okay, Instagram. Instagram had…remember, order of magnitude engagement on Facebook in the 1.7 range. So, here we go again looking at average engagement rate on a per post basis across all of the 1,500 companies. And you see that it was trending down a little bit there in the first half of the year, kind of stabled out in the summer. And then we see a bit of a rise there through Q4. Back up to levels that look like what we were seeing at the beginning of the year. Now, let’s do the same dance. We’ll break it down on a landscape by landscape basis, on an industry by industry basis. And here again, I’ve let most of the landscapes fade to the back.

I’ve brought hotels and resorts forward. That was another one of our top performers. And you can see that first of all from the back, everyone again was experiencing… This is the beauty of averages when you break things out. Most landscapes were experiencing the same thing – slight downward trend through the beginning of 2017. Obviously, as Instagram has put that algorithm into place, fewer people are going to be seeing your content. I’m sure all of you are seeing that in terms of your reach as well. And if your kind of content quality is consistent, and your new followers that you’re adding look a lot like your old followers, you should expect to see engagement rates consistent.

Of course, if you are changing up how you’re doing things, attracting new or different audiences and engage differently, you might see something different. But look at the far right of the graph here. Everyone lilting up. That’s higher ed there at the top. Like really driving hard through the end of the year in terms of increasing engagement. But almost every company, every landscape here, saw that bump from out of October into November, and then flat through December. From a content production perspective, on average, we’re still looking at about once a weekday.

Now, I know we can all schedule posts now on Instagram through a variety of mechanisms. That was not necessarily a thing that people were doing before. But .7, that corresponds to about once a weekday. And we definitely see on many, many, many business’ Instagram handles…if we look at posting on a day by day basis with Sunday to Saturday, you get consistent production of the week at one and then falls off on the weekend. And you see that here flat at .7 per day. So, thinking about that engagement rate though…

Facebook was declining. Instagram a little bit down, stable, and then maybe even back up here at the end of the year. So, I’m checking out some questions here. Just affirmation. This is wonderful. Thank you, Alexander. So, stable engagement rates. Good, so now my job was not to go find somebody who was say just stable or down, but let’s go find some people who are really killing it from hotels and resorts. So, who did I find? The Fairmont Chateau, Lake Louise. This is a boutique hotel in the Fairmount family located near Banff, maybe even in Banff National Park. So, this is in Alberta. This is the province just one to the east of British Columbia in Canada.

See, I live close to Canada, so I know a little bit about it. And the Fairmont did 326 Instagram posts last year. So, that’s nearing one a day. So, we already know they’re doing more than average. They’re not… This is not some of the beauty brands we see – 5 a day, 6 a day, 10 a day. You know, super high content production. But look at their average engagement rate. 4.2% on a per post basis. And then their time series… They actually saw a little bit of a decline through Q1. But then almost flat or up every month through the end of the year, and then seeing that sharper lift as the year kind of ended there in Q4. Remember, 1.7 was our overall average. 4.2…

This is higher than our average university, which is already our top engaging industry in our social media studies that we always do. So, let’s do the same dance now that we did for Hi-Chew. Let’s look at the visual content, dig in, see what we find, think about how we can apply it to what we’re doing. Okay, just take it in for a second. I’m going to look at over. I got the big screen over here. It’s beautiful. It’s beautiful content. This is, again, all their top performing by total engagement. A strong consistency from a coloring and a quality perspective. Not every shot is without a person, but most of the shot are without people. There’s obviously a very famous window you can see this kind of… The hotel must look out in some beautiful, I’ve never been. I don’t live that close as it turns out.

But just I love the content. And you just love the consistency. But now let’s go look at their least well-performing content. And it’s different. Right? And I’ll flip back. Take in the color, the consistency, the framing. You see even similar shots where the fire pit is looking out on the lake with the mountains. It’s awesome. Great. We jump over here… The first thing that jumps out at me is people. And I like people. I like people. I got kids, I’m married. I like people. But one, two, three, four… There are people in more than 50% of the shots. And I don’t know that that content…

Random people in your feed maybe is not something that you react as strongly to as a beautiful shot of some place that you’ve been, or would like to be, or is near you, or that you aspire to. Their content certainly proves this. Now, this is their worst performing content. The engagement rates here are still 1.5%. They’re still average. So, most companies would kill to have their poor content be better than most people’s kind of average or good content. But take it in. This analysis… Show me visually. Look at the campaigns. Look at how this stuff is framed. Look at how it’s produced. We can see consistency. We can see execution. But you have to dive in. So, we’re going to go from the good, and now I’m going to jump ahead here. We’re going to dive in. Look at that shot.

Turns out it’s totally a composed shot if you read the comments. The author is like, “The sky wasn’t real. It was like daylight, and I put a sky behind it.” But it still looks amazing. And this person, DelJay Photography, this was their shot. And you’ll see… Read down the comment there. Fairmont at Lake Louise says, “Incredible. We’d love to report with credit.” And of course a comment or two later, the author says, “I’d be delighted for you to repost.” And then what we’re seeing actually here is Fairmont’s repost. And you’ll notice they’ve got the camera emoji, giving the credit for the photo to Deljay Photography. Oh, okay.

So, now you got me. Now I’m wondering, do they actually have a staff photographer, or are they reposting other user generated content? And it turns out that, again, using sort of keyword search and looking for all the phrases that would indicate that this picture was not from them… So, there are a couple different picture emoji’s, the one with the flash, the one without the flash, pic by, picture by, photographer, quote, credit… There’s lots of words that you can use. But we’ve got a pretty flexible search infrastructure. And so it turns out that 78% of the Instagram content that Fairmont puts on their page is reposts. So, curated user generated content.

There is strong travel vibe in Alberta. There’s #ExploreAlberta, #TravelAlberta. Clearly, the travel kind of bureau for Alberta has strong campaigns and runs strong campaigns. The hashtags have high engagement. If you go do some Instagram searching on that hashtag, you’ll see what I mean. And of course, because this is all their content, 4.6% engagement rate, it’s slightly higher than their overall average, which is about 4.2. But the thing I wanted to call out as the comparison is that hotels and resorts generally do well. Again, people like to think about going on vacation. These are destination places. They invest in photography.

They invest in production, something that you want to like on Instagram. But on average, only 18% of the content in this landscape was reposts. And if you’re on a budget, and you have a strong community, or there are people in your community that would like to get exposure from your brand, lots and lots of inspiring kind of Instagram influencers or photographers would like to be in this boat. It’s not like, “How do you get in touch with these people” On Instagram. You can see it right here in the comments. That’s how these communications are happening. That’s how the permission was given and granted. It’s clearly doing very well for Fairmont. Okay.

Let’s move on to Twitter. Twitter, everyone’s favorite. I spend a lot of time on Twitter. Somehow I’ve lost my slide that has my overall average. I’ll tell you the story. We can see through the data when I send out the deck later on. Make sure to get that slide back in there. But Twitter, again…an order of magnitude lower than everyone else, which I’m .05, .04% from an engagement rate perspective. We obviously know there’s lots of content on Twitter. Again, the algorithm there, I find that it makes my life more enjoyable on twitter. I see the content from people I tend to engage with. There are differing opinions. But Twitter was down a little bit through Q1, flat until late summer. And then a downward trend for the year.

But as we can look here, that was not necessarily the case for every landscape. Higher ed is one of our ones there are the top. But I focused here on nonprofits. They also saw a bit of kind of down from Q1, flat. A little lift in September, but then back down toward the end of the year. From a content production perspective though, we actually do see that between the first half of the year and the second half of the year, there was a drop off somewhere in the 1.2 kind of posts a day range. 1.1, 1.2 down to a little south of 1.1. So, 15% or so on average. I know here at Rival IQ, we’ve actually paired back what we’re doing on Twitter. We used to schedule a lot of posts, and now we’re trying to be a little bit more authentic, a little bit more engaging and not just reposting the same stuff all the time. You see it in the data here as well as what a lot of other brands, and personas, and people are doing on Twitter.

So, I’ve heard this, you’ve probably heard it, too. Is Twitter even worth it? This is a question that people ask if you’re a business. And before I even show the data about somebody who’s doing very well from the nonprofit space, why do people use twitter? Do people spend time on twitter? Yes. Are audiences growing on audiences? Yes. I don’t have the slide here for you. But are they growing as fast as on Facebook or Instagram? No. But did the feed make people able to see content that they engage with more frequently? Absolutely. Do real conversation happen on Twitter? Yes.

If you have buyers that are potentially the kind of person who’s on Twitter either demographically or because of what you sale or who you sale to, it doesn’t matter if the engagement rates are low. The engagement rates are low because not everyone is seeing all your content. But if you’re getting good engagement on the content that you have, forget about all the followers you have. It doesn’t matter. This is why engagement rates are hard. You want to be able to dig in deeper on your Twitter analytics, go to analytics.twitter.com.

Look at your impressions, look at your engagement rates from who actually sees your content, and then you’ll get a little bit better idea about the quality of your content. Now, the organic reach of it…that’s a problem that every platform is going to keep having. But if you do customer service, if you’re out there interacting, engaging, getting love from people on Twitter… We get lots of love from people on Twitter sharing our content, reacting to our content. There’s a been conversation about like baseball the other day, and some stats we published.

If we weren’t on Twitter, if we weren’t thinking about Twitter, we’d be missing out on a lot of that. Okay, I digress. Let me jump back in. Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. This is the children’s hospital in the great Atlanta metro area. And they do a fantastic job with their Twitter handle. Their engagement rates…they don’t even look like Twitter engagement rates. They look like Facebook engagement rates or even better. And so I think it’s instructive to get into why.

First of all, look at the content production level here. So, 205 tweets throughout the entire year. So, that’s fewer than one per day. And they’ve done about 225, 26 retweets of others. So, if you’re kind of following the stream without replies, you’re looking at about 4, 450…about once a day. And that’s clearly what they’ve committed to from a social media perspective on twitter. Again, I told you, kind of down in Q1, flat, and then tailing off there late summer through the end of the year. That is not the pattern that we see here at all from Children’s Healthcare.

In fact, you see them sort of settling in at the .2 range. So, that’s four X what we see on average from our entire study. And they got this huge pop in August from a campaign that they did. I think we’ll actually get to see one of those tweets here in a second. So, let’s do the game. This is our third channel. This is our third chance at the game. Here is all their top performing tweets for the year. And Twitter people think about as a less visual medium. Of course, things are changing over time. We now have nice Twitter card previews if you’ve got your kind of image metadata set up right.

We get nice link preview now without having to necessarily share an image. It’s not a not visual platform. But this is a hospital. They’re not necessarily selling anything. I live in Seattle. If my kids are really sick, I go to Children’s. I don’t…it’s not really a choice. That’s where I’m going. I guess this is similar in Atlanta. But look at the content here – lots of people. So, Instagram for Chateau Lake Louise, there was…the people were bad. Here, we’re showing off people, and it’s not necessarily all patients. Though there are some patients mixed in there. But depending on your level of sort of pop culture ability, you maybe recognize some of these people here. I recognize some, not all.

So, let me give you a little overlay here. Turns out those top two pics, some professional wrestlers from Ring of Honor came. That was that August spike. 4% engagement rate on these tweets. Came by to spend some time with the kids. Of course, social media manager on point, taking care of that. You see this – the Atlanta Falcons. Those are not pictures. This was a mention of those. You got Nick Jonas, Ludacris, Coach Vince Dooley, tagging in the Braves. So, well over 50% of their top performing content included a mention, and it included a mention of a local…either local superstar from some genre or superstardom. But it involved a mention more important.

And so let’s just jump into one of those performing tweets. So, “Thank you @ringofhonor wrestlers for spending the day with our patients!” Clearly, a lot of burly men with belts came by to spend time and included a patient or two in the picture as well. They mentioned Ring of Honor. Ring of Honor has hundreds of thousands of twitter followers, apparently including Barack Obama. Okay. Who knew. But turns out…remember 205 tweets throughout the year, 73 of them had mentions. Their tweets that have mentions, two X the engagement of their tweets that do not have mentions. Turns out twitter is a very social platform. Most of us don’t get so much engagement on our handles that…

I’ll speak for myself. I can leave notifications on my phone. It doesn’t blow me up. Obviously, bigger brands have different ways to deal with these things. But if you’re a professional social media manager, people mention you, it’s a cause you’re supporting. You’re of course going to try and amplify that content. Leveraging the amplification power of your network or the people that you’re collaborating with or co-marketing with, absolutely is a way to find success. And we see that here for Children’s as well.

So, I’m about out of time for the prepared content that I have, but I do just want to summarize all of that into three quick takeaways for all of you. And then we can spend a little bit of time getting into questions. So, first, you have to know your platforms. You have to know who your audience is just generally but particularly if you have demographic differences between your audience on different platforms. You really have to know and understand those. You have to understand the unique strengths, the ability to do things like mention on platforms and how that will cause behavior change in the people you’re reaching.

And you’ve got to leverage the unique strength of each of those platforms. But more importantly, think back to the Chateau Lake Louise slide right there – good content, what it looked like from a visual kind of curation perspective. And think about how that compared to their least well performing content. Every day is a new day. You have a chance to test campaigns, to test ideas, to test different strategies. “We’re going to go all UGC. We’re going to feature our staff. We’re going to feature our product.” Whatever it is that you’re going to do, you have an opportunity every day to test, to measure, refine, and get to a better place.

Now, if you’re doing this on platforms that have stable or growing engagement rates, great. You’re not even climbing uphill. Facebook, we’ve seen it’s down. It’s still going down. I guarantee when we go and do a refresh and look at early 2018, we’ll continue to see that as they pair back organic reach as well. But if you know it’s flattish…Instagram is flattish…then you’re dealing with one less factor, test, measure, refine. You can do this. We can all do this. I say it about email marketing. I’ll say it about blogging. I’ll say it about anything you do. Everything time you do something else gives you a chance to build a data set and go back and find the best and the worst. Try to do more of the best, a little bit less of the worst.

So, let’s take a little time for questions here. I’m going to go find my question panel here. And see what people have to say. How do I make this thing bigger?

Okay, so through our research, are fashion and luxury brands performing well on Twitter?

I honestly have not memorized the entire study. And so we can go back and look to see what’s going on. I have that slide in here. Let’s see. Let me see if there’s a fast way to do this. I’m good with computers sometimes. There. Okay, so I’m back to one of the early slides that we looked at that was Twitter activity and engagement. And the question was about fashion and luxury brands. So, here are fashion landscape, again the 150 companies that we had selected.

And they are separate from, again, health and beauty, which was like wellness, makeup, etc. They’re actually one of the worst performers on Twitter. And they’re clearly not investing very heavily in it either. So, we’re at well under a Tweet a day. We’re probably at average a tweet every other day on average with the engagement rate also below average – worse than sports teams, only better than media. So, again, on average, we don’t see that these fashion and luxury brands are doing very well on Twitter. For the sake of real time…looking at it…we see that on Instagram, they don’t do much better.

Nor does health and beauty even though…which we know health and beauty brands are very heavily invested in social media marketing as well as in influencer marketing. And so here, there’s a little bit of a question for me. And I don’t have the answer, so I’m not going to be able to do this in real time. But how much of the…how many of the brand impressions and the reach that some of these brands are getting are actually not through their own channels but rather are through some more heavily influencer marketing campaigns that they might be doing? I don’t know the answer to that. Could be studied. I just can’t…I’m not smart, as it turns out. Or capable in terms of doing it in real time. Let’s see. Let’s look…

So, somebody else has a question here about generalizing the benchmarks to my country, which I know has different culture and limitations. So, again, everyone needs to know their…needs to know their audience. And things that we see that are happening at a platform level, it generally doesn’t matter about your country. Generally. I’ll qualify that in a second. But if we know that on average, Facebook is decreasing organic reach for example, of Instagram has a lot more content producers, which because of the algorithm has a factor on reach…

If more people are producing content and more persons like ourselves are following more brands, following more friends, that’s just…but you have a fixed amount of time to spend. You’re going to see a smaller percentage of the things. And the more that these algorithms get feedback from you, the more they’re going to prioritize the content that you typically engage with or watch and de-prioritize that other content. So, if we know that the algorithm is the algorithm generally, then we’re all finding that. It doesn’t matter the country that we’re in.

Of course, different countries obviously have different social media adoption levels on different platforms. There are countries in which Snapchat is really big, and there’s countries in which it is not. Same goes for Instagram. I think Facebook has a got a pretty broad worldwide structure. Obviously, we’re not looking at China at all here, for example. So, there are discrepancies there. But now you’re getting back to questions about everything from how do people want to be hearing from brands, the words that you should use, what’s okay, what’s not okay from a content campaign creativity perspective.

And there’s… Good luck if you’re not having someone on your team that is that person generally or understands that person or understands that target audience. I think we for example concentrate much of our marketing on the United States, more broadly in the English speaking world. But obviously there are strong cultural differences between us here and the United States, and people in Australia, or Canada, or United Kingdom, Ireland, etc. And you have to be careful to not overstep your bounds and to not tread into areas that could be fuzzy.

Let’s see, a couple more questions here. What agencies and advertise… No, so agencies and advertising companies…we actually…they’re explicitly not in that media. This is media in television, print, radio. There are probably a few personalities from that medium as well in there. But generally, it is organizations that product or share news. News or interest stories, etc. We actually had a separate category for agencies, a bit large. Did not include it in this year’s study. But it’s something that we’ve looked at doing. And maybe next year when we… Every year, we try to kind of make the study either deeper, broader, or both. So, when we head into next year, that is certainly I think a thing that we’re thinking about.

So, the next question – any ideas on top posts for higher ed posts with people without…?

So, let’s see. We’ve done a couple webinars on higher ed, mostly because every year…and we’re about to do the next one…we produce an entire study looking at all 355 universities that are part of the NCAA, division one, division two. And we look at some of the top performers on social media. And then we’ll have webinars that are just like this, trying to break down why some of these universities are so good. And I will tell you that the thing that stands out to me as someone who spent way too long in academia is that they have really broad communities.

You’ve got students who are potential, prospective students. You’ve got current undergraduate students. You’ve got current graduate students. Which it turns out are very different from your undergraduate students in many ways and very similar in other ways. You have your alumni. You have your faculty. You have your staff, your professors, etc. So many different sorts of constituencies and audiences. But this is one of the reasons that higher ed does so good on social media is that you’ve got a breadth of audiences that are all very excited. Sports fans…

Heck, you’ve got people that are fans that never even went to your university, haven’t give you a dollar except maybe in football, baseball, volleyball admissions. But they all have an affinity to your school and are looking to engage and be excited about what it is you’re doing. So, things that we’ve seen go well – focusing on your calendar. So, back to school commencement, winter break, just happenings on campus. Those things always do very well. Celebrating community.

These are things that also do really well. So, you have students that are doing amazing things off campus or on campus, whatever. But you’ve got students that are Olympians. You’ve got students that are winning major awards, inventing things, doing research, etc. The same goes for your faculty and staff. Celebrating the things that are happening for your community on social media always is a winner. Always, always, always is a winner. Focusing on the people, as it turns out, as much as I was making fun of Chateau Fairmont with their people posts. Community is what higher ed is all about.

And it turns out that those posts do really well. I think as apart of the some of the links that we send out in the email. We’ve got one or two webinars that cover this topic very specifically as well as I would drive you to our last year’s higher ed report where we do many case studies of things that go really well for higher ed social media as well. Let’s see. One more question in here. Thank you. Mentioned that social media should be involved in the community of our media. For example, being involved in meetings…

I think what they’re asking is…I mentioned something about social media being about involvement and engagement. This is one of the reasons I love Twitter is because it feels to me like the social place for my professional life. Most of my twitter following is social media, digital marketers, SEO’s, etc. And they’re people, and so they’re having people level conversation. They’re having work level conversation. I tend to enjoy that, so that’s where I spent a lot of time actually having back and forth, and commenting, and questioning, etc.

Facebook for all of us could be some of that. But if you’re a brand, that’s going to be the professional connection. And so I think like many people, Twitter is as much of a professional network as is maybe a LinkedIn might be. And so making sure that you’re not just pushing…this is not just like a link farm. You’re not just like, “Go to my content. Go to my content. Go to my content.” You should be taking the opportunity… Twitter is one of the easiest way to reach someone who you might not otherwise be able to reach. And because it’s easy. And if you are consistent, and you’re helpful, and you say the right things, you have a chance to have that conversation in a way that you might never have had before. Let’s see.

Are you finding that posts on Facebook and Instagram that have text on them perform poorly?

So, I do a lot of these kinds of deep dives. Yes. Instagram generally… I’ll talk about Instagram specifically. I find that on Instagram, we… Your traditional B to B content, which is like, “Come look at my white paper. Here’s a pithy quote or an inspirational quote in a box.” It’s not visual, and it’s not compelling. That kind of content just does not do very well on Instagram. It seems to do better on Facebook for the right audience in the right way. So, let’s switch to Facebook for a second. Facebook doesn’t want you to leave Facebook. So, if you spend all your time trying to monetize a customer by driving them off site, that kind of content is not going to get a lot of reach, and it’s probably not going to get a lot of engagement either.

But content that is native to Facebook and has…keeps people’s’ attention, keeps them on the platform, has high engagement, that kind of content is going to get more reach. And so strategically, there’s nothing wrong with trying to send people off Facebook every once in a while. But certainly engaging, keeping them on the platform is what Facebook is trying to drive most. And so there was kind of a mommy blogger that we studied a while ago, and she talked about breaking her content down into three parts – one purely on driving engagement for the content, one on highlighting content that she likes from other…curating other people’s’ content, and then a third kind of going off site.

A lot of her onsite content was inspirational quotes like, “You can do this. You’ve got this,” sort of support for parents and mother specifically. And some combination of the right quotes at the right time, the right look and feel, very sharable content, and a lot of people feel very inspired to share that, which of course drives your reach very heavily. So, that’s words on images that can do well in certain cases. But if you’re thinking about Instagram, and you’re a business particularly on the B to B side maybe try to pair down a little bit in terms of kind of the text-heavy on images. Let’s see. There’s one more question here. Another question. I know that many influencers, brands accounts that want to be famous, gain followers use robots a lot.

They like, post, comment. So, nobody likes robots. I think everyone, even people who are not in this industry, are starting to realize that bots are annoying. Bots noise things up. And the platforms are starting to try to clean things up. They’re not… Twitter did a big cleanup. We know Instagram has always had a strong effort to try to crack down on bots. But it happens. My recommendation, my advice, and certainly what we do on our own social media is we don’t use bots. We try and actually not even use auto responders at all to message DM’s.

They’re just not authentic. And personally, for me and personally for my business, we’re always going to bias towards authentic. And sure, we use listening. We absolutely…in platforms where it’s possible. We want to know when people are talking about us and sharing our content and if it’s appropriate to be able to jump in and be helpful or to say thank you. But yeah, I’m not super into advocating anything about bots. And so how much does video drive traffic and engagement? This is another question here. So, we know that video engagement has tended to be pretty high on Facebook.

Now, for a long time, that’s because native video was getting disproportionate organic reach to the other content types. I believe that they’re starting to ratchet that back a little bit, something we’ve started to study. I don’t have anything to publish yet. But Facebook video has definitely been a big driver of organic reach. Now, Buffer…everyone knows Buffer app, the social media management tool. They did a study, as did Wistia. So, Wistia’s study was really good. It basically looked at offsite performance. So, click performance to their site when they used video as their creative versus an image.

So, like you post a video, and then in your copy, a little message and arrow like, “Here’s my link. Click this link.” What they found for all their video posts was that it didn’t do very well in terms of actually driving clicks to their site. But it did great from a content engagement perspective. And so I forget the exact final ruling, but I think it was something in the vain of if we’re trying to dry people offsite, we’re actually not going to use video. We’re going to use video to drive content engagement on the platform. But if our true mission is to get you offsite, we’re not going to use video as our creative. Specific recommendations for video on social.

Bumpers matter, particularly on Facebook. That first one, two, three seconds…if people are scrolling, and they don’t stop at least with auto play, you’ve lost them. You see people with beautifully produced videos, and they have a seven second lead in, a ten second lead in, a black screen that… Not for Facebook you don’t, not if you want it to do well. So, you’ve got to remember to do social specific edits of your video content to make sure you grab folks. And I’ll say it, but everyone…captions. So many people watch with sound off. It’s a thing. Just deal with it. Do the captions. So many tools. YouTube makes it easy. Facebook makes it easy to do auto-captioning and clean up of those files.

Do you recommend follow/follow back at the first activities?

If that’s your thing, great, I think. I personally don’t do that. There are lots of tools that can let you do that. Of course Twitter is not super happy about automated bot activity. In fact, they’re trying to crack down on that more and more. So, I kind of put this into my own general mantra of I don’t mess with automation bots too much because at the end of the day, if you’re putting out good content, and there’s a reason that people want to follow you, great. And if not, then you’re not really measuring how well you’re doing.

Cool. Well, that’s all the comments, and that’s all the time. I really appreciate everyone coming to hang with us here and for sticking around to the end. I’ve had a lot of fun. I really love getting all the questions, so thank you to all of you. Rachel, and Angela, and Hamid, and Alex for all of the questions that you’re asking. It actually does make it a lot more fun for me. I love doing this anyway. But hey, engagement, interaction, that’s what this is all about. 

I hope to see you next week with Lee Odden here on the Data-Driven Marketer. Have a good day, everybody.

The post 2018 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report Webinar with *NEW* Insights appeared first on Rival IQ.

You’ll learn about:

• Identifying the best times to post by channel
• Post types and how to adjust for increased impact
• Pinpointing potential hashtags
• And much more…

This training is part of our ongoing training program. You can check out past recordings as well as upcoming training sessions in the Rival IQ Help Center.

If you have more questions, reach out to us on Twitter or via email!

The post Magnify Social Media Engagement with Rival IQ: A Training Webinar appeared first on Rival IQ.

Instead, I’m here to share that we’ve made a series of improvements that will enhance and simplify your analysis with Rival IQ.

These changes are designed to streamline your experience, making it easier for you to identify actionable insights and eliminate noise. 

Together these new Rival IQ features mean you’ll be able to:

• Focus even more on the data that matters — Hone in on what you need to know with the improvements to the tag manager and Facebook boosted post visuals.
• Identify more actionable insights, faster — Find what you need, when you need it with improved navigation, labeling, and duplicating.
• Solve even more social media puzzles — Transform reports and custom dashboards with expanded social posts visualizations.

Here are the details:

Improved Tag Manager

Tagging companies within your landscape allows you to filter which companies you include in an analysis. You can now easily create more tags and select all the companies you want to be associated with a tag. The Tag Manager can now be accessed from anywhere tags can be applied.

NEW! Facebook boosted post panel

Likely Boosted Posts now has its own panel in Facebook Social Posts dashboard. Using this panel, you can compare which companies boost the most posts and the engagement they receive by boosting posts. You’ll still see these in your Top Landscape Posts, and have the ability to sort, exclude, or include in your social post analysis. Facebook Boosted Post Detection is included in Engage and Engage Pro plans.

Post Layout Options in Custom Dashboards

Previously grid and mosaic layouts for visual posts were only available in the social posts section. Now, you can include choose which layout works best for you in any custom dashboard!

Improved Navigation

Ensuring that Rival IQ remains just as intuitive and easy to use as the first day you joined is important to our team. New features and settings can create a crowded sidebar, so to prevent that a few improvements recently rolled out.

• “Companies” has changed to “Landscape”. You’ll find your Landscape Settings here, as well as the ability to manage channels, add companies, configure alerts, and customize branding.
• “Google Analytics” has moved into “Web / SEO / SEM”.
• “Social Listening” now includes Twitter Discover and Instagram Discover.

Duplicate Landscapes

Simplify your process of recreating a landscape. Duplicating landscapes makes it easy to modify of existing landscapes instead of starting from scratch.

These new enhancements, except the Likely Boosted Post panel, are available for all customers.

Our engineering and product team is excited to share these improvements with you (as evident by the .gif they shared below). As always, we enjoy hearing from you. Drop us an email, a message on Facebook, or a tweet us.

The post Fresh Updates in Rival IQ appeared first on Rival IQ.

You’ll learn about:

• Testing and refining custom audiences
• Identifying opportunities to improve your CPC
• Maximizing your budget
• Facebook ad alerts and analytics
• Instagram ad alerts and analytics
• Leveraging Facebook Boosted Post Detection
• Using Google Analytics and AdWords in Rival IQ
• And much more…

This training is part of our ongoing training program. You can check out past recordings as well as upcoming training sessions in the Rival IQ Help Center.

If you have more questions, reach out to us on Twitter or via email!

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