Do You Know Where Your Teenager Is (online)?

By Sue Brady

source: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

So much has been written about the ‘demise’ of Facebook and how it’s losing traction with the younger set. Facebook’s audience is changing but that doesn’t mean it’s about to crash and burn. I often hear: The kids just aren’t using Facebook anymore. But is it really true? I did some digging and read a number of articles to really understand what’s been happening to the Facebook numbers. I discovered that yes, teens are leaving Facebook, but Facebook is far from dying. Teens are just turning to other tools.

Piper Jaffray released their semi-annual survey in October, 2013 where they saw a shift from the prior survey done in April, in preferred social media among teens. In the April survey, Facebook was preferred over Twitter with 33% siting the first, and 30% the second. The October study showed a large shift with 26% preferring Twitter, followed by Facebook and new to the top of the list, Instagram, each at 23%. You can read the full article here.

In the US, compared to three year’s ago, overall Facebook users have increased by 23%. The 55 and older crowd has been the biggest reason for this increase. In the last three years, that age group has grown from almost 16 million to 28 million users. And in the same period of time, teen users aged 13 – 17 have declined by 25% while young adults aged 18 – 24 have declined 8%. But somehow that doesn’t feel like the full story. Is it really just the younger crowd moving into older age groups, and not being replaced by the new young teens? It sure seems that way. The largest group on Facebook by pure numbers three years ago was the 18-24 crowd followed by the 35-54 year olds. Now, the largest group on Facebook is the 35-54 year olds, followed by 25 – 34 year olds (source: iStrategy Labs). Facebook’s audience is aging because teens, new to social media, are making other choices.

There are implications for advertisers. Advertisers can still reach a potential teen audience of almost 10 million kids, but that’s 3 million less than they used to be able to reach, and that number is not likely to improve in the coming years.

So where are the teens going for their social media fix? At the end of last year, it was announced that Twitter actually overtook Facebook as the most important social media tool among teens. And there are other, newer social media players too in this rapidly changing landscape.

FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Twitter. With 243 million monthly users, Twitter is gigantic. According to AllThingsD, 28% of Twitter’s unique desktop viewers are between 13 and 24 years old. When you look at mobile users, 25% of Twitter users vs 19% of Facebook’s are between 18 and 24 years old.  And, Twitter’s global audience aged between 15 and 24  is over 3 percentage points higher than Facebook’s  (32% to 29%).

Snapchat. Snapchat is the mobile app that allows you to send pictures that are viewable for 1-10 seconds and 15-second video clips can also be sent for a one-time viewing.  Snapchat boasts 30 million monthly users in the US and a full 55% of them use it everyday (source: Business Insider). There are 400 million snaps sent per day, worldwide. (source: Craig Smith, Author of Digital Marketing Ramblings). Its growth has been explosive. Snapchat’s primary demographic is the 13-25 age group, though the 40+ crowd is starting to adopt it as well (source: AllThingsD.com). According to Pew Research, 26% of cell phone owners aged 18-29 use Snapchat. Snapchap is only just starting to allow advertising and it’s not yet known how successful that will be.

Instagram.    Owned by Facebook, Instagram is also a photo and video share app, but the photos and videos don’t disappear.  They boast 150 million monthly users (source: Craig Smith, Author of Digital Marketing Ramblings). 43% of cell phone owners aged 18-29 use Instagram. 18% of those aged 30-49 use Instagram (Pew Research). Snapchat only has 5% of that age group. Like Snapchat, Instagram has been slow to get into advertising, but is definitely planning on monetizing the platform with ads.

WhatsApp. WhatsApp, the mobile messaging tool, has been picking up new users at the rate of a million A DAY. They boast 450 million users to Facebook’s 1.2 billion (worldwide). Their growth has been fairly amazing.  And guess what? Facebook recently announced that it’s buying WhatsApp for a deal valued at $19 billion. Not much is known about the demographics of the WhatsApp users, though in general mobile messaging services have high usage among teens and tweens.  The WhatsApp user base is strong in India, Europe and Latin America.

Facebook is alive and well and making acquisitions to make sure it stays relevant with a variety of age groups. But there’s no question the Facebook audience base is shifting. Perhaps the teen-set isn’t happy that mom and dad are following their pages, or perhaps that age group has just gotten tired of the platform and favors faster communication tools. Whatever the reason, Facebook remains a social media giant.

Why Earned Media is Important

By Sue Brady

There are three types of media: Owned, Earned and Paid. All three of these media types may play an important part in your marketing strategy. ‘Owned’ media refers to channels that you control such as your company Facebook page or blog. ‘Earned’ media is in essence word of mouth. When someone shares your content, that’s earned. ‘Bought’ is media you purchase, such as an ad or event sponsorship.

Today’s focus is on Earned media. You can read about owned media here.

Earned Media is the best kind of media because it carries with it an implied endorsement. It’s social proof when someone shares your content. But that also makes it the hardest media to garner. It’s easy (well, doable anyway) to write your own content or to pay for an ad to appear, but Earned media requires more work. A reader needs to feel compelled to distribute your content to their network.

Some Earned media examples include:

• A shared Facebook post from your brand
• A retweet of a company post
• A review of your product
• A quote from someone at your company included in an article.

This example showed up on my Facebook feed today because a friend of mine checked in using her Yelp mobile app when she arrived at this restaurant. Wow, looks tasty and I’m hungry…

Why is this important? Recommendations matter. In a survey by market research company Lab42, 69% of those surveyed said they ‘liked’ a brand because a friend did.

How can you make your content shareable?

• Make sure your content is relevant to your audience
• Post your content where your audience is likely to find it
• If you are making a special offer, keep it brief and easy to read and understand
• Encourage users to write reviews and share them with credit to the writer; ask for retweets or shares
• Write tweets using the # and asking for the retweet. Both enhance the possibility of sharing.
• Retweet others, share other content on Facebook, share articles on LinkedIn. You never know when that favor might be returned.
• Use pictures in your Facebook post; according to KISSmetrics, posts with photos get 53% more likes.

I’ll have ‘earned’ your mention if you liked this article enough to share it with your network. So please share!

Facebook for your Business – What Comes After Setup?

Part 3 in the 3-part series of what should happen after those Social Media accounts are set up. By Sue Brady

I’ve covered Twitter (read it here) and LinkedIn (read it here), and now I’ll cover Facebook. With over 500,000 active million users, Facebook is an important tool for your content strategy.

As usual, you need to start by solidifying your goals. You can then craft your content strategy around those goals. Your overall Facebook strategy might be to humanize your company, to position your company as a thought leader, to engage your customers or to show yourself as a company involved with the community. Maybe you want a particular piece of content to be widely shared, or your goal is to generate feedback on your page. Most ultimate goals focus around customer engagement in some way. Whatever your goal is, keep it in mind as you make all of your decisions for your Facebook page.

Some basics things to think about:
1. You’ll need to decide how frequently you want to post, but if you have nothing to say, best not to post anything that day.  A reason often cited for why a fan ‘unlikes’ a page is because the company posts too much.

2. Decide how much time you have to devote to your page. Some business-to-business (B2B) companies feel they don’t need a Facebook page at all.  Facebook can play a role in  B2B, just a different one from business-to-consumer (B2C) companies.

3. You already can see that Facebook is a very visual medium. Here are some statistics from KISSmetrics that show the value of posting with pictures:

• Posts with photos get 53% more likes
• Posts with photos get 104% more comments
• Posts with photos get 84% more click-throughs

4. KISSmetrics also states that posting with a question generates 100% more comments than statement posts. Get users to engage with your brand by asking questions!

Business-to-Consumer

Facebook is a natural if you are talking directly to your customer and brands use Facebook in a variety of ways. Most important to your strategy, know your target, know your goals and design your content around both. Consumers like to connect with brands. And brands like to put on a human face.  Facebook is a great place to do that. Be honest in your communications and make sure they reflect the tone you want your brand to take.

GAIN FANS

1. Don’t be shy about asking your personal network to ‘like’ your business page. It’s a great way to get started and generate some immediate buzz and activity on your feed, and helps you to gain exposure to their networks.
2. Also ask your network to ‘share’ particular posts. You will generate more shares by saying specifically in your post: Please share this.
3. Advertising. I know a relatively new company who went from a fan base of less than 1,000 to over 5,000 fans in three months. They did it by buying Facebook ads that offered a cents off coupon for their product. Period. They had been on Facebook for around 6-months before they started buying ads. They fielded the occasional customer comment during that time but they couldn’t generate the traffic they wanted. Once they tried advertising, they were able to generate a much wider base. Now they are enjoying much greater customer engagement, with fairly frequent posts from customers on their page. Facebook has some easy to use methods to help you maximize return on your advertising. This post is a great read on the subject.(Little known fact from the folks at Hubspot: you can test your messaging in advance of running your ad by creating unpublished posts, known as dark posts. Dark posts appear in the News Feed but not on your timeline. This article tells you how to do it.If you aren’t sure how to get started, here’s another gem from Hubspot explaining the options.

OTHER THINGS TO KNOW
1. It’s no secret that a big reason consumers like brands is because they are hoping for coupons. In a survey by market research company Lab42, they found that 77% of those who had ‘liked’ a brand saved money as a result. Tweet that stat! In the same study, 69% said they ‘liked’ a brand because a friend did.

2. Understand the Facebook Algorithm. Facebook’s goal is to keep users interested, and to do that, they show content they think a particular person will be interested in seeing. It’s important to understand this because it impacts how your posts will be ranked. How is rank determined? Through an algorithm, formerly known as EdgeRank. EdgeRank was created as a way to prioritize stories in a user’s news feed and referred to the concept of ‘gaining an edge.’ The key elements have remained the same over the years, although according to Facebook, they now use over 100,000 factors:

• Affinity Score – This is based on an action the user took, his ‘closeness’ to the person posting, and how much time has passed since the posting. Commenting on someone’s posts, or ‘liking’ those posts, increases a fan’s affinity to a brand. Think of it this way: liking a brand’s page gives the brand an edge.
• Edge Weight – Edges are weighted based on the effort required on the part of the user. For instance, leaving a comment has more weight than leaving a ‘like.’ A video view has more weight than leaving a comment.
• Time Decay – This refers to the length of time that has passed since an edge was created. As time passes, it loses value. However, if a story is very popular, even if it’s a few hours old, it could be bumped to the top of a feed.

You can read more about EdgeRank here.

3. Promotions. Promotions are a great way to garner fans on Facebook. But there are rules that have to be followed. The rules around promotions continue to evolve, so make sure you are using the most current set. For instance, it is now okay to use the ‘like’ functionality as a way to collect entries. Here’s a summary of the <current> Facebook rules as of August, 2013. You also must follow local and national rules imposed by the government (check with your lawyer!).

Business-to-Business

There are a few ways B2B companies use Facebook.

1. Human Resources. A common reason a B2B company has a Facebook page is for future employees. It’s a place to gain some insight into the corporate culture and learn a little bit about the company in a more casual way.
2. Putting on a Human Face. It’s not unusual for someone to reach out to their friend base to gain information on a product or service they might be contemplating for their business. If a recommendation is made on Facebook, it’s a natural response to click over to see that company’s page. It’s also a great place to interact directly with your customers. And remember, it’s Facebook…photos are important.
3. Leads. Tough in a B2B environment, but to gather more leads some companies will offer a white paper or something else of value for ‘liking’ their page. The user exchanges their email address for information they want to read. As a business, it’s still a person who buys your product, and Facebook can help you to connect. You can also indirectly create leads by posting pictures of an event or something of interest. The key here is that every post can’t be a sales pitch. Think entertaining and/or educational. You can also buy ads on Facebook to reach others who are not yet your fans (see the Advertising section above under Business-to-Consumer).

Final Thought

Be prepared for trolls. Trolls are users who frequently post negative comments on your page. They may feel wronged by your company or just have nothing better to do. You need to have a plan for how to deal with this. In addition, it’s important for management to be aware they are likely to see some negative comments on the company Facebook page. Let them know you have a plan.

Happy posting!

After Setup: Focus on LinkedIn

By Sue Brady

Part 2 in the continuing series of post set-up basics for Social Media (read part 1 – Twitter Basics here)

Congratulations! You’ve set up your LinkedIn company page. Now you need to make the most of it.  LinkedIn currently boasts almost 260 million users and remains one of the most actively used social media tools. It is viewed as a Business-to-Business (B2B) tool and not necessarily a personally social one.

As always, the first thing you need to clarify is your company’s LinkedIn goal so that you can make sure you are doing all you can to achieve it.

Possible Goals

• To have a place for seekers to learn about your company and/or products
• To offer advice (aka thought leadership) to potential customers
• To recruit new employees
• To generate leads/sell product.

Visitors will come to your LinkedIn page because

• They read a tweet from your company
• They read an article where your company is mentioned
• They saw your logo as the employer (or former employer) of someone they want to do business with or someone they know
• They are interested in a job posting associated with your company
• They heard about your company and want to gather some additional information.

In support of almost any LinkedIn goal, you’ll need to have a built out profile. It supports everything you’ll do on LinkedIn. Let’s say someone sees a tweet from your company, or reads an article about you or someone at your company. A first stop for many folks is LinkedIn because they can see what your company is all about at a glance and, they can easily see if they know anyone in their network that works there. So your profile is key and should be the first thing you focus on by adding information to your home page. You can include things like: address, date you were founded, website, company size, industry etc.

Also flesh out your Product/Services tab and list as much as you can to make it clear to viewers what your company does. And you’ll want to ask others to leave reviews of your products and services as a way to add more credibility to your page.

Once your page is as good as you can make it, you want to make yourself known.

Build a following

• Invite your personal contacts to follow your page
• Invite your business contacts to follow your page
• Invite your customers to follow your page
• Follow your customers’ business pages; a company may see your ‘follow’ and follow you back
• Find appropriate LinkedIn groups to join on behalf of your company so that you can start participating in conversations there. It’s a great way to connect with others.

Share content

• Share relevant content posted by others (companies and people) in your network
• Share articles you have found that are relevant to your audience
• Share blog posts you’ve written on your company site that your audience will find relevant
• Post updates about what’s happening in your company
• Answer questions that are posed to your company either directly or in a related group.

This picture shows a post made by Comcast Business Class that was also posted by an employee there. It is showing in my feed twice because I follow Comcast Business Class and I am also linked in with Craig. Using the options along the bottom of the post, I can like the article, leave a comment or share this article with my network.

Decide how frequently you want to post. Many companies keep an editorial calendar to inform content for all of their social media efforts. It’s a best practice and will help you keep it all straight, especially as you look to cross-post across your various sites.

Another way to reach potential customers is through LinkedIn advertising. You can target your ads based on your own requirements for the type of customer you want to attract. These might be a particular industry, job title, geography, or company size. Note that you might want to make your targeting ‘loose’ enough so that your ad is seen by a larger audience.

To buy an ad, you need to go here: LinkedIn Ads. You’ll be walked through the steps, starting with deciding between creating an ad vs sponsoring one of your updates. You can see an example of a post sponsored by Yahoo below. You’ll be prompted to set the minimum you are willing to pay for a click, as well as a daily budget. This is a great, easy-to-follow article that walks you through each of the steps from identifying your audience to analyzing your results: Tutorial for Advertising on LinkedIn.

Not only does advertising reach new potential customers, but you might get a benefit from existing customers. In the example below, the customer made a comment on the company’s post, and that means his network will now see that ad. In addition, the company used it as a way to politely ask for a recommendation on their product page.

Regularly check your LinkedIn page to see if anyone has sent you a message or commented on something you’ve posted (and/or use your settings to receive notifications via email). It’s usually a good idea to post a response if someone comments publicly on something you’ve posted. And of course, you should always answer a private message, and do so privately. Private message notifications show up at the top of your page on the right hand side: Next week’s article will cover the Post-setup Basics for Facebook for your Business. If you missed last week’s Twitter Basics post, you can read that here.

Focus on Twitter: What Comes After Setup?

By Sue Brady

In last week’s post: How to Set up Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook for Your Business, I talked about how you can set up your social media pages for your business. This post takes a deeper dive into using Twitter and increasing your presence there. Next week’s post will focus on LinkedIn.

Last year well over 300 billion tweets were sent. Tweet this stat! Twitter can be an impactful social media tool. But, before we jump into the basics, it’s important that you decide what you want to accomplish with your Twitter account. You may want to use it to track what others in your field are writing about, or you may want to use it to position yourself or your company, as a thought-leader. Or, you may plan to use it as a customer service tool. Your go-forward Twitter strategy will be different depending on your goals, so make sure you understand those.

Subject Matter. In essence, businesses tweet three different types of content:

• Information with no links – this may be something wise you’d like to share that can stand on its own (your limit on twitter is 140 characters, so there’s not a lot of space to get your point across).
• Information with a link to someone else’s content.
• Information with a link to your own content – A rule of thumb is to tweet your own content no more than 30%-35% of the time.

The type of content you post (or that you post as your company) will be driven by your overall Twitter strategy:

• If you are establishing yourself as a thought leader, you will want to publish links to important and relevant content for your target audience. This may be content you’ve written on a blog, or may be an article or tweet written by someone else. Or, you may post a tweet that contains a useful tidbit of information, but no link.
• If your goal is to monitor your competition or to see what thought leaders are saying on a given topic, you may not tweet at all, but rather just choose to follow a number of people.
• If your goal is to address customer service issues, you may be posting tips or how tos, or just engaging with your audience so that they feel heard. Several big brands have really figured this one out, including Taco Bell, Oreos, and Tesco.

Let’s cover some basic information regarding how to use Twitter.

Tweeting. You can post a tweet by using the ‘Compose New Tweet’ icon. Click the icon and a tweet box will appear.

From this box you can create your own tweet or copy and paste a link from an article you’d like to share. Because you only have a total of 140 characters, you might want to shorten the article link (aka URL) you are sharing. There are a few ways to do that. I like to use hootsuite’s product called ow.ly. Just cut and paste your link into their ‘shorten URL’ bar and click ‘shrink it.’ It’ll return a shortened link for you to cut and paste into your tweet.

You can easily add a picture to your tweet by clicking on the camera icon in the lower left-hand corner of the tweet box. Here’s an example of a Tweet with a picture:

Finally, you can also add your location to a tweet by clicking on the teardrop icon next to the camera icon. You can read more about that here. It’s a feature to use judiciously because it allows Twitter to embed your location into your tweets.

Retweeting. Retweeting is a way to share content. There are a couple of ways to retweet. One is to use the retweet button that appears underneath every tweet. Twitter provides four easy links under each tweet, and it’s where you’ll find the functionality to retweet:

Retweeting in this way means that Twitter will do the work for you. In the screenshot below you’ll see a tweet from Hubspot.com that I retweeted using the retweet button.  That tweet is automatically identified as being retweeted while still showing Hubspot as the source of the information.

The second way you can retweet is to use the ‘Compose new Tweet’ button. If you choose the manual method, the protocol is to include in your message the letters: RT (meaning retweet) or MT (meaning modified tweet). After the RT or MT you should acknowledge who you are retweeting. You do that by using the @ symbol followed by the appropriate Twitter handle, ie @SueBrady if you’re retweeting something I’ve posted. Then you copy and paste the link you are retweeting, along with a brief description of what you’re sharing. The person you are retweeting will see your retweet if they check their @connect page or if they have their email notifications turned on. Here’s a screenshot of a post that I manually retweeted. I added a comment in front of the RT but didn’t change anything in the original message so used RT instead of MT.

Favoriting. This function is one of the four you’ll see under each tweet. I use the favorite button to mark tweets I think I’ll refer to again, whether mine or someone else’s. If you favorite someone else’s tweet, they’ll see you’ve done that when they check their @connect page (or receive an email notification).  You can easily access your favorited tweets by using the navigation on the left side of your Twitter screen.

Here’s what a tweet looks like once it’s been favorited:

The hashtag (#). The hashtag is used on Twitter as a way to make searching for a topic easy. In the search bar at the top of your Twitter page you can enter anything after a hashtag, hit enter and see what others are saying about that topic. You can choose to look at the top tweets being viewed, all the tweets being viewed (in order of time) or only those tweets from folks you are following.

In your own tweets, it’s a good practice to add a hashtag in front of content relevant terms so that the content you are sharing is easily found. Studies have been done on how the number of hashtags used affects retweeting of your message. Most net out that having 3-5 hashtags enhances your chances of being retweeted. Others say that more than 3 hashtags in a tweet is annoying.

There are a number of strategies you can employ to expand your Twitter universe. Choose the ones that support your own goals.

Finding industry experts.

1. If you want to see what others in your industry are saying, look them up on Twitter and click follow. To follow someone you’ve found on twitter, from their home page you’ll see a follow button on the right hand side, directly under their description. When you follow someone, they receive a notification that you have done so.
   
2. You can also use the ‘Lists’ feature to find people/companies to follow. For instance, if you are on my Twitter profile page, you can click on my lists to see the ones that I’ve made public, and you can decide if you want to follow people listed there. For example, if you want to find digital marketers, you can click on my list for that and see who I’m following in that category. (Note: It’s easier to create your lists early on so that you can add your followers to your lists as you acquire them).
   
3. As you find articles of interest, you can follow the author by either clicking on their ‘follow us on Twitter’ button on their page (almost all articles now have that button) or by finding them directly on Twitter.

Gaining followers.

1. Follow others. Once you start following people, some will follow you back. That’s the simplest way to pick up followers.
2. Retweet. As you retweet others, they may start following you.
3. Attend tweet chats. Tweet chats are usually sponsored by a company in a certain industry and advertised on Twitter by them and by their followers. Here’s how it works.The chat host usually has a list of questions that they’ll pose for attendees to answer.  Once you know when a tweet chat is occurring, make sure you visit the advertised hashtag at the appointed time of day. Just type it into the search bar at the top of your Twitter page and it will take you to the chat. I find it most useful to click on the ‘All’ option at the top of the page once I’m at the tweet chat so that I can see what everyone is posting.There are a handful of sources of tweet chat schedules (here is one) but I’ve had the greatest success from seeing invites from folks I’m following.The key with gaining followers in this manner is to make sure you contribute to the conversation in a meaningful way. These can be a great source of information and it’s a good place to share what you know. And be sure when you tweet something in a tweet chat to include the # for that chat in your tweet, as well as a reference to the question you are answering. That way it appears to everyone else following the chat. This example shows a tweet I sent during a recent content marketing chat (in this case A7 refers to an answer to question 7).
   
4. Favorite other people’s tweets. Since ‘tweeters’ can tell when someone favorites one of their tweets, they’ll see your name and may follow you as a result.
5. Interact with your followers by personally tweeting to them. There are a couple of ways to do that. You can visit their Twitter profile and writing a tweet in the box on the left-hand side, or you can address them directly by using their twitter handle in the compose a tweet box from your home page. This is how you’d interact directly with your customers.
   Once you start interacting with your followers, they may retweet your posts to their followers, and people in their networks may decide to follow you too.

Be sure to follow me on Twitter @SueBrady. See you there!