Across social media, many brands have invested in promotional messages, influencer programs, and content production, however, despite its cost-effective power to build an audience, authentic and well-crafted community management still remains an untapped resource.

As marketers try to quantify and justify the returns on the investment in a social presence, they shouldn’t concentrate on vanity metrics, such as followers or impressions. Instead, they should and do look to engagement. Likes, comments, shares, private messages and click through rate, all present a better view of how your social pages are working for your brand. More than that, the conversations about your company, whether on your pages or in the vast socialsphere give you a more comprehensive picture as to what people think about their experience with your organization. By investing in community management and interacting with your audience, you are able to join or create these conversations, and give your brand not only a voice, but a personality.

Creating brand standards ensures continuity of a brand’s persona when interacting with its social audience. The words, tone and style that you choose when interacting with your audience should mimic that which you bring to your copy, and are just as important.
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While quality engaging content is undoubtedly important, sending it out into the void is not enough. Organizations can spend countless hours and valuable marketing dollars creating stunning visual assets, crafting creative and engaging copy, and researching messaging and targeting that will resonate with their audience – but posting it is only half the story.

Don’t underestimate the amount of time, planning and strategy that goes into talking to your customers from the perspective of your brand. Interacting with your audience provides a personal touch that brings your brand from a concept to an entity. Being able to understand and imitate the tone that a brand would have is something that is learned and perfected. This gives a brand a personality. A personality that should directly stem from the persona the brand has created, and one that your target audience will want to interact with.

Are you in the luxury market? Well then you better present proper grammar, elevated language and vernacular that positively correlates with the words, phrases and cultural touch-points your affluent audience wishes to see. Are you a commodity product whose value proposition is lower cost, or possibly a restaurant that wants to appeal to the everyday Joes and Janes? Well, then bring that experience to your customers with your social voice and tone. We find amazing examples in Wendy’s and Arby’s community management teams. Their customers want to engage with them on social, because they expect a sassy and sarcastic response that resonates with their audience. You community management should be a natural extension of the rest of your branding.

Every marketer has heard the adage that “Content is King.” Well if social media is your kingdom, your followers are your citizens, memes are the court jester, your brand standards are your laws, and community management is the reigning queen.

Customer service and the consumer experience extend from the four walls of your business or the pages of your website. Social media has quickly become the top choice for a customer care channel. When expressing opinions or sharing their experience with a brand, consumers turn to their personal accounts and engage with organizations’ pages. Yet, 89% of social media message to brands go ignored. This becomes a huge problem, as users become disengaged. The followers you spent time and money attracting leave your page, and those in the consideration phase of the buying cycle leave with a bad taste in their mouths. In fact, 78% of consumers have bailed on a transaction or not made an intended purchase because of a poor service experience.

Will a user ask you a question that they could have easily found through google or your homepage? Yes. Are they inquiring about a completely different brand or company? Quite possibly. Many times, their answer can even be found in the very copy of the post they are commenting their question on. But the processes and responses you put in place to address that user’s question reinforce your brand voice and show it cares about its customers. Having that easy access to just ask a question and get a reliable answer with minimal effort, is what people are looking for.

Social media gives a new power and voice to consumers. They can now share their opinions with not only their social circle, but the entire platform where they are posting. Gary Jules let us know the truth. It’s a mad world out there. Key word: mad. Users are 2X more likely to share a negative experience than a positive one. By quickly addressing these social posts you are taking action to prevent these comments from degrading your brand. You take a proactive, rather than a reactive stance to creating a better customer experience.

When an unhappy customer posts a complaint on your page, they expect a resolution. These moments aren’t just irritations but opportunities to turn a negative experience into a positive one. Research conducted by Pandemic Labs has shown that many consumers just want to be heard and feel as if their concerns matter. Alternatively, when your biggest fan has a place to rave about their new favorite product, they become an ambassador and bring their passion to not only their personal social circle, but become a peer that future visitors of your page can trust and follow. By engaging with these types of posts, you show that you care about what your community has to say.

In an atmosphere of constant communication, people now expect more for less, and may threaten to “bring down your business” with negative reviews, as if blackmail is the end-all-be-all to better service or discounted prices. It’s unfortunate when consumers automatically go into the offensive when they feel like they have been wronged. This can present itself in different ways. From a customer who doesn’t want to pay the associated fee for a cancellation or return, to a guest who is offended by an interaction with someone who represents you company. Even if that interaction was perceived in a different way than intended, or your policies are clearly explained, customers may threaten to use their social clout to perpetuate a negative review.

Regardless of what the reality of the situation may be, perception becomes reality to those who read their comments, and users are more likely to trust consumers – who they relate to as peers – rather than a message put out by the company they think is just trying to sell. But actions speak volumes, and when a company responds to complaints or thanks someone for sharing their positive experience, it shows that there are people behind the screen, working to create the best customer experience they can.

Monitoring of the conversations related to your brand also allows you to identify potential problems and address negative sentiments before they turn into a PR nightmare. Showing that you aren’t tone-deaf to your customers concerns keeps situations from escalating, and quick responses show not only the person you are responding to that you care about what you are saying, but also onlookers that the negative experience that person was reacting to doesn’t represent your brand standards.

Do not commit to creating and managing a social page if you are not expecting to support and actively manage the content and the community that it requires to be successful. If you think that you can get away with a set-and-forget type strategy – then social is not the channel for you.

Our industry has always been plagued by controversy over social media privacy settings, especially its real-world implications. Thanks to being primed by pop culture and real life, we all knew this was going to happen eventually. You know the classic “Has technology gone too far?” trope, but now we’re seeing it more prevalently in all aspects of our lives – security issues, political influences, Black Mirror episodes, etc. It’s hard not to worry about the consequences of a technology boom like the one we’ve had in the past ten years. Now with social media’s technological ramifications looming over our quotidian lives, we’re getting closer and closer to the world of Black Mirror.

In case you missed it…Facebook was rocked by a social media privacy settings data breach scandal two months ago. How bad are we talking? Oh, they just lost $80 billion because the incident affected 50 million users bad. Man, that’s really bad. And it’s not just that there was a data breach, it’s the fact that this data was sold to Cambridge Analytica (although it was prohibited by Facebook) to manipulate targeting for elections, including Trump’s campaign. All of this scrutiny comes with the territory of being the most popular social networking app, and this recent snafu has proved what many naysayers were already thinking: we can’t trust social media.

Critics are using this opportunity to call for an overhaul of social media privacy settings, if not an entire cleanse. Facebook said in a statement a week after the scandal, “The last week showed how much more work we need to do to enforce our policies, and to help people understand how Facebook works and the choices they have over their data.” In response to the breach, the networking titan has promised to unveil new tools to see and access the data they collect on its users. In the subsequent fall out,  the world saw Facebook in crisis mode, scrambling to regain their footing. People were disgusted that Facebook is just another money-grubbing company willing to sell out their loyal users; you can imagine that major trust was lost. While the data breach may not have impacted you directly, its implications touch all users of any online platform. This could happen (if it hasn’t already) to any app you’re on that you’ve given your personal information to.

So how does this affect our vocation? Well, social media is our business. As a millennial, I live and breathe this stuff. It was hard enough to convince my mother that the social media agency I work at is a legit opportunity. I love being on social channels because it makes me feel closer to my friends and loved ones than I’ve ever been. That’s why it was easy for me to gravitate towards working in this field – I felt comfortable helping brands online build their persona through community management and content creation. So while the Facebook Cambridge-Analytica affair may not have affected me or my clients directly, it harms the reputation of this channel we’re using daily that’s been formerly beloved in the industry. What I’ve seen in the two months following the incident are updated privacy policies from most, if not all of the social channels I use. These other social competitors have watched and learned from Facebook’s errors, because it could’ve been any of them. Yet I’m wondering just how much users really care, as no one I know will take the time to peruse privacy policies of all the apps and websites they give their information to. After all, how many times have you clicked “Agree” on the iTunes terms and conditions without reading the pages and pages of text? If we’re being pessimistic and assuming people are leaving Facebook, how can I reach an audience that isn’t there? Will people post online less, or delete their profiles entirely? If people don’t trust a platform tied to our livelihood, then we won’t be winning that Narcos money any time soon. We expected better from The Zuck because Facebook has been around for 14 years. But ultimately I believe that (to borrow the lyrics of Big Sean) the social company took an L but they’ll bounce back. Facebook is recovering, slowly but surely. Let this incident be a lesson to all platforms out there: transparency is key. The online world needs to translate to the real world, otherwise that discrepancy will alienate its users.

Ashes to ashes, dust to snapstreaks.

While a eulogy might be premature, it’s safe to say 2018 has been a whirlwind for the popular social channel Snapchat. In February, the app rolled out a controversial update to a majority of its users. An update that, to say the least, was very unpopular among the vast global userbase the app had built in the 5 years it has been live.

Boasting 187 million daily active users worldwide at the end of 2017, Snapchat was touted as one of the most important social networks among its younger audience. It is a platform for individuals to both connect directly with their friends and consume media via the app’s branded “Discover” stories. Users share short (up to 10 second) photos and videos – or “snaps” —with their friends, either directly or through the ‘stories’ feature. Living for either the duration of the snap, or 24 hours, respectively, snaps provided an authentic way to both share and view authentic views into friend’s daily lives.

In the prime of its life, Snapchat made changes in the hopes to capitalize on the popularity of its platform. And that’s when it all went horribly wrong.

Fundamental changes to how the app works, such as the displacement of where and how users see images and videos their friends send them, a new “discover” page showcasing brand content, global stories and influencers’ posts, and difficulty finding and viewing their friends’ stories were among the many complaints. Updated features, such as the introduction of Explore on the app’s “new and improved” snapmap, which uses GPS tracking to show users a live view of where their friends are in the world, were also ill-received. Individuals overwhelmingly saw the feature as more of an invasion of privacy than a way to better connect, and opted to switch to “ghost-mode” – making themselves invisible on the map. The intense and widespread anger felt by Snapchat’s audience fueled thousands of 1-star reviews in the app-store and even led to an official petition on change.org for the company to reverse its update. To date, over 1.2 million individuals have signed the petition, demanding that the app revert “back to the basics, before the 2018 update”. Positive changes, such as improved text features and the introduction of Bitmoji Deluxe, were noted, but vastly overshadowed by the negative sentiment.

As if the reaction among its users wasn’t detrimental enough, Snapchat also received a number of celebrity backlash that further tarnished its name and credibility.

On February 23^rd, reality TV star, makeup industry mogul, and avid snapchat user, Kylie Jenner tweeted “sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me… ugh this is so sad” to her 21+ million Twitter followers. What would have seemed a relatively benign tweet from anyone else, prompted her large following to voice their frustrations and intents to leave the app as well. Snapchat Inc. stock reportedly closed down 6% on that day, immediately plunging an estimated $1.3 billion off the company’s market value. While many factors could have impacted these numbers, the correlation to Jenner’s statement is interesting to note.

Only a few weeks later, Snapchat was part of its next celebrity scandal. Iconic, global celebrity artist, Rihanna criticized the app for approving and hosting an advertisement making light of domestic violence. An ad for a mobile game called “Would You Rather” featured photos of Rihanna and Chris Brown and asked whether players would rather slap her or punch him. The thinly veiled reference seemingly mocked the infamous incident in 2009 when her then-boyfriend, Brown, physically assaulted her. Even following a formal public apology from Snap, Inc, claiming the advertisement was wrongly approved, Rihanna turned to her social audience to denounce the app. Among other statements, she turned to Instagram saying “Shame on you…throw the whole app-ology away” and “I’d love to call it ignorance, but I know you ain’t that dumb.” The artist encouraged her “Rihanna Navy” to delete the app, and her following dutifully obliged. Snapchat, Inc. shares continued to plummet following the outcry, dropping by 5% and decreasing by an estimated $807K.

To add injury to injury, celebrity personality Chrissy Teigen shared her own disapproval of Snapchat, tweeting “I stopped using snap. The update, the constant complaints of people not being able to find me, plus the Rihanna poll…no bueno,” to her 10 million Twitter followers.

Further among the backlash from big names in the entertainment industry, the decreased usability and popularity of the app is leading top content creators on the platform to leave and turn to other ways to share their message, such as Snapchat’s main competitor – Instagram stories.

Though it is still too early to claim what the platform’s fate holds, it is clear that unless Snapchat combats the negative publicity it has been receiving and responds to users’ complaints, it could quickly join platforms like Friendster, Myspace and Vine in the social media graveyard.

Today, Facebook announced the arrival of Trip Consideration targeting.

Facebook’s [already available] Dynamic ads for travel allow us to reach potential travelers – users who are likely to take a trip. Meaning, if a user was perusing hotels/flights but didn’t book a trip, Dynamic ads for travel let us target these users with relevant ads based on their specific dates, destinations or other trip details.

So with the addition of Trip Consideration targeting, our capabilities ah go a bit further – now we have the ability to target users who have expressed intent to travel, but have yet to choose a location. We can now intersect these users earlier in their trip planning process and delivering them the right message with the right creative. This drives users with the intent to travel into your purchase funnel.

Trip Consideration targeting can be layered in with existing targeting options and is available across Facebook, Instagram and the Facebook Audience Network.

We know (on average) 43 days pass between the users decision to travel and the decision on where to go. Research also shows that users are spending more time travel-planning on their mobile devices, while also demanding personalization. “From inspiration to booking, mobile has become more important.”

So what does this really mean? “Mom” is interested in booking a family trip for Christmas break and browses travel-related pages, but hasn’t decided on a specific destination. At this point, we can push ads to “mom” promoting hotel or flight packages.

If you’re looking to drive users into your travel funnel with Trip Consideration or Dynamic Travel ads, reach out.

Come gather people wherever you post. And admit that the ads around you have grown. And accept it that soon, organic reach will blow. The ads they are a-changin.

While reading, we recommend you listen to:

As we all know, a robust paid social strategy is essential to fight back against the algorithmic timelines and declining organic reach. Lucky for us, social channels are constantly developing their paid offerings.

Twitter is introducing a new option for your ads – Promote Mode. With Promote Mode, automates promotion of your tweets and account by automatically amplifying your tweets and profile to a larger, interested audience. This is an always-on strategy that you can subscribe to by paying a flat fee every month, but you can cancel your subscription at anytime. According to Twitter, Promote Mode is mobile-first and still in Beta.

While Twitter is busy giving you new options, Facebook is looking to remove some.

Facebook recently announced via a small notification box in its new and improved Ads Manager that it would begin removing nearly 20 metrics it considers “redundant, outdated, not actionable or infrequently used.”

Starting July 2018, you will see some metrics options leaving Ads Manager, such as Actions, Button Clicks, Canvas Component Time Percentage, Carousel Card, and more.

Some of the identified metrics, like Social Reach and Social Impressions, won’t be missed since they aren’t actionable. However, Canvas Component Time Percentage might be missed since it indicates which components – Video, Splash, Text Box – resonates most with your audience.

Facebook also intends to clarify some of its metrics by labeling them as estimated or in development.

Let us know which metrics you think should stay and which ones should go!

Here’s a full list of all of the metrics Facebook has sent to the chopping block:

Actions, People Taking Action, Cost per Any Action: The Actions metric is a composite of various actions and events, such as engagement, clicks or conversions. As our platform introduces more actions that people can take on an ad, this metric becomes more nuanced, and a less relevant signal for measuring business outcomes. We recommend customizing your own composite metric reflecting actions that are meaningful to your business instead of using Actions.

Amount Spent Today: We recommend using our dynamic date selector to see results for Today and compare results across different date ranges instead of using the Amount Spent Today metric. Select Today for the date range and use the Amount Spent metric to see how much money you’ve spent on your campaign starting at 12:00 AM (midnight) today.

Button Clicks : The Button Clicks metric shows the number of times people clicked the call-to-action button on your ad. Button Clicks is redundant because these clicks are also either reflected in the Link Clicks metric or other distinct metrics like the Event Responses metric and the Offers Saved metric. We recommend using Link Clicks, Event Responses or Offers Saved instead of Button Clicks.

Canvas Component Time Percentage: The Canvas Component Time Percentage metric hasn’t been a widely used metric. We recommend using the Canvas View Time metric and the Canvas View Percentage metric instead of Canvas Component Time Percentage.

Carousel Card: We’re no longer supporting the Carousel Card breakdown for conversion metrics (ex: Website Conversions) and for any calculated metrics such as CTR because these insights have been infrequently used. You can still see the Link Clicks metric broken down by Carousel Card and see conversion results without the Carousel Card breakdown.

Link Click Destination: After we launched this breakdown in July of 2017, a number of mobile operating system updates that followed began to prevent us from determining if someone was redirected to an app’s deep link or to an app store for ads set up with backup link destinations. Advertisers can still use use Outbound Clicks and Landing Page Views metrics to measure which clicks lead people to destinations off Facebook while we continue to explore other ways of providing more granular app deep link or app store destination insights.

Mobile App Actions Conversion Value: The Mobile App Actions Conversion Value metric is based on the value you assigned to an app action when you set up the app event. We recommend using specific app event conversion values (ex: Mobile App Purchases Conversion Value) instead of Mobile App Actions Conversion Value.

Page Mentions, Cost per Page Mention: The Page Mentions metric is an outdated metric and is not indicative of either positive or negative sentiment towards your brand. We don’t recommend using Page Mentions to evaluate campaign performance. Instead, if you’re running a Page Likes campaign, we recommend using the Page Likes metric or the Page Engagement metric, as they’re more indicative of the success of a Page Likes campaign.

Page Tab Views, Cost per Page Tab View: The Page Tab Views metric measures the number of views of tabs on your Facebook Page that are attributed to your ads. If you’re running a Page Likes campaign, we recommend using the Page Likes metric or the Page Engagement metric, as they’re more indicative of the success of a Page Likes campaign than Page Tab Views.

Positive Feedback, Negative Feedback: The Relevance Score metric already uses Positive Feedback and Negative Feedback signals as inputs, and the granularity provided by breaking out positive and negative feedback creates more confusion than useful insights. We recommend using Relevance Score instead of Positive Feedback and Negative Feedback to understand how well a target audience is responding to ads.

Social Reach, Social Impressions, Social Clicks (All), Unique Social Clicks (All): Social metrics (ex: Social Reach, Social Impressions, Social Clicks) are outdated metrics that show the number of people who saw an ad when displayed with social information. The Social Reach metric isn’t meaningfully different from the Reach and Impressions metrics and the insights provided aren’t actionable, since advertisers don’t have control over when ads are/aren’t shown with social information. We recommend using Reach instead of Social Reach, and using Impressions instead of Social Impressions to evaluate campaign performance.