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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
