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Connecting social content to sales in four simple steps

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Recently both Facebook and Twitter announced separate commerce plays. Twitter acquired payment startup CardSpring and Facebook announced they are testing a “buy” button.

These announcements coincide with research from the JunGroup that suggests the trend is moving away from engagement inside social networks and back towards brand owned digital properties. Facebook and YouTube accounted for a combined 69% of all next actions taken after brand campaigns in 2012, but the corresponding figure for the end of 2013 has seen that engagement drop to 30%.

The percentage of brand messages pointing back to the brand’s own property has risen from 28% to 61% in the same period. The focus has clearly shifted from trying to encourage ‘likes’ to ‘clicks’ back to websites.

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Where do the clicks lead? (Image: Jun Group)

So what is happening here? Well for much of 2013 and 2014 Facebook and Twitter have in particular been trying to promote their platforms as paid media channels. The impact for Facebook brand pages has been radical. Organic reach of posts for brand pages has dropped from reaching 16% of your Facebook fans to an average of 3%. Facebook has stated this is due to the higher volume of content coursing through their network and corresponding attempts to keep the content relevant in the newsfeed. That means the algorithm that selects what content is seen hits brand page posts the most, as they tend to get less traction than posts between friends.

Paying to boost likes for tomorrow’s reach, given these algorithm changes, has a lot less value now than paying to drive revenue today. So this buy button must be seen in that context. The problem that Facebook has is the full value of the platform has never been to drive the last click. Rakuten, the global ecommerce behemoth stated that they saw a 25% increase in revenue from customers that became Facebook fans over non fans over the subsequent six months after engaging with a Facebook campaign for the first time. It has long been understood that getting closer to customers leads to more revenue, so opening up a closer and more frequent dialog with customers on social channels makes sense. However will the ecommerce plays by Facebook & Twitter lead to more revenue? I think the reality is, given the nature of social media, it is unlikely in the short to medium term.

So how do you use social media channels to drive more direct revenue?

There are many things you can do today to increase your revenue results through engaging with people on social channels. The best results come from four simple rules:

1)  You must be cross network in your campaigns and outreach.

Don’t bet the house on one network. Run connected, cross network campaigns that maximise your reach. The hashtag is a great way to group campaign interaction across platforms. If you add incentives for people to interact via the hashtag then it all helps to increase involvement.

Australian & New Zealand utility supplier Powershop who ran a social campaign that asked people to take pictures of their baking ‘fails’ and share it to Instagram or Twitter using a hashtag. They then featured the best of that content inside Facebook and on their website.

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2)  Stimulate peer-to-peer sharing of your campaigns and content.

This avoids the brand to fan newsfeed algorithm on Facebook. You want your fans to increase your reach and not rely solely on your wallet to be seen. Make sure you use interactive apps on your website, campaign microsites or social channels to increase the level of shares by participants to their friends. Gamification, incentives and promotions will help you do that.

To celebrate 100 years of Vanity Fair, Publisher Condé Nast put an interactive app into their website to encourage people to vote for their favourite cover of all time and share it with their friends.

vanity fair

3)  Make your website fit for the social consumer.

The shift from the second interaction of a social campaign being contained in a social network to being on a website doesn’t mean you can revert to 2005 with your approach to online marketing. Whether people are coming to your owned property from social interaction and peer-to-peer sharing or a paid post, make the website fit for the modern social and mobile consumer. If you do that you will see on average 10% more traffic to your site, 300% increase in dwell time on pages featuring social content and a 11% decrease in the bounce rate.

Arsenel football club  feature content from fans around the games on their website. This content has been shared to multiple social channels such as Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Vine and Pinterest and provides a rich stream of social content which is filtered, curated and published to a social hub.

arsnal4)   Increase conversions on your site with the social content you display.

You can make the social content on your website clickable, through tagging with product IDs and other links to drive people to the product page, the relevant area in an online storefront or any other conversion point you wish.

This helps connect the circle. You run connected cross network campaigns that link to all your marketing channels with a hashtag as the mechanisms to group the conversation. You challenge people with tactics like a hashtag competition to get them to create social content and then you select the best of that, feature it on your website and make it ‘shoppable’. For example, as a clothes retailer this could be getting customers to share a picture of them wearing recent purchases of a new range you’ve just launched. Then the best images from Instagram & Twitter could be featured on your website and clickable to an ecommerce environment where other web visitors can purchase that product. This approach will help you directly benefit from the increased reach and higher levels of engagement you get when you make your website fit for the social consumer.

Guest post by Richard Jones, CEO and Co-founder of EngageSciences

The post Connecting social content to sales in four simple steps appeared first on Technorati.


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