Facebook's new smart speaker, LinkedIn's re-built Pages, Twitter cracking down on "suspicious" follows, $100 billion worth of digital ad spend and the UK increasing festive ad spending in 2018

Social media platforms have made some interesting announcements over the next month. From re-building a part of the platform from the ground up to help improve engagement to launching smart speakers. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are all in our weekly news roundup once again. We're also exploring the success of digital ad spend so far this year, showing that traditional forms of advertising are taking a back seat to social media and video. Of course, we can't get away from taking a look at Christmas advertising, especially with the John Lewis advert being released this week. It seems that Christmas ad spending in the UK is getting a boost as the high street hopes to increase footfall. Find out more by reading five of the…

Social media strategy and planning essentials series

This is part 6 of my Smart Insights 12 part social media series. In the last part we looked at the role of content in social media; in this blog, I discuss how social needs to work as part of your overall marketing plan, not in isolation.

The role of a marketing calendar

Most organisations have a marketing calendar that outlines the key campaigns for the year, typically broken down into monthly cycles. As with the content calendar, I discussed in the previous article, this helps define the big campaigns, the key messages, promotions, CTAs and the channels through which they will be delivered. Social media needs to align with this calendar. Typically the most successful campaigns are executed across multiple channels simultaneously, promoting the same core message, albeit with a slightly different execution in each channel e.g. paid search campaigns typically use product and offer…

Social media strategy and planning essentials series

This is part 5 of my Smart Insights 12 part social media series. In the last part, we looked at the role of organic vs paid social media and touched on the importance of content. In this blog, I discuss a sensible way to approach content planning for your social media channels. Social media networks support multiple content formats and there has been rapid growth in the use of interactive formats, for example, carousel ads on Facebook. This flexibility of format (text, image, multi-image, video, carousel etc.) gives marketers the ability to experiment with different types of content to gauge how best to attract and engage social users. If people are the heartbeat of social media, content is the blood. It’s your content that people see and respond to, and that communicates your values and messages. But what content works? How do you plan what to…

Social media strategy and planning essentials

It’s important to know what other organisations in your market are doing on social media, to give you context for the current role social plays in customer communication. The aim of competitor analysis is to learn from the state of play and identify strategic opportunities. Please note that I also advocate researching the wider market to learn what works from brands that have a respected social presence. They may not be directly relevant to you in terms of content or product, but the techniques and social platform tools they use to engage customers should provide useful insight. This article looks at the types of competitor analysis you can and should be doing to help inform your social media strategy.

1. Audit scope of competitor activity

Your goal is to build a clear picture of how other organisations are currently using social media. This needs someone to spend time on…

Creating your social media strategy and tactical plan

Noun: Strategy / A plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim. First, you need to understand what a strategy is, and isn’t it. A strategy should define the main aim of your social media presence and set the parameters for what it will deliver and how it will be delivered. It will be supported by a tactical plan that defines how the strategy will be delivered, including the channels, resource and budgets to achieve it. [si_guide_block id="82119" title="Download our Free Resource – 10 common social media marketing mistakes" description="Avoid the pitfalls that limit engagement with your target audience by taking a look at our Free guide on some of the most common social media mistakes."/] Tip – ensure your strategy is no more than 3-4 pages long. A strategy has to be concise and provide the governing principles that guide the plan.

1…

Real world examples of a range of platforms that help land & expand

‘Social’ is an absolute phenomenon. Apparently, if Facebook was a nation, it would have more people than China. Serious scale to say the least. In today’s world, it’s not whether your ideal audiences are on social media, but a question of where they are. When we see life through an account-based marketing (ABM) lens, we want to work with as many of our target accounts as possible. That’s what it’s all about. So if organisations you want to onboard are there - you need to be there. If you don’t grab the opportunity, you can bet your bottom dollar your competition will - so get to it!

[si_guide_block id="118739" title="Download our Premium Resource – Account-Based Marketing best practices guide " description="Learn practical techniques, using relevant tools, to launch or improve an ABM programme."/]

Hello account-based social

Account-based social can be defined…

Developing a Joined Up Approach to your Social Media and Customer Communications

In this post I show how we use different tools and plugins for our different social platforms to let software services take some of the key pounding out of online publishing. Here is my summary of our process and the tools we use. We're always interested to learn about new tools or other approaches, so let us know if you have other suggestions.

The diagram shows the approach we use on Smart Insights to support content sharing across the main social networks while minimising the resource needed. We aim to publish two to three posts daily as a target, balancing advice and updates on major developments in digital marketing. These are posted to our blog and then we use tagging of topics in different categories to surface the advice in…

6 questions your boss will ask about social media automation (and how to win them over)

Engagement is the name of the game in running a successful social media campaign. Customers are 20-40% more likely to spend money on products coming from brands that engage with them on social media. However, responding to comments and messages left behind by potential customers can quickly consume a huge chunk of your time. On top of this, running a successful social marketing campaign involves carrying out tasks that are repetitive. Here are 8 statistics to prove the worth of social media marketing: It is for this reason why more and more businesses are using marketing automation tools to run their social media marketing campaigns. As its name suggests, these are software programs that handle many of the time-consuming tasks involved in running a successful social media campaign. By…

Ever found yourself stuck in a dilemma while posting images on social media?

A crisp shot posted on Facebook may appear to be of a terrible quality on Twitter, and that’s just two of the many different social channels out there.

While content marketing focuses primarily on the quality of content, the quality of additional assets, such as the feature images and video links should be equally scrutinized. These assets should compliment the textual content, instead of detracting from it. A blurry image may put the user off of your content entirely, as they might question the overall quality of the link.

If you can’t make the effort of presenting your audience with decent quality content, why should they make the effort of consuming it?

[si_guide_block id="85104" title="Download our Free Resource – Top 10 common content marketing mistakes" description="With so much content being produced,…

An outline of creative best practices across YouTube, Facebook and Twitter

The social media landscape may be constantly changing but one element remains consistent: content is king. However whilst content itself may be an essential component of any social media strategy, the creative formats and best practices for each platform are often quite different and not always transferable across one another. There are many helpful guides, blog posts and resources to help digital marketers stay on track but I thought it worthwhile highlighting some of key creative best practices for YouTube, Facebook and Twitter in the form of a quick, bullet-point checklist. This is by no means a definitive list but hopefully a decent top-level guide and primer for anyone new to producing social creative. [si_guide_block id="5768" title="Social media marketing strategy guide" description="Take your social media marketing strategy to the next level with our Premium-level guide. You'll learn how to…