Olivia is recognized for her knowledge of marketing and branding in China; she was featured in Forbes and grew a WeChat account from 2,000 to 5,500 followers in just 6 months.

Today she shares with Coachify her top seven tips on using WeChat as a branding tool.

1. WeChat is a chatting app: engage, tell a story.

Branding in China is becoming more popular. In China or in Hong Kong when you are outside there are bright neons and signs everywhere. However, people are not paying attention to that, they don’t read advertisements on the windows anymore – everyone is looking at their phone. Especially young, Chinese consumers nowadays want to disconnect from all the noise of advertisement.

We are getting so focused on telling our own stories and getting involved in other people stories – just look at your WeChat moments. Why would brands be not doing it? Why would brand not tell their stories to better connect with people? The key question is: how can brands better connect with their customers?

Storytelling and personalization are the answers. WeChat is a chatting app, people are expecting it to be interactive, and personalized, that’s what they crave from this platform. They expect to receive content that they can relate to and connect with on a personal level. Elijah Whaley, CMO at PARKLU makes a great point in this article about the digital consumer in China – your WeChat, and other mobile channels for that matter, should be fun, engaging and useful.

2. Make it about people.

Data from Tencent shows that people prefer to see and share content about their lives and those close to them. Reach out to your community, your coworkers, your customers and get them involved.

One of the most popular articles posted from the FitFam account was an article announcing an event in partnership with a women’s active wear brand. The article highlighted many of the reasons why people find the community so special, and what the core values mean to many of the young women in the community. It reached people on a personal, and emotional level, and ended with a call to action. It also included user-generated content in the form of photos that were taken of actual members of the community.

Other well-performing content comes from the FitFam partnership with Creative Humans writer Eduoard Bellin who interviews members of the FitFam community in-depth. These stories provide a window into the life of a friend, a workout partner – someone that people feel connected to and have an interest in learning about because he/she is part of their daily life.

3. KOLs are a must.

This is especially true for B2C brands. KOLs or influencers are a key strategy for many brands. They’ve amassed their followers through blogging, thought-leadership, as well as leveraging their celebrity status. KOLs are usually well-trusted and have a much more personal relationship with their fans. As this Boston Consulting Group article states; In China, shopping is about more than just the transaction. It’s about entertainment, discovery, and social engagement with friends, celebrities, and internet influencers. 

Chinese consumers trust influencers, and are not as put-off by sponsored content as much as their Western counterparts. In fact, many KOLs have done such a good job building up their fan base and making a niche for themselves that many have their own online stores on Taobao and Tmall where they are making millions selling products.

Make sure you set the right expectations in terms of your budget  and do your research carefully before selecting a KOL to work with your brand.

4. Look at the bigger picture.

I see many international brands coming into China and they have no idea what WeChat is, but they want it. The fact is that marketers need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. What’s your WeChat strategy? What do you want to achieve on WeChat?

WeChat is not going to be your magic solution. It is not going to solve your brand awareness problem, it is not going to make your brand instantly ‘localized’ – this is what your messaging and brand positioning is for. Once you have a WeChat account, you can’t just start posting the same content as you are on Facebook and Instagram (more on this later) and expect to achieve results, even if you brand is well-known.

How you will measure success apart of number of followers? With follower acquisition growing increasingly competitive, look at other metrics such as number of views and shares. If you have 10,000 followers but no one is sharing your content, you do not have an effective WeChat account.

5. Give people a reason to follow you.

There are well over 10 million official accounts, QR codes are everywhere, but people are not just going to scan and follow your account willy-nilly. What is your account going to do for them? Just pushing out content for the sake of raising brand awareness is not enough. How can your account serve a purpose? Can you provide some sort of weekly or monthly roundup, or showcase special deals only available on certain days, is there a menu item that can serve a purpose such as a weekly event schedule or interactive H5 animation describing your business?

6. WeChat is not Facebook or Instagram.

For one, WeChat is much more closed off. Official Accounts do not enjoy the same visibility as brands on Facebook and Instagram have. If you want your content and your account to be seen by people who are not yet following you, your content must be shared by a follower on his/her Moments feed or sent in a message to personal contacts.

There are also more limitations for interacting with your followers, however some third-party CRM platforms  can provide help with this. These limitations make it even more important to create quality content.

7. Plan your resources accordingly.

Who will manage your WeChat account? How you will connect it with your other social media channels and your website? Who can help you? Do you know what the workload looks like to put an effective, visually appealing article on WeChat?

Who will develop your content? Will you be doing your copywriting in house or will it be outsourced? Will you need translation? What about graphics and styling? All of these questions will help you determine how much you should be budgeting for your WeChat in terms of time and money. Don’t even apply for your WeChat account before you can answer these questions.

Picture Credit: Olivia Plotnick , ChinaChannel, FitFam, WalktheChat

Read on to learn how the recruiters, HR and employer branding specialists from the different parts of the world generate stronger candidates’ pipelines by using content marketing and storytelling.

1.Introduce Social Media / LinkedIn Training

 Did you know that employees have 10 times more connections on average than a company has followers? To leverage your employees personal brand and network introduce Social Media / LinkedIn training.

For example, Dell’s HR strategy including social media training resulted in higher quality hires, lower turnover and better engagement rates for Dell.

“We have trained to date over 16,000 employees! We also train our summer interns as part of their development and introduction to Dell. The biggest success is the ongoing focus on the program including monthly power hours by topic (how to deal with trolls, what is the deal with SnapChat, etc.) as well as the revisiting and updating of the content. The opportunity we have is to continue to have executives model this activity and behaviour.” – says Jennifer Jones Newbill, Senior Manager, Global Candidate Attraction, Engagement and Experience at Dell.

Click HERE to read our case study About social media and recruiting with Jennifer Jones Newbill from Dell.

2.  Empower your employees to tell the story about the company

Of course, they need to love their work in a first place, and the post should come from them, you cannot simply order a praising article. Readers will only spend their precious time on reading and sharing authentic stories. Pay attention to employees who already blog or vlog. Often those who relocate will be interested in documenting they journey.

3. Enchant your staff

Delight the staff with a small gesture or help when it is not expected, for example offering them flexible work arrangements or even showing that you listen, and you care:

“When you enchant people, your goal is not make money from them or get them to do what you want, but to fill them with delight.”

“(…) in a world of mass media, social media, and advertising media, it takes more than instant shallow, and temporary relationships to get the job done.”

Guy Kawasaki, Enchantment

4. Communicate your innovative HR policies

Challenge yourself (and your top management) to introduce a HR policy that could be shared as an interesting story.

Impossible? Here is the update from BrewDog:

“Thrilled to find out today that BrewDog have been shortlisted as a finalist in the 2018 Scottish Top Employers for Working Families Awards, in the ‘Best for Innovation’ category, for our Pawternity Leave initiative! (…)”

Seems standard but wait, did they misspell “paternity”? Or…

5. Measure success on your LinkedIn company page

Even if your company already has its LinkedIn page, you might strongly consider setting up a new page for your geographical region.

A simple company page is free yet give you some visitor demographics and some invaluable metric tools such as updates engagement and followers acquired in a specific month, week or even day.

Followers acquired are only included for sponsored updates. You could still measure the success of your organic (not paid) updates, by looking at the followers acquired on a given day if you post no more than one update per day.

This article was inspired by the companies and experts from Scotland, Germany, Czech Republic, Australia, and China.

What are your favorite company updates or ideas for using LinkedIn as employer branding tool? Reach out on LinkedIn or Facebook; we would love to hear about the examples from other countries.

Beata Dziedzic

Mirco, as a Big Data geek with a Ph.D. degree in Mathematics, how do you see social media transform in the next 5-10 years from now?

Great question to start off  Dagmara! I think we should always begin with a touch of SF, because quite often what some mavericks are dreaming about now, becomes reality later. Social media means media which are social, media that are embedded in the very tissue of the social web. Now, where is the social web and where is it going?

I believe that the plumbing has already been done, we have plenty of large scales social communities. We also have small dedicated communities, we have various types of communication tools, we have, in a word, the proper infrastructure. But something is still lacking, isn’t it?

What is lacking is true SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE. By this I mean: just like there is a logical intelligence, there is a social one. Not many people are social intelligence geniuses, to be sure, and yet without it not much happens in one’s life, because social intelligence drives success. 

So, here is my little piece of SF: I dream that very soon there will be another Social Web, let us say Social Web 3.0, which looks and feel like the existing one but with a glaring difference – it is smart. In this social web on steroids, people will get together, form teams, virtual ventures. All of that thanks to some help from the embedded social intelligence. It goes without saying that this would drastically impact social media and social advertisement as well. Highly focused communities would also demand highly focused media….

Will the social media 3.0 allow people with scarce social intelligence to do the work for them? Also, it is interesting that you see the future of social media 3.0 as a collaboration tool. Would not that be just another LinkedIn or Slack on steroids? Just another networking tool?

We definitely need a layer of intelligence on top of the existing social web to form a team of collaborators. I am not suggesting that a machine is better than humans at assessing whether some fellow is the right one to cover some new role in a team, but the machine could act as an advisor. I would not like machines to replace my judgment, but I would like machines to expand my possibilities. Imagine I need someone for my team who is extremely smart, knows how to speak Farsi and Icelandic, has a record of traveling in off-the-road destinations, and has a passion for new projects. What is my chance to find such a fellow now? Very slim, right? So, why not have a little help? There is another dimension involved. This is not a battle humans vs machine. Humans could recommend people too, and perhaps the machine would learn from them…

That is why you decided to build a platform that will enable it?

The platform, that I am building right now, is a “gaming platform”, in a sense. The chief difference is that instead of letting you play in an alternate world, it tries to turn you into a superhero in this one. Most of us live an unnecessarily boring life because we dream and leave our dreams in our closet. Why not add a little spice by being able to post your dreams adventures or join other’s dreams and team up with other superheroes? That is precisely what I want for the Social Web 3.0.

You mentioned that the Social Web 3.0 will impact social advertising. What is the biggest challenge while using social media for advertising and the way to overcome it?

The biggest challenge is that we are completely drowning in information: everywhere we are bombarded with ads, brochures, emails. The only way to mitigate this miserable state of affair is to provide value, highly specific value, to the individuals. If you shoot me an ad, most likely I do not want to hear it, but if you know what I am after and you leverage this knowledge by assisting me in MY objectives things are quite different.

On the other hand, retargeted ads can be pretty helpful. But, let’s drop the topic of ads and let’s get into something more entertaining. You mentioned that our lives are quite boring. What about viral content? It makes our life more exciting, or at least more fun. Getting viral is what everyone secretly dreams about, but they don’t want to admit it at loud. What do you think it takes to achieve viral growth? What could be the key variables that drive viral growth?

The paper which I have coauthored with my fellow researchers at Chapman University partially answers the question: to become viral it means to become like a virus. Viruses go from place to place in the body, being hosted not only by single cells but by entire organs. We essentially found a math model of virality which involves leveraging groups and communities instead of single individuals, to spread information around. To be sure, our research is simply a modest step in the right direction, we need more sophistication to provide a better representation of virality. But using interest groups and active web communities to spread your “virus” is certainly a great way to begin.

If the information is like a virus, looks like we should start spreading info locally, to the people that are close to us in a strictly geographical sense (but they are not our friends like on Facebook), and let them share the info to everyone globally.  Do you see a potential in it, in a tool where everyone can share anything they like, but there are no other rules involved?

The beauty of the social web as it already operates now is that the notion of the locality has undergone great changes. When I grew up, several centuries ago, what was the chance of having a talk with you about social life? Close to zero. Now my nephews, who live in Milano, have friends in Spain or … China. Therefore, virality can take different clothes… however, having said that, there are certain types of information which must be spread locally, for the very simple reason that they are intrinsically local: why should I broadcast to the entire world the news that the guy next door offers the best pizza and a jazz concert for an incredible price? A guy in Peru could not care less…as for the second part of your question, I think we should have themes, channels through which information flows. I am not a big fan of Twitter’s model.

Neither am I. It’s way too messy and requires a constant time commitment. Mirco, if you were on a mission to predict the popularity of pieces of information that spread through the social media networks, where would you start?

Going back to the previous answer, I would try to understand which paths this piece of information follows to spread, and what is the relevance for folks and communities which dwell on mileposts along this path. Example: Suppose you try to spread some news about a service. You want to hit ONLY groups and folks for which this service could be intriguing, right? Nobody spreads info if they do not think it is “cool” and valuable…

Sure thing. But what is the probability to detect information big stories before they even happen?

It is extremely difficult to predict the future, especially where the human element is heavily involved. However, IF (big if!) I knew a lot about the folks and groups which receive this information, for instance, their tastes, goals, dislikes, then something can be predicted, especially if I do have a track record of previous scenarios.

Even if we knew the tastes, goals, dislikes, likes, interests of everyone in the earth, there are still many external factors that can mess your equation up. Is there anything certain about social media at all?

True, indeed the variables are almost infinite. But, as I have already said, I do not like Hal 9000 type of AI. I rather prefer Jarvis, the AI advisor of Tony Stark in Iron Man: Jarvis advises me, but I decide. If it makes mistakes, it will learn to adjust.

Using data and identifying new opportunities for unlocking it requires creativity. Could you give us an example of a product or a service that used creativity to bring data to the next level and unlocked its potential?

The obvious thing that comes to mind is Youtube. Not a rocket scientist type of technology, by any means,  but one that has changed radically many aspects of our life: we can post anything, opinions, products tests, news, personal journeys. A video which is on your computer is your video, a video that is on Youtube is humanity’s video…a big difference.

There are plenty of tools on the market that helps identify the most influential authors (influencers), but after finding the right ones for your product or niche, the question emerges: How do we minimize the risk of not getting enough brand exposure, engagement or leads from this cooperation? We cannot be sure that our content will resonate well with the audience. What data would you be searching for to maximize the success of the cooperation with an influencer?

With a partner in crime, I have been working hard at a new platform to do exactly what you ask for. To be more precise, and going back to the previous part of this interview, I do not believe that getting the influencers on your side is enough. You need to also catch groups and communities for which what you want to sell is relevant, and communities have a life of their own. So, whereas as you said there are plenty of tools which are aimed at individuals who are “hubs” in the social web, this perspective is a bit too skewed toward single individuals.

You mentioned that community has a life on its own, can you share more details here…?

A community to me is like a collective mind: we are the neurons, but the whole has an intelligence of its own. It is the same everywhere: a single cell is one thing, an organ quite another. This is extremely important to understand if we really want to unravel the mysteries of the social web: if we stick to the view of the cell, we miss the organs…

Any golden tip for social media managers out there on achieving a consistent analytical approach?

Hire people, who understand both analytical tools and what these managers are trying to get. 

What is the one social media metric you would die to measure, but no one out there came up with a solution yet?

How much what we offer aligns with what people really want.

 I would risk a statement that people often times don’t know what they want…they search for one thing, but end up using or doing something completely different. People are irrational, don’t you agree?

You are right, but my measure is not what they want now, rather: after you show it to them, they like it or not? People are very bad at figuring out what they want before they see it but quite good at deciding what they like after they have played with it.

Information overload is killing our productivity. You have plenty of projects on your plate and you are surely a busy man. How do you achieve a better quality of information and remove the noise?

I will be honest with you: I was never good at that, I am someone who begins 1000 things and completes 2-3. But recently things have changed for me, simply because I realized (finally!) the truth: I do not have much time, nobody has, we barely have the time to do what we need and truly wish to do, and send everything else to hell.

…so, prioritizing.

 Do not let information drive you, any information,  drive your life and use the right info to go where you want to go.

How do you see the role of AI in data mining?

Well, the fact is, little by little we will let machines do the dirty job. Data sets are huge and complicated, so this is bound to happen (in fact, it is already happening). But I do not see the role of humans as something that is going to die anytime soon: humans are still needed to create new ways to model data, to make sense of what machines will find. Let us say that I am here an optimist: instead of substituting humans, I like to think of future AI as expanding our cognitive powers. But maybe I am a tad too optimistic. Time will tell.

They say that failures make us stronger. Could you share with us one of your failures and what did you learn from it?

There was a project I started in 2009 called MergingPot, the ancestor of this new thing. I spent a considerable amount of time building it, putting it on FB as an app, but eventually it died. Why? Truth is, I had no clue how to run a start-up, how to prioritize, how to engage people, and also my timing was not right. In fact, everything was wrong EXCEPT the core idea, which was way ahead of time. Now, if I was a complete fool, I would give up. Far from it…I always loved the hero who has been beaten up  to a pulp and yet makes a last comeback

Do you want more blood? I could go on forever. What is more interesting is WHY I failed. Chiefly by lack of consistency: when you start something, you MUST complete it, no matter what.

 Ouch! You even don’t know how much I agree with you on that one…thanks for sharing!

And of course,  thank you a ton for the interview, Mirco!

Thank you Dagmara! I had a lot of fun.

Tony, I am sure you know that one of the biggest struggles of every social media manager is to prove their impact on the company’s ROI. Can you give us an example of a campaign that is beautifully linked to return on investment?

A great example of showing the ROI of a social media campaign comes from one of Microsoft’s partners Cisco who saved $100K. While most companies spend big bucks for product launches on things like flying execs from all over the world they did the entire thing online. Here is the link to the case study. I encourage all in the social media industry to check it out!

Thanks for the link Tony. Also, can you share a proven method of retaining follower base and the way of measuring the retention rate?

Your followers will always ebb and flow. The trick to retaining them is to ask them what THEY find most interesting on your social channels. You can get immediate answers by conducting bi-weekly polls. This will provide the guidance you need to create the right content followers will keep coming back for! The way I measure retention is through weekly reporting. A part of these reports shows how many followers we gain/loss on each channel. To get this data you can use social media tools such as Sprinklr or the analytics each platform has to offer.

What is the biggest challenge in a social media manager’s job and the way to overcome it?

The biggest challenge I face is keeping up with the number of new social platforms introduced every day! Actually, tech advancements are exciting; the challenge is determining which are necessary to your organization’s success. The way to overcome this challenge is to really know what your audience demographics look like and to start off with the main social platforms you know have the most users like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Utilize the analytics each of these platforms offers to build audience profiles and based on what you find expand your platforms accordingly.

They say that failures make us stronger. Can you give us an example of one of your failures, experienced during your career in social media. What did you learn from it?

Sorry, I have no examples, I’m the bomb! Just joking, of course, we all fail at some point it’s coming up with quick solutions that make us truly successful. Early in my career, I actually had a hard time learning about the voice of the company. I was a budding social media personality in my own right and thought that my voice was universal… Not the case! My failure was that I didn’t learn enough about how the company spoke to its audience members before taking the job. I mastered it thanks to a supportive management team and a determination to get it right. Thankfully, I became great at speaking for a number of Fortune 500 companies including the one I work for now Microsoft!

My takeaway for social media managers (and community managers) would be to visit the social platforms of the companies they want to work for and get to know how they speak and what message they are looking to get across. Being the “voice” of an organization is a huge responsibility, what you say can affect how people view your company for better or worse.

How do you define the success of a non-quantitative social media activity?

It’s all about audience reaction. Knowing what I post brings joy to the audience for me is a true success even if it cannot be quantified by measurable standards. I like to create fun graphics and make jokes with audience members though these actions don’t produce sales or even tons of likes/shares. It’s the comments back of “you made my day” or “thank you” that makes what I do extra special.

Any golden tip on achieving a consistent analytical approach?

A consistent analytical approach always begins with a question. Was our promotion successful? Did today’s post resonate with the audience? Therefore, my golden tip is to be ok asking “why”. You have to be open to asking and thinking about how things occur. It’s the basis behind all analytics. So don’t be afraid to ask questions, they spark a deeper conversation that eventually leads to answers.

What is the one social media metric you would die to measure, but no one out there came up with a solution yet?

I really do not have an answer for this one. Almost everything can be measured on social these days. Once you master the tools available and really understand the importance of data analytics you can find any answer you’re looking for.

Are you using any social media management tools you cannot live without?

Oh yeah! Sprinklr is essential for what I do. I can set up listening queues, reports and of course engage with audiences on this tool. It’s easy to use and new features (like little bird-which can be used for influencer identification) are constantly added. If you aren’t using it I suggest you give it a try.

Can you share with us your process of coming up with a social media strategy? What is the most difficult phase of a strategy?

There are a number of steps to building a solid social media strategy my top three tips:

1. Create obtainable goals: Outline what you looking to do. Are looking to increase traffic, mentions, etc. A strong social media plan starts with know what the goals are and once established the fun part of how they can be achieved begins!

2. Find out who you want to be your audience: Your message needs to resonate with audiences for it to be successful. Identify where your industries audience behaviors, demographics, and interests lie. It is a lot of research but obviously worth it! Quick tip: You can find some of these answers by looking at social platforms in your industry and seeing who follows them and what content types they interact with the most.
3. Identify what channels will work best: There are a number of social platforms to choose from but what they offer may not fit with you organizations goals of reaching out to identified audiences. Learn which platforms are essential for business and will have the demographic you are looking to capitalize on.

 Step 3 is the most difficult phase of a strategy because each platforms functionalities change often so my suggestion is to be open and fluid to change. Do not be afraid to add other platforms as long as you have the bandwidth in place to support them properly.

Your biggest social media inspiration and social media guru everyone should learn from is…

I actually have two. CEO of Thrive Arianna Huffington (ariannahuff) and growing social star and host of the MPN Podcast Rachel Braunstein (@rkbraunstein). Both of these powerful women share great tips you need to know to propel your career and enrich your daily life. I love learning and both Arianna and Rachel provide guidance that is relatable to everyone. If you aren’t following them I strongly encourage that you do!

Thanks for that one. I read the book of Arianna Huffington, but I definitely need to check out the podcasts of Rachel Braunstein. Let’s talk about social media QA. Testing and innovation are an important part of every social manager’s job. Can you share your hit and miss of 2017?

My HIT of 2017 is Brand24 a FREE platform (with a paid component depending on your needs) allows you to perform deep analysis on a number of social media functions. I utilize it for event hashtag tracking. It is a must try. My MISS of 2017 would be underestimating the power of custom graphics. We are a visual society and people really respond to colorful and slightly graphics on social. Custom graphics are the main part of my social planning and essential to the continuous growth of the platforms I am responsible for.

What is the newest social media trend you would love to explore more?

Live video is taking off. All of the top social media platforms are providing avenues for users to live stream more than ever. It’s immediate and in many ways a more impactful way to get messages across. I have LOTS of video coming up soon for both Microsoft and for my personal brand so stay tuned!

What is your process and mentality around taking ideas, prioritizing & testing them efficiently, validating, and then feeding the learning back into the process?

I am an A/B tester. Everything that comes my way I want to know how it works, will it work and how it will be implemented. I am open to ideas but before they are presented to the field I want to make sure it’s something that they want and will enjoy. Do not be afraid to do beta testing with select audiences. The information collection is invaluable for success.

One DO and one DON’T for creating a meaningful growth in social media would be….?

Do: Like as many people on social platforms as you can.

Don’t: Over follow! Follow people you know will follow you back and help you promote your posts. As your social media platforms grow then you can start following verified accounts that may follow back in turn.

And the last but not least: what would be your 2017 social media tip?

My 2017 social media tip: Identify your TOP INFLUENCERS and utilize them to the fullest. Influencers are essential messengers you need to get your words in front of audiences you may not have direct access to. Engage with them as much as you can (once they are identified) and do not hesitate to reach out to them when you need specific posts amplified.

Thank you for the interview!

Numbers tend to be a true Achilles heel for plenty of fellow social media managers, but you definitely don’t shy from numbers as a research assistant, helping out in data gathering and analysis. Can you give us an example of a campaign that was beautifully linked to ROI? 

A lot of the time, I try to look for inexpensive ways to gather data. In my experience, few companies want to allocate a higher budget to social media, or media in general. So through freely available tools such as built-in media platform post/campaign monitoring tools, or even better: using Google Analytics really helps a lot. There are freely available courses on how to use such tools that I recommend everyone take advantage of. The only shortcoming of Google Analytics is its inability to monitor social media, however, I found that most platforms have their own tools available.

At the moment the best example of ROI in my experience was when I first started experimenting with social media and analytics. I ran my own advertisement on Twitter, and quickly learned all of my mistakes in the ad campaign through the Twitter analysis interface. I remember making the silly mistake of including too many, hardly relevant, keywords in the campaign thinking that as long as it reaches more people, it would be better. That was a wrong approach. After adjusting my keywords, I had gained a lot more followers and traffic to my main website at the time. Ever since then, I’ve been using the tools to find the best posting times for my particular audiences, as well as see what posts interest them the most and look for ways to make them more frequent.

Can you share a proven method of retaining follower base and the way of measuring the retention rate?

In my experience, the best way of getting a steady follower base is by finding a niche topic that you like to post about and stick to it. I have found too many blogs try and post a variety of content targeted at a varied audience. However, that tends to confuse the brand identity more so than gain more followers. For example, an account that posts only flowers will be more successful than an account that posts about flowers, cooking, and cars. People look for specialization. And of course, being engaging with the audience, and posting frequently enough and on a set day of the week/month is important.

The best way to measure retention rate would be through Google Analytics or that particular platforms available tools. I like to look at the numbers for returning users to see if I have decent retention rates. However, when using Google Analytics for this, remember to exempt the IP address from your work and home to not confuse results!

What is the biggest challenge in a social media manager’s job and the way to overcome it?

Being on time with posts. It is important to post content at the same time/day so that followers get used to when new content comes up! However, life happens and sometimes we can forget to run a post for the day. I believe it is important to have at least 2 people on social media for that reason. Someone who can pick up the slack on occasion, and generate content when you simply cannot. At my job, I was lucky to have very helpful coworkers who sent me content whenever I was sick so that I could prepare posts from home.

They say that failures make us stronger. Can you give us an example of one of your failures, experienced during your career in social media. What did you learn from it?

I have already mentioned some failures in my previous answers, such as:

• Using too many and irrelevant keywords
• Missing a post date/time

But another failure would be sticking to the same type of content for too long. Interests evolve and that is another reason why it is important to monitor the performance of your posts. You need to be able to evolve with the interests. For a long time, I’ve stuck to posting the same content on Tuesdays because it was just something we always did at NYIT Career Services. However, recently we realized that post was not being clicked! And so I found another type of content to feature in its stead and it has been much more popular with the audience.

How do you define the success of a non-quantitative social media activity?

Since my accounts were not extremely large, it was enough to peruse the mentions under the hashtag we used, or simply look at the comments that were made on certain posts. The cool thing about social media is that it is a two-way communication street! You can reply to people and engage with your own audience. One of the coolest things a brand can do is actually reply and/or address any concerns a follower has. It shows that you listen and that you care.

This approach might be a lot more difficult if you have a larger account. For those accounts, there are software’s available such as Sysomos Listen – Audience Heartbeat. There is a demo available for it, but I believe the full version needs to be paid for. This app allows you to track mentions of your brand. This will help you gauge the overall feeling that the audience has toward your brand and see what is being said about you. You can use that information to adjust in response to those concerns.

Any golden tip on achieving a consistent analytical approach?

I think the best tip for anyone starting out in social media is to stick to it. No matter what, keep posting daily/weekly. A lot of the time, we give up because we are not achieving immediate success with our blogs or media accounts, but that takes time.

The best ANALYTICAL tip I can give is to really invest in Google Analytics. Take the time to get certified in it – it is free. You will get an immense amount of data from it. Use it weekly to monitor your traffic/posts. Use that as a tool to experiment with new approaches and gauge their success.

What is the one social media metric you would die to measure, but no one out there came up with a solution yet?

This would be impossible to measure but I would love to know how many people click on my content because they like it, rather than because they want me to click on their content in exchange. You would see a lot of that happening on Instagram especially. People would comment things like: “Love your art! Please check out mine too!” Which makes you wonder if they only clicked for a click back.

Are you using any social media management tools you cannot live without?

Personally, at the moment no. Though I have used Latergram and Hootsuite in the past. Latergram was a cool tool, but its major fault is that it doesn’t let you set up an auto-post. You still have to be the one to wake up and push the button for it to work!

Can you share with us your process of coming up with a social media strategy? What is the most difficult phase of a strategy?

Knowing your own limits. Sometimes you set out to do too much. This is especially true if you work alone or in a very small team for a very large company. There are many things we WANT to do but cannot, because of time. One such example was how I used to go out, interview and photograph students on campus for our own little version of “Humans of NYIT” post. However, overtime it became difficult to manage due to time constraints.

It is hard to plan for future problems, but you need to try and have the foresight to see what might end up being too much in the future.

Your biggest social media inspiration and social media guru everyone should learn from is…

This may sound cliché but I would say Buzzfeed. Their content is always colorful and engaging and a lot of that is due to them hiring very colorful personalities. They juggle multiple topics but they do it right by using appropriate categories. They are very good at staying on top of latest trends, and they know what their users want to see.

Testing and innovation are an important part of every social manager’s job. Can you share what trends would you like to explore? 

360 click through photographs. Very cool idea, but only if you have a great camera and a cool photo to take. 360 photographs are a novelty that I feel need to be combined with some storytelling. There has to be a plot to the photo. However, 360 videos speak for themselves a lot more than a photo and I really love those. I feel that more brands should try and explore the possibilities of 360 photos/videos.

Another feature that I would love to explore in the future as it is not so readily available yet is Virtual Reality. Specifically, Facebook Spaces. I do not own a VR headset yet, and it is to my understanding that you cannot advertise in Facebook Spaces yet anyway. Though nothing has been said about Spaces being used for advertising, I believe that as with most mediums, eventually it will be open to advertising and I am wondering what that would look like.

What is your process and mentality around taking ideas, prioritizing & testing them efficiently, validating, and then feeding the learning back into the process?

I get inspired by a lot of random things throughout the day: music, shows, games…etc. Once I get an idea, I prioritize them according to how excited I am about implementing them. If I have several ideas I would like to test out, I give each of them about a week or two to test run on their own to monitor their performance (It could sometimes take up to a week for results to accurately show in analytics) before implementing the next. Depending on the performance of each, I judge whether or not it is worth it to keep them active. Then in the future, if an idea has similar specs as a previous one that had not worked then I will probably be less excited about testing it.

I base a lot of this on feeling, but that feeling is based on how I imagine the idea to work which is heavily rooted in past experience with similar ideas. It is visualizing its performance first, then implement.

One DO and one DON’T while creating a meaningful growth in social media.

I have seen a lot of accounts promise follows for a follow-back. I do not believe that creates meaningful growth in social media as it only gains you followers who are interested in their own content rather than yours. When looking for meaningful growth you want your followers to be there for your content out of interest for it. The most important factors in creating meaningful growth are:

• Great content

• Engaging and responsive community

If you create a community around your content, the numbers (followers) will follow. Remember to stay true to your own brand identity and do not let numbers scare you into conforming into something you did not want to be in the first place. To summarize:

DO: stay true to your original identity

DO NOT: promise follow-backs for follows

And the last but not least: what would be your 2017 social media tip?

This will sound corny but: Passion.

Love what you are talking about, and the world will love it with you. Do not post things you do not agree with. People can see through lies a lot more easily these days than in the past. Authenticity is key.

Thank you for the interview!

Lindsay Scarpello is currently working as a Social Media Manager at Omaha Steaks and today we will be asking her about the strategic approach to social media, social media ROI, most important metrics, trends, and inspirations.

Social media is a rough business. What is the biggest challenge in a social media manager’s job and the way to overcome it?

I think the biggest challenge is staying abreast of all of the new trends and how customers are engaging with content. Snapchat (and now, Instagram Stories) is the perfect example of something that came in, disrupted the way we thought people wanted to consume content, and is now a dominant medium on social.

Can you share a proven method of retaining follower base and the way of measuring the retention rate?

Good content. That’s it, really. That’s the secret. Create and share good content.

They say that failures make us stronger. Can you give us an example of one of your failures, experienced during your career in social media. What did you learn from it?

Good question. I think my best example of failure in my role has been when I ran social for a (now out of business) futures trading company. That company experienced a huge public mistake that drove away customers, which eventually led the company’s demise and their being bought and absolved by another company.

Before that, though, during the mistake period, my bosses told me not to respond to angry customers on social media. I knew in my gut that this was the exact opposite of a solid PR crisis strategy, but I didn’t press the issue or try to convince my bosses otherwise. Anyway, my position (and many others) was eventually eliminated due to the company going under, but I still wonder if I had countered my bosses’ ideas with a solid social strategy, where I’d be today. I’m ultimately happy because I moved on and have had a good career, but it’s still interesting to think about.

How do you define the success of a non-quantitative social media activity?

I’m not sure there isn’t a non-quantitative way to define the success of a social activity. Vanity metrics like impressions or reach aren’t much when it comes to proving sales value, but they’re often correlated and can give a great general idea of success. I guess I would say I judge the success by the responses I receive from our followers. Example: if I’m getting a lot of great community engagement on Twitter, that’s not something I can quantify, but that word-of-mouth is incredibly valuable.

Any golden tip on achieving a consistent analytical approach?

Figure out how to report sales or conversions (as you define them) and you’ve proven everything you need to. For us, we report on sales, but we also report on CTR, because we consider that a conversion for social. If we’re getting them to click through to the content or the offer, we’ve done our job. If they’re not following through to purchase, then there’s something else wrong with the sale or the UX of the page, or something. And that’s a valuable thing to know for other areas of the company.

What is the one social media metric you would die to measure, but no one out there came up with a solution yet? 

I think there are solutions for this but they’re generally expensive, cumbersome, and there’s no one-size-fits-all approach… I’d say differentiating organic vs. paid ROI on social.

Are you using any social media management tools you cannot live without?

CoSchedule. Seriously, look them up. (Other favorites: Buffer, Later, Canva, Sprout Social.)

What is the newest social media trend you would love to explore more?

I’m really exploring ephemeral content right now. I think that with Instagram Stories blowing up Snapchat and Facebook rolling out its own version, it’s only a matter of time till they open it up to brands. We’re heavily testing the format.

Can you share with us your process of coming up with a social media strategy? What is the most difficult phase of a strategy?

Hmm, it depends on the business. Basically, every company I’ve joined, I take some time to evaluate what’s working with their current strategy and what needs to change, and then I also assess what historical content/creative should be being used. Then I built an editorial/social calendar for however often needed — typically monthly.

Your biggest social media inspiration and social media guru everyone should learn from is…

There isn’t just one. Follow innovators in your industry, and follow/watch people on social whose content you really, really love. That’s where you’ll get your inspiration. My example: I love Epic Reads on social. They have nothing to do with the food industry, but I think they create great social content.

Testing and innovation are an important part of every social manager’s job. Can you share your hit and miss of 2017?

To be honest, we haven’t had one! It’s either too soon to tell, or we’re just doing a good job this year so far. (Probably the first one!) The closest thing I can think of it signing an annual contract for a tool, and then finding a cheaper/better tool right after doing so. Unfortunate but it happens.

What is your process and mentality around taking ideas, prioritizing & testing them efficiently, validating, and then feeding the learning back into the process?

I use a comprehensive to do list and just manually move them around as I get more time/as needed for what is the most pressing. If I don’t think it’s a good idea, I say so. There aren’t a lot of bad ideas out there that aren’t worth testing.

One DO and one DON’T while creating a meaningful growth in social media.

Don’t try to take shortcuts when it comes to creating good content. Work smarter and more efficiently, yes, but don’t put crap content out there. Do respond and engage with as much as people as possible to make real connections that will benefit your brand.

And the last but not least: what would be your 2017 social media tip?

Create. Great. Content!

Thank you for the interview!

Frederic, let’s go straight to the point – social media return on investment. Can you give us an example of a social media campaign that is beautifully linked to ROI and how to get it started?

When I arrived at TC Media (we had 125 papers running all across Eastern Canada), around 30% of our website’s traffic was coming from social media, which was clearly not enough. We get our digital revenues per page views, and social media was underutilized. So the first thing we did (the data team and myself) was to look at the numbers, both on GA and Social analytics. With that in hand, we then analyzed the content that was published and how much it was performing. From that, it was just a matter of finding the voice and tone of the brand(s), and how every journalist should be using social from then on. I’ve come up with a deck and presentation on how social affects your PV numbers, and how using social in a better manner would mean more eyeballs on stories the journalists were working hard for. After one year, social traffic had almost doubled, representing around 55% of page views source.  All because we organized how employees should use social media and gave them very few specifics guidelines so that their job would be easier.

All that made it easy for the social team to calculate how much revenue we could expect from a single follower in a given timeframe. This number helped tremendously to target our acquisition cost (yes, we did some paid acquisition campaigns in markets we reached less of the population than we were happy with) and forecast how much time it would take to make ROI on these as well.

Can you share a proven method of retaining follower base and the way of measuring the retention rate?

Let’s be honest: you will lose followers along the way. Maybe because they are not as attracted to your brand anymore, maybe they’ve had a bad customer experience, maybe the content you publish is not relevant to them…It happens. And brands shouldn’t be concerned as long as they GAIN more followers than they lose.

So the best method to retain – and gain – followers: get to know them. Find out who they are what they like, why they are attracted to your brand on social media, what type of content makes them engage with your brand. You might find some insight on your social audience that rubs you the wrong way (why don’t they like my super duper promotional posts!) but you’ll get a better grasp of what to do with your social channels. Most social media analytics or social media tools have the information needed for measuring retention rate. Explore the native analytics, get familiar with it: there’s a wealth of insight there.

What are the biggest challenges in a social media manager’s job and the way to overcome them?

One of the biggest challenges is how brands and companies view and utilize social media, and what they expect it to be for their bottom line. Social Media Marketing is SOCIAL first, media second and marketing third. Social is not just another marketing channel. It’s the only way people can interact directly, in real time, with their favorite brands. As a social media manager, you got to think about the relationship between the brand and the audience. You’ve got put the audience in the middle of all your initiatives. You must be able to answer “What’s in it for them?” to every piece of content you publish, every campaign you put out there. In a nutshell: SELLING SELLING SELLING = bad. Engaging, conversing, creating a relationship = good.

There is another hurdle: getting people to understand that in social media, they are not going against their “real world” competitor. Brands on social media are challenged by each and every bit of content that people put out: hockey scores, Minion quotes, vacation pictures, Memes, cat videos…

They say that failures make us stronger. Can you give us an example of one of your failures, experienced during your career in social media? What did you learn from it?

When I came onboard, there was a HUGE (and I mean HUUUUUUUUGE) contest that was going to be rolled out 3 months later. Problem is, it was thought out by people who had a very limited grasp on social media codes and idiosyncrasies. To make it brief, we had, for a month-long period, to get social users to a brick and mortar store, where they would fill a form to be entered in the contest AND to a website where they could double their prize…this was way too many hoops to go through for the average social media user. Needless to say that this social campaign was a disaster. What I’ve learned from that? As a senior social media manager, part of my job is to educate all the stakeholders that have influence, at one point or another in our content production/distribution funnel, AKA “don’t think of social after everything else is done and set in stone”.

How do you define the success of a non-quantitative social media activity?

It is difficult to do so, but it is doable. You can see if your hashtag, SnapChat filter or topic is trending at the moment, and you can analyze the sentiment/share of the voice behind your audience’s interaction with a campaign or social media tactic.

But this approach still leaves higher ups in the dark, as far as ROI goes, and leaves too much room for “feelings” and “I think that so and so was successful”. Even though social media is first and foremost centered on people there’s plenty of metrics we can, and must use, to measure our activities’ success.

Any golden tip on achieving a consistent analytical approach?

One thing that I’ve learned over the year is you’ve got to know WHAT you are looking for before starting to dig into numbers. Choose 2-4 KPIs and see how your strategy affects them. Adjust your strategy according to the numbers, by getting bolder with tactics that work and killing the ones that don’t. But if you do not have clear goals in mind, you will never be able to make sure your brand’s social presence grows.

What is the one social media metric you would die to measure, but no one out there came up with a solution yet? 

I’ve worked with a lot of social media analytics tools, and most of them are pretty thorough as far as metrics go. I would love to see single, hyper customizable tool, that lets me create dashboards for different stakeholders, with real-time analytics, on every social channel there is…that doesn’t cost 100k$ + a year. But seriously, I would like to be able to automatically and easily identify any super fans or advocates. Let’s say Mitchell likes and comments on almost everything we publish on social. I want to be able to engage with him on a personal level, get to know him better, understand why all the engagement, empower him as well, in some manner. But we cannot know that for now.

Are you using any social media management tools you cannot live without?

For small to medium businesses, you cannot go wrong with Sprout Social. A super intuitive user interface, thorough reporting capabilities, image editing…It’s the bee’s knees for everyone who is looking to step up their social media management game.

Can you share with us your process of coming up with a social media strategy? What is the most difficult phase of a strategy?

From experience and reading and working with the person I will tell about in question number 10, I’ve come up with a 10 point social media strategy handbook, that helps beginner and seasoned users alike get a better grasp on their social strategy needs.

1. Know your audience. Demographics, culture, other brands that they like, what makes them react.
2. Choose the social channels you will be using. No need to be everywhere all at once and do everything half-heartedly.
3. Define goals, KPI, and benchmarks. Being on social is not enough. There needs to be a purpose behind your tactics and initiatives. I’ve had a client where the goals were to Inspire, Educate and Convert their clients. Almost every piece of content had to fit in these three action verbs. You’ve also got to know which metrics you want to be influenced (bounce rate, conversions, engagement rate…) and what these KPI mean to your social strategy. Without step 3, you’ll throw darts in the dark, hoping to hit the target.

4. Write a social handbook. Who does what? What’s the approbation process? Crisis management? Voice and tone? Graphic norms? Colors…Make it as thorough as possible so a newcomer can quickly understand the way your social strategy works.
5. Take time. Time equals results. If you do social on the corner of the table (or hire your niece who’s always on SnapChat so she must be good…” you’ll get mediocre results.
6. Treat each platform independently. Do not link your Instagram account to Facebook, or your Facebook feed to Twitter. Different platforms mean different languages and rules of engagement.
7. Know when to publish. Be aware of what is happening on social so your content doesn’t get drowned. Know when your audience is online and engages with your content the most.
8. Listen and react. Being on social is not enough. SOCIAL means conversation, exchange. Listen to conversations with key words, hashtags that are relevant to your brand and products and engage in the conversation at the right moment. Answer every question your customers might have. Be there. Be prepared for crisis management as well.
9. Gather and analyze data that you decided to act upon at step 3. Get to know what the number means. Go deeper than likes and followers.
10. Adjust your tactics and strategy according to the KPI analysis.

Rinse and repeat.

Your biggest social media inspiration and social media guru everyone should learn from is …

SCOTT MONTY! I’ve had the chance to work with him when he was Ford’s Global Social Media Manager. The insights he would give us were invaluable. The most important thing I have learned from him is this:

On social media, people will share and engage with content that…

• Gives them a strong emotional reaction;
• Is funny;
• Will make them learn something new.

Brands need to understand that, instead of trying to push their latest promotion down their audience’s throat. I’ve also had the chance to work with Tara Hunt, who is educating people on what social media truly is. I have to mention Mitch Joel as well, as far as digital content goes, and Gary Vee, as polarizing as he can be.

Testing and innovation are an important part of every social manager’s job. Can you share your hit and miss of 2017? 

This year, we’ve tried a new social media management tool that was supposed make content sharing easier. But the way it was set up, it made our audience managers’ job more difficult. We’ve had to stop using the tool altogether.

We’ve also tried ChatBots, but it wasn’t really for our audience. After a few launches on some of our brands’ pages, we decided to stop the initiative. But that doesn’t mean they are not working.

Hits….There are many, depending on your industry! I would say that most things Facebook does to enhance Pages management/paid social activities/Instagram integration help us a lot. I’ve been hearing that Facebook is not the be all end all of the social media for the past five years now.  People need to realize that this is no Friendster and that Facebook is here to stay and will dominate social media for a long time being.

What is the newest social media trend you would love to explore more?

I would say a mix of augmented reality and machine learning in a social media context. How we can enhance the user experience, and learn from it, to deliver targeted content to users.

One DO and one DON’T for creating a meaningful growth in social media.

DO know what metric(s) you want to grow and DO know your audience. DON’T focus on follower count. It’s better to have a smaller, more engaged audience than a big audience that couldn’t care less about your social media content.

And the last but not least: what would be your 2017 social media tip?

When it comes to social media, unbutton the top 2 or 3 buttons of your shirt and loosen your tie a little. B2B, B2C, it doesn’t matter. People are on social media for the social aspect it. Make your brand personable, take the gloss and glitter away.

Thank you for the interview!

Kelly, you worked as a team leader with a global team to create and deliver strategic webinars and workshops. I believe that in this fast-changing and competitive market you learned a lot about a result-oriented approach. Can you give us an example of campaign/social media activity that was beautifully linked to ROI? 

Great starter question! One of my personal faves would have to be when The Daily Show did hidden videos when Jon Stewart announced his departure last year. Comedy Central created this campaign to create buzz for the new host, Trevor Noah, by utilizing Google ads and YouTube videos. What followed was a reported 38 million impressions, almost 3 million views, and even a Webby Award for Best Use of Data Driven Media. It was so fun to follow on social and uncover all the Easter eggs along the way – fantastic way to keep fans engaged and intrigued by the new host, loved it!

Can you share a proven method of retaining follower base and the way of measuring the retention rate?

That’s tough to narrow down to just one method to be honest! But if you’re particularly focused on seeing results and measuring retention, I would suggest outright asking your audience what they like. It seems so obvious, but a lot of companies want to avoid looking naïve on social, when actually, the audience will appreciate the chance to participate in the content they see and feel more connected to the brand. And most social networks make it easy to incorporate now too with the addition of polls. Asking their opinion ensures your content will hit the mark, and you can measure the results instantly through the poll answers, or in the native analytics of the network. When you start to see an increase in followers, you know you’re making an impact. If you start to see a drop off, take a deeper look at what content was posted when you see the biggest decline so you can revise your content strategy.

What is the biggest challenge in a social media manager’s job and the way to overcome it?

I would probably say resources. Depending on the role and the company, many social media managers find themselves overwhelmed if they have to take on the role of leader and executor. This is where managing your resources really comes in handy, and I would advise anyone in this position to consider the following:

• What is the current state of your social media presence? Are you stretching yourself too thin right now, focusing on a lot of social networks rather than honing in on a few key ones to do really well?
• Get organized! Nowadays there are so many ways to make your time more efficient by utilizing templates for editorial or content calendars, software to auto schedule and manage feeds, etc. It takes time to build out a process that works for you initially, but you’ll cut your time sourcing and managing content in half.
• If you’re set on getting more resources, whether its budget or people, everything you do needs to be visible and tie back to ROI. For example, if you get advertising spend, be sure to report back on how many more impressions and clicks you got as a result.

They say that failures make us stronger. Would you be so kind and give us an example of one of your failures, experienced during your career in social media. What did you learn from it?

I can recall a campaign I did back in the day when I was marketing in the music industry. One of the bands I supported was going to go on tour to support the 10 year anniversary of their most beloved album. During this tour they would play that album in its entirety live. So when it came time to put together a plan for online advertising, we made the mistake of only targeting older fans who supported the album when it was first released, trying to re-engage them and their love for the band. But when we looked at ticket sales, we saw that majority of those purchased were in fact from the newer and younger fans! It turns out they were more excited for that tour because they had missed out originally and were die-hards for the classic album. Though the tour was still successful, we couldn’t help but wonder how many fans we alienated by not broadening our reach in online advertising. All that to say, my key takeaway was to really understand the data and who your audience is on social – don’t just go by who you think the audience is. Experiment with A/B testing and pay attention to who’s clicking!

How do you define the success of a non-quantitative social media activity?

For me, this is where storytelling really comes in because qualitative metrics are all about shifting sentiment. While quantitative metrics are great, at times they lack the context needed to truly evaluate the success of your efforts. For example, if you’re just focused on the number of comments you receive on a post, you could deem it successful due to high volume. But without the sentiment, you’re overlooking if those comments were primarily positive or negative, which puts a completely different lens on it.

Any golden tip on achieving a consistent analytical approach?

I would say that no matter where you are getting your analytics from, the most important thing is to be consistent in the beginning so you can actually benchmark your success. Set targets for a quarter for example, and keep the same ones for each campaign you develop. Then once you achieve those targets, revisit your goals and define new analytical targets. Too often businesses create the content and report back on what metrics they achieved, but if you ask me, that’s putting the cart before the horse. You need to know what you want to achieve before you can establish how to get there.

What is the one social media metric you would die to measure, but no one out there came up with a solution yet? 

That’s a tough one! I think the biggest challenge for any social platform currently is accuracy with the qualitative metrics, such as sentiment. They’ve come a long way, but it’s so difficult for systems to pick up on context, even outside of social media. But because it’s considered a metric in social media, there’s much more demand for systems to evolve and understand context in this field.

Are you using any social media management tools you cannot live without?

Oh gosh, the industry has come such a long way in the past 5 or 6 years and developers are really stepping up their games… competition is intense now! I think rather than name any ones in particular, I will focus on features and say that personally, my “tool” is my phone. These days it’s all about making content that is mobile-friendly, accessible on-the-go, and secure. I’m big on experimenting with apps on my devices, whether it’s for publishing, following news, or analytics, I LOVE trying out new ones that have a nice, clean interface with intuitive features.

Can you share with us your process of coming up with a social media strategy? What is the most difficult phase of a strategy?

Yes! Strategy is one of the topics I’m most passionate about, so this may be a long-winded answer! Basically, for any social strategy to be successful, you need to start by building the right framework, which should include an audit of your social properties, benchmarking and establishing KPI’s, and finally your content strategy itself. None of it is easy to be honest! But I would say the most difficult phase is probably the content strategy, simply because that’s the day to day work that involves sourcing/creating content in addition to publishing, monitoring and engagement. Audits and benchmarking really only need to be done perhaps once per quarter.

Your biggest social media inspiration and social media guru everyone should learn from is…

I couldn’t possibly narrow it down to just one! But I will say there are several blogs and influencers I personally rely on for inspiration or education, including Jay Baer, Jeff Bullas, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Mari Smith. These are experts I’ve followed since the early days in my career and they’ve really helped shape a lot of my own opinions and strategies.

Testing and innovation are an important part of every social manager’s job. Can you share your hit and miss of 2017?

This could be a software, a product or anything else that comes to your mind and it is related to social media management. Wow we’re already reviewing 2017 and we’re only halfway through! This one is tough… so far, for hit I’m actually going to praise Instagram. They’ve been doing frequent updates with new features that have been huge for the platform this year, while taking direct aim at what I’m going to list as a miss… Snapchat – I know, feel bad saying this! But I feel like Snapchat is currently fighting a losing battle – they’ve always catered towards a younger audience and haven’t really conquered the business arena. Instagram on the other hand reaches a broader audience and is owned by the godfather of social media (Facebook), giving them the financial and creative freedom to replicate all the features that used to make Snapchat unique. The fact that they’ve managed to do so in such a short period of time doesn’t bode well for Snapchat I’m afraid…

What is the newest social media trend you would love to explore more?

Personally, I’m going to go with live video. It might sound kind of cliché because video itself has been on the rise for a few years now, but with the advancement into live video, there’s just so much untapped potential for both businesses and individuals! It may seem daunting at first, but if you can master it before it becomes the norm, you’ll be way ahead of the curve by capitalizing on this feature. It’s great for exposure, builds transparency, and really puts you at the forefront when it comes to being creative on social.

What is your process and mentality around taking ideas, prioritizing & testing them efficiently, validating, and then implementing the learning back into the process?

Those who have worked with me know I am ridiculously organized when it comes to plotting out campaigns and strategies! Personally, I’ve always done my best work by establishing a framework before anything else. This means looking at my goals and KPI’s first so I can keep coming back to what I want to achieve for step two, which is aligning tactics to KPI’s. For example, if my goal is awareness for my campaign, I should be looking at tactics that will focus on reach and impressions, such as online advertising. And from there is step three, which of course is measurement. Now that I know what metrics align with my objectives, how often will I measure them? What quantitative metrics will define success for this campaign? And what can I improve on next time? Is it the targeting? The creative? It’s never the exact same every time but having this simple framework helps me stay on track.

One DO and one DON’T while creating meaningful growth in social media.

DON’T focus on growth if your social media properties aren’t in that stage of development yet. DO take the time to make sure your audience is aware of you and your presence before expecting to grow it online. In other words, don’t put the cart before the horse folks?

And the last but not least: what would be your 2017 social media tip?

Keep educating yourself! Social media is one of the fastest evolving industries to be in, so if you’re in it for the long haul professionally, keep on top of tips, trends and technology. There are so many resources and influencers in this industry, so take advantage of them and never stop learning.

Thank you for the interview!

Fletcher, you worked closely with the marketing teams to create brand approved content to drive sales and increase conversions. Sales and conversions are all about hard numbers and the numbers are often times a true Achilles heel for social media managers. Can you inspire them by giving an example of a campaign that was linked to ROI (Return on Investment) and did well? 

The gap between a social media strategy and strong ROI isn’t as wide as it once was. The rise of high-quality tracking tools means I can follow someone from social channel to eCommerce solution to confirmed order. I’ve run a ton of ads that I reported with basically that same formula. We spent X, which generated Y traffic, and the average conversion rate was Z, but I don’t think that’s the most beautifully linked campaign I’ve run. I recently finished up a longer-term cosmetics campaign using really focused Facebook targeting on building an email list. The success of the resulting list has been staggering, we’re talking twice as many conversions as any list they ever bought. The way I see it all the revenue that email list is generating is the result of social media.

Can you share a proven method of retaining follower base and the way of measuring the retention rate?

You want the recipe for the secret sauce?! The best I can do is some of the ingredients. On all my communities I closely monitor attrition, how many people are unliking/unfollowing every day. I like to establish a baseline using historical data, and measure my success off that. If my attrition goes up, I know I’m not communicating well with the audience (unless the brand wants a big shake up in voice, you can expect attrition to go up then). It’s all about offering value to your fans. Their timeline/feed is a personal space for them, you don’t go to someone’s house and talk only about yourself. That’s a great way not to be invited back. Engage and offer value and you’ll get invited back all the time.

What is the biggest challenge in a social media manager’s job and the way to overcome it?

“We want you to make a viral video.” I get that, or a variation of it, quite a bit. All brands really want to be the next thing people are talking about but very few of them are willing to take the risks required to make it happen. I use the squatty potty video to help stakeholders understand. That video went viral because it’s a unicorn pooping ice cream. No one expects that. People know how seriously brands take themselves if you want something to go viral you can improve your chances by loosening the reigns a bit and getting weird.

They say that failures make us stronger. Could you give us an example of one of your failures, experienced during your career in social media? What did you learn from it?

I had just started managing social media for a major snack brand and the results were pretty great. Engagement had tripled, reach was through the roof, sentiment was overwhelmingly positive, and I think I got into this mindset where I thought I was invincible so I said, “Hey, everything is going so great we should take this to Reddit!” Which is the social media equivalent of starting a land war with Russia in the middle of winter. I pitched engaging with the international snack exchange subreddit, a place where people can post regional snacks and trade them with other people for snacks around the world. I think two people signed up and the whole thing just cratered. I learned that if you’re taking something to Reddit you need to be really buttoned up and offering a significant incentive. “We’re making our product available for exchange.” Isn’t going to cut it.

How do you define the success of a non-quantitative social media activity?

By how good the story is. I know that’s a pretty wishy-washy thing to say but I don’t think there’s anything quite like a good story. Early on with my aforementioned snack food client I had an amazing community interaction with a video game streamer. A guy with over 200,000 followers. It ended with him changing his profile picture to an image of our product. The next time I was in the office the screenshot of that profile was hanging on the Senior Manager’s wall. Pretty good story.

Any golden tip on achieving a consistent analytical approach?
This is a great question and something often overlooked by social media managers. The best advice I have here is, “Listen to your stakeholders.” We have a depth of analytics available at our fingertips that’s overwhelming and most of the time our stakeholders are not going to have time to dive deep into how many impressions we generated in Bodø Norway. I give them Reach, Engagements, and Link Clicks right up front. Then provide the bulk of the data below that they can dig into if they want.

What is the one social media metric you would die to measure, but no one out there came up with a solution yet?

Trust. It would be great to know how trustworthy my community finds me. People are so used to be sold to on social that everything is taken with a huge grain of salt. To know how confident people are in my messaging would be pretty cool.

Are you using any social media management tools you cannot live without?

I forgot my phone at home the other day and drove an hour to get it. I don’t need it to do my job, but come on. Other than that, I am a big big fan of Grammarly. I don’t make many mistakes but Grammarly is a super cool tool to catch the ones that I do and even improve my use of the language.

Can you share with us your process of coming up with a social media strategy? What is the most difficult phase of a strategy?

I start by asking them what they think their brand voice is like, that gives me a good idea who they think they are. Then I look at what they’ve posted and see what’s worked and what hasn’t. That tells me who their audience thinks they are. From that, I can recommend who we can be, what we can accomplish and how we can get there. The hardest part is that sometimes there’s a serious disconnect between who they think they are, and who their audience thinks they are. Resolving that discrepancy can be a painful process.

Your biggest social media inspiration and social media guru everyone should learn from is…

Gary Vaynerchuk and I literally don’t think there’s any other answer. I got to see him speak at Twitter with Dick Costolo a couple years ago and it was just this brilliant conversation about the state of the industry and where it’s heading. He was amazing. If you want to be a social media professional in any capacity and haven’t consumed everything Gary V has written you’re doing yourself a disservice.

Testing and innovation are an important part of every social manager’s job. Can you share your hit and miss of 2017? This could be a software, a product or anything else that comes to your mind and it is related to social media management.

I did a brief stint on Sprout this year that I didn’t enjoy. That’s not a knock on the Sprout platform, I just didn’t care for it, so that was a miss. As for hit, it is undoubtedly Instagram allowing the management of multiple accounts. I’m surprised there weren’t parades.

What is the newest social media trend you would love to explore more?

If I have to pick only one I’d say it’s probably bots. On its surface, I should hate it because I’m always talking about the human element of social and how important that is from a strategy standpoint, but when I think about it more the argument can be made that at some point bots will be a better user experience for the person using them. I’m definitely keeping an eye on bots.

What is your process of taking ideas, prioritizing & testing them, validating, and then introducing the learning back into the process?

I like to work in groups. Whether it’s creative for editorial content or strategic for campaign approaches I love getting a lot of different mindsets together to build something incredible. I also make sure the people that I bring together have different personalities and interests. If everyone was a goofy comic book nerd like me all our stuff would start looking pretty similar. With input from sports fans, fashionistas, foodies, and outdoors people I can put together a well -rounded plan more likely to make a connection.

One DO and one DON’T for creating a meaningful growth in social media.

Don’t script your responses. Everything should feel authentic because audience members can sniff out a copied and pasted response a mile away. So, I suppose the “Do” is draft your responses on the spot as often as you can.

And the last but not least: what would be your 2017 social media tip?

Remember to put down your phone every now and then. It’s important to get your head out of the constant flow of content and go watch a bird eat a piece of bread or something. Go to the zoo and don’t bring your phone with you, just live in the moment for a few hours and you’ll thank yourself for it. Also, if you have a significant other they will thank you for it too.

Thank you for the interview!

John Lovett is a Senior Partner at Analytics Demystified, a Mentor & Co-Founder @Analysis Exchange and an author of the book “Social Media Metrics Secrets: Do What You Never Thought Possible with Social Media Metrics”.  He spent the past decade helping businesses analyze and measure their digital marketing activities, but more importantly, his passion for analytics pioneered the development of the social media measurement. Today John will be discussing virality and analytics behind social media – fasten your seatbelts.

John: Hi Dagmara, thanks for inviting me to participate in your applied social series. I’m honored to be among such esteemed company!

John, I am so thankful for your book about social media metrics and that you promote more strategic approach among social media professionals. At the end of the day, our supervisors ask us about the hard numbers. How can we achieve a consistent analytical approach in the “era of too many social media channels, metrics, and data overload”?

This is a great kick-off question because it happens at almost every organization starting out with social media measurement. What are the numbers? As an analyst or anyone practicing social media, your first inclination might be to spout off total followers, number of outbound posts, number of reactions, and more as fast as possible to provide a direct answer to the question asked. Yet, counting metrics like these rarely satisfy business questions. You must get to the Business Value Metrics and Outcome Metrics which is accomplished through strategic planning. This challenging task is achieved by developing a framework for social media that transcends channels and tactics and maps back to corporate goals. With a strategic framework in place, you can build campaigns and plan tactics designed to achieve your stated goals. Then, when your supervisor asks about the numbers, you can consistently report on progress against stated goals, which specific activities either contributed or failed, and what’s coming next to accomplish your goals. By architecting a strategy you can communicate metrics that matter, while also setting goals, managing expectations and reporting across all your social platforms.

Defining Business Value Metrics is extremely important while coming up with the social media strategy. Could you give us an example of aligning social activity to business goals?

When it comes to aligning your social strategy to activities, I always encourage clients to start with the corporate goal in mind. An example might be a CPG company looking to build awareness of its new consumer product. The corporate goals are expansion and adoption of this new product line. Thus, your social media activity might include creative design to drive new prospects to your social platforms to generate awareness, with a primary goal of finding advocates to promote the new product line. Let’s say in this hypothetical example, that you’re offering a coupon download to try a sample of the product. Business value metrics that you could use to showcase progress against the goals of awareness and adoption include cost per new fan acquired, total cost of campaign, number of coupons downloaded, coupon redemption rate, number of advocate Tweets per coupon, etc. The possibilities are endless if you take a strategic approach and align your tactics with overarching corporate goals. But more importantly, the impact of this approach when communicating Outcome and Business Value metrics to colleagues almost certainly has a greater appeal to your internal business audience.

Coming back to creativity. Using data and identifying new opportunities require creativity. Could you give us an example of a product or a service that used creativity to bring data to the next level and unlocked its potential?

I’m continually amazed at creativity in social media. Whether it’s reactionary like Wendy’s response to the tweet, “Yo @Wendy’s how many retweets for a year of free chicken nuggets?”. Or strategically planned like Lego’s LEGO Life app. Companies are continually pushing the limits of creativity in social media by allowing consumers to push their own limits and take ownership of their own ideas. When a kid can create their own LEGO mini figure and chat to their peers in a safe and safeguarded emoji language…now that’s creative!

Can you share the best way of retaining follower base and the way of measuring the retention rate?

When it comes to retaining followers, the best way that I’ve seen is to consistently generate content. And I’m not talking about pre-canned Tweets or recurring Facebook posts touting products here. What keeps people coming back is interesting, thought provoking content that is altruistic in nature. Consumers are smart these days and if you’re disingenuous in your social marketing efforts, they’ll tear you to shreds and then they’ll leave you. On the flip-side being real and authentic while also creating interesting content will keep your audience coming back. Retention can be measured in a number of different ways, but for social platforms, I like to look at the number of followers at the end of each month; subtract the number of new followers; then divide by the number of followers at the beginning of the month. [(followers month end – new followers)/followers month start*100]. This will give you a monthly retention rate. For apps, I tend to look at Monthly Active Users. Calculating this is a bit more complex, but essentially you’re tracking events per user and attributing active status to any user that participates in a certain number of events that meet your threshold. Using this method, you can quantify how many people within your install base actually uses your app in a given month.

Let’s dive into the topic that everyone secretly dreams about, but does not want to admit it. Virality. What an elusive goal! John, any idea what could be the key variables that drive viral growth? Or should we just…spray and pray?

Please don’t spray and pray! The best social strategies are well considered and well-planned ones. While you cannot plan for virality, you can schedule your social content to align with your editorial schedule, your planned corporate promotions, your scheduled content and most importantly your strategy. Organizations that create social calendars and allow room for spontaneous and responsive content are most likely the winners in social media. In my opinion, virality in social media is capturing the hearts and minds of the critical mass. Unfortunately, you can’t plan for this. More often than not content goes viral when it evokes strong emotions. But putting this type of content out there is easily foiled and it makes companies vulnerable. Those that take the risk are often just putting themselves out there, but one in a million hit the jackpot and go viral. I wish I could give your readers the secret to viral content, but alas, I do not have the magic bullet.

What is the biggest challenge while using social media for advertising and the way to overcome it?

Well, when it comes to advertising there are two giants in the mix Google and Facebook. These platforms consume nearly 99% of all new ad spending. According to the IAB, Google consumes 54% of all new ad spending and Facebook claims 45% of new ad spending growth. This research illustrates that the real platform that your question addresses is Facebook. The remaining 1% of ad dollars are split among everyone else. So, what are the challenges of advertising on Facebook you ask…? Well, targeting your audiences is critically important and Facebook actually does a pretty good job of allowing businesses to do this via custom audiences and lookalike audiences. Through the Ads Manager and Power Editor, social media managers can get a handle on who they want to target and how to get them that fresh advertising content.

Non-quantifiable activity is anything that isn’t directly contributing to your bottom line. And sure, this is definitely worth measuring. Lots of activity on social is about building your brand, or creating credibility, or simply being there for your audience. If everything businesses did on social was revenue driven, the social web would be a pretty thin and boring space. Going back to my earlier answers, creativity and authenticity make social interesting. Brands that measure engagement and key into content that gets users coming back is what’s really compelling. Take a brand like Yeti. They predominantly make coolers and hats. Before we had the web and social, this is downright boring! But they’ve built and incredible brand. They generate so much brand goodness through campaigns like Yeti Presents on YouTube and just showing the wildly interesting people that they sponsor (without product overtures by the way) that makes me want to buy their products. I’m not sure that you can measure that. But I call it value.

What is the one social media metric you would die to measure, but no one out there came up with a solution yet? 

I’m bullish on Engagement. Everyone needs this metric. Everyone talks about this metric. But no one knows exactly how to measure it. The challenge with Engagement is that people can engage with social (or websites, or Apps, or TV’s or game consoles) in so many different ways that it’s tough to come up with a universal definition for engagement. As such, marketers have a very difficult time defining and explaining engagement and business people have an even harder time wrapping their heads around it. I’ve come up with my own calculations on a case by case basis, but that’s what they’re destined to be until somebody who’s voice is louder than mine can shout over the din of singular consciousness to form consensus around engagement.

Engagement or reach?

Quality or quantity? That’s how I look at those metrics. Reach is about getting them to notice you, which is definitely important, but Engagement is about keeping their attention. That’s where you win.

In the last 5 years we noticed an exponential increase in social media measurement platforms, there is also more awareness on how to use Google Analytics for examining audience, driving brand awareness or sales in social. Is there still a need to create and calculate your own customized metrics for social media? Can you give an example of when it would be necessary?

There are so many great tools out there for social managers, marketers, and analysts to use that it’s dizzying. Most tools do a good job of capturing the base metrics, or “counting metrics” as I call them in my book. But there will always be a need to generate calculated metrics to derive rates and ratios and to mix dimensions for deep analysis. For example, you probably already know how much social content you generate on all your various social platforms. But do you know what your share of voice among competitors is? To quantify this, you’ll need to do some customization to determine your competitor’s activity and to compare that to your own. Another example might be tracking “amplification rate”, which would give you not just the number of shares, but Shares divided by Followers (or likes, or pins) and multiply by 100 to get a rate. I do believe that as long as there are creative analysts looking for interesting ways to tell a story with their data that there will be a need for custom metrics.

What is the newest social media trend you would love to explore more?

One trend in social media that literally keeps popping up is Chatbots. Whether on Facebook or Slack, these seemingly helpful bots are working their way into social sites everywhere. I’m personally not a fan, but then again, I didn’t like Microsoft Clippy either. What I’d most like to explore is the AI side of social. The sheer volume of data emanating from social sites will be impossible for all the data scientists in the world to parse through without assistance. This assistance will come from artificial intelligence. The ability to surface unstructured data, whether it’s facial recognition, image interpretation, or comments in posts…the potential is huge. Who knows, maybe AI can help us weed out the fake news too?

What is the biggest challenge on social media now, in comparison to what it was 5 years ago?

I really think the biggest challenge in social media today is the same as it was 5 years ago…and it’s authenticity. The ability to be authentic and remember that the whole reason we’re doing this is to interact with other people is the main idea. But it’s so easy to lose sight of that. Especially when working for a large enterprise or for a big brand with deadlines and expectations for performance. Yet, social media must be genuine and that requires actually listening to people and responding to people in a thoughtful way. It also requires creating original content and images and thoughts…which is really hard to do! Authenticity in social media is hard and that won’t go away with all the Chatbots or AI support.

They say that failures make us stronger. Would you be so kind and give us an example of one of your failures and what did you learn from it?

Ugh! Failing is easy to do. Probably one of my biggest failures was creating a Framework for social media that was just too complicated. I spent countless hours building a model and explaining it to stakeholders from the most junior social media intern all the way up to the Chief Marketing Officer. The more I had to explain the more I felt like I was losing the battle. This taught me a valuable lesson, which is one of the oldest ones in the book; Keep It Simple Stupid! I learned that complex social strategies are necessary, but revealing all the dirty details isn’t. I had to learn how to read my audience and cater to their level of understanding so that it was broken down into simplest terms. My strategies still have lots of complexity baked into the calculations and tactical details, but they can be explained in two sentences or less and the top line results are clearly aligned with goals that everyone knows and understands. Social media is a very complicated space, but keeping it simple by relating back to the people that you interact with and communicating to stakeholders how that impacts your corporate goals is the best lesson that I’ve learned in my work.

Thank you for the interview!