Video: The One Type Of Content That Marketers Need To Produce More Of In 2016

Is republished from SocialBooom Company

Businesses want to spend more time with their audience in 2016.

Spending more time with your audience creates better customer conversions and building customer loyalty. I call this Trust Content.

The single biggest tactic that can help your business spend more time with your audience is video.

The 2016 Video + Social Blueprint

2016 is all about video for several reasons, but from a basic standpoint it’s important to acknowledge that mobile technology and software have advanced, so it’s no longer painful to watch a video on your phone. It’s easy create video from your phone and it’s easy to share it. The channels and the technology are finally in sync enough to create enjoyable mobile video experiences.

Snapchat and livestreaming apps like Periscope and Blab are important tools for investing in more video content (notably, livestreaming and snapchat were the two most requested topics for this year’s Social Fresh Conference).

Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter’s renewed focus on video content are also key ingredients. All of these platforms allow you to create video content that builds trust and allows your organization to spend more minutes and more meaningful moments with customers.

You should be looking at video opportunities on all of these platforms.

Compare the time you are able to spend with a consumer using video to the time you spend with a Tweet.

The modern digital world is very noisy. We’re consuming and producing more content than ever before.

This competition is causing old metrics of success to decline — pageviews are down, we are seeing less reach on social networks, less engagement with content across the board. There simply are not enough hours for all the content being produced to get seen.

Video offers the modern social marketer a unique advantage over the competition.

Consider these benefits of using video more in your social marketing.

1. Better storytelling

They call it storyboarding for a reason. When video is done well, it tells a story. It is interesting and compelling in ways that images and text cannot be. Snapchat is a great channel where you can test and learn how to tell a better video story.

2. More emotional

As customers, we react to emotion. Video offers the opportunity to express emotion through story, through moving images, compelling audio. If you are able to connect emotionally with a customer or prospect, you’ve managed to do something pretty rare in marketing your business. Rare, and very valuable.

3. More human.

Video gives your business the opportunity to put the people that make up and/or represent your company front and center. When a customer gets to know the people at your business, they build real connections and trust with you and your products.

4. Stand out

Most businesses are not creating compelling video content right now. And if they are, it is mainly being pushed on Youtube. Facebook and Twitter are emphasizing video content with better thumbnails, autoplay, and great ad options. Snapchat and livestreaming are also underutilized. If you strike now, most of your competitors will be playing catch up with you.

5. Better awareness

According to research by leading social and video ad vendor, Mixpo, video ads in social are very strong at building awareness and supporting top-of-the-funnel marketing efforts.

Video can work for converting customers as well, and building trust, but if you want to scale awareness, it is one of the more powerful tools available to your business. Especially when you match it with the intricate targeting options now offered by Facebook and Twitter ad platforms.

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9 Ways Social Media Measurement Can Improve Your Marketing Strategy

Was first published on SocialBooom Company

Do you know how effective you are with social media marketing? Are your Twitter and Instagram accounts resulting in business growth? How do you know which platform drives more customers? It’s hard to know these answers if you aren’t up to speed with social media measurement.

The problem with a lot of businesses is they struggle with actually measuring social media marketing. This is because they either don’t have the right tools in place or realize how beneficial social media data can be.

Unfortunately the only metric many businesses measure is their follower count. However, that number alone won’t do much to help you make important business decisions. You need deeper data from tools like Sprout Social and Google Analytics to get actionable information.

Aside from knowing how many followers you have, here is how social media measurement can help improve your business, and build your brand:

1. Know Your Audience

Your number of followers isn’t nearly as important as knowing exactly who is following you. It’s absolutely critical to know your audience demographics.

Knowing your social media demographics will allow you answer questions like:

• How old is my average follower?
• Are my followers mostly men or women?
• Where are my followers from?

Answering these questions allows you to tailor your messaging to your audience. Not only that, but your social media following is a good indicator of your customer base. You can use the data you collect to create new products and services targeting a specific demographic or customer avatar.

In addition to the data you get from Sprout, Twitter also provides some very in-depth information about your audience. With Twitter Analytics, you can find out more about your followers, such as their:

• Interests
• Language
• Lifestyle
• Consumer behavior
• Interests
• Income level
• Occupation

2. Create & Share Better Content

You’ve probably heard the phrase “content is king” in regards to SEO. Content is also crucial for social media marketing as well. If you’re not posting great content that resonates with your audience, then you’re going to have a rough time generating results.

One of the most important metrics you need to track is the social media engagement of each post. You should know exactly which Instagram and Facebook posts are generating the most engagement.

Once you know which posts people resonate with the most, you can create more of it. Maybe a certain headline formula you use catches readers’ attention or perhaps you notice your most popular Instagram photos all use the same filter. Look for any sort of patterns and similarities with your top social media posts and try to replicate it with future content.

3. Figure out the Best Time to Post

One of the most common questions business owners and social media managers ask is “when is the best time to post on social media?” The answer depends on your audience. If you don’t have a social media measurement plan in place, you’ll have to rely on your best guess.

Why guess when you can get hard data that shows you exactly when to Tweet or post to Facebook?

All you have to do is find your social media posts that have the most engagement, then look at what time they were sent out. Hopefully, you’ll notice a pattern in either the days or times these posts were made.

Figuring out the best time to post on social media is even easier with Sprout’s ViralPost feature. Instead of manually looking through your past social media posts to find patterns, ViralPost does the hard work for you and automatically schedules your posts to be sent when your audience is most active.

Don’t make assumptions on when you should post. Look at your social media analytics and you’ll find the answer.

4. Learn the Most Effective Hashtags

Hashtags have become synonymous with social media. Almost every well-known social media platform integrates them, so it’s important to track the hashtags you’re using. Hashtags serve three main purposes on most social media sites:

1. Categorize content
2. Make your posts more discoverable
3. Brand your company or specific campaigns

Sometimes you’ll notice a correlation between your most popular hashtags and your best performing posts.

Using the right hashtags on Instagram can instantly expand your content’s reach. Using Sprout’s Instagram reports, you can easily find your most engaged hashtags. If you’re struggling to come up with effective hashtags, give these tools a try.

5. Make Your Team More Efficient

Email and phone customer support teams are usually evaluated on metrics such as their response time and rate. The goal is to provide quick and effective help to keep customers satisfied. Now that more consumers are turning to social media to voice complaints and to look for customer support, you need to measure your social customer service as well. According to a report from SalesForce Marketing Cloud, 83% of customers like or love when a business responds to them on social media.

If your business offers any type of support through social media, you need a tool that will allow you to quantify your team’s engagement.

It’s a good idea to set benchmarks and goals to measure your team’s performance, so you’ll have a starting point to improve upon. To give you an idea of where to start, Lithium Technologies found 53% of Twitter users expect brands to respond to them within an hour.

6. Connect With Influencers

Social media is the perfect platform to connect with influencers since people use Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram to connect with others. Most brands start outreach campaigns by identifying influencers they’ve never connected with before. You should absolutely plan to build relationships with these people, but what if you could quickly identify users that already share your content?

With Sprout, you can see which Twitter users currently mention you the most, as well as which accounts you’re frequently mentioned with.

This data is helpful because instead of reaching out to people cold, you can start with the users that have engaged with your Tweets. They’re already familiar with you from sharing your content, which makes the initial conversation much easier.

7. Better Allocate Your Time

One of the worst things social media marketers can do is waste time on platforms that aren’t doing anything for their business. The shiny object syndrome can make it extremely tempting to jump from one network to the next. Before you know it, you’ll find yourself spread thin across Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest and five other social networks.

When you measure your social media efforts, you can see which platforms have the best results. Then you can focus your time where it’ll have the biggest impact.

You can see which social networks are driving the most traffic to your site in Google Analytics under Acquisition & Social & Network Referrals.

If you you’re spending a lot of time on a particular social network and not getting any real results, you can allocate more time toward better performing channels. On the flip side, if you’re receiving a lot of social media referrals from a platform you’re barely active on, it could be a great opportunity to ramp up your efforts.

8. Calculate Social Media ROI

Calculating your ROI is one of the main benefits of social media measurement. If you’ve ever debated whether or not social media marketing is worth it, or had to show C-level executives why your company should invest in social media, measure your ROI.

If you’re not a data-driven person, this might not sound like the most enjoyable task in the world. However, it’s not as difficult as it seems. Measuring social media ROI involves figuring out the costs you’re spending on social media marketing, and calculating the value you’re getting from your efforts. This metric is important because it puts a monetary value on social media marketing, which is something many brands mistakenly believe is impossible.

We created an entire guide that explains how to measure social media ROI, but here is a quick rundown.

• Specify an action social media visitors have to complete such as buying a product or signing up for a free trial.
• Attach a monetary value to that action.
• Set up goal tracking in Google Analytics so you can monitor the number of actions completed.
• Add up all the expenses related to social media including man-hours, content, ads and tools.
• Subtract your expenses from the revenue you calculate in Google Analytics.

A survey from Convince & Convert found 41% of companies had no idea if their social media marketing was paying off. Hopefully, more businesses will get into the habit of tracking their efforts so we can lower that stat.

9. Create a Better Strategy

Social media measurement enables businesses to make better decisions. Once you know what works and what doesn’t, you can make changes to improve your strategy moving forward.

There’s no reason to go into social media blind. With tools like Sprout, you have an arsenal of data that makes it easy to spot holes in your strategy and measure the success of every campaign.

Start by developing a clear and concise social media strategy. Don’t just brainstorm a plan in your mind, write it down. Your strategy should include milestones and goals you want to accomplish. Periodically review these to see if you’re on course. If it seems like you won’t meet your goals, look through your data using the information you read above, and make the necessary adjustments.

Social Media Measurement Is a Necessity

As nice as it is to take a free-spirited approach to social media marketing, you eventually need to become more data-driven to maximize your results. You should track your social media marketing with the same precision and effort you use to track paid ads or landing pages. If you’re not measuring your efforts, you have no idea whether or not you’re reaching your potential, or if you’re even making money.

It’s time to go beyond vanity metrics and get serious about social media measurement.

This post 9 Ways Social Media Measurement Can Improve Your Marketing Strategy originally appeared on Sprout Social.

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How to Create a Webinar That Gets Results

Was first published on SocialBooom

At Sprout Social, we love webinars. In fact, we have three different types of webinars and in a single month, we may run and participate in as many as six different sessions. One of the more recent webinars we ran was with an amazing company called Wistia, and it was oddly enough a webinar on how to run amazing webinars.

You can check out the recording at the previous link, but we decided to create this step-by-step guide on how to create amazing webinars to ensure you have everything that you need to get started.

Click below to jump to each section of the article:

• Webinar Types
• How to Create a Webinar
• How to Run a Webinar
• Webinar Hosting Platforms

From why you’d want to run a webinar all the way through to the tools you can use to get started, this post covers everything you need to know on how to create a webinar and to get your program off the ground.

Why You Should Learn How to Create a Webinar

When Sprout Social started our first webinar program, it was all about customer education. The purpose was to give customers an advanced look at how to use Sprout Social’s platform and to provide them with the chance to ask questions.

While these types are still a huge part of our program, we discovered other reasons to run webinars. We developed two other versions of webinars that include:

• Partner webinars are created with other companies within and outside our industry
• Thought leadership webinars are made to specifically speak to social media marketing issues.

Each of these webinar types helps accomplish one of these unique goals.

Creating Partnerships

Throughout 2015 Sprout had the opportunity to work with 15 other leading companies on joint webinars. And already in 2016, we’ve worked with nine additional businesses. This is great for a few different reasons:

1. These are typically adjacent companies with a similar audience to yours. If the time ever arises that a partner’s customers need a recommendation for a tool like ours, we can usually rely on them for a recommendation.
2. These companies have also ended up being some of our greatest customers. As we’ve worked with these companies they’ve discovered more about our platform and realized they could use their own social media management tool.
3. A lot of there partnerships have lead to deeper relationships. Relationships that turn into discussions about other joint pieces of content like eBooks, or even talks about higher-level things like product integrations.

Generating Leads & Customers

The main reason companies decided to start their own webinar program is typically due to lead generation and customer acquisition. This is because webinars are still a great way to drive qualified leads into your sales funnel. Our friends at Wistia recently shared some information on how their own webinar program performed in terms of lead generation in just three months.

Not only are webinars great for generating leads, but at Sprout we’ve found the leads generated from webinars convert to customers at a much higher rate than most of our other lead generation channels.

Bolstering Relationships

Webinars aren’t just great for generating new leads, they’re good for growing relationships with leads already in your system, or even your current customers. Leverage your webinar program to increase engagement with these groups of users to reduce the risk of them churning. Try and use your webinars to show these groups how to use your product in a way that they may not have imagined.

Building Your Brand and Trust

If you properly setup and run your webinar, not only will you drive a lot of leads into your marketing funnel, but you’ll also create a lot of impressions for your brand. Between the reach your webinar hashtag see and the sheer amount of people sharing your registration page online, you’ll gain access to a new and trusting social media audience.

Social media webinar with @SproutGKeenan & @MPatterson22 from @SproutSocial #SproutWebinar http://pic.twitter.com/iSmrUjkO7r

— Catherine Babin (@catherinebabin) February 23, 2016

Educating Your Audience

If you think beyond the importance of new leads for revenue and reducing your churn, you get to a much more fundamental webinar goal: sharing your knowledge with others. Even if a person joins you doesn’t immediately start paying for your product, that doesn’t mean it’s not a worthwhile venture to try your best to teach him or her something new.

How to Create a Webinar

Given the lead generation, branding and partnership potential of webinars, you’d think they’re a no-brainer. Well the difficulty with webinars lies within execution. Unfortunately it’s not as easy as slapping together a PowerPoint presentations and bringing home the sales. This next bit will discuss how to create a webinar, then we’ll move onto how to actually run that webinar.

Establish Your Goals

Why do you really want to know how to create a webinar? It’s important to hammer this out first because a webinar that’s geared toward teaching your customers how to use your platform and one aimed at driving new leads aren’t going to have the same audience, topics or presenters. Figure out what you’d like to do and plan the rest of your webinar accordingly.

Define Your Target Audience

Once you choose a topic, you can move toward picking a target audience. If you’re creating a product-specific webinar, that specific audience may have already started a trial of your service, or they could even be your current customers. If it’s a lead generation webinar, then that audience is likely similar to those you target with your paid advertisements. Try using a tool like Sprout Social to dig into your social media demographics data.

Find the Right Topic

Choose a topic that you know will resonate with your audience. If you can’t think of any ideas, try asking your sales team if there are certain questions they receive frequently that would make for a good presentation. You could also dive into your website analytics to see if there are any popular blog posts that are worth repurposing as webinar.

Find the Right Presenter

The fact that webinars aren’t in front of a live audience may lead you to believe they’re not difficult to do. It might seem like at the end of the day, it’s really just you speaking to an empty room. However, that’s not the case. A webinar can be just as difficult as giving a live presentation, so make sure you choose a presenter who is up to the challenge. If it’s your first time, you might want to have two presenters on the call so that one can take charge if the other has any hiccups.

Find the Right Partner

It’s not always necessary to include a partner in your webinar, but it can add a fun dynamic, helps scale the lead generation efforts and you have a person there to help you tackle questions. When choosing a partner, make sure you find one with a similar audience relevant to the content that you plan to deliver.

Create the Registration Page

After you have all of the content and presenters decided, you can build your registration page. This is the page you’ll send users to so that they can register for your presentation. Most of the webinar platforms give you the ability to create a page with their template, though it lacks customizability.

You could also create your own page that plugs into the webinar provider you use. This allows you to make it a bit more on brand. Here’s a look at a portion of the landing page we use at Sprout Social.

Drive Registrations

Once you’re ready to start collecting leads, it’s time to start driving them to your page to signup for the event. There are so many different ways to promote your webinar to drive leads to your site, but here are a few of the channels that we’ve found most successful.

• Email
• SlideShare
• Blog Sidebar
• Paid Social Media
• Organic Social Media
• Content Submission Sites

How to Run a Webinar

At this point, you’ve chosen a great topic and presenter, gotten all of the audience into a room together and are ready to present your webinar. Here are some things that you should keep in mind when it comes to actually running the webinar:

Practice Ahead of Time

No matter if you know the webinar content inside and out, it’s still good to run through what you plan to say a few times. Even though it’s really just you sitting in front of a computer, talking and presenting can be a somewhat nerve-racking process–especially if you’re not prepared. If you end up getting thrown off at any point, lose your place or find yourself fumbling, remember to take a deep breath and start over your last talking point.

Click the Record Button

Before you begin your broadcast, make absolutely sure that it’s recording. It’s a terrible feeling to put on an amazing show only to realize that none of it was recorded. If you don’t record your webinar, you can’t send copies out to those who didn’t attend or left the presentation early. If the webinar platform you choose doesn’t have recording functionality you can always use a screen recording tool like Quicktime to capture it.

Take Care of Any Housekeeping Items

Typically at Sprout Social, we start our webinar by addressing two things:

1. Tell your users how to engage with the webinar. The main reason of running a webinar is that your audience can directly interact with the presenter. Give your audience a unique hashtag they can use to ask questions. You can also tell your audience how they can do it through your webinar platform, which allows you to answer questions throughout the webinar or or after. Try to encourage users to engage with the hashtag by offering a prize for the most engaged Tweet containing that hashtag.

   

2. Let the audience know you’ll send out a recording of the webinar. If any of your audience members have to leave at any point, let them know they’ll be able to view it on-demand. You’ll likely find that this is the question that gets asked most often, both during and after the presentation.

Introduce Your Topic, Company & Self

When you finish your housekeeping, move on to introductions. Start by telling your audience what the topic is about with some background information. Then shed some light on why your company is doing this webinar and tell the audience what makes you qualified to discuss that topic to give yourself some credibility.

Deliver Your Content

This isn’t The Kings Speech or your high school debate class, and we don’t propose to show you how to give an amazing speech, but we will say that our best performing webinars are those that remain conversational. There’s no reason you can’t be fun and informative in the same show. Try not to sound like the ongoing instructor that drones on without asking any questions or getting the class involved. Keep it interesting.

Closing Remarks & Small Product Push

Once you’ve finished discussing your content, it’s time to move on to the closing remarks and questions. During the closing, it’s practical to take a moment to discuss your company a little bit or to extend an offer to the audience. Make sure you keep your pitch brief. You don’t want to soil the content you discussed because you came off as overly-salesy. You may also leave a bad taste in the mouth of the viewer, and when it comes time to send them a followup email, they may be turned off.

Questions & Answers

After the closing remarks, you can start to answer some of the questions that came in during your webinar. One great tip we can give is to come up with a few seed questions beforehand, that way you can address a topic no one asked. Sometimes it takes the audience a few minutes to warm up to the idea of submitting questions.

Webinar Hosting Platforms

This list is by no means all encompassing, and make sure you do thorough research on your tools before going out there and starting your platform. However, here are a few tools that we’ve come across:

GoToWebinar

GoToWebinar is a member of the Citrix family and offers some solid functionality. Email automation, customer branding and polls make it a good choice. The only issue we’ve run into is that if you plan to have over 1,000 attendees, you’ll have to bump your plan up to GoToWebcast. Then you’ll actually have to download the GoToWebinar software to your computer.

On24

Another amazing solution is On24’s webcasting platform. One of my favorite things with On24 is you can load your presentation to the platform ahead of time so you don’t have to worry about actually sharing your screen.

AnyMeeting

AnyMeeting provides a webinar hosting solution that seems to have all of the same features and functionalities as the others but with a much lower price point. Unfortunately if you are a fan of sharing your screen, that functionality is limited to a few of their plans.

Other Useful Webinar Tools

Over the course of our webinar career we’ve found some other great tools that you should include in your toolkit.

Keynote

The presentation creation platform from Apple makes it really easy to build a beautiful, informative webinar. If you have a solid design team, you can ask them to build out a robust template so you can create all of your own presentations with limited design requirements moving forward.

SlideShare

Make sure to put your finalized slide deck up on your company’s SlideShare page. This is a great way to get more impressions on your content after you’ve presented it. Here’s a look at the month-over-month impressions we’ve driven from SlideShare since regularly submitting our webinar content.

Wistia

SlideShare will house your webinar deck, but what about your webinar video? Look into creating a Wistia account for your video hosting. Wistia has great functionalities like the ability to add custom call-to-actions to your video and monitor some robust analytics.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is actually the company that brought you this blog post. There are a few really great ways to utilize Sprout’s social media management platform to help you run an amazing webinar.

To Drive Registrants: Social media should be one of the biggest channels for driving registrations to your webinars, but it can get cumbersome constantly signing in and sharing a post to your webinar intermittently. Use a social media scheduling tool like Sprout Social to create promotional webinar posts and schedule them for days leading up to the event.

To Assist Engagement: Engagement is such a big part of running webinars. It’s important to encourage your viewers to reach out to you during the webinar to create a better overall experience. However, it can get difficult to manage all of these conversations while presenting.

With Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox, you can manage all inbound messages during your webinar. Choose to filter by specific hashtags, social media profiles or keywords to ensure you’re not missing any of the conversation. You can also mark messages as complete as you go, making room for the new messages you receive.

Further Learning

If you’re still on the fence about whether or not you should start your own webinar program, check out the recorded video of the recent “How to Run an Amazing Webinar” video.

This post How to Create a Webinar That Gets Results originally appeared on Sprout Social.

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Syracuse Stuns College Basketball Fans, Social Networks

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The Syracuse University Orangemen became the first No. 10 seed in an NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Championship tournament to reach the Final Four, sending social networks into a frenzy.

Social media intelligence platform Synthesio found that Syracuse was the topic of 31.5 percent of March Madness-related mentions, more than triple the 9.58 percent of second-place University of Notre Dame.

Syracuse also accounted for three of the top 10 hashtags used during the second weekend of the 2016 NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Championship tournament, with #cusemode at No. 5, #syracuse at No. 7 and #orangenation at No. 10.

Other findings by Synthesio included:

• 75 percent of posts during the second weekend of the 2016 NCAA Tournament were from men, and 25 percent were from women.
• The most active age group was 18 through 25.
• 57.8 percent of all mentions were in English, followed by Spanish (14.4 percent) and Japanese (7.4 percent).

Readers: Did any of you have Syracuse in your Final Four?

Image courtesy of Syracuse Orange Facebook page.

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If you had to interact with your business ONLY on mobile, would you be happy?

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In 2014, we passed the mobile tipping point. There are now more people who own a mobile device in the world than a desktop computer. And that gap is growing fast.

Americans spend more than 60% of their online time on a mobile device today (Comscore 2015). These numbers are important for your business.

Last week I was in Barcelona, Spain for Mobile World Congress (MWC), the largest event of it’s kind. IBM invited me to the conference to talk about mobile innovation, #IBMMobile, and how businesses are coping with an increasingly mobile first world.

Everyone who is anyone in mobile was there, from hardware and software companies to the top innovators of app design.

More and more of your business is being done on mobile. The way you communicate with your audience. The way your audience finds you. The way they use your product or service. The way they buy it.

The more people I talked to in Barcelona, the more I realized these innovations are making your business better. But there is still a lot we can all improve.

Are you ready for the NEXT big mobile trend?

The mobile tipping point was just the beginning. Your audience wants easy, convenient access to your business.

In fact, one rapidly growing audience is the newly “mobile only” consumer. 1 in 5 millennials no longer uses a desktop device to access the internet. They are mobile only.

The one thing I saw over and over at MWC, is that most businesses are nowhere close to being ready for that.

When your customer cannot get the same content or service through mobile that they get through desktop or as easily as they do on a desktop device, they get frustrated. This hurts your relationship with them.

Here’s my challenge for you. Review all the major mobile touch points you have with your audience.

The Mobile Only Checklist

This list is a starting point. Your specific digital presence is unique and your business is unique. But ask yourself these questions to help gauge where you stand today:

1. Website: Is your main website mobile responsive?
2. Email: Are your marketing and product emails easy to ready on mobile?
3. Social: Does your social media strategy work for the mobile only consumer?
4. Customer Service: Can your customer service process be easily managed on mobile?
5. Lead Gen: Do your email lead gen forms work well on mobile?
6. Shopping: Is your sales and checkout process easy to complete on mobile?
7. Product: Can your customers access your product or service easily through mobile?
8. Process: Can your employees do their jobs just as well (if not better) from mobile?

Most businesses do better on the items at the top of this list, with a few details missing here and there. As you go down the list, bigger holes emerge. It is still very difficult, for instance, to fill out many lead gen forms and complete a lot of shopping cart checkouts through a mobile device. Number 8, your employee process, is an especially difficult challenge.

As you move down the list, the benefit tends to increase as well.

At the MWC conference, I saw a demo from IBM on how they helped outfit repair specialists for Coca-Cola  with an app that makes their daily repairs much more efficient, saving them time and headache. On a basic level, this increases the happiness and success of your employees. And, equally important, it saves the company money in a significant way.

Think Loyalty

Most of the items on this checklist are a huge customer service and loyalty opportunity.

If your business can create a better mobile eco-system today, especially compared to your competitors, your customer will reward you.

Let’s call this the Dominos effect. Dominos has been ahead of their competitors for a while now with online ordering and more recently their app ordering experience. It is such a well designed experience for their customers, that they have seen huge sales increases from loyal app order customers.

I think this is easier for businesses that have a service element to their business. I think about the great experience I have when using smartphone apps from companies like Etrade, Hilton, JetBlue and others.

I’m more likely to do business with these companies because of how easy their mobile experiences are.

BONUS: Look for the holes in your mobile presence

One of the most annoying mobile experiences I see consistently is logging onto a wifi network at a hotel, conference center, airport, or restaurant. I’d wager that most of the people logging into hotel wifi today are doing it from a mobile device, and 99% of these landing pages are not setup well for mobile.

This is an examples of a small detail that slips through the cracks. If you take on the challenge of trying to interact with your business exclusively on mobile for a day or a week, you will find more of these.

This may seem like one small pain point for your customer, but it is one they will remember.

I took a small poll on Facebook to see what bad experiences others  have when trying to interact with businesses online and here were some of the more common responses:

• Long load times: Internet speed is often slower on mobile. Consider reducing the amount of javascript and heavy tracking codes that could be slowing down your website on mobile.
• Issues with video: Video is increasingly important for your business. But on mobile, video presents many problems. Load time, autoplay vides that interrupt a mobile screen by taking it over, long pre-roll video ads that mobile users hate, switching between a video and a browser page, etc.
• Linking to apps: Whether someone wants to share your content on Twitter and Facebook, or click out from one of your links into an app, it is becoming more and more common to go from your website, email and social content directly to an app. But this experience is not always very fun if a business has not given it special attention.
• Bad mobile UI: Many forms and pages where mobile users have to input information are painful on a mobile device. From a simple contact form or lead gen email field to pop-up promotions that take up the whole mobile screen, these experience can kill your customer interactions and conversions.

Fixing mobile pain points are usually things we will get to later. As more of your audience spends time with your business on mobile, “later” is quickly becoming today.

 

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Facebook Enhances Video Metrics: This Week in Social Media

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Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention. What’s New This Week Facebook Adds New Daily Video Breakdowns: Facebook added “new daily breakdowns for video metrics,” which “gives Page owners a [...]

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Facebook Ads Strategy: How Marketers Need to Alter Their Techniques

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Do you use Facebook ads? Want to learn the latest strategies? To discover what’s changed with Facebook ads and how to get better results, I interview Rick Mulready. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to help busy marketers and business [...]

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Speed is Not the Currency of Satisfaction in Customer Service

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Many companies agree: it’s not easy to hug your haters. But doing so makes business sense.

Businesses that answer every complaint, in every channel, every time are businesses that consistently exceed customer expectations. They create advocacy gains that translate into real revenue.

You don‘t have to hug haters faster, you have to hug them across more platforms. This is especially true in the “onstage” (public and social) venues where companies often refuse to participate.

With the help of Edison Research, I asked over 2,000 individuals, who had complained to a business in the prior 12 months, whether they expected a response when they complained, and if they did expect one, how quickly they anticipated the business to reply.

Our findings form the basis of The Hatrix: the expectation and corresponding advocacy impact for onstage and offstage haters. (The Hatrix is available as a free, downloadable poster – take a moment to grab it now, and keep The Hatrix in your office to remind you of these key points).

Do haters expect a response?

Just as onstage and offstage haters differ in their use of technology, they also diverge in their expectation of a response. When customers complain in a direct, offstage manner such as telephone or email, they anticipate that businesses will reply. Specifically, when complaints are made by telephone, customers expect a response 91 percent of the time.

Email expectations are virtually identical; 89 percent of complainers who use that channel first anticipate a reply.
Our research shows that, 84 percent of phone complainers and 78 percent of email complainers actually received a response.
The expectations for response among onstage haters is far different, however.

When complaining in social media, customers expect a response just 42 percent of the time, and 40 percent receive one. When complaining on a review site like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Amazon or similar, 53 percent of those onstage haters expect businesses to reply, and 53 percent of the time a reply is received.
In discussion boards and forums, 47 percent of complainers expect a reply and their complaints are addressed 49 percent of the time.

Businesses must manage expectations better

Remarkably, the legacy, offstage channels are where companies are failing to meet the desires of today‘s customers. How much goodwill is being squandered with the 11 percent gap between expectation and reality in the email channel?

There are significant differences between offstage haters who want a reply and an answer, and onstage haters who often want an audience, and don‘t even expect a reply half the time.

How Fast Do Haters Expect a Response?

When I first designed this study with Edison Research, I anticipated a far different set of findings. I fully expected to discover that in today‘s hyper-speed world, speed of response would have the greatest impact on customer advocacy; that being fast would be the currency of satisfaction. But it‘s not entirely true, at least not yet.

Speed of response has an impact on overall customer satisfaction, and the willingness of haters to embrace your business, post-complaint. But the impact isn‘t massive. This is partially because when complaints are addressed, companies are doing a satisfactory job at answering them without delay. The problem is that many complaints are never answered.

If you want to retain customers with great customer service and customer experience, it‘s not just about being fast, it‘s about being everywhere.

Sixty-seven percent of haters who complain by telephone are satisfied with response time, and 75 percent of today‘s telephone complaints are handled by business within 24 hours.

Email doesn‘t fare as well, with 61 percent of haters satisfied with response time on that channel. This is perhaps because just 52 percent of email complaints are addressed within 24 hours.

Onstage haters are different

Onstage haters’ expectations for speedy response are quite different. Just 32 percent of social media complainers are happy with how fast businesses respond in that channel. This is despite the fact that 63 percent of social media complaints that are addressed are handled within 24 hours. That‘s not fast enough.

Today, 39 percent of social media complainers expect a reply within 60 minutes, yet the average response time from business is 4.9 hours. Closing that expectation gap is a major element of the Hug Your Haters success formula.

Haters who complained on Twitter are the most satisfied with response time. Eighty-eight percent of complainers who received a reply there are happy with the speed of that reply. This may be because many businesses in the United States and around the world have come to view Twitter as a primary customer service vehicle, and have assigned significant resources to the channel accordingly.

But according to our study, this Twitter-centric model of social media customer service may be misplaced. 71 percent of all social media complaints in the United States are logged on Facebook, with Twitter a distant second at 17 percent. Google + represents six percent of complaints, and Instagram, another five percent.

Certainly, Facebook has far more users than Twitter, which may partially explain a difference in usage. But many customers also take to Facebook to sound off in ways that may not be directly actionable or solvable. Often, Facebook complaints are structured, negative feedback more than they are cries for help. These are viewed as “complaints” by consumers, but may not be viewed as such by businesses.

This discrepancy may cause companies to misjudge the scope and scale of customer service opportunities. They seem to favor Twitter, where the overall participation may be lower, but the use of the venue as a direct customer service channel is more obvious.

Being fast is not the currency of satisfaction, but you must respond in less than 24 hours. To create customer advocacy that translates into real revenue, companies must set up a system to exceed expectations.

 

Drawn from Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers, about which Guy Kawasaki says: “This is a landmark book in the history of customer service.”

Written by Jay Baer, Hug Your Haters is the first customer service and customer experience book written for the modern, mobile era and is based on proprietary research and more than 70 exclusive interviews.

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Life on We Are Social’s Strategy Team

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We Are Social’s strategy team in London is on the hunt for new talent, looking to recruit a Senior Strategist. In this post, Lauren Hartwell, one of our Senior Strategists, gives her take on what working at We Are Social is like and what you can expect from a role here. If you’re interested in joining us, get in touch now.

“Right, so how shall we tackle this?”

“I think we need to consider the wisdom of crowds in our approach”

“You’re right, I think that will definitely be a key theme.”

“OK sure, so let’s run some qual on this before making the final decision.”

Nope, this is not a deep strategic thinking session, but a lengthy discussion about how to make the best lunch choice at the street food market in front of our offices in Finsbury Square…

Being part of the strategy team at We Are Social means these passionate discussions are part of the job, and luckily for us, the work we do as strategists here is as varied as the eclectic topics we find ourselves debating.

In recent weeks, I’ve held an upcycling workshop to brief creatives on a fashion project, considered the strongest approach to cutting through the impending noise of the Olympics, all while pitching for some of the biggest brands in the world. There’s no risk of getting bored.

Working in the strategy team at We Are Social is all about focusing on people and their behaviours, passions and needs, not just the social platforms ideas play out on. We find killer social insights that allow us to understand our audience, and that lead to social ideas that bring people together in a more meaningful (and exciting!) way.

But we don’t do this alone. We work closely with our Research & Insight, Client Services, Creative, Editorial and Innovation teams, so you will always know someone to have a drink with in our Town Hall on a Friday.

On the subject of socialising, we’re pretty good at having fun. Since joining a year ago, I’ve transformed into a Pearly Queen for a London-themed evening cruising the Thames aboard the MV Royalty, have become a Cuban lady for our Havana Nights summer party at the Queen of Hoxton Rooftop, and donned my apres ski wear for our Christmas extravaganza.

Oh, and not forgetting the legendary ‘Winter Conference’ (aka ski trip) in January. But that needed its own blog post…

If all this sounds like your cup of tea and you’re interested in hearing more about our Strategy team, we’d love to hear from you – just drop Lisa Berardi in our HR team a line for more information on our Senior Strategist role.

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