Social Media is Not an Island: 5 Ways to Move From Awareness to Conversion

So, your brand is on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube. You refresh your Radian6 hourly, have a killer Klout score, and hundreds of thousands “liked” your brand on Facebook. So what?

While it’s now considered a brand death sentence to ignore social media, many marketers, who are results- and/or strategy-oriented, are still failing to connect social to entire channel strategy and measure its results therein.

In fact, a recent Econsultancy study revealed that while 66 percent of marketers consider social media an integral part of their strategy, less than a quarter of them have measured its impact on their customer conversion rates. At the end of the day, customer conversion really is the end goal of any strategy, marketing or otherwise, a company bothers to put together.

Social media is somewhat of an anomaly though; it’s been widely accepted by marketers as a vehicle for awareness rather than one that can be relied upon for conversions or enhancement of the 360-degree customer experience. Ironically, it’s become a lot like traditional advertising in that regard. This is likely because marketers aren’t exactly sure the right next steps to take once they’ve met their social media awareness goal and they simply aren’t sure how to bridge their virtual friends & fans with tangible business objectives.

Not only is it possible to use social media as an effective customer conversion tool, marketers can take it a step further to use it as a customer retention tool thereafter.

Here are 5 steps you can take to elevate your social media goals beyond awareness and into customer conversion and retention:

1. Nurture Fan Engagement Immediately

Your job begins the second visitors arrive at your social media doorstep, so make sure your page has eye-catching visuals and branding that’s consistent with your official website (albeit a tad more relaxed, in most cases).

Like it or not, people are superficial — and most followers won’t ever come back unless they feel they have a good reason to. So once they’re in, offer immediate and easy ways to engage them: gift downloads, blog subscriptions or an email list.

Hint: use A/B and multivariate testing to see what types of content, design style and initial offers have a positive impact on conversion rates.

2. Encourage Sharing

When people tweet about you on Twitter, “like” you on Facebook or pin your images to their Pinterest boards, you have access to consumer data that can be used to create unique, personalized fan experiences — providing a boost to customer loyalty.

Of all the content you provide, you want to emphasize the type your fans will share with their friends and followers. Shared content is the strongest indicator of social media’s business value, as it translates into the types of action that lead to tangible results.

Take sharing a step further by integrating social media plugins into your site. Tools such as “like” buttons, comment boxes and recommendations turn these new visitors into brand advocates, making it easy for them to share select information with their friends.

Finally, show followers what they can do and what’s available to them by displaying prominent calls-to-action (CTA) with clear instructions.

Hint: Test various CTA combinations — in terms of style, content, placement, and ease-of-use — to see which bring in the most fans.

3. Gather Data!

One of the most important steps in moving from awareness to conversions is gathering data about fans and followers who end up on your website as a result of your social media efforts. You can learn a ton about the type of visitors you’re attracting — age, gender, location, relationship status, other “likes” and more — depending on the level of authorization granted by each fan.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Data: Why YouTube Will Never Look Quite Like TV

Even as YouTube pursues television-quality content, data is helping mold decisions about everything from hip hop dance moves to throat-slitting horror gore.

“This is the Steve Martin,” says Charlene “Chi-Chi” Smith, swinging her arms as she demonstrates the dance move: two exaggerated hip-hop steps to the left and another two to the right.

Smith, dressed in jeggings with black converse sneakers laced up to her knees, is Shakira’s former dance captain and has performed with the likes of Snoop Dogg and Diddy. Online instructional video creator Howcastrecently recruited her to teach the rest of us how to dance.

When it’s time to demonstrate the Steve Martin to music, Howcast’s senior director of production, Heather Menicucci, hits play on her open laptop. Fifteen seconds later, that’s a wrap. Smith has flawlessly improvised a professional-quality dance lesson without so much as stumbling on a word. Thirty minutes later, she’s also given one-take demonstrations of the Cut Daddy, the Robo Cop and the Dougie.

Smith is an awesome dance teacher, but the reason she's here today has nothing to do with hip hop. It’s about data analytics.

“Hip hop” is a topic plucked from Howcast's topic-selecting program, which selects winning video search terms based on their search volume, search competition, advertising yield, public competitor data and the past performance of similar themes. The company is filming its fifth series on hip hop and teaching us how to Dougie for the third time because both topics had a high “z score,” or likeliness of profitability.

In the realm of Internet video, Howcast is as good at data as Smith is at the Dougie. It makes almost every programming decision--from how much content it releases to whether a video should include an intro--based on the numbers.

Not all channels take their data analysis to the same extreme, but almost all of them base at least some creative decisions on their data dashboards. Even as YouTube pushes for high-quality, TV-like content, data is molding Internet video into a distinct medium.

“The way I think about [web video] is how I think about web 2.0,” says Tim Shey, director of the YouTube Next Lab. “The web 2.0 companies don’t spend years building their platform and then launching it and crossing their fingers … you launch with the minimum feature set you need to keep your audience happy. And then you iterate and improve.”

Shey is charged with coaching YouTube’s more than 1 million ad-serving channels to maximize their performance. As of late, that job has involved more data tools. YouTube continually refines its content creator tool set. In November, it launched a revamped data dashboard, including a new option to see how far viewers watch a particular video. In March, it announced new tools to analyzing total watch time on videos.

This sort of minute-by-minute feedback provides cues that Nielsen television ratings never could. And paired with online video’s relative low barrier to entry, it enables experimentation that would be inefficient or impossible to interpret in a traditional broadcast.

Before YouTube acquired his company, Next New Networks, in 2011, Shey led a handful of YouTube channels. He credits attentiveness to data with his success on the platform. For instance, one of his most successful channels, called Barelypolitical, originally targeted an older audience that actually followed politics. But when it introduced Obama Girl, with her tight shirt and gushing songs about the 2008 election's democratic candidate, it realized the channel had untapped potential.

Not only were Obama Girl’s music videos a hit, but other musical comedy about pop culture on the channel were gaining steam. Data showed the channel’s audience was also getting younger. Reacting to these factors, Shey and his team decided to create a weekly pop culture musical comedy segment called “The Key of Awesome” and aimed it at a teenage audience. It ended up blowing past their previous successes to the tune of more than 1 billion views.

Barelypolitical accidentally discovered a hit format it may have not noticed without analytics. Howcast's data-driven experiments are more deliberate.

Smith has planned to create 40 videos on the day that I visit the Howcast studio. In a handful of them, she’ll teach dancers in the room with her instead of demonstrating solo. Again, this decision has nothing to do with hip hop. Howcast wants to know if its audience responds better to a solo teacher talking to them directly, or to a teacher and student combo. So it’s filming samples of each method to use as a test.

The company has run about 35 similar tests since it started in 2007, according to Rick Bashkoff, Howcast’s VP of Business Development & Marketing. At one point, for instance, it added short expert introductions to each of its videos, but a look at the drop-off data showed the 10-second clips were sending users clicking elsewhere. Now Howcast videos jump right into the action.

CafeMom Studios, a channel that hosts mostly talk shows, noticed a similar slump when it verbally transitioned from story to story during its daily news show. It, too, decided to ditch its intros.

“As a result, we have seen audience retention smooth out--we no longer lose viewers between stories--and more are now sticking around for the whole video,” CafeMom EVP of Content Tracy Odell tells Fast Company.

Sticking around for the whole video is something YouTube is pushing for. In addition to investing heavily in high-quality content, It has also began rewarding videos that retain viewers, not just attract them, by favoring them in search and suggested videos. As a result, Shey says that time spent on YouTube has been rising. Viewers watch 4 billion hours of video on the site every month.

Shey says data can help creators make content that keeps people watching their videos.

“Especially if making long-form content, you can really understand at what point do people rewind and watch parts of the video again and again, do they fast forward, do they drop off, you can really look at videos and see how far they’re watching and then try to understand why,” he says.

Bashkoff agrees. Howcast sticks to a short how-to format, but he's thought about how data might also shape episodic, long-form content. Do people navigate elsewhere when that guy’s throat is slit? Now you know where your optimal gore line sits. Is a character more engaging when he’s fat and bald or handsome and fit?

Howcast’s co-chairman, Kevin Law, has a unique vantage point from which to approach the question. He’s also the CEO of Uncommon Content Partners, which makes shows of television length and quality for YouTube. According to him, the data-based decision making of Howcast doesn't translate well to the entertainment-focused content of Uncommon’s Reserve Channel.

It would be too expensive, he says, to do the sort of experiments Howcast uses to program its instructional videos on the long-form shows that populate Uncommon’s YouTube channel. Data isn’t nearly as useful when making programming decisions, either.

“You make a video about how to fix a flat tire because you are addressing an individual need of theirs,” he says. “It’s not that the person who fixes a flat tire wants to see a show about cars.”

“When you’re entertaining somebody, it’s more subjective. You’re trying to anticipate what is going to make somebody laugh or cry or be inspired.”

Uncommon’s creative process may be all art, but it can’t escape science. Just like Howcast--which gets between 30 and 40% of its traffic from search and most of the rest from suggested videos--the majority of the Reserve Channel's viewers find its shows through some type of query. Most people do not yet commit to watching any YouTube series every week the same way they do television shows.

Data drives how each of Uncommon’s shows is paced. It changes how they’re promoted, and it will ultimately decide which shows get dropped and which shows get their own channels.

“It’s an interesting combination of art and science,” Law says. “I don’t think it’s ever really existed to the extent it does now, for video programming, because of the web.”

Source : fastcompany[dot]com

Manolo Espinosa Wants To Know Why Your Mom's Not On SoundCloud Yet

In 2006, one of the most vibrant social networks in the world was the photo-sharing site Flickr. By November, Google had purchased the video-sharing site YouTube for 1.65 billion. But lost in that year's community-content boom was a little company called Ear-Fi that hoped to do for audio what Flickr and YouTube had already done for photos and video. Founder Manolo Espinosa says, “Our idea was, ‘Hey how about setting up a platform that helps people tell stories as simple as talking, sharing as simple as clicking a button, and listening as easy as picking up a phone or computer?’”

It was an inspired notion. After all, in the broadcasting revolution of the previous century, radio came before TV. Why shouldn't there be a platform where professionals and non-professionals can share sound clips as easily as photos or video clips? And the timing was perfect, or so it seemed–-the financial crisis hit the following year, and Ear-Fi never made it through 2008.

Now Espinosa has a second chance to revolutionize how the web listens to itself. Last September, he became the “Head of Audio” at SoundCloud, the sound-sharing platform famous for its orange and blue audio player that lets listeners comment directly on a clip's waveform. First marketed toward musicians as a cleaner alternative to MySpace, SoundCloud wants to expand its user base to include anyone with a microphone connected to the Internet (which, thanks to smartphones, is now nearly half of American adults).

So what’s a non-musician’s SoundCloud page supposed to sound like? Some clues can be found on Espinosa’s own sound stream. There’s a minute-long clip recorded at a San Francisco Giants game capturing crowd noise, stadium music, and the cry of a food vendor yelling, “Peanuts!” Espinosa also recorded a short thank-you message to the organizers of #wjchat, a weekly journalism discussion group which Espinosa guest-hosted a few weeks ago. Dig deeper and you’ll find off-the-cuff recordings of lectures and presentations given by media heavyweights like the New York Times' Brian Stelter and Columbia University's chief digital officer Sree Sreenivasan.

None of it sounds professional, and that’s the point. “You get a fair amount of authenticity when you record someone’s voice," Espinosa tells Fast Company. "You get the background noise which helps with informal sharing of thoughts and ideas.” In a world where texting, tweeting, and chatting have all but replaced the traditional phone call, SoundCloud’s focus on the human voice is filling a gap not only in the digital space but in our everyday lives. Wouldn’t you rather your friend post a spoken birthday greeting on your Facebook wall than a perfunctory block of text or, even worse, an e-card? “We’ve had people who have recorded stories about their unborn kid and shared that with their family," Espinosa says. “About two or three weeks ago we found out (a couple) had proposed on SoundCloud. There was a collective hooray across the office. We’ve worked with big artists, but when we have a story like that, we’re just like, ‘Wow, this is amazing.’”

Journalists are another group not using sound to its full potential, Espinosa says. “When the Supreme Court had their health care debate, numerous news outlets referred to the fact that they were recorded, you could listen to them. But even a smaller percentage of those actually embedded the audio of that.” Beyond obvious uses of audio, Espinosa also encourages journalists to use SoundCloud like they use Twitter, to broadcast stray thoughts or to include interview clips or other sound content left on the cutting-room floor.

The biggest challenge for Espinosa’s team is convincing audiences that sharing and preserving sound is as worthy an endeavor for everyday people as it is for musicians, podcasters, and radio stations. The best ways to do that, Espinosa says, is to make SoundCloud compatible with as many platforms as possible (which it's already done so through recent integrations with Facebook and Flipboard), and to make the act of recording, uploading, and sharing sound clips as pain-free as Instagram makes photo-sharing.

[ Image: Flickr user Evan]
Source : fastcompany[dot]com