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Refinery29 is now officially part of Vice Media. It is the first major media merger announced in recent weeks to be successfully completed after Vox Media and New York Media as well as Group Nine and PopSugar also said they intended to merge. In a memo to staff, Vice Media CEO Nancy Dubuc complimented the…
Oprah.
Dave Ramsey.
Seth Godin.
Besides being highly successful in business, these people are known as thought-leaders — or experts — in their industry.
Similarly, as a marketer, being an expert in your field is crucial. To do that, you have to drive traffic to your site, nurture and convert leads, and build brand authority and reputation.
That’s where thought leadership comes in.
According to research by Edelman and LinkedIn, out of 1,200 respondents, 58% read one or more hours of thought leadership per week. Additionally, 55% of respondents said they use thought leadership to vet organizations they may hire.
Consuming thought leadership content also affects purchasing decisions. In fact, 60% of decision-makers said thought leadership convinced them to buy a product or service they weren’t previously considering.
Below, let’s review what thought leadership is and how to use it in your marketing strategy. We’ll also explore the best examples and types of content you can consider creating.
A person or company might use thought leadership as a content marketing strategy because providing value to your audience demonstrates your brand helpfulness. Then, down the road when someone is seeking a product or service like the ones you provide, they’ll consider you an expert and turn to you first.
If you’re good at it, you’ll increase awareness among your target audience, generate more leads, improve social proof, and boost engagement online.
For instance, Brian Dean is a thought leader in the SEO space. By regularly posting content related to his expertise, he’s proven his value as a content marketer worth following.
So, how do you incorporate thought leadership into your marketing strategy? Here, we’ll analyze the top thought leadership marketing tips.
Now that we’ve covered what thought leadership is, let’s review some best practices before you get started.
Knowing your audience is the key to succeeding with any marketing strategy, and thought leadership is no different. Begin with your buyer persona. What motivates, inspires, or causes your audience pain? What questions are they asking? To figure this out, look on social media or conduct customer interviews. Once you know these things, you can begin answering their questions with thought leadership content.
Additionally, it’s important to continuously check-in and reevaluate your buyer personas. Are your customer’s questions changing over time? Do their pain points look the same today as they did when you first began as a company? People evolve, and so will your audience.
Social media is an effective opportunity to build your brand and expertise. First, social media keeps you active and engaged with your community. Second, you can use it to comment on industry news and ensure your brand voice is heard in conversations regarding relevant industry trends.
Plus, you can use social media to promote thought leadership content in an organic way without seeming too promotional.
Creating thought leadership content doesn’t just mean posting on your blog. It also means being active on social media, guest posting on other sites, and speaking at events or on podcasts.
It’s important to mix it up with owned media versus other media sources. Additionally, consider having a combination of written content vs. video content vs. audio content, like podcasts.
Ultimately, thought leadership content should show up wherever your audience is.
If your competitors are creating thought leadership content, analyze what they’re doing. How often are they posting? Where are they posting? Don’t be afraid to get inspiration from your competitors.
Plus, you can also look and see what your competitors are missing. Perhaps you can fill in gaps in the content they’re putting out.
In order to truly succeed at thought leadership, you need to create valuable content. Show that you’re an expert in the industry by speaking intelligently on specific issues in the industry. It’s important to dig deep and show off your expertise in one subject area at a time.
For instance, it can be tricky to prove yourself an expert in marketing as a whole (at least in the beginning), but you can have the director of SEO at your company create content for your blog or LinkedIn to demonstrate your brand’s specific expertise in SEO.
We can’t say it enough, but being too promotional doesn’t connect with your audience. In fact, it’ll probably annoy them. You should produce content that is genuine and authentic to your brand. Additionally, you want to make sure your content makes sense to everyone, offers perspective, and is supported with market-backed research that’ll help inform your audience’s opinions or decisions. Using examples, facts, and quotes will go a long way.
Once you’ve thought about adding thought leadership to your marketing strategy, it’s time to dive into the type of content you’ll want to create.
So, how do you come up with content ideas to talk or write about?
To start, you could do some keyword research to see what people are asking. This goes back to understanding your audience so you can create content that answers their questions.
You’ll also want to keep in mind industry news. Is there anything pressing going on? Are there any issues being discussed in your field? If so, address those and forecast the future of your industry.
Additionally, you can’t go wrong with articles using formats like tips, how-tos, or best practices. You’ll just want to ensure you’re producing long-form, educational content that your audience wants to read.
After you’ve considered the format and type of content you want to produce, it’s time to dive deep into the strategy.
Before you jump into thought leadership, you’ll want to have a strategy and a game plan for how you’re going to move forward.
Here’s a simple step-by-step process you can use as a starting point:
Step 1: Set a SMART goal. SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely goals. Before you begin working on thought leadership, have a goal for what you want to get out of it, whether it’s increased traffic to your site or lead generation.
Step 2: Brainstorm content ideas. Think about your personas. Is your content focused and strategic to what they want to read or watch? What are they searching for and asking on social media? Answer these questions during your brainstorming session.
Step 3: Analyze competitors. To kickstart more brainstorming ideas, answer questions like, “Who is my audience currently going to for answers?” Again, you’ll want to fill in the gaps in their content and talk about what they aren’t.
Step 4: Create and distribute content. Once you’ve decided what content to create, make sure you have a point of view and personality. Your content should be easy to consume and easy to share.
Step 5: Measure results. Track your results in order to see if your thought leadership content has been effective. Use your SMART goals to determine what metrics you’re tracking.
Oprah Winfrey, former talk show host and media mogul, spoke at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism commencement ceremony in 2018.
She took some of her time to speak on the role of journalists today. She said, “You will become the new editorial gatekeepers, an ambitious army of truth-seekers who will arm yourselves with the intelligence, with the insight and with the facts necessary to strike down deceit. You’re in a position to keep all of those who now disparage real news — you all are the ones who are going to keep those people in check.”
Throughout the years, Oprah has earned her title as a media expert. Her advice and opinions on the industry are considered thought leadership because of her expertise, which she spent her career cultivating.
Dave Ramsey is an expert in finances. He has a degree in Finance and Real Estate, and is known for counseling people on paying off their debts. Ramsey became a thought leader when he continued to produce content in the industry, including hosting a radio show, writing books, and podcasting.
One of the best examples of his thought leadership content is his podcast. He posts shows almost every day on topics such as, “Own the ‘Personal’ Part of Personal Finance” and “Don’t Play the Student Loan Forgiveness Lottery!”
Seth Godin is an entrepreneur turned business mogul. He’s written books addressing marketing, advertising, and leadership. He’s also in the Marketing Hall of Fame, launched by the American Marketing Association of New York. He became a thought leader because of the successful content he delivers, including speaking engagements, books, and his blog.
A great example of thought leadership content he’s produced is his blog. Here, he regularly writes about his areas of expertise, including marketing and business. For instance, in this blog post, he writes about great storytelling. He says, “A great story is true. Not necessarily because it’s factual, but because it’s consistent and authentic. Consumers are too good at sniffing out inconsistencies for a marketer to get away with a story that’s just slapped on.”
Marie Forleo is a life coach, speaker, author, and host of her own YouTube channel show, MarieTV. She is known for creating and selling online courses, especially in regards to copywriting. She became a thought leader because of her expertise in business coaching.
One example of thought leadership content she’s produced is this video on her YouTube channel:
Here, she speaks on her expertise in content by discussing how to find fresh content ideas every week. She delivers three strategies her viewers can use to generate content ideas for their blog, podcast, or videos.
Brian Dean is an SEO expert. After he created a successful online business, he decided to create a blog — Backlinko — that chronicled the lessons he learned along the way. Essentially, he created a thought leadership site meant to boost his credibility.
An excellent example of his thought leadership content is this blog post. He uses long-form content that is educational and valuable to his audience, writing “21 Ways to Promote Your Blog (In 2019).”
Sallie L. Krawcheck, CEO and co-founder of Ellevest, a digital advisor for women, is an expert in finance. Before she started her company, she was the president of Global Wealth and Investment Management at Bank of America.
Throughout her career she’s become a thought leader because she is widely published both on social media and traditional media such as television shows.
One example of thought leadership content she’s created is on LinkedIn. Here, Krawcheck proves her expertise in finance by publishing articles and organic posts about finance. This boosts her company’s value and brand awareness.
Thought leadership is a great strategy that every content marketer should be thinking about, particularly since it allows you to prove expertise in your industry while simultaneously expanding your reach and helping your readers and customers grow.
It doesn’t get much better than a moment of delight on social media.
We love the brands who deliver these moments to customers (as customers of some of these brands, we particularly love when it happens to us). And we aim to deliver delight on a regular basis when we interact with Buffer customers online, too.
Social media engagement seems like a slam dunk strategy. Everyone should be doing it, right? But it certainly comes with its blind spots and questions.
Should you be replying to everyone?
How can you make sure you capture all your mentions?
What are the best ways to respond quickly?
In this post, we’ll run through some of the reasons why investing in engagement makes business sense, and we’ll touch on the specific tips and workflows to master engagement on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
One of the quickest and easiest ways to set yourself apart on social media is simply to reply. If you reply to all your customers, all the time, with a helpful and happy response, then you’re really ahead of the curve.
That’s right, all it takes is engaging with the people who want to engage with you. You’ve probably heard this stat before: Eighty-eight percent of brands don’t respond to messages that need a reply. Really! You can be among that elite 12 percent, simply by engaging.
We’d love to give you some tips on how to do just that.
Before we get into the specifics for tools and workflows on the major social networks, let’s start by discussing some of the benefits and the “why” for social media engagement.
We want to help you get there. Here’s a guide on all things customer support and social media with dozens of tips that you can implement today and begin to delight your customers.
With social media engagement, you will naturally amplify your brand’s voice and tone, plus you’ll have your interactions front-and-center before a larger audience.
(DMs excluded.) 
Think about some of the private interactions you have with your customers, like with traditional customer care channels like email, which are private, 1-to-1 interactions. But with social channels like Twitter, these interactions can be public — at least to start. Same goes for engaging with your audience in Instagram comments or Facebook reviews.
You’re already wow-ing your audience in other channels like email and live chat.
With social media, the awesomeness you’re delivering is visible to everyone.
Those amazing audience interactions that create strong word of mouth marketing for you are now amplified to a much larger audience.
Existing and potential customers get to see first hand that you’re responsive and actively supporting your products or services.
You can deliver delight very fast and in a focused way, chatting with your audience about specific topics and campaigns or helping solve particular problems that they’re facing.
With a focus on the short ‘n sweet, something magical happens:
Because of its fast and friendly nature, social media is often preferred over other channels of getting in touch. And the more you respond quickly to your audience, the better they’ll learn that social media — Instagram, Facebook, Twitter — are great places to connect directly with your brand.
At Buffer, a vast majority of our audience is on social media throughout the day. It’s where they’re at and where it often makes the most sense for them to reach out and get in touch.
We have more than 1,000 conversations a week on social media!
We imagine that there might be a large volume of social conversations happening for you, too. People spend an average of nearly four hours a day consuming media on a screen. And a growing percent of that viewing happens on smartphones and apps.
That’s a lot of eyeballs on screens.
Social media channels provide an easy outlet for customers to switch from browsing to chatting at a moment’s notice. More and more those chats are pointed toward brands on social where customers are beginning to expect quick answers to their problems and authentic engagement with their conversations.
One of the best ways we’ve found to make sure you catch all these conversations is to use a social media engagement tool. There are a lot of great ones out there. We’ve built one at Buffer called Buffer Reply, which you can check out at buffer.com/reply.
The biggest social networks in the world live under the Facebook umbrella, and brands that make great use of their Facebook Page and Instagram profile can create wonderful experiences for their audience.
It all begins with getting set up correctly. Let’s start with Instagram.
You want to show people that you are committed to being there for them on social, and one way to do that is to put in the time to create a complete profile. This includes the obvious bits like profile picture and description. By the way, we did a whole episode on Instagram bios just a couple weeks ago if you scroll back through our podcast archives.
But beyond those basics, we also highly recommend filling out the finer details like category, location, and contact information. This shows your audience that you’re willing to engage with them in any way that works best for them — whether it be through a DM, through a reaction to a Story, or through email or in-person.
The same advice holds true for your Facebook Page. Spend the time to fill out everything completely, including your profile picture, cover photo, and About section. But also making sure that all your contact information is listed.
As a bonus tip, if you’re actively engaging with people on these networks, then those interactions are likely to be quite easily visible whenever someone visits your page. You can see the replies to things like Facebook posts, and you can scroll through Instagram comments. If you notice that a brand is jumping into the comments to answer questions and share emojis, then you’re likely to leave with a positive feeling about that brand!
The other major tip we want to share about engaging on Instagram and Facebook is to take advantage of some of the new features that both networks are rolling out to manage conversations even easier. There’ve been a lot of neat announcements recently. You might have heard about Threads, a new standalone app from Instagram that is intended for private, 1:1 conversations. It remains to be seen exactly how brands might use this tool, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.
What’s more immediately clear is the way that Facebook hopes to unite its messaging for businesses into a centralized inbox. Currently, you can manage Messenger and Instagram DMs through your Facebook Page, and Facebook has added even more functionality just this last week, including the capability of:
Also on the horizon: Instagram DMs might be coming to desktop soon. Currently you can only access these through the mobile app.
Twitter is an especially effective customer support and success channel that can be scaled much easier than traditional phone or email support channels. It’s fast and effective for your customers, and it’s speedy and efficient for your social media team.
Like with Instagram and Facebook, it helps to get the profile set up completely. Specifically for Twitter, it can be great to add support hours to your Twitter account profileTwitter makes it incredibly easy to include your support hours directly on your Twitter profile. This helps set response time expectations with customers which is crucial.
Similarly, you can enable the‘Provides Support’ label to let customers know that your Twitter account provides support by quickly enabling this option.
One small tweak that we highly recommend making on Twitter is allowing anyone to send you a Direct Message. You can reduce friction by allowing anyone to send you a private Direct Message as opposed to the normal flow where a you and your customer must follow each other in order to DM. This would encourage more conversation with your audience.
Even if it’s just one or two people replying on your social handles, signatures are a great way to make your customers’ experience that much more personal. It can even help reinforce a sense of continuity of care.
You can add this manually into each message, or this can be automatically added if you use a social media support tool like Buffer Reply.
And if you’re not sure what to use for a signature, we’ve found that common conventions include appending first names or initials next to things like hyphens or carats.
Ok, we’ve mentioned tools like Buffer Reply a few times now, and for good reason: when it comes to social media monitoring, it’s very important to capture all your brand mentions. Third-party tools like Reply can make this much easier.
Ideally, with social media monitoring, you’ll want to get all
By setting filters and searches in these tools, you can ensure that you capture it all and respond to every conversation that needs it.
We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!
Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Facebook, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.
The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode. It’s our hope that you’ll join our 27,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!
The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.
Black Friday is less than a month away. Are your promotional emails ready?
Implementing an effective holiday email marketing strategy can help drive ecommerce and online sales, increase charity donations, or get your subscribers directly to your store.
But don’t wait until the last second to get started on your emails: Winter holidays are the top consumer spending events of the year, according to the National Retail Federation, and some businesses are already sending holiday emails.
That’s why I’m hosting a Facebook Live on November 5, 2019 at 1 p.m. ET on AWeber’s customer community page. Tune in to learn how to:
And more!
Watch on November 5th. Even if you can’t stream it in real time, you can always catch it later. The video will stay up on AWeber’s Facebook customer community page.
Not an AWeber customer yet? To catch more Live videos from our email experts, sign up for a free trial of AWeber and join our private Facebook community. (Only AWeber customers can join!)
The post The Top Holiday Email Marketing Tips of 2019 appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.
If you don’t have clarity about the unique value you bring to your ideal clients, this episode is for you. I spoke with Lisa Mullis of Paraphrase Communications about the “Value Framework” she uses to help her clients package and position their “high value offers.” If you like what you hear, read her guest blog post where you can download her Value Framework Blueprint. Also, listen to our previous podcasts on the “comparison trap” and being an “experienced newbie.” Then, write a review, subscribe on Apple Podcasts and, one more thing, be sure to sign up for my Quick Tips from Marketing Mentor.
Black Friday is less than a month away. Are your promotional emails ready?
Implementing an effective holiday email marketing strategy can help drive ecommerce and online sales, increase charity donations, or get your subscribers directly to your store.
But don’t wait until the last second to get started on your emails: Winter holidays are the top consumer spending events of the year, according to the National Retail Federation, and some businesses are already sending holiday emails.
That’s why I’m hosting a Facebook Live on November 5, 2019 at 1 p.m. ET on AWeber’s customer community page. Tune in to learn how to:
And more!
Watch on November 5th. Even if you can’t stream it in real time, you can always catch it later. The video will stay up on AWeber’s Facebook customer community page.
Not an AWeber customer yet? To catch more Live videos from our email experts, sign up for a free trial of AWeber and join our private Facebook community. (Only AWeber customers can join!)
The post The Top Holiday Email Marketing Tips of 2019 appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.
Do you create video content for Facebook? Wondering how to allow others to advertise during your videos? In this article, you’ll learn how to monetize your Facebook video content with Facebook ad breaks. What Are Facebook Ad Breaks? Facebook ad breaks allow you to monetize your Facebook video content. Ad breaks are short ads (in […]
The post How to Monetize Your Facebook Video With Facebook Ad Breaks appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.
Start grassroots experiments with the team as a way to demonstrate agile practices while also educating leaders and middle management about how their roles can evolve to support this new way of working.
Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.
It doesn’t get much better than a moment of delight on social media.
We love the brands who deliver these moments to customers (as customers of some of these brands, we particularly love when it happens to us). And we aim to deliver delight on a regular basis when we interact with Buffer customers online, too.
Social media engagement seems like a slam dunk strategy. Everyone should be doing it, right? But it certainly comes with its blind spots and questions.
Should you be replying to everyone?
How can you make sure you capture all your mentions?
What are the best ways to respond quickly?
In this post, we’ll run through some of the reasons why investing in engagement makes business sense, and we’ll touch on the specific tips and workflows to master engagement on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
One of the quickest and easiest ways to set yourself apart on social media is simply to reply. If you reply to all your customers, all the time, with a helpful and happy response, then you’re really ahead of the curve.
That’s right, all it takes is engaging with the people who want to engage with you. You’ve probably heard this stat before: Eighty-eight percent of brands don’t respond to messages that need a reply. Really! You can be among that elite 12 percent, simply by engaging.
We’d love to give you some tips on how to do just that.
Before we get into the specifics for tools and workflows on the major social networks, let’s start by discussing some of the benefits and the “why” for social media engagement.
We want to help you get there. Here’s a guide on all things customer support and social media with dozens of tips that you can implement today and begin to delight your customers.
With social media engagement, you will naturally amplify your brand’s voice and tone, plus you’ll have your interactions front-and-center before a larger audience.
(DMs excluded.)
Think about some of the private interactions you have with your customers, like with traditional customer care channels like email, which are private, 1-to-1 interactions. But with social channels like Twitter, these interactions can be public — at least to start. Same goes for engaging with your audience in Instagram comments or Facebook reviews.
You’re already wow-ing your audience in other channels like email and live chat.
With social media, the awesomeness you’re delivering is visible to everyone.
Those amazing audience interactions that create strong word of mouth marketing for you are now amplified to a much larger audience.
Existing and potential customers get to see first hand that you’re responsive and actively supporting your products or services.
You can deliver delight very fast and in a focused way, chatting with your audience about specific topics and campaigns or helping solve particular problems that they’re facing.
With a focus on the short ‘n sweet, something magical happens:
Because of its fast and friendly nature, social media is often preferred over other channels of getting in touch. And the more you respond quickly to your audience, the better they’ll learn that social media — Instagram, Facebook, Twitter — are great places to connect directly with your brand.
At Buffer, a vast majority of our audience is on social media throughout the day. It’s where they’re at and where it often makes the most sense for them to reach out and get in touch.
We have more than 1,000 conversations a week on social media!
We imagine that there might be a large volume of social conversations happening for you, too. People spend an average of nearly four hours a day consuming media on a screen. And a growing percent of that viewing happens on smartphones and apps.
That’s a lot of eyeballs on screens.
Social media channels provide an easy outlet for customers to switch from browsing to chatting at a moment’s notice. More and more those chats are pointed toward brands on social where customers are beginning to expect quick answers to their problems and authentic engagement with their conversations.
One of the best ways we’ve found to make sure you catch all these conversations is to use a social media engagement tool. There are a lot of great ones out there. We’ve built one at Buffer called Buffer Reply, which you can check out at buffer.com/reply.
The biggest social networks in the world live under the Facebook umbrella, and brands that make great use of their Facebook Page and Instagram profile can create wonderful experiences for their audience.
It all begins with getting set up correctly. Let’s start with Instagram.
You want to show people that you are committed to being there for them on social, and one way to do that is to put in the time to create a complete profile. This includes the obvious bits like profile picture and description. By the way, we did a whole episode on Instagram bios just a couple weeks ago if you scroll back through our podcast archives.
But beyond those basics, we also highly recommend filling out the finer details like category, location, and contact information. This shows your audience that you’re willing to engage with them in any way that works best for them — whether it be through a DM, through a reaction to a Story, or through email or in-person.
The same advice holds true for your Facebook Page. Spend the time to fill out everything completely, including your profile picture, cover photo, and About section. But also making sure that all your contact information is listed.
As a bonus tip, if you’re actively engaging with people on these networks, then those interactions are likely to be quite easily visible whenever someone visits your page. You can see the replies to things like Facebook posts, and you can scroll through Instagram comments. If you notice that a brand is jumping into the comments to answer questions and share emojis, then you’re likely to leave with a positive feeling about that brand!
The other major tip we want to share about engaging on Instagram and Facebook is to take advantage of some of the new features that both networks are rolling out to manage conversations even easier. There’ve been a lot of neat announcements recently. You might have heard about Threads, a new standalone app from Instagram that is intended for private, 1:1 conversations. It remains to be seen exactly how brands might use this tool, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.
What’s more immediately clear is the way that Facebook hopes to unite its messaging for businesses into a centralized inbox. Currently, you can manage Messenger and Instagram DMs through your Facebook Page, and Facebook has added even more functionality just this last week, including the capability of:
Also on the horizon: Instagram DMs might be coming to desktop soon. Currently you can only access these through the mobile app.
Twitter is an especially effective customer support and success channel that can be scaled much easier than traditional phone or email support channels. It’s fast and effective for your customers, and it’s speedy and efficient for your social media team.
Like with Instagram and Facebook, it helps to get the profile set up completely. Specifically for Twitter, it can be great to add support hours to your Twitter account profileTwitter makes it incredibly easy to include your support hours directly on your Twitter profile. This helps set response time expectations with customers which is crucial.
Similarly, you can enable the‘Provides Support’ label to let customers know that your Twitter account provides support by quickly enabling this option.
One small tweak that we highly recommend making on Twitter is allowing anyone to send you a Direct Message. You can reduce friction by allowing anyone to send you a private Direct Message as opposed to the normal flow where a you and your customer must follow each other in order to DM. This would encourage more conversation with your audience.
Even if it’s just one or two people replying on your social handles, signatures are a great way to make your customers’ experience that much more personal. It can even help reinforce a sense of continuity of care.
You can add this manually into each message, or this can be automatically added if you use a social media support tool like Buffer Reply.
And if you’re not sure what to use for a signature, we’ve found that common conventions include appending first names or initials next to things like hyphens or carats.
Ok, we’ve mentioned tools like Buffer Reply a few times now, and for good reason: when it comes to social media monitoring, it’s very important to capture all your brand mentions. Third-party tools like Reply can make this much easier.
Ideally, with social media monitoring, you’ll want to get all
By setting filters and searches in these tools, you can ensure that you capture it all and respond to every conversation that needs it.
We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!
Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Facebook, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.
The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode. It’s our hope that you’ll join our 27,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!
The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.
It doesn’t get much better than a moment of delight on social media.
We love the brands who deliver these moments to customers (as customers of some of these brands, we particularly love when it happens to us). And we aim to deliver delight on a regular basis when we interact with Buffer customers online, too.
Social media engagement seems like a slam dunk strategy. Everyone should be doing it, right? But it certainly comes with its blind spots and questions.
Should you be replying to everyone?
How can you make sure you capture all your mentions?
What are the best ways to respond quickly?
In this post, we’ll run through some of the reasons why investing in engagement makes business sense, and we’ll touch on the specific tips and workflows to master engagement on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
One of the quickest and easiest ways to set yourself apart on social media is simply to reply. If you reply to all your customers, all the time, with a helpful and happy response, then you’re really ahead of the curve.
That’s right, all it takes is engaging with the people who want to engage with you. You’ve probably heard this stat before: Eighty-eight percent of brands don’t respond to messages that need a reply. Really! You can be among that elite 12 percent, simply by engaging.
We’d love to give you some tips on how to do just that.
Before we get into the specifics for tools and workflows on the major social networks, let’s start by discussing some of the benefits and the “why” for social media engagement.
We want to help you get there. Here’s a guide on all things customer support and social media with dozens of tips that you can implement today and begin to delight your customers.
With social media engagement, you will naturally amplify your brand’s voice and tone, plus you’ll have your interactions front-and-center before a larger audience.
(DMs excluded.)
Think about some of the private interactions you have with your customers, like with traditional customer care channels like email, which are private, 1-to-1 interactions. But with social channels like Twitter, these interactions can be public — at least to start. Same goes for engaging with your audience in Instagram comments or Facebook reviews.
You’re already wow-ing your audience in other channels like email and live chat.
With social media, the awesomeness you’re delivering is visible to everyone.
Those amazing audience interactions that create strong word of mouth marketing for you are now amplified to a much larger audience.
Existing and potential customers get to see first hand that you’re responsive and actively supporting your products or services.
You can deliver delight very fast and in a focused way, chatting with your audience about specific topics and campaigns or helping solve particular problems that they’re facing.
With a focus on the short ‘n sweet, something magical happens:
Because of its fast and friendly nature, social media is often preferred over other channels of getting in touch. And the more you respond quickly to your audience, the better they’ll learn that social media — Instagram, Facebook, Twitter — are great places to connect directly with your brand.
At Buffer, a vast majority of our audience is on social media throughout the day. It’s where they’re at and where it often makes the most sense for them to reach out and get in touch.
We have more than 1,000 conversations a week on social media!
We imagine that there might be a large volume of social conversations happening for you, too. People spend an average of nearly four hours a day consuming media on a screen. And a growing percent of that viewing happens on smartphones and apps.
That’s a lot of eyeballs on screens.
Social media channels provide an easy outlet for customers to switch from browsing to chatting at a moment’s notice. More and more those chats are pointed toward brands on social where customers are beginning to expect quick answers to their problems and authentic engagement with their conversations.
One of the best ways we’ve found to make sure you catch all these conversations is to use a social media engagement tool. There are a lot of great ones out there. We’ve built one at Buffer called Buffer Reply, which you can check out at buffer.com/reply.
The biggest social networks in the world live under the Facebook umbrella, and brands that make great use of their Facebook Page and Instagram profile can create wonderful experiences for their audience.
It all begins with getting set up correctly. Let’s start with Instagram.
You want to show people that you are committed to being there for them on social, and one way to do that is to put in the time to create a complete profile. This includes the obvious bits like profile picture and description. By the way, we did a whole episode on Instagram bios just a couple weeks ago if you scroll back through our podcast archives.
But beyond those basics, we also highly recommend filling out the finer details like category, location, and contact information. This shows your audience that you’re willing to engage with them in any way that works best for them — whether it be through a DM, through a reaction to a Story, or through email or in-person.
The same advice holds true for your Facebook Page. Spend the time to fill out everything completely, including your profile picture, cover photo, and About section. But also making sure that all your contact information is listed.
As a bonus tip, if you’re actively engaging with people on these networks, then those interactions are likely to be quite easily visible whenever someone visits your page. You can see the replies to things like Facebook posts, and you can scroll through Instagram comments. If you notice that a brand is jumping into the comments to answer questions and share emojis, then you’re likely to leave with a positive feeling about that brand!
The other major tip we want to share about engaging on Instagram and Facebook is to take advantage of some of the new features that both networks are rolling out to manage conversations even easier. There’ve been a lot of neat announcements recently. You might have heard about Threads, a new standalone app from Instagram that is intended for private, 1:1 conversations. It remains to be seen exactly how brands might use this tool, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.
What’s more immediately clear is the way that Facebook hopes to unite its messaging for businesses into a centralized inbox. Currently, you can manage Messenger and Instagram DMs through your Facebook Page, and Facebook has added even more functionality just this last week, including the capability of:
Also on the horizon: Instagram DMs might be coming to desktop soon. Currently you can only access these through the mobile app.
Twitter is an especially effective customer support and success channel that can be scaled much easier than traditional phone or email support channels. It’s fast and effective for your customers, and it’s speedy and efficient for your social media team.
Like with Instagram and Facebook, it helps to get the profile set up completely. Specifically for Twitter, it can be great to add support hours to your Twitter account profileTwitter makes it incredibly easy to include your support hours directly on your Twitter profile. This helps set response time expectations with customers which is crucial.
Similarly, you can enable the‘Provides Support’ label to let customers know that your Twitter account provides support by quickly enabling this option.
One small tweak that we highly recommend making on Twitter is allowing anyone to send you a Direct Message. You can reduce friction by allowing anyone to send you a private Direct Message as opposed to the normal flow where a you and your customer must follow each other in order to DM. This would encourage more conversation with your audience.
Even if it’s just one or two people replying on your social handles, signatures are a great way to make your customers’ experience that much more personal. It can even help reinforce a sense of continuity of care.
You can add this manually into each message, or this can be automatically added if you use a social media support tool like Buffer Reply.
And if you’re not sure what to use for a signature, we’ve found that common conventions include appending first names or initials next to things like hyphens or carats.
Ok, we’ve mentioned tools like Buffer Reply a few times now, and for good reason: when it comes to social media monitoring, it’s very important to capture all your brand mentions. Third-party tools like Reply can make this much easier.
Ideally, with social media monitoring, you’ll want to get all
By setting filters and searches in these tools, you can ensure that you capture it all and respond to every conversation that needs it.
We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!
Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Facebook, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.
The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode. It’s our hope that you’ll join our 27,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!
The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.