FreshNetworks Blog

It is very easy to get excited by social media. By “Likes” and “Follows”. To think about the tools you can use. To worry about creating content. To feel you must rush to be on the latest platform or site. But in all this excitement it can be easy to forget something that is more important than the tools, platforms and sites that you can make use of – the skills and expertise you need to identify, manage and grow a true online community.

When we talk about social media we are really only talking about tools that we can use to help us and the people we engage to achieve a task. To make a success in social media we need to understand online communities. For those of us who have been working in this space for many years this has long been the basis of all our work.

What is an online community?

There is a temptation to assume that all use of social media is the same – that we are ‘doing social media’. But this is just not true. There is a fundamental difference in how people behave when they are primarily in a group of actual friends (such as on Facebook) and how you interact with people not because you know them and are friends with them, but because you share a common interest (such as in a forum for fans of Arsenal football club, a site for mum chatting about nutrition in early years or a group of runners helping each other with training advice and tips as they prepare to run a marathon).

An online community is a group of people who exhibit this second behaviour. They do not necessarily know each other, and may not have any desire to become friends in that broader sense of the word. They do have a common passion, interest, concern or question. And they can find and engage with others online because of this.

Working with online communities

For most organisations looking at social media, it is only by identifying, building and engaging with online communities that they will start to get real benefit. Online communities are truly scalable because they do not rely on becoming ‘friends’ with people but mean that you (the organisation) and the rest of the community engage on topics that you all share in common. This is real engagement in a way that just amassing Likes or Follows is not.

Social media just provides the set of tools you can use to do this. But the real skill is threefold:

1. Firstly to be able to identify the community you want to engage and understand why they would engage with you. What is the passion, problem, concern, issue or question that you can connect with your community about? And why would they connect with you at all about it?
2. Then how do you find these people and help them to find you? Likes on Facebook or Followers on Twitter do not necessarily make an online community.
3. Finally how do you manage them. There is a valuable and often heated debate elsewhere about the differences between a social media manager and a community manager, but any community does need the ‘party host’ role. A community manager who facilitates conversations and activities, helps to moderate the community so that it is a productive and friendly place for all, and who acts as the link between the organisation and the online community.

With all the excitement of social media it often feels like we have forgotten what we have known for many years about online communities and the way they work and interact. For anybody looking at or working in social media a solid grounding in how online communities work and how we should work with them is essential.

If you’ve got a Facebook account, chances are you will have seen the different ways in which brands approach updating their statuses. It’s worth putting some effort into making sure that you are creating engaging content for your Facebook fans. By ensuring that they are engaging with your content, you can develop and nurture an on-going relationship with them

The way in which you write an engaging Facebook status update will obviously vary depending on your audience, but here are a three tips which could be applied to many Facebook communities.

1. Make it short

A common mistake on a brand page is to treat status updates like blog posts. However, long copy on Facebook often doesn’t work in the newsfeed and simply doesn’t get read. Many updates I see could be cut in half with a bit of clever editing – so think about the key message you are trying to communicate and delete the fluff.

2. Make it personal

We may be working in digital marketing, but it’s worth remembering that most people haven’t ‘liked’ your page because they want you to sell stuff to them. To make your updates relevant to your fans, ensure that they show you are interested in them as individuals. Ask your fans about their opinions and their experiences – and show that you are interested in what they have to say.

3. Make it easy

If you give your Facebook fans an obvious call to action, they are much more likely to engage with your content. With so many other people and brands competing for attention in the newsfeed, you need to make sure that your update is one that stands out as simple to read and respond to.

A great way to do this is to write statements which invite your fans to fill in the blanks – for example:

“My favourite flavour of ice cream is ______”.

It only takes a few seconds for someone to read this short sentence and react. You may not be directly selling them your ice cream, but you will have made your fan stop and think about eating your ice cream for a moment.

With seven in ten brands saying they plan to increase their presence across social media in 2012 (according to a recent survey by Awareness) we thought it would be a good idea to take a regular look at the current social media landscape.

So here’s a quick run down of  what we think has been hot in social media this January:

1. Farfetch.com – the future of social retail?

2012 looks set to be the year of the social online retailer. Luxury retailer farfetch.com announced that it saw a 73% rise in traffic from Facebook in the second half of 2011 and it recently raised a second round of funding to the tune of $18m.

And it’s not just luxury online retailers who are seeing the value of social. As part of its strategy to encourage social shopping, fab.com launched its live feed for members to easily check out what others are buying, liking, tweeting and sharing – all in real time.

Just 7 months since launching, fab.com already has 1.4m members – over half of which have joined as a result of social sharing, so it clearly makes business sense to encourage this channel.

2. KLM and Scandinavian Airlines encourage social flying

Following on from their popular ‘Surprise’ campaign, KLM are getting even more social by launching their ‘Meet and Seat’ campaign. The idea is that when customers book flights, they have the option of creating a public profile and then choosing who they sit next to on the plane. Romantic stuff or creepy as hell? You decide.

Scandinavian Airlines has also got in on the act by encouraging members to use their air miles by booking flights together. Their ‘Couple up, to buckle up’ campaign shared QR codes with members who had to put their phones together in order to access a unique 2 for 1 booking code.

3. Soundcloud gives Instagram a personal touch

It looks like sound hosting just got interesting with the launch of Soundcloud’s new slideshow app, ‘Story Wheel’,this month. The idea behind ‘Story Wheel’ is that members can look through their Instagram photos and record an audio description to go with them. The effect is an old-school slide-show with a personal soundtrack – you can see the founders of Soundcloud’s own version here.

Audio-hosting platform Soundcloud has grown by about 1 million members in the last couple of months and is now fully integrated with Facebook. This month, it reached a milestone of 10 million users, so diversifying their offering is a smart move to show that sound can make images that bit more personal.

With such a large audience behind them, perhaps now may be the time for brands to think about how they can use audio-hosting as part of their social media strategy.

Socialbakers.com describes itself  as “the world’s fastest growing social media and digital analytics company” and claim “over 250,000 marketers as customers across all continents in over 60 countries”. We caught up with Katrina Wong, their VP of marketing to find out more about social media analytics and the future direction of one of the first companies in the world to have initial access to Facebook data.

FreshNetworks: So why do you think social media metrics are important for brands and businesses?

Katrina Wong:  Social media has completely revolutionised marketing. If you think back to the days before Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., the information and feedback  a business got from its audience was via traditional market research and surveys. These were slow, costly processes. Now so much information about your target audience is available extremely fast and at your fingertips. You can get so much data and insight about your customers without much effort or work. That is super powerful.

FN: What does Socialbakers measure?

KW: We naturally look at the number of fans, number of followers, etc., but what we’re really focusing on is engagement – it’s so important to look deeper than at just the number of people on your page. It’s about what people are saying, how often are they saying it and drilling further into that.   It’s about how often people are visiting your page, how long are they staying there, how often are they saying things about your brand. It’s about the level and quality of feedback rather than being just about numbers; that’s how I think about the engagement metrics Socialbakers provides.

FN: What do you think are the most important metrics to look at in terms of engagement?

KW: I think its really important to look at a mixture of fan numbers, likes, and comments on Facebook and be able to see that on a daily or even hourly basis. Are they liking AND commenting? Are they just fans who don’t interact? It’s important to look at the relationship between these 3 metrics.

FM: Without using the tool what do you think are the best ways to measure social media?

KW: That’s really the hard part.  Facebook and the other social media platforms hold so much data and without a tool like Socialbakers, you’re really left to your own devices. You could just look at the data yourself, you can spend days on end manually counting likes, comments, retweets or whatever. You can do it, but if you want to be efficient, I’d seriously suggest using a tool or a platform like ours.

FN: Can you tell us a little bit about how Socialbakers works?

KW: We have two products. The first product we built was for analytics. This allows you to access, sort and export data very easily. One huge advantage for Socialbakers is that not only can you access the data for your company’s social media channels, you can access the data of your competitors and literally compare like with like, right there on the screen or in a printed report. Being able to monitor your competitors is powerful for a business that wants to stay ahead.  Competitive insight is unique to Socialbakers.

The second product – what we call our Engagement Builder –  is for social media campaign management. On one hand, you can manage your communication from one place – like scheduling updates – and assign responsibilities to your team members. On the other hand, you can create customisable Facebook applications for your page to engage your audience.

FN: Obviously you cover Facebook but what other platforms do you cover too?

KW: Google plus, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. With regards to Twitter, we can show the number of followers.  We are looking at doing what we did for Facebook and adding that to our Twitter product — we’re working on this at the moment. We’re looking at country data, other location data, popularity on Twitter, etc.

We’re looking into how we can mine data from individual accounts as an aggregate for Twitter too. We’re hoping to replicate what we’ve done for Facebook on Twitter, as well as for all of the other social media platforms.

FN: Who do you see your main competitors to be?

KW: We get asked that a lot! We’re the only company to build a solution that interfaces with all the publicly available Facebook data rather than just interfacing with a subset of data. When I think about that, there’s no other company that does that.

FN: How far back does the data go in Socialbakers?

KW: The data goes back a few years, basically as long as we’ve been monitoring and we were monitoring very early on with Facebook.

FN: Aside from the platform developments you’ve already mentioned, what does the future hold for Socialbakers?

KW: From a product perspective, we have such a close relationship with Facebook that whenever they bring out something new, we’ll be able to develop something for it and usually the first to launch. Sometimes we’re one of four companies that they work with them in this way, so we’re definitely one of the first to know about something new.  We’re lucky we have history with them and this puts us in a really great position when it comes to Facebook and leading social media analytics.

Image courtesy of inblurbs

An essential part of social media management is blogger outreach. Here are our social media management team’s top tips to ensure you reach  your target market effectively:

1. Be relevant

It might sound obvious but make sure that the bloggers you contact are actually relevant for your message. Do your research.  If you’re not sure whether something will fit, it’s probably sensible to err on the side of caution and not bother (most bloggers will probably hate emails that start “I know you never write about X, but I’ve got this product…”).

And where do you find relevant bloggers? Google is the best place to start – advanced search features allow you sort to by date, time and location, helping you find the right people who are talking about the things that matter to you.

Also check out blogrolls from the sites you know are relevant – it’s always good to know what the bloggers you’re reaching out to  are reading.

Another big recommendation from the team here at FreshNetworks is PeopleBrowsr, which can help you find bloggers by filtering via location, influence & communities to zero in on who is worth reaching out to.

2. Get to know your bloggers and build relationships

Follow your bloggers on Twitter – whether from your brand’s or company’s account or your own – and talk to them. If you’ve got something interesting to say, they’ll  listen.

Take every opportunity you can to make connections offline – such as industry events and conferences – or even think about hosting a blogger event of your own.

3. Get your message right

Don’t just send a blogger a press release and hope for the best. Tailor your message and demonstrate that you know why you’re writing to them. Which piece(s) of content on their blog were interesting or prompted you to write to them?

Write to the blogger like they’re a human being but don’t be too over-familiar. Use an open and friendly tone of voice and unless you really think it suits, don’t be too formal . Get to the point!

4. Make it easy for the blogger

You want the blogger to write something for you, so don’t make their life difficult. Attach images that they’d otherwise have to take from your website, give them accurate information, include links and make the information you’re presenting straightforward.

5. To pay or not to pay and other incentives

We’d never pay for  blog coverage and we’d never recommend a client to. Firstly, your chances of being re-blogged by others is diminished if they see that a post talking about your brand is sponsored. Secondly, bloggers’ opinions count. Surely it’s better to get coverage because they think your brand or product is cool or your message is interesting rather than having paid for it?

Of course, products for review are a different matter and a nice freebie or two can definitely keep a good blogger relationship thriving!

6. Say thanks/ show you care

Finally, say thank you. And mean it.  A quick email, a re-tweet, a link posted on Twitter – simple things to show your gratitude, show-off the coverage to your audience and (hopefully) reward the blogger with some lovely traffic back!