From time to time, I like to pick the brain of a community manager or social media marketer and understand how they function and approach the various aspects of social media and content.
Given how vast and diverse social media is, there are literally hundreds and thousands of opinions around community management and social floating around there, and it’s important to identify the right people in order to get the right advice. My quest last week led me to Kristy Hughes, who encapsulates the very essence of what a community manager should aspire to be.
The Community Management Superstar – Kristy Hughes.
A little bit about her, Kristy Hughes was recently appointed as the sole Community Manager at Saatchi & Saatchi in Sydney. Lured from her role in Search & Media last year, she works across a range of clients tailoring a social content presence that best meets their needs as a business.
With a background in SEO (that predates the Link Building days), Blogger Outreach, and Copywriting, she places a great deal of emphasis on data-driven insights, building relationships with clients/communities and bespoke tonality for brands on social.
Her role encompasses everything from detailed campaign reporting and content creation to community management, crisis escalation as well as social campaign consulting.
In short – a well rounded digital and social marketer, which is why I harassed her with 400 e-mails last week.
My intention when speaking with her was to understand what she felt about community management and social, but what she gave me can well be used as the guide to success for a community manager. Read every word!
Your primary strengths lie in understanding a brand’s style, and then converting that style into an online presence by providing tone, structure and a framework. In essence, bringing a brand to life on social media. How do you go about this process?
In the beginning I do a formal audit of their social presence (or presences) and identify their size, levels of consistency, if there are any patterns in content, or lulls in activity. Most of the time a brand will have several accounts, some active, some dormant and no long term plan for maintaining and optimising content across them. After my \’social stocktake\’ I book a meeting with my client and speak with them at length about what they see the role for social being, what the business as a whole expects to see on their channels and why they\’re now placing a focus on putting a plan in place.
I ask really open ended questions and do A LOT of listening. It is super important to hear what your client has to say, as one size doesn\’t fit all. You don\’t always need to reinvent the wheel, but they\’re also expecting to see change- so keep this in mind. Some brands use their social presence as a customer service platform, others customer retention tool and most, simply a content amplifier. Unlike other traditional channels, Social has, in a way been \’forced\’ onto brands. It was not born out of a business need- therefore it is important early on to establish what that need might be and assess the best way a social plan can deliver to this.
Given that you\’ve worked with a number of brands, what’s one thing that they just don’t seem to understand from a community management and social media perspective that you need to focus on time and time again?
This changes a lot. Right now? It\’s justifying the cost of creating bespoke social content in a considered but flexible way and paying for this content to be amplified to its full potential. They\’re struggling with the shift from social being a \’free content amplifier\’ to something that now does represent a cost in both creative and media. Why create really great content that organically is only going to reach a small percentage of your community? Optimizing your content can only help you so much. A great idea deserves to get exposure, or it can so easily be wasted. Moving from a campaign focused spend to an \’always on\’ presence can be a tough one to sell in.
Quotable! Keep this in mind, peeps!
Are brands still very Facebook focused? Do you try and sway them into spreading out their presence on other networks? If so, which ones do you generally recommend?
In Australia, generally yes. Mainly because the bulk of a brand\’s audience will be on Facebook and when allocating spend on a \’cost per unique\’ reach basis it is the most cost effective. In terms of swaying them to other platforms, it really does depend on their product offering. Some brands offer products and services that are naturally quite social/conversational (beauty, fashion, FMCG) and for others, it\’s a stretch.
Not every brand needs every channel, and if they\’re unable to create tailored content for each platform, or engage with the community on a consistent basis- it does far more harm than good. I am a big believer that each of the channels have their own strengths and unique audiences, however I am also a realist when it comes to the bottom line. Spending the same amount of time creating content to go to a Pinterest following of 500 people as you would a Facebook content plan for 300,000 doesn\’t make a whole lot of business sense. Keep it focused and do it well.
For someone who is just starting out at managing a brand\’s presence on social media, what three pieces of advice would you give them?
1. Work directly with your client, and cc you Account Manager where required. Social moves quickly and whilst it\’s really important to work closely with your AMs, they may not be around when you need something approved to go live in less than an hour. Keep them across everything but don\’t overcomplicate the communication process.
2. Establish a \’way of working\’ that clearly defines roles and responsibilities. Who is posting? Who is moderating?Who is in charge of approvals (if required)? What hours are you expected to be on-page? Who are the important points of contact in a crisis? Having all of this in place ensures you get off of the right foot and maintain a harmonious relationship with your client, because once it goes sour, it is very hard to recover.
3. Let your reporting inform your content creation. Assess your metrics closely and get to know your community. I have markers for gauging how my content is performing that I adjust based on each community. They\’re all incredibly different, what works really well for one brand may fall flat with another. There\’s no sure fire formula so without analysing your data- you won\’t know what\’s working and what is letting you down.
And another one for your Pinterest boards!
Are there any particular tools that you use for reporting statistics and data around social media? Which tools do you use, and why do you prefer these over others?
I do my own manual reporting. Which may seem tiresome, but I like to work with raw data- direct from the platform, and pull in other stats that are relevant to my insights and the client\’s needs. Over the years I\’ve probably used most of the bigger ones. Buzz, Sprout Social, Radian 6, Simply Measured.
There are bits and pieces I\’ve really liked about the functionalities from each of these but I am yet to find one that \’does it all\’. You also need to ensure the KPIs you\’ve put in place can be manually calculated. What if your tool becomes redundant in a year and you aren\’t able to give a YoY analysis because you didn’t know how it calculated the metric you were tracking? Be smart with your data and always know what you\’re looking at. It also really depends on what the client wants to report on, and this can change campaign to campaign.
What do they need to show to their bosses? And why? I have created Community Health Reports to both inform my content, as well as deliver to the client\’s KPIs, check in on competitors and highlight opportunities in the future. Make your reports work for you and don\’t overcomplicate them. It\’s the insights that are important, not the sexy graphs (although I do like those too!)
How important is it for a community manager dabbling in social media to understand the technicalities of SEO?
I think it\’s imperative, but I would say that! I am pretty biased there. I most certainly wouldn\’t be as good at my job without that background- and this is why. As a CM, Social Media Manager, Content Creator (whatever you would like to call yourself) there is one really crucial thing you need to understand- and that is the true \’value\’ of content. On your channels and off them. You need to be able to work with your media agencies closely to add your social data in with their reporting to show its value.
If you can\’t explain why something \’worked\’ clearly to your clients and be able to provide them with some context, why would they invest more in what you\’re working on?
She’s full of quotes, this one.
If there’s one mindset around community management that you’d like to change world over, what would it be?
That it\’s a job for a junior. Whilst younger people do kind of \’get it\’ a little more, by no means should it be left to the devices of the latest Grad. Being able to write, doesn\’t make you a Copywriter just as having a Facebook account doesn\’t make you a CM. This is more important I guess when dealing with a big brand. We are getting more and more coverage in the media for responses on topical or sensitive issues- or even poorly considered content.
The last thing a brand needs is an inexperienced CM telling a consumer to \’just check the website\’ when they come with a legitimate query, or writing an ill informed response in a potential crisis situation that ends up in the press.
I figured if I asked Kristy any more questions she\’d never speak to me again, so I decided that those questions gave a pretty good idea of the State of Community Management as of now, and serves as a brilliant guide for aspiring community managers trying to find their feet.
In closing, here are my key takeaways:
Listen to your clients. Do a lot of listening. Did I mention you should listen? LISTEN DAMMIT.
Social Media is no longer a free amplification tool, and you should come to terms with that.
Not every brand needs every channel. Each channel has its own strength.
Work directly with your clients as much as possible, but establish a proper working process.
Doing manual reporting might not be everyone\’s game, but it\’s important to dive into the raw data to understand what\’s going on behind the tools you use for reporting.
Community Management is not a job for the \”junior\”. Brands need to be represented by experts online.
When she’s not being an amazing community manager for her clients, Kristy manages to find time to be a mentor at Propellher, as well as contribute to Blogger Connect. You can find her and stalk her on Twitter, and if you’d like to throw any questions her way – feel free to ask away in the comments section.
January 25, in the lives of amazing people like you and me, has been reserved for Opposite Day. For those without common sense, here’s an explanation of the day. You may or may have not seen Opposite Day being observed in the popular sitcom Seinfeld – so it’s not something that the internet made up on a lazy Tuesday afternoon.
For Opposite Day, I decided to get in touch with Steve Spicer, an all-round brilliant guy who has handled social media for some very high profile individuals such as Derren Brown and Peter Serafinowicz.
He’s a Social Media Marketing professional, who works primarily with brands and businesses in the entertainment sector. Having been at this now for close to five years, he’s considered to be something of a Social Media veteran, causing many people to wonder, ‘How is he still here?’
I decided to ask him questions around how he handles social media and digital marketing, and he gracefully answered.
Avtar: Steve! It’s 2014! Are you happy?
Steve: Hi Avtar, can I be honest with you right up front? I’m not happy. Seriously. Social Media has completely failed to live up to everyone’s expectations and, excruciatingly, is still here. It’s still thriving and it is still a hot topic, despite the very best efforts of people like me to exhaust its gimmicky engines over the past 18-24 months.
Avtar: I agree, not even sure why we\’re bothering with this any more. Regardless, what changes have you brought about to your social media strategy as part of your social resolutions?
Steve: Social Resolutions? We do those now? Okay, so off the top of my head, I’ve resolved to really plough a lot more energy into more frequent and more text-heavy updates. If I know one thing for certain, it’s that people are getting sick to death of colourful, entertaining content and long for the simplicity of getting comfy with an e-reader to get stuck into some meaty, well-researched long-form articles that can take up the best part of an afternoon to read.
Avtar: On that note, let’s make sure we throw in numbers in this interview and make this absolutely massive! Which platform drives the least amount of engagement for brands that you manage and why?
Steve: From where I’m sitting, ever since they got rid of the Fail Whale, Twitter has really struggled to regain any of the start-up swagger that was on show back in 2007 at SXSW.
Users of the platform are struggling to keep up with the speed of their own updates, tiring of the endless exposure to socio-political activism, and are growing deeply resentful toward the constant interruption to their favourite television programmes to read what other people are writing about those same shows.
Add to that the swelling army of celebrities who are cutting out their publicists and managers to engage their audiences with unfiltered honesty, I mean – who wants that!?
Avtar: To hell with Twitter. I’ve heard MySpace is the in-thing now. What tips do you have for social media managers looking to master Twitter though?
Steve:
I cannot overstate how important it is to ignore what everyone else is saying and to find your own focus to the exclusion of all other stimuli. Literally – ignore everyone. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to mollify your audience by attempting to engage them in any kind of meaningful dialogue. The numbers are simply against you from the get-go. It is impossible to hold a conversation with everyone who follows an account, or Page or whatever so don’t even try. Speak and they will listen. If they like, they can always leave a message.
Avtar: Not like social media is for engagement with fans anyway, there are 1-800 numbers for that. Good analysis, Steve. Tell me though, when you hit a wall and can\’t think of any further ideas for content for the pages you manage, how do you come up with ideas?
Steve: I’m a big believer in the old adage that the only way to go forward is to first go back, so when I hit The Wall, I go back and look at what ideas were working well in, say, 2010 and just rehash those as best I can. Seriously, if the wheel wasn’t wobbling then, there is no need to stop and change it. Failing that I just steal. Copy-paste is how we spell ‘homage’ these days.
The perils of running multiple Twitter accounts mean I’m constantly asking Wait, am I me? before tweeting…
Avtar: You and me both! So, what are the key ingredients that make a marketing campaign successful on social media?
Steve: In my experience there is really only one ingredient – and that is advertising. As a society of consumers, we’ve grown up watching ads, reading ads, gazing up at ads on billboards, listening to ads between songs on commercially funded radio stations. The conditioning is already in place, so the only way to truly guarantee a successful marketing campaign across the new frontier of the Social web is to simply cover it with ads – in the margins, in the messages, everywhere: just like in the real world. Wherever the eye goes, the money flows.
Avtar: Just this morning I clicked 29 ads! Loved every second, such a rush. In closing, what’s the golden piece of advice you’d like to give marketers for 2014?
Steve: Slow down. Things aren’t that different now to how they were ten years ago. There’s a lot of hubbub around innovation and ingenuity, and the stress caused you to try to figure out what either of those words means and applying them to your practice can put you in hospital. So relax. Marketing is still marketing, it just happens to have got so much easier – you can put an unpaid intern in charge of your company’s Social account, and the selling will take care of itself.
So there you have it guys! Focus on long, drawn out, research heavy content with simple graphics (if any at all), don’t respond to your fans immediately, focus on spending at least $5,000 on advertising for each of your campaigns and if you’re ever in doubt, flip back to 1995 and see what kind of campaigns worked then.
Got any questions you’d like Steve to answer? You can tweet to him at @BunchOfSteve, or follow his antics on Instagram!
In the final quarter of 2013, Facebook announced that Facebook pages would see a significant drop in their organic reach – leading to a massive uproar from the social media marketing community. Business Insider published a story talking about how Facebook had screwed an entire profession. Since then, marketers and social media professionals have been fumbling around trying to figure out how to combat this. In fact, we ourselves put together an article that would help marketers deal with this change.
And just when the dust had began to settle and community managers were coming to terms with this new change, there’s another twist in the tale. Not as significant as the one before, but Facebook today came out and said that posting text updates with links is a no-no, and if you want your links to get a little more reach, go ahead and use a link-share. A what? Example below:
However, don’t take this as gospel. As is always the case with Facebook, they never come out and flat out say that a certain post type will do better than the other, but they do give little hints like they have in their latest news release, at least hinting that text updates won’t see as much distribution as link-shares.
A few marketers like myself saw this one coming. Facebook’s been experimenting with the kind of image that shows up in a link-share, trying to give users and page managers the best of both worlds by providing a large image in addition to text and a link for users to interact with.
It however is worth mentioning that until yesterday, my photo posts on Facebook have still got more engagement than link-shares, so perhaps this is something that’s a Work-in-Progress from Facebook and hasn’t affected everyone yet. Facebook is sticking to their guns and saying that link-share posts have been getting a lot more engagement organically in newsfeeds, which is why this change is being implemented to posts showing up via Facebook Pages in newsfeeds as well.
So what now? Here’s my take.
Tips & Dealing With This Slight Tweak:
I’m going to continue posting a mix of photo updates and link-shares, probably maintain a 70-30 split between photos-links, until I see a shift in my own Facebook Insights about Link-Shares getting more exposure. However, it’s vital to get your link-share strategy in place as well.
Link-shares give you a lot of copy to play with. In addition to the text in the post, you get to edit the title of the Link as well as the description below it. Make sure you cover as much information as possible about the link here. Make the link-title snappy and something your TA would want to click.
The Various Text You Can Play With on a Link-Share.
It’s important that the image that shows up in the link-share properly renders. Facebook pulls images from the source URL that you’re using, which is why it\’s important to ensure that on the page has a nice selection of images you can pick from.
The default display size of the image showed in the link-share is 377 x 197, however, Facebook recommends that the image be sized at 1200 x 627.
Often you won’t have an image of that size in the link that you’re directing users to. Facebook allows you to upload an image to the link-share to further customize your post, so that’s covered. Once you paste the link on the new post entry area – the link renders and right below the image it gives you an option to Upload Image”. Nifty.
In the event you’d like to use Bitly for click tracking, you can paste the Bitly link – Facebook automatically renders the final destination of the click – but it still attributes your Bitly link with clicks.
All things said and done, this isn’t a drastic change in the newsfeed algorithm itself. Your reach isn’t going to go back to 15% of your total page size, but your link-shares shall at least get more exposure than other types of posts – good news for a fair amount of marketers who’ve always been worried about not getting enough traction on links and complaining about losing too many pointless clicks when promoting an image with a link attached.
America’s National Football League is one of the most popular sporting leagues in the world. How popular? Let\’s just say that 34 out of 35 of fall’s most watched TV shows in the US were NFL games. We’re not kidding. The average game got 17.6 million viewers and 205 million Americans watched at least one game. The most watched NFL game drew 31.7 million viewers, involving the Raiders and the Cowboys.
If that’s not enough for you, you should know that the NFL’s highest-paid player Aaron Rodgers draws a salary of $43 million USD/year. If you’re not an NFL fan and you\’re wondering where you’ve heard that name – he was featured in State Farm’s hit Discount Double Check ad.
But you’re a social media marketer. What does any of this have to do with you?
A few days ago I came across a very interesting statistic. Interesting for me at least. Each conversation I brought it up in, I was given very strange looks by family and friends. So I’m trying my luck with you lot. Only 5.76% of the TV coverage of an NFL game involves showing the actual game action.
WSJ’s graphical depiction of a typical televised NFL game.
Unbelievable? Maybe you\’ll believe The Wall Street Journal. 7.85% of time was spent on showing replays, 32.98% of the time was spent showing commercials, 35.08% of the time the broadcast shows players… just standing around, and 18.32% of the time – you\’re exposed to shots of the coach, crowd and cheerleaders. For those of you familiar with NFL games, this probably doesn\’t come as a big shock.
Being a social media marketer often asked questions about content strategy – the first connection I made was tying back the NFL\’s television content strategy to a brand\’s online content strategy. What if a brand were to do the same with their content online?
I stretched my imagination, and tried to correlate what each category would mean for a brand on social.
Correlating a Brand’s Online Content with the NFL’s TV Coverage
Game Action:
This is what fans tune in to watch the NFL for. The game. The real, actual, living and breathing content that they consume – that they enjoy. For a brand online, it ties back to something simple – the original content that the brand shares. Their unique blog posts, their insights and their special posts that their fans actually enjoy interacting with and come to the brand\’s portal for.
Replays:
What fan doesn\’t like watching a replay? Every touch-down needs to be re-lived, every massive tackle needs to be seen again. Except, there\’s one stark difference. The replay is packaged very differently from the original play. A replay is in slow motion, with different camera angles that allow fans to analyze the play a little differently. Similarly, for brands online – replays correspond to repackaged original content, such as infographics, charts, or insights drawn from earlier original work.
Fans like to see this content, it gives them a fresh perspective and makes it shareable. That being said, there\’s a limit to how many times you can watch a replay.
Commercials:
To make money, television channels have to sell ads and commercials. In the same way, in order to be sustainable and make a profit – brands online need to have content that ties back to sales for them. Quite simply put, commercials on the NFL equate to the sales – products and services content that a brand puts online.
Shots of Players Standing Around:
Ask any fan, and he won\’t mind seeing Peyton Manning standing around talking to his pals. It gives them a glimpse into the life or behavior of a superstar athlete, and they enjoy it. But just for a little while. Showing it over and over again, the same shot – would probably annoy the fans. These shots, equate to the contextual and timely content that brands publish online around their products.
Oreo usually does some really great ones, and fan like to engage with them. But then again – not too much. The odd one once in a while is good enough.
Shots of the Coach, Crowd, Cheerleaders:
They\’re a vital part of the game as well. They\’re the ones that make things happen, that entertain – that bring about an ambience and feel to the stadium and the plays. So who does this relate back to? For me – this relates back to the team that makes up the brand itself. The CEO, the Marketing Manager, the Sales Manager – everyone else. It\’s important to have content around the brand\’s team and employees to bring about a feeling of realism to the brand, a human touch – if you will.
So, that being said – can you have sales related content dominating 32.98% of your content strategy? Absolutely not. The entire reason why the NFL\’s television coverage has become such a big deal is because that which needs to be given attention is getting the least amount. If your content strategy doesn\’t have a bias towards the real, fresh content – your brand\’s strategy will be called out as well.
So what\’s a healthy balance? That\’s the entire point now, isn\’t it. We put together an infographic that covers what a healthy split between the types of content of your brand should be.
The Optimum Content Strategy Split
The entire reason the Wall Street Journal\’s report made such big news was because it was shocking that just 5.76% of the television coverage was actually about the game. About what fans tuned in for. If you content strategy was along the same lines… you\’d make the news too. Not in a good way.
Therefore, ideally:
40% of your content should be about real, fresh content.
25% of your content should be infographics and insights based on that content.
20% of your content should be hardcore sales stuff (gotta do it!)
10% of your content should be contextual, timely content – talk about only that which directly can be tied to your brand.
5% of your content should be around your team – around the people of the brand.
What does your current content split look like? Do you agree with the split that we came up with?
Are you the best social media manager in the world? If you’re not on the top in this quiz, chances are that you’re not. Circus Social, developer of social media tools for digital marketers, launched the Community Manager’s Quiz in October 2013 with the intent of helping social media marketers realize how good they truly were at marketing. After answering 40 in-depth questions spread across functions such as Project Management, Ethics, Analytics and more – Jessica Quinn came out second from top, out of 650+ community managers that have taken the quiz so far.
But what sets her apart from everyone else? Clearly it’s not that she’s read the most amount of books on social media, for you can’t really “learn” the right ethics, and social media management is a lot about the person involved. Was she manufactured in a super secret lab in the depths of the Canadian Rockies? That was my best guess. But it didn’t fly well in focus group testing. So I set out to find out what makes Jessica Quinn so good.
A communications professional currently in health promotion, Jessica manages social media platforms for Northern Health, the health authority in the northern region of British Columbia, Canada. During grad school and in the nascent stages of her career, she developed a strong focus on social media marketing and eventually created a side consultancy business for herself, called Jessica Quinn Social Media Marketing. Her aim was to help Northern BC businesses and organizations with their social media strategy, implementation and management. You can join her legion of followers on Twitter!
The above representation may or may not be what Jessica exactly looks like.
I tackled her in the street and forced her to answer a couple of questions!
How do you manage social media differently from the rest of the world?
I have a corporate marketing background, so my first thought when approaching social media for any business or organization is to align it to that business’ overall marketing strategy. It’s so important to make sure that your efforts are related to the bigger business objectives. From there, the more specific social media objectives and tactics can be created, whether they’re creating awareness, educating, finding customers or branding yourself as a knowledge leader – it’s all part of creating a strategic online community around a brand.
What platform generates the most amount of “meaningful” engagement for you and why?
In terms of direct, meaningful conversations, Twitter is my personal platform of choice. It’s so easy to search for any topic and directly reach out to whoever you want, even influential leaders. Indirectly though, I beg people not to underestimate the power of the blog I’ve heard people say that blogging is on its way out, being replaced by all the different options of microblogging, but creating engagement on platforms like Twitter and Facebook can be so much more effective when you have a social media hub — like your blog — to point people to for more substance. I blog for Destination BC and it’s this content on their blog that can really drive a lot of their engagement in highlighting our province. However, I will say that Facebook is the place to be for creating significant engagement during high profile campaigns or contests. I manage a health authority Facebook page that sees a large increase in reach and activity during month-long campaigns that we run. Deciding on a platform for engagement purposes really comes down to what your social media strategy and goals are.
What’s something that most social media managers are getting wrong?
I think that most social media managers do an amazing job! I’m constantly in awe of the way that some of the big brands are able to create such a huge presence for themselves online, and particularly the way that they handle issues which inevitably arise. The nice thing about social media is that there are not necessarily any hard and fast rules. There is still so much room for creativity and innovation, both in the areas of development and management.
However, I have seen too many social media managers place too much priority on simply gaining followers and fans. For example, it’s a bit of a pet peeve for me when brands create contests asking people to “share” or “like” their contest post for a chance to win a completely unrelated prize. This method definitely lacks authenticity. Building a solid fan base can be slow at times, but it’s the development and nurturing of that community that is the important piece – not just pumping up the numbers.
Awhile back, I put together a blog post of my top five “don’ts” in social media, mainly based on things I’d seen people doing poorly.
What’s your take on Facebook apps and contests?
Facebook apps and contests can work really well as long as they’re done correctly and stick to the marketing strategy. Also, they need to be relevant to the brand (see above answer about my pet peeve!). Contests (and the apps that run them) need to be easy or fun enough that people will participate; if it’s too cumbersome, it’s so easy to just stop in progress. Social media managers need to think about what the purpose of the contest is: do you want to highlight a product? Do you want to create awareness about something? Create something that’s unique; challenge people; but keep it relevant to the brand and the interests of the community.
Should brands outsource community and social media management or hire someone to do it in-house?
Both ways can work and be very effective, but outsourcing community management does present a few extra challenges that brands need to be aware of and work towards meeting head on. No matter who is managing a brand’s presence, the most important piece is consistency — in terms of content, voice and responding. This can be more difficult if the work is outsourced, but not impossible — the agency just needs to have a thorough understanding of the brand and be a part of the team. It’s also important to have the “inside scoop” — what goes on behind the scenes, what’s the personality of the team, what projects are high level, what’s happening in real-time? This is where an in-house manager has an edge, as they’re privy to all of this. It really depends on the goals of the social media activity, the size of the organization and its relationship to the social media manager (in-house or outsourced).
Got any questions for Jessica Quinn? You can ask her in the comments below! What’s the one big takeaway from this interview? What did you learn from Jessica?
