Here are some of the key takeaways from our content this week, along with actionable steps that you can use right away to help you build and maintain your social team's digital strategy, improve your digital marketing results, and optimize your digital marketing efforts without breaking the bank.
Whether you're the Director of Digital Marketing, a Social Media Manager, or the Marketing Manager of an SMB, you'll find something helpful that you can apply to your business right now in our Weekly Digital Digest!
Digital Strategy
3 Ways You Can Up Your Social Customer Service Game in 2017
Earlier this week we talked about how social customer service will continue to grow in 2017 and why that is. The current driving force behind this is new technology, as chatbots have evolved from tone-dead automatons to a thoughtful extension of self-help service options. These chatbots are helping businesses deliver faster and more reliable responses to simple inquiries that otherwise tie up support staff's time.
So what should you do if you want to leverage this tech in your own social customer support program without making costly mistakes?
- Even if you're not sure how such a tool would fit into your existing support workflow, if nothing else you could use the bot to acknowledge customer issues and greet the customer. Be sure to let them know that their problem will be addressed, along with an estimate of how soon they should expect a response. Even if you're not equiped to respond to most issues immediately, this instant first touch can go a long way towards setting expectations, making customers feel valued, and improving their overall support experience.
- Chatbots handle walking customers through simple sets of instructions very well. You should try programming the steps to solving a few common, but simple, customer issues into it, place the bot on relevant areas of your website, and see how your customers respond.
- Don't force your customers to use it. If someone asks one of the simple, frequently asked questions you've set your bot up to respond to, that's great, but make sure that if the bot is struggling to provide a useful answer or to understand the question that it is set up to get them connected with a real person, either online or via a returned call from the next available support representative.
Ultimately the most important step you need to take here is to listen to customer sentiment about how you've implemented your new bots. Are things going smoothly, are there some tasks you expected it handle well that aren't working out like you expected? Stay on top of this feedback to make sure your implementation is a success.
Social media Management
3 Tips to Use Native Facebook Video Content to Break the Low Organic Reach Blues
If your social team is facing ever falling organic reach on Facebook, what can you do about it? One step in the right direction is to harness native Facebook video content. Native Facebook videos drive more reach and interactions, with double the reach of third party videos and double the likes, 3x as many shares, and 7x as many comments!
In fact SocialBakers found that Facebook videos received more organic reach than any other post type, with a 135% increase over the organic reach of a photo, and more fan reach as well, with 148% increase in reach to your existing Facebook audience over posting a photo.
How can you create great Facebook videos that will reach more of your audience organically and help you drive more interactions?
- Keep your video short - Ideally you want to get your message across in 48 seconds or less.
- It should succeed without sound - Think about how people view Facebook videos. Many are on mobile devices, some in public places. Sound doesn't play unless the video is clicked and the vast majority of videos are watched without it, so make sure your video has text, subtitles, or is easy to understand without them.
- Include a call to action - Reaching more people and getting someone to like a post isn't an end goal, it's a means to an end. Include a call to action asking your viewers to take an action that is meaningful to your business or your social media program.
If you follow these tips for creating great Facebook videos, you'll be one step closer to reaching and engaging a larger share of your audience organically, and driving some of the people you've reached and engaged to take action in helping you accomplish your business goals.
Small Business
3 Steps To Find the Right Content Mix for Your Business
Should you create new content or curate content? It always astonishes me when people approach this question as a strictly either/or decision. The reality is that for most businesses who cannot afford a large, dedicated editorial team (most SMBs), the answer will always be a mix of both.
So why should you curate content on your social channels while also writing your own original content and sharing it there as well?
- You should be posting more often - As we already talked about earlier this year, posting more content has had a clear impact in the growth of traffic and social interactions for many major brands and media outlets. Most businesses can't keep up with the output some of these organizations manage, but you don't have to. Curation can help you to consistently post new content, along with your own analysis and opinion, to keep your social channels active and provide some additional value.
- Create content that supports your business goals - You might be wondering how to decide which content to curate and which content to write yourself. Focus on creating content that is related to your core business offerings and will help you convert traffic into leads and customers. Use curation as an opportunity to round out your content mix with other topics that you have authority on and will add value for your customers, but aren't as likely to result in new business.
- Reuse your existing content- Upcycling your content is a great strategy to help you take one piece of content and use it in part to create another piece of useful content. This post is a prime example. I took content I curated and added my own analysis and opinion to throughout the week, summarized the 3 most important posts, and added additional information and actionable steps that will help you put each of those concepts to work for your social team right away. Even if you saw one or all of those posts this week, you're still going to get even more value out this one, but I didn't have to create this post from scratch. If you didn't see any of those posts this week, then I've just successfully reused my curated content to create an original piece of content that reached a new audience. See? It works.
Make sure that you find the right mix of content curation and original content creation for your business and your team. You don't want to stretch your social team or members of other teams who are helping you create content past what they can reasonably accomplish while also doing their jobs.
Just prioritize creating the content that is most likely to help you drive business results, and then choose the right topics to focus on to curate content that will be helpful to your audience.
What do you think of our new Weekly Digital Marketing Essentials series? Let me know in the comments below.
