Welcome to this week’s edition of the Social Media Marketing Talk Show, a news show for marketers who want to stay on the leading edge of social media. On this week’s Social Media Marketing Talk Show, we explore updates to Facebook Creator Studio as well as new Twitter Camera and conversation management features. Tune Into […]
As the martech industry continues to grow exponentially, two paradoxical truths remain constant: Massive consolidation in platforms and massive expansion in apps.
Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.
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We will share the results and plan to continue to track this Event Participation Index so that others in the events space, like us, are better equipped to make decisions.
Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.
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To create a winning link-building campaign, you need a clearly-defined strategy that deeply considers three core areas in equal weight: your audience, your industry and the media landscape you’re aiming to enter. Gaining this knowledge presents topic gaps, inspiration and content potential that can then inform a focused strategy and the creation of a highly-relevant […]
Wish you had more information to guide your marketing decisions? Wondering how Google Analytics can help? To explore how to use Google Analytics to eliminate uncertainty, I interview Chris Mercer on the Social Media Marketing Podcast. Mercer, as he likes to be known, is the world’s leading authority on Google Analytics and the founder of […]
If you’re looking to get even more out of your Instagram presence, the Instagram swipe up feature is a great addition to your Instagram marketing strategy.
The Instagram Story swipe up allows you to be more tactical with your Stories, leading to even more clicks and conversions.
Let’s talk a bit more about what this feature is and how it works, before diving into how to utilize it.
What is the Instagram swipe up feature?
Marketers know all too well that Instagram doesn’t offer much in the way of adding links to posts. And changing the link in to your bio can be tedious, especially if you’re publishing multiple times a day and wanting to link to different landing pages. But accounts that meet the criteria to add swipe up links to their Instagram Stories have the option to be more versatile.
Instagram swipe up is incredibly useful because it allows businesses to promote products, blog posts and sign up pages. These pages open right in the app for users to explore as well.
When a swipe up link is added to a Story, viewers can simply tap on the arrow at the bottom of their screen or swipe up on the Story to access the link.
Here’s what this looks like on a Sprout Social Instagram Story below.
How to get the Instagram swipe up feature
Remember how I said only accounts that meet certain criteria are able to access the Instagram Story link feature?
Because Instagram wants to keep it exclusive for the time being, they’ve set restrictions on accounts that can access this feature and add it to their Stories.
In order to get the Instagram swipe up feature, your account:
This means that celebs, public figures and brands that are verified and haven’t crossed that 10,000 follower threshold are still able to access the coveted Instagram swipe up feature.
How to add a link to your Instagram Story
Once you’ve reached the criteria that give you access to the Instagram swipe up feature, the link icon will automatically appear at the top of your stories editor (fourth from right).
Once you tap it, the window that allows you to add a link to your Story pops up. Add any link to your website, whether it’s a blog post, a landing page or a piece of curated content you’re sharing with your audience.
This is also where you input information about brand partnerships if you’re sharing sponsored content. Tagging your business partner adds a “paid partnership with” label to your story, but it can also limit your ability to edit the Story.
Click the + Web Link section, add your URL then tap Done. You can easily clear or edit your link by tapping the link icon again, or move forward and share your Story with your followers.
Get the most use from the Instagram Story link
So you know what it is, how you get access to it and how to add the Instagram swipe up feature to your Stories.
Now let’s talk about various ways you can take advantage of this new feature to link to websites from your Instagram account.
Promote blog posts
Want to promote your recent blog post? Creating a graphic and sharing it on your Instagram Story is a great way to get even more social traction to your content! Just be sure you’re on top of Instagram’s Story dimensions when you create your visuals. Remember that not all mobile devices have the same dimensions, so it’s important to create graphics within the right dimensions.
When you create your graphics, be sure to include relevant visuals to your blog content and keep your imagery on brand.
Using similar fonts and colors to your overall brand helps with brand strength and recognition, especially when users are scrolling aimlessly through Instagram Stories.
Take a look at this example of a blogger sharing a link to a recent post.
Notice how the graphic and text are concise and clear; the blog name is above the image, and below is the title of her blog post and even the CTA “Swipe Up,” which appears above Instagram’s native “See More” to signify a link.
Another great way to use the Instagram swipe up feature is by promoting your products. After all, Instagram is a visual platform, so use it to share stunning, professional photos of your products with a direct link to their product page.
Take a look at how clothing boutique DressUp promoted their summer tops on their Instagram Story.
Using one of Instagram’s built-in features, the brand created a collage of their products in their Story and used the swipe up to link to a product category page. They’ve made it easy for viewers to instantly shop after seeing something they like.
You can take this one step further with Instagram shopping and link your products to your Instagram account so users can view a story and make a purchase without ever leaving the app.
Promote virtual events
If you’re putting on a virtual event and you’re trying to generate a larger turnout for it, use the swipe up feature to attract registrants. You probably already have promotional graphics for it, so share your graphics to your Stories and include a link to the registration landing page.
Take a look at this webinar promotional graphic from Zapier. They shared an Instagram post from their feed onto their Story and added a direct swipe up link, making it easier for their followers to sign up for their upcoming webinar.
You can easily share your Instagram posts to your own story by tapping the share icon and selecting your Story. This can be a great way both to add links to Instagram posts and get people who are viewing your Story to click to your feed.
Promote landing pages
Whether you’re linking to a sales or service page or an informational landing page, it’s incredibly important to get it in front of your potential customers’ eyes.
These types of webpages are transactional pages, meaning their purpose is to reel visitors in and get them to sign up or make a purchase.
Take a look at this Instagram story promoting and linking to an online course sales and landing page.
Creating Instagram Story graphics (or videos about a service, or even sharing videos of other users as social proof) to link to landing pages should be a big part of your Instagram Stories strategy.
Promote videos
Whether you recently posted a new video to IGTV, YouTube, Facebook or directly to your website, you can easily increase views by sharing a link on your Instagram Story.
Here’s an example of a user sharing a thumbnail of her recent YouTube video on her Instagram Story. The Story links directly to the video so her Instagram followers can immediately watch it.
Once you unlock the Instagram swipe up feature, you can bring your cross-platform promotional content and strategies to your Stories.
Simply create a graphic in Instagram story dimensions, upload it, add a link and publish. Voila! And now you’re able to send followers from Instagram to a video, another social network or your website.
Promote lead magnets
Trying to grow your email list? Promoting lead magnets and email list signups is another great use of the Instagram Story link.
Or, invest in Instagram Story ads, like this example below, that will add an easy-to-use signup form directly on swipe, rather than a signup page that users have to navigate through.
How to increase swipes
Now that you’re getting ready to take full advantage of the Instagram Story swipe up feature, it’s important to note a few tips that can help you to increase Story clicks to your website and other promotions.
Include a call to action
First, you should include a call to action right in your Story. Whether it’s a video or graphic, you need to call attention to the swipe up link at the bottom of your Story.
Add GIFs/arrows
Instagram Stories have a ton of stickers to choose from, like arrows, GIFs and other visuals that can help draw attention to your swipe up link.
You can add an animated arrow pointing to the link, or you can even find stickers that flash “SWIPE UP” at your viewer so they know there’s more they can access.
Post often
As with any platform, the more consistently you post, the more reach and engagement you’re going to receive. If users watch your Stories often, your brand will appear towards the beginning of their Stories feed.
But if you take a long hiatus from posting Stories, you could lose your place in their feed, losing dedicated viewers and potentially loyal customers.
Once you start working on an Instagram Stories strategy, try to keep up with it so you don’t lose that hard work and viewership.
Start increasing clicks and conversions with the Instagram swipe up feature
Ready to start converting your Instagram followers? Learn even more about the benefits of using an Instagram Business Profile, and how its features can help you grow and promote your business.
How do you access the analytics you need to measure your online marketing ROI effectively? You need the right tools. This article highlights five tools that provide insights into your marketing results. Read the full article at MarketingProfs
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We often use surveys to gain an understanding of how our customers think and feel about our product or services. But a poorly crafted survey is vulnerable to response bias, which causes participants to answer questions inaccurately. Here's how you can minimize response bias. Read the full article at MarketingProfs
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Marketing events have been canceled because of COVID-19. But what about post-pandemic? If events resume, will people even attend? And most important, do we now have an opportunity to make live events more valuable for everyone involved? Read the full article at MarketingProfs
Social media campaigns are focused and coordinated efforts that generate measurable results across social media platforms. Campaigns are a chance to switch things up, reach your audience in a new way, create memorable content and make a real impact on top-line business goals.
However, for all the value they can bring, campaigns come with innate challenges. Raise your hand if you’ve ever tried to juggle:
Concepting, creating and scheduling dozens of social media posts across multiple networks
Managing your community and monitoring social for all campaign mentions and engagement opportunities
Soliciting and curating user-generated content
Reporting on your campaign’s performance to your boss, client or other marketers
Optimizing your campaign to make sure your numbers keep growing
Whether you’re a brand marketer running multiple campaigns or an agency marketer managing multiple clients, an easy-to-use, turnkey solution that facilitates collaboration, execution and reporting all in one place can work wonders. We’ve created this guide to show you how to run your smoothest, most successful campaign yet—using Sprout Social.
Set your campaign up for success with a comprehensive publishing suite
Once you’ve got your strategy squared away, goals set and creative assets prepped, build your publishing blueprint with Sprout.
Manually logging in and out of native platforms to schedule content can be tedious. Sprout’s intuitive publishing tools help you map out your long-term campaign strategy and schedule content across different profiles and platforms simultaneously. The collaborative calendar is shared with all users in your plan, so marketers, managers, clients and marketing leaders can all view or contribute to your planning efforts
Visually engaging content is an effective way to capture your audience’s attention while delivering information about your brand, product or service. When you’ve invested a lot of time creating beautiful assets to support your campaigns, it’s important to be able to access them with ease as you start scheduling out their content.
Sprout’s Asset Library simplifies asset management, letting you create, organize, edit and publish assets from a central location. This accessibility has become even more important as more people shift to working remotely. Sprout integrates with Dropbox and Google Drive so you can add images or videos to your posts directly from the Compose window. If you feel more secure uploading directly from your computer, you can also easily drag and drop files into the Asset Library.
Social platforms have adjusted their algorithms over the years to serve up more relevant content to users and prioritize paid content. As a result, 45% of consumers now rely on suggestions in their feed and/or use discovery tools to find new accounts to like and follow, compared only 25% using hashtags for the same purpose. While campaign hashtags are still an effective way to encourage engagement among your audience and create a thread of connected content on social, brands also need to embrace other tactics to get eyes on their content.
Including strategic CTAs that drive action and publishing your content at the right time are both crucial to driving authentic engagement and optimizing campaign outcomes. Sprout Social’s patented ViralPost® technology analyzes your audience data to find the times most likely to reach your largest audience and receive real-time engagement updates. Use Optimal Send Times in Compose to schedule with precision and choose the best times to post that are specifically calculated for that profile on that day. Or, configure your Sprout Queue with ViralPost®, an automated approach that schedules your content for you while still optimizing your post times.
Plan tags and tracking now to report more effectively later
Marketers continue to struggle to measure the ever-elusive ROI of social campaigns, but Sprout’s tagging toolset can help. As you compose your content, incorporate a tagging structure that organizes and tracks the success of your marketing campaigns. Each tag should serve a specific purpose. Consider creating tags based on content themes, content types or your goals: for example, awareness, engagement, lead generation and more.
Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa has developed a sophisticated tagging tree that the team uses to categorize every post. The upfront work they put into tagging pays off because they’re able to generate a report tailored for any given campaign or stakeholder, which ultimately fosters more transparent and rewarding relationships.
As you run your campaign, you can also use the tags you’ve created to evaluate and test your content and continue optimizing your campaign. In our recent Sprout Sessions Digital event, speakers shared a number of ideas for how customers have used tags to test in the past.
In addition to message tagging, Sprout users can add URL tracking to links to easily identify social referral traffic and conversions from social campaign posts in Google Analytics. Being intentional about your tagging and URL tracking will help later when it comes time to report your results.
Bring leaders and stakeholders into campaign planning with ease
While a specific campaign may be your main point of focus, your content calendar most likely includes plenty of other posts that are part of your overall social strategy. Remember those tags we talked about? Brands can filter their scheduled content by tag and temporarily hide any posts that don’t relate to their campaign from view. This can be helpful if you’re sharing your calendar with leadership or agency clients who want to focus specifically on upcoming campaign posts and strategy.
Since social campaigns ladder up to larger marketing initiatives, brands often implement an approval process that safeguards brand standards. Sprout’s approval workflows let stakeholders review, comment and give final sign off on scheduled posts. This level of governance ensures that marketing leaders feel informed and confident about how social supports campaign goals.
Optimize campaigns with real-time data and feedback
Social campaigns aren’t something you can just set and forget. Consistent management maximizes impact.
While SMMs won’t need to do a full-blown report on their campaign every day, they should be keeping an eye on performance. If you notice a post performing well right out the gate, you can apply those insights to your future content and potentially enhance your campaign in real-time. Additionally, if a Facebook post is resonating with your audience particularly well, or one of your more essential posts is garnering low impressions, you have the option to boost those posts directly in Sprout. A little paid jolt can make a big difference for your campaign.
Inbound messages can also help you revamp content in real-time. The Sprout Smart Inbox centralizes messages from your audience, providing opportunities to engage with new customers and gauge the reaction to your campaign. To organize your inbox, apply message tags as they come in to categorize and separate campaign feedback, leads and customer support.
Sprout’s Inbox Rules allow Advanced Plan users to create automated systems that categorize and apply tags of your choice to specific inbound messages that meet certain criteria. From there, you can surface specific Inbox Views that show only messages relevant to that topic. For example, create inboxes specific to your campaign, customer service issues, product feedback and more. Based on the rules you establish, you can then set up Automated Alerts to receive notifications about the messages you deem most important.
Inbox Rules came in handy for Indiana University when the school encountered a crisis. The social team created rules to auto-apply tags on the specific incoming messages related to the issue and the university.
“Being able to automate that process so that all of the messages that come in during these situations are channeled into one space lets us analyze messages quickly, make decisions or offer suggestions to leadership about what actions should be taken,” says Norman.
While a lot of inbound messages may relate to customer service issues, there are many other reasons consumers reach out on social. In the latest Sprout Social Index™, we found that 59% of consumers message a brand on social media when they’ve had a great experience.
If someone’s loving your campaign, don’t ignore it. It’s just as important to respond and show your appreciation to those consumers as it is to resolve customer complaints. It can go a long way in building customer loyalty, especially if those consumers are continually engaging with you and your content.
In Sprout, users can view conversation history between your team and contacts. With that context, you can personalize responses and nurture a lasting customer relationship. In the same window, you can add contacts to VIP Lists, which is useful when identifying brand evangelists and potential ambassadors or influencers for your next campaign.
Use social data to inspire confidence in your campaigns
Campaigns are all about the payoff, but only 43% of socialmarketers use social data to assess campaign performance. There’s a lot to be learned from social data and without it, you can miss out on valuable insights that support top-line goals.
Sprout’s robust analytics and reporting capabilities help you track campaign success and generate reports that inspire confidence, not confusion. If you strategically tagged your campaign content, the Tag Report presents metrics for each tag so you narrow in on metrics like engagements, impressions and clicks.
And if you forgot to tag your messages when you initially scheduled them, don’t worry—you can retroactively apply tags in the Post Performance Report. Rather than apply tags message by message, users with Professional and Advanced plans can tag them in bulk. For instance, if several messages with the campaign hashtag were sent out untagged, use the search feature to bring those posts to the forefront and tag them all at once.
Hone in on the metrics that matter most
If your brand has built a paid strategy for your campaign, your bosses will be especially curious to know how that money was spent. Sprout’s Paid Performance Reports help track performance and inform budget decisions on the fly for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn campaigns. The reports are digestible and focus on the metrics that clients and executives alike will care about most, like cost per conversion, cost per click, total spend and more.
If you’re on the organic side and working with a media buyer or paid social expert, these reports can also help you share insights and collaborate to improve both the paid and organic efforts of your campaign.
— Katie Burton, Digital Marketing Strategist (@KatieBurton_) May 13, 2020
And to bring it all home, don’t just tell your clients and executives how your campaign performed, show them. With Sprout’s Premium Analytics customers can tailor a report specific to their campaign with custom reporting options. In addition to the out-of-the-box reports offered, you can build a report from scratch by adding and arranging data and text widgets in a way that tells a story and clearly demonstrates campaign success. Once you’ve drilled into the data that underscores the value of social, share it with your social team and beyond.
Conclusion
Putting it simply, Sprout takes the pain out of campaigns. Dad jokes aside, Sprout can truly help nurture your campaigns, community and company goals.
Sprout removes the busywork from your process, streamlines content creation and simplifies reporting so you can focus more time on optimizing your campaign, tending to your customers and looking forward to your next project.
Try Sprout Social for free with a 30-day trial. Already a customer and need help getting started with custom reports? Find more in-depth how-tos on creating custom reports here.
Marketers are learning key lessons as they navigate current economic conditions, many of which will likely remain part of their strategy in a post-COVID-19 world.
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Welcome to the Social Spotlight, where we dive deep into what we love about a brand’s approach to a specific social campaign. From strategy through execution and results, we’ll examine what makes the best brands on social tick — and leave you with some key takeaways to consider for your own brand’s social strategy.
Overview
Brands are in a tough spot right now. Not only are most struggling to determine how to best support customers while also ensuring that their businesses can survive a global economic threat like the current pandemic, but the world’s biggest brands have the added scrutiny of public opinion about how they conduct themselves to worry about. Social has become the primary stage for proving that a brand understands what its audience is experiencing and can adjust its communication with consideration and empathy. And the brands that have the most challenging path to walk are those whose business is most threatened. Financial institutions top that list, but Visa has been able to demonstrate both empathy and optimism by making quick, thoughtful and appropriate adjustments to its social strategy.
What you can learn
1. Pivot your partnerships.
Visa spends a considerable percentage of its overall marketing budget on event sponsorships, the most visible of which is the Olympics. Alook back at Visa’s social content from early in 2020shows a heavy push for its sponsorship, focus on partner athletes and promotion of the event itself. When the IOC announced that it was delaying the 2020 Olympics until at least 2021, Visa had to pivot its strategy and make adjustments to its partnerships with athletes. The result is an emerging content series featuring athletes as they experience the pandemic much like we do–at home and in quarantine.
Getting started: You may not be able to change the financial terms of any sponsorships or partnerships you have, but you may be able to adjust the marketing or content parts of your agreements. Just as you’d change the copy or design of your advertising to match the current conditions, you should reassess your content and paid sponsorship efforts.
2. Reposition your offerings for the current situation.Visa is one of the world’s largest financial services institutions, and its products are used by a huge range of people and businesses To serve such a broad demographic, Visa has an equally wide range of product offerings that it can promote via social. But we all know timeliness is key to relevance, so Visa has chosen to promote the products and services that best meet the rapidly changing needs of business owners, employees and customers in the time of COVID-19.
Getting started: Do your due diligence to understand the biggest challenges for your audience right now–chances are they’re very different than they were six months ago, and potentially even different than six weeks ago. Once you know what they’re struggling with, assess your offerings and align them with the specific needs of your customers in this unique time.
3. Be the community resource the community needs right now. Visa has long supported small businesses with both product offerings and philanthropic support. But the need for resources may have never been greater in the small business community than it is right now, and Visa recognizes that now is the time to step up its efforts through new tools, services and partnerships.
Getting started: What are your most vulnerable customers struggling with right now, and what resources can you offer them to demonstrate not only that you understand their situations, but that you will support them so they will still be there to be your customers when we get through this? It’s understandable that not every brand can create a seven-figure relief fund or a star-studded benefit, but even a well-researched blog post can change the perspective of someone facing extreme uncertainty.
Our communities need help now more than ever. The @Visa Foundation will designate $10 million for immediate emergency relief and $200 million for small and micro businesses, aligning with the Foundation’s long-term focus on women’s economic advancement: https://t.co/ihNsQpZ7Egpic.twitter.com/Tge0NWB1Tx
In Sprout, users can view conversation history between your team and contacts. With that context, you can personalize responses and nurture a lasting customer relationship. In the same window, you can add contacts to VIP Lists, which is useful when identifying brand evangelists and potential ambassadors or influencers for your next campaign.