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Tag: social media

Social Media Strategies You Need to Know

The best campaigns achieve the farthest reach and highest impact, but only if strategic communication professionals have a solid understanding of social media, and also know how to best employ it. As communicators and storytellers, we’ve learned how to do this pretty well and have gathered some key tips to increase awareness or position your brand on social channels:

Make a plan

Spend time researching which sites make the most sense for your campaign. Which platforms best match your message and audience? Study similar campaigns and learn from their strategies.

Understand who your target audience is, and which platforms they frequent

In the planning process, identify the preferences of your audience. Are they incessant tweeters, or would they prefer to pile up lots of likes on Instagram? Brainstorm the types of posts and messaging that are most effective for this specific audience.

Craft salient posts

Think carefully about what you want to say on social and how you can make it most interesting. Make sure that you are weaving core messaging throughout your posts, without being redundant. Strike a balance of timely issues and evergreen content.

Use images and video

If a picture is really worth a thousand words, it’s worth even more on social media, where tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than those without, and Facebook posts with images garner 2.3x more engagement than those without. To ensure that your message sticks, create eye-catching images or include short videos, a trend that has proven very effective.

Post frequently and build credibility

To get your message across powerfully, you must have a consistent presence on social. Create an editorial calendar to help organize your posts. Be informative and relevant, but definitely avoid spamming your audience. Finally, make sure that what you’re sharing and posting is factual and timely to those you’re trying to reach. That’s how you build credibility as a source.

Follow these steps, and you’re on your way to a smart and effective social media plan, PR pros!

Making the Link: Public Relations and Search Engine Optimization

As PR pros, we have the fundamentals down when it comes to content. But to take full advantage of that content, we also need to know how to maximize its impact digitally by mastering search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is not an exact science and can require a lot of trial and error, so check out these need-to-know tips:

PageRank Variables

For Google, the ordering of the web pages is based on PageRank, an algorithm that assesses 200 variables. One of the many variables is content creation. If a website consistently produces trustworthy content, it will rank ahead of those that don’t produce regularly. This variable gives an important advantage to digital media producers who consistently upload strong content.

Take, for example, “Sean Spicer.” When one searches the Trump administration’s recently departed Press Secretary, the vast majority of results on the first page are news articles, pushing his official biography to the second page, because Google likely sees it as “old” content.

The higher a website ranks on the results pages, the more domain authority it has – a score calculated by the number of other trustworthy websites linking to that site, significantly increasing its ranking.

Tip: Add and edit new content on a regular basis. Consider a blog, for example, to promote relevant and timely topics that will help feed this content space.

Domain Authority

These days, securing news placements online isn’t only an earned media win; it also helps tremendously with your client’s SEO. Earning links from higher-ranking websites, such as CNN or KevinMD, increase your client’s website ranking and give it more authority. Be sure to include a link in your pitch or press release.

Moreover, internal linking can be just as important. Take inventory of your existing content and find ways to link it to other pages and resources on your website. This tells search engines that you have strong, relevant and plentiful content.

Tip: Link where you can! Whether it’s in a pitch to a reporter or among pieces of content on your site, getting traffic to your client’s site and keeping it there is critical to good SEO!

As communicators in the digital media age, our knowledge and expertise regarding SEO is an invaluable part of what we have to offer to position clients as experts regarding their health care issue. Content is king, but we have to know the tools and tactics to ensure it doesn’t get lost.

Optimizing Facebook Live to Engage Your Target Audience

The Reis Group has recently taken Facebook Live by storm, actively utilizing this relatively new broadcasting tool to bring added value and drive key messages to our clients’ target audiences. Facebook Live has proven to be highly relevant for our health care PR industry and appears to be a lasting trend that will continue to grow.

As we’ve managed several Facebook Live events for our clients, from Q&As to event broadcasts, we have gathered several lessons learned in the planning, implementing and going-live stages. Here are five helpful takeaways for optimizing Facebook Live:

  1. Create an event page: In order to drive awareness in promoting your Facebook Live event, create an event page sharing a description and inviting followers to join. You can promote the event page on your social channels, and add some ad dollars to boost it to your target audience. Just before going live, remind guests who responded “interested” or “attending” to the event that the video will be live on your Facebook page, not the event page.
  2. Minimize scripting: Since Facebook Live is a less formal video format that is meant to be conversational, consider offering the speaker several talking points, rather than a script. You may want to write out the introduction, however, so the moderator or speaker makes sure to include all the important points. Since consumers will be tuning in and out of the video throughout the live event, it is important to periodically reiterate some of the key information about why you’re having the event, who the expert is, how to get more info, etc.
  3. Coordinate bodies in the room: Based on the format you choose for your Facebook Live, you will need additional people off-camera to staff the event. Coordinate who will be monitoring questions from Facebook, and whether they will be sharing questions verbally off-screen, or monitoring while on-screen. Also, designate who will be in charge of filming and who will be moderating for the speaker, if necessary.
  4. Conduct a practice run: Set up a private Facebook group or private stream to practice your Facebook Live set-up in the location of your event. This will help you determine the best seating, branding, lighting, camera set-up, staff assistance needed, etc. Additionally, be sure to test your Wi-Fi connection, speed and reliability.
  5. Plant seed questions: In the beginning of the live event, you may not immediately see an influx of questions, so it’s a good idea to have friends or coworkers on stand-by to ask pre-determined questions via the comments section. Additionally, if you have a moderator on screen, they can have some initial questions to address with the speaker as well.

We are excited to continue managing Facebook Live events for our clients, and tweaking our methods each time, based on lessons learned. Do you have any additional takeaways from your experience with Facebook Live? Share with us in the comments.

Measurement Tactics: Improving Messaging & Engagement

In a crowded online space, social media posts require targeted messaging and visuals to reach and engage your desired audience.  In order to gain traction with consumers, brands must understand what motivates and influences them, and produce content that is helpful and relatable. By utilizing measurement tools, brands can get a better sense of what drives engagement and action in their community, and help reach their organization’s goals.

This article will demonstrate how to incorporate social media measurement tactics to test and improve your content, leading to a more successful social media strategy. 

Set your goals: In order to be successful on social media, it is important to set specific goals to lead your efforts. First, determine who your target audience is—whether that is women 45+ who experience chronic pain, or adults over 30 who have experienced Alzheimer’s in their family. Next, figure out what social media networks this audience is active on—you want to create a channel of communication where your audience is already engaged.

At the start of 2016, Facebook had 1.59 billion monthly active users—which is more than 20 percent of the global population. Facebook has become a major content discovery platform. According to recent data published by traffic analytics firm Parse.ly, more traffic to news and media sites is driven by Facebook than Google. This means that people are often finding content in their Facebook feed and clicking through to articles directly from their feeds.

Google versus Facebook | Improving Social Media Messaging and Engagement through Measurement Tactics
Parse.ly network traffic from Google versus Facebook

After discovering where your audience spends their time on social, figure out what actions you want your audience to take. Is your ultimate goal to drive people to sign up for research studies or to your website to learn more information about your cause? Reversely, what can you provide your audience to better reach their goals? How will following your page benefit them?

Implement your content strategy: Figuring out the best content to share on your social channels starts as an experiment. You won’t be able to determine what works best with your audience until you test out different messages and apply measurement to the results. As you brainstorm content to share, figure out several different categories of content that may be relevant to your audience.

Erin Hildreth, Senior Manager of Marketing and Communications at The Vision Council, shares how social media plays a role in her organization: “Social media has personified all of our campaigns, and the sheer reach of one interaction has the power to grow your message exponentially. It is something that we think about constantly when preparing our campaigns because it is a way to truly touch people as they go about their days and live their lives.”

Test your content and optimize: Facebook and Twitter offer very in-depth insights for organic and paid posts. It is important to review your page analytics often to note trends and see which categories of content are performing best. Here are a couple things to look for:

  • What day of the week and what time of day is your content getting the most engagement (likes, comments, shares, retweets, favorites, replies)?
  • What types of content are eliciting the most comments? Are these all positive comments?
  • When promoting your organization, what messaging works best with your audience?
  • What types of links are receiving the most clicks?
  • What types of images or graphics seem most eye-catching/appealing to your audience (based on the engagement)

Another measurement tool that often comes in handy is Google Analytics. Aside from seeing how much traffic is coming to your site from social each week, you can set specific goals on Google Analytics that will allow you to see when consumers from social complete a certain action on your website. By pulling weekly analytics reports, you can see what aspects of your content strategy are contributing to your bottom line.

Measuring success: In order to show your results and improvement on social media to others within your organization, it is important to do monthly or quarterly dashboards that highlight your growth. I’ve found that showing the percent change in followers, engagement and/or impressions is a strong way show success—for example, “Since January 2016, we’ve increased engagement on the page by 123%.” Another important metric to share will be goals completed through social media on Google Analytics.

Stacy Mowery, Director of Brand Development at Banner Health shares, “Measuring our social media analytics helps us understand our message reach: Who are we reaching? Who is most interested in our content? The metrics can also help us understand which topics or types of posts are most engaging to our audiences. A few years ago we began studying the differences in engagement between heavy visual posts vs. posts with just written content. The data showed visual posts are clearly more engaging, so we now have shifted to a heavy visual social strategy.”

Thinking strategically about your online goals and always staying up to speed on the latest social trends, changing algorithms and measurement tools is key to having a successful approach across your social platforms.

This is an excerpt of an article originally published in the PR News Writer’s Guidebook.