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social media trends

We’re calling it: top social media trends for 2023

By | Stories

We love predicting social media trends, so it was fitting for our latest Feeling Content live event that we turned the whole morning into a forecast session – looking forward, looking back: hottest social media trends to come out of 2022 and into 2023.

For those that couldn’t make it, we wanted to share our best guess on what we think will stay and what will go.

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5 lessons from five years in business

By | Stories

A wise mentor of mine once told me, “if you can make it to five years in business Hannah, you’ll be flying”. Her words have echoed in the back of my mind since she uttered them, and I’ve speculated fondly for years about what this business birthday and might feel like.

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Which Facebook Ad type is right for you?

By | Stories

Calling all novice social media advertisers.

If you’re looking to dabble in your first social media advertising campaign to help solve a pain point for your business, then this blog is for you.

Before you launch straight into the world of Facebook Advertising Manager, take a moment to educate yourself on the different types of paid campaigns available to you, to ensure you don’t waste precious advertising moolah on ads that don’t align with your end goal.

From top of the funnel advertising, all the way down to the bottom, social media advertising allows you to move customers from awareness to consideration to conversion, based on an objective of your choosing.

With two awareness objectives, six consideration objectives and three conversion objectives at your advertising fingertips within the Facebook advertising matrix, get to know the most common Facebook Ads and discover which one might be right for you.

1. Have you just launched your new brand or business and want more people to know about it?

Given the fact you’ve just launched your business (congrats, btw!), it’s likely the number of people who know about it is low. If you’re nodding, you need to start at the very top of the marketing funnel: Brand Awareness.

Facebook Ads Manager has two objectives to choose from for this top of the funnel activity: Brand Awareness – which measures your brand uplift – or Reach – which aims to reach as many people as possible.

Unless you’ve got a big chunk of advertising dollars to put behind a campaign, we recommend choosing Reach over Brand Awareness, which is most effective when used to study an uplift over time.

Think of a Reach campaign as casting the net wide. This campaign objective is optimised for impressions because at this stage of your business journey, you want your brand exposed to as many people as possible.

2. Are you trying to grow your Facebook following or get more people to engage with your ads?

While Facebook follower numbers are often referred to as a vanity metric, there’s method to a growth-first strategy.

The more followers you have, the more eyes you’ll have on your organic posts.

There are three types of engagement objectives you can choose within Facebook Ads Manager: Page Likes (optimise for people to like your page – Facebook only), Post Engagement (optimise for likes or comments on your ads – both platforms) or Event Responses (optimise for responses).

Choosing Event Responses will optimise for people to respond to an event which is helpful to gauge interest; however, this objective sits under ‘consideration’ in the marketing funnel aka is still only a way to garner engagement rather than convert people to buy tickets for an event. You’ll need to choose a conversion objective if you’re all about reporting ticket purchases.

If you’re thinking ‘great! I’ll put a social media paid campaign in market to build my Instagram following”, unfortunately, there isn’t an equivalent as Page Likes on Facebook for Instagram.

If you’re wanting to grow your Instagram, organic growth is key, along with partnering with digital influencers.

3. Do you want to grow your consumer database?

More people in your database = more people to send future communications to.

There are two ways to do this. Firstly, you can use Facebook Forms as the creative for your ad, where people can sign up directly through the form. However, this requires a bit of manual labour downloading the customer list and uploading it to your CRM.

The second option is to create a Traffic Campaign and direct people straight to the sign-up form on your website, which should already be integrated into your CRM (less manual input).

Lead generation activity like this also sits as a consideration marketing activity, as you are moving people through the funnel who want to learn more about your business or brand and are actively opting in to hear more.

4. Are you trying to drive people to a specific page on your website?

Just like a drag car driver puts their foot down on the accelerator to speed as fast as possible towards the black and white chequered flag, a Traffic campaign tries to achieve the same. Your audience is the driver and the finish line is your web page.

You can choose to optimise your campaign for Link Clicks (get as many people in the target audience to click the link) or Landing Page Views (if you want people to wait for the landing page to open).

As you’re moving people through the marketing funnel, you can consider refined targeting here using demographics and interests.

5. Are you trying to get people to ‘add to cart’?

“Show me the money,” said every e-commerce marketer ever.

If you want people to buy your product using social media advertising, you’ll need to ensure they are ready to purchase. Meaning, it’s not the first time they are learning about your business or brand.

As a conversion objective, social media ads are optimised for people who are ready to purchase.

This is when you’ll be targeting your most qualified audience, based on performance primed for conversion.

Remarketing is a great way to achieve this, by creating a custom audience such as your CRM database, recent website visitors or people who have engaged with your ads in the past 180 days.

There are a few additional steps required to create a Conversion campaign, such as installing a pixel and creating a custom event; however, you should have a pixel regardless of which campaign you’re running to ensure you can always track your paid performance.

Still unsure which Facebook advertising campaign is right for you?

Get in touch with our team and book a call with one of our social media paid specialists to learn how we can help.

If you prefer to DYO social media advertising (or would like to upskill in this field), book into our 1:1 training to learn the ins and outs of Facebook advertising for yourself.

 

You’ll learn how to set up a campaign, define your audience, community manage your ads, create retargeting audiences and monitor performance.

 

If this is something you’re interested in, shoot us an email and learn more.

By Rochelle Vaisanen

When not climbing mountains on two wheels, Rochelle can be found on the hunt for the best almond croissant around town. A lover of good coffee, food and wine, and with a passion for travel, Rochelle is always on the lookout for new adventures locally and abroad.

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7 quick actions to improve your Instagram engagement

By | Stories

Got 99 problems and boosting your Instagram engagement is one? Let us help.

Whether you’re a social media manager or you’ve been tasked with overseeing the channels on top of your workload, one of the things we get asked often (read: ALL. THE. TIME) is how to improve engagement on Instagram.

With its fickle algorithms and ever-changing platform features, it’s easy to feel a little lost when hatching a plan to move the needle on your engagement.

Don’t despair, there are things you can do to give your engagement more b-b-bounce than a berocca by leaning into the platform’s algorithms and new features.

Read on for our top seven ways to help improve engagement on your Instagram.

1. Create Instagram Reels

Do you ever find yourself scrolling in the Explore tab on Instagram, waiting for something to jump out at you and grab your attention?

Us too, along with the other 200 million Instagram users who scroll the Explore tab each day. Let. That. Sink. In. For. A. Moment. 200 million people.

Now that you know how many Instagram users are ‘exploring’ what’s new on the ‘gram, it makes sense that’s the place your content needs to play.

With Reels occupying two squares in the grid compared to the standard single square posts in your feed, you’ve got double the chances of getting users to stop mid-scroll and click your content.

More impressions and views = more engagement.

We don’t just preach this to our clients, Reels are something you’ll find weekly in our Media Mortar feed – here are a few reasons why they are part of our social media strategy too.

2. Put on your SEO hat when creating your profile and posts

engagement_3If you thought you only had to wave the SEO (search engine optimisation) wand over your website copy, we’ve got news for you.

Since November 2020, Instagram has extended how people can find your business based on a keyword search that picks up words in your Instagram handle, name, bio and, wait for it … captions.

While #hashtags traditionally were (and still are) a great tool to make your content discoverable by adding them to your caption or first comment, keyword search provides more scope for your business and brand to be discovered with words and phrases across other touchpoints on your profile.

It’s time to put down short form captions in favour of keyword-rich ones. We have some copywriting tips to help you over here.

3. Ensure your profile promotes what you do

Now that you know your Instagram handle and bio have a chance of appearing in an Instagram user’s keyword search, you’ll want to ensure you make it crystal clear to users who you are and what you do.

If you only have a few seconds to capture the audience’s attention, you’ll want them to know they’ve landed in the right place.

If your username doesn’t have a clear searchable connection to what you are selling or the service you are providing, the first thing you’ll want to do is update your ‘name’ on your profile.

For example, @mediamortar doesn’t tell anyone that we are a content marketing agency, does it? So, our name in our bio is ‘Content Marketing Agency’. If someone searches for a content marketing agency there’s more chance of Media Mortar showing as a search result rather than if our name was still Media Mortar.

Beyond updating your name, ensure you are optimising your bio with keywords that help identify your business or brand.

On our Media Mortar account, you’ll find copywriting, social media, graphic design and marketing strategy – calling out a few of our key services for those that might not be searching for the umbrella service “content marketing”.

4. Share Instagram Stories

If you nearly fell off your office chair when you found out how many Instagram users are scrolling the Explore tab each day, you’ll want to place your feet firmly on the ground to stop your chair from spinning with this one: over 500 million accounts use Instagram Stories every day.

Thanks to the functionality of interactive stickers, such as quizzes, polls and question boxes, Instagram Stories are an effective way to encourage engagement and two-way communication, which is a refreshing change for users who are constantly bombarded with one-way communication.

Like any social media platform or function, there are a few things to consider ensuring the infamous algorithm favours your content. These include Stories with video content, visually led with limited text and content with a cohesive look and feel of feed posts, to name a few – read our tips on how to lift your Stories game to help you on your engagement boosting way.

5. Start using Alt Text

Hands up if you started to notice blocks of additional text at the bottom of Instagram recently, which give a description or summary of the image? Meet, alt text.

This game-changing feature uses automated object recognition technology that aims to describe photos for people with visual impairments.

Not only does adding alt text to your posts ensure your social media posts are more accessible and inclusive (snaps), it also provides another opportunity to optimise your profile with your brand’s SEO keywords by crafting copy for the alt text rather than using the automated caption.

How many times can we tell the internet that we’re a content marketing agency in a caption? Turns out, plenty!

6. Get tagged or mentioned in partner posts

engagement_4Want more eyes on your Instagram profile and more people engaging with your content? Get your business or brand tagged or mentioned by others in their Instagram posts, Stories or Reels.

Whether you partner with influencers to tag or mention your brand in their sponsored posts or collaborate with business partners to cross-promote each other’s services, having your account tagged elsewhere is discovery gold.

Of course, you’ll want to be selective with where your business is tagged and promoted and ensure you’re tagged on quality content. The goal is to ensure the content piques the interest of the audience and drives them to click on your tag, taking them straight to your profile to learn more.

7. Post when your followers are online

If the television show Survivor aired at midday on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, do you think the ratings would be the same as when it airs at 7:30pm on the same days? I think not.

Just like commercial television, planning your social media content for when your audience is online or will be most engaged is a simple solution to improving your post stats.

Given how much content is uploaded every minute of every day on Instagram (reportedly 95 million photos and videos), by posting when your followers will be online, there’s more chance of seeing it pop up on their feed when they are mid-scroll, rather than it being lost amongst the other posts and videos from accounts they follow.

For more social media tips and tricks like this:

 

By Rochelle Vaisanen

When not climbing mountains on two wheels, Rochelle can be found on the hunt for the best almond croissant around town. A lover of good coffee, food and wine, and with a passion for travel, Rochelle is always on the lookout for new adventures locally and abroad.

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How to create a social media style guide

By | Stories

It’s as simple as this: if your business is on social media, you need a social media style guide.

Without one, you run the risk of inconsistency, mistakes and confusion on the very channels that work like a megaphone for most businesses, social media.

Adhering to a social media style guide keeps your brand’s look and feel consistent, helps onboard social media team members with ease and builds credibility online by exercising a cohesivity across all platforms.

Read on for our suggestions to make a rigorous social media style guide.

1. Social media policies

Your social media policies should sit at the top of your style guide, outlining your company’s rules for working with social media platforms.

Keep your policies short and sharp – you want this document to be read after all!

Example policy: Team members must have their access revoked from social media accounts if they leave the business for more than 14 days.

2. List your social media accounts

style_guide_listYour social media style guide is a simple way to keep track of all your accounts, so creating a list will ensure they’re consistently named (e.g. @mediamortar) and saved in the one spot, easily accessible when you need them.

You can also add here what type of content you do on each channel and frequency for each – e.g. Reels, IGTV, carousels or IG Guides.

Tip: Send new-starters the list of your accounts and ask them to follow each account, this will keep them up to date, and it will also give you more exposure!

3. Approval process

Unfortunately, social media mistakes are inevitable, but putting an approval process in place will ensure errors get picked up before they’re sitting on the little-internet.

Include in your social media style guide how your posts will be checked (pro tip: scheduling your content will help this!) and approved and who will review the work when the reviewer is on leave.

Tip: If a review process is unattainable, think about a checklist that can be ticked off before something is posted.

4. Tone of voice and audience

style_guide_tone_of_voiceThere’s nothing worse than a social media channel where every post reads differently – it’s the equivalent of listening to someone talk in a noisy room. Who said that?

By clearly outlining your target audience, you can determine the tone of voice you’ll carry throughout your brands’ channels.

Tip: Choose 10 adjectives that describe your brand image and tone – then list them under this section of your style guide (e.g., casual, modern, fun, soothing).

5. Frequently used terminology, industry specific language, and deal-breakers

Create a list of appropriate slang, frequently-used terminology, and industry specific language – but also create a list for your brand’s ‘deal-breakers’, inappropriate words and phrases.

If you want your team to avoid certain cliches (‘there’s something for everyone’, ‘for all tastes and budgets’, ‘this hidden gem’), make sure they’re listed here too.

Tip: Consider whether dad jokes and terrible puns are ok for your channels- or whether it’s more appropriate for your brand to stick to the facts and avoid colloquialism all together?

6. Preferred dictionary, grammar, spelling, and punctuation

You wouldn’t read two chapters of a book and expect a different style of writing or grammar on every page, and same goes for social media posts.

Do you use serial (aka Oxford) commas? How many exclamation marks are too many? Will you use the UK or English dictionary to reference?

In this section of your social media style guide you’ll also want to spell out how you write out numbers, date, and time conventions.

Tip: If you have a grammar style guide for printed works, you can use this when creating your social media style guide. However, do keep in mind, social media is more casual, so some of your pre-existing rules for copywriting might not carry over to social media.

7. Emoji use – yay or nay

Does it make sense for your brand to be more relaxed and cheekier with emoji usage or would you prefer to err on the side of serious and ditch them altogether?

Either way, you should highlight your emoji and if it’s a *thumbs up emoji* to their use, add 5-10 emojis that you will consistently use as a brand.

Tip: Make sure you’ve downloaded an emoji keyboard for your desktop to add them without fuss.

8. Create a hashtag and tag bank

It’s worth keeping a hashtag bank for each type of post you create to make sure they’re in line with your content pillars.

If you create campaign hashtags (that said, we recommend you build consideration for your branded hashtags first), be clear about where and when you’ll incorporate them.

While you’re at it, write down a list of compulsory third party accounts you tag to extend the reach of your posts – whether it’s suppliers listed, photographers, magazines or content aggregators.

Tip: Don’t just copy what your competitors are doing with their hashtags on social media, do the research and figure out what works best for your company, and avoid joining the clone club with other brands in your industry.

9. User Generated Content (UGC) rules and guidelines

style_guide_CTADoes your company have a process for getting permissions to use UGC?

If you do, outline this in your social media style guide to make sure people aren’t reposting content without going through the correct procedures.

You’ll also need to determine how you’ll credit the user, as you’ll want the format to be the same each post.

Example: You might decide to credit users with a camera emoji before tagging their account, or simply spell out the word.

10. Post format and sharing guidelines

Since all platforms have different character limits and post layouts, in your social media style guide you’ll want to outline how your post formats change for channel e.g. Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

Regardless of platform, social media copy should generally be kept short, but whether you’ll include a link, CTA, or location pin on all posts, needs to be determined in this section of your social media style guide.

Tip: Consider whether it’s appropriate for your brand to share from other pages and accounts. Or if you should avoid competitors work all together.

11. Call to actions (CTAs)

CTAs are important not only for engagement on posts, but also giving other website links like articles, blogs, or content on other platforms more traffic.

Your social media style guide should clarify if calls to action are required in every post. If they are, determine if the CTA will lead only to your assets (e.g. website) or other timely and relevant pieces (e.g. a news article).

Tip: Links are great for engagement so you might create a rule that every post must contain a branded CTA that encourages people to click a link. This is especially important if you want to drive people to your brand’s website.

12. Design and aesthetic guidelines

style_guide_designIf your business already has a design team, you’ll be able to transfer the brand colours, fonts for graphics, logos, watermarks, and trademarks to your social media content.

In this section of your social media style guide you want to get clear on how things look too – do you do black and white images only? Or do you have a rule that a tile must be every second image posted on Instagram?

Tip: Style rules should also be applied to other external editing apps and platforms like photoshop and Canva.

13. Watermarks and trademarks

If you’re putting your content out there and want it to be exclusively yours forever, consider including a watermark rule in your social media style guide.

Be sure to outline clearly how, when and where you’ll use your watermark.

Example: The brand’s watermark is to be placed on the top right-hand corner of every image and video posted to social media.

14. Community management

Whether you like it or not, you’re likely to have someone not like what you’re talking about online – and how you respond to the complaint or customer review is even more important than the complaint itself.

It’s important to treat any conversations your team members have with audiences online as a statement from the company – as their response could be screenshot and reposted, for better or worse.

Outlining a clear community messaging system is crucial for crisis management. You can decide to make a rule to ask for the user’s phone number to take the conversation offline, or you can develop a social key message document for your team that provides responses for typical/anticipated questions.

Tip: As well as specifying when a conversation needs to be moved to a private channel or phone call, outline when/if it’s ever appropriate to hide or delete comments.

Add any extra helpful info for your brand

It’s important to keep in mind, not all the above will be relevant for your business, and you might think of other things you’d like to add into your social media style guide.

Make a dot point list of any extra notes, tips, or tricks relevant to your brand and industry – because there are no hard and fast rules when writing a style guide.

Happy social media style guide writing!

By Gemma Donahoe

Social media moves quickly, and so does Gemma. She’s got a strong eye for viral content and the ability to create compelling, tailored content for a wide variety of target audiences.