A guide to Social Media
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The book is a guide to social media, hints, tips and how to guides. We have tried to keep it broad on skill levels and have focused on Facebook as this is the predominant social network in New Zealand. Get this one right then expand out as your confidence grows. TAG The Agency will be available to support and answer any questions you may have or that are inspired from this guide. Our goal is to help assist your brand. The objectives of bringing your brand to life on social media are to:
•Assist in the generation of leads for your database •Assist in the increase of brand awareness in targetted geographic regions •Broaden the communication channels •Assist in the delivery of one common experience that customers will recognize
Build a community
them, understand them and Build Know a community
them! Know them, understand them and talk to them! Communities are built through dyn Communities are built through dynamic and engaging andcontent. engaging content.
Have a plan and an approach to developing content. Long term sustainable planning is required for social media; it’s easy to start a page but hard to keep content flowing and your audience engaged.
Content for your brand should be built around the community that you’re in; looking to extend content beyond the brand and making it personalised and specific to the community the your brand works in. 3
Social media platforms
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Case study
Community growth
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The Mission: After a few skirmishes on the social media battlefield, KiwiRail Scenic decided to enter the fray and create a Facebook page. The KiwiRail team were eager to work with us to develop a strategy that would allow them to successfully engage, and win the battle for their audience. The Strategy: We put our recon tactics into action by interviewing key stakeholders in order to gain a strong understanding of how KiwiRail operates. From there, it was a case of developing a social media strategy that would create an emotional connection between the brand and their audience, whilst also taking steps to enable KiwiRail to defend their newly won territory on social. Once the Facebook page was implemented, the primary focus was to highlight the beautiful scenery that New Zealand has to offer.
As a tactic to promote engagement with the audience, KiwiRail ran a user-submitted photo competition as an initial campaign. This saw them flooded with around 1,000 new page likes and enough user generated content to share through all their social channels. The photo competition helped build a library of images that could then be used to promote KiwiRail to offshore audiences through sites such as Get Inspired and Book Travel. Winners of the photo competition received a trip on board KiwiRail Scenic trains for a special journey where they would continue to share images from on-board. This gave KiwiRail a large library of owned images that could be used for future content and allow them to avoid any copyright issues when using them to promote themselves offshore. The Outcome: After the initial successful campaign, the KiwiRail Scenic community continues to grow and engage positively. Whilst they run their Facebook page internally now, we continue to provide ongoing content mentorship as well as full management of their Instagram account.
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Page roles
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Page roles in order of hierarchy and access: Admin – complete and total access to everything (whoever created the page is an admin by default) Editor – can edit the Page, send messages and post as the page, create Facebook ads, see which admin created a post or a comment, and view insights. Moderator – Can respond to and delete comments on the page, send messages as the page, see which admin created a post or comment, create ads and view insights. Advertiser – Can see which admin created a post or comment, create ads and view insights. Analyst – Can see which admin created a
post or comment and view insights. To add a collaborator, go to your page settings and the “page roles” section. You can type in the name of any Facebook or person who has liked your page. Alternatively, you can type in an email address accosiated with a Facebook account. Note that when a collaborator posts to the timeline or responds to a comment or post, it will state that ‘John Smith’ has posted, but this is only shown to other collaborators on the page and not the general public.
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Content tips
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Content: Content should always subtly link through to the brand – don’t ‘hard sell’ on social media, but do link your clients to content on other platforms and allow them to go from there. Visual content (think photos, graphics, video etc) trumps text. When you are engaging with and building your audience you want to address them in a way that is both compelling and informative. Studies have proven that coloured visual content generates up to an 80% more engagement than its less-interesting counterpart. (Source: http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/visual-content-marketing-strategy#sm.00001s1m184hpzel5zz9nswrbvr3n)
Copy Guidelines: When posting to the page, be sure to talk from the company as opposed to ‘I’. A Facebook business page should always communicate from a ‘we’ perspective. When posting to the page or responding to comments, be sure to triple check spelling, tone and manner to make sure this aligns with the tone and style section within your Social Media Strategy. This will ensure all communication from franchisees and agents is consistent. To add a personal touch, your company may choose to add initials to the end of comments so fans feel like they are connecting to a real person, eg ^AB.
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Social media image tips
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Imagery: All imagery should comply with Facebook advertising standards in the event that the content will be re-purposed for an ad. A quick and easy guide can be found here: https://www. facebook.com/ads/tools/text_overlay Page specs (as of August 2016) are as seen below: It is important to note that although Facebook cover photo dimensions are 851 px x 315px, only the centre (563px x 315px) portion of the picture will display on mobile. Imagery for your Facebook timeline should be 1200px x 630px to be optimised for both desktop and mobile viewing. Photography: We have found that imagery including people or faces work far better than imagery without people, especially on Facebook (think Face Book, it’s about faces). We have specified within the Social Media Strategy and guidelines to use imagery with more than one person which reflects family, togetherness and warmth. When picturing a house, be sure to include the whole property. Eg, try not to cut off the roof
and use a high quality camera. Free Image Editing Tool: www.canva.com is free and perfect for resizing images to optimise them for social media. You can also upload (drag and drop) assets such as the Tall Poppy transparent logo to place on your imagery. For consistency, we recommend logo placement on the bottom right of your imagery. Use PNGs over JPGs: PNG files are a lossless format, meaning that compression doesn’t affect the quality of the image. Unlike JPGs, which create artifacts and blur images at a certain point, a PNG file will always look at least as sharp as the original image.
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Image specs
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Profanity filter
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Profanity filter: Set your profanity filter to strong (see below for instructions) as this will elimate any chance of coarse language tarnishing your brand’s page.  How to set profanity filter: Click settings at the top of your Page. From general, click profanity filter. Select medium or strong (we recommend strong) Click save changes.
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Inspire them
Write to inspire the like, the share, the comment, the re-tweet, the pin‌
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Long ago in the digital marketing space, we’d often find ourselves following the same path as television, just with a different spin on it. The focus was to interrupt the browser, user or reader with our very important message, screaming at them the importance of this message! Eyeball blasters and disruption were the buzzwords of this new way of marketing… Thankfully, this is no longer the way. It’s almost as though the Internet has matured and so have our thoughts on communicating through it. And more so, how we communicate through Social Media. Over time playing in the social media space, we’ve had the opportunity to spend time developing the challenging and more often entertaining art of content marketing and native marketing. With the introduction of these new marketing buzzwords, we have investigated, tested and refined how to communicate and market through social media.
So what have I learnt? In the instance of content, it’s simply explained; These days effective marketing through social media channels is about developing content and posts that are designed to inspire people. We’re not talking about posting photos or videos of inspirational messages screaming ‘Just do it!’ It’s not that at all; it’s about creating content that inspires people to take action on it: like, share, or comment! The inspiration of engagement is now the new marketing gold. Content is king, context is queen, and distribution is boss. But inspiration is the trump card that lays them all out. So for your next post through your social media channels, think about the following: Who are you inspiring?
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Case Study
Entertain and educate
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These are a couple of examples of inspirational content from the New Zealand Police.​ ​ The first is engaging with their community on an inspirational level, sharing the excitement and success of the 75th Anniversary parade for women in the Police force. The second clip is targeting a younger demographic, showcasing the Police with a lighthearted approach; fun and engaging as well as extremely viral as they inspired other Police Forces around the world to take part.
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Make them aware
Once you are there, drive awareness by connecting the dots
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Simple steps can deliver great, low cost returns. Once you are on Facebook or any other social network make sure you let people know, the simple step of adding the Facebook URL of your page to your website, business card and any other marketing collateral you have.​ ​ With all social marketing you have the ability to communicate with your community multiple times a day over the course of a week. Unlike other marketing and advertising the contact frequency with social media is substantially higher.
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Advertise to them Advertising accelerates the awareness of your community and extends your organic growth
There seems to be a vast amount of options these days for digital advertising. The range of choice in the modern marketer’s toolkit is almost endless; from banner ads to mobile, along with good old EDMs (yes, they still have their place), then add in social and search. It can make your head spin. So which ones work? Great question. As always, we say ‘think of your clients’ as that’s the best way to determine where to spend your precious advertising budget. Why spend when your audience isn’t there to see the ads? Seems pointless. Digital ad spend is a challenging beast, but one that can be tamed if you stop to plan it out. The same can be applied to the creative that makes it work. We’re a fan of all online ads, but more so of audience based advertising, where you run ads that resonate and inspire audiences to take action. And why not? Especially when we can target audiences so well. So, which works? Well, they all do. However, when planning, keep the following in mind: Adwords: for when people are looking for something particular. Facebook: your ads and content has got to be better than peoples’ kids and cats. After all, that’s why they are on social media... Make sure that you have great content behind your ads as the last thing you want is for someone to click the ad then end up on a bland or unused page. Have a good page, and then implement re-marketing to them when they return to Facebook to look at cats.
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Re-marketing is something that works across both search and social as it tracks people that have visited your site then displays an ad to them. The only downside is they keep getting advertised to – even if they have purchased the product, so watch the settings on that one. These are just a few examples, but one thing that’s consistent across all is to always run analytics. This will allow you to run multiple ad sets across multiple channels, then you can tweak, test and refine what ad is working. Learn, adapt and change to suit your audience. You can’t always get it right, but as long as you are comfortable to follow a more agile way of advertising you’ll see the success. Running advertising through your Facebook page in the form of promoting your brand can help grow awareness of your Facebook page. For example, using the following targeting within the Wellington area, your exposure of content would be:
page. At the bottom of your Boosted Post you can see the total number of people your post has reached. Hover over the number to see the following: Organic reach: The number of people who have seen your post in New Feed ticker or on your Page’s timeline. Paid reach: The number of people who have seen your post through an ad. Ads manager: Ad manager gives you far more targeting options than Boosting a post to effectively define your audience to serve them content that resonates with them. Your audience can be defined by the following parameters: location, age, gender, interests, behaviours, connections, and there is even the ability to upload a csv file of email addresses to directly target people on your database.
Boosting content from the Page: Boosted posts will mean your selected post/s appear higher in the newsfeed, giving your audience a better chance at seeing them. You can view insights for your boosted post when you go to your Page and click the promotions tab. You’ll then be able to view a summary of all promotions created from your Page, as well as manage, edit or pause promotions from your
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Insights
Data is knowledge. Social can provide you with knowledge through data via the insights they capture on your community.
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Insights: Use insights to gauge your likes, reach and engagement and better understand your audience. Insights can be found by clicking the ‘Insights’ tab at the top of your Page. To export your insights, click Overview on the left, then click Export in the top-right corner. Exporting your insights will give you information surrounding how many people have liked/unliked your page, their age and gender. For Boosted content, clicking ‘see results’ at the bottom of your boosted post on your timeline will allow you to see the demographics of the people who saw your boosted posts and the actions they took as a result. You can also do this through Ad Manager or by going to the Posts section of your Page Insights.
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Campaign for their attention Campaign, but don’t forget your current fans, do remember to connect the campaign to your brand
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We’ve covered off content and networks for social media, the next thing is campaigns and how often to run them. The first questions we’ll ask a client when we start talking campaigns is: why and what.
as a page post on Facebook, and away you go! You’ll get plenty of likes and strong engagement from your existing community. Then, if you want to focus on new consumers, set up a Facebook app with the prize being a new phone and run ads to target people that are not currently part of your community. Bingo! You have two completely different campaigns to cater for two different audiences!
Why run a campaign and what would you want from it? The ‘why’ sounds a little off, as most want to run campaigns to attract people to their community. The ‘want’ being a typically bigger community. When taking it to the next level, make sure you capture the email addresses of each potenThis is where I start to talk through campaign tial client in your Facebook app, then you can cycles and how they build into good content. use these addresses to send out graceful email Campaigns are a brilliant way to grow a campaigns that will further promote your social community, however, you need to make sure communities, and of course, sell your solutions to your community is encouraged to stick around potential customers. and engage with the brand via great content, otherwise you can campaign all you like but The next part is the cycles, to keep both the comthe traffic will not be sustainable. munity growing and feeling good for sticking around. You will need to run these campaigns More importantly, as with all campaigns, it’s often, note that you don’t want to overcook an opportunity to get your product or service things so keeping them a good distance apart into the hands of your target audience. So with plenty of good content in between should DON’T fall into the trap of giving away the make things run more latest and greatest tech product (ie: Apple smoothly. Watch or iPad). As every brand from cars to shoes to consultancies have valuable brand So now you just have to come up with 12-24 experiences that can be offered as a prize. Still unique campaign ideas focused on current and wanting to give away an iWatch? Best get in new clients. Sounds tough? touch and we can help clarify things for you. Best get in touch then ;) So why a campaign and what’s a campaign cycle? Campaigns to grow your community are great, as long as you also run campaigns for your current community. The simple way to enable this is to run campaigns that focus on the needs of new consumers and then run others to focus on the upsell or add value to existing customers. For example, if you are a Telco, run campaigns based around a free credit; set that up
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Post vs App App based campaigns grow your email database​ Posts based campaigns grow your engagement
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In my last blog post ‘Campaign Cycles’ I touched briefly on Post Campaigns and App Campaigns and how they can be used for inspiring action from different communities (ie: current community and new community building). Post Campaigns are simple, fast and easy to launch – all you need is the idea for the post, what you want to give away and some sexy imagery to catch the eye of the community. Then, they simply like and comment on the post to enter. Note that you can’t ask them to ‘share to enter’ as this breaks the Facebook terms. The post would go nuts and you’d be happier than a squirrel in a nut shop…until it comes time to draw the competition winner. You would have to trawl through the participants to find the winner you’ve randomly drawn, then you’ll have to wait for them to get in touch. You also need terms and conditions for the post and for it to be clearly marked with the timeframe of the competition. So, a Post Campaign is quick, cheap and simple to get going, but it’s also time consuming in the management of the campaign. Oh, and I forgot to mention you don’t get any data capture from the community, existing or new. App Campaigns are an effective way to increase awareness of your brand as well as capture key marketing data, they can also be an effective way of developing content for your social channels if executed correctly. Apps require a little more thought along with a good ad budget to support and extend the reach of the campaign. However, if done correctly, they provide an excellent return on the investment. The key part of a successful App
Campaign is clever creative and a clean, clear ad strategy. So an App Campaign is a great way to capture data, inspire greater interaction with your brand, and to grow your community. They cost a bit more so you may want to run them every 2-3 months as a focus on the creative will always work better. It also pays to stop other ads running or adjust your targeting so you don’t saturate the market during the campaign period. Hopefully that clarifies things a bit more and if you need help with creating campaigns, from post to apps or even more exciting content campaigns – get in touch!
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Case study App vs Post
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The Colgate campaign has been designed to reward the existing community of Colgate, through this campaign the page engagement skyrocketed, with the majority of people participating were from the existing community. However as the promotion grew in size, more and more people started to tag friends into the post further extending the reach beyond paid advertising and increasing the community size as new people start to ‘like’ and engage in the competition. Trustpower approached us to create a campaign that targeted 20-35 year olds in Auckland, Wellington, Tauranga and Dunedin, and actively excluded Christchurch. The objective was to acquire an owned database that they could contact in future and to generate reach and brand awareness within the specific age bracket.
T rustpower’s core offering is power and Internet; it’s better together. We built them a mobile friendly Facebook app and directed users to the page through targeted Facebook advertising. Once users landed on the app, they were asked to upload a photo of what they thought went better together, let us know their first name, last name and phone number. In return, they were in the draw to win one of ten Apple TVs, which incorporates both power and Internet and creating a solid campaign from advertising to acquisition to prize fulfillment Through a mixture of boosted Facebook page posts, and Facebook ads that directed users straight to the app, we reached over 860,000 people within the target demographic.
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App examples
Campaigns through Social media Post campaign •creative concept •post artwork •post copy •standard terms and conditions for the competition supplied •draw management
Data Capture App •creative concept •captures name, email and phone number •post artwork •post and campaign copy •app development •standard terms and conditions for the competition supplied •Standard privacy policy supplied •draw management •ad management
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Photo competition •creative concept •develops user generat ed content •captures name, email and phone number •post artwork •post and campaign copy •app development •standard terms and conditions for the competition supplied •Standard privacy policy supplied •draw management •ad management
Voting competition •creative concept •captures name, email and phone number •post artwork •post and campaign copy •app development •standard terms and conditions for the competition supplied •Standard privacy policy supplied •draw management •ad management • follow-up participation email campaign
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More than marketing
Social media sits outside the realms of marketing and advertising, it’s a style and way of being. Getting the best from social media is to make it part of your day to day life. Actively engage in the networks you are on, look for content opportunities; from houses you like to home décor, through to sporting events. You will be amazed at what people find interesting, but do keep in mind that a community is best built through a common interest, so be famous for your interest.
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Pepsi New Zealand Back to the Future with Pepsi! As you may or may not know 21st of October 2015 was the exact date that Marty McFly set on the time traveling DeLorean, the year when shoes could tie themselves and skateboards would hover! To take advantage of this day Pepsi New Zealand teamed up with Brand Spanking and TAG The Agency to create an event not to forget! The idea was simple; hire a movie cinema and play the Back to the Future 2 movie. Brand Spanking took care of the promotional staff and talent, leaving us to focus on socialising the event. The brief was simply to do something cool and we do cool well. So we pre-filmed a bunch of iconic wellington locations, set up a green screen at the event and went about creating images and short video clips that replicated people riding on ‘real’ hover boards! The clips where filmed, edited and published all on the night allowing people to continue the excitement and fun of the Back to the Future movie long after the credits rolled. Take a look at the highlights here: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxQt03tX2qY
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Share success Success breeds success.​
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Film success
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Successful video tactics for social media include the following: Keep it short, ideally 90 seconds or less Film with the network placement in mind, for example if it’s Facebook the clip will need to work without sound just as well with sound (Facebook default is no sound). If you are using the clip as an ad in YouTube, have a hook within the first 5 seconds to keep people watching, but keep the overall length to 30 seconds for the best, positive experience for the viewer. Share through video snapshots of success stories. Share a tip a day on how to present your idea.The key is to keep the videos short and regular.
Film and share short interviews with your delighted customers. The power to is in your hands.
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Support
Tools, tips and hints on how to get the most from social media. TAG The Agency is here to help, if you have any questions on social media and how to get the best from it, please get in touch: hello@tagtheagency.com Or call Tom on 021 779 298
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What’s next? The future is already here...
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