The Relationship Between Content and Engagement

Greetings everybody, welcome to the Wednesday, May 29th, 2019 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook over at WSI Digital where we work with businesses and organizations on helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. Hop over to poweredbywsi.com to learn more about us and what we do for our customers. Online. Today's show is, uh, gonna kind of draw attention to, um, social media marketing industry reports from, uh, the folks at Social Media Examiner. If you have been a frequent flyer on Free Webinar Wednesdays, you know that I'm a big fan of Social Media Examiner. I follow their podcast. I've been to their event the last couple of years, uh, Social Media Marketing World. out in San Diego, and Michael Stelzner, who is the founder and creator of Social Media Examiner and all the great stuff that they do, recently announced that their report, which I believe is the 11th consecutive report of its kind, probably making this one of the longest-running social media marketing industry reports in the world, looking at trends and activities, um, This is now available, and through the month of May, it is essentially ungated, which means they're making it available without you having to provide a name and email address. I listened to a social media podcast, Social Media Examiner podcast, and they brought Michael on and he chatted and went over some high-level observations. And I just want to point out a couple of those things during today's Free Webinar Wednesdays. So that kind of offering up some, some thoughts, I guess, or observations, if you will, but also making sure that you know how you can go out and actually get your own version of this report and download it. And I've got in another window here an actual PDF of the report that we'll pull up and take a look at. But if you want to get a copy of this yourself, You can simply go to socialmediaexaminer.com, and if you type in report 2019 and hit your enter button, that'll do a redirect to this landing page. If you've not been here before, you'll probably get a pop-over that'll say, hey, would you like to get information? And you can put in your email address and it'll email it to you. But as you're kind of scrolling down, um, And again, you can see you've got some popover activity going on where it's prompting you to get access to the report. You certainly can click on the call to action button and add your email address and have it sent to you if you would like. However, if you don't want to give Social Media Examiner your information and you want to just get the report but not let them know that you've gotten the report, you can simply close those and you can go directly to the download report here button until May 31st. So we've only got a couple of more days left. But if you click on this, it will pull down the actual report here, and then you can go through, take a look at it. Now they've embedded the report directly on their site as well. So if you want to go through and actually take a look before you download it, you can, which is kind of cool. Or you can do what I've done and you can snag a copy of the PDF and have it available to you that way. Probably the 2 most notable things I would say that jumped out at me, and let's go ahead and we'll just maximize this to make it bigger and make sure that this doesn't throw off my GoToMeeting here real quick. So it looks like that did pick up. The one thing that he pulled out that thought was rather interesting is for the first time in the 11 years that they have actually been tracking this, Facebook was on a decline. And it's important to know this is a report that they poll marketers and get their opinion on where marketers are going to be spending their attention and dollars and effort in the coming year, not necessarily what consumers are using. So if consumer preference is still using Facebook and that continues to grow because that's where people want to hang out and that's their chosen social network of preference, that's fine. But what this report does is it actually looks at where marketers are planning on spending their time and budget and money and effort to go after consumers. So first off, Facebook on a decline. I suspect that's because You're seeing other platforms, and most notably Instagram, which is somewhat ironic given the fact that Facebook also owns Instagram. So even though Instagram is picking up in activity and Facebook might be declining as an overall Facebook organization, they're still seeing some growth. It's just user base is shifting. And I think one of the things that Michael talked about in the podcast interview, and it was also discussed when we were at Social Media Marketing World earlier this year in San Diego, Is a vast majority of consumers don't have a foggy clue that Instagram is actually owned by Facebook. They think that they're using a separate system, and that's one of the interesting facts when you talk to the millennials or the younger folks that think that they're kind of giving Facebook the thumb and saying, you know, I, I'm not going to support you, I'm going to go to Instagram because Instagram isn't Facebook. And the reality is it's still part of the very same platform. So depending on, as a marketer, or if you have oversight of the marketing function within your organization, it would be really interesting to see, you know, if your organization is also experiencing that. I think some of the big reasons why Facebook utilization is declining is just the overall organic visibility continues to be a challenge, and especially after F8 made its announcements of some of the shifts going after more of the group participation, one-on-one, some video, although we'll see video is one of the things that's not taking off as fast as maybe what people had anticipated, in particular live video. So I was just kind of intrigued based off of, you know, what the results found as it relates to Facebook. I think there's still gonna be an interest in Facebook advertising, but There's even been comments that I've read that have said within the next couple of years, Facebook advertising is going to get to the point where it's going to be so expensive for small businesses, it's going to be cost prohibitive for them to be able to participate because only the big organizations and bigger firms that either have significant budget or some collaborative buying power are going to be able to afford Facebook ads just by their competitive nature. This one kind of bummed me out a little bit. The next item that they also talked about was Messenger bots and chatbots. If again, if if you listen to any past free webinar Wednesdays, you know that I have talked and been pretty excited about bot technology, the conversational capabilities that it provides of bringing people together and having more of an intimate dialogue. Last year at Social Media Marketing World, bots were all the rage. This year there was some conversation around them, but not necessarily as much. Yet people still felt that they were important and worth considering. Bot popularity seems to have been somewhat of a flash in the pan for a vast majority of the marketers that have responded to this survey. And I don't know whether that means they've realized that it's more complicated than what they originally thought, if that means Facebook in particular, Messenger bots that are using the Facebook Messenger interface, are being scrutinized or restricted with capabilities because Facebook is continuing to evolve how it is allowing people to use its Messenger bots. But the Messenger and the bot capabilities does not seem to be on the radar screen this year as much as it was for last year as it relates to what marketers are putting into their their, their quiver of tools, if you will, for the coming year. I alluded to the fact that Instagram, super hot, and seems like that's where everybody is kind of spending their time, not just from an Instagram native platform, but also taking a look at stories and the popularity of stories, which is essentially a functionality that they did a little R&D, and by R&D I mean rip off and duplicate, from the folks at Snapchat, being able to have these ethereal content posts that will go and last for 24 hours, and then they disappear from the stream. Instagram, if you do stories, provides you with the ability to post those stories directly into Facebook. So even though Facebook utilization might be on the decline for the first time in several years, being able to take stories out of Instagram and also post them directly to your Facebook stories so that you can remain engaged there is something that they're making possible. If you have the Facebook app on your mobile device, you may have noticed a significant redesign that has taken place. Not only have they changed the color scheme and the blue is gone and it's much more of a clean layout, but on the mobile device now when you open Facebook, the first things that you see at the very top are these long vertical kind of portrait-sized cards that are representative of the stories from the people that are in your network and your friends. And that's really where I think Facebook is, is playing off of the popularity of Instagram and making sure that it's easy for you to cross-promote, um, from the Instagram Stories platform directly into Facebook. Engagement, uh, it's funny, I was just down in Memphis, Tennessee last week speaking at the Barrett Graduate School of Banking, and one of my slides talked about the importance of content and how banks and all businesses for that matter need to start embracing content and thinking more like publishers. One of the things that's kind of a common phrase in the world of banking and finance is, what are the 3 most important things in real estate? And those are location, location, location. So when I ask that question in a room full of bankers, typically I get the answer location, location, location. When I ask the same question about digital marketing, a lot of people say content is king. However, and as this report kind of reinforces one of the things, and I don't remember who originally said it, and I might be paraphrasing it, but I had heard at one point somebody say content is king, but engagement is queen, and she holds the keys to the castle. And I believe it was Mari Smith that may have said something similar to that effect. So I'll give Mari a hat tip and acknowledgement of me kind of Maybe plagiarizing what it was that, that she had said or that I had heard. But just posting content for the sake of getting content out there isn't cutting it any longer. And so you really need to figure out how you can build engagement with your audience and making sure that not just content goes out and educates and informs and, and helps your audience be smarter or better prepared, not sales-related information, but really helpful educational Adding value type information, but looking for ways that you can actually engage and interact. And so one of the examples that kind of rolls back to the stories option is, while the stories themselves are ethereal in the sense that they disappear after a period of time, one of the things that you can do, or that you can seek to do, is when you post your story, if you have any way of enticing or encouraging or inspiring the individual that's watching your story to engage with you, whether it's a swipe up or direct message me or post a comment. While the story itself may disappear, if somebody watches that story and it inspires them to reach out to you and have a conversation or ask a question, that direct message remains regardless of whether or not the story disappears or not. And so it's that engagement, that interactivity, that conversation that you can build that is one of the things that a story can help to facilitate. And it's not a conversation that you're building with a bunch of people. You're not doing mass conversations, more one-on-one. It's much more of an intimate approach. But as Facebook talked about in their F8 conference, a number of examples, they're trying to take their engagement strategy, and I think this is indicative of all social platforms, not just Facebook, but they certainly talked about it a lot in their presentations, is going from an open kind of community park type relationship where everybody's in the same big open space and we're all talking and everybody's interacting with each other, to inviting people into more of what they refer to as a living room experience, where they bring people into your home. It's a select group of people, maybe 1 or 2 people, and those dialogue opportunities create better engagement, more of a one-on-one. It creates more work, it creates a little bit more effort on your part as a brand, because instead of blasting content out that can get to hundreds or thousands of people. Now that you're doing more of an engagement, kind of one-on-one or one-on-few, you have to have more of those conversations, and you've got to be a little bit more attentive and responsible in how you interact with those folks. But engagement is really where I think we need to focus our effort in 2019, is how do we make that conversation really relevant to the end user, to the recipient, to the person that's on the other end of that computer screen or that phone screen that we're having dialogue with. YouTube and video remain very high. You can see a vast majority of marketers plan on increasing their utilization of YouTube video. That is also in the opposite direction of what marketers had said as it relates to the utilization of Facebook video. Even Social Media Examiner has actually taken their long-form video off of their Facebook page and they've moved it directly over into their YouTube channel. So for Social Media Examiner, Examiner, they created an episodic video blog series called The Journey, which is where Michael Stelzner kind of documents through video, 10 or 12-minute video snippets, his initiative and effort to build Social Media Marketing World and the challenges that he experiences under Social Media Examiner and running a company and all the things that small business owners get to deal with on a day-in and day-out basis. So YouTube is certainly something that you should probably be taking a look at as a potential option. Some of what we've suggested to our clients, and I even mentioned this at banking school, is follow people, look around. So, you know, you probably, if you're using Instagram, for example, or if you're on Facebook, you probably have folks that you're following or that you're connected to that are playing around with stories. And it's Even if you're not comfortable with that, stories can include video. It can include static images, stickers, filters, overlays, emojis, you know, all of those different sorts of things just to give you some inspiration. Also hop out into YouTube and do some searching. You may not realize this, but YouTube is owned by Google, and YouTube also happens to be the world's number 2 search engine behind Google itself. So, depending on whatever industry it is that you are a part of, hop into YouTube and just do some searches for things that are going on in your industry and questions that people could be asking and see what sort of information is out there that is already being produced. You can also take a look at some of the other things like Social Media Examiner, take a look at Gary Vaynerchuk, although when you watch any of Gary Vee's videos, you want to make sure you've got your headphones plugged in because The guy has pretty colorful vocabulary, and you definitely don't want— or maybe you do— but if you're in an office environment, you may not want a bunch of F-bombs and other sorts of colorful language broadcasting over your speakers. So just be a little cautious with that. But there's a lot of YouTube channels out there that you can look at for inspiration. Some might be within your industry, some might be without are outside of your industry. But definitely video is something that you're, you're going to want to make sure that you're paying attention to in the coming year as a way to distribute your content, demonstrate your expertise, build relationships. It's really the best way for people to get to know and like and trust you because they can see you and feel like they get to know you a lot better. Despite the fact that the Facebook focus and increase has kind of stagnated and dropping a little bit. There's still a pretty significant portion of marketers that are planning on continuing their use of Facebook. May not be as much as maybe it was last year, but that's still the dominant platform, followed by Instagram. So even though, you know, Instagram is nipping at its heels, it's still within the same environment. So I'm not going to go through every single one of these pages. I just wanted to give you some of my thoughts on the executive insights. You can see through the, the remaining 40-some pages that we've got here, it does a really good job of knocking out all of the different responses. It gives you some really good graphs so you can see engagement becoming a prominent desire or question that marketers are asking. Any items that are specifically of importance, they've done a good job of highlighting those so they pop out. Some really good statistics. So as you look at building your own social media marketing plan for the coming year, where you feel your organization should be spending time to try to generate interest and activity, this gives you an idea of really where everybody else is going. One of the thoughts that was also presented during that podcast overview that Michael Stelzner kind of shared was, while there seems to be some shifts, for example, the decrease in Facebook utilization, the lack of utilization as it relates to the Messenger bots, some of these other things that might not be as popular as what we had anticipated, The question begs, does that mean that you shouldn't be focused on those, or does that mean that marketers found those to be more challenging and they're not paying attention to them, they're not adding them to their list? But that doesn't necessarily mean that they're not going to be an effective tool for you to consider. And in an area where people are decreasing the utilization or the focus in some market areas, That may be more of a glass is half full as opposed to glass is half empty, because if you've figured out a way, for example, to leverage live video, which seems to be something that really still hasn't caught on, or you've figured out a way to leverage Messenger bots to build conversation and interact with your audience, that there may be opportunities for you to capitalize on that because other marketers are decreasing their focus and attention in those areas. So that might create more of an opportunity for you. It's really a decision that you have to make yourself to determine if that's something that, you know, is really the glass is half full or the glass is half empty. But there's always different ways of looking at statistics anytime statistics are presented. You know, the data is just data. It's up to us as humans to be able to interpret that data and try to determine what the actual meaning of that data really is. So, um, some things to kind of consider. Of course, they've got a couple of little promo banners in here that draw attention to the fact that they've got a pretty awesome conference that you might want to put on your calendar for next year. Um, if you do decide to go to Social Media Marketing World 2020, let me know. Would love to see you out in San Diego, as I've already purchased my ticket. For that event. But you can see here, for example, this is the graph that they talked about where you, you can see the rise of Facebook utilization peaking last year at 67% and now down to 61%, you know, lower than what it was even 2 years ago. So some, some really interesting statistics here for you to pick through, tons of good stuff. I'm a little bit of a data geek, so I really enjoy this type of information, but just wanted to make sure that you knew how you could go about and actually getting your own copy. And again, before the end of May, you've got the ability to, to get access to this report ungated. If it's after May 31st, still no big deal. You just basically provide Social Media Examiner with your email address and they'll collect it and send you a link to your inbox and you'll be able to download it that way. But sometimes people like ungated content and he's made this available for everybody that is interested in getting a copy of it. So check that out and drop me a note. Let me know what you think. If there's anything in there you feel that you might be shifting strategy or doing something a little different, I would love to know. Another article that I stumbled upon that I just thought I would share from SWOT.io. There's a social media trends for 2019, and this kind of walks through some of the big trends that continue to be on folks' radar screens. Some of it supports what Social Media Examiner reported, some of it's kind of new. So you can see there's a mention of social video. Here's the reference to stories, chatbots, different sorts of consolidation. You know, one of the things that Facebook announced at their F8 conference was the consolidation of their messaging platforms. And while it's not going to happen overnight, one of the things that they're trying to position is whether you are interested in sending a message to somebody through Facebook Messenger, Through a direct message on Instagram, through WhatsApp. Those are all Facebook-owned and operated platforms, trying to make sure that you can go through and consolidate and as a business be able to manage those directly through one platform. One of our— and this isn't the WSI corporate partnership, but one of the partnerships that our office here in Michigan has established is with a company called LivePerson. And they've done a good job, particularly in the banking sector, providing integrated messaging directly from web as well as other channels. But they've got a pretty sophisticated consolidation structure that allows for people to send messages directly to users of the platform from text messaging, from WhatsApp, Apple Business Messenger, Facebook Messenger. And so it allows for you to be able to collect all of those messages into one centralized dashboard with metrics and analytics and reporting. And it allows your agents within your organization to be able to manage multiple conversations at the same time. You roll in some automated bot-based intelligence where you can look for common questions with bots providing, I'll say canned responses, but I don't want you to feel like it's just generic and impersonal. I mean, it's all in how you actually present the information back to the visitor that's coming to your website or sending you content. But if somebody's wondering whether your organization, you know, in a banking world, are you guys open on Columbus Day, or what are your hours on Christmas Eve, a bot can look for some of those verbal cues or typewritten cues around things like hours, are you open, availability, closed, and come back and offer at least a first attempt at answering those questions in a comfortable way while still providing access to a human agent if your human agents are available. Some conversation around live video as well as Messenger marketing, although according to the marketers polled in Social Media Examiner's report, Messenger-based marketing is on the decline. Data and being able to figure out how you can kind of data mine all the information that is available to you about your customers. Influencer relations— this is where you basically seek out individuals within your market area, or your market industry I guess I should say, that have a significant amount of influence or reputation or followers, and how can you get them on board to be able to be an advocate for your organization. And the theory around that is if you've got some folks that are out there that are well-respected that aren't necessarily part of your organization, but other people follow them and they're curious on what they say. If you can get them to spread the gospel of your organization, that influencer-based marketing can be a real boon. It's kind of like word-of-mouth or testimonial marketing on steroids. So some more, some more references to chat and live streaming, even smart speakers where you start taking a look at The device created by Amazon whose name starts with an A, and I'm not going to say her name out loud because that, that, that will trigger her and she'll want to have me engage in a conversation, and I'm not quite ready for that. More live, mobile first. I caught that. I just caught also— chase a squirrel here. I did just recently catch an article that indicated that the sites that are starting to get indexed now moving forward are going to be actually indexed under Google's mobile-first index. There's always been 2 different indexes in Google, the desktop and the mobile, and mobile has gained more and more popularity over time. Now Google, I believe the article was something to the effect of, they're going to be indexed with the mobile index only. They're not even going to look at desktop anymore just because of the prevalence and popularity of mobile devices. So that goes back to your individual web strategy. Take a look at your website, make sure that it is mobile-friendly, make sure that it makes sense for your mobile visitors. What are your calls to action? Those are certainly important things to take into consideration. Reinforcement of stories, there's direct messaging, talked about that already. Watch a story, send somebody a direct message, and to be able to interact with them. And then another reference to influencer marketing, having trust and authenticity, certainly very important in today's day and age. So you can take a look at the rest of what this article provides just to kind of give you some other insight on things that you likely are going to want to keep in mind as you evolve and develop your social strategy for 2019 and beyond. So with that, those were really the kind of the, the two, the two main areas that I wanted to talk about today on Free Webinar Wednesdays. So go out between now and the end of the month, make sure that you snag your copy of Social Media Examiner's industry report and read through that. Also hop over to SWOT.io and take a look at their social media trends for 2019. Might be something worth printing out, sharing with your, with your internal team, coming up with some ideas on exactly how you'd like to use some of those in the coming year. But with that, we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna wrap up this week's Free Webinar Wednesdays. I'm just gonna do a quick check of my calendar because I want to just double-check to see whether or not we're gonna be able to do a live show next week. And I believe believe that we are going to be able to do that. I will be traveling— for those of you in the banking world that might be in the Dakotas, I will be traveling to Sioux Falls, South Dakota to facilitate a social media panel discussion next week for the South and North Dakota's joint annual convention in Sioux Falls. And we've got a good lineup, a couple of Couple of awesome banks. We've got another marketing agency. We've got a representative from the South Dakota Bankers Association, as well as an attorney joining us on that panel discussion to talk about some of the things that, that the community banking world might want to keep in mind as it relates to jumping into social media. Of course, in the banking world, we've got all sorts of interesting, fun things that we need to worry about, like compliance and privacy and technology and productivity and culture. So we'll chat about those. I think my job as the moderator/facilitator of that panel is going to be a hard one in the sense that I need to figure out a way that I can keep that conversation to only 60 minutes. But it should be a good one, and I'm looking forward to the discussion and meeting some cool folks and some awesome bankers while I'm out in Sioux Falls. So with that, we'll go ahead and we will wrap the show. We'll look forward to seeing you next Wednesday, June 5th, which also happens to be yours truly's birthday. So you can figure out what you're gonna bring to me on my live birthday show. You've got a week to figure that out. Until then, we'll look forward to seeing you online at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Have an awesome week, and we'll, we'll see you soon. Bye-bye.