INBOUND 2016: Chelsea Hunersen "Less is More: How to do Better Social with Less Content"

Good morning, everyone and thank you for coming to first breakout session. Hopefully we can set the tone in a really good way. I'm going to. Does this sound better? Does this sound better? Do you hear it either way? Okay. Hopefully we can set the tone in a really good way. Get started on social. Speaking of setting the tone, I like to really get a feel for who's in the room, so I'm going to ask a couple questions. How many people here run a social media team specifically or manage social media directly? Lot of people. Excellent. How many people do social as a part of one of 10 things that they already do? Look around, you're in good company. We're all busy, so. Excellent. Good to know you have a lot of company in the room. As Becky mentioned, I've been at HubSpot for about three years. I spent about two years working on social directly, but I've also worked in technical services. So one of the reasons I'm really excited to be giving a talk in me grow with HubSpot track is because one of the things I get really good at is using the HubSpot product to do social specifically. So I'll give an overview and then we'll have a couple of minutes for Q and A at the end. So please feel free to ask any questions based on what we've talked about. Before we get started, though, we're plugging in a mouse and this mouse. There we go. So I know it's been a long 24 hours. A lot of things have happened. I just want to start by asking everyone to take a breath collectively. And then I want to ask everyone to take a second and think about something that they've learned so far at Inbound, at any of the talks you've seen so far and just turn to the person next to you, introduce yourself, say hello, and say something really interesting that you've learned that you're looking forward to taking back to your team already. I'll give you 60 seconds. Amazing. Has everybody made a new friend? Has everybody learned something so I don't have to talk anymore today? Right? Excellent. So glad that we've gotten that started. Now let's actually talk about social. So we talk about qualifications. What brings me here today to talk to you? I actually counted how many things I've done on Social at HubSpot. I literally counted. I posted to their Facebook about 3,276 times, to LinkedIn about 1,638 times, and to Twitter about 13,104. We can actually increment one to Facebook here, because I posted again this morning. But basically that's a lot of posts, right? We're all busy. We all talked about how we're busy, how we have a lot to do, and a lot of my job is figuring out how to fill this time with things that are meaningful, how to actually do more with social content. So as we're talking today, we're going to talk about a couple of different things that have to do with more with our social content. One is what does it actually mean to do more? We got to set the baseline for how we're doing more, how to find the content that's actually going to get us to do more, how to do more with that content, how to create content that does more. This is different. I promise we'll get there. And then how to optimize your content for better results. So also because I work in social media and because I'm working on social media at Inbound, I have to put a plug in there for using the hashtag. So I'm also going to put up there some tweets. This is a tweet you can take a picture of. You can tweet yourself. Use this as an interlude using the inbound16 hashtag. So excited to be talking about social. And if not, I have another one for you. We're already bored. Moving on to talking about actually why we're here. What does it mean to create more with our social? We're all thinking about this, right? What do we mean besides memes? We are marketers, so we need more time. We're so busy. We need more time for our social media. We need more quality out of our social. We need things that are going to perform better for us so we can get more time and we need more roi. As we're thinking about how to do more, these are the things that we really want to address. How to get more of out of our content. And getting a lot of. This is a bit of a balancing act, right? I looked for a balance image. This is the best that I got. I think it's pretty good. But when we're thinking about more content and more quality, we kind of want to balance a little bit with setting ourselves a baseline and setting ourselves something that's going to be able to build off of where we're going to be able to generate what we want out of our social and then give ourselves a little bit of room to experiment and to figure out content that's going to get us even more. So I also found this tweet yesterday, I didn't actually get to listen to Gary Vee, but what I thought was really cool about some of the things that he said and some of the tweets that I was seeing coming in is this thought about there is a balance, right? It's of kind creativity, it's science. A lot of the social, as I'm sure you know, is a mix of a bunch of different things. So we'll talk about each of those. So giving yourself room to do some buffer, how do we find content that does work? That's the real question that we start with. So we start with an audit, right? This may seem relatively simple, but what I think is interesting about the audit is what we actually want to audit. So HubSpot did an experiment about a year ago. We looked at some of the views that were coming from our blog content. We found out that 76% of our views on bullets content were from old posts. This is monthly, right? And those come from about 30 of the same posts. We also found out. There's your tweetable link, by the way. Right. If you want your stats, you can have that. We also found out. I did an audit of our posts month to month and figured out where our leads came from. For those of you who are demand generation or lead generation, I found out that over 99% of our leads month to month actually come from content that we've created in the past, and that is direct social leads. Right? So it doesn't have to be content that's coming out at the moment that you have to produce in the moment. But let's talk about why we're talking about leads and why we're talking about views, right? Those are not things that you might necessarily think about when you're thinking about social media and thinking about what's successful. The reason that we talk about views, the reason that we talk about leads has to do a lot with intent, right? As we're creating content that's getting put on social media, the really exciting thing about getting content that's generating leads or getting content that's generating views is because there's a whole new level of intent there. People are so excited about it that they're pursuing the content. They haven't just clicked on the content and then clicked off, right? There's proof of concept that people are really interested in what we are publishing. So as we're looking for things that we want to publish on social that we want to double down on, we want to look for things that have this flavor of intent Same thing, right? Blog posts that drive the highest number of views also are an indicator of people who are showing affinity for certain types of content. So also, I want to put out there that not all blog posts are created equal. Sorry, you may not have realized this, you may be painfully aware, but as we're looking at the content that we want to double down on, that we want to do less and more of, I think it's really important to point out that not everything is a winner. And so when we're thinking about how we want to do better social, a lot of it is thinking about what are the winners, how can we do better with those? So how do we pick what content are the winners? I think there are a couple ways. One, you can talk about views of content. One, you can talk about clicks of content. You can talk about shares of content or leads from content. So as you may have guessed, my two favorites have the real intent behind them. They're shares and leads, how you can figure out what people are sharing and what they are downloading, because those are showing the further action from just clicking in. So we'll talk about finding leads. If you are a HubSpot user, one of the best things to do is to use the reporting tool to generate reports on how people are getting in and what they are converting on. That's a really good way to see where people are interacting with your content. So an attribution report is a really good tool for seeing the pages that people are converting on directly to become leads. Once you figure that out, you can have a really good sense of what's driving you can also use this report to generate to the blog posts as well as website pages that are getting people to download your content. That's again the really strong indicator that people are going to interact with the subject matter, the content that you have out there. I would recommend creating a report and downloading a list of these posts to be used later. And that way you can reuse them from time to time and build a schedule of things that you are going to be able to have a social schedule off of and build the rest of your social planning off of. Another thing that is a really good way to show intent is using shares, right? The thing about a share that's kind of funny is someone can share your content without actually viewing it. So that's a different kind of intent, but that's actually a good signal too because if somebody's sharing your content, you are getting it out there for the world to see. So share is for that reason is another thing that I really like as a form of intent. There are tools that allow you to measure that. HubSpot Social Inbox is one of them. You can see sort of interactions that people have with your content. If you really want to drill down. There are things like BuzzSumo and Simply Measured that allow you to look at shares specifically or you can check on platforms. So this is Facebook specifically. Facebook has a really good insights tool. If you were to go into Facebook, you can see exactly what people are doing with each of your pieces of content. I go in and check pretty much monthly how people are interacting with our content, what they're sharing, what they're clicking. And that gives me a sense of what I should repeat and what topics I should be passing back to our content team to be creating more of. So let's talk about clicks because I mentioned that once and clicks are certainly very important as well, why we might use them. Clicks are good to compare posts against each other. So if I have two different posts that are similar topics, I might want to know if there's a particular one that grabs people's attention more. They're also good to talk about the popularity of subjects. So I can get a sense of are people liking productivity content? Are they liking e commerce content? Are they liking. It's a good sort of general gauge to see where people are clicking. It's a good thing to know in your funnel. I want to know approximately the clicks that I have and that way I can also look at the conversion rate and I can see, well, are people clicking and then are they converting? If they're not, then that's not a good thing and that's something that I want to fix in my funnel. And I also can use clicks as a really quick way to find extra content to fill my schedule. I can go and look through what has gotten really a lot of clicks and maybe reuse that. The thing that I think is really something to caution with clicks though is that they're a shorter term strategy because again we talked about intent, right? When somebody's actually clicking through to your content and downloading from there or sharing from there, it's saying they're not just caught by the headline, they're not just clicking in and then clicking off, they are actually sticking around. So I use clicks as a higher level thought there because we're getting people to the content. We don't really know if they're staying. So I would say use that but don't overuse it as you're trying to build out A good content schedule. If you are using the HubSpot tool, you can find the clicks by actually filtering. If you were to go into Social Inbox in particular, you can filter by campaign, you can filter by date, and you can get a sense of approximately what people are clicking and how well each of those things are performing. You'll notice here that one of the things that performs really well for us is GIFs. That's just a side note. You may experiment with images and types of things and find that there's something that gets a lot more clicks than others and that's a really good thing to reuse. So pro tip, start taking notice too if you can. As we're talking about the people who are clicking, as we're talking about what leads are getting generated, see if there's any kind of patterns that you have there. For example, if there are certain types of days of the week where people behave differently, we've noticed that on Mondays, for example, nobody really likes to do work, but they like to read really long form articles. So the articles that'll do really well on Monday are things like coffee versus alcohol, which is better? Or have you a lot of coffee stuff does well on Monday, People must be drinking a lot of coffee. But a lot of the longer form stuff is something that does well on certain days of the week. So we know we're watching for those patterns and we start to develop a schedule with what we have about what performs. So we're finding our most engaging content. We're going to save it, we're going to use for later. That's building our baseline. That is how we actually get started and start to save ourselves more time. Then we want to do more with it, right? So how do we get more out of this Content that we already have is doing well. So there's learning from it, which we've talked a little bit about. There's amplifying it, reusing and repurposing and there's also generating leads or generating roi. For those of you who are interested in actually doing that demand generation piece. So learning we want to use data on behavior to do social better. If we're just posting and we're spraying and praying, that's not really doing a whole lot for us. That's not really giving us a way to modify our social. We want to learn from our success in a couple ways. So we want to learn the subjects that perform well. We want to see are there particular types of posts that people are engaging more with. Again, we found that it used to Be where HubSpot I work for a company called HubSpot. We had a lot of marketing content that performed really well. We started to watch the trends and we've recently found that people don't like that quite as much anymore and now they start to look at productivity content. So we use a lot more productivity content. We keep an eye on the subjects that are generally performing better than others. We want to look at the types of things that perform. Are there specific types of posts that perform that we want to use better? We want to look at the wording of posts. So one of my favorite things about posts, which is just kind of interesting so I try and get it out there when I can. Negative wording in posts actually tends to perform much better if you're using a superlative one way or the other. So best or worst, that'll generally perform better than hey, here are tips for you. Here are the best tips that for getting your hottest content. Actually, people generally tend to click right. So negative performs better than positive. These are things that you can take a look at as you're looking at your content, you're doing your audit. You can also take a look at posts that you might want to reuse. There are some schools of thought that would say that you want to reuse posts a lot. I tend to reuse posts maybe once a month or so if they're really good. And it's okay to do that if you have other content in between. But you can get a sense of what posts really perform well. What are your heavy hitters and what might you be able to reuse later and offers to reuse. If you're using offers as well, you can learn from that. Pro tip. Be open to surprises. Be open to learning things that you may not have known previously about social and don't fight it. We used to think, for example, that when we were posting on Facebook, we were posting at 6pm that it was Australia because it was Australia's time zone and that's who's interacting with our content. We did a test and we actually found out that the people who were interacting with Our content at 6pm were people from the Nordic region and Benelux region of Europe. Why they're downloading at 1am their time, 12pm their time, I don't know. But we're learning from those things and we're being able to iterate based on what we actually know. So what do we do when we find a really good post? I think this is really important and amplifying it is really Huge. We want to share through employees or share through advocates. So imagine if everybody at Inbound shared the same post and how awesome that would be, right? That's potentially not going to happen unless something really fantastic gets tweeted. I would have assumed that Gary Vee would have been the guy who would have gotten that done. But think about it. If you have a lot of different people sharing the content that you are posting, that is really the best way to earn trust. That is the best way to get your content amplified. So doing that through friends or doing that through employees or influencers is a good start. Building up those relationships is a really good thing to do. And if you have employees, that's a really good baseline to get started with, having them share your content. So other ways that we can amplify our content include with paid. I could give an entire different talk on paid. I won't, but one of our product managers, Lars Osterberg, is giving one, I believe this week on different ways to use that. I'm sure there are others using paid. If you find a post that performs really well without paid, doubling down on it with paid is really a good way to go in this day and age. Another good thing to do is to participate in co marketing. So co marketing. Co marketing is. I'll go talk about that and we'll come back to here for a second. Co marketing is one of the secret hidden treasures of amplifying your content, right? What co marketing is is finding a partner that is a content partner that does something similar to what your business does. Does. Has maybe sort of a similar audience with a little bit of overlap, but also does something that you can't do. So what co marketing is is you work together to create an offer and then you both promote it separately to your audiences and trade offers. So you can do that by creating ebooks and swapping them. You can do that by actually creating content together. You can also do that by simply trading tweets. We started to do that recently, found a lot of success with just finding other tweets or other companies where we say, hey, we'll tweet one of your posts. If you tweet one of ours and you have met all these friends, now a lot of people are looking for simple amplifications. So being able to share those audiences is a really helpful thing. Pro tip in co marketing, again, finding an audience that is relatively similar to yours but can offer a new perspective is a good way to start amplifying your content. So next we want to build on success with more success. How do we repurpose content? There are a couple of different ways. One is to update and republish offers. So I mentioned in the beginning that we found we did an experiment where 76% of our blog posts were generating the vast majority of our views. I would suggest taking a look at your blog posts and seeing what are generating your views, what are generating your leads as well. And it's okay to republish that content. So what we'll do is we'll create a list of those blog posts and then every couple of months we might take one and update it with a couple of new content or a couple of new tips. For example, if we're talking about Snapchat and that's one of our best performing posts, and Snapchat changes, we might republish the same blog post if it's already performing well and keep people coming to it. Some stuff would need to be updated more than others, but it's a good sense of how to actually reuse content in a really meaningful way. As a note, if you do reuse it, one of the things you might want to do is put an editor's note that says that something's been republished and updated. So other things that we can do are create new copy and images for the same content. If you already have an offer and it's performing well, go ahead and do it again. We will relaunch stuff periodically and we'll create new images and test different different images against each other. Another really good way to test images if you have the budget is to do this with paid. But sometimes we'll just create new images, see how they perform compared to previous iterations of that same product launch. And that's a really refreshing way for people to actually get that content. Another good way is to syndicate on additional assets if you have other blogs that you can contribute to. Syndication is a powerful tool as well. And creating different mediums. So if you are able to move into an audio medium or a video medium, we'll talk a little bit about that in a moment. Is another good way to repurpose your content. So some of the favorite ways that I have to repurpose are video. Video's becoming huge. And that's something else that I could give an entirely different talk on. If you have the bandwidth to edit a video, that's a really good skill to have. If you don't. Live video is another really good option. We found with live video that it actually works really well if it's just casual. If you just have people sitting and talking. If you have people who are really connecting, stand away from the mic. Connecting with an audience, but about a topic that they're really going to enjoy. Buffer does a really good job of this. If you have ever had a chance to take a look at what they do, and the amount of preparation that's required to sit down and talk to an audience and answer questions and create a real new piece of content out of that is so small compared to the reward that you get from it. Snapchat is a controversial tool, but it's another way, if you have an audience on Snapchat, that you could repurpose your content into a visual medium. And podcasts are also coming back. So if you have the ability to repurpose as a podcast, that's another good option to try. And again, that's one of those things where you can sit and talk and if you have someone who's good at talking, that is a thing that you are able to do in minimal amounts of time and get a really big result out of. SlideShare is another thing that's actually a little bit more prep. Sometimes we find that if you have a PowerPoint presentation, you can actually upload it to SlideShare and that's an additional piece of content that you have to share out. Stats pages are a quick trick that we have. If you're amassing a lot of stats or if you're doing research, just putting them on a page and being able to share that page is a great way to reuse stats without having to do too much extra warning. This is really important and this is something that we've actually come to learn a lot recently. Just because you repurpose content does not mean you should stick the same thing on a different network and hope it works. Repurposing content really needs to be about finding the network that you are posting on and making it feel really unique to that network. So if you are putting something on Facebook Live, really talking to the audience and talking to them in a way that they'll appreciate if you are moving it to LinkedIn and it hasn't previously been wording it in a way that's going to make sense for your LinkedIn audience, and it's probably different across networks, but making it feel really unique to that network and possibly changing a little bit about what you're saying or how you're saying it is really important. Also, think about what you have going on in your office. Another really good way to get content is to think about who's there and what they're doing. Do you have a guest that's coming in that could be on a good Facebook Live panel? Do you have a client that's coming in that has a really interesting story to tell? Do you have an event that's going on in your office that you can stream? All of these things are also really good, quick wins for creating content. I also highly suggest, if you are, for example, live streaming content, downloading that and cutting it up to be used for edited video later is another really good way to use that content again and again. So generating ROI from your content for many of us is really important. To generate leads from posts, one thing that you can do is put a tailored call to action on the post itself. What we found works here is if you have a blog post, a lot of those blog posts that we found that were generating views, what we did was we put a call to action that was not at the bottom of the post, but a sort of line in the middle where we talk about, hey, this is how you might schedule social media. Hey, by the way, do you want a template? You can get that here. So putting tailored calls to action in the middle of your posts and then posting those posts to social is another good way to get that landing page there, to get that blog page there, to actually get more out of the posts that we are putting on social and creating offers based on posts. For example, if you notice that one of your posts is doing really, really well and you think there's more meat to it, that's a really good indicator that if you want to generate leads, maybe you should create further content about that particular topic. So creating content that does more, right, because we've talked about finding ourselves more time, we've talked about doing more with the content. So how do we create content that does more? There are a couple of really important things that we want to keep in mind there. We want to create content that's going to leave us time. So we want to create good content. I feel really strongly about saying this, even though it's so obvious, but we don't want to just create content that is for the sake of content. We want to create content that's actually going to be really helpful to people. Think about the content that you're creating and think, do I want to read it? Would I actually share this? If so, it's probably worth sharing. Make it shareable. So shareable content is something that I think people don't necessarily think think about as much, but probably should spend more time on. People Share for a couple of specific reasons, right? They share because they're entertained by something. They share because it's an expression of who they are. They share because they want people to know something about them. So as you're creating content, one of the best ways to get started on amplification, to get started on those downloads, is to make it shareable. And thinking about that from the outset and thinking about how to create content that people are going to find is expressive of who they are and how it's going to help show something about their knowledge or their causes is a really good way to start that process. Early addition to making it shareable, we want to optimize it per network. We talked about that a little bit and we want to find the right audience. If you are in some of the networks, like Facebook or LinkedIn for example, and you do have a content piece that is more specific, you can target it to a specific group. That is a really good way to start getting the content in front of the right people and testing with other people's content. We talked about co marketing is another good way to test the water to see how well people are interacting. You can share somebody else's article on Facebook, go and see how the interactions are going on Facebook. And if that's working really well, perhaps it's a piece of content that you would want to consider creating something similar to for yourself. Write correctly using correct grammar. Unless you're deliberately using incorrect grammar. By that I mean if you're trying to make a point, if you're trying to make a joke, that's potentially acceptable. But actually using correct grammar is a good way for people to respect what you're saying. A thing that I think is really important for people to keep in mind too is as we're creating this good content that's going to be shareable, that's going to do more for us. We want to do the best we can to make it evergreen, which means not necessarily referencing a whole lot of specific dates or details that we can't repurpose or re edit out later. If we create content that is a template or that's an explainer, or that really is relatively timeless, we can reuse it later. And that's really important as we're building out that content schedule to have content that we can use again. So now we have created the content, how do we make it even better? There are a couple things that I think each content should be. One is relatable to scalable, three testable, and four is better. I'm going to say that again because I think it's important these days. You may have noticed or Gary Vee may have said that we don't want to be overwhelmed with bad content. You think about why things like Twitter have gone under. It's because people like us have ruined it by just publishing headlines and not actually relatable content. This may sound slightly in conflict with the first thing I said about reusing content, but I think there's a way to reuse that content in a way that you're going to present it to people in a way that'll be helpful. Something else that I thought was interesting too is if you look at the top people on Twitter, they're all people. And I think that's really important in the way that Twitter is evolving too. As we're thinking about the people that do well, these people promote. These people actually share interesting things, but they talk to people like they're humans. They don't just share robotic content. Fun fact, the number 10 user, the first brand that is highly popular on Twitter is number 10, and that's YouTube. Back to the whole video thing. Why video is popular. As you're creating this new content, as you're creating what you have room now to create, try experimenting with making it relatable. Making it scalable is also super important. There's a lot of power in sitting down and writing your own post, but if there's a way to outsource it to other members of your team, or if there's a way to plan a campaign where you can leverage other people, creating a scalable piece of content is going to take you a long way at the end and testable as well. I think we really need to be keeping an eye on things that we want to know about. So if you are publishing content, I would suggest attaching campaigns to it so that you can compare campaign to campaign. We've recently started putting times in our publishing slots, so I will tag a campaign with the time that I've actually published it and that way I can measure against when it's been published and when people are converting on it to see approximately how long the tail Facebook is. Setting things up in a way that's actually going to be testable is really helpful as you're learning about your content going forward and making it better. I can't say that enough. Would you want to read it? Would you want to share it? If not, it's really not worth spending your time on and I strongly believe that. So going back to our morning exercise right we talked to each other. We met something, we learned something. Try something human, but use what you've learned. Make it really human. Make it digestible in a way that people are going to get excited about. And if all else fails, using animal pictures is a really good way to get people's attention and keep it right. That's all I have. Thank you very much, guys.