Are You Wielding Your Social Media and Blog Like These Fortune 500 Companies?

LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are the most utilized social networks by Fortune 500 companies, according to recent research from UMASS Dartmouth’s Center for Marketing Research.

The report was part of an annual analysis of the digital efforts of companies on the Fortune 500 list. The researchers examined the social media presences of each firm in 2018 to determine whether it has an active account on various networks. They also looked at whether each company on the list is maintaining a public-facing corporate blog.

Some 98% of Fortune 500 companies have an active account on LinkedIn, the same share as in 2017, the analysis found.

The platform is used most widely because it both helps firms connect with customers/potential customers and because it can be used as a powerful tool for hiring. As the researchers note: “LinkedIn remains the most popular platform [with Fortune 500 companies]. Businesses have set up shop on the site to tell their story, network, stimulate word of mouth, and recruit.”

Twitter is the second most used social network by Fortune 500 brands (91% use; up from 88% in 2017). It is followed by Facebook (89%; up from 85% in 2017), YouTube (77% use), Instagram (63%), and Pinterest (32%).

Instagram adoption by Fortune 500 companies has been rising the most quickly among the social networks examined. The platform has experienced significant increases in its adoption rate every year since 2013, the analysis found.

As the researchers note: “With its constant innovations, Instagram proves to be an important marketing tool for [Fortune 500] companies. The steady increase in usage over the past five years (up 10% from last year), makes it a platform to watch going forward.”

As for corporate blogs, their use by Fortune 500 firms has also been steadily rising. Some 53% of the companies examined now have a corporate blog, up from 42% in 2017 and 36% in 2016.

The researchers theorize that the use of blogs may be increasing in part because they give firms full ownership of content and establish direct connections with audiences.

As the report states: “[Regularly publishing blog posts] creates long-term relationships between businesses and their customers. In addition, as some of the larger platforms struggle with terms and conditions of use, blogs are ‘owned’ by their corporation. No limit can be imposed on length or type of post. No post can be removed or censured. Blogs are unique and may be gaining popularity because of it.”

Ultimately, what emerges from the research is that Fortune 500 companies are bullish about digital marketing: More firms are utilizing more social networks and the use of blogs is quickly growing as well. If the trend holds, this year should bring an even higher level of online engagement by big firms.

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Are You Wielding Your Social Media and Blog Like These Fortune 500 Companies? posted first on http://getfblikeblog.blogspot.com

The New Facebook Is Coming: What You Need to Know About F8

Armies of developers assaulted the seven kingdoms of Facebook this week as Mark Zuckerberg’s team hosted 2019’s F8—a conference specifically for Facebook developers. While gorging on feasts and drink, the throng heard tell of something amazing, something impossible, something … different.

Zuckerberg shared that, in the history of Facebook, there have been four major redesigns and developments. 2019 will mark the 5th, and is therefore referred to as FB5.

Yet this might be the most pivotal development of all.

FB5 marks a radical shift in how Facebook looks and operates, both on desktop and mobile. Which means that you’re probably freaking out just a little bit right now.

What’s going to be different? How will my spend on the Facebook platform change after today?

More importantly, how will these changes impact businesses and organizations depending on Facebook for reaching their audiences?

We’re going to explore all the announced changes and developments right here! And don’t worry, just because the new Facebook is coming, that doesn’t mean the walkers will get you. We’ve got your back.

We're live from F8! Tune in to watch the keynote!

We're live from F8! Tune in to watch the keynote!

Posted by Facebook on Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Watch Facebook’s opening keynote for all the news.

Facebook’s New Look

On an aesthetic level, Facebook is going through a re-design that gives it a clean, contemporary look. Given that it’s been many years since any major design change was implemented, this news is both refreshing and jarring to long-time users.

Facebook’s new icon and profile image speaks volumes about the platform’s direction. The changes are subtle yet important. A shift in font and in hue signify an understanding of the necessity of change alongside the need for continuity.

Carried through throughout the desktop and mobile apps, we see a cleaner, brighter Facebook that is, at the same time, simpler. Here’s a shot of Mark Zuckerberg showing off the new design from the stage:

From a design perspective, this direction will have a positive impact on those who spend a lot of time on the platform—something that Facebook has been strongly considering in many ways for the past year.

This predominantly white design also lends itself perfectly to a dark mode that iOS users will appreciate.

Here’s a quick video from Facebook showing off the new design:

Here's a closer look at FB5, including Dark Mode for web, coming soon. pic.twitter.com/Z55iUOdekr

— Facebook (@facebook) April 30, 2019

Facebook’s New Focus

More important to both users and businesses of the platform, though, is the change in News Feed. Because of Facebook’s renewed focus on community and private interactions, we can expect to see a radical change in how the consumption of content and information flows through Facebook going forward.

As Stephanie Liu, a social media strategist who was attending F8 put it, “The idea here is that our friends and family are the core of our social lives and communities is what gives us a sense of purpose and helps us grow in ways that we want.”

Facebook Groups will now be front and center—literally. Access to Groups will be prioritized and content from your Groups will also be surfaced more.

Facebook’s renewed emphasis on Groups.

Now, what the images and videos and announcements have not said is that the News Feed is going away. In fact, a close look at some of the shared imagery shows that there’s still a Home icon and that stream is showing the kinds of posts and status updates we’re used to seeing and creating and sharing.

But is this is the beginning of the end? Only time will tell.

According to Facebook, “People will start seeing some of these updates in the Facebook app right away, and the new desktop site will come in the next few months.”

So some of you may already be seeing the new Facebook app.

Functionally, most of the changes are, not surprisingly, coming to Groups:

• New Groups Tab. This has been overhauled to make finding new groups that you might be interested in even easier. And it’s also going to include a feed just for groups. This feed would let you easily see recent activity within the groups you’re a member of (and could potentially replace the News Feed as the default stream).
• Easier Group Participation. In addition to seeing more group activity within your feed, you’ll also see more connections among groups and other areas and aspects of Facebook that you’re using, such as Marketplace or Facebook Watch.
• Community-Specific Features. There will be new features to help specific kinds of communities better serve their members, such as improved Chat for Gaming Groups, and better interaction during Facebook Lives for buying and selling.

Facebook for Conversation

Ultimately, Mark Zuckerberg wants us to feel safe and secure while using Facebook and, more importantly, while having private conversations. That’s why there’s also a tremendous effort being put into the Messenger platform.

First, the new Messenger is going to be much faster, which will make using it around the world and in low-bandwidth areas even easier.

Second, the new Messenger is going to include end-to-end encryption which means that hackers, the government, and even Facebook itself cannot monitor your private conversations.

Third, the new Messenger is going to include a Friends tab that will help with the interoperability that Zuckerberg promised months ago: the ability to see updates and messages from your friends on other platforms like Instagram or WhatsApp!

“What’s really nice from a business perspective is that you can now reach out to your customers through Messenger across multiple platforms so it makes it a lot easier to scale and service and grow your business.” Stephanie Liu

Finally, Facebook is releasing a stand-alone Desktop app for Messenger to make it easier than ever to participate in text chats as well as voice and video calls.

The New Facebook Is Coming

If you’ve been watching Game of Thrones, you know that the Starks of Winterfell have a family motto: “Winter is coming.” That refers not to the season so much as the cold, dark, plight that comes with dramatic change.

Should you be as concerned about the new Facebook as the seven kingdoms were for the walkers beyond the Wall?

We don’t think so. At least … not yet.

But inevitably, change is coming and the strategies and tactics we used for social media success yesterday will not be as effective tomorrow.

What’s clear today is that Facebook is all about communities, which means you and I should be all about communities. Businesses and organizations today should be using Facebook Groups to foster audiences and build communities. You and your employees can be using existing Facebook Groups to create connections and foster relationships.

The writing is on the wall, so to speak. Make sure your business is prepared.

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The New Facebook Is Coming: What You Need to Know About F8 posted first on http://getfblikeblog.blogspot.com

5 Facebook Ad Campaign Changes That Improve Your Results and Overcome Ad Fatigue

Every Facebook ad campaign you run will eventually encounter ad fatigue issues. It doesn’t matter who you are or how much you spend on Facebook ads, the algorithm works the same for everyone. (Ad fatigue is when your audience sees the same ads again and again, and becomes less responsive to them.)

Instead of pausing and stopping your ad campaigns, discover what Facebook ad campaign changes you can implement to improve their performance.

How to Identify Ad Fatigue

You can identify ad fatigue by analyzing the change in your ad frequency, the change in your results, and the cost per result.

Your frequency will typically be higher than 3, and your results will have decreased over the last 7 days, therefore increasing your cost per result. You’ll also find your CPM increases, and your quality score and conversion score are below average. (You may want to get a more detailed look.)

Once you’ve identified the campaigns and ads negatively affected by ad fatigue, you can now implement one of the following Facebook ad campaign changes.

1. Change Your Facebook Ad Creative

The first of the Facebook ad campaign changes involves updating your ad creative. This is one of the two different ad changes you can make, but more on the second one later in this article.

Your creative is the ad format including the image or video at the heart of your ad.  This is what grabs your audience members’ attention in the Newsfeed, and stops their scrolling.

For example, if you are using a single image format, you can create a new ad with the carousel format or one using the video format and vice versa. By updating the images or videos in your ad, you are presenting something new to your audiences.

When creating your new ad, navigate to your existing ad and duplicate it using the Duplication feature. Once your new ad is in draft, make the change to your ad format or image or video by either selecting one from your library or uploading one from your computer.

2. Change Your Facebook Ad Copy

The second of the Facebook ad campaign changes you can make is another ad change involving changing the copy of your ad. The copy of your ad is the text that appears above your creative.

A copy change is not about changing the offer you present in your ad. It is about changing the way you present your current offer. You could focus on a new product/service benefit or target a new customer pain point in your copy. The idea is to again show your target audiences something new in their Newsfeed.

To make this change, navigate to the ad level of your campaign that you’ve identified as decreasing in performance. Once at the ad level, select your current ad, and click on Duplicate. Duplicate the ad once then in the new draft ad, and make the relevant changes to your ad copy.

 

 

3. Change Your Targeting

The next campaign change you can make requires a refresh of your targeting. Here you are changing who you are showing your ads to, as opposed to the previous two changes where you are changing what you are showing your audiences.

The type of new audience you introduce to your campaign will depend on the temperature of audience you are already targeting. The three audience temperatures are: Cold, Warm, and Hot.

Cold audiences consist of Saved audiences featuring interests, as well as Lookalike audiences. Warm audiences include any Custom audiences such as video and page engagement. Hot audiences only feature website custom audiences. These are the highest quality audiences as they consist of people that have already taken a particular action on your website and are furthest along the buying process.

 

For example, if you are running a campaign that is targeting an interest audience which is “cold”, the audience change would involve targeting either a new interest audience or a Lookalike audience.

If you are targeting a warm audience such as a Video Custom audience, you could change your targeting to showing ads to a Page Engagement audience instead.

Finally, if you are targeting a Website Custom audience, changing an audience at this stage would involve creating a new Website Custom audience with a different audience duration.

The key here is to duplicate the ad set in the campaign and keep the ads at the ad level the same. First, navigate to the Ad Set level of your campaign and select your ad set. Then, click Duplicate and create one copy. Make the targeting change in the new ad set by creating the audience in the audience section or selecting an audience that you’ve previously created.

Finally, navigate to the ad level and use the post ID method to ensure you keep the same ad with the social proof. From the create ad section click on “Use Existing Post” and from the post selection matrix select “Ad Posts” and choose your previous ad.

 

4. Change Your Objective

The fourth campaign change is changing your objective. Here is where you switch the overall objective to reach a new segment of your existing target audience.

When you choose an objective, Facebook segments people in your audience based on how likely they are to complete the action you are optimizing for. For example, Traffic targets people who are most likely to click on link ads, Video views segments people who watch a lot of video on Facebook.

By switching objective you can improve your campaign results. For example, if you start testing an audience using the Traffic objective and it delivers positive results until you encounter ad fatigue issues, switching the objective to Conversions can deliver better results.

To change objective, navigate to the campaign level and use the Duplicate feature to create a copy of the campaign. From the objective dropdown, select your new objective. Next, keep the ad set targeting the same as well as the ads (by using the post ID method covered earlier).

 

5. Change Your Offer

The last of the Facebook ad campaign changes you can make is to present a new offer to your target audience. This change combines the ad creative change and copy change. If you aren’t getting any traction with your ads, present a new product or service to your audience.

To do this navigate to the ad level of your campaign and duplicate your ad, as described previously. Then add in the information about your new product or service in the copy, headline, URL and creative. Again, depending on what temperature of audience you are targeting, use the SBA copy method for warm audiences and the RTM Method for hot website audiences.

 

* * *

Don’t just stop your campaign when you see your results decrease, instead implement one of the Facebook ad campaign changes covered in this article which include: creative, copy, targeting, objective or offer changes.

This refreshes what your audiences see or introduces new audiences to existing ads thereby reducing the impact of ad fatigue and boosting your results.

5 Facebook Ad Campaign Changes That Improve Your Results and Overcome Ad Fatigue posted first on http://getfblikeblog.blogspot.com

Why Isn’t Anyone Talking About Live Video Anymore? The Current State of Live

10 Useful (and Fun!) Ways to Use Instagram Stickers

Over 500 million people use their Instagram stickers for brands and personal accounts every single day. And it makes sense why. There are endless ways to use them. (Plus, they’re just so darn fun!)

Instagram stickers open up a whole new world of digital engagement and recognition for brands—regardless of industry or niche. And you can choose from lots of different sticker types, such as:

• Hashtag stickers
• Poll stickers
• Question stickers
• Location stickers
• Mention stickers
• Music stickers
• Countdown stickers
• GIFs
• Emoji sliders
• Shoppable tags

In this post, we’ve created a handy list of ways you can use Instagram stickers. But before we dive headfirst into those tips, however, let’s review why Instagram stickers are so great in the first place.

Benefits of Using Instagram Stickers

Engagement

Customers love interacting with your content. Stickers, such as for polls and questions, make talking with your audience easier. Or, at the very least, include them in the conversation. (If you’re stuck on ideas, grab some content inspiration.)

Brand Development

Stickers give brands more opportunities to show off their personalities. Instagram stickers let you share things like music and GIFs that uniquely represent your brand voice. Using them will help make your Instagram stand out among the competition and continue to hone recognition from viewers.

Discoverability

Location, hashtags, and mention stickers make getting found in Stories shared by other accounts easier—whether by an influencer adding your post to a Story or the location of an upcoming live event. The more strategic stickers you add to your post, the greater chance your Story will be seen by new and relevant audiences.

Check out these ways that you can use Instagram stickers for brands to reap those (and many other) benefits.

10 Ideas for Using Instagram Stickers

1. Share context

A picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes you need to add context clues. A random photo of a crowd standing outside your store doesn’t mean anything on its own. Add an event hashtag sticker on top, though, and suddenly your viewers can access all the photos taken at your special occasion.  

2. Set reminders

Of the many Instagram stickers for brands and personal accounts we’ve seen, the set reminders tool is the most practical. Once you put a Countdown Sticker on your Story, viewers can add the event to their calendar and turn on reminder notifications. It’s a great tool for helping your fans keep up with all your awesome events and special offers.

3. Schedule live streams

Use the Countdown Sticker to notify viewers when you’ll be going Live. One of the best ways to get new eyeballs on your streams is by promoting the heck out of the event ahead of time. Because Instagram Stories go hand in hand with Instagram Lives, it only makes sense that you should use them together.

4. Caption live replays and videos

Stories need context (as we’ve already explained). So when you share a replay of a live stream (or even just a regular video) to your account, you can use Instagram Stickers. Hashtag and mention stickers help explain who and what your video is about. And Question or Poll stickers can work as fantastic survey tools for your main topic.

5. Promote time-sensitive events.  

Events like one-day-only sales or early bird specials greatly benefit from the addition of Instagram Stickers for brands. In addition to using the countdown timer, brands can also add funny reaction GIFs or emoji sliders to add excitement or call attention to the time crunch.

6. Answer FAQs

Give customers a chance to get their most pressing questions answered with help from Instagram stickers for brands. The question sticker allows for short-form answer responses, so they’ll have a chance to add details if they like. You can then use the mention sticker when you share their questions with the corresponding answer in your story later.  

7. Set the mood

There’s no better way to convey a feeling than to use with the right music. (Just ask anyone who has ever proclaimed their love for someone while holding a boombox over their head.) Use the music sticker on your Story to create the vibe. Instagram helps you out with this by offering a music search by category, listing songs for happy, upbeat, and inspirational music, among others.

8. Get direct feedback

Sometimes, businesses have questions for their audience that they can’t ask anywhere else. Which brings us to our other favorite use for questions stickers. Add these to your story to learn things like audience preferences, opinions, and special requests. Everyone loves having their opinions heard, so this Instagram sticker for brands is sure to be a hit with your audience.

9. Promote CTAs

Instagram stickers for brands are about more than just having fun. They can also be a great tool for driving traffic to certain landing pages, boosting engagement with other social posts, and much, much more. For example, you can help viewers find and submit to your contest using the hashtag sticker.

10. Feature new products  

Shoppable tags are a new Instagram story sticker for brands that everyone can get excited about. Tag the products featured in your story to send users to your online store. You can even use the rest of your story to share other product details and demos when selling products on Instagram.

If you want to make some incredibly engaging and memorable Instagram stories, you’ve got to use Instagram stickers for brands. These 10 creative uses for Instagram story stickers are just the tip of the iceberg.

* * *

Want to track the ROI of your Instagram Stories? Use Agorapulse’s reports and see if all those stickers are paying off!

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10 Useful (and Fun!) Ways to Use Instagram Stickers posted first on http://getfblikeblog.blogspot.com

Should Your Agency Use Emojis in Social Media? Really?

“Charlotte, we’re a Fortune 500 institution,” the CEO of a large US corporation said. “Our followers don’t want to play childish emoji games!” As director of Contentworks Agency, I had just suggested the brand use more emojis on Twitter to improve its engagement and brand perception.

That incredulous reaction from brands is not uncommon. So, should your agency use emojis in social media? Let’s first look at some emoji stats.

Emojis by the Numbers

• Emojis were developed in the late 1990s by Japanese communications firm NTT DoCoMo.
• In total there are 3,019 emojis in the Unicode Standard as of March 2019.
• 5 billion emojis are sent daily on Facebook Messenger.
• World Emoji Day is July 17.
• 92% of Internet users have used emojis.
• 25-29-year olds use the most emojis.

These are the top five most popular emojis in 2019. (Nice to see that happiness and love outweigh angry and sad in the social media space!)

Now, let’s dig into why I suggested to the CEO that his brand use emojis.

5 Reasons Your Agency Should Use Emojis in Social Media Marketing

1. Emojis are universal

The great thing about social media marketing is that it’s universal. You can reach potential clients all around the world with just one tweet. But what about the language barrier?

Emojis are completely universal as their meanings are understood in the same way in each country. For marketers, this is a good thing. You save on translation costs, print, designs, and the need to localize the meaning for each region.

Take this emoji billboard ad from McDonald’s as an example. Regardless of language, we all understand the meaning: Having a bad day? Go to McDonald’s and get happy again. Very smart use of emojis!

Similarly, as a roadside ad, this emoji storytelling method is easy to grasp and understand:

Takeways:

• Keep it simple; McDonald’s used a very simple and easy to understand sequence.
• Use familiar emojis that your global audience will relate to.
• Display your emojis on a clean background to make them easier to read.

Did You Know …

If you hashtag an emoji on Insta, it will become a live link to see all other Instagram posts that have hashtagged that emoji.

2. Emojis engage fans

There’s a good reason why social media marketers use emojis. (Aside from the fact that we like emojis and it’s fun to use them.)

The use of emojis increases engagement by a whopping 48% on Instagram. Posts that use emojis on Instagram have an interaction rate of 2.21% and posts without emojis have 1.77%.

In fact, Wordstream founder Larry Kim, conducted an experiment to analyze the impact of emojis on engagement. Tweets with emojis received 25.4% more engagement than those without as you can see below:

And influencers are using emojis to increase engagement too. A recent study analyzed 31 million tweets and half a million Facebook posts and found that emoticons were a common factor among all the influential social accounts.

Not all users experience an increased engagement rate, and the rate may depend on the social media channel. For example, the Social Media Lab ran an experiment on Twitter emojis that had very different results from the Lab experiment on Facebook emojis.

My view on this is that engagement results depend on the brand, subject, and emojis used. For example, asking users to vote using emojis or emoticons rather than a comment or share is usually successful as it requires far less user effort.

Here’s one we made earlier:

Takeaways:

• Run split tests on your posts with and without emojis to test the results. As an agency, you can also use this to show your clients what works and what doesn’t.
• Increase email engagement with emojis. 56% of businesses saw an increase in email open rate when they used an emoji in the subject. Remember that not all emojis show up properly on different mobile devices. Be sure to test before you go live.
• Modernize the way users engage with content by employing emoji plugins like emojics.

3. Emojis make innovative marketing campaigns

Working in digital marketing today requires continuous innovation and creativity. It also demands that agencies stay focused on user trends.

Remember back in 2014 when Taco Bell (or rather, Taco Bell’s marketing agency) decided to lobby Unicode Consortium for a taco emoji to be made available for Android and iOS? This led to a change.org campaign with thirty-three thousand online signatures and the creation of the taco emoji that sits on our emoji dashboard today. True story.

More recently, marketing agencies have been incorporating emoji tactics into leading brand campaigns.

For example, Disney used emojis to promote “The Force Awakens” and to introduce the BB8 droid:

The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) used emojis to create awareness about animals in danger of extinction, WWF created 17 emojis of endangered animals and encouraged users to donate 10p every time they retweeted one. WWF’s #EndangeredEmoji Twitter campaign received around 559,000 mentions and more than 59,000 signups in the first three months since it was released. (Watch its short emoji video here.)

When the Beatles catalog launched on Spotify, Spotify developed fun ways for followers to celebrate the Beatles with emojis. This neat campaign made #BeatlesOnSpotify four times more popular than #Beatles during the launch and gave Spotify an 83% share of the conversation!

Did You Know …

Agencies need to use emojis on a case by case basis. Though most millennials prefer to express emotion using emojis, only 37% of people over 65 feel this way.

4. Emojis work with human psychology

I’m not a psychologist, but I am interested in the best ways brands can communicate on social media. And for that, we need to understand basic psychology. In a 2017 study published in the journal Trends on Cognitive sciences, researchers found that the use of emojis provides the same satisfaction as actually interacting with another person. Similarly, studies show that 72% of 18-25-year-olds preferred using emojis to convey their feelings. This makes the use of emojis highly valuable in gaging brand or product sentiment.

And social media users respond positively to emojis.

Takeaways:

• Don’t be afraid to use emojis in Messenger or comments when responding to fans.
• Social media users are often afraid to comment on sensitive topics as their friends will be able to see them. Use emoji votes to gauge true opinions.
• Keep emoji usage friendly to foster positive brand association.

5. Lose the emoji snobbery

Just like our Fortune 500 client, many agencies and brands believe that emojis are only for trendy fashion companies and not serious finance brands. Or perhaps even that they are too cheap for their own brand. That simply isn’t true. Social media users are emoji users. Once we understand that, we understand that if your brand is too exclusive for emojis, it’s too exclusive for most Internet users. And this applies across various sectors. Look at cool finance brand Revolut and the way it interacts with fans using emojis:

And LOL at the company’s in-app push notifications:

Takeaways:

• Use fun emojis to communicate with your clients, like a facepalm for a wrong password.
• Research your closest competitors and check out their social media engagement using emojis.
• Never dismiss an industry as not being right for emojis. Government, finance, and even legal sectors successfully use them.

Cool Tools

Want to check out a few cool emoji tools for your agency? Here are my faves:

Emojipedia: You’ve heard of Wikipedia but did you know there’s also Emojipedia? Emojipedia contains info on every single emoji and how it related to world events, objects, places, and celebrations. A great bookmark for social media managers!

Emoji Tracker: Want to feel like you’re in the Matrix but also accomplish something productive? Check out Emoji Tracker. This incredible real-time stats site monitors the popularity and usage of emojis on Twitter.

Apple Animoji: If you have an iPhone X with facial recognition, you can try animated emojis for messenger and video. You can even create video with animoji and post it on your Facebook page or stories.

* * *
Dr. Owen Churches, a post-doctoral fellow at the school of psychology at Flinders University explains:  “Before 1982 there would be no reason that ‘:-)’ would activate face sensitive areas of the cortex but now it does because we’ve learned that this represents a face. This is an entirely culturally-created neural response. It’s really quite amazing.”

By using emojis in our proactive and reactive marketing campaigns, we are hitting the right buttons with social media fans.

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Should Your Agency Use Emojis in Social Media? Really? posted first on http://getfblikeblog.blogspot.com

7 Great Reasons to Get Really Excited About Bulk Publishing

Does the mere thought of scheduling multiple social posts at once make your heart race or your palms sweat? You might have an unwarranted fear of bulk publishing on social media. For fans of task batching, scheduling a month or two at a time is a dream come true. But for social media managers who aren’t yet on board with bulk publishing, it’s easy to dream up worst-case scenarios.

Let’s look at why bulk publishing on social media is more satisfying than scary with Agorapulse.

1. Your workflow will get ridiculously simple

As an experienced social media manager, you already have your workflow down. From crafting campaigns and creating on-brand content to sharing tweets and monitoring engagement, you’ve made a plan and stuck to it. Wouldn’t a new scheduling system require extra steps to complete and more time to master?

If you’re already familiar with Agorapulse’s publishing process, you’ll find that the bulk interface looks almost identical. That means adding bulk scheduling to your workflow is a breeze.

Importing social posts from a spreadsheet might add an extra step to your process, but you’ll save tons of time in the long run. Our guide to bulk uploading will get you up to speed quickly. Once you have the hang of bulk publishing, you can queue up to 100 tweets in a single upload.

To make scheduling even easier, try bulk publishing via an RSS feed. Just type the URL, and the Agorapulse bulk publisher will input post titles and links for you, saving you even more time.

2. You can maintain control over complex social campaigns

Adding dozens of evergreen content to your social media queue might not sound too scary. After all, these posts are relevant in any season, and slotting them into available spots doesn’t require a ton of precision. But can bulk uploads on Agorapulse work for campaigns that require specific sequences and exact timing?

While adding posts to a queue is the quickest way to bulk publish, you can also use more granular scheduling. Just add columns for times and dates to your CSV file, and you can avoid having to input a schedule for each post.

With this process, you’ll get the best of both worlds: the convenience of bulk publishing and the precision of your campaign calendar. You’ll also ensure that your campaign goes off without a hitch, from launch to completion.

3. You can modify the look of your content before it goes live

Whether you’re managing social media for your company or for a handful of clients, you strive to create an on-brand look and feel on each platform. Images that look off or copy that doesn’t resonate can fail in a big way. Won’t bulk publishing take away some of the control that you have over how your social content appears?

Even when bulk publishing, you’ll have a chance to review and modify each post before adding it to your schedule or queue. That means you’ll always know what to expect from your bulk uploads.

From giving your posts a quick once-over to proofreading captions to swapping links and images for Twitter Cards, you can make sure each tweet looks just right before it goes live.

4. You won’t have to worry about keeping hashtags consistent

Whether you use a set of branded hashtags for your tweets or your team has created a handful of hashtags for an upcoming campaign, you’ll want to keep these terms consistent with every scheduled post.

When you bulk publish, you don’t have to worry about your hashtags getting lost by the wayside. Consider adding hashtags to your CSV file before uploading it to Agorapulse. Or create hashtag sets in Agorapulse and select the right one to attach to each post before scheduling.

5. You won’t lose the ability to track your traffic

Correctly attributing traffic and conversions is essential when tracking the return on investment (ROI) for your social media plan. Is bulk publishing really going to let you monitor traffic effectively?

You can add UTM parameters to your links before bulk uploading your posts. If you’d rather tackle UTM tracking right in Agorapulse, simply switch on the toggle as you’re reviewing each post and add the right parameters. Now you’ll know exactly where each click or conversion originated.

6. You can stay engaged when using bulk publishing on social

Bulk publishing can be a great way to automate your social media strategy. But won’t this style of scheduling tempt you to set and forget your social media plan?

One of the biggest benefits of bulk publishing on social media is the time savings you’ll experience. After speeding up the scheduling process, you’ll have tons of extra time to grow your following. Try taking advantage of Agorapulse’s social listening features to monitor conversations about your brand, engage with your community, and follow key hashtags.

7. You can pause or edit your bulk posts to stay current

Having the power to schedule up to 100 tweets at once can do wonders for your workflow. If you plan right, using Agorapulse’s bulk publishing tool might even free up extra time for crafting better campaigns, engaging with your community, or developing more in-depth analyses. But aren’t there downsides to scheduling content too far in advance?

You don’t have to worry that breaking news or unexpected events will compromise your carefully laid plans. You can always pause queue categories, edit your posts, or reschedule your content in order to stay current. Be ready to respond to key happenings, and you’ll never appear out of touch or behind the times.

Ready to get over your fear and start scheduling? Begin bulk publishing on social media in two easy steps: select the Bulk Publishing button on your preferred platform, and schedule all your social content in Agorapulse within minutes.

7 Great Reasons to Get Really Excited About Bulk Publishing posted first on http://getfblikeblog.blogspot.com