One Twelfth’s Four Social Media Insights for the Week

September 24, 2014FACEBOOK, SOCIAL MEDIA, TWITTER

Celebrate good times because it’s One Twelfth’s social media insights for the week!

 

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At One Twelfth, we run several social media accounts for brands that are still considered small businesses. Since they’re not large, universally-known companies, it’s up to us to get them established and as influential and well-known as the big brands.

 

From the numerous experiments we run to see what works and what doesn’t, we come across interesting insights that allow us to delve a little deeper in the mysterious world of social media. Here are the four we found this week:

 

1. Stay close to home

 

If you’re building your brand, why would you talk about anything else other than your own brand? The posts might not be popular and receiving attention at first, because you’re just starting out, but you still want to establish an identity that showcases who you are and what you do.

 

With an engineering scholarship account we run, we obviously need content in between the time between the award ceremony and the next time to register, and the time it takes to deliberate and find a winner. In that time, we’ll usually post articles about engineering or students and how they can be engineers.

 

But no posts do better than those either focused on the engineering company itself or details about the scholarship. With the award ceremony taking place this week, however, we were able to focus our posts back on the account itself. As expected, we got some of our best reach and engagement numbers, better than just about every other engineering-focused post we’ve made.

 

2. Organic reach will only get you so far

 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: You have to spend money to make it. On social media, you are competing with tens of millions of people for attention. When you’re all yelling at the same time for potential customers to look in your direction, it can be difficult to make your voice more unique and more prominent than others.

 

How do you make your voice louder? With a megaphone of course. On Facebook, a megaphone would be equivalent to an ad that will pop up on the timelines of users that have been talking about the product or service you offer. If you’re adamant about making yourself noticed on social media (I’m looking at you medium-to-small-sized businesses), you will have to invest some money into creating a Facebook ad to give yourself a leg up over your competition.

 

With one of the accounts we run, the ads expired and the page is now solely reliant on organic reach. The page that used to easily surpass a couple hundred reaches with paid ads now struggles to eclipse the hundred mark. The voice of the copy and the images haven’t changed, it’s just that less people are now seeing it, which greatly hurts our potential to attract new followers.

 

3. Use the right words when having a sale

 

Having a sale is a great way of not only attracting new followers and potential buyers, but of showing some appreciation to your loyal following, as well. It’s kind of like you’re saying, “Hey, thanks for buying our products when they’re full-priced. As a token of our appreciation, here’s a discount.” Even if you might not be making as much as you would selling it full-priced, you’re still generating more attention than you usually would.

 

However, there is an art to having a sale on social media. Using the right images and capitalizing the right words will always work, but an enormous part of attracting attention is to use the right words.

 

This article by Shopify gives some great advice on what words to use. There are specific words that have the effect of evoking an emotion or attracting attention from your audience. Words such as ‘FREE’ or ‘NEW’ make you think of things that you want and need, even though you might not even need the product or service. Just the simple thought of receiving something free makes you think you got a bargain, while ‘NEW’ makes you feel like you’re ahead of the curb and modern.

 

Take a look at this example:

 

“When Ariely offered buyers a choice between a Lindt ‘Lindor Truffle’ for 15 cents — about half of its usual cost — and a Hershey Kiss for 1 penny, 73% chose the Lindt because of its apparent value. But when the price of both items was lowered by just one cent to 14 cents and free respectively, 69% of shoppers took the free Hershey Kiss.”

 

It took one cent for users to completely change their minds about what they want. It took one of those coins you see on the ground and don’t even bother to pick up for users to say they wanted something different.

 

Next time you write copy, remember that every single word counts.

 

4. Stay on top of Twitter

 

When it comes to building your brand on social media, there are few better platforms to be personal and intimate with your audience than on Twitter.

 

Unlike Facebook which will only provide you with so much information, with much of that info random and disorganized, Twitter has the tools that allow you to key in on your audience. Even better is that it allows to connect with your current audience, while also allowing you to connect with potentially new followers, on account of what keywords they’re using.

 

Say I run an account that sells chocolate. All I would need to do to see who’s talking about chocolate is to input it into the search bar of twitter. Once I do so, an entire untapped audience is there for me to engage with.

 

There’s also a constant stream of information that you can’t find anywhere else. Unlike a platform like Facebook where you can only get so much information at a time, follow the right people on Twitter, however, and you’ll find yourself opening doors to rooms you never knew existed.

 

Also, staying on top of Twitter is important when it comes to trending hashtags. These are a great way of including yourself and promoting your company, as many other Twitter users are also participating in making that specific hashtag a trending topic.

 

For example, for an engineering account we run, I happened to notice the trending, promoted hashtag ‘#BeAnEngineer. Naturally, I took advantage. The results were some of the best I’ve received on the website, including highs in retweets and favorites.

 

It didn’t take too much thought, since the original idea was already created. All I had to do was add my own spin. We also did the same for a humor website we run, as well.

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