How to Improve Social Media Marketing - Becky Schroeder
•
1 like•321 views
From ITC Agent Conference 2016... Are you on social media but struggling with how to use it? Do you know the basics of using Facebook and Twitter but know there's more to it? In this breakout, you'll learn how to take your social media marketing to the next level and leave with tips you can use to improve your social media presence.
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (20)
Viewers also liked
Viewers also liked (16)
Similar to How to Improve Social Media Marketing - Becky Schroeder
Similar to How to Improve Social Media Marketing - Becky Schroeder (20)
More from Insurance Technologies Corporation (ITC)
More from Insurance Technologies Corporation (ITC) (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
How to Improve Social Media Marketing - Becky Schroeder
- 1. How to Improve Social Media Marketing (Advanced) Becky Schroeder | @beckylschroeder Vice President of Marketing #AgentCon16
- 2. ITC Facebook • Likes 87% • Organic reach 152% • Organic impressions 17% • Engaged users 95% #AgentCon16
- 3. @InsTechCorp • Followers 46% • Retweets 128% • Impressions 79% • Replies 25% • Likes 1100% #AgentCon16
- 5. The #1 mistake you can make in marketing is to assume people are rational. ~ Seth Godin #AgentCon16
- 6. #AgentCon16
- 7. Social media isn’t about what you do. #AgentCon16 It’s about WHO you are. It’s about your WHY.
- 8. The strength of your social media is determined by the strength of your content. ~ Haroon Rashid #AgentCon16
- 9. #AgentCon16
- 10. #AgentCon16
- 11. Content Ideas • Holidays • Events • New blog posts • Other content • Archives #AgentCon16
- 12. Content Ideas • #TestimonialTuesday • Promotions • Use ITC’s marketing blog (GetITC.com/blog/marketing) • Curated content • Mix it up #AgentCon16
- 18. Image Resources • Royalty free • Thinkstock • Shutterstock • Public domain • Pixabay • Public Domain Archive #AgentCon16
- 19. Image Resources • Creative Commons (CC0 and CC 2.0) • Unsplash • Skitterphoto • Pablo by Buffer #AgentCon16
- 20. #AgentCon16
- 21. When do you post? #AgentCon16
- 25. #AgentCon16
- 26. The Right Tool • AgencyBuzz • Hootsuite • Buffer #AgentCon16
- 27. We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how WELL do we do it. ~ Erik Qualman #AgentCon16
- 34. Build an Audience • Use hashtags • #AgentCon16 • #ThrowbackThursday • Current events #AgentCon16
- 35. #AgentCon16
- 36. Brands that use social media as a broadcast system will end up feeling pretty lonely. ~ Kim Garst #AgentCon16
- 37. Marketing without data is like driving with your eyes closed. ~ Dan Zarrella #AgentCon16
- 41. Maybe don’t call it social media. Just be human and tell your story. ~ Gary Vaynerchuk #AgentCon16
- 44. #AgentCon16
- 45. Watch Competitors • Follow them on Twitter • Add to Pages to Watch on Facebook #AgentCon16
- 46. #AgentCon16
- 47. Follow ITC • www.facebook.com/InsuranceTechnologiesCorp • www.twitter.com/InsTechCorp #AgentCon16
- 48. Thank You Share your thoughts with us using #AgentCon16 Becky Schroeder | @beckylschroeder Vice President of Marketing
Editor's Notes
- My name is Becky Schroeder. I’m the vice president of marketing at ITC. Among our other tasks, ITC’s marketing department is responsible for ITC’s social media presence. In case you don’t know, that’s 5 Twitter accounts, 4 Facebook pages, 3 LinkedIn pages and 2 Google+ pages. If you’re not following us on social media, you should. POLL (Myspace) When I started at ITC in 2011, there was no consistent effort on our social media presence. So marketing took it over.
- In the time we’ve been measuring our social media efforts, we’ve grown the followers on our main ITC Facebook page 87%. Our organic reach, which is the number of people who have visited our page or seen our content in their news feeds, went from 376 in a month to 1,773. Which when you factor how some of this increase is due to the increase in followers, amounts to an improvement in organic reach of 152%. Organic impressions, which is the number of times our content is seen (can be more than once by a single person), went from 9,197 in a month to 20,473. It was 23 impressions per page like. Now it’s 27 impressions per page like. That’s an increase of 17%. Our engaged users increased 95%.
- In the same time, I’ve grown the main ITC Twitter account: Followers have increased 46%. Our average retweets in a month have increased 128% and replies 25%. Impressions have grown 79%. And the average likes on our tweets in a month have grown 1100%. In the last 12 months, we’ve gotten 12 leads from social media. Is that our goal for social media? No. But it’s a result of our efforts to provide information that is helpful and valuable to our followers. We’re not on social media to get leads. I’ve got other channels for that. We’re on social media to show that our goal is whatever goal you have. That we want to help our customers succeed, whatever that definition is for them. You’re in this breakout because you already know the basics of social media. You want to improve your social media presence. How did we get these results? I’m going to share our secrets. None of it is complicated. Everything we’ve done, you can do to help improve your agency’s social media marketing.
- Before you do anything, you have to know where you are right now. How many likes do you have on your Facebook page? How many Twitter followers? How many clicks is your content getting? What is your reach like? How many impressions are you getting? Are people commenting or replying to your content? Are they retweeting or sharing it? If you don’t know what you’re social media efforts are currently getting, you have no way of knowing if the changes you are going to make have the impact you want. By the way, this presentation is going to focus on Facebook and Twitter as they are the most popular networks, but a lot of these tips can be applied to other networks. Bottom line? The best way to learn how to use social media is trial and error. Don’t be scared to jump in and try out new things.
- We are not rational. We choose products and services based on emotion. Everything. From the cars we buy, the clothes we wear to the soda we get from the machine, the impulse gum purchase in a gas station. We make a choice by how we feel, by what we want other people to think about us. We make these decisions on our emotions. Sure we tell ourselves it’s the logical choice. But the logic is only the justification for what is an emotional decision.
- In his 2009 TED talk and in his book “Start with Why”, Simon Sinek said “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.” What do these have to do with social media?
- People don’t follow you on social media to learn about insurance. They want to learn about you. Why are you in insurance? Six months ago, we launched a new blog series on our rating blog called This is the Way. We interview different people in the industry, talk to them about how they work and to share their best tips. During our work on this series, we’ve learned the people in this industry are passionate about what they do. And they all have a story. Social media isn’t about what you do. It’s about who you are. It’s about your why. Concentrate your efforts not on the insurance you sell but why you’re in this industry. The best marketing, whether it’s on social media or another platform, is not about what you do. The best marketing is the stories you tell.
- You might be inclined to work on building your audience first. But don’t. If you start trying to get your clients to follow you before you build up your content, they will look at your profiles and not find a reason to click. Before you do anything else to your social media, focus on your content. Start telling your story. Find ways to show who you are and why you do what you do. Then when your clients do click on your profile, they’ll be more interested in what you say and more likely to follow you. My best tip for building a focus on your content is to create a content calendar each month. Yes, it takes some time and effort to do this every month but there are some big benefits to working through your content once a month instead of each day: Keep you organized Let you know what content needs to post when, which helps with writer’s block Share your plan with others in your office so if you’re gone, they know what to post while you’re out.
- This is the content calendar we use at ITC. Admittedly, it’s a little more complicated than what you would need. But remember, we have social media accounts for ITC and our four products: Insurance Website Builder, AgencyBuzz, TurboRater and InsurancePro. But with this, me and my marketing coordinator know exactly what kinds of posts we need to publish every day from every account. What once took two of us an hour to an hour and a half to do every day (each), now one of us can schedule all our Facebook and Twitter accounts for a whole week in an hour. That’s huge.
- Yours might look something more like this. Before you work on the content, decide how often your going to post to each of your networks. Are you going to post to Facebook 3x a week? Every day? Are you going to tweet once a day? Twice? More? Knowing how many posts you need each day will help you fill your calendar with content ideas.
- For filling your content calendar: Look at the month. Are there any major holidays? What about any fun holidays like Grilled Cheese Day or Talk Like a Pirate Day? Look for days that fit within your agency’s personality and brand that you can use to insert some fun into your social media efforts. Do you have any events planned that you need to promote prior to the event and share pictures during or after the event? If you’re blogging regularly, don’t forget to add those posts to your calendar. I like to share a new blog post on Twitter multiple times spread out over a week or two because social media moves fast and not all of your followers will see it the first time. I do recommend you change the commentary with the link for each tweet so it’s not repetitive for anyone who might see it more than once. Are you creating other content? Videos, ebooks, checklists, etc? Add these to your calendar. If you’ve been blogging a while and have an archive built up, add an archive post to your calendar once or twice a month. Then when it’s time to schedule that day’s post, find an old favorite and share it. Just remember to scan through it to make sure all the information in the blog is still correct and relevant.
- Take advantage of weekly hashtag themes like #ThrowbackThursday (or #tbt), #TestimonialTuesday, #WednesdayWisdom Sprinkle promotional content throughout your calendar. You don’t want to be overly promotional. I try to maintain a balance of 80% useful/informational content, 20% promotional. Look at what else you’re doing. What can you tell your followers about? Every month we publish a post on our marketing blog that includes 10 content ideas. You can use these ideas for a blog post, your newsletter or social media content. Fill holes in your calendar with curated content. This is content from other sources that you share from your profiles. Just be sure when you schedule them to add your own thoughts on the content. Don’t forget to mix up your content. You want to post more than links because other types of content (like images and video) may get better engagement which will help boost the reach of your other posts because Facebook (and now Twitter) will show your content to more people if it is engaging.
- Here’s a recent blog we shared on our Facebook page. It was a great post. But it was only seen by 5% of our followers. It had a 2% engagement rate.
- Compare that to this picture of two of our salespeople at a trade show. It was seen 40% of our followers and had an engagement rate of 5%.
- Or these pictures from our Pi Day Pie Contest. It was seen by 78% of our followers and 5% engagement rate, which included 10 comments (one of our most commented on posts). It also had 235 post clicks as people were clicking through the photos. The more people clicked on a photo, liked or commented, the more people Facebook showed it to. It’s a sad truth that only a fraction of your followers will see you content, but if you want to be on Facebook, this is the game you have to play. Why don’t we just post content like this? Because we need to share other content like blog posts, videos, white papers, testimonials, etc. So we post a mix of content. Including these #LifeatITC pictures that get such high engagement, helps boost the content I want more visibility for. Engaging posts will get you more reach. This isn’t just limited to Facebook. Twitter is also starting to filter its content and showing the most engaging posts at the top of a person’s feed when they first log in.
- One other quick thing about content… visuals are way more engaging. Here’s a tweet with a just a link and some text. One click. Less than 1% engagement.
- Here’s a tweet that also includes an image. 19 total engagements. 2% engagement Images will stand out in the busy Twitter feed more than just text and links will. Find ways to include images with your tweets.
- There are a ton of places where you can get images for free or for a small fee. There really is no excuse to be downloading and using copyrighted images. If you are using Google Image search and using images you find there without buying the appropriate license, it’s not a matter of if you get caught. It’s a matter of when. You can’t always get your photography. But here are resources you can use. Royalty free means you pay a small fee and then can use the image without paying additional licensing fees. You also don’t have to give attribution. A couple websites: Thinkstock and Shutterstock Images in the public domain have expired copyrights or their creators have relinquished all rights. They are free for personal or commercial use. (If you use an image of a recognizable person, you may need to get permission. Some website will have gotten a model release. Always check the license agreement that comes with the image.) Couple websites: Pixabay and Public Domain Archive
- Photographers who license images under creative commons choose how the images can be used by specifying a particular CC (creative commons) license. CC0 means owner has relinquished all rights. CC2.0 requires you provide attribution. A couple websites: Unsplash and Skitterphoto. Both are CC0. You don’t need a graphic designer to create gorgeous images with a text overlay. Pablo by Buffer is a free app. You can choose from one of their more than 50,000 images (provided by Unsplash) or upload your own. Then use their handy app to write what you want on top of it. You can share directly from Pablo to social media or download to use it wherever.
- Here’s one I did using Pablo.
- Now that you know what to post, you need to find when. You will find numerous articles on the Internet that talk about the best time and day to post on social media. Mornings, evenings, 3 o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, Saturdays. The advice is generic and covers every day and time of day. My advice? Find what works best for your followers.
- For Facebook, go to your Insights (it’s at the top of your page). Then click on posts in the left hand column. You’ll see this graph. You can get an overall impression of when the majority of your followers are on Facebook. Or you can hover over a particular day of the week and see times specific to that day. We like to schedule a post 30 minutes before a peak time so it’s already in the newsfeed when people log onto Facebook. For Twitter you can try different times of day and look at your analytics to see when you’re getting the more impressions and engagement. Or you can use third-party tools.
- One is Tweriod. It shows the time range for weekdays and weekends that most of your followers are online. You can get this report for free once a month. Just sign up with your Twitter account. You can pay to get more analysis, but I find this is once a month report is sufficient.
- Another option is Followerwonk. Followerwonk is a Moz app. You can use your Moz login for it. You can also sign up using your Twitter account. The free subscription lets you know when your followers are most active which will help you determine what times of day are best. You can see ITC’s followers are most active between the hours of nine and 1 p.m. So that’s when we focus our most important content. The best marketers and social media managers use tools to boost productivity. A huge benefit to social media management tool is scheduling posts ahead of time. Remember that content calendar we talked about? Combine that content calendar with a social media tool and you can have a week’s worth of social media posts scheduled in 30 minutes or less. Cancelling during a tragedy or disaster
- A few years ago before a Radiohead concert, some staging collapsed killing one person and injuring many others. Live Nation, the promoter for the event tweeted about the concert being cancelled. Then shortly after, this tweet was published. Obviously it was a scheduled tweet. You can also see they got some flack for the gaffe. Just keep this in mind when you schedule tweets that if something happens, you should cancel them.
- If you’re already an AgencyBuzz user or planning to start using it soon, use the social media module that is included! You can schedule posts to Facebook or Twitter from within it. There’s even a content library of social media posts you can use if you just really have no idea what to say. These posts are editable so you can tweak it to fit your agency. There are many more social media management tools out there. Here are a couple more to get your search started: Hootsuite and Buffer. Both are fermium meaning you can use it for free with some limited capability. Or pay for a bigger plan for access to more features like the ability to have multiple profiles or multiple people working on your corporate account.
- When you’ve got the content down, when your social media profiles have become something you’re proud of, it’s time to start building your followers. But don’t try to build an audience if you’re building up your content or are barely available on social media. I can’t tell you how many insurance agency websites I see that have social media icons on them that don’t actually link to anything. Or they do but the last time the agency posted was six months ago or longer. It is by worse to have a stale social media profile than no social media profile at all. Some of these tips for building an audience may seem basic, but there are a couple reasons why I’ve included them in this presentation. 1. Like I already mentioned, I see so many agents not doing these things. 2. They’re best practices.
- Put the icons to your social media profiles on your website in a conspicuous place. Either header, footer or floating on the side.
- Maybe both
- Include them in your email signatures for everyone in your office.
- Put them in your newsletters
- And all your marketing emails.
- You can even send an email asking your clients to follow you on social media. This is an email we send to our new customers. It says Insurance Website Builder but you can bet we have a version for all our products.
- Use hashtags in your posts to become more findable. If you’re attending an event, find out if that event has a hashtag (like AgentCon16) and post using that tag so other people at the same event will find you and hopefully follow you. Use weekly theme posts like ThrowbackThursday, MotivationMonday, etc Look on Twitter.com for trending hashtags. If there’s a topic you can contribute to that is not out of line with your brand, tweet using that hashtag. My last tip for building an audience? Follow first.
- Find your clients and prospects and other people who fit your target client profile on Twitter and follow them. Set a goal for yourself. Maybe you’ll try to find five people to follow every week. Most people are inclined to follow you back. It will be a slow process to build your follower count up. But when you buy followers all you’re getting is a higher follower count. When you build your followers slowly, you’re building your engagement too.
- You can schedule your posts ahead of time. But you can’t schedule engagement. The key word in the term social media is SOCIAL. If all you ever do is talk, if you don’t ever listen, why would people engage with you. What I like to do is every day look for someone I can retweet and someone I can reply to. I may not get a response the first time I engage with people ITC follows. But eventually, the more I do it, the more engagement we get. So schedule ahead, but engage live.
- You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Remember when I said at the beginning to benchmark your social media efforts? You need to be check in with your results regularly to see how your changes are working out.
- In Facebook Insights on the Posts page I mentioned earlier, you can see all your published posts and their reach and engagement. Look for trends. What types of posts get the most reach? Which ones are getting the most engagement? When you do, you know what kind of content to use more often. Other options in Insights: See how your likes are trending Reach Page views Actions on page A breakdown of your followers by age, gender and location You can also export your insights to excel to dig in a little deeper.
- In Twitter you can see a 28 day summary or toggle it to any time period you want.
- You’ll be able to see your impressions and engagement, including clicks, retweets, likes, detail expands, media views (which is when people expand your pictures), clicks to view your profiles. Like Facebook, look for tweets that get higher than normal clicks, retweets and likes. Then aim to do more tweets like that. You can also download your activity to excel for a deeper look.
- Facebook is only going to show your posts to a small percentage of your followers. But for a small budget, you can boost your important posts so more of your followers see it.
- You can target people who like your page, people you like your page AND their friends, or a custom audience, where you can upload a list of your clients’ email addresses and Facebook will target any accounts associated with those emails. You can boost a post for as little as $1. So it’s an incredibly budget friendly way to get more reach on the most popular network. But there is more value to boosting your posts than just getting more visibility for one specific post. When you boost a post and it gets more engagement, Facebook is more likely to deliver the next similar post to more of your followers. So basically you can grow your organic reach by occasionally boosting a post or two.
- Twitter is also starting to filter its feed. You can also get a lot out of a small advertising budget on Twitter. You can quickly boost a post for more visibility. Choose your target location and budget. Or you can do even more targeting by going to ads.twitter.com. There’s a lot more we can talk about with advertising on social media platforms. If you’d like to try advertising on Twitter or Facebook, there are many resources out there for you. The networks themselves also do a good job of guiding you through each step of the process to make it easy for you.
- Social media is also a great way to keep an eye on your competitors. Watch what kind of content they’re posting. What are they getting engagement on. You can’t see how many clicks their links get but you can see the likes, comments, number of shares, retweets, likes.
- Follow them on Twitter and create a private list so you can keep tabs on them there. Facebook has a feature called Pages to Watch. Go to your Insights Overview page. Below the handful of published posts, you’ll see a section called Pages to Watch. Click the Add Pages button, Search for your competitors and click Watch Page next to their page name. You will then be able to see their total page likes, number of posts and engagement in the last week in comparison to your own. If you see their engagement go way up, click on the page and see what they posted that got such high engagement.
- Don’t be like that guy at a networking event that only ever talks about himself and cares nothing for what anyone else has to say. You need to be unselfish in your efforts for a long, long, LONG time. Then, maybe, SOMEDAY, you’ll get leads. But here’s the thing. If you are only on social media because you think it’s going to get you more leads, it’s not going to work out as well as you’d like. Remember. Social media is not about what you do. It’s about who you are and why you do what you do.