How We Increased the Readership of Buffer’s Blog to Over 1.5 Million Visits

Every company is a media company these days, and Buffer is no different.

We started the Buffer Social blog in January 2011 and since then it has been a key component in the success of the company. We have published more than 1,000 posts—and we’re honored to receive more than 1.5 million visits every month.

It’s been a long, challenging journey, though.

We first hit one million sessions in a calendar month during March 2015—a full 4 years after launching—and after months of floating around 1.1 to 1.2 million sessions, and struggling to break out, we hit 1.5m sessions in May 2017.

You can check out our growth below:

During our journey from zero to more than 1.5 million monthly visits, we’ve learned a ton and would love to share some of our lessons with you today.

Ready to jump in?

The 3-step system behind our blog growth

In this post, we’ll draw back the curtains and share the three step process we use to grow this blog:

1. Audience
2. Cadence
3. Promotion

Feel free to click on the bullet point that interests you the most to skip to that step.

1. Audience

Understanding what content our audience craves

The content you read here is as likely to be about the evolution of social media, how to create amazing social media content, or little-known tips and tricks as it is about the latest Buffer developments and features (we also share all our culture related content on our Open blog, too).

Our hope is that these posts reflect the needs of our customers as well as the perspectives and views of the writers, editors, and strategists that make up Buffer’s marketing team. And in turn, we hope a few readers would become Buffer customers, eventually.

Before thinking of blog post ideas, it’s helpful to understand what your readers want from you. Otherwise, you’re shooting in the dark and hoping everything works out.

After several iterations of our content and through studying our blog posts data, we uncovered that our audience enjoys our long-form, educational blog posts.

Knowing that has helped us to decide what types of blog posts to write. And no matter what type of post we’re creating, the aim is to help marketers and small businesses to become more successful on social media.

Try this

To find out what your readers want, you could study the performance of your existing blog posts or ask your readers directly through on-page surveys like Hotjar Polls.

How we come up with blog post ideas

It can be challenging to continually create high-quality, valuable pieces of content on a weekly basis.

As an established blog, you can run the risk of dropping your standards or hoping that creativity can be scheduled in order to hit a certain number of posts in any given month.

At Buffer, we do our best to avoid that way of thinking.

Although we aim to publish twice per week (more on how we decided on that cadence a little later), we always strive for the utmost quality and the sweet spot between content we know will get traffic and content that delivers value to our readers (and Buffer).

For example, we might write about the latest social media trends or platform features, but you won’t see us commenting on a potential Mark Zuckerburg presidential run just for some quick traffic.

Here are the various ways we come up with blog post ideas:

Keywords: Ranking for keywords around social media marketing, such as “social media analytics”, has gradually become a top focus for us. We tend to research keyword opportunities and then come up with ideas around them.

Inspiration: We keep an eye out for popular discussions in the industry such as falling organic reach on Facebook and brainstorm ideas around each topic.

News: Whenever a social media platform launches a new feature such as Instagram Stories and Facebook Stories, we like to help our readers understand what the update means for their business.

Past experience: We come up with ideas based on posts that have performed well. For instance, when our post on headline formulas performed well, we thought of ideas like copywriting formulas and storytelling formulas.

Intuition: Sometimes you just have to trust your gut. Occasionaly we’ll come up with post ideas based on the intuition we’ve built up over years of running the blog.

How we decide which posts to write

We come up with many ideas but they don’t all get published on our blog.

When assessing an idea, we think about the following questions:

• Is this relevant to marketers or small business owners working on their social media?
• Does this help them solve a challenge they face at work?
• Has this been written before? If yes, can we add more value to the topic?
• Is there interest in this topic? (Sometimes, that means looking at the search volume for the keyword or Google Trends data)

When we can answer “yes” to these questions, we would pick that idea and move it to the “Pipeline” column on our Trello board.

Try this

Come up with a set of criteria relevant to your blog goals. Writing only blog posts that meet your criteria can help to keep the quality of your content high.

2. Cadence

Finding the right cadence to meet our goals

Over the years we’ve realized the importance of editorial cadence and heading into 2017, we decided it was something we wanted to focus on heavily.

After some experimentation, we realized we needed to do the following:

• Publish consistently: We had tried publishing four or five times per week, but found that our standards were dropping and we were on the losing side of the quantity vs quality battle. We’ve found that two new blog posts plus our podcast show notes per week feels like the perfect amount of content.
• Plan ahead: By planning our content up to four-six weeks ahead of publishing, we have plenty of time to research and plan how each new piece of content will be promoted.

To aid us with this, we use a handy Trello calendar power-up that displays cards with due dates in a weekly or monthly format. We use the monthly calendar to help us organize our editorial schedule and give us a quick overview of the following few weeks.

Planning ahead and giving ourselves more time to edit our content has been one of the key factors in unlocking our growth and reaching the 1.5-million milestone. This has enabled us to take the utmost care with every post to ensure the quality is right when we want it to be when we hit ‘publish’.

Try this

I would recommend experimenting and finding a suitable editorial cadence based on your content goals and the amount of time you have. There is no one right editorial cadence. HubSpot publishes several articles a day while Backlinko publishes less than once a month.

2 ways we streamline our editorial communication

1. Keeping everything in one place 

Slack, email, Discourse…

Communication can get a little overwhelming at times. To counter this we have all the key discussions in the respective blog post Trello cards. Even if we discuss something related to a blog post in Slack or on video calls, we’ll make a note in the Trello card.

This serves two purposes:

1. Single reference point: Instead of having to look through Slack or trying to remember what we discussed five days ago on the video call, we know we can find all the key information about an idea on its Trello card.
2. Information transparency: By having the information on Trello, we can keep the relevant team members in the loop even if they missed the Slack or Zoom conversation.

Try this

Find a tool that suits your content system. For us, it’s Trello.

If you are already using a tool for your content system, lean into it and use it to store all the key information about your content.

2. Making time to chat face-to-face

Ash, our blog editor, and I have a weekly meeting every Tuesday where we talk about all things related to our blog.

This is a practice that content crafters at Buffer have been doing since the start of the blog. These recurring meetings encourage us to reflect on our recent work and think how we can improve.

Here’s what Ash and I usually do during our content syncs nowadays:

• Review recent blog post performance
• Discuss blog post ideas that are being worked on now or that are planned for the next few weeks
• Discuss interesting social media or marketing news
• Share well-written blog posts we read recently
• Brainstorm new blog post ideas

You don’t have to keep to the same agenda but I would recommend at least reviewing the results your recent blog posts and refining your content strategy.

Try this

Have a content sync with your editors and writers at least once a week. If you are the only writer, you could meet with your team lead or a teammate who is keen.

3. Promotion

Focusing on content promotion, not just creation

Derek Halpern of Social Triggers likes to spend 80 percent of his time promoting his content:

“It’s smarter to find another 10,000 people to consume what you’ve already created as opposed to creating more.

“Or, in other words, create content 20% of the time. Spend the other 80% of the time promoting what you created.

We are far from spending 80 percent of our time promoting our blog posts but here are two things we do to share our content with more people.

4 ways we promote our content

1. Repurposing blog posts for social media

We repurpose our blog posts into content suitable for each social media platform. For instance, here’re some things we do:

• Brian Peters, our Digital Marketing Strategist, creates Instagram stories with the key points of the blog post and invites our Instagram followers to check out the full post on our blog.
• He also creates short videos using the content in the blog posts to share on Twitter and Facebook. We found that videos have been receiving more engagement and, consequently, more reach on social media than links.
• I republish our blog posts on Medium, often with a different headline and shorter content.

Instead of simply sharing a link to each social media platform, we found that customizing the post for each platform such as adding videos for Facebook has generated more engagement from our fans.

While doing this might not always drive traffic to our blog, I believe it helps our followers gain trust in the content that we create. And next time, when they are looking for help on social media marketing, maybe they will think of the Buffer blog first.

2. Building a loyal newsletter following

Despite the rumors, email is not dead (and I can’t see it dying anytime soon).

Our email list is often the #1 driver of traffic to our content on the day it’s published and provides us with a way to get our content in front of our most avid readers.

We are grateful that many people have signed up to receive our blog newsletter over the years, even after we stopped growing our email list actively. We send them an email whenever we publish a new blog post or once every week.

With about 100,000 subscribers, each of our new blog posts gets about 1,000 to 2,000 visits from these subscribers on the first day alone. (The conversion rate is definitely something we can work on.)

Try this

Having a newsletter following has allowed us to share our content with a group of readers who would read our new blog posts whenever they are published. If you wish to build a loyal readership and grow your blog, consider growing an email list for your blog.

3. Paying attention to long-term traffic (SEO)

Often, our content ideas come from an amalgamation of the methods listed above. And in most cases, we aim to generate long-term search traffic for each of the posts we publish.

Our blog post on Instagram algorithm is a great example. We knew it’s a popular topic among social media marketers, and people are searching for “instagram algorithm” on Google (about 4,000 searches per month).

By understanding the term people are searching for on Google for this topic and writing a well-researched, high-quality piece, the blog post was able to rank on the first page of Google and has been bringing in 600 to 800 views per day since we published it.

We believe this focus on bringing in long-term search traffic to new posts has helped unlock growth for the blog in the recent months.

Try this

If you want to generate long-term search traffic for your blog posts, learning how to do keyword research is a great place to start. Here are a few resources to get you started:

— How To Do Keyword Research – The Beginners Guide to SEO by Moz
— Keyword Research for SEO: The Definitive Guide by Backlinko
— How To Do Keyword Research in 2017 by Ahrefs

4. Craft headlines that attract readers

A great headline can bring people to a blog post from RSS feeds, social media, and search engines.

David Ogilvy, once wrote, “On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy”. In fact, we found that as many as 78 times more people read the headline on Twitter than read the blog post.

Inspired by Upworthy’s editorial process of writing 25 headlines per article, I would come up with at least 20 headline ideas for each blog post. Not all of them are great but each of them helps me come up with a better headline.

I often refer to this blog post on headline formulas to help me brainstorm. We also use YoRocket, a WordPress plugin that analyzes and suggests improvements for our blog post headline.

The 20 headlines also come in handy when we want to share the blog post on social media more than once. I would share those headlines in the Trello card with Brian Peters, our Digital Marketing Strategist, who would promote the blog post on social.

Try this

For each of your blog post, brainstorm at least 20 headlines before settling on one. Here are some of our go-to headline formulas:

— Headline + Headline (E.g. Understanding the Instagram Algorithm: 7 Key Factors and Why the Algorithm is Great for Marketers)
— Item and Item: Listicle (E.g. Optimal Timing, Videos, and More: 10 Easy Ways to Boost Your Instagram Reach)
— The Complete / Ultimate / Beginner’s Guide to ____ (E.g. A Complete Guide to Instagram Marketing: Get the Playbook That Drives Results for Instagram’s Top Profiles)

Bonus: Relaunch older posts to boost traffic

Many topics we cover on the blog such as social media tools or social media marketing budget are evergreen topics.

But as things change quickly in the social media landscape, the information in a blog post can become outdated quickly.

So instead of just writing new blog posts, we also update existing blog posts on evergreen topics that have outdated information or even more potential for traffic through search. This keeps our blog posts relevant and useful for our readers.

For example, when we updated our social media analytics tools post in March 2017, the daily traffic more than doubled from about 300 to 700:

(The two spikes of traffic came from our RSS feed and email digest).

Try this

Briefly, here’re the 3 steps of a content relaunch:

1. Identify underperforming content: Brian recommends looking for posts that rank 7th to 15th on Google, posts where organic traffic has fallen, posts that underperformed, and posts that are good but could be better.

2. Improve and update that content: Some of Brian’s suggestions are updating the images and screenshots, improving the post’s structure, and adding a new case study.

3. Republish your post: The last step is to update the “Published” date in WordPress to today (the day of the relaunch). That will bring the blog post to the top of your blog.

If you’d like to get traffic from social media by sharing your blog posts there, we’d love to help you. Try our 14-day free trial and experience the difference today. 

Thinking about vanity metrics and 1.5 million thank you’s

Having over a 1.5 million visits per month is great but you could also argue it’s a vanity metric. And you’d probably be right.

As content crafters at Buffer, we’re in the business of selling software. We don’t take a direct, hardline approach to this, but our content is essentially here to increase our reach, build our brand, and in-turn drive Buffer’s sign ups and revenue figures in the right direction.

Alongside traffic, we also pay close attention to the number of Buffer customers referred by the blog, and the monthly recurring revenue figures generated by those customers.  These metrics give us a better sense, in quantitative terms, of how the blog is providing business value.

In our case, increased traffic seems to correlate pretty well with some of our more meaningful metrics like sign ups—as our traffic grows, so does the number of signups and revenue generated. That said, we’re keen to do a bunch more to optimize these flows and see how we can maximize the value of every visit we receive to the blog, without compromising reader experience.

Overall, we’re happy with the progress of the blog, and we hope you found this blog post useful. If you have any questions about our editorial process, feel free to ask them in the comments section below.

And, finally, thanks a million for being one of our readers. We truly appreciate it

source https://blog.bufferapp.com/buffer-blog-one-million

The Complete Guide to Creating Effective Snap Ads with Snapchat Ad Manager

In the past, if you wanted to run Snap Ads (Snapchat’s full-screen video ads), you would need to go through one of their ads partners. Now, though, you can create Snap Ads yourself through Snapchat’s new self-serve ads tool, Snapchat Ad Manager.

Snapchat has even included a video creation tool in the Snapchat Ad Manager to make creating engaging, awesome-looking vertical videos a breeze.

We’re thrilled by the possibilities that Snapchat Ad Manager has brought about for marketers. And we would love to help you get started with creating your very own Snap Ads and measuring their performance.

Here’s everything you need to know…

What you’ll learn in this guide

Here’s a brief look at what will be covered in this Snapchat Ad Manager guide. Feel free to click on the quick links to jump to the respective sections.

— First up, what are Snap Ads?
— The benefits of Snapchat Ads?
— Quick overview of Snapchat Ad Manager
— How to create an effective Snap Ad with Snapchat Ad Manager
— Beyond Snapchat Ad Manager: Good-to-knows

First up, what are Snap Ads?

3-10 second full-screen vertical video ads

Snap Ads are full-screen vertical video ads that can be up to 10 seconds long.

Snapchat users (or Snapchatters) can swipe up, anytime when the video ad is playing, for more — watch a longer video, read an article, install an app, or visit a website.

Snap Ads appear in between friends’ stories and Snapchat curated content such as Snapchat’s stories or publishers’ stories.

Snapchat also offers two other types of advertising: Snapchat Geofilters and Lenses. But these cannot be created in the Snapchat Ad Manager just yet. You can create Snapchat Geofilters online or on the mobile app, while you have to work with a Snapchat partner to create Lenses.

The benefits of Snapchat Ads

Distinct audience, powerful targeting, and immersive experience

Snap Ads are an exciting, largely untapped advertising channel for marketers.

Here are just three of the benefits that make Snap Ads attractive:

• Active user base: The 166 million Snapchatters who use the app daily, on average, spend over 30 minutes in the app and open the app more than 18 times per day.
• Distinct audience: Huge percentages of Snapchat’s U.S. daily users cannot be reached on Facebook (35 percent), Instagram (46 percent), Twitter (81 percent), and other major social platforms, according to App Annie. Similar trends were found in the U.K.
• Powerful targeting: With Snapchat’s data, which includes data from Oracle Data Cloud, you can reach Snapchatters based on their demographics and their online and (even) offline interests and behaviors. You can also use your own data to reach your customers and similar Snapchatters on Snapchat.

If you are still a little unsure if Snap Ads are effective, especially in comparison with other social media ads like Facebook ads and Instagram ads, perhaps these statistics could convince you.

MediaScience did some research (commissioned by Snap Inc.) and found that Snap Ads are more effective than most social media ads in several ways:

• Persuasion: Users are much more likely to purchase a product after seeing a Snap Ad than most other social media ads — over two times more lift in purchase intent.
• Attention: Snap Ads are shown full-screen, and as such, receive up to two times more visual attention than most other social media ads. (Instagram Stories ads were not considered in this study.)
• Engagement: Snap Ads’ swipe up rate (or the rate at which users check out your website, video, or app) is five times higher than the average clickthrough rate of other social media ads.
• Sound: Over 60 percent of Snap Ads are played with audio on. (In comparison, 85 percent of Facebook videos are watched without sound.)

If you are a little more interested in Snap Ads now, let’s learn more about the Snapchat Ad Manager.

Quick overview of Snapchat Ad Manager

Before we go through how to create Snap Ads, let’s first get familiar with the key sections of the Snapchat Ad Manager.

On the left side of the screen you can navigate to the key sections of Snapchat Ad Manager:

1. Dashboard: This is where you create, view, and manage your Snap Ads. You can also see the metrics of your ads as a graph and in a table.
2. Creative Library: This is where you view, edit, and create ad creatives.
3. Custom Audiences: This is where you can create lists of Snapchatters (which you can use for targeting) using your customer data.
4. Help Center: This is where you can find guides on how to do various things in the Ad Manager and get help from Snapchat.

Now the fun part begins…

Let’s go through the steps of creating a Snap Ad and assessing its performance with the Snapchat Ad Manager.

How to create an effective Snap Ad with Snapchat Ad Manager

Below, you’ll learn how to create a Snap Ad and evaluate its performance using the Snapchat Ad Manager in this section.

If you are familiar with the Facebook Ads Manager, the Snapchat Ad Manager is very similar. If you’ve not used Facebook Ads too much, you’ll get the hang of it quite quickly.

Feel free to set up your business account on Snapchat here, log in to your Snapchat Ad Manager here, and follow along!

Snap Ads use the same structure as Facebook ads — campaign, ad sets, and ads. To create a Snap Ad, you’ll work your way down the structure: create a campaign, an ad set, and then the ad.

(For now, you can only create one ad set and one ad at a time.)

If you haven’t created a Snap Ad before, a pop-up will prompt you to create a campaign once you log into your Snapchat Ad Manager. You can also click on “+New Campaign” to get started.

1. Choose an objective for your campaign

First, decide what you want Snapchatters to do when they see your Snap ad. You have four options:

• Drive traffic to your website
• Drive install of your app
• Grow awareness
• Drive video views

Note: To take any of those actions, Snapchatters will have to swipe up while viewing your ad.

Then, set a schedule for your campaign. You can either start the campaign immediately and run indefinitely or define the start and end dates. You also have the option to set the status (active or paused).

Finally, name your ad campaign. To make finding your ad campaigns easier, you might want to think of a simple naming convention. Here’s a naming convention you could use:

(Objective) – (Schedule) – (Team member’s name)

If you manage several clients, you could also specify the client in the name in your ad campaign name.

Hit “Next” to move on to creating your ad set.

Note: Try to finish setting up your ad in one sitting as Snapchat doesn’t seem to auto-save during the ad creation process. If you quit the process halfway through, you’ll have to start from the first step again.

2. Set the audience, budget, and schedule of your ad set

First, name your ad set according to your naming convention. Here’s a suggestion:

(Audience details) – (Budget) – (Goal) – (Schedule)

Then, there are three main sections to fill up for your ad set — Audience, Budget & Goals, and Schedule.

Audience

The “Audience” section contains five main parts that allow you to specify the audience you want to reach:

• Geography: You have to select a country you want to target. You can then make your location targeting more specific by including or excluding certain areas of the country.
• Demographics: You can specify the people you want to reach by their age, gender, language, income, parental status, and more.
• Audiences: You can even target people based on what they like, what they’ve bought, what they’ve watched, and where they’ve been. You can also target your customers on Snapchat (i.e. Snap Audience Match Audience) and Snapchatters that are like them (i.e. Lookalike Audience).
• Placements: You can choose if you want your ads to appear in only Snapchat curated content such as Snapchat’s stories and publishers’ stories (“Content Placement”) or all of Snapchat including between friends’ stories (“All Snapchat”).
• Devices: Finally, you can define the devices you want to target based on the operating system (Android, iOS, or both), connection type (cell, wifi, or both), and service provider (AT&T, O2, etc.)

While you are only required to select a country at the minimum, setting more specific target audience will help you achieve better results—bear in mind that Snapchat do not allow ad sets to reach less than 1,000 people.

Here are some targeting best practices from Snapchat:

• Keep your audience size less than 20 million people for the same creative
• Create an ad set for each unique group of people you’re trying to reach
• Test Lookalike Audience for prospecting and finding new customers
• Try using multiple ads per ad set so you can see how different creatives perform with the same audience

Budget and Goals

The “Budget & Goals” section allows you to state your daily budget, goal, and bid amount.

The minimum amount for the daily budget seems to be $100. Any lower and you won’t be able to click “Next”.

The delivery of your ads will be optimized for the goal and the bid amount you specified. But you will be charged based on the number of times your ad is served.

For example, you set your goal as app install and your bid as $10. Snapchat will use your bid of $10 to compete against other advertisers’ bid in an auction. Snapchat will then show your ad to the people it thinks will most likely install your app, over ads of advertisers with a lower bid.

But Snapchat will not charge you $10 each time someone installs your app. It will charge you based on the number of times it has shown your ad. So each app install could cost more or less than $10.

It is recommended that you set the bid amount to how much each goal action (e.g. app install) is worth to you. If you are not getting the results you want, you could try increasing your bid.

Schedule

The “Schedule” section allows you to set the schedule for that particular ad set (which is different from the ad campaign’s schedule in the previous step).

As you can run multiple ad sets within each ad campaign, the ad sets can have a shorter schedule than their ad campaign.

Once you’ve set the audience, budget, and schedule of your ad set, hit “Next” to move on to creating your ad.

3. Select an ad type and upload a creative

Now you’re ready to create you Snap Ad. First, you’ll need to select your ad type:

Fill in the basic information (such as the creative name) and select the ad type you what.

There are four ad types available on Snapchat at the moment:

• Top Snap only: A Top Snap is the three to 10-second video ad that Snapchatters will see. There won’t be a swipe up call-to-action for this ad type since there won’t be any video or link attachment.
• Web view: This ad type allows you to drive traffic to your website (remember all traffic will be mobile) to take your intended action: purchase a product, make a booking, read an article, etc.
• App install: This ad type helps you to drive traffic to your app page in the Apple App Store or Google Play Store so that the Snapchatter can easily install your app.
• Long-form video: This ad type acts as a trailer for your long-form video that can be up to 10 minutes long.

Note: The article ad type (which links to a multimedia page) doesn’t seem to be available in the Snapchat Ad Manager yet. A workaround, for now, is to use the web view ad type.

Upload or create your content

There are a few tiny details to complete before uploading or creating your ad creative.

• Brand name: Enter your brand name (maximum of 25 characters, including spaces). This will appear in the upper-left corner of your Snap Ad.
• Headline: Enter your headline (maximum of 34 characters, including spaces). This will appear right below your brand name.
• Call to action: Select your preferred call-to-action from the list. The options available will depend on the ad type you have chosen. This will appear at the bottom of the Snap Ad.

“Media File” is the vertical video you want to use for your Snap Ad. If you have created it already or prefer to use a third-party software to create it, simply hit “Upload” to add it to your ad.

If you are not sure how to create vertical videos, Snapchat has this sorted for you! Hit “Create” and you’ll be brought to Snap Publisher, Snapchat’s online video editing app.

You can either create a video from scratch here or edit one of the nicely-designed templates. The Snap Publisher feels quite intuitive and allows you to do basic to advanced video editing. Here’s a short three-minute video by Marketing Land on the things you can do with the Snap Publisher:

As for the content of your Snap Ad, selfie videos are a great option to start your ad, according to Liam Copeland, Director of Decision Science for Movement Strategy. Perhaps because they look like stories from friends and make the ad experience less disruptive to Snapchatters.

The trick is to film videos on iPhones using the front facing camera with the talent front and center — and with no branding until three to five seconds in, according to Copeland.

“The more organic the ad feels and the later the branding appears, the more likely a user is to swipe up to view long-form content or web content,” he said.

For more tips on creating great Snap Ads, check out Snapchat’s Help Center where they listed the specifications and offered advice for each ad type. Here are just some of the best practices listed there:

• Use voiceover call to actions to encourage swipe up
• Three to five seconds is the sweet spot for Snap Ad length to drive action
• Provide an offer message, if available, by second two or three

The final step of Snap Ad creation is to fill up or upload your attachment — the website, app page, or video that you want Snapchatters to see when they swipe up.

4. Run campaign

Click “Launch Campaign” and your ad campaign is ready!

If you have been following along, you have just set up your first Snap Ad campaign. Congratulations!

5. Monitor, optimize, and report

After you have launched your ad campaign, you might want to monitor its performance, edit the schedule or budget, or report your results. You can do all these easily in the dashboard of the Snapchat Ad Manager.

Monitor your ad performance: The dashboard will display your overall and individual campaigns’ ad metrics. You can drill down to each campaign, ad set, or ad by clicking on its name and see the metrics for specific date range by updating the date selector.

The default ad metrics shown will change according to the objective of the campaign. You can customize the metric columns of the table by clicking on “Customize Columns” in the upper-right corner of the table.

(Here are the definitions of all the metrics you’ll see in the Snapchat Ad Manager)

Edit your ad schedule or budget: When you are viewing a campaign or ad set, an “Edit” button will appear in the upper-right corner of the page. Snapchat allows you to edit a few details of your campaign or ad set.

Campaign:

• Campaign name
• Daily budget (This has to be larger than 70 percent of the sum of daily budgets of all ad sets within the campaign.)
• Schedule
• Status

Ad set:

• Ad set name
• Schedule
• Daily budget
• Bid amount

Report your ad results: If you would like to report your ad results, you can click the download button beside “Customize Columns” to get a CSV file of the table you are viewing.

There’s also an option to break down your results by day, week, or month so that you can see how the ad has performed over time.

Beyond Snapchat Ad Manager: Good-to-knows

Snapchat Mobile Dashboard

Snapchat has made it very easy for you to monitor your ad campaigns — even on the go. With the Snapchat Mobile Dashboard, you can see the performance of your ads right within the Snapchat app. No additional app is required.

At the moment, it seems that you can only view your ad metrics but not edit the ads.

To access the Snapchat Mobile Dashboard, swipe down in the camera mode, tap on the gear icon, tap on “Snap Ads”, and select your account.

Snapchat Business Manager

Snapchat Business Manager is where you manage your ad accounts (e.g. billing and access) and members (e.g. roles and permissions).

Each business account can have multiple ad accounts, and each ad account can have multiple members with different roles and permissions. Only the admins for the business account can invite members and assign roles to them.

Have you tried Snapchat Ad Manager?

And that’s all you need to know to get started with creating Snap Ads and measuring their performance!

Are there any sections that you wish I had written more about? Let me know in your comments below.

If you have tried the Snapchat Ad Manager, is there anything I’ve missed in this post? What tips do you have for those who are going to use the ad manager for their first time?

—

Image credit: Snapchat, Marketing Land

source https://blog.bufferapp.com/snapchat-ad-manager

Why I Think Social Media Is For Branding and Engagement, Not Traffic or Revenue

Social media is changing.

It used to be a one-to-many channel. Businesses would publish links, photos, and videos on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, hoping to reach as many people as they can and drive a high number of leads and sales.

When marketers first started using social media as a marketing channel, there was less content, less noise, and people were willing to click on almost everything they saw on their news feed.

Then, we hit content shock.

There is now more content on social platforms than people can consume. If a post doesn’t look interesting or useful, people just scroll past it. As Rank Fishkin observed, “Twitter, Facebook, et al. have become more challenging sources from which to drive traffic. Clicks are just harder to come by.”

Social media is no longer a megaphone.

It is now becoming a one-to-few — and often one-to-one — channel. Businesses and organizations that are succeeding on social media now are the ones providing personalized social experiences to their fans such as KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, NASA, and Airbnb.

Social media is becoming a conversation. Here’s why…

Social media is incredible for some things but not all things

Social media is often seen as a solution to every marketing problem. And, of course, it’s great for certain aspects of marketing including brand awareness. But the truth is, social media probably isn’t going to help you achieve every business or marketing goal you have.

For example, I believe social media is no longer a great traffic driver for most businesses. The strategy of batching and blasting marketing messages across various platforms might have been an effective way to drive clicks in the past, but not anymore. And, in mind at least, that’s not a bad thing because:

Social media is becoming an engagement channel. 

And with this shift comes new opportunities, such as incredible customer service and one-on-one conversations, which major social media platforms are embracing more and more with platforms and features like Messenger, Instagram Direct, and Twitter Direct Messages.

Engagement is also about the content you create and share across social platforms. Is it entertaining, useful, or unique? Does it encourage your audience to respond? Or is it just there to drive clicks back to your website?

The future of social media (and some might argue the past and the present of social media) is about deepening your relationships with your fans by engaging them and not simply pushing out marketing messages.

Let’s look at why this shift might be true…

4 reasons why engagement is the future of social media

1. Low organic reach and referral traffic

In recent years, organic reach on social media has fallen so low that social media is becoming a less viable channel for traffic.

Businesses are reaching fewer people on social media and getting less traffic from social media through organic means. Even publishers, businesses that heavily rely on social media for referral traffic, are getting less social referral traffic. Many major publishers have been seeing a fall in Facebook referral traffic — some as much as 50 percent.

As the amount of content on social media increases far beyond what we can consume, each social media post becomes less and less likely to be seen.

Here’s a simplified calculation: if 10 million posts are published per day by users and brands and all social media users collectively consume only one million posts per day, each post has a 10 percent chance of being seen. If the number of posts published per day increases to 100 million and all social media users still consume only one million posts per day, each post now has only a one percent chance of being seen.

The reality is that as more content is published on social media, organic reach will naturally fall.

A study by Social@Ogilvy found that Facebook organic reach has fallen to just six percent in 2014.

The number likely has fallen even further after Facebook made a change to its algorithm to prioritize posts from family and friends over those from Pages.

Social media is losing its potential as a traffic channel as more and more content are posted on social media. As Michael Stelzner, CEO and Founder of Social Media Examiner, said, “Traffic has been going down, down, down and down. For years! That’s the challenge – you’re not getting the reach or visibility and we have to be OK with that reality.”

We have to adapt accordingly.

2. The rise of social messaging (and chatbots)

While social media has been the dominant platform over the last five to 10 years, social messaging apps (messaging apps built around social media platforms) are growing much faster than social media platforms. There are now more people using the top four messaging apps than people using the top four social media apps, as reported by Business Insider.

Activate, a strategy consulting firm, predicted that 1.1 billion more people will use messaging apps by 2018, resulting in 1.5 times more people using messaging apps than people using social media apps.

The rise of social messaging signifies a change in people’s social media behavior and preferences — towards more personal, one-to-one communications. When people view social media, they are no longer just thinking about the posts on their news feed. They are also thinking about reaching your business for customer support through Twitter, receiving timely information or ordering products through your Messenger chatbot.

A company that is at the forefront of this change is KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. Apart from posting interesting content on their one-to-many channels, they have invested a lot in one-to-one channels.

• They have over 200 agents who respond to questions on social media in 14 different languages 24/7.
• They developed a Messenger chatbot that sends boarding pass, flight information, and updates to their passengers. Their passengers can also get customer support and travel directions directly through Messenger 24/7.
• They provide social customer support on WeChat and Kakao Talk, two of the most popular social messaging apps in Asia.

By engaging their social media fans on both one-to-many and one-to-one channels, they were able to gain tremendous business value. For instance, they made €25 million from social media in 2014 (this number is likely to be higher today), and their social media efforts helped to increase their Net Promoter Score from 35 in 2015 to an all-time high of 43 in 2016.

Businesses that only push out marketing content on social media will miss out the opportunity to serve customers in meaningful ways and might be left obsolete on social media.

3. People use social media to reach brands

Social media is the first place most people turn to for customer support, as Sprout Social has found. And more and more people are using social media to get help from brands. The average number of social messages that needed a response from brands had increased by 18% from 2015 to 2016.

People are not only using private social media channels such as Messenger or Twitter Direct Messages to reach businesses for help. Take a look at Airbnb’s Facebook Page and you’ll notice that its users are also commenting on its posts to get help. (And Airbnb does a great job responding and helping them.)

There’re benefits to helping customers on social media. Sprout Social also found that being responsive on social media prompts customers to purchase while ignoring customers causes less brand loyalty.

At the same time, it’s becoming easier to help your customers on social media. To meet this trend, social media platforms are developing more customer service tools to help businesses respond to their customers.

• You can let customers send you a direct message on Twitter without needing you to follow them.
• You can send automated welcome direct messages on Twitter and prompt people with the best ways to reply.
• You can manage all your Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram interactions in a unified inbox.
• You can use Smart Replies to automatically answer frequently asked questions for your Facebook Page.

Businesses have to change their approach towards social media and go beyond just publishing content. You’ll have to be there and help your customers when they ask for help.

4. Algorithms prioritize engagement

Besides engaging customers through customer service and one-on-one conversations, engagement is also about the quality of your content. Is it engaging enough to elicit positive responses from your fans?

To be seen and hear on social media (organically), you need to create content that engages your fans. The number of engagement on your social media posts influences the number of people who would see them.

If many people engage with your post, social media algorithms will take it as a sign that your post is interesting and will more likely show that post to more people. If there are few interactions (or many negative interactions such as “Hide post” on Facebook) on your post, social media algorithms will assume it is uninteresting, irrelevant, or not useful and not show it to as many people. So the more positive interactions on your posts, the more people you will reach on social media.

If your ultimate goal is traffic, leads, or conversions, then the more of such results you can potentially get. Socialbakers studied 30,000 Facebook posts by over 2,700 businesses and found that the more interactions a Page has, the higher the traffic to its website.

What’s the value of engagement?

I believe businesses will no longer join social media because they see it as a strong referral source or direct revenue channel. The primary reason to be on social media will be to build your brand through engagement.

Many businesses are already doing this — strengthening their brand through social media. Some (like KLM, Starbucks, and Nike ) help their customers quickly resolve issues through social media.

Others share content that their fans like and grow their brand through amplification from existing followers, influencers, and social ads. If you look at the social media profiles of brands like Denny’s, Oreo, and GoPro, you’ll notice how they use their content to reinforce their brand image rather than link their fans to their website or directly sell their products.

Social is a way for us to build confidence in the brand by showcasing our personality. Engage with them, inspire them and answer their questions quickly.

Hannah Pilpel, social project manager at MADE.COM

But why brand-building with social media is so important?

A customer’s journey with most businesses is not linear

Most customers rarely go from your Facebook Page to your website to your checkout page. It might look more like this:

➡️ Someone hears about your product through a friend.
➡️ On the same day, the customer sees your Facebook post, enjoys the content, and comments on it.
➡️ The following week, the customer searches on Google for a product that you sell and your website appears on the first page.
➡️ She recognizes your brand and tweeted you a question about your product.
➡️ You promptly replied her, and she decided to order the product from your website.

(Even this is a very simplified version of an actual customer journey.)

A study by Sprout Social found that 85 percent of people have to see something on social media more than once before they would purchase it. But they will also unfollow you if you post too many promotional messages.

By engaging your customers through timely customer support, one-on-one conversations, and interesting or helpful content, you can strengthen your brand image. Then, when these customers are deciding if they should purchase or continue to purchase from you, this brand equity can help win them over.

And it’s proven by research.

Social media interactions increase customer loyalty

A group of U.S. researchers studied consumers’ interactions with their favorite brands and their relationship with the brands. They found that consumers who engage with their favorite brands on social media have stronger relationships with those brands than consumers who don’t engage with their favorite brands.

Consumers who engage with their favorite brands on social media are more likely:

• to have a better evaluation of the brands,
• stay loyal to the brands, and
• recommend the brands to others.

When they trust your brand, they’re more likely to give you their email address, sign up for a webinar, or purchase your product when you ask. That’s the reason why MailChimp does so much brand marketing. Their brand marketing creates a bias for MailChimp so that when someone is choosing an email marketing platform, she will think of MailChimp first.

Branding sounds good but…

What about measurable ROI like leads and sales?

Yes, they are important, too.

Marketers and businesses will always want to justify the time, energy, and resources they spend on social media. 78 percent of social media marketers discuss social media ROI with their boss, and 42 percent have such discussions frequently, according to Simply Measured.

If social media ROI is important to you and your business, you can still keep an eye on results that are more directly measurable as you focus on brand-building on social media through engagement.

There are several ways you can measure these results such as through Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics, or Facebook Ads Manager if you are using Facebook ads. Also, as social media platforms develop more shopping features such as Pinterest’s Buyable Pins and Instagram shopping, there’ll likely be more robust analytics to show the monetary value of social media.

Here’re a few examples of how businesses are measuring their social media ROI, according to Econsultancy:

• KLM looked at sales generated from customers who visited their site directly from social media and found that these customers contributed €25 million of sales in 2014.
• BT calculated a cost saving of £2 million per year from providing social customer support as customer support through social media is cheaper than that through the phone.
• MADE.COM compared the average order value of people who went to their site from social and their site average. Their social media fans spend, on average, 4 percent more per order.
• Incontact trained half of their sales reps on social selling and found that these sales rep had a 160 percent bigger sales pipeline and achieved 215 percent more revenue than those without.

It’s important to remember that when you use social media as an engagement and brand-building channel, you might not generate many leads or sales directly from social media. But you would indirectly.

For instance, someone might discover you on social media and, a week later, find you on Google and purchase from you. We will usually credit Google for the purchase when your social media activities actually helped to influence the purchasing decision. Using tools like Google Analytics’ Multi-Channel Funnels or premium social media analytics tools, you can evaluate how your social media activities indirectly helped with lead generation and sales.

Over to you

People’s behaviors on and expectations of social media are (or have been) changing. Social media platform themselves are also adapting to meet this change.

If you want to succeed on social media, I think your primary goal on social media should be brand-building. You have to focus on the “social” of “social media” and engage your fans.

What do you think?

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We have built Buffer Reply to help businesses serve and engage with their fans more effectively on social media. If you want to build your brand and give your followers a better experience on social media, we’d love for you to give Buffer Reply a try.

Image credit: Pixabay, (feature image), Econsultancy (quote)

source https://blog.bufferapp.com/social-media-is-for-branding