6 Simple Ways You Can Use Neuroscience to Increase Marketing Productivity

Neuroscience is a multidisciplinary science that is concerned with the study of the structure and function of the nervous system. When applied to our professional lives, neuroscience can help us to unlock our greatest potential.

Increasing your meaningful productivity can have a huge impact on your day-to-day work and can greatly influence your professional success over a long period of time.

This week on the Science of Social Media, we’re examining the fascinating field of neuroscience and how it can positively influence our marketing productivity.

Think of today’s show as little tricks for your brain to work smarter, not harder.

6 Simple Ways to Use Neuroscience to Increase Marketing Productivity

What follows is a detailed summary of the episode transcript. Feel free to jump around and explore each of these top marketing lessons from history’s most influential leaders in this week’s Science of Social Media:

• Willpower and working smarter, not harder
• Start your day with difficult tasks
• Add value and meaning to your work
• Avoid multitasking
• Take a deep breath
• Create a to-do list
• Take a break and move

Let’s dive in!

Willpower and working smarter, not harder

One of core values here at Buffer is working smarter and not harder.

When we say productivity and working smarter not harder, we mean working on meaningful projects that make a big impact – not necessarily working more.

In the American Psychological Association’s annual “Stress in America” survey, participants were asked to assess their ability to make healthy lifestyle choices, and willpower was the number one reason they cited for not following through with those healthy choices.

Many people believe their lives would improve if they could boost their willpower — more control over what they eat, when they saved for retirement, and how to achieve goals.

Luckily for us, using neuroscience we are able to increase our willpower, and therefore, our meaningful productivity.

Start your day with difficult tasks

First and foremost, start your day with your difficult tasks

There’s been considerable research into willpower and one of the pioneers in this area is Roy Baumeister.

Baumeister discovered that willpower actually operates like a muscle: it can be strengthened with practice and fatigued by overuse. Willpower in the brain is fueled by glucose and it needs to replenished in order for it to perform optimally.

Willpower and self-control is at its peak first thing in the morning, so this is the best time to make yourself take on the hardest tasks of the day.

When creating your to-do list (more on that later), make sure that you carve our time in the morning for the most challenging tasks. This will help to ensure you’re starting your day on the right foot.

Add value and meaning to your work

One subject that comes up quite often when looking into the field of neuroscience is dopamine. Dopamine a neurotransmitter, which means it’s a chemical release by your nerve cells to send signals to other nerve cells.

There are a couple of different pathways for dopamine, and one of them plays a major role in the motivational component of reward-motivated behavior.

A team of Vanderbilt scientists conducted a study in 2012 analyzing the brain patterns of people they described as “go getters” and that meant they were willing to work hard for their reward, and the other group of people was “slackers” and they were not as motivated to work hard.

To quote the study “The team found that the go-getters had higher levels of dopamine in the reward and motivation part of the brain. The slackers had higher levels of dopamine in the emotion and risk part of the brain.”

Nothing will motivate you to be a go-getter if you don’t truly desire the reward that comes with the work. Tie your performance to something that contains value and meaning for you and you’ll quickly move to the go-getter side of dopamine production.

Avoid multitasking

We all like to believe that we’re master multitaskers.

NPR interviewed neuroscientist professor Earl Miller from MIT and he shared some interesting thoughts about multitasking. In short, the human brain is not engineered to multitask.

Miller is quoted as saying, “People can’t multitask very well, and when people say they can, they’re deluding themselves, the brain is very good at deluding itself.”

What we can do, however, is shift our focus from one thing to the next with astonishing speed.

The way to be most productive is to focus your full attention on one task at a time. Give it everything you’ve got. Then, once you’ve completed the task, move onto the next one and give that your full attention.

When you’re creating content for social, close out your email, turn off Slack, put your phone in your bag and focus fully on the content.

Take a deep breath

When you’re feeling stressed or overwhelmed, take a deep breath.

In a new study, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and their colleagues have identified a handful of nerve cells in the brainstem that connect breathing to states of mind.

The study demonstrated that slow breathing induces tranquility to your body. And if you think of it, that makes sense. Because if you were to start breathing really quickly right now you’d feel the state of your body starting to change completely.

We know that as marketers and business owners, tasks can really start to pile up throughout the day. Sometimes we feel like we won’t be able to complete everything, let alone at a high level.

Breathing not only reduces stress and increases focus, but it helps to bring a sense of clarity of what really needs to get done and what can be put off for another time.

When you have a million things to do during the day, that clarity is invaluable.

Create a to-do list

There’s nothing like a good to-do list.

It turns out we are not alone in our love of lists, our brains also love lists. That’s because it’s the most effective way for the brain to receive and organize information. Recent research suggests that the key to a more organized mind and productive brain is to make to-do lists.

Neuroscience tells us that the brain’s working memory stores information on a short-term basis.

According to Dr. Daniel Levitin, most people can hold about four things in their mind at one time. When we ask our brain to store more than is optimal, it causes our performance to decline.

Since our brain has an attention filter, urgent matters will be at the forefront. At the same time, our brain doesn’t forget those less important matters either, and won’t hesitate to remind you of them somewhere around 3:00am. If you have a to-do list, your brain can rest because it knows you’re on it.

Research also suggests that when we process information, we do so spatially.

Lists appeal to our general tendency to categorize things—in fact, it’s hard for us not to categorize something the moment we see it—since our brains chunk information into short, distinct components.

Take a break and move

Research into neurogenesis, the ability of certain areas of the brain to grow new cells, indicates that we can foster new brain cell growth through exercise. Our brain has the amazing ability to rebuild and rewire every day.

The area of the brain linked to learning and memory is called the hippocampus. Research shows that endurance exercise sparks new neuron growth in the hippocampus as a protein (called FNDC5) is released into the bloodstream when we sweat.

There’s also other productivity benefits as well.

Exercise can help boost alertness. When you exercise, you’re increasing blood flow to the brain, which can help sharpen your awareness and make you more ready to tackle your next big project.

According to the University of Cambridge, exercise releases serotonin into your brain that helps you feel better and improves your state of mind, making the stresses of work easier to handle.

Daily exercise results in:

• Improved concentration
• Sharper memory
• Faster learning
• Prolonged mental stamina
• Enhanced creativity
• Lower stress

An incredible tool in your neuroscience toolbox.

How to say hello to us

We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!

• Hailley on Twitter and Hailley’s Website
• Brian on Twitter and Brian’s Website

Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Facebook, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.

Enjoy the show? It’d mean the world to us if you’d be up for giving us a rating and review on iTunes!

—

About The Science of Social Media podcast

The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode.  It’s our hope that you’ll join our 27,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!

The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.

source https://buffer.com/resources/neuroscience

Inside Look: How Two Teams Share a Social Media Inbox

8 Unexpected Marketing Lessons from History’s Most Influential Leaders

This week we’re taking a journey through time and uncovering some of the greatest, yet most unexpected marketing lessons from some of history’s most influential thinkers, philosophers, and leaders.

You may not realize it now, but there is so much we can learn from leaders like Socrates and Oprah and Cleopatra. Much of what they would consider their mantra has a ton of implications on marketing today.

In episode 141 of the Science of Social Media, Brian and Hailley break down concepts like the Socratic Method, transparency, rhetoric, and lots more.

8 Unexpected Marketing Lessons from History’s Most Influential Leaders

What follows is a detailed summary of the episode transcript. Feel free to jump around and explore each of these top marketing lessons from history’s most influential leaders in this week’s Science of Social Media:

• 1. Aristotle
• 2. Socrates
• 3. Oprah Winfrey
• 4. Abraham Lincoln
• 5. Catherine the Great
• 6. Martin Luther King Jr.
• 7. Cleopatra
• 8. Eleanor Roosevelt

Let’s dive in!

1. Aristotle

One of the most well-known philosophies of the Greek philosopher, Aristotle (born in 384 BC), is his idea of persuasion, otherwise known as rhetoric.

He breaks down persuasion into the three categories: Logos, Pathos, and Ethos.

These three concepts can be valuable for content marketers, writers, and bloggers. After all, isn’t persuasion one of the most important parts in marketing?

• Logos: The application of logic in efforts to persuade. Logos tries to persuade an audience using logical arguments and supportive evidence.
• Pathos: Playing to human emotions. Using anecdotes and stories, marketers can connect with their audience, adding a human element to content.
• Ethos: The concept of ethics. It works off the idea that it is impossible to persuade anyone of anything if you’re not credible.

You must establish your credibility and reputation as a writer. This is done through personal branding and your ability to build a following. Ideally this would results in brand building and thought leadership.

2. Socrates

Next up on our list of marketing lessons from historical leaders, born 90 years before Aristotle, is Socrates.

Those that took a middle school science class learned about the Socratic Method. The Socratic Method is used in asking questions and posing theories to investigate and to stimulate the foundation of new ideas.

The Socratic Method applies to the interactive aspect of marketing. Get your readers involved by asking them questions or looking for their ideas on certain issues and engage them with interactive content.

Invite your audience to engage in a lively debate. Actively involve them in your marketing process so that your team can generate new product ideas, marketing campaigns, and content topics based on the feedback you’ve received directly from the people that matter most.

Most of all, don’t forget that the Socratic Method applies internally as well. Your team should be debating and questioning trends, norms, traditions, and ideas at all times.

3. Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Winfrey has built much of the rapport she has with fans by being honest throughout her career.

Oprah stayed true to herself and was honest to her audience through ups and downs. She also held her guests to this standard as well – ensuring that honesty was always the number one priority.

The benefit of this honesty and transparency in marketing is that it helps to build trust with your customers. Think of all of the brands that create a memorable customer experience by being genuine, human and transparent.

A modern social media strategy demands authenticity and being transparent is something you can’t ignore. That is one of the most important marketing lessons Oprah has taught us from her success.

4. Abraham Lincoln

As the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln became famous primarily because of his contributions to the abolition of slavery and the American Civil War. But aside from his political and human rights achievements, Lincoln is also known for his oratory skills.

He has articulated some of the most memorable lines throughout his political career. In fact, his Gettysburg Address in 1863 became the most quoted speech in US history.

His words live on as we apply them in the perspective of marketing, particularly when it comes to planning and preparation.

Lincoln once said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four hours sharpening the axe.”

Marketers should understand that the more time spent on preparation, the less work they have to do in executing.

In addition, Lincoln taught us that it’s not about the amount of hours you work or the number of projects you launch, it’s about the quality of those hours and projects.

Focusing on fewer, but more impactful projects and campaigns will improve your brand’s results and most likely make you more successful in your career as well.

5. Catherine the Great

One of the most influential political leaders of the Eighteenth Century, Catherine the Great was said to have played an important role in improving the welfare of Russian serfs.

She placed emphasis on the arts and helped to cement Russia as one of the dominant countries in Europe.

Catherine the Great is a shining example to modern marketers that it often takes incredible courage to make your vision come true.

In Catherine the Great’s time, smallpox was a terrible problem throughout what is now the united kingdom and Russia. Catherine heard of the new inoculation treatments in England and risked the entire dynasty to travel and get her and her son inoculated.

We know that creativity requires original thinking and transcending traditional ideas, yet we’re so inundated with incoming information, that it becomes harder and harder to truly think for ourselves.

6. Martin Luther King Jr.

Very few people in American history are as celebrated as Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister and social activist who led the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

When examining King from a marketing perspective, he teaches us that not only carefully crafting, but truly believing in and embodying your brand message is critical for people to buy into what you’re saying.

As marketers, it’s only when we truly believe in our message and stand behind it 100% that can it be successful.

Carefully crafting your message is time well spent and pays ten-fold in the long run.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech is world-famous still today. We might compare that world-famous effect with going viral. Messages that are particularly well-crafted spread like wildfire throughout the Internet.

The marketing lessons bestowed from MLK Jr. include saying what you want to say as quickly and clearly as you can.

Use words everyone understands. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech isn’t an hour long or even 30 minutes. It’s 17-minutes in total and something that changed the course of history forever.

7. Cleopatra

One of the more interesting, yet fairly unknown historical leaders on our list is Cleopatra. C

Cleopatra ruled ancient Egypt for almost three decades. Well-educated and clever, Cleopatra could speak 6 different languages and was known as a strong and charismatic ruler. During her reign, she forged political alliances with Roman military leaders Julius Caesar and Mark Antony – which helped to hold many regions together over decades.

In terms of marketing lessons, Cleopatra had an incredible knack for seeing the bigger picture.

As marketers it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day: writing articles, posting to social media, analyzing our efforts, and everything that comes with the role.

Sometimes we forget to look up and ask: “why”? Why are we doing this? How does what we’re doing at this moment contribute to the greater goal?

We need to understand how our tactics relate to the strategy and matching our behavior to that understanding.

8. Eleanor Roosevelt

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

Eleanor Roosevelt is a perfect example of a leader that practiced creative innovation – including helping redefine and shape the role of the First Lady.

She not only participated in radio broadcasts, she also authored a daily syndicated column, held press conferences to discuss women’s issues, and was an active supporter of civil rights policies and New Deal social-welfare programs.

Her ability to redefine expectations is a reminder that great marketers always look for opportunities to break the mold. To get to the next level in marketing, we must think outside the box to what seems unimaginable.

Make space to think. Make space to challenge assumptions. Make space to break things.

So what is it that you hope to accomplish? Does it seem too big or too scary to do?

We hope you challenge that notion and set your goals as high as they can go.

How to say hello to us

We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!

• Hailley on Twitter and Hailley’s Website
• Brian on Twitter and Brian’s Website

Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Facebook, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.

Enjoy the show? It’d mean the world to us if you’d be up for giving us a rating and review on iTunes!

—

About The Science of Social Media podcast

The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode.  It’s our hope that you’ll join our 27,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!

The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.

source https://buffer.com/resources/marketing-lessons

The Art of Copywriting: How to Write Better Captions that Get Engagement

7 Easy Ways to Improve Your Retargeting Ad Campaigns

Retargeting, also known as remarketing, is a powerful form of digital advertising in which audiences (potential customers) are targeted with specific ads based on their behavior online.

In other words, retargeting campaigns turn internet “window shoppers” into real paying customers for your business.

While we as marketers would love to live in a world in which a majority of online visitors became customers, the truth is the buying process is extremely complicated. In fact, roughly 98 percent of your website traffic won’t convert into customers upon first visit.

Whether you’re just getting started or a seasoned expert, these 7 easy retargeting advertising tips will help take your campaigns to the next level.

7 Easy Ways to Improve Your Retargeting Ad Campaigns

Feel free to jump around and explore the 7 ways to improve your Facebook retargeting campaigns:

• Retargeting Overview
• Tip #1: Understanding the buyer journey
• Tip #2: Improve audience targeting
• Tip #3: Keep a close eye on advertising frequency
• Tip #4: Experiment until you find a highly-compelling offer
• Tip #5: Utilize Dynamic Creative Ads on Facebook
• Tip #6: Set up simple sequential engagement campaigns
• Tip #7: Embrace the emotional side of marketing

Let’s dive in!

Retargeting overview

As we mentioned in the introduction, roughly 98 percent of shoppers are visiting your store or website and leaving without ever buying from you. Check out this data from Statista on the trend over time:

What if there was a way to communicate with those people?

What if you could sell more products to people that are already familiar with your brand?

Luckily for us as marketers, there is! It involves a highly-effective marketing strategy known as retargeting. Retargeting helps you win back visitors — turning them into customers, email subscribers, product advocates, and more.

Retargeting ad campaigns play into one of the oldest concepts in marketing: The Rule of Seven.

The Rule of Seven simply states that the prospective buyer should hear or see your marketing message at least seven times before they buy it from you.

It is predicated on the notion of building trust with the buyer over the course of several messages or interactions.

Which brings us to the seven easy improvements you can make to your advertising campaigns starting today.

Tip #1: Understand the buyer journey (or buyer cycle)

Understanding the buyer journey (or buyer cycle) is crucial and applies to all of your retargeting campaigns.

It’s similar to the sales funnel, in that the process begins with more customers at the top in the awareness stage and ends up at the bottom with much fewer people in the conversion stage. Here’s a nifty graph showing this process from McKinsey & Company:

Retargeting is intended to capture more of those consumers as they proceed through the funnel. But if you’re not careful, you can actually damage conversion rates by ignoring the buy cycle.

If you’re considering letting your retargeting ad campaigns roll along on their own: don’t do it.

It’s not just about showing your ad to the wrong person multiple times, which by the way, can be quite annoying to customers.

It’s more about losing all awareness of the performance of your ads. If there’s one thing that marketers need, it’s a detailed understanding of their data and the effectiveness of their marketing initiatives. That means understanding what’s successful and what’s not. Who’s converting on what? Which ad set or ad creatives have the highest ROI?

Tip #2: Improve audience targeting

We’ve talked to lots of brands that start out with targeting anyone and everyone that visits their website in their retargeting campaigns.

Needless to say that approach isn’t always the most effective.

Customers visit to your website for lots of different reasons. They visit different pages. The pages they visit represent different buyer intents. Perhaps they’re not looking to buy your product at all.

The key is to match your custom advertising audiences to those shoppers’ intents.

For example, if you’re an ecommerce brand and someone visits your website shopping for shoes, make sure that you segment those people into a custom audience labeled “shoe shoppers” or “footwear.”

Over the past year at Buffer we’ve created various audiences based on the subject matter our visitors are interested in learning about. We have a custom audience for traffic to all Facebook marketing pages, Instagram marketing, customer experience, case studies, etc.

That allows us to be hyper-focused on what type of content we deliver, which helps to drive down costs.

Tip #3: Keep a close eye on advertising frequency

Frequency is something that many advertisers don’t necessarily consider in their campaigns, but should be thinking about in terms of improving their overall performance.

A recent study on U.S. consumer emotions associated with retargeting ads determined that ad frequency had a negative impact on buyer emotions.

Heavy ad frequency changes a buyer’s outlook from positive to negative. It can be intrusive, annoying, and worse yet — it may cause customers to become angry with your brand. Which will affect current and future sales.

Make sure to implement some sort of ad frequency limit on your campaigns. At Buffer, we’ve implemented a frequency limit of three. If the audience starts seeing the ad more than twice, we’ll either shut it off or change up the ad creative (which is a best-practice regardless).

Tip #4: Experiment until you find a highly-compelling offer

We had the pleasure of hosting Facebook ad expert Molly Pittman the Buffer Podcast back in episode 42 and she discussed this idea of lead magnets.

Lead magnets are your most compelling call-to-action. Something that you know your customers love and that other people will love, too.

If you’re not sure what that lead magnet could be, start with a quick analysis of your website traffic. What products, pages, articles are people visiting most frequently?

Then if you want to take it a step deeper, analyze conversion rates for those products or pages. In other words, what’s the total number of people that convert from a specific page compared to total number of visitors?

The higher the conversion rate, the better the magnet.

At Buffer, we had no idea where to start with retargeting. After some investigation, we found that one of our posts on Instagram marketing was generating a ton of traffic and had an unusually high conversion rate to product trialists.

Today that ad has driven more than 175,000 visits to our website and thousands of product trials.

Tip #5: Utilize Dynamic Creative Ads on Facebook

You’ve probably experimented with dynamic product ads on Facebook, but have you tried dynamic creative ads?

Dynamic creative ads are a tremendous advertising tool because they ultimately take the guessing work out of your advertising copy.

You can upload multiple images or videos, headline and description variations, as well as CTA button texts – and Facebook will test and automatically optimize for the best combinations. This graphic from WeRSM demonstrates this concept perfectly:

It’s important to note here that, because Dynamic Creative Ads only work with Traffic, Conversions, and App Install campaigns, it’s best to use these types of ads in the middle and the bottom of your sales funnel.

For instance, if your ecommerce business sells sunglasses, you could easily test standard product photos, action shots, vs. customer testimonials in your ads.

Facebook will then put your budget to the ads that are performing best.

Tip #6: Set up simple sequential engagement campaigns

When setting up sequential engagement campaigns, you’re taking a very large audience and converting them into a smaller, more qualified audience.

This is different from segmenting your audience because this is based on people who interact with your content. It’s a great way to grow your brand awareness while also moving people down the funnel.

Let’s say your a small-to-medium sized ecommerce brand that sells unique hair products.

Start by boosting a video that has performed well organically on Facebook or Instagram.

After a while, the views of that video will slowly start to pile up. You can then create a custom audience based on people who have watched 3 seconds, 10 seconds, 50%, 75%, or even 100% of the video and target them with an ad that makes sense sequentially.

Blenders Eyewear does an incredible job of this – delivering ads on Instagram when and where they are most relevant.

Put yourself in the mind of your audience here. Think, if I saw this ad, what would be the next logical step? Then map that out over the course of a few days to a few weeks.

Tip #7: Embrace the emotional element of advertising

We all like to believe that we’re intelligent buyers who always act rationally, but that’s only partially true. Our emotional side has a lot to say when it comes to purchasing products.

A simple list of product features might convince the rational self in some users, but it tends to have no effect on their emotional self. Our emotional self-doesn’t care about features, that part of us wants to see and imagine the benefits.

Coca-Cola’s recent Super Bowl ad, A Coke is a Coke, is a wonderful example of how emotions can elicit strong feelings of connection and understanding:

It’s important to address both the rational and emotional side of potential customers in your ads. Speak like a human. Use emotive language. Talk about benefits, not features.

Help people imagine a life with your product – one they never knew existed.

How to say hello to us

We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!

• Hailley on Twitter and Hailley’s Website
• Brian on Twitter and Brian’s Website

Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Facebook, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.

Enjoy the show? It’d mean the world to us if you’d be up for giving us a rating and review on iTunes!

—

About The Science of Social Media podcast

The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode.  It’s our hope that you’ll join our 27,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!

The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.

source https://buffer.com/resources/retargeting

Does Vertical Video Make a Difference? We Spent $6,000 on Tests to Find Out

There has been much discussion recently on industry-leading publications about the effectiveness of video on social media.

For example, did you know that video posts on Facebook receive at least 59 percent more engagement than other post types?

Since our 2017 research with Animoto comparing square vs. landscape video, little has been published around the impact of video format on overall video engagement.

Specifically, vertical video vs. square video.

While we know that square video (1:1) results in 30-35 percent more video views and an 80-100 percent increase in engagement compared to landscape video (16:9), we wanted to know how vertical video stacks up on Instagram and Facebook (both within the News Feed and Stories).

Which is why we teamed up with our friends at Animoto once again to test (and test again) the hypothesis that vertical video would perform better than square video on social media.

We were shocked by the results!

Today we’re excited to share our research with you along with several actionable takeaways for marketers looking to improve their social media video marketing results in 2019.

Author’s Note: We’ll be talking a lot about great video marketing tools in this post. Our must-haves are Animoto’s iPhone app for vertical videos, Animoto’s web app for square videos, and Buffer for sharing. Feel free to grab a subscription from each before we get started.

Table of Contents

Below are the full details from our study on everything from our vertical video hypothesis to the surprising results! Here’s a quick look at what we’ll cover:

• The vertical video and mobile hypothesis
• 3 important video marketing takeaways
• Other key video marketing learnings
• Overall vertical video research conclusion
• What’s next for video marketing?

Let’s do this!

The vertical video and mobile hypothesis

This research idea with Animoto all came from one simple statistic: square video takes up 78% more real estate in a person’s mobile newsfeed than does landscape video – making square video more engaging, more effective, and easier to watch.

And since square video outperformed landscape video in almost every category, we hypothesized that vertical video would eclipse square in a brand new study.

But why is video – particularly mobile video – such an important part of your social media strategy?

According to a recent report from Nielsen, U.S. adults are spending 10 hours and 24 minutes per day interacting with media, whether that be watching, listening to, or reading content across all of their devices.

And shockingly, mobile phones (smartphones) alone accounted for 65% of total digital usage, up from 62% in Q1 2018:

As mobile usage continues to increase year-over-year, our social media and video marketing strategies must evolve along with the expanded use to focus on mobile-first experiences.

Sometimes that’s as simple as formatting the video to fit natively within the platform.

3 important video marketing takeaways

Video is leading the way with social media marketing and so we’re super excited to share this actionable research with you.

By the end of this article, you’ll be equipped with data-backed ideas and insights that you can apply to your own videos today.

But first, a few key takeaways to set the study up!

1. Facebook News Feed: Use vertical video to drive traffic

In all of the experiments we conducted, we consistently found that vertical video outperformed square video within the Facebook News Feed. First let’s look at the cost per click (CPC) comparison:

• Buffer: Cost per click (CPCs) 26 percent less expensive with vertical video
• Animoto: Cost per click (CPCs) 38 percent less expensive with vertical video

Next, let’s take a look at the cost per view (CPV) comparison:

• Buffer: Cost per view (CPVs) 68 percent less expensive with vertical video
• Animoto: Cost per view (CPVs) 26 percent less expensive with vertical video

Since the video tests (vertical vs. square) were identical in content, theme, length, headline, caption, and more, it came as quite the surprise that vertical video outperformed square by such a significant margin (as much as 68 percent less expensive in cost per view).

It’s also interesting to note that not only did vertical video outperform square in the Facebook News Feed, but Facebook outperformed Instagram in overall cost per click (CPC) within the feed. An important takeaway for advertisers.

Buffer averaged $0.29 CPC on Facebook and $0.51 CPC on Instagram. Animoto averaged $0.32 CPC on Facebook and $1.31 CPC on Instagram.

2. Instagram Feed vs. Stories: Stories are a great way to inspire action

When looking at the Instagram Feed vs. Stories, it became immediately clear that Instagram Stories are a great way to inspire people to take action. In both the case of Buffer and Animoto, Stories consistently reduced advertising costs in regards to cost per thousand impressions (CPM) and cost per view (CPV):

• Animoto: Stories 57 percent less expensive for CPMs and CPCs than the feed
• Buffer: Stories 50 percent less expensive for CPMs and 30 percent for CPCs than the feed

Cost per click (CPC) data:

Cost per one thousand impressions (CPM) data:

However, it’s important to note that costs actually increased with Stories compared to the feed when measuring cost per view (CPV):

• Animoto: 108 percent more expensive on 3-second CPV and 65 percent more expensive on 50% total watch time CPV
• Buffer: 71 percent more expensive on CPV 3 seconds and 21 percent more expensive on 50% total watch time CPV

As many of you savvy marketers might have guessed at this point, we witnessed a rise in cost per view as cost per click decreased.

We believe that this is largely due to the fact that it is hard to get people to watch your entire video or when they’re too busy taking action such as “swiping up” or clicking on a link.

Overall, Instagram Stories are a great way to get people to take action and a big opportunity for brands to utilize in 2019.

3. Instagram News Feed: Use vertical video to generate engagement

The final big takeaway from our research is that the Instagram Feed is a powerful platform for driving engagement when compared to Facebook (News Feed & Stories) and Instagram Stories… almost too good!

Reversing the Instagram Feed data from takeaway #2, you’ll notice that 3-second CPVs were 91 percent less expensive on average for Buffer and Animoto. In addition, 50 percent total watch time CPVs were 43 percent less expensive on average.

But which format drives more engagement within the Instagram Feed? Turns out it’s vertical video!

• Animoto: Vertical video resulted in 13 percent more 3-second video views and 157 percent more 50% total watch time views
• Buffer: Vertical video resulted in 6 percent more 3-second video views and 187 percent more 50% total watch time views

The practical takeaway here is that the Instagram Feed is a great way to boost awareness around your product and generate engagement.

Other key video marketing learnings

In addition to the three key learnings above, our research pointed to some other unexpected takeaways that you might be able to apply to your video marketing strategy.

1. Facebook marketing is alive and well

We’ve discussed the power of Facebook marketing (here and in previous studies) and found that it remains a viable way for brands and businesses to reach target audiences. Particularly, if you’re looking for an inexpensive way to drive traffic to your website.

In all of our tests, we found that Facebook consistently generated a lower CPC than its Instagram counterpart.

While Instagram was the most effective way to generate interactions and engagement in our tests, Facebook emerged as an extremely reliable way to drive traffic.

We’ve seen this hold true over the past two years at Buffer as well. Our most successful social media advertising campaign of all time – a campaign that is still running today – runs on the Facebook News Feed:

This campaign has generated more than 169,000 link clicks and reached more than 1,500,000 people since launching in April 2017.

The best part is that it’s a super simple ad concept:

While brands and businesses flock to Instagram in 2019 in search of a new promising advertising platform, look for Facebook to continue to offer a low-cost, action-based alternative.

In terms of what type of content to create for Facebook, remember that, on average, video posts receive at least 59 percent more engagement than other post types.

2. Highly-produced “polished” video content doesn’t always win

One of the more interesting portions of our experiment revolved around testing what we called “organic” vs. “polished” video content.

• Organic videos are what you would imagine as DIY-style. These videos didn’t include any B-roll, special effects, transitions, or other more produced elements. In other words, they looked like they were made by an amateur.
• Polished videos are much more produced. These videos included studio lighting, B-roll, special effects, transitions, and other elements that give them a professional feel.

With our research, we wanted to know if spending more time, resources, and money on producing polished videos actually resulted in greater results than organic DIY videos.

We found that there was no statistically significant difference in the results.

In fact, in many cases, organic DIY videos outperformed polished videos on both Facebook and Instagram.

In collaboration with Animoto, Smarties ran their own experiments to test whether or not highly-produced video ads outperformed organic DIY video ads on Instagram Stories:

Their team found that organic DIY videos resulted in a 50 percent decrease in cost per 10-second video view on their highest performing ad. In their case, unpolished smartphone imagery was up to 2x more effective at capturing their viewer’s attention.

All of this to say that it’s more important to experiment with a variety of video types and formats than it is to work on perfecting a single video. The more video content you publish, the more feedback you’ll receive from your audience, and the quicker you’ll improve.

3. Instagram Stories ads one of the biggest opportunities in 2019

As a result of this experiment, we see Instagram Stories as one of the biggest opportunities for brands and businesses in 2019. It’s why we built a tool called Stories Creator dedicated to helping brands create thumb-stopping Stories content.

And though Instagram Stories now has an incredible 500 million people around the world using the channel on a daily basis, it remains a relatively untapped advertising resource.

“Right now, one of the interesting things about Stories is there’s a benefit to being an early adopter… the pricing is really attractive. And so we think the mix shift to Stories is a big opportunity for us. And it’s going to take time to continue to get advertisers in, but we’re very happy with demand to date,” explained Sheryl Sandberg in Facebook’s recent Q4 earnings call.

We discussed the impact of Stories in this research above, but other big brands such as Bustle, Nike, Square, and more have experienced similar results as a part of their strategies.

Blenders Eyewear, for example, has generated thousands in revenue for their products using Stories ads – leveraging special announcements like a much anticipated restock, flash sale, giveaway and any limited time promos:

We’ve seen similar results when we use Instagram Stories ads to promote our blog posts and podcast as well. Our Instagram Stories ads cost just $0.06 – $0.12 per click when a typical Facebook feed ad usually costs around $0.30 – $0.60 per click.

Multiply that cost savings by thousands of dollars in ad spend and it’s a no-brainer in choosing Instagram Stories as our primary social media advertising channel in 2019.

Overall vertical video research conclusion

If we were to boil down this research to one key point, it would be that businesses and brands must keep up with mobile-centric video trends if they want to succeed on social media in 2019. A mobile-centric strategy relies heavily on vertical video and creating content that feels native to each platform.

As we mentioned in the beginning, mobile phones alone accounted for 65% of total digital usage in Q2 2018 (up from 62% in Q1 2018) – with that number growing by the day.

Everything from your website to the content you create for social media must focus on the mobile experience. Sheryl Sandberg puts it perfectly when she mentions:

One of the challenges that marketers have is keeping up where consumers are. If you think about our history, people made the shift to mobile before marketers did. And I think one of the successes we’ve had is we made it easier for advertisers to move into a mobile environment.

For marketers, the constant challenge is making it easier for your audience and customers to consume content when and where they want it. Not when and where it’s convenient for you, but when and where it’s convenient for them.

Luckily for us, Facebook and Instagram are making it easier than ever for marketers to provide a mobile-first experience.

It all comes down to whether or not you are willing to be an early adopter, experiment with vertical and square video, try new things, and always be looking to the future of social media.

What’s next for video marketing?

We’re in the midst of a video revolution. The traditional 16:9, landscape format is being replaced by a new, 9:16, vertical format that has fast become the default for video creation and consumption.

Vertical video used to be seen as a mistake —something people do when they forget to turn their phone horizontally while filming — but since the rise of platforms like Instagram Stories, vertical video has taken over and become an innovative way for individuals and businesses to tell stories.

Over one billion people use the vertical video format on Facebook-owned properties like Instagram and WhatsApp alone — and even YouTube has now embraced vertical video on the web and mobile.

Vertical video has changed video production. Anyone can now create incredible video content from a smartphone — no need for cameras, expensive editing suites, it can all be done in the palm of your hand.

Interested in creating  your own vertical videos? Check out Animoto’s Social Video Maker iPhone app designed for just that. Their web app is great for mobile-friendly square videos. We used Animoto to help generate more than 2,000,000 video views on social media in 2018.

source https://blog.bufferapp.com/vertical-video

The 10 Top Social Media Tools Brands are Using to Succeed in 2019

Marketers are faced with an ever-growing list of responsibilities. From social media marketing to customer experience and advertising, it can be a challenge to stay on top of everything.

Luckily for us, there are a plethora of great social media tools on the market to help you succeed in your role and stay productive.

Tools for content curation, discovery, scheduling, publishing, analytics, and more can be used to enhance your effectiveness.

This week on The Science of Social Media, we’re exploring the top 10 social media tools brands are using to succeed in 2019. Utilizing these tools in your daily workflows will help improve results across the board.

Let’s dive in!

The 10 top social media tools to try in 2019

Here are some of the most-used social media tools used by some of the world’s top brands:

• #1: BuzzSumo
• #2: Google Trends
• #3: Buffer Publish
• #4: Canva
• #5: Unsplash
• #6: Animoto
• #7: Feedly
• #8: Buffer Reply
• #9: Native Analytics
• #10: Todoist
• Honorable Mentions

1. BuzzSumo

Website: https://buzzsumo.com/

Pricing: Plans start at $79/month

Details:

BuzzSumo is a tool that lets you find the most shared content and trending influencers. You can use it to analyze which content performs best for any topic and all you need to do to get started is to search for a topic or a domain.

Through BuzzSumo you’re able all gather a better understanding of your impact on social media and develop smarter content strategies by seeing which of your own pages were engaged with the most. BuzzSumo will break the results down by Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit shares.

This provides the added benefit of being able to see which articles are performing well across the web without having to constantly monitor multiple social channels.

Similar tools: Ahrefs, Meltwater, Mention

2. Google Trends

Website: https://trends.google.com/trends/

Pricing: Free

Details:

Google Trends is a completely free tool that Google created to help anyone search for trending topics online.

Brands use it to monitor notable things that are happening in the world. Many professionals use this as a way to discover and share information related to what’s most popular right now.

You can also use Google Trends to monitor keywords to see if they are trending and how their current volume compares to previous months and years. You can then use this information to inform your content and social media marketing strategy.

Similar tools: Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, WordStream

3. Buffer Publish

Website: https://buffer.com/

Pricing: Free (paid plans start at $15/month)

Details:

Buffer is a social media marketing platform designed to make it easy for businesses and marketing teams to schedule posts, analyze performance, and manage all their accounts in one place.

For example, Buffer allows you to set up a schedule for your social media profiles, and after you add content to your Buffer queue, it will publish at the times you’ve designated.

Buffer also provides a robust analytics dashboard so that you can see which of your posts are most popular on social media, and easily Rebuffer them to your queue.

In addition to our web application, we also have both Android and iOS apps as well as a fantastic Chrome Extension that’s great for Buffering while you’re browsing the web or on the go.

Similar tools: Hootsuite, Falcon.io, Sprout Social

4. Canva

Website: https://www.canva.com/

Pricing: Free (Canva for Work starts at $12.95/month)

Details:

Another fantastic tool that absolutely every brand or business online should know about is Canva.

Many times social media managers and marketers need to be able to create beautiful images without a designer. It’s what makes up part of a great social media strategy.

Canva is the tool so many marketers rely on for making great-looking social media images quickly. You can use the ready-made templates, icons, and illustrations to make your images look professional without having to do much of the actual design work.

Canva has an easy to use drag-and-drop interface plus a massive library of over two million graphic elements.

Similar tools: Crello, Buffer Stories Creator, Bannersnack

5. Unsplash

Website: https://unsplash.com/

Pricing: Free

Details:

One of our favorite tools in the design, photography, and video space is Unsplash. Unsplash is a massive library of free professional photos you can use — free!

Unsplash photos are really popular with many social media marketers because they can help give your content a professional, polished look.

And there are so many Unsplash collections to explore. We recommend finding a couple of creators whose photos you really enjoy and following them so you can always find their latest work.

Similar tools: Pexels, Storyblocks, Videvo

6. Animoto

Website: https://animoto.com/

Pricing: Plans start at $5/month

Details:

Animoto is one of our go-to social media tools for quickly creating stunning marketing videos.

Their video maker turns your photos and video clips into professional content in just a few minutes. They describe it as “fast and shockingly simple,” – and we would agree with that.

There are so many benefits to being able to quickly create engaging marketing videos. Video is a content format that we know a lot of people struggle with, but Animoto helps to bridge that gap.

We’ve used it to create quick recaps of recent blog posts for social media, videos promoting a big announcement, and videos around product launches.

Using Animoto, there are plenty of opportunities for you to add value to your audiences’ lives.

Similar tools: PowToon, Adobe Spark, Crello

7. Feedly

Website: https://feedly.com/

Pricing: Free (paid plans start at $5.41/month)

Details:

Our next tool is Feedly. Feedly is great for so many things. Maybe you work with influencers and want to follow their blogs, or you need to keep up on industry news, or any other reasons that you might visit several websites. Instead, you can add all those RSS feeds to Feedly and see them there. A huge time saver.

Feedly is also great for content ideation. You can add several of the blogs, writers, and publishers whose content you like to one feed and see them in one glimpse.

It even has a Buffer Publish integration so you can schedule your content to go out right from the Feedly dashboard.

We also want to give Flipboard a quick shoutout here, too. While it’s not an RSS aggregator like Feedly, you can follow topics on Flipboard and it curates the world’s news stories to help you stay informed.

We’ve used Feedly to follow specific influencers and industry news, and Flipboard to keep up to date with bigger stories.

Similar tools: Flipboard, Quora, Pocket

8. Buffer Reply

Website: https://buffer.com/reply/

Pricing: Plans start at $50/month

Details:

This next tool is one of our very own at Buffer: Reply. I think we’ve mentioned it a few times on the show but we’ve never gone too deep.

Buffer Reply makes social media engagement easy for marketing and support teams who need to respond to social conversations. It’s all in one inbox.

What’s great is that through Reply you can see social conversations across social networks:

• On Twitter, you can see public tweets that @ mention your handle, direct messages, and any searches you have set up for keywords or hashtags.
• On Facebook, you can see comments on your Facebook Page posts and ads, visitor posts, private messages, and reviews.
• And for Instagram business profiles, you can see comments on your posts and ads as well.

It’s a single inbox where you can see all of these conversations happening. It’s a huge time saver. In our case, our customer support team and social media manager, Bonnie, spend a lot of time in Reply every day, and we know that when someone reaches out, they would be getting an answer from us.

Similar tools: Hootsuite, Mention, Sprout Social 

9. Native Analytics

We would be remiss if we didn’t mention native analytics for each social platform, which is completely free.

Let’s quickly go over the top three, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Facebooks Analytics

Under the Insights tab on your Facebook Page, there is just so much information. Everything you ever wanted to know about your engagement, number of likes and followers, how your posts are doing, and, of course, Facebook’s Pages to Watch which lets you compare the performance of your Page and posts with similar Pages on Facebook.

You also get insights for Facebook Groups so if you run a Group definitely check those out.

Instagram Analytics

With Instagram Insights, you can see activity around how frequently users interact with your posts, see how your posts are performing over time, and find out where your audience is from as well as their age range, gender, and when they are online.

Twitter Analytics

Starting with Twitter, their analytics can reveal a lot of valuable data about your audience, how well you’re engaging your following, and what your top performing content is.

All you have to do is go to analytics.twitter.com to log in and start learning more about your audience and their interests.

10. Todoist

Website: https://todoist.com/

Pricing: Free (plans start at $3/month)

Details:

The last tool we want to mention today is related to your productivity as someone managing social media: Todoist.

Specifically, within Todoist, I have created a free Social Media Calendar by Buffer that you can use to make sure that your brand and business are posting to important social accounts on a regular basis.

This type of calendar is important because, by consistently posting great content, you’ll be able to grow your audience, increase engagement, and build a community online.

This sample social media calendar is based on real content and scheduling times from Buffer’s own social media accounts.

Similar tools: Wunderlist, Trello, Any.Do

Honorable mentions (more social media tools)

Although we couldn’t cover all of our favorite social media tools in this episode, we wanted to share some more of our favorites!

• AdRoll
• IFTTT
• Zapier
• Iconosquare
• Quuu
• Brand24
• Buffer Analyze

How to say hello to us

We would all love to say hello to you on social media – especially Twitter!

• Hailley on Twitter and Hailley’s Website
• Brian on Twitter and Brian’s Website

Thanks for listening! Feel free to connect with our team at Buffer on Twitter, Buffer on Facebook, our Podcast homepage, or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.

Enjoy the show? It’d mean the world to us if you’d be up for giving us a rating and review on iTunes!

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About The Science of Social Media podcast

The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing tactics from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode.  It’s our hope that you’ll join our 20,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!

The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.

source https://blog.bufferapp.com/social-media-tools-2019