ZC Social Media Academy October

After not being able to attend last month’s academy I was looking forward to getting up to date with the latest news in the Social Media world presented by Zoe Cairns herself.

October’s academy focused on ‘Quick wins to accelerate your digital activities in 2019’, which was a great way to motivate and prepare all attendees to start planning ahead for the forthcoming year.

Jamie started off by sharing a simple piece of advice when it comes to social media advertising “whoever gives the most value wins”. He gave a deep insight into how to develop your Facebook advertising strategy and how to find your winning posts.

Jamie shared Persado’s algorithm which focuses on 5 key emotions: Trust, Pride, Joy, Fear, and Anticipation. In order for your ad to be successful, he suggested choosing a focal emotion to maximise the impact this will have on your audience.

Image source: https://bit.ly/2OOQfXF

Speaking of audience, Jamie mentioned that in most cases of an ad being unsuccessful it is likely that the targeting was incorrect or too broad. Other common shortfalls for ads may be that the message wasn’t clear, your website isn’t up to scratch (when the customer lands on your site from the ad), your credibility didn’t come across (or took too long to convey) or your CTA (call to action) was too harsh.

To overcome these factors it was suggested to evaluate the hook within the ad and question whether it was obvious what you were selling? Most importantly conduct market research to discover your audiences pain points and provide them with a solution portrayed in your ad!

An insight into the Facebook relevancy score was shared and recommended that all businesses conducting Facebook ads should be aiming for a score of 8 or above. This score can be found within the Business ads manager after your post has reached 500 impressions. To note, it was emphasised just how important it is to review your ad whilst it is live to see what’s working and what isn’t, to achieve the most from your ad – it also gives you tie to evaluate its impact and make relevant changes to improve its performance.

A brief introduction to a ‘quick win’ for Instagram is to maximise your ad/product/companies exposure by getting a ‘shout out’ from an influencer within your field. To check the validity of the potential influencer or even your own companies business account Jamie shared a tool https://phlanx.com/engagement-calculator which allows you to have a better insight on an influencers engagement rate. Very useful! The average engagement rate on Instagram is around the 3% mark.

Zoe then gave an overview of ‘quick wins’ for each platform: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. She started with quick and useful facts about the platform such as whether it is mainly B2B or B2C, the average age of a user, whether you can have a businesses profile or not, and what the goal of the platform should be i.e. Facebook is for conversion/engagement whereas Twitter is lead generation.

These facts were then followed by 5 quick ways to generate quick wins, these would differ across all platforms due to the goal and audiences being different also. The most common wins were to use images within your posts and to be consistent.

Once again, it was a great afternoon and I received a wealth of knowledge that I am hoping to implement into my own marketing activities for mso. I would recommend the academies to anyone who is willing to learn more about social no matter what your current understanding is. There is something for everyone and is a great opportunity to network with other Kent businesses, see you again next month Zoe!

To book on to November’s academy all about Creating Effective Campaigns for 2019 please click here.