A kayaker drifted along in silence off the coast of New Zealand when, last year, a seal slapped his face with an octopus. The trip, part of a GoPro product launch, was funded by the company, and the sucker punch that the seal delivered was captured on video. The clip went viral when GoPro uploaded it to Facebook.
More companies are shifting their media budgets to social channels in pursuit of this dream. It’s only natural that businesses move to where their customers are. And these days, they’re on social media platforms.
What kind of content is most effective on social media sites? Opinions are plentiful, but evidence is not. Harikesh S. Nair is a marketing professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He says that there has been little research done in the real world. Facebook has the data, but getting generalized insights is impossible. Each commercial user only sees their metrics.
Nair, Dokyun Le of Carnegie Mellon, and Kartik Hosanagar from the Wharton School teamed up with an analytics company that collects daily performance data for about 800 business Facebook users. The researchers, by pooling data from more than 100,000 posts and using novel machine learning techniques to characterize the content of the posts, published a paper with accurate answers for companies to optimize their social media strategy.
Content is important
Nair says that when firms entered social media for the first time, they did so with a mindset inherited from the old media. He explains that The goal was to maximize the “reach,” or the number of people exposed to the brand message. Maximizing one’s online follower count by using various incentives like coupons, free swag, and sponsored posts to attract followers.
But eyeballs didn’t equal engagement. Nair says that early audits revealed that awareness was not enough. The content was not being interacted with by the followers. This isn’t surprising, as commercials and the price of free TV have always been irritating. Why would anyone “like,” comment on, or share with their friends a self-serving advertisement?
Nair explains that the focus was on getting exposure and figuring out how to make users want to interact with your message. Content marketing was born. The industry grew as a result.
Be Someone
Nair explains that social media marketing has two different streams, each with a distinct goal. One is called “performance marketing” and aims to increase sales immediately, or “conversion.” Another is “brand-building,” which focuses on building a relationship with customers to earn their loyalty over time.
The data revealed that most firms only used one, and very few companies did both. Nair says he doesn’t know why, but it could be a matter of organization. The teams in charge of social media at different companies may have a closer relationship with their sales and marketing departments.
Researchers hired Amazon Mechanical Turk workers to evaluate a subset of around 5,000 seats to categorize each post. They then labeled the content based on soft attributes such as humor and emotion or complex information such as price deals. They then used the labeled data to train a machine with natural language processing algorithms and machine learning algorithms to go through the remaining posts.
They found that when they combined the content attributes and engagement figures – the actual likes or shares for each post – they saw a stark difference in performance. “When a business says, Hey, here’s a 20% off coupon, it gets shallow engagement,” Nair says. When it uses ‘brand personality’ content – talking to users in a way that simulates a natural person – it gets engagement.
Mix it up
We know we are being played but can’t help it. The irreverent, bantering personality is just a construct. It’s a brand profile. Marketers exploit our desire to find others like us and to group ourselves into tribes. Nair says that research shows that persuasion efforts are more credible if they appear to be coming from a person or friend rather than, for example, a company in Cincinnati.
Performance marketing has its place. Nair believes that users may be reluctant to share these posts as they do not want to seem like they are promoting a business or overly excited about saving money. He says that people are “hyper-aware” of how their actions will appear on social media. They consider how their actions may appear to others. But this doesn’t stop them from clicking on the coupon.
He adds that there’s no reason why a company couldn’t do both. This is where many companies fall short; he says: “A content strategy could combine the two, using informative posts to generate instant leads and personality posts to build brand capital over time.” A portfolio approach.”
Engagement Is King
The study found that brand-personality content is crucial to any social media marketing campaign. Nair says that the main difference between broadcast media and social media is that user engagement, as determined by algorithms, is now a key factor.
Facebook’s News Feed gives priority to engaging content. You’ll be buried further down the News Feed if you send out posts without visible engagement.
Nair claims that in this way, optimizing engagement — those valuable likes, comments, and shares — on social apps may be today’s equivalent of search engine optimization (SEO) on the web. In both cases, the goal is reverse-engineering systems’ ranking criteria to equate value with popularity.
Nair says that it may sound paradoxical, “but you cannot get engagement without engagement.” Even if your main focus is on performance marketing or driving sales, you should still add good brand personality content to stay visible in the crowded market.
