This presentation will discuss social media as it relates to digital marketing. I'm going to be describing the charts and graphs and pictures in the presentation for those of you who by chance don't have access to the visuals here. The first slide depicts social media platforms by popularity in the US. The chart shows that YouTube is number 1. It really has taken over the number one spot from Facebook in recent years. Facebook is number 2. The Facebook popularity has declined in most age segments, declined a lot with younger age segments. But it is still strong with older users. That is its core audience right now, is older users. Instagram over the years has grown the fastest. Over the last, say, 3-4, really 5 years, Instagram has really gained in momentum and is now number 3 on the chart. That's something to keep in mind, a very significant trend. This next slide shows social media frequency in the US. It continues to evolve. The chart shows Facebook has quite a heavy frequency. A lot of daily users on Facebook. The same with Snapchat, a lot of daily users. Instagram, same thing, of course. Twitter not as much. YouTube quite a few daily users. What this slide really depicts is the fact that social media has become a daily activity with most Americans. If we want to look at up and coming consumers, we look at Generation Z. Generation Z, they're effectively teenagers today. Instagram leads with Generation Z. But TikTok is gaining popularity. They are actually right now with Generation Z growing the fastest. On this chart, it shows that Facebook is almost the last place for Generation Z. The only one with fewer users would be LinkedIn and that's because it's more of a business-to-business type platform. You wouldn't expect a lot of teenagers to have LinkedIn accounts, although some do. Now we're going to be looking at a very important trend for businesses. Organic reach. Organic reach is how many consumers that you are reaching at a particular time. Reach means your content has showed up on their news feed and they're seeing it. Doesn't mean they're doing anything with it, consumers. But you have to have reach in order to have engagement which is the target for social media marketing. The problem is that since 2012, and this chart depicts 2012-2018, the organic reach has dropped significantly each year controlled by, in this case, Facebook and Instagram. If you have a business, you had a free ride in 2012. You could reach 17 percent of your audience just by posting anything. Today, this chart depicts 1.5 percent in 2018. It's actually below one percent now in the current year. It's sort of a scary concept for businesses because 5-7 years ago, even 10 years ago, doing very well with Facebook as a free platform and they were reaching a lot of their audience and gaining momentum. But that's since the organic reach has been curtailed by the Facebook and Instagram. Along with that decline, you'll see this next slide shows ad revenues increasing. It's no coincidence that the last slide and this slide have reverse trends. Ad revenues are increasing because businesses are being curtailed as far as their organic reach so they have to buy reach. Because they have to buy reach, they are spending more each year in order to reach more audiences. It doesn't mean they're going to get engagement, it just means they're reaching, but you have to have reach to have engagement. The two slides are reversed. There's a reverse trend and that's something important to remember. That's the same with Facebook and Instagram. Their ad revenues have increased along with the decline in organic reach which the prior slide showed. There's a direct relationship there. Now, we're going to be looking at reach itself, and then we're going to be looking at engagement. This slide shows daily reach. Actually, it's daily potential reach for a particular business. This is for a hotel in the San Diego area. Each day, they're seven days listed here. The highest day is 12,640, and the lowest day is 12,575, or actually 471, 12641. What does that mean? That means that the answer is pretty clear. The potential audience for this business to reach, and this is Facebook, is consistent throughout the entire week. There is no weekend drop off. It's consistent through the week. But the image right below that looks like a whale in the ocean. It shows peak times of the day when social content will have the largest audience. Really, it's from right around 8:30 AM to 9:30 PM. After which time, the available audience plummets and then the lowest point is going to be around 2:30 to 3 AM. Then it starts building fairly quickly from there. The reason businesses have to know this is because you need to know when you should be posting. You want to post where you have the highest available audience. That way you'll have the highest available potential engagement. So you don't want to be posting at 2:30 or 3 AM in the morning. This next slide shows reach versus engagement and just that it's a small sample type comparison. But it shows that photos reach more than links. If you have a link, the photo will get higher reach, the link will get lower reach. Also with that lower reach, the link gets less engagement. If you're going to link to a video or something that's on the outside, you're not going to get the engagement you probably want. Photos do a lot better and videos do well also. The next slide is, I call this the social engagement pyramid. It is a pyramid and it starts with the base of the pyramid. You can't have a pyramid unless you have a base and that's where it starts and there's a next level and then the top level. The bottom part starts with reach and reach is the goal of traditional old media advertising or marketing. How many eyeballs can you get in front of? It doesn't mean they're paying attention to you, but it just shows how many eyeballs you've reached. You have to have that though. Now, if you are a community manager, which is what a social media manager is for a business, you are called a community manager, you have to have reach. But if all you're getting is reach, you're not going to keep your job that long because you have to have reach and you can buy reach, but you can't buy engagement. There's a direct correlation between the number on reach and the numbers of engagement. In other words, if you have a few reach, 1,000 potential customers or 1,000 people, that's your reach. But the engagement might be 25 or 30. Those are people that actually are engaged. Actually click on like, comment or that level of engagement. Let's say you have 30 people engaged, potential customers engaged. If you had 100 reach versus 1,000, you might have two or three people engaged. That's why there's a direct relationship between the amount of reach and the engagement. Engagement is how a community manager's job is measured on engagement. But then if you look at the very top of the pyramid, you have with sharing. Sharing is another level of engagement. If somebody is sharing your content, what that is saying is that they really buy into the content. They really believe it's valuable and they are going to share with their network. When a lot of networks are sharing a post, let's just say network to network to network, there's an exponential growth potential there. That's how content can reach a million people through sharing. That's really the highest level of engagement. But you really need the mid-level for sure and that's how you're going to be judged as a community manager. How do you get more engagement? This next slide talks about the 80/20 rule. It's about thinking value first and sales second. 80/20 rule has been out a number of years now and there's been different variations of it that have been positioned by different marketing people but the core premise of it holds true for today. There's some psychological and consumer behavior of issues going on here and that is that the consumers will unfollow a brand that promotes incessantly or every post is promoting their brand. Consumers will unfollow that, 46 percent will. Marketers need to find the balance between selling and offering value and entertainment to the audience. The one thing I think community managers can lose track of and businesses can lose track of sometimes is the fact this is an entertainment medium. You need to keep people entertained. Entertainment in the context of the 80/20 rule has to do with education, information, valuable information, something that appeals to people's interests, something that's inspirational. That's the 80 variety of this breakdown, then the 20 breakdown, the 20 percent variety is promotional and driving sales. We have a sale today coming for our special, that type of thing. I'm going to show you evidence of this in a few slides later, how this works, but if you try to sell with every post, every communication, you will actually lose your audience. They don't want to be sold to, they want to be entertained. That's something to keep in mind. This is another way of positioning the 80/20 rule. The chart says 80 percent of your social message should focus on engaging your audience and only 20 percent should be directly promotional, so don't oversell. How does the 80/20 rule work? It's a psychological concept based on consumer behavior. So WIIFM, W-I-I-F-M, what's in it for me. You always have to ask as community manager, what's in it for me? Meaning, what's in it for the audience, what do they get out of it? It's not what I'm trying to do marketing wise, it's what they get out of it. Audiences don't like being sold too. If you do it too much, you lose your audience. Audiences desire entertainment and informative content, that equals value to them. That's why they come back to you. They don't come back to you to keep getting sold, they come back to you because you're offering something over and above that. That's the essence of the 80. You make sure that most content is informative and entertaining and direct promoting and selling of the brand should be kept at a minimum. Now I want to make one distinction here that your content, if you're a business promoting your brand through social media, you are a community manager, imagine yourself in that chair. You don't have to be exactly 80/20. It might be 70/30, it might be 60/40. Sometimes we've had clients where the business is heavily promoting an event that is very, very important to them. So they're going to use more promotional posts during that time. Their ratio may be closer to 60/40 versus 80/20. So it can vary based on the needs of the business, but the important thing to remember is that you want to have a mix that makes sense for the business, for the strategy of the business, but most of your posts, they've to be 80, but most of your posts need to be adding value to the lives of your audience. Now I'm showing you some live examples. This is from this hotel I was talking about, which is a client of ours, and we have a post where they're selling something, they're selling a yoga event which you sign up for that. This is the 20 percent variety. They had three engagements. They reached 369, which is the bare minimum, three engagements and no likes. Then if you look over here on the right-hand side of the page, there's a picture of President Kennedy back in 1963, because this is a historic hotel and one of the unique selling point is this history of it. It shows President Kennedy and his motorcade going by the hotel. There's a brief story around that. If you notice, instead of zero like it's got 36 likes and engagements of 268 and shares and comments and 1800 people reached versus 369. The more interesting the content, and the more interested the audience is. The social media algorithms take effect at some point and they expose the post to more of your audience. If the small sample of your audience resonates with them, they allow more of your audience to see it, and that's what happened here. This was not paid reach here. Another example of the 80/20 rule in action, I believe the advertisement is, they want to host your next event, they had one like, the 20 percent variety. Look over here to the right-hand side, this shows Tom Cruise in a scene from the movie Top Gun that was shot at this hotel and it shows it in the room they were in. Again, it's a story. We tell a short story here and it resonates. We had, again 1,867 organically reached people. A lot of engagements, a lot of likes and things like comments and shares. Again, it shows you that you will be successful if you use some version of the 80/20 rule. This next slide shows the 80/20 rule in action. The last two were Facebook, this is Instagram. You notice they have a Black Friday sale again, heavy promotion right there selling that. They had 37 likes which for Instagram is not very good. This one was more just showing the one of the unique selling propositions of the hotel. They have a beautiful Olympic-size pool. They're showing that, they're not sell anything, they're just showing a picture of the pool with a beautiful background. They had 336 likes versus 37. That's another indicator of what's going on. Then two more Instagram ads. I've shown you a lot of proof of concept here. Here you have a sale, this is the hotel's restaurant is on GrubHub and so they're promoting that, had 16 likes which is very low for Instagram. Then for this slide which shows a sign outside their front door, were not selling anything, they're just showing a really cool-looking sign with a beautiful sunset. It's called the Boulevard, there on [inaudible] boulevard, shows the boulevard 247 likes and that was another. Each time I show you that it's proof of concept that's how the 80/20 rule works. This is actually for a brewery, for a well-known brewery called Stone Brewing. We've got the 20 percent variety, had 48 likes which is pretty low and there we have people. I want to make the point now that of the 80% variety, value, entertainment, interesting things, showing team members does resonate well with audiences. The team members resonate. That's something that you want to keep in mind when you develop 80 variety of the 80/20 rule is the fact that team members is part of the 80. It shows team members having fun, it personalizes, humanizes the business. That's really important. The last slide is about storytelling. If you can tell a story in social media, you will get more engagement. This is about storytelling here on the left. Again, because it's a hotel in their unique selling proposition is all about the history of the hotel. This shows some of the famous guests they've had at the hotel, Frank Sinatra, people like that. Then they have again, President Kennedy, a story about his last visit to San Diego. It's a story that resonated with a lot of people. Look at the likes first, look at the likes here. Both of these had more likes than normal. This one had a lot, but it told a really cool story and 45 shares which is astronomical. I just want to tell you that storytelling is important. We're going to be talking about that later on in the course but storytelling is really important. If you have chance to click on Airbnb, Airbnb tells a great story on YouTube so stories resonate with audiences and I'll be talking about that later on in this course. For now, that is social media and thank you for watching and listening.
