Author: Abhi Dwivedi

Founder, Direct Response Marketer, Ex Software Developer, Accidental Geek, Innovator & BATMAN!

7 Effective Ways to Increase Your Social Media Traffic and Conversions

Posted on by Abhi Dwivedi

If I talk about the blog traffic, social media is among the top 3 traffic sources. For many blogs, social media traffic is more important than search traffic and direct traffic. In reality, the amount of traffic you manage to attract from social media and the level of engagement you manage to drive from it, depends majorly on how you structure your social media posts and share your content to get more social media traffic.

Social Media Traffic

Have you ever thought why social media is so important?

Because, people spend a lot of time on these social media networks, and that is what makes them the perfect medium for referrals and driving social media traffic to the website pages.

Social media drives traffic by engaging viewers and offering them useful content, connecting with the audience and get feedback.

To help you understand this better, here are some of the key points you need to keep in mind while creating a strategy for driving traffic and conversions from social media.

1. Use High Conversion Keywords: On all social networks, certain keywords generate more engagements than others. They can easily attract more clicks and, hence, can get more social media traffic. And using them intelligently can increase the visibility and effectiveness of posts on social media.

Image result for increase the visibility and effectiveness of posts on social media.

Here are some of the keywords for leading social networks:

  • Facebook – Where, When, Tell Us, Inspire, Submit
  • Twitter – ReTweet, Follow, Social Media, New Blog Post, Check Out
  • LinkedIn – Created, Improved, Increased, Developed, Reduced, Researched
  • Google – Share, Promote, Increase, Create, Discover

2. Expand your Reach with Hashtags: You definitely have seen many people use different hashtags with their social media posts and updates. Hashtags expand the reach of your posts beyond your immediate followers and help you reach new audiences.

Here’s a quick look at the optimal hashtag usage stats for the top social networks.

Facebook:

  • Hashtags were not very effective when Facebook first started, but in the last couple of years, hashtags have been an effective source of traffic and exposure.
  • You can get 593 interactions per cost if you’re using 1-2 hashtags per cost.
  • But, here the irony is, if we increase the hashtags to 3-5 per month, the average interaction falls down to 416 interactions per cost.

Twitter:

  • Tweets with hashtags attract 2x more social media traffic.
  • Only 1-2 hashtags could increase the engagement by 21%.
  • 40% of tweets with hashtags get retweeted.

 Google :

  • Hashtags are automatically added to your posts based on the content but you can edit hashtags as well.
  • Google also shows a list of related hashtags that can be used to gauge the interests of your audience.

3. Use More Visual Content for more Engagement: It is no surprise that image-based contents attract more engagement as compared to the simple text-based posts. So, it is very important for you to add images, videos, vines, GIFs and other forms of visual content regularly to your posts.

Image result for visual content for more surprises
There’re some stats related to visual content in different social media:
Facebook:

  • Image-based posts attract 39% more social media traffic.

Google :

  • Videos get 28% more engagement.
  • Images get 94% more engagement.
  • Animated GIFs get 39% more engagement.

LinkedIn:

  • Images based posts attract 98% more social media traffic.
  • Linking to YouTube videos results in 75% more shares.

Twitter:

  • Including media can get you 200% more social media traffic.

4. Always Use Short and Concise Updates: Shorter updates always attract more engagement on all social networks as compared to the longer ones. This is probably because social network users have short attention spans and don’t usually have the time to read the long posts. 

Facebook:

  • Facebook posts with less than 40 characters received 80% more social media traffic than longer posts.

Google :

  • The headline should be shorter than 60 characters; otherwise, the engagement fails by 18%. 

 Twitter:

  • Tweets shorter than 100 characters attract 17% more social media traffic.

5. Your Blog Content should be Share-Worthy: Your social media engagement and conversion rates have a lot to do with the type of content you have written. Most of the optimization techniques will be effective only if you have written the best quality content, otherwise, techniques will not be much effective.

Image result for share worthy blog content

In general, the preferable content is the one which is highly actionable and interesting, written in a funny way. And the whole story revolves around the headlines. It is the most important part of any content to grab as much as social media traffic.

Take reference from other blogging sites, from there you can get new brainstorming blogging ideas that let you create worthy posts like interviews etc and, apart from that you can hire quality freelance writers to help you create viral content.

Apart from high-quality content, sharing free tools and resources also attracts increased engagement and social shares.

6. Identify & Amplify Top Performing Content: Content amplification is the strategy that you need to drive-in growth. Driving social media traffic and conversions from social media is not just about using random and isolated techniques. It’s equally important to identify the right channels that are sending you the social media traffic, the content that is attracting the highest engagement, and the pages on your website/blog that can be used to amplify such content for even more social media traffic.

Image result for how to amplify the written content for blogs

There’re some tools that amplify your content, like TrenDemon. You can integrate it with your Google Analytics account to get real-time stats on your social content and the channels.

7. Always use a Social Media Friendly Website Structure: The structure of your website have the same impact as that of your content quality on the number of shares and social media followers. Most of the times, visitors find you either through your social media updates or from Google search results. You need to have a website structure that encourages these visitors to share your content and follow you on social media.

Image result for social media friendly website

 

Driving conversions and social media traffic require a combination of tweaks to your posts and some structural changes to your website and blog. At the same time, you need to keep an eye on your social media stats to understand which content is performing well and you can leverage it to increase your overall social media engagement. If you can get this combination right, you can create the sustainable stream of high converting social media traffic to your blog or website.

Hope you’ll get some idea about how to get more conversions through social media. Let me know your opinions in the comment box below.

6 Social Media Metrics Marketers Should Track

Posted on by Abhi Dwivedi

One of the most obvious benefits of Social Media is increasing Brand Awareness. Social Media is the collection of online communication channels, dedicated to community-based input, interaction, content-sharing and collaboration. Websites and applications dedicated to forums, micro blogging, social networking, social bookmarking, social curation, and wikis are among the different types of social media.

If I talk about metrics, then there are hundreds of metrics that you could be analyzing. But, do you really know where to find them and are they all necessary for your business? In this post, we’re going to look at the metrics you can gather from the top social networks and which of them can reap out most of the benefits for your business.

These are:

1. Assess Discoverability via Mentions and Inbound Links:

Your posts are one of the ways to contact the right people on social media channels. The more content you disperse and distribute, the more your business shines and the easier it would be for your target audience to find you. If your follower and fan metrics are increasing, your reach is increasing too.

The number of mentions corresponds to the number of times someone has mentioned your business. This happens in different ways on different social media platforms. Perhaps someone replied on Instagram using your tag or, when someone responds to or interacts with your shared content, there’s often a mention.

If your audience is not mentioning you online, perhaps the content you’re sharing isn’t propitious with them and they’re not finding it perfect and relatable. Consider conducting few splitting tests with your audience before you choose which messages to proliferate.

If every industry is different, then your social media efforts must be different to one another in relevance to your industry, but you need to have your eyes onto audience growth strategies as well.

2. Evaluate Engagement level from Different Audiences:

You can find different engagement level of your audience through different metrics level of social media insights. Engagement can be in various form such as re-tweets, forwards to a friend, comments, likes, shares, and inbound links.

You also need to check your traffic by Google Analytics.

By analyzing the conversion rates on all of your social channels, you can determine what types of content to promote on each channel. And, this technique can work wonders.

3. Impact of Influencer Marketing:

If you want to amplify your reach on social media, then don’t forget to consider influencers. Look for the influencers who have developed something that’s relevant to your business. Influencers are not competitors but they are reaching the very target market you want to touch.

Social Media

The first step is to search for the influencers who will deliver the most value to the market. Some of the good tools for influencers search are BuzzSumo, Traackr, and GroupHigh. You can use unique UTM codes to check who’s driving you the most traffic.

So, always mention the influencers for your marketing.

4. Survey your Customers:

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) helps you gauge the sentiment of your audience. To calculate your NPS, survey your customers with the following question: On a scale of 0 to 10, with 10 being highest, what’s the likelihood that you would recommend us (our company) to a friend or colleague?

Once you know the sentiment of your audience, develop a series of surveys to understand the sentiment on each social media network. By which you’ll get to know in which area you need improvement.

This technique can work the best for your weak areas, from which you can work on them and ammend them as your customers want.

5. Also,

You can measure your spending against your goals and KPIs. The most effective content assets for measurement include blog posts, ebooks, videos, and presentations.

Start measuring the conversions from all the social media sites to see if they are paying off. Conversions include subscription metrics, registered users, and the number of leads from your social channels. You also need to understand the conversion rate from the social media network to the lead.

To consider engagements from all the platforms, you need Google Analytics.

6. At last, determine the ROI of Social Channels:

How many sales are you generating from your social media marketing?

First, you need to set the URLs for each action, due to which you’ll be able to see the metrics on different social platforms.

Also use a single-touch attribution model, which allows you to see if the lead has come from a single source of social media. If you use the multi-touch model, you’ll be able to determine if the lead came in from multiple sources.

Determine which model is best for your business and understand how the social platform is impacting revenue within the organization.

To become a shining star on social media, you need to consider these above-explained metrics. They all possess plausible importance and can empower you and your business by guiding you on the path of creating a relevant brand presence with a positive ROI.

Hope you find it effective for your social businesses too. Let me know if there can be some other metrics also, will add them next time. Please share your thoughts in the comment section below. And dont forget to subscribe to my blog!

4 Smart Ways to Use Social Videos for Your Marketing Goals

Posted on by Abhi Dwivedi

Raise your hands if you have gone a day without watching video on the Internet. Very few hands raised, right? It’s hard not to watch video online. In fact, a video is everywhere. Scroll down your Facebook feeds and you’ll see it there streaming without you even clicking on it. Search on Instagram, yup. There it is. You can’t escape from online videos. If you are a marketer or a small business owner, it’s time to embrace it. The good news is you don’t have to be a big enterprise with professional social videos team to take advantage.

The difference between social video and other types of video is important.

What are Social Videos?

Live video retain the authenticity, no matter what approach you take. Live video happens in real time and should feel like an open conversation between your brand and your audience. Social Videos can also include the pre-recorded video that has been edited to the channels unique sharing and viewing habits. The goal is to encourage engagement and sharing among your target audience. If your target is on social media, then your business should leverage video content on that platform.

Use Social Media to achieve Marketing Goals:

The power of social videos is leveraged to fuel company branding. It would be the effective strategy to showcase your company’s culture with video content, which is related to the company size.

Social Videos are not all about brand awareness, you can use it to meet marketing goals such as increasing conversions and sign ups.

1. Customer Support:

If your website is getting flooded with requests for tutorials and questions related to the topics, then video(s) can be the best solution.  You can start a YouTube channel for a video series, or even create short video for your Instagram page. Through videos, customers easily understand the point which is being stated by the support member. Customer’s expectations have risen with the scarcity of time, they need instant answers and want support on their terms, short videos help support teams to deliver faster, smarter, more personalized customer support.

2. Sales Promo or Announcement:

Any social platform is popular for promoting e-commerce. A short and catchy 5- to 30-second promo video is a great way to catch and hold people’s attention on social media.

Media theorist John Berger says that “seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before he/she can speak.” Videos allow a complete visual communication and help build emotional connections with people. Compared to image and text, a video is a completely different method of engaging audiences since the amount of information it can display in a second outweighs the amount of information that is read.

Texts vs. Social Videos

 

Three great reasons why videos have become an integral part of online promotion:

  1. Online video is cost-effective.
  2. Videos increase brand recognition.
  3. Online videos are inherently viral.

3. Live Stream:

Live social videos are an increasingly popular way to provide followers with information they are seeking, especially if your goal is to nurture existing customers. Because real-time video is like a conversation with your audience, it helps deepen their connection with your brand.

Attention is the new currency in businesses and is one of the most scarce resources that seem to be more craved for than…money itself. Likes, shares and comments, they are all forms of social media attention.

How to get them?

Well, a live streaming video might be the answer. It is no secret that social videos are becoming an increasingly important element of brands inbound marketing and live streaming can take your video marketing to a completely new level. Plus, due to its cost-effective production, a real-time streaming video is much more available for small businesses, but its not just limited to that!

4. Customer Testimonial:

Sharing success stories from your customers is a way to add new voices to the mix. In today’s fast-paced world, Videos have quickly become the most effective content medium in Internet marketing. Whether it’s a product video, live streaming event, or testimonial, video engages users unlike, any other alternative content form. And, this is the biggest reason of popularity of social videos.

 

 

The value of Video Testimonials:

  • 65 percent of your audience is inclined towards visual learning.
  • Website visitors are 64 percent more likely to follow through with a conversion after watching a video.
  • Online shoppers are 63 percent more likely to purchase a product if it has reviews and ratings.
  • 90 percent of online shoppers say their buying decisions are influenced by online reviews.

Social media has so much potential that it is difficult for any business or brand to ignore it. Not only it can help a brand connect and engage with their target market, but it can also help drive traffic and increase conversions. Of course to do all that there’s one thing you’ll need in particular: Great social videos for marketing.

If you enjoyed this post, I’d be very grateful if you’d help it spread by emailing it to a friend, or sharing it on Twitter or Facebook. Thank you!

5 Business Driving Metrics for Digital Marketing

Posted on by Abhi Dwivedi

In this Digital Marketing era, not only the measurable metrics and other analytical data are possible and available in real-time, the need to measure these data is considered paramount as evidence of success. In a rapidly changing business landscape, the need to measure digital marketing success has increased in importance more than ever. Businesses take maximum advantage of digital channels such as Google search, social media, email, and their websites to connect with their current and prospective customers.

Today, in the digital marketing world, numbers are the key points around which everything rotates.

You must know the worth of your time that you’re spending on writing those erudite Facebook posts.

Check the number of reactions, comments and shares that you are getting and see how many  “Fans” and their friends you are reaching. If your followers are loving your tweets on Twitter, check the number of re-tweets you are getting.

I want you to focus on five numbers, 5 digital marketing metrics that will drive your business.

Key Metric #1- Page Behavior on Google Analytics:

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for brands, bloggers or businesses. Through the use of Google Analytics, you can uncover a tremendous amount of data about your website that can be used to enhance your digital marketing, also in business development strategies.

The problem is there are literally thousands of numbers to look at.

You can check the full website traffic as a whole or any single individual page by checking the single screen of Google Analytics.

When you click on ‘All Pages’ option, you’ll see all the websites and you can get there by entering Google Analytics, by selecting the ‘Reporting’ tab and then scroll down, simply click on ‘Behavior’. Once there click on “Site Content” and then “All Pages”. This is the page behavior in Google Analytics under digital marketing.

Look at the wealth of information!

From there, you can see the top performing pages on top-ranked by ‘Pageviews’. Also, you can make decisions about what’s working, what’s not and what our community wants more (or less!).

Looking at the traffic channels you will get to see which channel is the largest driver of traffic to your site. You’ll notice that the channels are listed in order of driving power; the channel at the top is the one that drives the majority of site traffic.

Key Metric #2 – E-Mail Open Rates:

What’s the point in spending all the time and effort in building an email list if the people on the list never open the emails that you sent them?

Email open rate is a critical metric with which you should get intimately familiar. But, according to me, at first, you must know that what’s a good email open rate under digital marketing.

It’s a question much pondered about, as it depends on the condition and some other metrics.

Your email open rate is calculated by dividing the number of unique opens by the number of emails sent, minus the number of bounces:

Open Rate = Unique Opens / (Number of Emails Sent – Bounces)

So, out of the people who actually received your email, your open rate is the percentage of people who opened that email.

Across all industries, the average open rate for the second quarter of 2016 was 25%.

However, the more accurate answer really depends on your industry. For example, MailChimp reports that the average open rate for companies in hobby industries is 28.49%, whereas the average open rate in the digital marketing industry is 17.85%. That’s a pretty significant difference.

So, if you really want to have a benchmark to measure against, you should be looking at the average open rates for your particular industry.

The massive fluctuation is based on the segment of our entire subscriber base we choose for the mailing and the subject.

You need to become familiar enough with your email open rate to understand what a good/bad open rate is based on your business, your market and the type of emails you are sending to the different segments of your list, which is necessary to understand the digital marketing better.

Key Metric #3 – Facebook Post Engagement:

Facebook post engagement really depends on Facebook fan page numbers.

It doesn’t really consider the number of fans you’re having on your Facebook account, what really matters is the number of people engaging, reacting, commenting and sharing your posts.

When calculating Engagement Rate for Competitors, you don’t have access to their Facebook Insights data, but can still draw meaningful insights by looking at engagement relative to total fans. This method of calculating Engagement Rate can also be used to measure page Engagement Rate for your competitors since it does not require page insights data.

This calculation for Engagement Rate can also be referred to as Engagement percent of total fans. To draw meaningful conclusions, make sure that while comparing competitor engagement rates, you should use this calculation for your kind of digital marketing as well.

As a rough comparison, the number of Facebook Fans you have is similar to the size of your email list. The number or percentage of post engagements is similar to your email open rate and link clicks.

Key Metric #4 – Landing Page Conversion Rate:

What you think, what does it really mean by a good landing page? A good landing page really means ‘High Converting’.

We have an absolute scale to measure our landing pages performance.

If our landing page conversions rate (the number of people who complete the information divided by the number of people who land on the page) is under 30% we pull the page, work on it and try again.

From 30% to 50% is considered “average” for us and, we leave the page up while we continue working on it. Above 50% is considered “good” and we pore a disproportionate percentage of our Facebook Ads budget to promote it.

But, the point is how do you calculate your landing page conversion rates.

The landing page conversion rate is simply the “Results” (the number of people who made it to the “Thank You” page) divided by the “Link Clicks” (the number of people who clicked the actual ad and were taken to the landing page).

Key Metric #5 – Blog Social Sharing:

When it comes to promoting your blog post, I recommend you doing everything in your power to do so. Share it, tweet it, promote it, like it, talk about it, comment on it, and put it on every social network where ever you possibly can.

How many people share our blog posts, and where, tells us the relative value of the information we are providing to the online community, whether or not it can be profitable for them.

Key to Digital Marketing

By using alternative forms of content promotion, you can gain a huge advantage over the competition. Instead of trying to gain clicks, views, conversions, and engagements from a narrow slice of the population, you’re able to maximize the huge amount of traffic from new sources.

I want to share the techniques that let you share your content easily through digital marketing. These are:

  • You should start with the right content, with the primary goal of producing a blog article isn’t to “rank” as much as possible but it is to create a well-written piece of content.
  • Write content for your target persona, which includes a few demographic facts and figures along with a fictional name and photo of the person you’re trying to reach.
  • You should know about your topic clearly.
  • Use long-tail keywords because they will drive targeted traffic to your site.

The above presented 5 metrics can be easily used to get high traffic at a glance, how our website, email, Facebook, landing pages and blogs are performing.

Don’t be afraid of the numbers, just embrace them. They provide amazing insights that will drive your entire digital marketing.

If you found the post useful, I’d be very grateful to get your thoughts in the comment box below.

 

7 Ways to boost your Organic Reach on Facebook

Posted on by Abhi Dwivedi

Feeling disheartened on getting ignored on Facebook? Or, despite lots of endeavors you are not getting the appropriate organic reach on Facebook?

Yeah! Most probably. Because…

…Nowadays your organic Facebook posts can only be seen by your most devoted fan or your ardent follower, which would not be a good news for getting better organic reach. Have you ever thought what does that mean for a social media marketer?

Facebook marketing has changed a lot over the past few years. The days are gone when getting organic reach was so easy that, all you needed to do was throw up a Facebook post and then sit back and wait for tons of engagement to fill your page. The trickiest part is Facebook’s definition of promotional content versus quality content.

We don’t exactly know what triggered Facebook’s organic reach decline. But, it’s probably due to an increase in competition in the news feed and too many promotional posts rather than the good content.

But, Facebook wants marketers to step up their game.

If you want to increase your Organic Reach on Facebook, I encourage you to be laser-focused on a proven strategy that works.

Here, in this post I want you to know about some strategies to blow up your own page. 

1.Find the Right Content: If your content doesn’t click your fans, they are not going to engage with it. And if your fans don’t engage with it, you’re going to struggle for your organic reach on Facebook.

How to get Organic Reach

The key point behind the success of your content is to choose the right mix of the content and publish it on the right time. Each time someone likes, comments, or shares that engaging content, they send a signal to Facebook that they want to see more of our content. This helps us get seen more in the news feed when we post the links that go back to our blog. Your fans are people, and people like to be entertained. They want you to show your personality. And, they want to know you’re real.

Are you just putting links on your page? If so, you’re most likely not getting the engagement you want.

Consider mixing up the variety of your content.

2.Get to know your Facebook Insights Inside and Out: You should dig into your Facebook insights like crazy. You have to know about each page of your insights inside and out. Test your content often.

But, don’t just read the data. Learn from it. Always try to learn what it means and how to interpret the numbers. First of all, learn how to use the info in your insights to make data-driven decisions about your Facebook marketing to get the organic reach as your post deserves.

Don’t always stick with the same strategy; always change the strategy as per requirement, because the content that worked well last week might fail in this very week.

3. Always try to Stand Out in the News Feeds through Visual Marketing: To get the organic reach as you want, visual content is must for your posts. Visual marketing not only means posting photos on social media. According to BuzzSumo, the posts with the image get 2.3 times more engagement than those without images.

I’m talking about using visual marketing to tell your story and to communicate your brand’s message. Visual marketing has become a force to be reckoned with on Facebook! It’s no longer an option to post visual content on Facebook. It’s become necessary for marketers to at least learn the basics of image creation.

There are so many ways to use visual marketing to grow your Facebook page and get the deserved organic reach:

  • Create branded quote images.
  • Pull tips from your blog posts and put them on images.
  • Use powerful imagery to develop thought leadership in your niche.
  • Use visual marketing as eye candy to stand out in the news feed.

Use any of these, and you’ll be able to create branded images in a minute or two.

4. Show People that you’re paying Attention: If you have posted something on Facebook, then you won’t go to watch cricket, infact it’s the time to get the most organic reach through your post. Nobody does that, of course! Instead, you want to feel special. Real people always want to connect with other real people. They always want to know that you’re approachable. Most of all, they want to know that you’re paying attention to your page.

 

Once they get to know that you’re listening they would try to engage more from next time. When someone takes the time to interact with your page, acknowledge it. Even if all you do is “like” their comment, just make sure to appreciate it.

So, always respond when your fans mention you in the comments.

5. Always recycle your Evergreen Content: It is one of the cornerstones to increase your organic reach through your post.

Evergreen content is the content you create that never gets old. It stands the test of time, and it remains relevant and useful to your fans.

Each time this kind of content gets posted, it always reaches a new audience. At Post Planner, we have around 500 evergreen blog posts that rotate on our page. Not only do these posts consistently drive traffic to our website, but also they continue to build the lead in our niche.

If you have a library of evergreen content (even if it’s just 10 or 15 posts), start recycling on your Facebook page. It will contribute to your page growth and turn out to be a consistent source of website traffic for you!

6.Be Strategic about your Posting Time: There can be a lot of opinions about the posting time on Facebook. As you’re the only one who has access to your insights. Then, except you, there is no one who knows the best time to post on your page, and get the best results out of it.

Posting at the right time can mark the difference between going viral and not being noticed at all. The key here is to make this decision based on your data. If you have an online business and your audience is global, look at the times you’ve selected. Some marketers suggest posting at peak times when people are on Facebook. Others suggest posting at non-peak times since there’s less competition in the news feed. So, you need to choose proper timings to get the good results and increase your organic reach.

Here, I would suggest you to test with the timings to know which works best for your posts. Remember, the best tim to post on your page might not be the times when you are typically on Facebook. Be flexible and open to change.

We do this because people have appointments and meetings during the day that begins at the top of the hour. In the few minutes before those meetings start, what do they do? Yep, they grab their phones. Meaning, it could be a good time to increase your organic reach.

So far, this posting strategy has worked well for us.

7.Plan your Content in Advance: If your audience loses interest in your page, you’ll lose your ability to increase your Facebook organic reach. It’s a tough pill to swallow when you’re working hard to post high-quality content consistently. That’s why it is extremely important to plan your content in advance. If you plan and schedule your content ahead of time, you can be more strategic about each piece of content you post.

There is need of variety of content thus, you need to curate and create different types of contents accordingly. In doing so, you’ll always be confident in knowing that the right piece of content is going out at the right time—consistently. You’ll also avoid the stress of trying to find content to post at the last minute.

Summing up, increasing Facebook organic reach has gotten tricky—but it’s definitely still do-able! No matter how you look at it, you’ll need to be savvy and agile to get seen more in the news feed and noticed by your fans. We hope you’ll take these strategies and apply them to your own page! And we’d love to hear about your Facebook journey and your results along the way.

SAVE TIME, WORK SMART AND GROW YOUR AUDIENCE!

I hope you liked the post. Let me know about your opinion in the comment box below.

 

Use Social Videos to Produce Different types of Businesses

Posted on by Abhi Dwivedi

The term Social Videos covers the lot of ground. It can refer to something as carefully crafted as a Super Bowl commercial, or something as raw as a live stream on Facebook. Videos don’t simply tell a message; instead, they tend to display certain meaning – video is the ultimate show that turns people more sociable. Successful social videos cut through technology, all the while conveying messages in the form of entertainment, around the world, at any hour of the day.

Want to create a wide range of content through your videos without a lot of effort?

Here in this blog, you’ll discover how to repurpose videos into many forms of valuable content.

Plan your video campaign style:

The first step is to decide what type of video content you’re going to create.

Here are some ideas to inspire your own video series:

  • Line up industry experts for a series of video interviews related to your topic.
  • Develop a series of webinars to share business tips and tactics relevant to your industry.
  • Use FAQs to record a number of Q&A videos.
  • Interview with industry experts.

If you plan to have guests involved, you can use a scheduling tool. Set up time slots that work for you and create a form requesting all of the information you want from your guests; for example, their full professional name, the best contact email for them, their Skype username, and so on.

 

Social Videos Upload Schedule

Record & edit your Social Videos:

To help you handle your social video campaign in-house, you’ll need two sets of tools; one set for recording and one set for editing.

Recording tools: Skype and other recording apps it supports, YouTube live and for webinars consider Clickmeeting, GoToWebinar, Adobe Connect, Livestream, and WebinarJam.

Editing Tools: Two of the easiest editing tools to use is iMovie (Mac only) and YouTube Editor (online).

Both have all of the basic features for editing video, including trimming, splitting, audio extraction, adding titles and video transitions, and much more. Prepare a full video transcript and/or include a well-structured summary with takeaways and links to any tools and resources mentioned in the episode.

 

 

Research Keywords for Individual Asset Landing Page Titles:

The social videos you create will produce assets for at least three landing pages that you can optimize for search engines like YouTube video page, SoundCloud podcast episode page, blog post page.

You’ll need to add original content to each of the three landing pages, so plan your content marketing editorial calendar accordingly. The more original content that search engines can find on these pages, the better and higher they’ll rank in search results.

So, always try to put the titles that are related to the inside content and also expand your brand SEO opportunities.

Publish & Promote your Social Videos:

Once you’re done with your videos, publish it on YouTube. Here’s the list of some elements that you need to keep in your mind while you publish the videos:

  • Title: The length of 70 characters would work best for YouTube videos.
  • Description: YouTube lets you use up to 5,000 characters in your description; the more, the better.
  • Tags: You can use up to 500 characters when adding tags.
  • Playlist: Sort your videos into optimized YouTube playlists.
  • Custom thumbnail: Choose a high-resolution (1280x 720) image.

After you publish your video, be sure to add YouTube end screens and cards.

Try to turn your audio into podcasts as they increase your brand exposure to more platforms.

Write a Blog Post and Embed the Video and Audio:

Create multimedia blog posts offering readers at least three ways to consume your content:

  • Provide an on-page text transcript or summary, or both. Use visuals you created for your social videos to beautify each blog post.
  • Embed your video from YouTube. Also, add a direct text link to your YouTube video page below; this will help the video page rank higher in Google.
  • Offer a PDF download with takeaways and links.

Combine Videos into a Video Course:

If you’re doing instructional social videos on related topics, combine all those videos into a (free) course. The only additional task is to add a solid course description for each of the following sites:

  • Udemy is free to join and add courses too. It’s a good platform for bringing in new students.
  • Teachable is a good Udemy alternative, but it has less activity.
  • Kajabi is the most solid platform, giving you lots of course-building and marketing tools.

Creating your video campaign is an easy and highly effective way to try video marketing, and walk away with lots of solid content assets and developed social media channels. Finally, be creative, not only with the videos themselves but in the campaign strategy you build around them. As my head of marketing quotes, “creativity wins over the cost of production every time.” Get that bit right and video won’t just be the future of content marketing, it’ll be the future of content marketing for you.

 

Did you discover some great strategies in creating social videos? if yes then let us know in the comment section below that What are your exciting ideas of marketing—and how are you implementing them?

 

 

 

5-Step Guide to Maximize Conversions by Facebook Video Ads

Posted on by Abhi Dwivedi

Facebook video ads can help you stand out and grab people’s attention with motion. At any given moment, you can pick up your smartphone and start consuming a massive amount of content. Facebook especially makes it convenient for the users to get sucked in by various Facebook video ads. But, when you’re on the advertising side of things & trying to push your business out into the social media world, all the noisy content can make it easy for your audience to drown you out. Videos can be used in all kinds of Facebook video ads and for a variety of advertising objectives.

Maybe you’ve already built a strong following on Facebook and are working hard to maintain your reach and engagement. Yet, for one reason or another, you fail to see the conversion numbers that you’d expect. After all, there’s a ton of competition for News Feed real estate these days.

Facebook Video Ads, is the one thing you should start utilizing today to increase your conversion game. Don’t let yourself edged with the thought of being oblivious to the art of  creating high-quality videos. Stop getting bogged down with the thoughts right now. Today, with smartphones and webcams it is quite easy to make professional videos. Through the assistance of smart technology creating high quality videos has become as easy as munching nuts. If you think otherwise, you’ll be missing out on a seriously underutilized method to reel in your ideal customers.

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In fact, even though people are watching more than 100 hours of video on Facebook each day, they comprise less than 1% of the content brands post each week. So, to help you harness all the power, I’m going to share a 5-step guide to maximize conversions using Facebook video ads.

1. Convince Your Audience to stick to your Videos for at least 3 Seconds:

Although Facebook videos get played automatically in users’ news feeds, it’s not so easy to convince your audience to watch your videos. And, you must know that Facebook doesn’t count a view until a person watches your video for 3 seconds or more.

So, I recommend you to add closed captions. That way, your audience can consume your video even without sound. After all, 85 percent of Facebook video ads are watched without sound.

2. Only Share the Content that’s Valuable and Engaging:

Don’t let your video fizzle out after the opening scene. After all, your overall goal is to get people to take the next step to convert. To help with this, if there’s one thing your Facebook video ads should offer, it’s valuable content that engages your viewers. Speak to their biggest hurdle and tell them how you can help clear those with ease, whether it’s through educating or demonstrating.

Also, try to keep in short and be straightforward. And, the most important points of the videos are included in the copy of the Facebook video ads itself, with a link to take action.

3. Zoom-in on the motive for your Ads:

It’s best to get super specific with your video’s objective before you begin spending your hard earned dollars on advertising. Facebook is kind enough to ask you what your campaign objective is when you’re ready to get everything set in your Ads Manager.

Go with the obvious conversion objective. You’ll then most likely be driving them to a sales page on your website to grab hold of your offering. Zooming in on this step to best align with your overall goal plays a big role in increasing the performance of your Facebook video ads.

4. Target a Warmer Crowd:

No matter how good your video was, but if you don’t target right people, you won’t get all the good results you were hoping for. Of course, your ideal audience depends on what your objective is. And, you can certainly try and pull new people into the funnel.

Some experts say that the most powerful ads are directed towards a warmer audience. After all, one warm lead is better than 10 cold ones.

Who can be the part of your warn audience? People on your newsletter list, website visitors, and even those who have liked your business page. Your ultimate goal is to guide them through the conversion funnel to become a customer. Therefore, your offer is probably centered on one of the following: a free trial, software/product demo, flash sale, or a webinar sign-up.

5. Maximize your ROI:

Facebook offers you the ability to split test various versions of an ad to evaluate what works best. After all, there is no magic formula. But you definitely need to avoid turning the process of setting up your campaigns into a guessing game. So, if you’re feeling unsure for your video ad’s objective, target audience, I suggest you to get to A/B testing right away.

I am not suggesting you create different videos for each test, instead just choose the one thing to test across multiple versions, whether it’s your headline, call-to-action, thumbnail, target audience or just a link in ads copy.

It can be overwhelming trying to learn all there is to know about creating a Facebook ad strategy that works while staying on top of the platform’s never-ending changes. You might think you’ll never be able to get ahead of your competitors when tactics you learn today become outdated tomorrow.

Facebook videos are all the rage right now, beating out static posts for some serious airtime across our News Feeds. So, it’s time for you to take advantage of this under-utilized advertising method, and you don’t have to wait another minute. Utilize this 5-step guide to maximize your conversions with Facebook video ads and an evergreen course that lets you rule the Facebook ad strategy like a pro.

I hope this post will help you. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.