Unfortunately, you can’t just fire up Google and do a quick image search.

Not because you can’t find dazzling icon sets; you can. But, you’ll also find plenty of former icons and icons that require attribution, and, finally, a few icons that constitute copyright infringement.

The social media platforms have enforceable brand guidelines in place to help them protect the icons that are, in fact, registered trademarks. While you are unlikely to find yourself in legal trouble over an animated thumbnail, it can suggest a lack of professionalism. This can be particularly damaging if you’re a social media professional.

The best place to find free social media icons is from the platform itself. We put together this list of approved social media icons and what you should know before you start using them.

What can you do with social media icons?

Social media icons are an effective method for directing your users towards your social media pages. However, you will need to follow the brand guidelines if you want to use the icons correctly.

The guidelines cover essential details like sizes, colors, and even how to refer to the social media platform when using the icons. If you follow the brand guidelines, then you will have an idea for using social media icons in the following ways:

• Email signatures
• Newsletters
• Navigation menus
• Business cards
• Posters
• And more…

How can you use free social media icons safely?

1. Facebook

We included Facebook at the top because they’ve recently changed their social media icon’s design to a new color with a rounded shape.

If Facebook blue clashes with your design, you can use the black and white icons included in the asset pack. However, Facebook also includes a grey icon in their asset pack despite not mentioning it as an official color.

Beyond these color schemes, Facebook does have other guidelines for representing the app on your page. You should pay particular attention to the approved phrases and copy standards.

Icons:

Color schemes:

• Blue #1877F2
• Grey #898F9C
• White #FFFFFF
• Black #000000

Do's Don'ts

• Use the ‘f’ logo to promote your page.
• Keep the words and logo at the same size as the surrounding icons.
• Use the thumb icon with a clear call-to-action.
• Link icons directly to your Facebook page.
• Capitalize Facebook when it is not used in a URL.
• Only say “Like us on Facebook”,”Visit us on Facebook” or “Find us on Facebook”.

• Don’t change to the shape or proportions.
• Don’t animate or place other objects over the icons.
• Don’t change the angle or direction of the icons.
• Don’t use the icons to replace words in sentences.
• Don’t make any Facebook icons the dominant feature of your design.
• Don’t use Facebook as a verb like “Facebook us”.

2. Messenger

As a general rule, you should use the ultraviolet gradient to encourage direct communication via Facebook’s popular instant message platform. However, you can revert to the solid black icon if you have technical or design limitations.

While the Messenger brand guidelines are similar to the main Facebook platform, there are some significant differences to keep in mind:

Icons:

Do's Don'ts

• The Messenger logo should always be below your brand logo.
• Keeping the above in mind, the Messenger logo must be at least 30px x 30px.
• Use the logo with a CTA that says “Connect with us” or “Chat with us” on Messenger.

• The Messenger logo shouldn’t be above or beside your brand logo.
• Don’t modify the design, scale, or color scheme.
• Don’t use the logo in place of any words.

3. Instagram

Instagram, like Messenger, has a simple approach to logo colors and your options for using them.

The critical point concerns the multicolored Instagram icon. You can only use the multicolored icon when you are referring to the app. For any other use, like advertising your profile, you must use the Instagram glyph.

However, you do have the freedom to choose the glyph’s color. While the recommended use is solid black on white, you can use any solid color you like. Just keep the overall design the same with no alterations to the proportions, shapes, width, or rotation.

You are further restricted in how you display the icons. Most notably, you can’t use either logo as a dominant feature, and you can’t imply a partnership or endorsement.

Icons:

Do's Don'ts

• Display the logo at a minimum 29px x 29px.
• Maintain the capitalization and consistent font size with the surrounding content.
• Use the glyph with a clear CTA like “Follow us on Instagram”.
• If you use the API, then say your product is “for Instagram”.
• All copy, other logos, CTAs must be kept half-a-glyph away.

• Don’t modify, abbreviate, or translate Instagram.
• Don’t combine the word, or any part of the Instagram brand, with a company name or other terms.
• Don’t change the color of the glyph to a pattern or animation.

4. WhatsApp

WhatsApp provides eight icons to give you some flexibility without breaking any brand guidelines. When using these famous social media icons online you can use any variation of approved colors.

If you use these icons, then you shouldn’t go wrong. However, there are specific rules on how to use WhatsApp in your copy and the use cases for a number of icons.

Icons:

Color schemes:

• Teal #075E54
• Green #128C7E
• White #FFFFFF
• Light Green #25D366

Do's Don'ts

• Always capitalize the W and the A.
• Use WhatsApp as one word only.
• Stay within the color scheme.
• Download screenshots directly from WhatsApp.
• Use the square logo for advertising the iOS app only.
• Use the WhatsApp logo to promote your business presence only if you use WhatsApp for business or the API.

• Don’t make any changes to the color, shape, or proportions.
• Don’t animate or fabricate other objects over the icons.
• Don’t combine the logos or the name with other logos, company names, wordmarks, or generic terms.
• Don’t use the WhatsApp logo to replace the word WhatsApp.

5. Twitter

Twitter is the most flexible platform when it comes to its detailed brand guidelines. Not only can you use different backgrounds, but they provide a flexible lockup for branded hashtags.

As you’d expect, they prefer you to stick to the approved color scheme. However, you can request permission to use black Twitter logos in your designs.

As mentioned, Twitter is more flexible than its fellow social media giants, but you’ll still need to follow these rules:

Icons:

Color schemes:

• Blue #1DA1F2
• White #FFFFFF
• Black #14171A

Do's Don'ts

• Use the most recently available icon when possible.
• Surround the logo with a whitespace that equals 150% of the logo width.
• Use a logo that is larger than 16px.
• Use the white logo on images with a slight black tint on the image.
• Maintain the logo colors but you can change the background color.
• Try to use the logo without a container. If you need a container, you can use a circle, square, or a square with rounded corners.

• Don’t make any alterations, rotations, or modifications to the design.
• Don’t animate or add accessories like chat bubbles.
• Don’t change the angle or direction of the icons.
• Don’t overemphasize the logo in your design.

6. LinkedIn

LinkedIn sometimes gets forgotten in the social media shuffle, but it can be an excellent platform for growing a small business. When it comes to their icons, they have simple guidelines for advertising your social media presence.

While you have just two options for the main logo, you can get them in English and Chinese.

The default logo is blue, but you can use black and white versions if your site’s color scheme is black and white.

Beyond the color, the brand guidelines are direct and easy to follow.

Icons:

Color schemes:

• Blue #0077B5
• White #FFFFFF
• Black #000000

Do's Don'ts

• Use the ® when linking to the platform.
• The minimum height is 21px when measured by the height of the “in”.

• Don’t make any changes to the color, shape, or proportions.
• Don’t animate or fabricate other objects over the icons.

7. Reddit

Reddit’s marketing is a unique challenge, but their logo, Snoo, is the cutest one on this list. When it comes to Snoo variations, you’ll find different lockup arrangements for the logo and the wordmark (including one specifically for advertising your AMA).

When it comes to share buttons, Reddit provides four alternative Snoos in different styles.

While you have some room to choose a social media icon you like, you are restricted in your color choices. Namely, you have two: orange-red and white. The background should always be orange-red and, barring one exception, Snoo’s head should be white.

Reddit users are a strong community, so it’s worth covering the brand guidelines before launching your marketing campaign.

Icons:

Share buttons:

Color schemes:

• Orange-red #FF4500
• White #FFFFFF

Do's Don'ts

• If you use an orange-red background in your design, then place a circle around the Reddit logo.
• If possible, the logo and wordmark should appear together – otherwise, you must explicitly mention Reddit in the headline or the copy.
• The letters are rounded, and the ‘i’ is shorter with an orange-red oversized dot.
• The safe space should be at least 140% of the icon size.
• Minimum 24px display size.
• You can create artworks, custom, and brand Snoos if they are consistent with Reddit’s content policy. Branded Snoos require a license.

• Make any changes to the color, shape, or proportions.
• No outlines or reversals.
• You can’t change the typeface.

8. Pinterest

Pinterest’s brand guidelines are the most flexible on this list when it comes to color options. While the only acceptable logo is the familiar ‘P,’ you can change the colors to match your design.

The only color restrictions are related to the color fills. You can use solid colors only, and the ‘P’ must always be consistent with the background color.

When it comes to copywriting, you will need to skim through the brand guidelines to get a sense of how you can advertise your page.

Icons:

Do's Don'ts

• Use the logo to promote your page.
• Use a CTA that displays your Pinterest account.
• Buttons in CTAs should link to your account with either a solid or outlined design.
• “Find us on” and “Follow us on” are the appropriate references.
• You can also say “Find more ideas on,” “Get inspired on,” and “Popular on.”
• Always keep the “P” in the circle container.
• Non-interactive elements should include your account name.

• Don’t use the Pinterest wordmark.
• Don’t say “Trending on” or “Trending Pins.”
• Don’t make alterations, outlines, filters, or effects.
• Don’t specifically mention Pinterest when sharing your full page URL.

9. YouTube

It will come as no surprise that YouTube has multiple logos that feature the play icon. With a long wordmark, this shorthand will help you discreetly place the icon in your header or footer.

Each YouTube social media icon comes in black, white, and red variations.

One frustrating thing about the Google family of products is its rigid approach to brand guidelines. It was quite surprising to discover that YouTube is one of the few Google products to offer an asset pack. However, YouTube also asks you to complete a formal brand request before using the icons to promote your channel.

Icons:

Color schemes:

• Red #FF0000
• Black #282828

Do's Don'ts

• The logo needs safe space that is at least equal to the size of the “play” icon in the logo.
• The minimum height is 20dp
• Use the play icon if the logo is too large.
• You can only use the logo and icon to link to a YouTube channel.

• Don’t make any changes to the spacing between the icon and the word or the letters within the word.
• Don’t change colors, typeface or the shape of the logo.
• Don’t use the logo in a phrase or a sentence.
• Don’t change the number of triangles, add patterns, or use words.

10. Google

As mentioned above, Google doesn’t have a user-friendly approach to social media icons. Unfortunately, use of the official Google logo is restricted to official partners and sponsored events.

However, you can use their icons to support your product if it works with Google products. Unfortunately, there isn’t a one-stop location for the product icons, so you will need to download them individually. Just be sure to use the most recent ones.

When using Google product icons, you will need to use the full-color version in most instances. However, some exceptions can be made for grey or white.

It can get very complicated once you decide to use the icons.

Icons:

Do's Don'ts

• The logo should be used to support your product, not sell it.
• Maintain a strong visual hierarchy with your brand icon dominating the page.
• Your copy must reflect that your product is “made for” or “works with” the Google product.

• Don’t modify, change, or distort the colors.
• Don’t use the name in your product name.
• Don’t use Google icons on merchandising.
• Don’t use the icons in a sentence or as words.
• Don’t mimic Google’s color scheme.
• Don’t overstate your relationship with Google or its products.

Conclusion

It might even be an excellent time to undertake a social media audit of your online communication. While you’re unlikely to be sued if you’re using off-brand icons, for designers and social media professionals, using the right icons is about attention to detail and professionalism.

Have any questions about using these social media icons? Ask away in the comments below!

The post Social Media Icons: The Only “Approved” Icons by Each Social Media Site appeared first on Revive Social.

Free podcast hosting can give you a low-cost way to experiment with podcasting and build an audience before making a lengthy financial commitment.

In this article, we’ve compiled a list of your best options for a feature-rich experience that doesn’t empty your wallet. Not only do we consider storage and bandwidth but also the enhanced features like analytics and distribution that will help you grow an audience quickly.

Table of contents:

• Why do I need podcast hosting?
• How does free podcast hosting work?
• Best free podcast hosting on the market
• What to look for with a free podcast host?
• Which free podcast host is for you?

Start a #podcast for free with these 6 podcast #hosting options

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Why do I need podcast hosting?

It would be wonderful if you could just upload your podcast to Apple or Spotify and then wait for your audience to grow. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

In the same way that Google doesn’t store any websites, Apple doesn’t store any podcasts. A podcast host does all the heavy lifting. They store it. And they use RSS feeds to let the directories know when episodes are released. Finally, when your audience clicks play, your podcast host is the one sending files all over the world.

There’s a reason why Apple and Spotify want to avoid all this hard work and this file size calculator reveals it.

If audio is uncompressed and uses a high bit rate, then five minutes of speaking can take as much as 106 MB in storage. That better be the best five minutes of your audience’s life because Apple, for one, limits podcasts to 150 MB.

Specialized podcast hosts have the tools and the technology to store large audio sizes and deliver fast data transfers without crashing servers or buffering endlessly.

How does free podcast hosting work?

Given they offer all of these benefits, you might be wondering how they can offer them for free?

Most free plans will offer limited storage and bandwidth. Your podcast host knows that when your audience starts to grow, you will upgrade to a paid plan for the increased storage and bandwidth.

Another option gaining traction is revenue-sharing. Podcast advertising is predicted to reach the billion-dollar mark by the end of 2020 because it has a high conversion rate, 63% of listeners made a purchase after hearing podcast ads.

This is notable because a number of podcast hosts are growing their ad networks and offering to split the advertising revenue with creators. This means, in some cases, you can get unlimited, high-quality hosting without reaching for your wallet.

Best free podcast hosting on the market

Now that we’ve discussed the value of free podcast hosting, let’s look at six excellent alternatives. The one that’s the best fit for you will at least partly depend on what your long-term goals are, but they all offer an excellent way to experiment with podcasting.

• Anchor
• Buzzsprout
• Sounder.fm
• Podbean
• Spreaker
• Acast

1. Anchor

• # of episodes/storage: Unlimited
• # of podcasts: 1
• Outbound bandwidth: Unlimited
• Website:
• Monetization: (the US only)
• Distribution: one-click distribution

Anchor has only one hosting plan and it offers unlimited everything. Normally, a business that only offers free plans isn’t likely to be a business much longer, however, Anchor joined the Spotify family in 2019. I think they’ll be ok.

Besides financial security, one of Spotify’s great benefits is its innovative advertising network. Anchor leverages this network to offer free podcast hosting with a revenue share model that splits everything 30-70 in your favor.

Equally important for the emerging podcaster is Anchor’s advanced analytics. In contrast with other hosts, Anchor offers detailed analytics on audience drop-off, demographics, and even preferred platforms. If you plan to experiment with formats and styles, then these analytics will tell you which version of your show is going to be a hit.

On the other hand, Anchor doesn’t offer a website or a custom domain. If you want to market your podcast, then you will need to use a podcast page hosted on www.anchor.fm/yourname.

Who should pick Anchor?

 The Experimenter 

• You’d like to try different things to see what works.
• Great analytics like listener drop-off will help you perfect your show.
• Built-in recording options with a drag-and-drop editor.

2. Buzzsprout

• # of episodes/storage: 2 hours/mo for 90 days
• # of podcasts: 1
• Outbound bandwidth: 250 GB
• Website: (with ads)
• Analytics: Basic (listens and downloads)
• Monetization:
• Distribution:

Buzzsprout is one of the most popular podcast hosts with over 10 years and 100,000 customers on their books. The first thing to remember is that the storage is quite low. For this reason, Buzzsprout is well-suited to podcasters on the verge of upgrading.

On the positive side, the automatic file conversion will keep beginners happy. Essentially, you can throw any file at Buzzsprout and it will be automatically converted and optimized for the podcast directories.

While Buzzsprout offers limited analytics, they do provide a growing range of integrations for extended features like analytics, charting, audio recording, WordPress publishing, alongside their own API.

Finally, you should consider Buzzsprout if you want to learn about monetization options. Not only do they have a growing library, but they also offer a slice of sponsorship, donation, and affiliate marketing to all users.

Who should pick Buzzsprout?

 The Ambitious Podcaster 

• You’re ready to monetize a growing following.
• You like automatic audio optimization that includes bitrates and ID3.
• You’d like to use a custom domain.

3. Sounder.fm

• # of episodes/storage: Unlimited
• # of podcasts: 1
• Outbound bandwidth: 20k streams/mo
• Website: (with ads)
• Analytics: Advanced (includes demographics and keyword searching)
• Monetization:
• Distribution:

Sounder.fm is an emerging hosting company started by former Google and Spotify executives. Founded in 2019, they are the youngest hosting company to make the list, but they are growing quickly.

We included them in the list because they have a strong SEO focus. As just one illustration, they offer automatic transcriptions in their free plan. In fact, the transcription will be hosted on your podcast page to increase your show’s discoverability.

If you like to use tracking tools, like Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel, then you will be able to integrate them seamlessly with Sounder.fm.

Who should pick Sounder.fm?

 The Beginner 

• You’re not sure if it’ll work out but you want to give podcasting a shot.
• Share small audio snippets with the Soundbite audio share feature.
• Built-in automatic transcription for improved SEO.

4. Podbean

• # of episodes/storage: 5 hours (500 MB)
• # of podcasts: 1
• Outbound bandwidth: 100 GB
• Website: (with ads)
• Analytics: Basic (listens and downloads)
• Monetization:
• Distribution:

If you’d like to use free podcast hosting without spending too much time on the details, then Podbean is a superb option for you.

Not only do Podbean offer a website with basic themes, but they also limit the free plan to mp3 files at 128 kbps. Although the maximum file size is 100 MB, you can publish three times a day.

Furthermore, you can use a range of plugins for automating basic tasks. There’s everything from Google Analytics, email marketing, meta tags to video, and audio optimization.

Who should pick Podbean?

 The Hobbyist 

• You’re in it for the fun and not necessarily looking to scale.
• Guests can “call in” using the free Podbean app.
• Listed in the Podbean app with over a million active users.

5. Spreaker

• # of episodes/storage: 5 hours (500 MB)
• # of podcasts: Multiple
• Outbound bandwidth: Unlimited
• Website:
• Analytics: Basic (listens and downloads)
• Monetization:
• Distribution:

Spreaker is the only host on the list to offer multiple podcasts on the free plan. Equally important is the unlimited bandwidth, which is a perfect mix for tinkerers.

I also like the range of soundtrack options available through their partnerships and libraries. Of course, you will have to pay for jingles and licensed music, but the range is terrific.

If you would like to try some live podcasting, then Spreaker’s free plan is a solid option with 15 live minutes per podcast. Although they don’t offer a website, you can easily share audio snippets directly from your podcast page.

Who should go for Speaker?

 The Rambler 

• You want to make multiple podcasts and try different things.
• The audio library makes it easy to find auxiliary sounds.
• One-click sharing to connected social media accounts.

6. Acast

• of episodes/storage: Unlimited
• # of podcasts: 1
• Outbound bandwidth: Unlimited
• Website: (with ads)
• Analytics: Basic
• Monetization:
• Distribution:

If you want to start with a big host, then Acast is your option. Not only is it the choice of The Guardian and The BBC, but also most of the winners at every British Podcast Awards.

While Acast offer an unlimited service for all of their users, monetization is for paid users only. On the other hand, free users get marketing tools like the transcription service and Snipper for creating small audio-visual clips that are perfect for social media.

On the negative side, Acast’s free website only allows for basic color and button styling. Moreover, they don’t support custom domains in their free or paid plans.

Who should choose Acast?

 The Next Big Thing 

• You know your podcast will be huge and you want professional hosting.
• Create small audio-visual clips for sharing with the Snipper tool.
• One-click transcription is available.

What should you look for with a free podcast host?

Storage size: One of the most important considerations. We’d recommend free podcast hosting that offers a minimum of 500 MB storage. This will give you room for at least three episodes at 150 MB. Even a small archive is a good step towards building an audience.

Outbound bandwidth: Keep in mind that just 10 listeners committing to an hour-long podcast at 128kbps will use 562 MB bandwidth. You need at least 250 GB of outbound bandwidth.

Analytics: The more advanced analytics the better. Advanced analytics will help you fine-tune your show with extra details like listener drop-off and demographics.

File types and bit rates: Unfortunately, the podcast directories have different requirements, so, in the beginning, opt for a podcast host who only supports MP3 and M4A or offers automated optimization and conversion.

Distribution: Your podcast should automatically provide you with an RSS feed for sharing with podcast directories. It is nice to have a podcast host who automatically distributes your episodes to the major directories.

Extra tools and integrations: Building your audience will be a lot easier with marketing tools like Sendinblue or one-click social sharing of audio highlights.

Website and pages: The best free podcast hosting options will give you a dedicated site or page where people can listen to your archive using a web player.

Which free podcast host is for you?

As can be seen, free podcast hosting offers a great way to lower the costs of podcasting without sacrificing quality. While you might be tempted to opt for a host who offers revenue sharing, ultimately you should consider whether the same host can help you build your audience.

Free #podcast #hosting: 6 reliable options for beginners

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In other words, consider what you would like to achieve and pick free podcast hosting based on your needs:

If you would like an easy to record your podcast and experiment with multiple styles, then choose Anchor.

For the best learning and marketing options, it’s hard to pass up Buzzsprout’s tools and documentation.

If you would like to build your audience through SEO tools, then take advantage of the automated transcription from Sounder.fm.

If you would like to have fun and leave everything on autopilot, then take advantage of Podbean’s automation options.

For multiple shows, and live podcasting then Spreaker is your best option.

If you would like to not only marketing tools but also a well-known host, then opt for Acast.

Have any questions about these podcast hosts? Ask away in the comments section!

The post 6 Free Podcast Hosting Services for Starting a Podcast Today appeared first on Revive Social.

The background

My problem is this: we run a famous (my term), CodeinWP comics series which has a year’s worth of material and we’d like to draw attention to the archive. The comics are popular on social, so it stands to reason that people would be interested in seeing more.

I wanted to find a way to share links to the archive category page without needing to change the OG (Open Graph) tag with every image share. The question, then, is how to share a link on Facebook that gets reach while also presenting the images in their best light.

At some stage, Fearless Leader asked me why I wasn’t including the article links with every image share on social. As mentioned, I had strong opinions on links in captions which includes their negative impact on reach. I also think it harms the perception of the page which helps fuel a negative spiral of, even, lower reach and engagement. Cue an ongoing debate with gentle reminders that at its core social media is a fast paced environment and it can be hard to keep up with changes and their impact on content.

In the end, I decided to try sharing images with a link in the caption. Is it possible that the definitive answer to how to share a link on Facebook is actually misleading? If I share an image with a link in the caption will I see an improvement in reach?

The Hypothesis:

I think that sharing image posts with a link in the caption will have a lower reach than, cleaner, properly formatted photo posts.

How we’ll perform the test of Facebook reach

The problem with this test is that sharing the same image multiple times in a short time frame will have an adverse effect on reach. The best way to avoid this corruption is to use two pages of similar standing with an extended “rest” for the images. I have two outlets appropriate for distribution:

• ThemeIsle with 37,000+ likes and followers.
• CodeinWP with 32,000+ likes and followers.

I gathered the data over a few months of posting. I mixed the post types across the channels to ensure neither channel had a monopoly on either style. Where possible the posts were made with minimal changes to the copy and time schedule.

Here are the examples of the two post types; a standard image post on the right and a link in caption post on the left.

All of the posts were scheduled for posting from within Facebook with at least a week separating them. I started posting with links in the captions from the end of August.

Data and results

The averages were higher on both pages.

ThemeIsle Reach:

• Photo Posts: 1,103
• Link Post: 1,263
• Link posts had ~14% higher reach than standard photo posts.

CodeinWP Reach:

• Photo Posts: 1,263
• Link Posts: 1,422
• Link posts had ~11% higher reach than standard photo posts.

On both channels the posts with links in the caption outperformed standard photo posts which makes for an interesting result.

The whole test is about reach but how many clicks did we get? We only amassed 70 clicks which translates to roughly 5 per post.

Individual Posts

Let’s look deeper into the results and see what happened.

This was one of my favorite recent comics because it plays on a familiar problem with WordPress and it seemed destined to speak to people. As you can see, it got a reach of just 484 people with an engagement rate in the vicinity of ~1.4%. 1.4% is rarely a good statistic to quote. For anything.

The good news is that the post with a link in the caption performed closer to expectation.

This is closer to the reach and engagement I should see for this content. Reach was better by a multiple of ~3 and engagements were great with more than 7 times the engagement.

I also performed some experiments with the copy but it did not prove to be an equalizer. The link-in-caption post still outperformed its link free sister by some margin. The engagement rate for the link in caption post was more than double at 5%.

vs.

So I guess this means the job is done, the myth is busted, and Fearless Leader wins again? Well, not entirely. I did notice that the posts with links also attracted more negative feedback.

This was consistent across both channels with a total of 15 lower tier negative feedbacks. By lower order, I refer to “hide posts”. We weren’t reported and we did not have any unlikes. However, this was still ~3 times the amount of negative feedback received on no link posts. It also represents an average of ~1 negative feedback per post when the average post receives 5 link clicks.

So, how to share a link on Facebook?

We know that getting organic referral traffic from Facebook is difficult but if you want to know how to share a link on Facebook, then try adding links in captions. The data shows that this is actually a better option than an image share on its own.

Will I add this to my Facebook strategy in the future?

Yes, I will. I know the negative feedback seems to suggest it is a risky strategy but I feel the ratio is still in our favor. Link clicks, reach, and engagement all increase when a link is added in the caption. I think it can be safely added to the strategy without significant risk on our part. I also think that any risk can be mitigated with monitoring for the type of negative feedback and the total over a fixed period.

Myth status?

I am now quite confident that the answer to how to share a link on Facebook is to use the link-in-caption method. Obviously, the traffic you send back to your site will not be enough to fuel your business. Rather, any traffic you drive should be considered a bonus, rather than a brilliant strategy for growth hacking.

A final word on aesthetics, the posts themselves are not very clean. The value of the standard link post lies in the formatting and appearance of your shared links. It will be interesting to now compare link-in-caption to link posts. Look out for that one in the coming months!

If you have any suggestion or ideas you’d like me to test, then please drop a mention in the comments.

The post How to Share a Link on Facebook? #SocialMediaMyths appeared first on Revive Social.

The good folks at Buffer will back me up with proof that more than 3 hashtags per tweet cause engagement to drop by as much as 17%.  I have never really had any reason to doubt this figure until I started spending a lot of time scrolling through #WordPress. You won’t believe how often I see over-hashed tweets like these:

Everything about the use and history of hashtags tells me that they have the wrong approach. So, when I see tweets like this perform well I start to openly ask: how many hashtags should you use on Twitter, actually? It is possible that the 1-3 hashtag rule is just a myth?

The hypothesis

If I post tweets with more than 3 hashtags I will not see a 17% drop off in engagement when compared to tweets with 1-3 hashtags.

So, I’m going to aggressively hashtag a series of tweets to see the impact of hashtags on retweets, likes, impressions, and URL clicks. I’ll also post a number of tweets which meet the hashtag standard of 1-3 so we can find the baseline. In the end, I will know exactly how many hashtags to use for the best reach and engagement.

How the hashtag test will unfold on Twitter

Luckily, I have access to two accounts with similar numbers and content types which helps offset the impact of any variables.

This is the plan for this Twitter experiment:

• 26 Tweets from ThemeIsle with between 5 and 24 hashtags.
• 26 Tweets from CodeinWP with 1-3 hashtags.
• I mixed it up and posted some tweets with the exact same content.
• When I posted the cross over tweets they were a few days or weeks apart.
• I pulled up all of the data at the end of October.

Accounts used

• ThemeIsle with 4,500+ followers
• CodeinWP with 3,700+ followers

Both accounts are active and tweet multiple times a day on WordPress and other tech themes.

Data and results

You can see that the ThemeIsle account suffered enormously with the extra hashtag burden. Engagements dropped off at a rate of 23% which is significantly higher than the 17% predicted.

Overall numbers

Overall, retweets were tight (31-26) and the hashtag heavy posts enjoyed a win with ~30% improvement. However, I believe this was related to anomalies and luck rather than the number of hashtags.

Likes adhered to the formula with the appropriate hashtagged posts receiving close to double the number of likes.

URL clicks are actually an important metric to consider and in this case, I was shocked to see parity. This is the only high point for the hashtag heavy posts.

Media engagements were about on par with expectations; low hashtag tweets performed 25% better than the hashtag heavy tweets. It is the least valuable metric for me but it confirms people are more likely to click on a post that doesn’t hurt their eyes on initial viewing.

A quick note on impressions

I want to talk about impressions because I noticed some interesting behavior. When you look at the overall numbers it seems that you can still enjoy a high number of impressions when you go hashtag happy. You can see that the impressions appear stable ~70% of the 1-3 hashtag tweets. However, closer analysis reveals that the impressions followed a downward trend for the entire month with some significant drops along the way.

(Charts by Visualizer Lite.)

The impressions were stable initially but as the tweets continued the impressions started to dip. The drop between tweets 21 and 22 is quite large. This seems to confirm the theory that heavy hashtags are taken as a sign of a spammy account.

Individual tweets

In order to see if the engagement rate dropped at the expected 17% rate, I looked at each of the tweets individually. There was one huge anomaly that threw the overall numbers out of whack.

This tweet with a comic on web developers and the misconceptions of their work employs a common internet trope with a four-panel image. It managed an engagement rate of 2.7% and represents nearly 40% of the engagements for all of the heavily hashtagged tweets.

Over twenty hashtags helped this tweet “beat” a single hashtag tweet. The single hashtagged post was only able to muster a 0.9% engagement rate. In this case, the engagements for the multi-hashtag tweet were 545% higher which is slightly different to the 17% drop-off predicated by the formula.

However, as stated, it was an anomaly. Further digging revealed tweets which did conform to the rule and you can see the 17% drop off in engagement for multi-hashed tweets.

So, how many hashtags should you use?

The data showed me that tweets with 1-3 hashtags will perform better than tweets with more than 3 hashtags. I saw that most of the metrics do, in fact, drop by at least 17% when more than 3 hashtags are used. Admittedly, I was shocked to see retweets and link clicks were not affected, overall, in the same way. So, should we make over hashtagging part of our Twitter strategy to drive traffic or spread a message?

I don’t think so because the difference is not significant enough to be rewarded. We saw how impressions dipped as the month wore on. A balanced posting schedule would be needed to avoid misidentification as a bot. This means no more than 2 hashtag heavy tweets in a given week. I’d also propose a few criteria for consideration:

1. If you really want to use multiple hashtags then you should be driving traffic to a very important source. The benefit is slight and there’s no guarantee it outperforms a pinned tweet or even 3-4 tweets with different copy.
2. If you have to do it, then make them creative. Pushing these hashtagged tweets will annoy people, so make sure there is some value and/or fun to help offset the hashtag impact.
3. For media tweets, it would be better to tweet the image/video multiple times with amendments to make up the retweet deficit.

For me, the big takeaway here is that the quality of a tweet can be enough to overcome people’s innate hashtag prejudice.

Myth status?

Even if you do decide to add it to your strategy them do not use it often, more than 2 a week, or for an extended period. Otherwise, you run the risk of throttled impressions and perhaps being flagged as a spam or bot account.

So, unless you are seeing incredible conversions on these tweets then it would not be a strategy to follow. The better strategy would be to perform a detailed hashtag analysis and see where the engagement is coming from. The excessive hashtag tweet is a lazy tweet.

I promise I will never do this again.

The post How Many Hashtags Can Twitter Bear? (Social Media Myths) appeared first on Revive Social.

1. Social Media Marketing World: Best of the social media conferences

• When: 20-22nd March, 2019
• Where: San Diego Convention Center, California.
• Price Range: $297 for Community – $1597 for All-Access
• Virtual Ticket: Yes
• Website: Social Media Marketing World

Started in 2017 this is probably one of the biggest social media conferences in existence. With, an estimated 7000 social media marketers attending this is truly a mega-conference. With the tracks available at this event, we should all be grateful for the virtual ticket option.

The virtual ticket will only give you a slice of all the education, knowledge, ideas that are available in the 120 keynotes, conferences, and workshops covering all aspects of social media, from community to advertising. There is an entire track devoted to Facebook Ads with 10 different talks from experts like Jon Loomer. In other tracks you’ll hear Mari Smith sharing wisdom on organic Facebook reach; Jay Baer will be there to help you turn customers into marketers; Andy Crestodina will give you the rundown on Google Analytics and how to make the numbers actionable.

The event networking surpasses every other event in this list. Indeed, there is even incredible pre-event networking opportunities with online groups set up in the build up to the big event. Once you get to the event you will find the networking plaza is the perfect place for you to meet other social media professionals.  With color coded tables you will be able to flit between the most interesting subjects.

2. The Social Shake Up

• When: 6-8th May 2019
• Where: Marriott Marquis Atlanta, Georgia.
• Price Range: Tickets are discounted until April. At the time of writing this article, the price for All-Access is $1290 rising monthly to $2290 in the month before the event. The Shake-Up pass starts at $995 and rises to $2095.
• Virtual Ticket: No
• Website: Social Shake Up

This is another big one out of North America that runs over 3 days. If you are looking for a conference with plenty of learning opportunities then you should consider The Social Shake Up. The speakers have been pulled from a range of companies including Lego, Cicso, Facebook, IBM, and Arby’s.

As mentioned, the speakers are diverse which is reflected in topics covering all the main platforms, but also content types and approaches. With valuable workshops on crisis management and social media on a shoestring budget, this is a great conference to visit. You will also get a jumpstart on content forms that will help propel you and your brand to the top: video, podcasting, visual storytelling are given focus during this conference.

Perhaps most importantly, for entrepreneurs, this is one of the social media conferences which will help integrate your social efforts with wider business goals. There’s a lot on offer for non-marketing professionals making their first move into social.

Social Shake Up is a strong conference with seasoned professionals also well represented. The famous networking sessions will be a good opportunity to connect with them and build relationships and knowledge. professionals over good, Atlanta food.

3. Intrigue Summit

• When: 26th June 2019
• Where: TBA, New York, New York
• Price Range: All-Access Pass $299. VIP Access Pass $399. (Early bird prices available until 30th January)
• Virtual Ticket: No
• Website: Intrigue Summit

The first thing you will notice is that Intrigue Summit is an event for digital marketing specialists with social media enjoying some coverage. However, there are two reasons why this event should still appeal to you.

• The sessions are organized in to Q&A sessions with multiple subject matter experts. This means over 200 experts will share their knowledge on the day.
• The 2019 sessions are particularly valuable for entrepreneurs interested in expanding their social media efforts: branding and design; mobile and video marketing are just three of the sessions you’re sure to enjoy.

You will also be impressed with the communication at Intrigue; audience members are encouraged to discuss, debate, and suggest. This means that the previous years’ registrants, like Microsoft, Facebook, Google, are actually a selling point. The prices are also more managable which translates into the most outstanding educational ROI of all the social media conferences we have considered.

4. Digital Summit

• When: 26-27th February 2019
• Where: McCaw Hall, Seattle, Washington
• Price Range: $200 off until the end of 2018. Conference Pass $245. Plus Pass $345. Premium Pass $445. Platinum Pass $995.
• Virtual Ticket: No
• Website: Digital Summit

A caveat to this entry is that Seattle is the first Digital Summit event of the year. This is a conference that travels with events all over America. If you can’t make it to Seattle then check out the website footer which has links to all locations for 2019.

Generally, Digital Summit events attract around 800-1000 people to 50 sessions and speakers. This is a good balance and will give you a chance to learn from experts from diverse companies like The Onion, Sparktoro, Airbnb, Slack and more.

Similar to the other social media conferences, Digital Summit has a strong emphasis on the marketing ecosystem and current trends. So, for entrepreneurs this represents a great opportunity to get up to speed with analytics, mobile, social as well as brand storytelling, strategy, and content. What’s more you also have the opportunity to access presentation slides and recordings for a year.

5. Marketing Show North

• When: 27-28th February 2019
• Where: EventCity, Manchester, UK
• Price Range: Registration is free. They do offer keynote priority passes for £20 + VAT per session which guarantees you a spot and quicker entry into the keynote.
• Virtual Ticket: No
• Website: Marketing Show North

There’s a strong future vibe to Marketing Show North with much emphasis placed on helping marketers and entrepreneurs keep pace with developments in technology and how they relate to marketing. You can expect to see virtual and augmented reality alongside drones, AI, and chatbots.

As you’d expect this means a diverse range of influencers and thinkers from fields like media, creative, digital, and marketing. This gives you a chance to learn from key influencers and experts in smaller case study driven seminars. There will also be a strong focus on future marketing trends, technology, and innovation in the 8 keynotes held over the 2 days.

For UK based entrepreneurs this is one of the must-do social media conferences for learning and awareness.

6. Atomicon

• When: 8th March 2019
• Where: The Assembly Rooms, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK
• Price Range: Early bird special £171 available until 1st December, 2018. Full price tickets are £350.
• Virtual Ticket: No
• Website: Atomicon

This is a social media conference run by Andrew and Peter, also known as the Content Mavericks who run the marketing membership site Atomic. If you check out the website you will immediately see that this is completely different from the other social media conferences on the list. The focus of the conference is on learning and implementation. Every talk is accompanied by an implementation plan to help attendees cement ideas and move forward with them. This will be followed up with an online implementation workshop in the week after the event.

The event places a premium on engaging speakers with verifiable experience in a variety of areas. For entrepreneurs the experience of brand building from Chris Ducker will be particularly valuable and help attendees make the most of the video marketing talks that follow. There’s also essential teaching on 2019’s biggest social trends like Facebook Ads and Messenger Bots.

7. Social Media Strategies Summit

• When: 19-21st March, 2019
• Where: Anaheim Marriot, Anaheim, California
• Price Range: From $1,999 for the keynotes and breakouts – $2,989 for everything.
• Virtual Ticket: No
• Website: Social Media Strategies Summit

This is probably the only event that is geared towards senior-level marketers with presentations coming from communications directors at Fortune 500 companies. You will immediately notice that the presentations are skewed towards strategy and current trends; storytelling receives its own track at this event and strategy is consistently represented in presentations.

There are even a few presentations for managers and team leaders to help them organize the most effective team. If you’re on the verge of scaling up then you should be sending your social media manager to this conference. With talks focused on content accelerators and virtual reality this is a conference that helps you move to the next level.

8. Social Media Week

• When: 20-22nd February 2019
• Where: TBA, Austin, Texas
• Price Range: $275
• Virtual Ticket: No
• Website: Social Media Week

Social Media Week in Austin will bring together over 100 speakers who will share both their experience and knowledge with an audience of over 100 people from more than 50 countries. If you’re looking for takeaways and actionable tips for video and performance then this is a must-attend conference. Molly Mahoney is a professional performer who will deliver a presentation designed to help entrepreneurs build their confidence in front of camera.

It is one of the few social media conferences openly acknowledging the downside to social media. We all know that bullying and harrassment have been able to flourish on the networks, but this is the only conference encouraging us to take action.

The conference will encourage attendees to consider how they tell stories. Creators share the platform’s burden when it comes to controlling and minimizing hate speech, fake news, bullying, and so on. Social Media Week is a model for how social media conferences will appear in the future with a commitment to creating meaningful content that also helps to improve the platform.

9. Social Media Camp

• When: 25-26th April 2019
• Where: Victoria Conference Centre, BC, Canada
• Price Range: TBA
• Virtual Ticket: No
• Website: Social Media Camp

Now in its tenth year, Social Media Camp is one of the oldest social media conferences on this list. It is also Canada’s largest. It works hard to uncover the cultural impacts of social media while also offering marketers an opportunity to improve their skills. If you are interested in the broader policy implications of social media then this is the best conference for you to attend. Far from blindly celebrating social media, this conference promises to look at the darker side of security and personal safety.

This is another great conference for entrepreneurs because of the efforts to attract the widest range of delegates in North America. With people coming from multiple sectors from all over the world; the networking on offer is second to none. Perhaps more importantly, Social Media Camp offers a unique benefit with their coaching initiative that promises to help beginners wrap their heads around the information they receive. The social media magicians will take the time to help you find the best track for your business interests, and clarify any confusion over the content.

10. Social Media Day

• When: 1-3rd May 2019
• Where: Congress Centre, London, UK
• Price Range: Earlybird tickets available until 31st January 2019 for £350 + VAT. The full price ticket is £500 + VAT
• Virtual Ticket: No
• Website: Social Media Day

If you are interested in the breaking edge of social media technology then get to London for Social Media Day. The first day’s presentations are all focused on disruptive technology and its impact on social media. If you have any interest in marketing or building a product that will last multiple generations then virtual reality and AI are two technologies you need to embrace. Social Media Day launches into these two subjects on the very first day which means you could just attend one day and be ahead of your competitors.

Competition and noise are two themes that run through the entire conference with presentations focused on how to create the best content for your audience across channels. This is one of the only conferences to almost ignore Facebook. Instead the emphasis falls on our favorite channel, Instagram, as well as YouTube and even LinkedIn. If you manage to make it to Social Media Day, then you will be lucky enough to acquire content creation tips that are about the fundamentals of storytelling which are quite flexible when it comes to audience and channel.

If you’re an entrepreneur ready to challenge the established order then Social Media Day, with its focus on disruption, is one of the essential social media conferences in 2019.

Final word

There’s little doubt that social media networks are one of the most powerful channels in the marketer’s book. The ability to easily connect with an audience makes it an essential tool in the entrepreneurial kit. However, these networks are also quite noisy and competitive; the more knowledge you acquire the better placed you are to make yourself stand out from the pack. Our sneak peek into the best social media conferences for 2019 is here to help you plan ahead and make the most efficient use of your time. Each of the conferences holds a unique appeal for an entrepreneur and should be considered in terms of your own goals.

If we missed any social media conferences you’re particularly excited about, let us know in the comments.

The post Social Media Conferences That Entrepreneurs Should Consider in 2019 appeared first on Revive Social.

I see social media myths everywhere: on Reddit, in Slack groups, even on the big networks. It’s hard to discount some of the stories because we have so many variables at play. The Algorithm shoulders much of the blame here because sometimes the creators don’t even know how it all works.

So, you might hear scheduling posts will destroy your organic reach. This means you stay awake all night just so you can send that post at the right time. Eventually, you hear that it isn’t true. We need to find a way to separate the myths, claims, stories, and suppositions from the best practices and useful advice.

The theory

This is not just one of those shadowy tips, but it is one of the more controversial. Some people have argued passionately for it. Twitter is amazingly complicated; tweets have a shelf life of a minute, but you need to constantly tweet. We also know that repeating tweets can be problematic, so you need variety in your tweets. When one of these tweets performs well, then you can really get jammed up because you know people will like it, but many people missed it and you can’t re-publish it.

Retweeting yourself makes sense, right?

Well, you know a lot of people will mock you for indulging in this kind of trumpeting. Twitter can be a scary place, and people generally see self-retweeting and liking as a sign of desperation and narcissism.

But these are company channels, so why not experiment a little?

Usually, I wouldn’t take social media tips from randoms on Twitter, but I decided I was willing to risk the company to look a little socially awkward in this case. If retweeting yourself will double your retweets, impressions, and all those other little measures we love so much, then I would consider it one of my best social media tips.

What’s going to happen?

If the theory is correct, every tweet I retweet will receive a boost in impressions and engagement. Obviously, the benefits will be an exponential thing with more popular tweets enjoying a bigger jump, but this will also be an effective strategy for the less popular tweets too. The bump will be large enough to incorporate it as a regular practice in the future.

How am I going to do it?

I am going to pick the best performing and worst performing tweets and then retweet them. In some instances, I will quote them, and in others, it will be a standard retweet. I am also going to select older tweets and retweet them.

The results

I started off with a quoted retweet from our monthly WordPress news article. My quoted retweet for the monthly news got a slight impression boost. It got in front of 147 more people but performed much worse than the original in terms of actual engagement.

The original tweet leaned into Yoast’s popularity and the growing concerns about Gutenberg for WordPress.

This is the result of the retweet with a quote. I removed the Yoast mention but retained the hashtag. There was a slight boost to the impressions but the dip in engagements counteracts it. This is not just a problem from retweeting but the removal of the mention. Yoast engaged with the original tweet, so it gave a little bump.

I also tried a straight retweet of an underperforming post. This is a more interesting tweet because it doesn’t really glom onto anything external, apart from WordPress.

The results here are fascinating. This second post had no engagement, you can see the narcissist-tweet from me in the box. No one liked it, no one retweeted it, yet it got more impressions than the news retweet above.

You can see in the details that nothing interesting happened with only 2 genuine engagements. Check out how well it performed, impressions wise, compared to a regular tweet.

The retweet was never popular, and the engagement rate is almost unmeasurable but somehow it has almost eclipsed a tweet with a good engagement rate.

I decided to try this with another, let’s say unloved, tweet on a different account.

As you can see there was nothing doing with the original tweet. It seemed a worthy tweet for the experiment.

The retweet led to twice the amount of impressions with 3 times the engagement (taking the retweet out of the number). The numbers are still low, but there was a significant uptick.

I saw this really pay dividends with a popular post. A retweeted Hansel and Gretel post doubled in impressions and engagements.

So, it seems pretty simple, right? Find the best tweets and then retweet them for twice the impressions and engagements. Actually, it is not always that simple.

I have a decent enough tweet here which reached around 70% of our followers with an engagement rate of ~0.88%. When I blast it, I am going to see something amazing right? I am going to viral, right? I’ll start a YouTube channel, and become a star.

Eh. Maybe put the Lambo on hold for a few months or so.

Once again, I am the lone retweeter. We got a little bump in both impressions and engagement rate (0.94%) but I was a little disappointed. The theory that all retweets would enjoy a double bump didn’t hold here.

So…I switched accounts. I got another comic tweet which had a 50% impressions rate on an engagement rate of 0.93%

Once again, I made no changes but I was hoping to see a nice bump for the tweet regardless.

The impressions hobbled to just 1575 which is a gain of 78. The engagements are not that much better; we get just 2 extra link clicks. I should be happy that the engagement rate is now over 1% but at what cost?

Finally, I decided to put it to the test with a different content type. Link tweets are the unfortunate tweets of the Twitterverse. Generally, they are not too special but they are kind of necessary.

I picked a popular tweet that leaned heavily into a broad hashtag, Marketing, and included a mention for SendinBlue.

You can see that the impressions are lower than 50% and the engagement rate is sputtering at 0.36%. On the bright side, we saw an unpopular tweet double its performance after a retweet. So, I head into this one with confidence.

What do you think?

This is the first time I have seen the engagement rate drop following the retweet. When you take my original tweet out of the calculations the new engagement rate is 0.33 from an extra 126 impressions.

The verdict: Social media myth or not?

So, it is true that I saw a bump every time I retweeted myself, but I really wanted a leap. In some cases, I saw over a 100% increase in the impressions, but in other cases, I saw ~10% increases. When it comes to engagement I saw a worse performance with just an additional retweet, or view, in some cases. While this might mean a 100% increase it’s not much when I moved from 1 to 2.

The bump was not at all exponential. The rate of increase was lower the more popular the tweet. I also found that I was never able to reliably double anything (except the tweets themselves). The increases were, across the board, inconsistent. If you retweet, you will see more impressions, this is how the system works, but is it worth it?

Not really.

Myth busted. It’s one of the social media tactics that will work in some cases but shouldn’t be part of your ongoing strategy.

Do you know any social media myths you’d like us to look into next? Let us know in the comments!

The post Retweeting Yourself Doubles Your Reach … Or Not? (Social Media Myths) appeared first on Revive Social.

I had planned for some Pinterest experimentation in June, but I wasn’t able to get there due to a number of different projects competing for my attention. I found some cool stuff on Instagram and my focus on WordCamp Europe gave me a good opportunity to play with Twitter videos.

These experiments were possible because of our role as media partners and we conducted a number of interviews with both speakers and attendees. We also used our very own article on social media videos to structure our interviews.

Social media case study #1: Tweeting for WordPress

As I mentioned once or thousands of times already, June was a rough month with WordCamp Europe dominating most of our thinking. 2018 was our first run at the media partnership role and this created an extra bit of pressure around our planning. And not an insignificant amount of performance anxiety.

While it is possible for planning to be a stressful experience we should remember that it is also utopian. Planning is a wonderful thing; you imagine achieving so much and layer in so many dreams, wants, needs, and goals. When WordCamp Europe came around I was very excited because I spent last year watching it from the office on the livestream. This year I was going to nail it.

Then…It comes time to get in there and mess up your pretty hands.

Not quite perfect. I also volunteered to be part of the communications team and I made a rough, but correct, decision on the first day. We were conducting interviews with the speakers and we had planned to make them live interviews. We reversed this decision because many people actually feel uncomfortable with the live aspect. So, the end result was we had limited equipment for the interviews: no mic, no camera, no tripod.

Personally, I am not a huge fan of the live aspect so I should have anticipated there would be some discomfort. This is reasonable and we can live with it, but switching to recorded interviews meant editing. As you know Twitter videos have to be 2:20 seconds long and there is no way around it. We could upload them to YouTube and then re-post to Twitter but our content strategy on YouTube is not incredibly flexible. The speaker interviews were far removed from the content we put on YouTube and they would have a negative impact on the ranking of the channel. Essentially, we would have been using YouTube as a CDN and this would have hurt us.

We went with the threaded tweets option but the videos still needed to be cut down to the appropriate time limit and this took time. Balancing everything with the volunteer obligations slowed us down.

However, the videos were successful which, to be honest, wasn’t a surprise. We had a solid concept and any interaction with the official #WCEU hashtag was going to deliver an impressive amount of reach for us.

We selected one of the more popular speakers and prepared questions in advance.

The process just required some classic research and very little digging.

The theme of the talk was announced in advance and he has written an article on the same subject. We just built questions around the article and voila! A pretty good interview.

We had requests for a full transcript and got the impressions up to 4,000 for the first question. The threaded interview obviously lost some ground, but it was a better way to present the entire interview without milking it for attention.

Rather than drip feed people the interview we linked the threaded tweet in the initial tweet and pinged anyone who commented on the first video. This is a better way to handle it.

No jump cuts, but still not too bad either.

Social media case study #2: Posting to Facebook from Instagram

So, I am not sure if you have heard but business pages are getting destroyed by the Facebook algorithm. As you know I have put on a brave face. My tears are all inside while the outside is all cucumbery. I have a tried a few different things over time. You know, what everyone says to do: post quotes, post videos. It works for these big brands with money burning a hole in their budgets.

Usually, we have fewer options, but as I mentioned above you just need to interview celebrities and people will follow you like I do bacon. If you are not able to interview celebrities, there might be a few other ways to skirt the rules.

I like playing with Instagram because it is so hot right now. Even with the limitation on the data released, it is clear that Insta is a pretty tasty platform for the hungry marketer. In the mad rush to post on multiple platforms while still looking calm I made a boo-boo. I managed to duplicate content a few times but this caused fewer problems than you would think. In fact, I got a little reward when the cross-posted content got much better reach on Facebook than an image posted natively.

First a little context for you. Our most recent Hackathon saw us make a Create a Wapuu app. Wapuu is kind of a big deal in the WordPress community. As part of the MVP and presentation, the team made a Wapuu. We grabbed an image of the little guy for Facebook and Instagram. I first shared it to Facebook and got the expected response.

Move along there’s nothing to see here. Wow. Flaming wreckage.

The two loves were from the wider company family. I wish I was joking. This shouldn’t have happened like this. This should have been a moment of glory. The WordCamp mascot is much loved. And, I mean much loved. This mashup should have made the people laugh. They never even had a chance.

In a typical 3-year-old tantrummy way I took my Wapuu and went home. After a few days, I decided to post it on Insta. Finally, we had found some intelligent people who appreciate a good Wapuu. The numbers are little short of incredible. For example, the reach was half of the Facebook reach. Those hashtags really help. I don’t go crazy; maybe 10-15 variations but they really helped Wapuu get where he needed to go. We also got a little fringe benefit with some good attention from influencers within the WordPress marketing space.

Finally, I noticed that Wapuu went back to Facebook; just five days after his initial outing, but I left it to see what would happen. I was curious since I had a post reach four people last week when the Messenger button was auto-selected.

It turns out that Wapuu did quite well,  thank you very much, and suffered no ill-effects from the duplicate post in such a short time.

Wapuu got a nice organic reach boost of 39% and some more reactions. It makes sense that the Instagram numbers would feed into the algorithm, but I was surprised given the proximity of the posts.

I also ran a similar experiment with link posts. Obviously, the link is unclickable in Instagram, but when it carries over to Facebook the link is clickable.

I tried it with an older blog post on Chrome extentions and got a weirdly good response on Instagram.

I am a reasonable guy, but that image is awful when it makes it to Instagram. However, it was popular enough.

So, when the post is left to ferment on Facebook I found it performed well.

Not amazingly so, but better than a post from the day before which had an organic reach of 520.

Social media case study #3: New tools, same problems

I wanted to find some ways to make my life a little easier, and since my wife really loves the dog, I had a look at social media tools. Is this a case study? Not quite, but I have been meaning to try a different batch of tools for some time and now I have an excuse.

One of the first tools I tried was MetaShort because it offers me the opportunity to easily manipulate the meta data and customize links on Facebook especially. My final review is eh. I did like having more power over the description and image but ultimately I didn’t feel a strong urge to use it more often.

The best option for Facebook is to dig in and set it manually then tweak with the debugger.

I am interested in using a new tool because I have had some issues with Hootsuite over the past year. I looked at Content Studio this month. It’s kind of cool. I like the way the tools are integrating 3rd party content.

The posting options to queue, schedule, evergreen queue are nice. I can see why some of these tools are getting so much traction but Content Studio lacks decent insights at this stage. There’s not much data for digging when compared to a tool like Keyhole and I got a few errors when I tried to compare pages.

Finally, let’s go full automation and let Lisa pick our best pictures for Instagram. In this app a friendly AI, Lisa, will analyze your pictures, select the best one and suggest optimized hashtags.

I threw a trio of images at Lisa and she picked one without me in it. Clearly, the AI is broken. I also found the hashtags to be…questionable at best. If you look closely you’ll notice #asklisa is in there twice. That’s a little presumptious Lisa.

Conclusion

The post Posting to Facebook From Instagram – Social Media Case Study #8 appeared first on Revive Social.

Last month, I argued that Facebook was a waste of time for marketing, but this month I got some good advice and managed to recover some organic reach. So, it is true, Facebook is hard to give up. Facebook, I wish I knew how to quit you.

Twitter is the other popular platform that teens hate. With just 3%  of them claiming it as a go to. Which makes sense actually, Twitter is very much a platform for grown-ups only.

Twitter has been fun this month and I experimented with my Twitter copy and tried to get clever. Turns out clever is not necessarily better.

Breaking into Pinterest is not so good either. I did that too. I cleaned it up and started learning more about it.

Social media case study #1: Facebook’s back, back again.

I can’t seem to give up on Facebook, much as I’d like to. Facebook’s DAU numbers will always make it an attractive proposition, and we have 60k people on our pages. This is a decent enough sized audience to continue trying to engage with them. Reaching out via groups has proven successful, but it would be nice to use the page for more than a first line of contact.

Considering this I asked George, the Facebook ad maestro, if he had any quick-fire tips for improved organic reach. Spoiler alert: he did. His advice had me a little concerned about engagement baiting, and I was worried that my “new tactic” could be misconstrued.

George suggested asking questions, not asking for comments, but questions that would provoke responses from the audience. His examples were “Do you feel the same?”, “Do you have friends like this?” and so on. It seemed like sound advice.

I have tried it a number of times since. Our most recent video was, unfairly, ignored by most of the audience. Check out a video post with more dismal numbers than a losing lotto ticket.

Just one reaction. From a teammate. The heart reaction on its own is pity/support/keep your chin up. Thanks, Robert.

Diagnosing this issue starts with the post text. It is not social, and the copy is bad. The good advice arrived a few days after the post. So, I grabbed some stills from the same video and made them into a single post. The results:

The copy is still not 100% on point, but it is closer to a successful format. The organic reach jumped up, and the people reacted more. I will tweak the copy yet again, and then re-post the video to see the impact. And, of course, I will continue using the tactic for interactions.

Social media case study #2: Twitter hashtags and copy

When I receive a good idea I really like to beat it into the ground. I have been giving more love to Twitter lately and playing with it a lot. I was inspired to try a few methods for a better strategy. 

My first strategy was to promote some blog posts hard with tagging and clever copy. I have never been a big fan of tagging other users. This is the online equivalent of mentioning someone when they are in earshot. It feels needy and weird to me. I always assumed that good writing and images would help. The flaw with my thinking is that everyone agrees that I am not as clever as I think I am. So tagging and hashtagging it is then.

Depending on the hashtag I saw a pretty nice jump in impressions. I used a bunch of stills from our most recent video, they may look familiar, and hashtagged them for web designers or freelancers. Even with a spelling mistake, we reached 50% of our followers.

When I targeted the same images at web designers I saw a massive drop.

I also feel that the line about the octopus was a mistake here. “Have you ever had these clients?” is infinitely more social. The Octopus character can’t be seen in the clutch of images, and so the reader has no frame of reference and the line makes no sense. In any offline social situation the octopus comment would be greeted with befuddlement.

The octopus will become my catchphrase for catching weak and abstract copy. I swear, 87% of my problems are related to an irrational belief that I’m pretty clever. I look back over my tweets and see the creative copy and I shudder. Like every month.

This month was all about the GDPR regulations. Not sure if you heard anything about it? We had two solid blog articles on GDPR and the best approach for businesses to take. I wrote a couple of tweets with more ‘creative’ approaches. An Agony Aunt and a dialogue because I was sure they were so clever.

I wonder if a less clever approach would have fared better. I feel like impressions go up, but engagement is still lacking. It will be good to focus on this in the future.

Focusing on Twitter conversation means focusing on trends, right? For me, there are certain things I hate doing, and trendjacking is one of them. I feel like the potential for calamity is much, much higher. Finding the balance is tough, but this advice about crowbarring the brand into current events has helped. I think there is a way to work with trends.

Taking into account an updated Twitter strategy means I need to suck it up and just get more involved with popular hashtags. I got lucky with a beta tester role for Hashtagify, so I am monitoring the breakout hashtags for their potential to us. I have just applied the old social rule about religion and politics to my approach. Seriously, it just means being sensible and asking yourself questions before tweeting (ironically this is not the usual practice for Twitter). Do I really need to throw the company name into Pakistani politics? Probably not.

On the other hand, #StupidQuestionsForAliens is something we can have some fun with.

Social media case study #3: Pinterest

We are expanding into Pinterest with some of our more visually appealing content. Saved logins are killing me. I accidentally set up all of the CodeinWP comics on my personal Pinterest account. So, I need to migrate everything across to the company account. I also found that the stats aren’t large enough to give me much to work with yet. However, I can see a 3 fold increase for the vertical images.

This is not so surprising, I read that images outside the Pinterest parameters of 2:3 will either be cut off or distributed less. I can already see that this will have an impact on the distribution of our comics that tend to favor width over height.

The vertical infographics that I shared via ThemeIsle got better distribution, even without keyword optimization.

I spoke to our illustrator about reworking the comics into vertical arrangements, he was not overjoyed with the prospect. This tendency of social media sites to prefer different sizes really plays havoc with our illustrations. We have had some trouble getting the ratio right for web and social without losing too much quality.

This is an experiment in its early days, and it gives me a great idea of how to move forward. You can even see that the simple Canva graphic for “6 Free Blogging Sites” got good distribution over the video series on Elementor.

Social media case study #4: What is Mastadon?

I decided to play around with Mastadon since I have been putting it off for some time. Mastadon is a little (a lot) like Twitter, but it is open source and decentralized. There’s no advertising, data mining, or central authority. It currently has around 160,000 users.

Users are the central concern for Mastadon with 500 character limits on their posts (also known as Toots), granular content support and media warnings a part of every instance. The instances are the thousands of communities that comprise Mastadon. This means it is not a single platform housing communities, like Twitter, but a network of platforms (instances). You can see the similarities to Twitter below.

The setup is fairly simple but you can make choices that help you find the best instance. The options are broad: artist, developer, sysadmin, sports lover, and so on.

You can see the instances change when I select English as my spoken language.

I selected the mastadon.technology instance which directs me to the signup page:

The Mastadon instance can be set up to show a chronological timeline of that instance (Local), or all instances that it knows about (Federated).

I selected Federated timeline and who should pop up but an old friend called the BBC.

When you decide to Toot you have quite a few options; post publicly, privately, to followers, or just to mentioned users. You can add photos, emojis, video, and content warnings to your Toots.

I sent a few Toots, but the data was not too exciting at this early stage. I plan to continue playing with it and I will share the results here.

That’s it for the month, thanks for reading! Next month I will bring some more data on Pinterest, along with some more insights into Mastadon.

The post What Is Mastadon? Social Media Case Study #7 appeared first on Revive Social.

We’ll also briefly cover a few miscellaneous things that have gone on this month, like spring cleaning on LinkedIn and a couple of new YouTube channels.

Social media case study #1: Is video a cure-all for declining reach?

I keep playing with videos on Facebook because we are working on video content generally. It seems like the perfect solution because video is the panacea for Facebook ills, right? I don’t think so, and it isn’t just us. I looked around the WordPress space to see how things are unfolding. It made me both happy and sad to see that even the heavyweights have trouble working with the algortihm.

I heard some rumblings about this last month, but I decided to watch via Pages to Watch feature to see what was happening. Names withheld to protect the innocent. Not that it matters because everyone seems to be getting beaten down by the algorithm. I noticed one video got 284 views and 4 likes from an audience over 200,000. For me, the video ticked all of the boxes. It is an explainer on Gutenblocks, in particular how to create and edit them. Gutenberg will be out soon, so the video is both timely and informative.

I was under the impression that informative posts still received a boost from the News Feed algorithm, so did this one slip through the cracks? In my research, I saw similar numbers for video on multiple pages. Our own practical SEO video only received 3 likes and a share from 130 views.

It’s weird because all of the video content mentioned above is good. For tutorials, explainers, and product announcements, quality is crucial, and all of the above videos meet the standard.

I must enjoy pain because I still decided to try another video with great animation and motion graphic design. The video is “6 Steps to Design a WordPress Site”. We got 108 views and one like from our videographer. It really gives me the idea that informative is not a powerful ranking signal, maybe I dreamt it? Without comments, our great videos can’t get any traction at all. All of the videos I have looked at ended up getting belted by the algorithm.

I could draw three broad conclusions from these experiments. Firstly, the videos are not informative enough. This is possible in some circumstances, but definitely not all. It feels more likely that the videos are not considered informative when the user sees them. I don’t think our users are interested in SEO when scrolling their News Feed.

This leads me to my second conclusion: I don’t think users really want informative videos on Facebook. We tried a few different videos over the past 8 months and they rarely performed well. We made a 7 part series on Elementor add-ons. A great subject for WordPress users and the full video got 20k views on YouTube. We sliced and diced and kept most of the videos to a minute/minute and a half. How’d they do?

Facebook says no!

Clearly, if someone wants a tutorial or any kind of informative video then they search YouTube. A Facebook video is more serendipitous. Essentially, we need to find information that a user didn’t realize they needed to know. This X-factor is genuinely difficult.

This leads to my third conclusion: info-tainment is the only way to get eyeballs from Facebook. Info-tainment or hijinks (or a massive advertising budget).

Social media case study #2: Facebook Groups as the cure for declining reach

Are you ready to give up on Facebook yet? I’m thinking about it right now. How much time do you spend creating content for it? It feels increasingly wasteful to spend too much time on Facebook.

Despite my pessimism, we did see some cool stuff on Facebook this past month. Facebook Groups was a nice surprise for us and we will continue to push efforts in this direction. This will be a great way to leverage an incredible archive of WordPress tutorials, reviews, and guides.

We posted a cool article on the best theme for page builders to some groups. When I say we, I mean the chief. He nailed it. The simple group post in a reply to a question saw more than 550 users visit the page. Compare this with the single like we got on the regular post to our Facebook page.

From this, we can formulate the best practices for Group posting. The best approach is to drop links in response to a question. Personally, I don’t post in or join groups with constant link posting. These groups have no value. They are just mini News Feeds and people ignore most of them.

The tactic for me going forward is to listen to groups and provide help. This won’t always be in link form. I have given advice here and there also. It is closer to advocacy and support than marketing, similar to the approach I have on Quora.

I realize now, that the only good thing about Facebook is groups. Great for research and traffic. Beyond that, it is not such a useful platform anymore. I feel like Instagram is a better place to expend effort. I saw that Mercedes are getting 15x the engagement on Instagram.

Facebook is dead, long live Instagram.

Social media case study #3: Instagram mishaps

When fooling around with Instagram this month I made some pretty concerning rookie errors. The moral is that hashtags are crucial to Insta-success.

Clearly, this is on me. I scheduled the posts at all different times because I was poking around to see what would happen. My poking led to a week’s work of content without hashtags. There might be some debate about the optimum hashtags number for engagement, but we can be sure that 0 hashtags is pretty bad for engagement and reach.

What I have been doing is posting, and then putting hashtags in the comments. The scheduling of Insta content late at night did not sync with my son’s sleeping/teething/crying schedule. So, no hashtags were posted. I found it dropped as much as 10%.

I decided to make things easier for myself and put the #hashtags in the #text. You know what was weird? I found it had a negative effect on my reach even when the engagement was higher.

Image 2 had no hashtags and got better reach even with less engagement. This makes sense but I am surprised to see it performed so well. Clearly saved photos are really good for reach.

Social media case study #4: Pinterest it and they will come

We have decided to open a traffic mine over on Pinterest. Everyone talks about Pinterest like it invented traffic. We are in there now too. It is prompted by two things. One, Facebook is crap. Two, the audience on Pinterest is growing and going to get better.

I think this will also be a great way to diversify our audience. Currently on Facebook and Twitter 86% of our audience is male.

Pinterest claims 70% of their audience is female, so this makes it a great opportunity for us to diversify our audience.

I love being able to see what content on our blog gets pinned by others. The increase blog traffic post seems to be popular, but the image is from BackLinko. Luckily the archive is full of great blog posts that are focused on blogging. CodeinWP has an awesome ebook about blogging which could find a good home on Pinterest.

We have some big blog projects in the works and this could be a great place to release them.

I spent time pinning various images from our comics and creating boards for themes. So far…nothing. But these are early days, and once we start to optimize for Pinterest I am confident we can build something decent.

Final thoughts and miscellany

The carnival is over for Facebook, so we’re going to start doing stuff on LinkedIn. Have you seen the changes to “acceptable” LinkedIn content? It is getting so broad that I saw a karate kid meme in my feed. Sure, you can make the text about being a robot engineer, but it will always be a meme.

I spent some time optimizing the profiles with updated copy, and I discovered that we had an Iranian HQ for one of our side projects. Not really, but CodeinWP Iran has taken our name (could be a coincidence), and our logo (unlikely to be a coincidence).

That’s all I have for you this month, thanks for reading and I will see you in June!

The post Is It Time to Stop Using Facebook as Part of Your Social Media Marketing Strategy? Social Media Case Study #6 appeared first on Revive Social.

Best social media podcasts

1. Social Media Marketing Podcast

Host: Michael Stelzner

Frequency: Weekly

Format: Stories and interviews with experts in a specific area.

Duration: Most episodes run around 40 minutes.

One of the best social media podcasts available right now. It has a holistic approach and contains interviews, discussions, strategies, and more. There’s also an excellent blog post supporting every episode which takes some of the pressure off my memory. Personally, I have trouble with the dodgy Australian accent framing the episodes, but this is my issue. This is essential listening just for the opening tips with the latest app, website, or feature you can use immediately. You might not use every discovery but this is where I first heard how easy it was to make images, gifs, and infographics with a little tool called Canva.

Jump in point: December 8th, 2017: Visual Personal Branding: How to Build a Loyal Following With Images. This is a good episode to re-visit in the aftermath of the News Feedocalyspe.

2. Social Media Lab from AgoraPulse

Host: Scott Ayres

Frequency: Weekly

Format: Hosts reveal outcomes of various experiments. Some special guests.

Duration: Usually around the 15-20 minute mark. Review and wrap up episodes run longer.

Social Media Lab is a new podcast married to AgoroPulse and their website. It is on the list of best social media podcasts because it tests ideas about what will work on social networks. So much of social media work is gut instinct because we all have ideas about the algorithms and the best recipe for achieving more reach. This podcast is an initiative that takes the most popular theories and seeks to ‘crack’ the social media code. Lucky for us they are nice enough to share the results with the wider social media community. They also take requests. Brilliant.

Jump in point: Again, in light of the FB News Feed change the 6th Feb episode on re-publishing evergreen content is essential listening.

3. The Science of Social Media from Buffer

Hosts: Hailley Griffis, Brian Peters, Kevan Lee.

Frequency:  Weekly, but some special episodes can appear outside this schedule.

Format: There’s a good mix here, Brian and Hailley are constants but they might present stories, share things that inspire them, interview experts or provide insights and test results.

Duration: Ranges between 10-20 minutes with some special episodes outside the range.

Buffer’s podcast provides a breezy discussion oriented podcast with all of the latest news and views from the social media industry. This is a great podcast for the deep dives they take into all the big news. You are also going to find some detailed insights into changes to algorithms and features. This is one of my favorite podcasts because they also provide details on books you can read for inspiration – and they still somehow manage to keep it tight and under 20 minutes most weeks.

Jump in point: Personally, I loved episode 62: Top 9 books every Social Media marketer should read. I’ll also make mention of Episode 84: Instragram Marketing Growth: 3 Proven Tactics to Grow.

4. Social Media Social Hour

Host: Tyler Anderson

Frequency: Weekly

Format: Interviews

Duration: From 20 minutes to an hour.

This is one of the best social media podcasts because each episode is built around an actionable tip. If you are looking for actionable ideas then start with this podcast. Tyler Anderson is a social media entrepreneur and he has access to some of the biggest brands and influencers. Each week he is joined by a guest to discuss social media, tech and all facets of online marketing. You will get access to some great tools and strategies that are used by his agency in their day to day operations. Great not just for social media management, but also productivity and content marketing.

Jump in point: 23rd February’s “Social Media Marketing Strategies That Work Right Now“.

5. Social Pros

Hosts: Jay Baer and Adam Brown.

Frequency: Weekly.

Format: Interviews.

Duration: 30 minutes to over an hour.

The tagline is “real people doing real work in social media” and this show is like an access all areas pass. Jay Baer is a legend in marketing circles and this gives him great access to the most interesting brands in the world. This means you can grab the inside skinny on what brands like Ford, IBM, and ESPN are doing.  You are going to grab some awesome strategies and pick up a few secrets from the teams setting new standards in social media marketing.

Jump in point: 6th October 2017: Why cartoons outperform every content format and 2nd March 2018: How to make social videos worth watching.

6. The Hubcast

Host: George Thomas

Frequency: Ranges from 6 days to two weeks.

Format: Interviews and discussions.

Duration: Ranges from 20 – 55 minutes.

I included this for the Hubspot users. This is just one of Hubspot’s podcasts and it is the most valuable from a social media perspective. Hubcast is driven by interviews and discussion, and you sure won’t miss any news about Hubspot. However, there is still a lot there for you if you use different tools. They share details on free tools as well as some of the best strategies you can employ in your own work. If you do use Hubspot then you need to sign up now to hear the best tricks and tips for the tool.

Jump in point: Hubcast 164: Pillar Templates, GDD, and Dead Keywords introduces the concept of growth driven design with some actionable tips.

7. Community Signal

Host: Patrick O’Keefe

Frequency: Bi-weekly

Format: Interviews with community managers from a broad range. Big brands are represented, like Ubisoft, to influencers and authors, like Jared Smith.

Duration: Ranges from 20 – 45 minutes.

The social media landscape is inherently community focused, and this will be more accentuated in the light of algorithm changes and scandals. This is the best social media podcast focusing just on community. This is absolutely essential listening for social media managers because you are going to hear from marketers that excel in online communities. The host, Patrick O’Keefe, has extensive community managing experience and he brings incredible contacts to the table. All the guests have insightful stories from diverse industries like gaming, Lego, or luxury handbags.

Jump in point: 12th February Why Ubisoft created a community content team is a pretty good tip on how to approach your communities in the days of declining reach.

8. Social Media Pubcast by Jon Loomer

Host: Jon Loomer

Frequency: Weekly, but it has been on a break for the last month.

Format: Discussions or chats. A chat with an expert over a beer brings a relaxed format that is an enjoyable break from traditional interviews.

Duration: Ranges from 30-50 minutes.

Learn from the accidental marketer with this relaxed podcast. The changes to Facebook’s algorithm have made this a crucial podcast. Jon Loomer is a Facebook ad wizard who built an incredible business around this expertise. Now he shares his Facebook marketing tips with other industry experts in a relaxed beery atmosphere. This is also a great two-fer podcast with tonnes of tales for entrepreneurs. All the true tales of the ups and downs in building a business from your ideas.

Jump in point: The Myths of Facebook Business Manager goes through all the features and fears of the tool.

9. Perpetual Traffic

Hosts: Keith Krance, Molly Pittman, and Ralph Burns.

Frequency: Weekly.

Format: Interviews and discussions with social media managers and advertising experts.

Duration: Ranges from 30-45 minutes.

In the post-News Feed world Facebook ads will become even more crowded. Perpetual Traffic is an essential resource for you going forward because it contains the best tips on Facebook advertising. You will also be able to find some tips for other channels like YouTube, Twitter, Google AdWords, LinkedIn and so on. This is one of the best social media podcasts for people just moving into Facebook advertising (and you probably should be).

Jump in Point: February 20th episode on How to Optimise and Scale Facebook Ads contains guidelines and results from rigorous testing. Get the skinny on the pitfalls to avoid and takeaways to make scaling campaigns better and easier.

10. The Art of Paid Traffic

Host: Rick Mulready

Frequency: Weekly with some bonus episodes.

Format: Discussions, case studies, and interviews.

Duration: Wide, wide range from 9 minutes to over an hour.

Simply put, this podcast has the best of everything: paid traffic tips, tactics, and strategies for creating leads and making sales. Covers all the major channels like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google Adwords as well as the strategies like retargeting, creating funnels. A few great tips on writing good ad copy. A wide reaching podcast that covers all aspects of paid marketing.

Jump in point: Episode #182 the case study of a targeting strategy that turned $223.50 into $46,000.

11. Online Marketing Made Easy

Host: Amy Porterfield

Frequency: Weekly.

Format: Mixture of interviews, discussions, step-by-step guides and masterclasses.

Duration: Ranges from 30-50 minutes.

This is an incredibly diverse podcast which almost gives you a new degree in online marketing. Amy Porterfield’s podcast has the best structure of all the social media podcasts I listen to. Amy is going to become your new best friend with her mix of mini masterclasses and step-by-step guides. After listening to one of these podcasts you will walk away with ideas that you can implement immediately. This is another of the best social media podcasts with a strong entrepreneurial flair; great for anyone building a business.

Jump in point: Episode #187 How to use Pinterest to generate traffic and profits because few other podcasts have talked about it. Fewer still have given such great tips. Check out the collections here.

12. The Sophisticated Marketer’s Podcast

Host: Jason Miller

Frequency: Bi-weekly but with multiple episodes dropped on the same day.

Format: Mixture of interviews and discussions notably they are conducted with an incredibly wide range of people.

Duration: Anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour.

This comes from LinkedIn but it is brash and to the point. Miller covers trending topics but also has broader social stories in there like the slow journalism movement. There are really valuable tips on improving presentation skills, dealing with difficult colleagues, as well as an interview with Jay Jay French from Twisted Sister. This is one of the best social media podcasts because it is the podcast on the edge.

Jump in point: March 12th episode with Mark Schaffer and the hard truths for content marketers and the way to move forward.

The post 12 of the Best Social Media Podcasts to Follow if You Want to Stay Ahead of Trends appeared first on Revive Social.

Putting our tears for Facebook aside, how does it all impact your work? How does it change your day to day operation? Even one of the biggest names in WordPress SEO, Yoast, noticed declining reach this month.

The new Twitter rules have me very excited. Twitter is such a great platform that is ruined by excessive posting and needless retweeting. I think this has great potential to clean up the platform and return it to its former eminence. Well, eminence is a bit strong but I think it could return to a better place. Let’s face it, if your strategy was established in such a way that this update has you worried then you were the problem with the channel. I also think it could go further and end this kind of spam.

Social media case study experiment #1: New channels, new challenges

Other channels are legion for us, so let’s stay calm. And, as you know I am killing it on Reddit. Like any hero I am not selfish, so I jumped over to Medium to share the love. I like Medium (it is such a cool thing to love right now) and it has a good amount of traffic. 

It is a nice mix of social and publishing platforms. However, for my initial post, the good folk at Medium did not respond well at all. Well, actually, they did not respond at all. 

Rough. I created a quick story with our web tarot images. It was mainly about getting onto Medium and seeing how the platform worked and what I could do on there. I think this is a good platform for brand awareness/building but I’d be very reluctant to share anything else over there.

The thing is that I think we can reach people from outside our WordPress niche particularly if we look to expand our content offerings. For example, if we sought to start providing more blog content that was platform neutral then Medium would be a perfect place to start offering it because of the diversity of the Medium audience. It would allow us a good chance to reach people that see us as just a WordPress company.

I’m still keen to try, so in April I will take a few of our client comics and publish them on Medium. These comics regularly pull the highest share and comment numbers across social networks.

In the meantime, I’ve still got Reddit, right? Weeelllll…

Social media case study experiment #2: Square video gets squashed

So, we made this cool video 10 totally legitimate reasons why you should never use WordPress. Video is the most oft-cited cure to your declining organic reach and square video even more so. If I film myself reading the paper people will watch it if it is square. We beat the hell out of this video with a blog post (the link above), landscape and square posts on Facebook and the aforementioned Reddit post. The best result was from the newsletter where it pulled over 400 clicks.

The landscape post went to the CodeinWP Facebook page and got a tasty boost. I had low expectations for this post because of the aspect ratio but it performed well enough. The engagement rate was still low at around 1% (at time of writing), and the organic reach was low at around 10%, but it broke the shackles and reached people.

Not too shabby, but I was hoping for better based on the quality of the content and the fact that it is video. A lack of negative feedback is always nice, but the other numbers were underwhelming. So, we posted the square video on Themeisle’s Facebook page. This was the post that was going to ROI the heck out of that video. Did it? Weeellll…

Not really I guess. The engagement rate is 0.65% and we got us some negative feedback as part of the bargain. The organic reach, understandably, was lower than a dachshund’s belly with just 863 people seeing our content for free. Even with the boost we reached just 10% of our audience. Did we get the sweet video boost? Not really. The organic reach was slightly higher but only around 25% or so.

My feelings on this are that the Themeisle post suffered because it followed the CodeinWP post too quickly (but these are the sacrifices I make for you, dear reader). I also had a look at the audience insights and I noticed that our combined audience buck most of the trends for accessing Facebook. Some stats place mobile access as high as 95% whereas I am seeing the opposite.

Maybe not quite the opposite but definitely adjacent to both. Look at the numbers for computer access. That’s a massive discrepancy. This partially explains why the video worked well in 16:9. It is a much better aspect ratio for desktop. Square videos on desktop look weird. I worked with the animator to create an easily squarable video and we paid to have him adjust the aspect ratio for Facebook. But hey, now I know. In future, I don’t think we’ll worry too much about square versions.

Social media case study experiment #3: Reactions

I paid closer attention to how our posts were affected by shares, comments, and reactions. I didn’t actually attempt to encourage reactions, as this practice is frowned upon by Facebook. Still, I was curious. Plus fooling around with posts gives me an idea of what matters to Facebook. Besides, no one is watching anyway. The reactions actually do matter.

I really concentrated on a few link posts because we give everything else a sneaky boost. The first item for your consideration is a link to a round-up of 20+ free UI kits on CodeinWP. The free round-ups are always popular with our audience and this garnered 8 likes from a reach of 363 (2.2 ER).

In the last month, we also put together a monster post about WordPress hosting, which is a controversial subject. This post got 2 likes, 3 shares for 995 reach (0.5 engagement rate).

Finally, a funny links post to a bunch of animated CSS puns. We have posted this kind of content before and got a good reaction. This post got 5 reactions with 3 likes and 2 loves. The loves were enough to boost the reach to 995 (0.5 ER).

This is weird, but not unexpected, because the free themes are probably more useful to the audience. It is interesting to see exactly how much effect the different types of reactions have. For the next month, I am going to go through the list here and see how different ideas impact on reach.

Social media case study experiment #4: Advertising for the newsletter

I have been wanting to talk about BizarroDevs for some months now and I know you are going to say that BizarroDevs has no place in this article. But my fearless leader and I have been enjoying our work on BizarroDevs. It is, for sure, my favorite side-project for some time. We started with the obligatory subscribers from the office in January and this month ends with 544 subs on the list. How did we get here? Through a mix of trade and advertising. Our research helped us find a bunch of newsletters for either a mention swap, or a good source to get some ads happening. Did I mention the name enough?

Oh and tweets. We sent some tweets. Let’s see which method was most effective.

Tweets. I sent 32 tweets from the @BizarroDevs account and 6 from @Themeisle when Twitter Promote Mode was running.

Results: 1 subscriber = 32 Tweets. Nice one.

We also created some ads in various newsletters that crossover with our intended audience. The best deal for us was with WebToolsWeekly which cost us $75 and brought in 75 subs. This dollar is actually very well spent because these guys are proving to be our most engaged readers.

Our ad in eWebDesign was pricey at $450 for access to 240,000 subs. Unfortunately, it brought us a lot of sessions but only 45 subs. Tedium gave us a better return for the $50 we spent. We pulled in 24 subs. Our final ad, so far, was with PonyFoo Weekly which only got us 13 subs from our $75 spend. It has been an interesting experiment, and this gives us a good idea of where we want to go for future targeting.

So, that’s the end for this month. Thanks for reading and I am going to leave you with something weird I noticed these last few weeks: off-topic comments on Facebook ads. We had one with a guy complaining about the EU, and this random one about English football hooligans.

I had no clue what was happening, so I asked him which hooligans were worrying him. It took me like 3 days to work it out. Have you seen anything like this? Is this a spoiling tactic used by people who are frustrated with ads?

The post Square Videos: Should You Be Using Them? – Social Media Case Study Ep. #5 appeared first on Revive Social.

Social media case study experiment #1: Twitter Promote Mode: TPM

Twitter Promote Mode, hereafter TPM, ran for a month and it was a lot of buck for a little bang. If you are not familiar with TPM, it is an automated promotion option available on Twitter. It costs $99 for one month of promoted Tweets with a maximum of 10 per day. TPM promotes the first 10 Tweets you post each day (as long as they pass the “Quality Filter”). Basically, make the first 10 count because you can’t pick and choose the Tweets that get the boost. The only way to selectively boost Tweets is to pause TPM and switch it on for your ten best Tweets. However, this needs to be done with care because your subscription doesn’t stop during these pauses. Your billing cycle will still end at the same time.

Secondly, you will see that the interests are quite broad. Although it is quite humorous to see Interest listed as a subcategory under interests. For us, the best bet would be to pause and then manipulate the targeted interests according to the posts. Technology and computing is a solid entry for our visual content, but the rest are up for grabs. Note the comment ‘we’ll only target people in the country you selected’.

You can jump into settings and select targeted locations, but again only 5 locations within the selected country. It should be added that TPM is in Beta right now, however, the targeting options still feel too narrow.

At any rate, we confirmed everything and we left that sucker to run for a while. The results? Meh.

You’d have to say that the reach of these promoted Tweets is nice, as it costs about $5 to reach 2000+ people which is probably a $10 investment on Facebook. However, it has to be said that the impact of said reach is weak. We paid $12.75 for each new follower.

A note on my approach here: I decided not to take full advantage of the Tweet numbers. This was a conscious decision based on the limited targeting options and my commitment to never spam. In the end, we will pay about $1 to boost each Tweet which isn’t that bad.

Final thoughts: TPM is not so useful for us in this current iteration. If you operate in the covered niches and countries then this might be a good way to get started in social media promotion. In particular, I see it being a good tool for small and local businesses who might not have the time or budget for running ad campaigns. I would add a caveat and argue that if you plan to run a social media ad campaign, Facebook is still the best option.

Social media case study experiment #2: Switching channels

When Facebook made all of their big changes recently I got a little nervous because we all knew people would start losing jobs. I decided to start experimenting with other channels in order to provide some level of comfort to my young family. Most businesses’ social media marketing efforts center around the 4 big ‘uns: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest. Obviously, this is valuable advice, but I disregarded it this past month. What I mean is, if we know that these four are effective, and we’ve already got strategies in place for those networks, then what’s the harm in going outside them and having fun on Reddit?

I have to be honest, I don’t hear heaps of marketers making efforts with Reddit. Not that it doesn’t happen, but it seems like the least popular channel for marketers, despite the fact that Reddit claims 330 million users with 274 million unique monthly visits. These numbers don’t compare to Facebook or even Twitter, but they’re actually better than the current usage statistics for Pinterest.

It also gives us a chance to target our audience via the subreddits, whereas targeting Twitter users with organic posts is actually quite hit and miss. Hashtags can help direct the message, but the amount of noise in the WordPress section of the Twitter-sphere is riotous. In theory, Reddit targeting can be almost as specific as Facebook’s targeting tools.

So, I dove into Reddit using my own profile. Why not? What is the worst that could happen?

Well, nothing actually. Everyone was really supportive and we made a sweet .25 USD in Bitcoin.

The Reddit community has a bad reputation and the number of subreddits at the fringe of good taste make it unpalatable. However, the channel has genuine potential if you are able to get in there. Google was able to use it to perform user testing for the Pixel phone and got 1300 comments in a single day. As you know, comments can be up or downvoted so Google was also able to see which ideas were the most popular.

How did I approach it? I completely avoided marketing and showed no interest in driving traffic. I went with proven content, our comics, and I followed the rules of each subreddit.

The rules don’t specifically forbid comics and/or jokes but I know the WordPress subreddit is a more serious forum. The simple solution was to speak to the moderator about posting the comic and making my intentions clear. Basically, I offered to post the comics but without a link. This was not such a large concession since every comic is watermarked ‘CodeinWP’. The mod approved my request and I posted some comics.

I am calling this a win. We only drove 33 users to the website, but that was never a goal. At the time of writing this, the comic was upvoted 179 points from 91% upvotes. It only got 1,700 views, but there are 50 comments. We didn’t get trolled at all and we were lucky enough to receive only positive comments. We also got a new channel to share our content and get more eyes on it. This is like walking into a party, getting a warm welcome and making everyone laugh.

Social media case study experiment #3: Impact of Facebook ads on WordPress installs

We released Orfeo, a Hestia child theme, in January 2018 and it surpassed 7,000 active installs by the end of February. We ran Facebook ads from 31st January until 16th February.

The ad looks really nice but the figures seem a little off to me. The ad spend was $473 and we reached 27,592 people. We got 56 downloads from 601 link clicks.

You can see that the downloads have been quite consistent throughout the campaign, without any major spikes or dips. But I feel like the ad should have had more impact. The ad looks good and the strategy was sound. Plus Orfeo is a beautiful theme we built from our flagship product, Hestia. I’m curious to know how other ads fared in this period after the News Feed changes. I think there was also some blowback from users against advertising on Facebook. We saw some negativity towards the end of 2017 (community standards prevents imagery here), but we look forward to improvements.

The price of success: What the trolls taught me

I wanted to include some information about my newsletter and the overall experiment, but we started getting our first trolls this past month. I feel like this is a rite of passage. For me, the first troll was remarkably similar to my first shave. I thought my handling was incredibly smooth but actually, everything was stinging, and there was a lot of blood. A lot.

Hiding comments is never helpful. People are immediately suspicious when they see this. I learned it is better to let the comments overflow with tagging and emojis than to look Orwellian with the hide button. I am happy to say that I have never deleted comments, so 1 point for me.

Comments need engagement regardless of sentiment. In some ways, the best way to approach a negative comment is with the same attitude. One user claimed our competitor was ‘999% better’ than us. I replied with a ‘Whoa. That’s a high number’ and asked him why. He was pretty friendly and then proceeded to set out some conditions for our improvement. These conditions were actually impossible, but still, the feedback was interesting – and the conversation remained civil.

Final thoughts

The post Revive.Social’s Ongoing Social Media Case Study (Ep. #4 – Twitter Promote Mode, Reddit, More Facebook Ads, and Lessons From Trolls) appeared first on Revive Social.

Social media Facebook News Feed: Observations

I am cheating a bit here, and I am going to share what I observed rather than give you the definitive job-saving tips. So, obviously, there was the big change to the Facebook News Feed this month. This was hot on the heels of the engagement bait hunt that started in December of last year. If you have been reading the updates then you know that the News Feed change created an incredible amount of barely disguised tension.

But, we knew something was coming, didn’t we?

Rather than re-hash the information let’s just keep some stats in mind. The Big Z said that news makes up 5% of the News Feed and they expect it will drop to 4%  (his engagement rate isn’t that good). When you talk Facebook numbers this is obviously a massive dip. However, when you consider the size of the audience you are accessing for such a low overhead (keeping in mind that you can reach 1000 people for just $5) it is clear that this remains a powerful platform.

What did we see? Not much change for a lot of our content. The comics, my favorite project, are still working well. They still get around 10% organic reach, which is pretty sweet.

Our link posts don’t fare well under the new regime with a paltry reach between 2-3%. Actually, this is neither a surprise or a concern. We only publish essential link posts, everything else is for Facebook content.

For my dictionary experiment, I am seeing around 5% reach.

Again, this is a pretty sweet outcome for quick content.

Anecdotal evidence: I have noticed that some pages still get prominence in my News Feed. I read The Guardian every day and I interact with their posts. I see Guardian links after a few scrolls, beneath Groups.

This is interesting to me; I don’t interact with all of the Groups but they still get prominence over the page post. I would actually like to see this change. For that matter, I’d like to see the page posts given precedence over maybe 50% of my Facebook friends, and that’s a conservative measure.

The classic See First in your News Feed is going to come in handy for all of the admins out there. Happy to report it still works.

Not only do the results give me hope, but I see some experimentation from Facebook. My favorite is the page carousel. I noticed the carousel that contained a bunch of posts from pages that I like.

I only saw this once. Which is a little disappointing because I like this method for delivering page content.

Social media case study experiment #1: Writing styles and supporting imagery

Sometimes I feel like I make two big mistakes when I write my copy: trying to be too clever, and being too product/sales oriented. The clever is especially difficult for me to pull off. I have been playing with my writing style lately in order to find that happy medium between professional and casual.

• Content: Two forms of copy for our new free icon packs
• Outcome: Less clever and salesy copy for the win

We created an icon pack at the tail end of 2017 and it has everything a good icon pack should have (multiple formats, 100+ icons, vectors, free). We promoted them heavily through Facebook, Product Hunt, newsletters and so on. It was a great opportunity to see the impact of copy on engagement. I felt comfortable with this because the product is so good, I thought copy couldn’t damage anything.

Incorrect.

Here are the positive results for CodeinWP. The copy is clear and concise. Not clever, not trying too hard to “sell” the free icons to people. Not quite as conversational as I would like, but not too bad either. As of 31st Jan, the engagement rate is 5.8%. This was a successful post. Although note Facebook dropped some data from it.

Now let’s cruise over to the ThemeIsle version to see a real horror show. I messed this one up good.

Let’s deal with the issues individually.

First, the copy. I got a little excited with all the Christmas cheer and it’s trying too hard. It is too sales driven for a product that is free. The intended message gets lost in the flashiness of the copy.

The copy is also too long. 59 of the post click went to Other Clicks, of which the “See more” link is a huge part.

Second, while it is not clear from this image I managed to bury the link in the initial post. The link was beneath the “See more”. Luckily for me, the chief lives in Portugal so I still have all of my fingers. This really was a rookie error.

Third, the GIF. The GIF looks awesome. It is really, really cool. But you can see in the numbers that the GIF dragged attention away from the icons. The GIF should have complemented the message rather than detract from it.  In the end, we got 57 clicks to play and 15,000+ views. Not on point.

Fourth, it feels like there is some confusion over what users are meant to do with this post. The call to action is more like a mumble to do. The CodeinWP post screams: Download them now. ThemeIsle barely looks up from its sneakers: Check them out. It is further complicated by the giant play button on the image. Playing the GIF became the call to action.

The end result? The goal was for people to go to the site and download the icon pack. Look at the post clicks. Only 41 link clicks, 14 reactions, 1 comment and 1 share. That’s an engagement rate of around .04%.

A few lessons to be learned here: keep the copy nice and clean. Don’t oversell it. Don’t be too clever. Keep the call to action solitary and obvious. Pick the right visuals to support the post. Don’t bury the link.

Social media case study experiment #2: Testing videos on Facebook

We have a blog post on the evolution of the WordPress UI which basically runs through the changes to the dashboard over the past 15 years.

We posted the images of the dashboard in the early days of our Instagram posting.

The post garnered us 59 likes, which was a good figure for these early days. We decided to get an animation of all the dashboards for our YouTube channel, the blog post, and social media. Obviously, we went through some iterations. We made major changes to the intro screen and the music.

This seemed like a good opportunity to test the videos to see what people responded to.

• Content: Video with simple intro and music vs. video with exciting intro and soundtrack
• Outcome: The simpler video far outperformed the “exciting” video

In both cases, we spent $64 but video one was much more successful. It reach 27,100 people for 10,745 views.

Video two reached 12,800 people for 8,574 views. Reactions and post clicks were around 20% of the amount for video one.

The first version enjoyed a little boost from Facebook once it was clear it had a better response from the audience. With almost the same budget spent on the same audience, we got way better results and lower cost per reach for the first one.

The first video has such a clear introduction and you know exactly what you will get when you click to watch. The second video is less obvious. I have written in the past that content that tells the story at a glance is always more successful. This is further proof of that fact. Also, music and sound are almost irrelevant. People are still choosing to watch Facebook videos with the sound off.

Final thoughts

This was a great experiment to run. It will help with the budget for video projects in the future. With every iteration, we get closer to a nice formula for our audience.

The post Revive.Social’s Ongoing Social Media Case Study (Ep. #3 – Facebook News Feed Updates, Writing Styles and Supporting Imagery, Testing Facebook Videos) appeared first on Revive Social.

The end of 2017 was quite interesting here at Revive.Social, and we experimented a lot with our images and content. Mostly I am interested in post types and the level of engagement we are getting with them.

Social media case study experiment #1: Re-purposing blog content

• Content: Link posts.
• Outcome: Fail.

One of the most important things I have learnt is that link posts are like speed limits; no one pays attention. Notwithstanding their value as April Fool’s jokes, but that’s about it. Link posts are getting lower than 5% organic reach and the engagement rate is embarrassingly low. Check out this link post on the popular subject of page builders, Elementor specifically.

The numbers are bad all across the board here. The content is good, from both timeliness and quality, but it got little to no love. Well, not enough love to make it worthwhile. Both our ThemeIsle and CodeinWP blogs publish great content for WordPress users, but it doesn’t transfer to success for the Facebook audience. I have consistently found that the audience ignores link posts.

As a result, I have decided not to push links much at all. We might have certain articles that we should or need to post, but beyond these core articles I see no value in link posts. Instead, I have started picking one post from the blog per week, the standout, and posting it. For anything else which might have appeal I am taking the main points and re-configuring them into an interesting image.

When we take a blog post and re-purpose it as an image we start to see the engagement rates reaching over 2%.

• Content: In house image with an infographic style design vs Blog content.
• Outcome: Image wins by some margin.

For the same link post with the same copy the results broke my heart a little. Just a little.

Link posts are not bringing us any value on their own. From here on we will be converting articles to images with some link support in the copy. As we get deeper into 2018 we will be working on tweaking a mixed media approach to re-purposing our blog content.

Social media case study experiment #2: Video can fail. And does

We’ve already been working on developing a new style, mostly in our images. I formally dissolved my commitment to Canva in November. It is not a problem with the tool itself. Canva, and Snappa, are nice, on the contrary they are too good and the style is ubiquitous. Across all social media channels you can see the Canva and Snappa ‘style’. If I continue to use these tools then it is hard to make a different kind of noise than everyone else out there.

We regularly reach 5% of our audience, but I’d like to reach a little higher than that. This means I needed to consider changing up the content I was delivering. We have seen above that images perform strongly, so that just leaves video.

Video is often touted as the savior of your Facebook page. This is partially true. There are a number of tools to help with video making. Lumen5 is popular and easy to use, but this is not necessarily going to help you boost your content. The first thing we noticed is that weak openings are indeed destructive. You’ve heard that before, I am sure. But a weak opening absolutely murders any decent content or concept.

This is so important when you are pushing content on Facebook. Take our video of most famous brands using WordPress. It got an engagement rate of just 0.83%.

• Content: Video of famous brands using WordPress vs Infographic
• Outcome: Infographic for the win.

The originating content/concept is solid. Just compare those numbers with the infographic post which had better numbers across the board ( engagement rate of 3.5%).

There are two factors at play here:

1. The video thumbnail is as appealing as a shoe sandwich. There’s no explosive start that grabs attention.
2. The infographic is snackable and tells us the whole story in a second.

We ran the same test again specifically with a different image that could be turned into a gif. The content was exactly the same but the form was slightly different. The results were consistent.

• Content: Funny GIF vs three image post
• Outcome: Image wins.

The GIF had less than 1% reach after 15 hours with 3 likes and 6 views (engagement rate around 2.7%). Check out that thumbnail. Pretty slick.

After 15 hours it was time for a mercy hide. I rejigged it to a three image post and got an organic reach of 5%, with 20 reactions and 3 comments in an hour (currently 1.9% engagement rate).

So, the content is solid and people were engaging, however, those starting images created a high barrier to interest.

As part of this project we have started playing more with humor and, in particular, comics. We engaged two illustrators to work on some comics for us and they are starting to get some traction.

These WordPress comics routinely have better engagement rates 2%+ than any other form of content. They have also helped us appreciate the differences in our audiences. For example, I posted a GIF to ThemeIsle which reached 365 people (ER of 3%). I designed the GIF to show the full story at a glance.

The image on CodeinWP reached 1341 with an engagement rate of 3.2%. Clearly, the ThemeIsle audience is less interested in CSS jokes. It’s a pity, because the joke is decent.

We’re finding that this new format with more humorous posts is regularly pushing our organic reach up beyond 10%, and the comics are getting us as high as 45%.

Because the numbers are better we are boosting this content more. This is actually proving to be a winning strategy. We see our competitors and all the ads look the same, and the posts rarely differ. When people see a promoted post with the CSS cure for pimples they are genuinely astounded. One commentor was genuinely stunned “Why is this a promoted post? Did someone in the marketing team have a pimple today?”

Social media case study experiment #3: Experiments with hashtags

Hashtags on Facebook confuse me. In other words, I am never really sure if they are a thing or not. I see a lot of them. Even in native Facebook posts. However, their ability to have an impact is something I wonder about.

I spoke with my fearless leader and she dismissed the value of Facebook hashtags. We decided to give them a try just to see.

Experiment design here is slightly problematic. It needs to be the same content served to as much of the same audience as possible. This is almost impossible without spamming some unfortunate souls. We decided to test with the WordPress comics on ThemeIsle and CodeinWP. In spite of the differences in the audiences, at the same time, the pages affinity ratings for the audiences are quite high.

I took this WordPress comic and casually tossed the #FridayFunday on it. It did have a slightly larger reach. 17 people in fact. On the other hand, it got fewer reactions for, obviously, a lower engagement rate.

I will continue playing with them to see how they perform with other content types, but their value seems low. Fearless Leader 15 – Chris 0.

A word on targeting…

They say most people mess up the targeting in Facebook. I am most people. The thing with targeting is that it seems really cool. After all, Facebook has all that information and all those users. I target every variation of web design and web development. Then I add WordPress, plus every competitor real and imagined, then I’m going to see a massive boost, right?

Nope.

I tricked the targeting out on this post and managed to reach 706 people.

Lesson learnt.

The post Revive.Social’s Ongoing Social Media Case Study (Ep. #2 – Re-Purposing Content, Failing Videos, Hashtags) appeared first on Revive Social.

The good news is that GIFs are incredibly easy to make, and the right idea could help you go viral easily.

Video guide to GIFs

We’ve also created a video version of this guide:

Why make animated GIFs?

There’s a whole lot of giffing going on. The GIF is the lingua fraca of social media: Facebook revealed that people sent 13 billion GIFs in the last year, or nearly 25,000 GIFs every minute. Twitter users love GIFs and they sent 100 million of them in 2015 alone. If you are looking to cultivate a personal touch to your business profile then engaging with popular communication tools can be quite helpful.

The other good news is that all of these Facebook and Twitter GIFs come from a library, usually Giphy’s, which offers you an opportunity to have your content spread across the internet. Brands that create a GIF can upload it to Giphy’s library, add a couple of interesting tags and then it becomes available to the audiences using Facebook Messenger and Live, WhatsApp, Tinder, Twitter, Slack, Telegram, Viber among others.

• See it in action if you search for “Good morning” – 2.1 million people end up selecting a Starbucks-branded GIF as a result. Netflix are all over GIFs too, with fans using “sad” 6 million times a month to find videos of shows and characters from the global video streaming service. Finally, there are 12.9 million searches for “dance” that lead to users clicking on a Coca-Cola GIF (data).

GIFs can give you an easy way to spice up your Facebook ads with a video. Video is among the most shareable content and boosts your reach by an astonishing 135% over photos.

You can also cross post them in emails. Email marketers make animated GIFs all the time and their results have been great. Dell tested the power of GIF in their email campaign for the launch of the XPS 12 Convertible Ultrabook. This is the GIF:

The GIF is nice. However, the results were beautiful: 6% increase in open rate; 42% increase in click rate; 103% increase in conversion rate; 109% increase in revenue.

Are you ready to get started?

Key guidelines when making animated GIFs

We’d argue that the most important guideline is to know your audience. If you don’t know your audience and you start giffing like a teenager, you could find yourself in real trouble. Get an idea for what your audience will find acceptable and then play by these rules. Once you are comfortable with your audience and the boundaries you can start making some GIFs.

• Timing is crucial. Don’t write a novel on these. Give your audience a positive experience and don’t tell them 10 ways to improve their copy.
• Avoid gradients. Gradients will lead to color banding when used in GIFs.
• Title then text. Don’t try and squeeze all of the information into one frame.
• Make good font choices and avoid script fonts. They are especially hard to read on mobile and Twitter.
• A GIF should be short and sweet. The format does not compress well, so you are best keeping it under 30 seconds so your file size is low.

How to make animated GIFs for free

You can throw your images into a free web app and have your GIF in a few minutes, or you can use existing video.

Make animated GIFs for free with Giphy

The best free tool is Giphy. Their GIF library is used to send over 1 billion GIFs and they are seen by more than 100 million DAU. You can easily create and upload your GIF to their library which is attached to the biggest social media apps available.

The first thing you need is some video or images. If you need some stock photos then luckily there are some great places to find them for free.

Once you have your content jump over the Giphy and get busy.

Click Create → Slideshow:

Select your photos and then drag and drop onto the screen:

You can caption your GIF and set the speed of the transitions:

Side note: it is very difficult to control the time with Giphy. If you have a lot of images you would like to use then you will receive an error message when you try to change the speed. You can see what happens when I tried to minimize the speed when using 6 images:

You can order your shots according to how you would like them to appear.

Click Create Slideshow:

You will then see the completed GIF with options to Favorite, Copy Link, Download or get the embed code:

Download –
will give you multiple options. You can download a full size source file, or you can download an optimized version. The social download will restrict the GIF to 10MB and the small will restrict the GIF to 2MB:

In my case, the source file was just 180KB. Social was 178 and small was 29.5KB. Obviously – with a simple GIF – when using still images then size is not such a problem.

Other options:

If you would like to pimp your gif then you can use GIF caption to add animated text, subtitle and captions.

The GIF editor will help you add stickers and other effects to your GIF. You can add your pre-made GIF, but you will not be able to select when the stickers pop up. They will be over the entire GIF and the speed is not very good. It is also not possible to remove stickers once they have been added to your GIF.

Best of the rest

Gifs.com will allow you to make GIFs from existing videos. It is free but you will have a watermark on any GIF you create. You can remove the watermark for $7.99 a month. Sign-up is required to create the free GIF.

If you are going to create a GIF from a screen recording then the best option is Recordit. You can download the app from here: http://recordit.co/. To make animated GIFs, simply drag the frame over the section of the screen you would like to record, and it will upload it and give you a shareable link.

Paid options to help you make animated GIFs

The best paid option is Photoshop because you will have full control over your images/GIF. If you don’t have access then it might be worth asking someone to try and put this together for you.

The steps are fairly simple.

Upload your images.

The first step is to place all of the images in one folder and click File Scripts Load Files into stack. Select all of the images you would like to include and click OK. Photoshop will create a separate layer for each image.

First open a new art board and click Layer → New Layer:

Give your layer a descriptive name to help organize everything. Create all of your layers and organize them as you see fit:

Click Window → Timeline  to open the video timeline. It will appear along the bottom of the screen, but you must be sure to select ‘Frame Animation’:

Return to the Layer menu and Select All layers.

Then click the menu option on the timeline and select Create new layer for each new frame.

Open the menu again and select Make Frames From Layers.

This will populate the timeline with each of the layers as a separate frame. The problem is that each of the layers will be present in every frame. If you need to have the layers revealed then you need to select a frame and leave only the information you want visible:

Once you have selected the correct visibility for each of the frames, you can set the delay. If you have a lot of text in the frames then you must make sure the time delay is long enough for users to read the text. I selected 3 seconds, which is plenty of time (maybe too much) for users to read a sentence.

To set the time delay simply click the time value below each frame and set the time:

You can also set the looping at the bottom of the timeline, which can be customised also. I set it to forever, but you can experiment with the number of loops according to the GIF:

Preview with the play button and adjust as necessary.

Save and export your animated GIF.

Click File → Export → Save for Web (legacy).

To open up the save options. It will select GIF by default, but depending on your background, you might need to make some changes. If you have a flat background then you should be able to set the GIF with the standard options:

If you selected a gradient for the background then you have to select dithering. Dithering will ensure you don’t have color banding in the GIF which looks awful, just awful:

In order to keep your file size down, you can avoid dithering. If you use a gradient then you will need to experiment with the dithering to see which number gives a good balance between quality and file size.

Click save and then check out the results:

My To-Do GIF ended up downloading at 38KB with full dithering. However, it is important to understand that the requirements here are quite low. There is no gradient, no animation and it is a simple GIF with text.

In order to make the most resource-effective GIF, you will need to consider the best practices from the very beginning. Manipulating the file size via reduction of digital elements will hurt the quality. Aim for a simple GIF which can tell the story, and you will be able to have a more effective GIF at the end.

Level up and make animated GIFs like cinemagraphs

This is a special option for anyone who wants to make animated GIFs that are more unusual. Cinemagraphs are still photographs with small repetitive movements that form a video clip. The first thing you will need is a good video clip with repetitive motion. Aim for something with a natural loop.

Open the video file with Photoshop and find the point you would like to use for the static image. Align the timebar with the image and select it via Shift+A → Ctrl+Shift+A → Ctrl+V. Photoshop will create a new layer with this image. You will see it added to the timeline at the end of the video clip:

When you make animated GIFs regularly, you learn to make things as easy as possible. So, the best tip to make life easier is renaming layers. I call them image and video. Kind of hard to get confused with these names. Just double click on “Layer 1” to get the option to rename:

It is also a good idea to reduce the size of the image. I always make it 800 wide. This will help us keep the file size managable. To change the image size simply click Image → Image Size and adjust the width. When you’re asked to convert the image to a smart object please select convert:

The image will form the bulk of the screen display and we need it to sit over the video. Select the Layer and move it above Video Group to create a new track on the timeline:

Align the image with the point you would like the video to start. Now we will cut the video to make things easy. Select the video layer and place the marker at the cut point. Then simply click on the scissors to make the cut and delete the clip you don’t need:

Grab the right edge of the image and then drag it to the end of the video clip to align the static image with the entire video:

Now we will create a mask on the image layer. This will allow us to reveal the video clip beneath it. Essentially, we are erasing part of the image to show the video. To create the mask just click on the image layer and then click the icon that looks like a circle in a rectangle:

The white box that appears is the mask and painting black on this layer will remove part of the image to reveal the video beneath. To get started, click the mask that is next to the image layer:

Select the brush tool and start painting the parts of the image you don’t need. If you remove visibility of the video layer you will see the background:

Once you have removed the parts of the image you don’t need, you can watch the GIF to ensure the animation is smooth and the masking is effective.

Now to export as a GIF. Click File → Export → Save for Web and wait for Photoshop to render your clip:

Bam! Done and ready for Facebook.

How to create a Split-Depth GIF

The final and arguably coolest of the GIFs will look like a 3D video with about 10% of the work. You need to find a clip where the subject comes close to the camera. The split-depth GIF works through occlusion to create depth. Two white bars superimposed over a video create the illusion of depth. The eye sees the white bars as in front of the video image, when the image is broken, it appears that the image has moved closer to you.

This tutorial requires After Effects.

The first thing you need is a clip with a moment of close-up. I used a dog clip that I found on Pexels free stock video site.

Open your clip in After Effects, scrub it and find the point you would like to use. Grab the ends of the clip and drag them in to shorten the clip:

We need to create the white bars that will create the illusion of depth. To do this, right-click beneath the clip and select New and then Solid.:

You can choose to lay the white lines horizontally or vertically. It depends on the path of the object. If the object moves left-right then vertical lines are needed. If the object path is up-down, then you will need horizontal lines. Depending on your needs, you should set the dimensions to 10px and 800px. Name the line accordingly:

Once you have the line on the screen you can duplicate it with CTRL+D or CMD+D. Rename and move the line. Set the lines so that the screen is broken into rough thirds:

We will again use masking for this project. The mask will go over the white lines to allow the dog to ‘break’ through. The mask will be automatically created when you draw a rectangle on the screen. Draw the rectangle to the side of the line and change the mask from ‘Add’ to ‘Subtract’:

Set the position as the key frame by clicking the Stop Watch next to Mask Path:

When you reach the “break” point, where you would like the line to be broken, then you need to move the mask over the line. To move the mask, you need to ALT click and drag it. Th animation will take care of itself and you will see new keyframes created. You can contour the mask to your object by SHIFT clicking the mask corners. This will allow you to move the mask around the object. You should also add feathering of about 2px to soften the edge:

Advance the video frame by frame and SHIFT click the corners of the mask to continue the contouring. Slowly skipping through the clip frame by frame is tedious, which is why the clip selection is so important.

Once you are finished with the masking, you can export the file. Select Composition and then Pre-render. In the render queue, select Output Module to open the settings. You can output as either PNG Sequence or Quicktime mov:

Almost there. When the file has been rendered, you will need to open Photoshop and import the saved file through the file menu → import → video frames to layers:

Make any final edits you would like when you get the range to import box. I select beginning to end:

From here the process is the same as for making animated GIFs in Photoshop. Click File:→ Export → Save for web:

Click save and wait for the file to finish. When you make animated GIFs for social media, the file sizes are an important consideration. I exported twice; one at 128 colors and full dithering which gave me a 15.9MB file:

The second file I exported at 64 colors and no dithering for 9.61MB:

Can you see the difference?

The first one is ready to be posted.

Final thoughts

It is actually pretty easy to make animated GIFs and you can increase your dynamic content with a minimum amount of effort. The idea of an animated GIF might be old but has not shown any signs of disappearing, indeed it has proven quite adaptable with cinemagraphs and other forms emerging.

With the continued integration of GIF libraries into social media apps, it is a perfect time to up your GIF game. If you take the time to make the higher level GIFs then you will be able to create impressions.

The post How to Make Animated GIFs for Social Media appeared first on Revive Social.

I should probably start with an introduction, though. Hi, I’m Chris. I’m responsible for this blog’s social media presence (plus two of our other blogs’ CodeinWP and ThemeIsle).

One of the issues I have faced is the number of articles that are written about social media marketing. It is hard to separate all of the noise into useful advice that you can use to build your site or reputation online. I read widely on the subject, but I keep finding myself asking more questions about the process. “Is it working, how long do I persist in this before I stop and try something different?”

These are the questions that keep me up at night, sitting in total darkness staring out the window. In the rain.

Well, okay, it is not that bad obviously, but learning the craft was proving more difficult than anticipated. One of the problems, I think, is that best practices in social media have a unique fluidity and an algorithmic law. It is hard to determine how the law functions with a reasonable degree of certainty without constant experimentation.

We are looking to build an audience on social media and increase the engagement while sticking to the laws of the algorithm. One thing that is immediately obvious is that the law is also determined by the brand ideal associated with each of the networks. So, in the case of Facebook, their algorithm is defined by their specific philosophy; connectedness, community, communication, free speech or, in Mark Zuckerberg’s words, “Facebook stands for bringing us closer together and building a global community.”

So, I am happy to introduce our first social media experiment on Facebook concerning content and community. How did I develop the following idea? Over at PostPlanner, they have an article which GUARANTEES (all caps in original) engagement – here.

The fifth tip suggests trying to use Behind-the-Scenes photos to humanize the business. This kind of content promises to make us stand out from the competition and provide the transparency that fans (fans seems to be the term everyone likes…not users nor customers but fans). So, the experiment was to boost organic reach with a series of posts that were based on the team and not on the thing that the business does – in our case, WordPress products.

Starting the ongoing social media case study

Social media case study experiment #1: Images from the team-building trip to the Danube Delta in Romania.

• Content: 5 Images with captions.
• Outcome: Success!

For this post, we had an organic reach of 1088 with 20 reactions and shares. This was nearly twice the reach of our previous link posted article, 591 organic reach, and five times the reactions and shares.

Social media case study experiment #2: Combine behind the scenes with a good story

Bill Widmar provided us with a great post recently on 6 Facebook Business Page tips here. My favorite tip is number 6 which tells me that emotion is the key to the fan (and by extension the otherwise cold and lifeless algorithm). Check out the post because we paid a lot for excellent tips from the maestro of marketing. Bill says that stories are key because people love heart warming stories. The algorithm knows this and it will reward warm and fuzzy posts.

• Content: Two images. One of our interns, Dragos, on his last day. One of the entire team being happy.
• Outcome: Success!

This post outperformed the Danube post with twice the reach and reactions. We used Dragos’ quote, with his approval of course, and allowed his story to shine:

Takeaways

Indeed the algorithm is cold and heartless, but it is driven by the logic imparted from its masters. The posts that have a social and humanizing aspect (community driven) are given a decent boost, and these increased eyes will lead to increased reactions. It is clear that to work effectively on Facebook we need to work within their focus of building communities. Read more here.

Social media adventures in video

No social media experiment would be complete without dipping a toe into the video pool. I have added “adventures” here because live streaming feels like an adventure every time I do it.

Everyone is experimenting with social media video because Facebook is pushing video heavily. The big guy, Mark Zuckerberg, saying “I see video as a mega trend, same order as mobile.” If rumors are to be believed, Facebook is willing to spend $1 billion on original content next year. Admittedly the numbers are assumed, but they do seem consistent with business goals that are increasingly centered around video.

For example, we all know that they have started their own social media experiment with Facebook Watch in America. We also know that video is already huge on Facebook with Buffer statistics suggesting that billions of videos are watched translating into millions of hours spent on video each day. So the equation seems fairly simple. Get video + post it = they will come. Too easy.

Nothing is ever that easy, right? If you read widely you will see that:

• “Video is the best with Facebook’s algorithm update”,
• Facebook is giving longer videos a bump”,
• Facebook updates News Feed algorithm to focus on video completion rates”.

There’s a lot of different information available about video, best practices, and the best way to get that elusive News Feed bump.

So, this leads us into the next batch of experiments: two live videos and some original content.

Social media adventure #1: Facebook Live announcement and a sneaky update

My first Facebook Live was an attempt to test the waters and see the results. It was a fairly simple setup with just one devilishly handsome man, me, on the camera announcing a new update to our flagship product Hestia.

• Content: Streaming video with an image.
• Outcome: Qualified success.

The results: 5 live viewers and a post stream organic reach of 837 with 37 clicks. 107 minutes viewed in total from 216 video views. The video was short coming in at just 2 minutes and 28 seconds.

Social media adventure #2: Facebook Live behind the scenes and meet the team

The second Facebook Live ‘event’ which combined the behind the scenes logic with live video. Another simple setup with a walk around the office and quick introduction to the team.

• Content: Streaming video only
• Outcome: Success.

The results here were a little better with an organic reach of 3,789 and 65 reactions. We managed to jag 3 shares out of the 1,350 video views. The video was longer at 4 minutes and has a more festive air with a lot of joking and fun.

Takeaways

A few things stand out from looking at these videos today. The first video had an image of me leaning forward while I scratch the side of my head. This was created because I made a mistake setting up OBS. What this means is that Facebook started streaming the few seconds before I planned. Like a 2 second delay, which left me looking like a fool.

The content was not very appealing to users either. It seems clear that the content of news etc. is not as enthralling as I would think. Clearly, a movement away from these themes is crucial to the success of the next stream.

So, the second live stream contained an image of the area outside our office. While this is not necessarily the most beautiful image one could see it is an improvement. We also found that the team introductions were much more interesting for people. News and updates are forms of information that can be found elsewhere, behind the scenes and team introductions not only personalize the company but they cannot be found elsewhere.

Social media experiment #3: Original animated content

For our final experiment we converted our blog post “How to be the worst WordPress designer on the planet” in to an animated video.

• Content: Animated video with text.
• Outcome: Success.

We did boost this post to the tune of $50 and we got a total reach of 96,198 (nearly four times our audience). We picked up 426 new followers in the week after the initial post.

Takeaways

Clearly video is the key to the algorithm’s heart! Particularly original content that is uploaded directly to Facebook. A sneaky boost is well worth the money.

Next steps

So, I read Ana Gotter’s recent blog post which warns me that ‘Algorithms change, and those trending growth hacks may do their job and then fall by the wayside.'(see the full post here). I think this is really good advice, but with some things, like video, we can feel safe that Facebook will continue to push it and that it will remain appealing to people in the long term (at least until extinction). 

We are going to continue the video experiments on Facebook, particularly with original content and live streams. I am excited about all of our social media experiments, but I am *really* excited about the comics. We have brought in an illustrator/animator, and we are working on more dynamic content for the social channels. This will include a monthly comic series, which will tackle a range of subjects from the WordPress environment but also the wider tech world.

This is the first example of our new comic style posts, drop by next month to see how it performed.

The post Revive.Social’s Ongoing Social Media Case Study (Ep. #1 – New Experiments) appeared first on Revive Social.