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Social media’s a fickle game. From profile pictures to bios to link shorteners to images, there’s so much to think about before you tweet, share or post.
As marketers, it’s even harder. Is your post on brand? Has it gone through the appropriate checks? Do you have the right assets attached?
It’s a no-brainer that in the world of ever evolving social (these platforms are levelling up faster than Pokémon), you need to put a lot of effort into getting your content noticed. Of course, it helps if it’s valuable, but it does need to also be eye catching and pretty.
That’s why rich media drives better engagement. Say you’re a food lover, and suddenly before your eyes, a picture of a vibrant, colour-rich, fresh-looking burger and salad appears. Will it get your attention? Heck, yes. Will you read the attached content? Probably, but chances are you will only click if it’s really good. Think recipes here, or a discount on your favourite restaurant.
If only targeting all customers were that simple. It may hard to, for example, make an accounting firm seem just as appealing, but it’s easier than you think – with the right assets and graphics, anything’s possible.
I do see us investing further from a content perspective
That’s why we got excited about Hootsuite’s integration with Google Drive, Dropbox and other content repositories.
Through this, Hootsuite users can add content sources they already use into their Hootsuite dashboard, as well as search and organise digital assets within the platforms.
Video’s on the rise
This shows larger social players – such as Hootsuite – are recognising the power of digital assets. Omar Kaywan, senior global product marketing manager at Hootsuite tells Marketing Tech all assets are important in their own way, but it does see its customers “posting more video on social”.
“Facebook in particular actually has more video sharing and video publishing than any other video network on social. I think we’re starting to see video evolve a little bit more, and probably other formats like GIFs will be more popular that what it is today; and we know images continue to perform very well too,” he says.
Hootsuite reportedly has the largest amount of integrations in the marketplace, including its own directory with a range of complimentary apps.
The more in-depth integrations however is an area the company wanted to move toward for a while, Kaywan said, after hearing from customers around the world.
But the next step, he added, was to deliver more “out of the box digital asset management systems”.
“I do see our roadmap continuing to evolve from that perspective, especially when we are talking about additional other forms of assets that could be posted on social, i.e. video, or other kinds of rich media. I do see us investing further from a content perspective,” Kaywan explained.
The popular elements of social marketing
Social media marketing in itself encompasses many areas, including social selling, customer service and advocacy, and for Hootsuite, these are where its enterprise customers are continuing to invest.
As we mentioned above, social marketing is an evolving beast, and various tactics and strategies are emerging from the woodwork as the tech products for marketers and advertisers get more media rich and intelligent. And with Kaywan predicting that “more and more companies” will engage with social marketing as we go through the digital transformation of brands.
Although there’s not much point in spending time, money and effort on social without the right measurements and metrics. Hootsuite has a major focus on this area in particular and hosted an online event earlier this year themed around social ROI, where 20,000 people registered to attend. This shows the vast yearning there is in the marketplace for guidance on what to measure, but Kaywan explains there’s no “one-size-fits-all answer”.
“It depends what you’re doing. Sometimes social ROI could be the fact that you have a cost savings on your customer service efforts, or from a marketing perspective it’s sometimes focused on delivering leads. The cost per lead could be the measurement of where you deliver ROI and for social selling your strategy could be measurement of how much revenue is being generated.
“There no particular statistic to focus on, but from an elementary perspective, tweets, likes, retweets, shares are all important to capture,” he adds.
As social media marketing does continue to get more and more exciting – think Instagram Stories, Facebook’s adblocker ad announcements and Twitter’s verification process, as well as the various strategies and campaigns popping up – it can only be helped via integrations such as Hootsuite’s.
