LinkedIn Live Is On The Way

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Like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter before them, professional networking site LinkedIn is ready to join the livestreaming trend. In a conversation with TechCrunch, the Director of Product Management, Pete Davies, said live video has been the platform’s most requested featured. Now, that wish has been grated – at least for U.S. users.

Launching this week with invitation-only trials, LinkedIn Live will be available to those who request the feature via a contact form in the coming weeks. The functionality could be a huge benefit to brands covering press junkets, conferences or product announcements, but has the potential to create unwanted clutter from “entrepreneur gurus” and “leadership coaches” who often spam the site. Perhaps the approval process for acquiring the feature will set a precedent for video production standards.

The platform is reportedly working with simulcasting services like Wirecast, Socialive, and Wowza, among others, to develop API connectivity for professional broadcasts.

Be among the first to know when you can request LinkedIn Live by subscribing to our weekly newsletter.

Understanding Your Facebook Page's Customer Satisfaction Score

Businesses that advertise on Facebook will soon be assigned a customer satisfaction score. The scores, expected to have a full rollout by the end of Q1, range from zero to five and can impact a page’s ad cost and delivery performance. Consistently poor customer feedback will result in penalty periods (some lasting upward of six months) where ads will cost more and reach fewer people during that time.

How is a customer satisfaction score generated?

In June of 2018, Facebook began collecting feedback from customers who had interacted with or purchased products from a company whose ads they had been delivered. The feedback asks users to rate their satisfaction with the company by selecting a smiley, neutral, or disappointed face. Alternatively, users can actively provide feedback by selecting an ad from their history in the Ads Activity tab and completing a more detailed questionnaire about their experience.

How are score penalties implemented?

Once a page has access to their customer satisfaction dashboard, they can view their score as well as individual comments left by customers. If the page score falls under three, ads associated with the corresponding ad account will see an increase in cost and a decrease in reach.

According to information provided to AdvertiseMint, “If a business maintains a low score, Facebook will increase penalties each month until that score is improved. If the score drops to one or less, the business will be unable to run ads on Facebook’s platform.”

What can I do to improve my customer satisfaction score?

While little is known about how pages will be able to combat unfair or biased feedback, screenshots of the dashboard reveal several tips on maintaining high scores via Facebook. In full, these include:

  • Set better expectations with your customers: “Low customer satisfaction ratings are often caused by a mismatch in customer expectations and what they experience. This includes making sure the product matches what’s depicted in your ads, and that shipping times displayed are accurate. Honor any return and exchange policies advertised on your website. If you're operating in a different time zone than your customers, be clear about how long it takes to reply back to customer inquiries.”

  • Be clear about what you’re selling or offering: “Pictures, videos and all other ad creative should accurately represent what’s being sold. Ensure dimensions, sizes, materials and all other aspects of your product are accurately shown and stated. If you're selling apparel, ensure the size charts you're using work for other countries you're selling to (ex, United States sizing may be different than sizing in China).”

  • Ensure the quality of goods from suppliers: “If you’re sourcing goods from suppliers, ensure you maintain quality control and that the goods are shipped on time and as stated on your website and ads.”

  • Set clear expectations for shipping: “Door-to-door shipping time should be accurately conveyed. The shipping information you provide should be inclusive of processing times, item availability, shipping costs and any other factors that may impact the amount of time an item takes to ship. If possible, provide tracking information about the shipment so that the customer can track their package.” 

  • Make sure you can meet customer demand: “Scale your advertising with your businesses' ability to deliver products. If your inventory is limited, you may want to consider running fewer ads, or make it clear to customers before they purchase when the products are expected to be in stock and shipped. Be proactive about telling customers when you can't fulfill what was promised (ex, you've run out of inventory, and it will now take longer than expected to replace an order).”

Why are customer satisfaction scores important?

Aside from the obvious consequences related to ad costs, customer satisfaction scores provide a new opportunity to hold businesses accountable for the customer service they provide and the promises made in their advertising.

For the first time, a clear connection will be made between Facebook pages, ad accounts, and physical businesses. If any part of that thread delivers a bad experience (say a social media manager takes too long to reply to a Facebook message, or a sales rep is rude during a telephone call), it could harm the social advertising component and affect the company’s bottom line. That’s a big deal, but if a business is dedicated to its customers in the first place, they shouldn’t have anything to worry about.

With the promise of more information in the coming month, Facebook’s Social Media Marketing Lead, Wes Finley, said: “This enforcement rewards businesses that offer superior service and high-quality products as they face less competition in the delivery auction and benefit from higher consumer trust overall.”

How To Write Powerful Ad Copy

Whether you’re working with photos or videos, trying to earn more followers or make a sale, social media ads that produce conversions are all dependent on persuasive accompanying text.

When faced with creative roadblocks, marketers often turn to tried-and-true methods of stomping out writer’s block. One classic and commonly trusted technique urges copywriters to build text that answers five basic questions: who, what, when, where, and why?

Communicating these details to your audience equips them with all of the information needed to take action with an ad, but focusing on a different set of questions (recommended by Colin Theriot of Cult of Copy) may give viewers the extra push to respond to your call-to-action.

The next time you’re composing ad text, put yourself in the position of the ad recipient and try answering:

  1. Why me? – Your ad recipient should immediately be able to understand why they’ve been included in your target audience. Don’t be afraid to speak to their behaviors or interests that you’re already aware of. Explain why this ad is of specific interest to them. 

  2. Why you? – Although your page name will appear next to your advertisement, that could mean very little to a recipient who isn’t already familiar with your brand. Include a concise description or a significant fact about your company to let audiences know why your brand is the best one to deliver this message.

  3. Why this? – Given what you know about your ad recipient’s set of circumstances (i.e. the reason you’ve included them in your target audience), make sure the offer you’re promoting is one they will find relevant, interesting, and helpful. 

  4. Why now? – Audiences need a reason to stop scrolling and pay attention to your ad. Use deadlines or time-sensitive calls-to-action to motivate viewers to act as soon as they see your offer. No matter how well-intended, social ads can be notoriously hard to track down once a user has passed on them.

Example:

 Thinking of selling your home? We’re Pleasantville’s leading real estate experts, helping sellers get top $$$ since 1975. Get a FREE home evaluation report within the next 30 days when you sign up for our mailing list today. Unsubscribe anytime, but this offer ends at midnight.

Staring at a computer screen for hours on end is no fun. Take a break, head outside and let Deph Digital create compelling ad copy on your behalf. What are you waiting for? Contact us.

Don’t Break the Internet: How Content Creators Can Fix It Instead

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2018 was a tumultuous year for social media. The Facebook algorithm shook up publishing habits for brand pages; Mark Zuckerburg, Jack Dorsey, and other social network executives faced congressional hearings; Twitter cracked down on millions of fake accounts; GDPR compliance rolled out across Europe; and we were all left wondering how to survive yet another breach of privacy or personal data hack.

The tech world is in a tailspin trying to figure out how global social media platforms can operate on a singular set of rules that will protect users, stop the spread of misinformation, and, you know, safeguard the legitimacy of democratic elections.

As new practices and policies pop up, the results rarely favor brands or businesses from a marketing perspective. Social publishers have noted significant decreases in organic reach, lower financial returns on their ad investments, and stagnated follower growth.

Many marketing agencies (Deph Digital Media included) are offering practical solutions: Focus on engagement! Increase your niche audience ad spend! Collaborate with influencers! But if we’re being totally transparent, these are temporary fixes to a much bigger problem.

In a recent episode of the podcast Recode Decode with Kara Swisher, Nicole Wong, who is a former legal director of products at Twitter and former senior compliance officer at Google, made an interesting observation about the shift in our online values. When Google began assembling the structure of the Internet as we know it today, they had three pillars of search:

Comprehensiveness – Users should have access to all of the information they could possibly want.

Relevance – When looking for specific information, or answers to questions, users should be delivered a pertinent response.

Speed – Responses should be generated quickly.

In the years since, Wong claims that social media has changed the way digital companies interact with their users. Their new principles consist of:

Personalization – As opposed to showing all available content, social algorithms provide users with information they believe the user wants to see, based off their interests and activity history.

Engagement – Rather than giving direct responses to queries or providing baseline data, social networks deliver content that is meant to keep users on their platform for longer periods of time.

Speed – Users still expect content and information to be delivered quickly.

If the past year has taught us anything, it’s what happens when social platforms are committed to these values. The consequences include woefully uninformed users, manipulative digital activities, and disastrous user experiences.

Somewhat naïvely, marketers have aided tech giants in building the crisis situation by not holding their content to higher standards.

Advertisers have, through overly broad interest-targeting, pushed promotional messaging under the guise of personalization. However, it is to the extent where users can’t pinpoint why they’re being shown certain ads, making the blind consumption of such media vulnerable to manipulation.

In order to expand their reach, publishers have flooded timelines with content that’s focused on virality with hopes of being re-shared and increasing engagements. Often, we’ve been guilty of trying to satisfy user cravings for instant communication by jumping into social conversations before having complete and accurate information, thus amplifying partial or inaccurate news.

Taking cues from Wong’s brainstorming session during the Recode podcast, here are three social content pillars that publishers should consider for 2019:

Accuracy – Content or information should be truthful, cited, and appropriate for the page’s audience.

Authenticity – Publishers should place quality over quantity and create content that users will resonate with, not simply react to.

Context – Due to the non-chronological nature of social, delivered content should be comprehensive and complete at all times.

Applying these values would not only impact a brand’s social output, but completely transformation typical marketing objectives. Companies would have to create super specific target audiences with the intention of building community, as opposed to increasing ROI. Link clicks would have to be earned by distributing wide-ranging and thought-provoking articles instead of late-breaking headlines that trickle out information in waves.

That may not sound like something content curators would want to get behind but, although monthly marketing reports may take a hit, studies show that 91% of customers value authentic social activity from brands they follow, with 63% of those customers likely to make purchases. If speed and virality has to take a backseat in order to reach those numbers, publishers are bound to concede.

Until that happens, or until social network executives take meaningful actions to fix their platforms, it’s up to the users and publishers. If all of the content online adhered to these standards, then perhaps fake news wouldn’t be an issue.

Optimizing Instagram Stories

This week, Instagram unveiled a new Countdown Sticker for stories that displays a customized timer for events. The feature is an exciting addition for brands, so this seems like the perfect time to review other innovative ways you can implement story features to optimize your business profile.

Increase Participation 

The Countdown Sticker includes a Remind Me option that will alert followers once your custom countdown ends. You can take advantage of this alert by offering your following notices about upcoming sales, physical events, or even as a reminder of when you’re going to broadcast live.

Increase Your Discoverability 

The Location and Hashtag Stickers have a purpose far beyond letting your followers know where you are. Both features have the ability to expand your Instagram reach outside of your own following. When used, your content will appear in a location-based story of the destination you’ve entered, or within a hashtag story that’s visible within search. If your particular story gets enough engagement, it might earn you a spot on the coveted Explore page.

Increase Your Mailing List

The Questions Sticker is most commonly used to hold Q&A sessions via stories. An alternative use is to ask viewers to opt in to your mailing list by submitting their email address in the question field.

Similarly, you can ask Poll questions like: “Can we add you to our newsletter list?” Once the poll has concluded, view the results for those who answered Yes and send them a direct message asking for their email.

Increase Your Web Traffic

Surpassing 10,000 followers on Instagram unlocks the powerful ability for accounts to include links with their story posts. Since clickable links aren’t supported on ordinary grid posts, the feature in which users can swipe up to visit your landing page or blog is more than valuable.

Increase Engagement

Interactive story capabilities though Polls and Emoji Sliders provide businesses a unique and easy way to communicate with their Instagram audience. Consider using these features to crowdsource ideas or collect feedback on your products.

Increase Your Following

When partnering with other Instagram users or influencers, include a requirement that, for the duration of your collaboration, each user should tag the other’s profile in their stories by applying the Mention Sticker. This is an easy way to have someone recommend your profile to their following.

Increase Your Streams

If you’re in the music industry, apply the Music Sticker to your story and search for your own track to encourage streams from your viewers.