Facebook has published the latest episode in its new ‘Social Skills’ series, which aims to provide expert insights and tips to help social media marketers improve their approach, and maximize their results.
The latest episode features Katie Marylander, the Director of Global Social Marketing for GoPro. Marylander manages the social strategy for the brand, which includes oversight across more than 70 regional accounts, and a huge global audience.
Marylander provides three key tips for an effective social media strategic approach:
1. Maintain a regular posting schedule
A key element of GoPro’s approach, Marylander says, has been consistency:
“Publishing with a regular cadence can keep your community really engaged, which helps the algorithm keep your content leveling to the top of people’s feeds. And then the more often they’re engaging with it, the more often it’s at the top of theirs.”
This underlines the importance of a documented, organized approach to social media marketing, which includes researching your audience, establishing brand voice, outlining your content plan on a calendar and maintaining a schedule.
It also likely involved not getting disheartened. You can’t expect to see floods of engagement right away, but if you stick with a documented content plan, over a defined period, you can then measure your results against the preceding time frame to get a clear view of how your efforts and working, and what benefits you’re driving for your brand.
2. Establish clear goals
Another element of effective social strategy is aligning your efforts to a defined goal, which you can then measure your performance metrics against.
Sure, getting lots of Likes may feel good, but is it driving traffic to your website? Posting memes could mean you get more reach – but is that helping you sell your products?
Defining these elements is key to maximizing the performance metrics that are of most relevance to your brand, and understanding the best approaches to get there.
Marylander notes that UGC plays a big role in GoPro’s approach.
“At GoPro, UGC drives our strategy. It’s where most of our content comes from, and can be anything that a user captures authentically that we didn’t pay for or produce ourselves. Our followers can just take our product and capture the content that they want.”
When customers are posting about your business, that enables you to build a relationship with them by requesting permission to repost their content. That can help deepen brand connection, while also showcasing your products in the real-world, via real people, helping to boost those links.
3. Understand the impact of varied approaches
GoPro also looks to measure each content type based on the interactions it sees, rather than using a blanket approach to engagement across all formats.
For example, still-image posts may get more comments, while videos get more views.
“We have a theory that you get one action out of a consumer. So the one action might be a view, it might be a comment, it might be a like. If you post a video and you’re like, ‘I only got 50 likes,’ you might’ve gotten 500 views and we’re still going to count that, because that counts as the action that they engaged with you.”
The approach underlines the importance of understanding how your audience responds, and what that response means, digging deeper into the binary metrics to get a clearer view of how each element interacts and connects into your broader strategic approach.
When viewed from a broader perspective, you can measure how each of these elements contribute to your end goals by building your own metrics to assess their impact on your KPIs.
Facebook’s Social Skills videos are worth a look – even if you’re an experienced social media manager, there are likely a few reminders and pointers worth taking in and keeping in mind in your approach.
