Category: Social

In London on 26 May 2016, the Facebook for Business team held an event on the topic of ‘Unlocking Europe’s Digital Economy’. As a social consultant at Organic, I decided to go along. My aim was to gain deeper insights into Facebook’s long-term strategy and to consider its implications for brand development.
At the end of the event, I didn’t leave disappointed.

Facebook on facing the future

Over half of the world’s web users are also Facebook users. As such, the social media giant has the ability not just to understand where the digital world is heading – it also has considerable power to nudge it along.
Orla Malone, Facebook’s SMB Manager, confirmed several points that I personally and we at Organic already believed to be the case:

• ‘Messaging’ is the next revolution and it’s already started. We’ve seen this from the rise of messaging apps, to bots, all the way to broader social trends and behaviours – young people in particular engage with each other online more through messaging than posting. Messaging is going to get even bigger and brands need to prepare for it.
• The power of images, and their centrality to Facebook’s strategy, is hard to overstate. Our brains can analyse images 60,000 times faster than words.
• People are consuming video content differently. Mobile devices now account for 45% of video views globally. (It’s reasonable to assume this figure is even higher in developed, urbanised countries with better mobile networks and more Wi-Fi hotspots.)

Relative to the above three points, Facebook’s approach to Virtual Reality (VR) has been more ambiguous since its purchase of Oculus Rift, at least to those outside the company.
It’s clear to me now, however, that Facebook sees VR as infinitely more than a specialist tool, novelty item or piece of hardcore gaming apparatus.
At least as far as Facebook is concerned: VR is The Next Big Thing. Brands had better to get to work.
Facebook sees the evolution of digital content as a logical, linear progression:
TEXT → IMAGE → VIDEO → VR
My own flowchart would look slightly different, but still follows the same overall trajectory:
TEXT → IMAGE → VIDEO → 360 VIDEO → VR

What’s next for content?

Let’s take a few steps back. In reality, whichever form the content takes, whether we’re talking about traditional long-form articles, live video or next-generation VR, many of the same considerations apply.
I believe these four points are more important than ever.

Discovery is king

Thanks to digital, various media that were once only available to the biggest companies are now in the hands of some of the smallest. It’s unsurprising therefore that the gap between the content available to us and our ability to consume it is continuing to grow.
In this environment, discovery has become king.
Given the likelihood that average or low-quality content is more likely than ever to be lost in the crowd, it follows that more effort should be directed towards higher-quality content. This is true even if it means reducing output in terms of quantity.

Stop thinking ‘desktop first’

As digital consumers we’re all on our mobiles, but as developers and designers we’re still optimising for desktops. A good indication of this comes from Orla Malone’s striking statistic that 93% of daily Facebook use is mobile.
For all brands a mobile strategy is essential – this should go without saying! – and this strategy should not be merely an afterthought.

When two become one: The merging of the online and offline worlds

The online and offline worlds are becoming increasingly interconnected. Social media was never meant to function in a vacuum, so it’s quite surprising to see how some brands use social as a separate channel on its own.
Rather, social is a reflection of one’s life experiences and emotions, and one of the supplementary tools for communication. Social works best when it makes a connection to real life. It’s no wonder then that experiential content does so well on social.

I want it all. And I want it now

Users must find what they are looking for, or they will leave instantly. Of course, serving them the content and services they need involves a relentless focus on on-site optimisation.
But it’s about far more than that. For example, an ad that offers specific products or services but takes users to a generic landing page is likely to fail. User expectations need to be aligned with content.

A case in point: Look Fabulous Forever

I’ve tried to focus this article on high-level trends and their implications for brand strategy. But before concluding, I’d like to mention a few points raised by Tricia Cusden, the founder of Look Fabulous Forever. Her experiences and best practice tips were one of the highlights of the event.
A key insight that informs Look Fabulous Forever’s content strategy is that older people are often irritated by ‘anti-ageing’ messages. Most are happy to be ‘old’. Therefore, the brand asks: shouldn’t we be celebrating age instead?
Their social media channels are mainly used for sharing interesting stories. This minimises social media spend, as users are actively seeking their content.
Stories are created by the target audience. This takes the guesswork out of creating relevant, resonant content.
Furthermore, the owner herself often gets involved. She filmed a video tutorial (using her webcam) during which she put on makeup herself. This created trust in the brand and, more directly, caused an instant increase in sales when it went online.
Brands can no longer rely on an effective monopoly of the means to produce average-quality content. As such, it’s incumbent on them to produce higher-quality work, giving your users both what they want and what you promised.

Who cares how you feel?

The answer to this is actually, quite a few people. And we’re not just talking about your immediate digital social sphere. The advent of a range of ‘reactions’ on Facebook has long been in the offing, and now the redesigned ‘like’ buttons have finally been rolled out across the channel. The new reactions allow users to express feelings beyond the mere ‘liking’ of a post, which in theory should liberate users to be more expansive in how they communicate their feelings.
Until last Thursday if you declared yourself to be ill in bed, then any ‘likes’ garnered might have felt inappropriate, and yet a quick emotive response or expression of empathy is still sometimes required that doesn’t demand the typing of an entire message. Therefore the new ‘sad’ icon can instead be deployed to express the appropriate empathy. Similarly, users have struggled to express visual engagement for political or difficult newsworthy items relating to human tragedy for instance, but arguably a ‘sad’ or ‘angry’ face could be construed as a little facetious depending upon the content. That being said, overnight the scope for quick visual expression has increased options for users looking for a quick click.
The new icons are fitting for an age in which feelings are expressed concisely and visually, hence the rise of emojis, GIFs, and vines (in 2015, the Oxford English Dictionary even declared an emoji to be the ‘word’ of the year). You might say that we’ve communicatively come full circle having moved away from using lettering to convey our feelings, back to basic paralinguistic features, or at least signifiers of these in lieu being able to stand next to that person to communicate our feeling of support, anger, astonishment or amusement with a gesture or facial expression.

What do the new ‘reactions’ mean for marketers?

Although the ‘Like’ button will retain its strong position (it remains the icon that is privileged beneath a post), there will likely be a decrease in the comments users supply – perhaps a significant decrease.
The data Facebook can capture through users’ icon use will be valuable in assisting the channel with future algorithms. Certainly marketers will benefit from this data to target users based on the emotions they express. However, we do expect to see challenges in how reactions are measured. At the moment, new data is not available through APIs, so third party tools won’t be able to help. The goal is to get actionable insights that will have a positive effect on ROI, not merely allow the facility to languish like a novelty toy.

How can brands benefit from this change?

Given the competition from rival social channels, in part this move has been necessary to keep users engaged. The more Facebook can tailor content to the user, the more time the user will spend on that channel.
The major benefit of the new reactions for brands is that it provides deeper sentiment feedback on the content, which can be now be measured quantitatively and minus complex analyses. Brands can gain precise insight into their audiences and how to generate the response they require, which assists significantly with targeting content.
This change also presents an opportunity to incorporate the reactions feature into marketing messaging and visuals, as illustrated in these examples from Graze and Chevrolet. Campaigns can furthermore encourage people to express their love or fight negative sentiment by playing with the new icons.

What about negative sentiment?

Ordinarily, those who wish to express negative sentiment towards a brand would do so through the comments, which would probably be even more harshly expressed than by clicking on an angry emoticon.
However, the angry emoticon won’t always mean users hate the brand; they might simply be expressing that the content makes them angry, or that ad is not relevant to them and therefore an irritant, as illustrated by this Adobe stock post.
It’s doubtful whether a large number of angry faces will have a negative effect on a post’s reach, but its presence could influence other users. Angry faces may actually present an opportunity for leveling up the customer service on Facebook as brands can reach out to these people individually and try to generate positive and personalised engagement.

So has engagement increased or decreased post ‘reactions’?

Because Mashable has very high engagement (thanks to their high publishing content and general avoidance paid promotions), we analysed their Facebook page and discovered that the data did support our predictions. There was a 59.47% decrease in comments since the new reactions were rolled out, while, on average, reactions consists of 77.15% Likes. We anticipate a similar trend across Facebook. Perhaps this is because of the novelty of the mechanism, and the time-saving element which negates the requirement for articulation of feeling. We’ll soon find out.
Watch this space for further insight into the impact the reaction changes are having on brands and how these might assist you in your marketing campaigns. Let us know your thoughts on Twitter.

There are some straightforward but highly effective steps you can take to help your brand messages emerge from the digital noise in 2016.

1. Ensure your brand is mobilise

 
The vast majority of digital transactions and interactions now take place via mobile. Brands that don’t allow for swift, super-easy, minimal-click purchases on mobiles, or those that have not yet fully made the transition from laptop/desktop, will lose out. High quality, shareable, social-specific video content should also be at the forefront of a brand’s online presence with a strong call to action at the end. 

2. Focus on customer experience

 
Online and offline worlds must be coherently aligned. Often customers who physically shop in-store use their mobiles to ‘research’ the desired item prior to or even while in-store, so the physical/digital worlds need to be fully joined-up to supply continuity to the customer’s shopping experience. Furthermore, with channels like Facebook and Twitter being used to broadcast brand marketing messages and to deal with customer complaints and queries simultaneously, the voice of the customer relationship manager needs to be consistent with marketing messages. Through aligning customer service with marketing know-how there exist great opportunities for reinforcing brand personality and establishing good PR. 

3. 1-click purchases

 
Big brands like Amazon have made the purchasing experience even easier: the customer looks for, clicks on and purchases the desired item without going through a protracted payment process. Acknowledgement is received by email. By optimising the user’s journey and supplying secure forms of payment like Paypal, ApplePay and Samsung Pay, there is no need to depend upon prolonged security-checking processes to make a purchase.

4. Data rules

 
All successful marketing activity is underpinned by robust data, otherwise expensive creative content is too easily wasted and marketing messages are lost. How data is captured, used and analysed will build a deeper understanding of customer behaviour, allowing for flexibility and relevance to the user. Secure data-driven insights are the backbone to quality content creation which forms the infrastructure to any content plan.

5. Keep it personal

 
Algorithms are making advancements in directing relevant ads to individual buyers. At the moment content is served based on cookies and user preferences are indicated through ‘likes’. Information has become increasingly targeted, presenting the user with what’s most likely to appeal to them, for instance via effectively directed ads that are relevant and don’t intrude on the user’s journey. E-newsletters might remain abundant, but it takes a very strong call to action to get the recipient to open one. Rather, younger people will elect to track down deals online or in response to a call to action at the end of a video.