OUR FACEBOOK STRATEGY
An addendum to the last post — Starting an ecommerce business? Don’t set up social media accounts. Not yet. To get better context, read that story first.
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First of all, why so much emphasis on graphic content?
We, as a business, are a lifestyle product (& services). For health and lifestyle products — in general — graphic content has proven to yield much better results. Add to that the fact that we are in fashion, and the choice gets clearer by the minute.
So. In the last post, we talked about a lot of things. We talked about identifying — via a pilot — the right social media platform for your business, we talked about the 80/20 rule, we talked about letting go of FOMO, but when it came to one specific content — video content, I mentioned the necessity of consistency. In short, we talked about some sort of a periodicity in our content strategy. Lets start from there.
PERIODIC VIDEO CONTENT?
Yes. In any content marketing, there are two most important things you need to consider — (1) Quality of the content needs to be high-ish, (2) Content flow needs to be with a consistent frequency.
I do mean high-ish. Compromising a little bit on quality is fine — specially in the early stages. Putting off content creation isn’t. The avg. quality of your content would improve with time. Don’t focus a little bit too much on attaining perfection.
Let’s look at our nas daily example again.
He creates one 1-min video every day, and backed by that, has managed to amass a loyal follower-base of 1M+ in less than 1.5 years. How can I say it is loyal? Look at the engagement numbers for any of his videos.
WHAT IS A GOOD PERIODIC FLOW?
IDK. Experiment and figure out for yourself. An ideal number would be between 4–6 short videos every week — to maximise the impact it can have to your business. But our marketing team is virtually non-existent at the moment. So, we are keeping a target of 2 videos each week.
WHAT SHOULD THE VIDEOS BE LIKE?
Anything that’s relevant to your audience — and is inline with your business segment. Just because cat videos are relevant to your audience doesn’t mean you should start promoting those. But if you are selling say groceries or bakeware — I wouldn’t mind you creating short, crisp recipe videos.
Don’t feel the need to talk about your product all the time in the video. That just ticks off the audience.
Take this example. Let us assume I am running a tech blog with lot of traffic and reader-base. Microsoft just gave me a ton of money as strategic partner. What do I need to do? Promote Internet Explorer.
What will I do, Wherever I put up the screenshot of a browser to illustrate the web-view for the code, I use Internet Explorer. At some places, instead of writing browser, I’ll even use Internet Explorer or IE in the text. That’s cool. As an audience, you wouldn’t mind that. But what if I started using the phrase “Microsoft’s latest Internet Explorer 14.xx” every single time? Nobody wins. Not me, not Microsoft. Get the gist?
WHY SO MUCH EMPHASIS ON VIDEOS?
Four reasons:
- Better engagement. Better brand recall. Higher interest levels.
- Higher chances of getting shared.
- Much — and I mean muuuuchhh — better chances of getting higher organic reach.
- Eventually drive traffic to our platform with a 1 — second frame containing a CTA — at the end of all videos.
Facebook has been experimenting quite a bit with videos, so the relative probability of organic reach of videos being higher is much more when compared to text or image based posts where Facebook has largely suppressed organic discovery.
And this data is almost 3 years old. From what I recall, the organic reach for a page with >1,000 likes this year could be as low as 0.6%.
Remember, more than likes and comments, shares matter.
Shares are to your facebook page what Spinach is to Popeye.
You want your audience to share your content. And why will anyone share the post where you are talking about a discount, a brand, or anything similar? Basically, when have you ever known anyone to love repeating what a narcissist has to say about himself?
Want your audience to share? Create good content, relevant content, share-able content. Let’s circle back to nas daily again, shall we?
The Jan 4 video — which is incidentally a pinned post on his page — the number of shares are almost as high as the number of comments and number of reactions combined! That’s insane, isn’t it?
Granted, the number of shares is just 1.3% if you compare it against the views, but it is still 400k+. Which means that this video would have shown up in newsfeeds of friends of 400k people!!! That’s more than a few million views that this video would have gathered — just because it was shared.
Now, look at the video on the right. One posted less than 12 hours back
- 171k views
- 1308 comments
- 9.1k reactions (5.3% of the number of views)
- 1527 shares (0.9% of views)
Consistency! It helps.
What happens when you keep on seeing the same ad again and again? The chances of you actually checking that product out keeps on getting higher and higher. Whether you buy it or not — that’s a different story.
If you keep on seeing content from the same source again and again in your newsfeed because your friend(s) keep on sharing it, your chances of checking out that source is even higher than that of checking out the product. That’s how influencer marketing works!
And yes. This is the real influencer marketing. You get a celebrity to talk about your product, sure it would have instant visibility in front of an audience of millions. But you get your audience to talk about your product, you get an instant access to their friends — social validation!
OKAY. I AM SOLD ON THE WHOLE VIDEO THING. JUST STOP ALREADY! SO… YOU SHARE VIDEOS FROM YOUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL?
No. I’ll advise against it.
We don’t even have a youtube channel. It did not fit in our overall marketing approach. Maybe some day we will. But it is not the right platform for us at this stage.
Anyway. Even if you have a youtube channel, don’t use those videos. Upload the videos on Facebook directly. As I said, Facebook has been experimenting quite a lot with its own video platform. Get the best out of it.
Native Facebook videos have an 186% higher engagement rate and are shared more than 1000% more than videos linked to from other hosting sites
So go ahead. Create videos. Take them from your smartphone, get a gopro and mount it somewhere, get a professional camera and a tripod, or even get a drone. I don’t care how you take it. Just get going.
30s — 1 min videos, a few hours doing some basic editing and that’s it. Don’t overdo it.
I’ll start sharing results of our marketing campaigns — reach numbers, impact etc. soon. If you’re interested in them, I would add you to the list.
Oh. And if you liked the story, would you mind showing it some love. 🤓
Press the 💛, won’t you?
