Welcome to November! My favorite month of the year for a bunch of reasons, but one in particular is the crisp air completely legitimizes higher ABV sippers (and flasks). It’s always beer:30 somewhere on the mountain, after all…ski hills are opening soon! If you’re tracking with me, we’re working on setting your craft beverage brand up for high-performance storytelling on the three major social networks of interest to craft beverage: Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Last time we focused on switching your Instagram profile from personal to business for marketing and reporting purposes. Now we’re going to dig into the visitor data available to you on each platform using social reporting tools.
Remember the advantages to having a business Instagram profile include:
- Email/phone/connect with the brand directly versus relying on comments.
- Instagram Insights for reporting and analytics.
- Targeted promotion of engaging posts for additional reach.
Before we get into all the data at our fingertips, why does information about how fans interact with your social efforts matter? In short, we have the opportunity to get smarter about how we spend our time (and money) in social. It’s far too easy to post it and forget it: check the box on social by snapping a photo of an event with your smartphone and uploading it in real-time. That makes everyone a marketer, but not always a good one. Imagine if your posts started getting twice the engagement…three times the likes…four times the followers. With a quick review (I recommend monthly) of your social media performance, you’ll be in a position to post more strategically AND efficiently, with even greater ROI. Let’s look at some examples:
Scenario 1: you hit a plateau of followers. Month over month you’re not witnessing the increases you had enjoyed during the first year you were in business. A review of the data shows that current followers aren’t sharing your content. Suggestion: take a critical look at how your craft beer brand is represented visually through photos/videos and use relevant hashtags to introduce your content to new audiences.
Scenario 2: the engagement with your content decreases. Likes, retweets and other activity has dropped significantly and you’re nervous. Turn to the data – to what do fans respond? Is it something everyone can agree with, like a new product release? Or is it content that causes a stir, where they have to pick a side? Suggestion: try to post content that always warrants a response either way.
Scenario 3: current and potential fans can’t figure you out. Are you a craft beverage brand or something else? When you post randomly without a content strategy or calendar, your current and potential fans have trouble understanding what you stand for. When they’re confused, the last thing they want to do is endorse you to their friends or followers. Suggestion: time to set a True North for your social efforts!
The target social platforms have their own way of tracking and reporting visitor engagement. We’ll go through each at a high level:
Instagram Insights are only available to business profiles through the mobile app. For a time period you select, the following data points are available:
- Account Insights, including impressions, reach, website clicks, profile views and followers.
- Post Insights, with likes, comments, saves, actions and discovery tracked.
- Stories Insights, featuring impressions, reach, taps forward, taps back, replies, swipes away and exits.
Measures that matter: “actions” are important because they’re a snapshot of the user’s response to your post. Ideally, we want them to reach out to connect (phone, email, address), click on the website link for more information or follow your profile for future dialogue. “Discovery” is a nice-to-know stat on where your post was viewed by the user on Instagram, which is especially useful if they weren’t already following your profile. Much of the data is only available once you’ve reached a minimum amount of traffic to your profile (typically 100 followers).
If you love the data, Facebook has got you covered, with more than a dozen different ways to slice and dice visitor engagement with your craft beverage Page:
- Overview: for a selected time period, get an overview of your key performance indicators, like actions on a Page, likes, reach, engagements, followers and most popular posts (with the opportunity to boost for increased visibility).
- Promotions: activity related to your paid ad account, tracked by campaign activity.
- Followers, Likes, Reach and Page Views: all important measures of the strength of your content.
- Page Previews: whether or not the preview content available to users who hover over your profile before clicking was enticing enough. Definitely a reminder to keep things fresh and updated!
- Actions on Page: similar to Instagram, specific button-clicks on your Page, including Directions, Website, Phone Number and other Action buttons.
- Posts: reach and engagement for your top posts by day and time period (definitely good for deciding when to post!).
- Events: activity around events that you have posted to your Page calendar, including ticket sales if Facebook commerce is enabled.
- Videos and Stories: viewership stats of the more lasting videos and fleeting (24-hour) stories.
- People: great resource for learning about the gender, age and origins of fans, followers and others visiting your Page.
- Local: by request, see information that will help you make business decisions both inside and outside of Facebook. Generally, relies on app-based geo-tracking to identify customers based on proximity to your business.
- Messages: statistics around fans and followers that have allowed Page messaging features.
Measures that matter: hard to pick just a couple, it really depends on your goals for Facebook. I like the Overview tab because it offers actionable insights at a quick glance. The People tab is also key to understanding your audience and whether or not your content strategy is winning with them.
I was surprised by how many data points Twitter collects. Take a look at the list – you too may have just found some more actionable insights on visitors to your account!
- Home: overview of account, including top tweet, top follower and activity summary.
- Tweets: impressions, engagements, link clinks, retweets, likes and replies.
- Audiences: general stats on ALL Twitter users, not just those following you, including filters for interests, demographics, lifestyle, consumer behavior, mobile footprint and others.
- Events: actionable insights around holiday, sports, movies and other trends for the general Twitter audience. Helpful for making campaign/promotional decisions.
- Videos: views/starts, minutes watched and completion rate for organic and promoted video.
- Conversion Tracking: user tracking from a Twitter tweet/account to a linked website.
Measures that matter: I like the performance tracking of tweets, but especially interesting are the Audience and Event tabs. These are key differentiators for Twitter over Instagram and Facebook and an opportunity to learn what’s trending in general in order to tweak your strategy if appropriate.
Social Tools
I continue to evaluate social listening and reporting tools with clients. We’ve found a great set of features with Sprout Social that have allowed us to consolidate all social posting and analytics activity under one roof, including:
- Smart Inbox: monitor, filter, tag and manage all messages across all platforms. Identify and engage key influencers. Track keywords, hashtags and locations for competitive insights.
- Team Tools: sharing responsibilities for social posting and response to customer service inquiries. Template and suggested reply tools make it easier to use a consistent brand voice.
- Publishing Calendar: balance your real-time activity with scheduled messaging around holidays, promotions and events. You pick the date and time of the post and Sprout Social does the rest.
- Reporting: native social media measures like we discussed above, with the addition of cross-platform insights. Reports can be scheduled and distributed automatically to the team.
Sprout Social Discount
If you haven’t already, visit SproutSocial.com, a tool to help monitor, grow and track social media efforts. I’ve evaluated a number of tools and I find this to be the most insightful and easiest to use, with access to a single interface for posting content to all major social platforms. As an advisor, I qualify for discounted pricing of $150/month for up to 2 users and 3 social profiles (i.e. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter) for Enterprise-level services. Additional profiles and users can be purchased.
What I’m reading this week:
1. Legendary Master Distiller Dave Pickerell has passed away on November 1 in San Francisco. Such sad news for the tight-knit spirits community. I spent time with Dave during my time working on Maker’s Mark. Here’s a photo with my buddy Mitch at the distillery in Loretto, KY.
2. Widmer Brothers and Lyft Collaborate on Closing Time IPA: creative use of packaging and product naming to pull off this Lyft promotion for 50% off a single ride to encourage responsible drinking in the Portland metro area.
3. 85% of brands have invested in Instagram, with 4.21% engagement rate (compared to 0.07% for Facebook and 0.03% on Twitter). Check out How to grow your Instagram using analytics: a webinar hosted by Peg Fitzpatrick, social media expert and co-author with Guy Kawasaki of The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users.
Information is based on best available, public resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. All trademarks are the property of their respective companies.
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