Sendible Blog

Great video demonstrating how to schedule Facebook and Twitter posts using Sendible courtesy of YourChurchFanPage.

These days, it’s harder than ever to get your updates noticed on Facebook. Due to the sheer volume of posts hitting the news feed, there’s a good chance that your updates will be missed or simply overlooked due to all the other noise. For this reason, it’s now more important than ever to make sure your updates are noticed and acted upon. In this post, I’ll demonstrate how with 6 simple tricks, you can increase your exposure on Facebook and generate more click-throughs to your website.

1. Attribution Links

Several social media management tools, such as Sendible.com, allow you to include attribution links along with your posts. These are little customizable links that appear below your updates and can contain any text you like. They can also link to any website you like. In the example below, we’ve included the link “Visit our blog” below the post.

2. Branded Facebook Posts

It is also possible to include your company name below every update you send to Facebook. So, instead of seeing “via mobile” or “via Sendible”, your posts could display “via My Company” with a little square icon alongside. This is a great way to build up your brand awareness and have Facebook users click on your company name and go directly to your website. The option for branded Facebook posts is currently a feature offered by Sendible.

3. Scheduling

To ensure the best possible chance of having your Facebook posts noticed, you should schedule your posts to be published at the time your fans are most likely to be looking at their Facebook news feed. There are various tools out there that make it easy to schedule your Facebook updates.

4. Link Previews

Another easy way to engage your Facebook fans is by creating interesting link previews. Link previews are made up of a thumbnail, title, caption and description. These details appear whenever you post a link to Facebook. Certain 3rd party social media management products, such as Sendible.com, make it easy to customize these details so that you can make your link previews more descriptive, resulting in better click-through rates.

5. Facebook Photo Albums

Another great way to gain more views and click-throughs, is by posting several photos to a new or existing Facebook Photo Album on your Facebook Page. Facebook Photo Albums are known to generate more click-throughs on a news feed and therefore, higher levels of engagement. You can use a social media dashboard to help you to schedule these Facebook Album posts ahead of time for maximum engagement. Here is an article from our blog that explains how to do this using Sendible.

6. Geotargeting

In Facebook, users disclose a lot of relevant information about themselves – for example their age, gender, location, work history, language etc. As a Facebook Page administrator, you have the ability to deliver content that’s only relevant to specific fans. Since you are targeting specific fans by location or language, you can customize your content to generate the most engagement for the subset of fans that are being targeted. Click here to see how easy it is to target specific fans using a third party social media management tool.

I recently read the following post implying that the levels of engagement on Facebook are reduced when using third party social media management tools. From our analysis, this is completely untrue and we have seen the exact opposite effect with users on our social media platform. By using third party applications, such as Sendible, for scheduling, geotargeting and branding their Facebook updates, brands are in fact seeing higher click-through rates, building better brand awareness and dramatically increasing their engagement ratio. To sign up for a free Sendible trial, visit http://sendible.com/signup.

We are excited to announce that we now support embedded Wistia videos within Sendible. To distribute your Wistia videos through Sendible’s email marketing software, follow the steps below:

1. Sign into your Wistia account, create your video project and upload your videos.

2. Select a video and click Embed.

3. Select “For Email Marketing”

4. Copy the Video merge tag and open up your Sendible message box.

5. Select the HTML view on the message editor and insert the code into your HTML editor.

6.Click Update and you’ll be ready to send your message.

You’re spending serious time and money on social media marketing, but are you measuring your return on investment? If not, how do you know it’s even working? By measuring these 5 social media metrics, you will be well on your way to getting an accurate representation of your ROI.

Referring Sites (or where your clicks come from)

This metric tells you which percent of your clicks came from which social networks and is more useful than you might think. By measuring where the majority of your clicks are coming from, you can determine where you should be spending more or less time. For instance, if only 2% of your clicks come from Twitter but 65% come from Facebook, then you know that your audience is more present on Facebook and you should spend more time there. There are some social media management dashboards out there that support this metric, but if you sign up for a bit.ly account, you will be able to track it there.

Comments

Comments may sound like an obvious one, but are you using a social media monitoring tool that can provide you with a chart that represents comments over time? If you monitor your comments over time, you can see which topics got your audience talking and continue to post about those topics. If you have a Facebook Business Page and monitor your Insights, you can find this metric in the “Interactions” portion of your Insights page.

Klout

This metric probably deserves an entire blog post for itself but I will try to be brief and highlight the key things you should be paying attention to. Klout summarizes your Klout score as “The Klout Score measures influence based on your ability to drive action. Every time you create content or engage you influence others. The Klout Score uses data from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Foursquare in order to measure:

How many people you influence (True Reach)

How much you influence them (Amplification)

How influential they are (Network Score)”

Your Klout score will be on a scale of 1 to 100. Don’t worry if your Klout score is low, you should view this as a work in progress and something that you are constantly striving to improve upon.

Your Klout score is broken down into True Reach, Amplification, and Network Score. These are used to determine your Klout score.

Your True Reach is the number of people that you influence. Klout’s True Reach count focuses on people who act on your content by responding to it or sharing it.

Your Amplification is how much you influence people. Klout explains this on their site, “When you post a message, how many people respond to it or spread it further? If people often act upon your content you have a high Amplification score”.

Your Network Score indicated the influence of the people within your True Reach. Klout explains, “How often do top Influencers share and respond to your content? When they do so, they are increasing your Network Score”.

Sentiment

Since I just complicated your life with that really long explanation of Klout, I’ll keep this one brief. Sentiment is simply whether people are saying positive, negative or indifferent things about your brand. There are several tools that can be used to measure this, but make sure that they measure sentiment for each individual message so that you can address negative comments. An overall sentiment score is useless if you can’t take action to improve it.

Mentions by Source

If you are using a tool to track mentions of your brand, make sure it measures mentions of your keyword/brand by source. If you aren’t using such a tool, keep in mind that listening is a big part of social media and you should really try to do this. Mentions by Source will tell you where people are talking about you, which gives you the perfect segue into the conversation. For instance, people may be asking their friends questions about your brand on Twitter; you could chime in and help answer them using a twitter management tool. If this metric is measured correctly, it will tell you what percent of your mentions are coming from blogs as well as social media. You then should be able to view each mention and see the sentiment.

If you start measuring these 5 metrics, you should have an idea of your return on investment and whether you are spending your time and money wisely. By ignoring these simple metrics and continuing your social media strategy blindly, you are just throwing away your time and money. Do yourself a favor and start by finding a social media management tool to help you monitor these metrics today.

I keep reading posts about how you shouldn’t post to Facebook using a 3rd party APIs because it kills your EdgeRank. Supposedly Facebook penalizes 3rd party APIs’ EdgeRank (the “secret sauce” that determines how often your Page’s updates show up in users’ news feeds) and collapses 3rd party API updates. While I’m sure that there’s merit to these arguments, I also don’t think writing off social media management systems (SMMS) is necessarily a good idea, or even an option for large companies or for agencies managing multiple brand accounts.

Benefits of using SMMS include:

• Ability for multiple people to post from one central dashboard.Yes, you can now have multiple Page admins on Facebook, but SMMSs offer the ability for multiple admins to manage posts in a more robust way than one-off posting directly to Facebook.
• Workflow tools–post scheduling, draft/approval modes, and ability to assign issues to certain admins are all valuable workflow tools.
• More robust moderation/blocklist capabilities–Facebook offers rudimentary moderation and profanity blocklist functionality, but for regulated industries like pharma, insurance or finance, more robust controls may be necessary.
• Post scheduling–yes, I know–social media is supposed to be real-time and not scheduled, but in reality, that’s not how a lot of businesses work. From needing to schedule posts to cover non-business hours to just needing a schedule to stay on top of posting, being able to view both upcoming and past posts via a calendar can be enormously beneficial. Managing social media accounts is a juggling act and whether you have one person managing all company social media accounts or a bunch of people managing one account, calendaring is, in my opinion, highly valuable.
• Data analysis and reports–Facebook’s Insights leave a lot to be desired in terms of data aggregation, engagement analysis, and activity reports. Yes, there are tools you can use to augment Facebook’s lackluster insights, but in my opinion they don’t compare to the functionality SMMSs offer. The ability to see the number of clicks per post, total reach and/or engagement combined with Twitter, Linkedin and blog posts, and other advanced metrics simply doesn’t exist using just Facebook’s insights.
• Unique features–I use Thrive as an SMMS and it offers a super cool feature–the ability to create a custom action link on posts without links. You know how, when you post to Facebook, “like,” “comment” and “share” links appear below the post? With Thrive you can add a customized action link such as “donate” with a link to your nonprofit’s donate page, or “shop” with a link to your company’s online store, “take action” with a link to your organization’s advocacy page–whatever action/landing page you want. I’m sorry but it’s just cool, and you can’t do it posting directly from Facebook.

So sure, there’s merit to the arguments that using a 3rd party app to Facebook could potentially affect your Page’s EdgeRank. However, when those arguments are coming from EdgeRank Checker–sorry, I’m skeptical. Especially when their argument against SMMSs include this:

“Posts that are scheduled typically struggle to have high engagement. This is most likely due to the nature of a scheduled update. It’s difficult to create unique engaging content several hours or days in advance. Any negative impacts of scheduled posts are most likely correlations with poorly developed content….Automated content typically performs horrendously, due to lacking human touch and craftsmanship. These types of updates struggle for engagement as is (even if they were manually posted onto Facebook). We highly advise against any automated content on Facebook.”

Sorry but that’s just BS, IMHO. You can think of updates off the top of your head and have them be crap, or you can schedule posts a month out, linking back to evergreen content on your website, that result in a ton of traffic back to your website. Obviously, there’s an element of “real time” to Facebook updates, but there are plenty of pages that achieve high engagement via posts that are created well ahead of time and scheduled. I don’t buy this argument at all–and my experience managing Facebook pages over the past 3 years bears out my skepticism. Content that is scheduled through a 3rd party API doesn’t mean that content is “automated”–it can be as carefully curated as content posted in real time directly to Facebook. The platform from which you post doesn’t dictate the quality of the content you’re posting.

What’s your experience been with posting directly to Facebook versus posting from a 3rd party API? Have you noticed a decline in engagement after switching to an SMMS? Or do you think this whole EdgeRank/3rd party API thing is overblown?

This post was kindly contributed to us by Maggie McGary. Visit her website for more great articles: http://www.mizzinformation.com

Inspire

A meeting of the brightest marketing minds – planning and preparing for the next generation of marketing integration. Hear speakers from some of the most forward thinking brands and agencies on their latest campaigns and thinking, and meet suppliers of dynamic marketing and media solutions and services in the exhibition.

Innovate

An exhibition packed with 150 suppliers of every marketing solution from mobile apps and augmented reality to social media management tools, plus experts who can help you integrate this with your existing marketing. Over one hundred of the most innovative world class speakers, looking at all possible futures for the world of media. With an emphasis on real life case studies and ‘best practice’ methods – so you can start to put the new thinking into action, today.

Integrate

Online. Offline. The new digital technologies and social media. All working seamlessly together as one. Explore the strategies. Experience the solutions. Engage with the future. And enjoy the company, at MediaPro 2011.

There will be over 50 major brands at the centrepoint of a unique speaker programme at mediaPro, including Unilever, Boots, Universal Pictures, Thomas Pink, Jimmy Choo, Google, EMI Music, Bridgestone, Arsenal, M&S, Samsung, 02, Siemens and many more. Combine this with the leading suppliers of future facing marketing solutions in our exhibition and you have the most exciting marketing event of the year.

Highlights of what you will learn include…

• How to develop and manage an integrated communications programme to engage, educate, nurture and inform your audience, based on market insight analysis and individual preferences from Google.
• How Save the Children built an integrated digital campaign around a TV broadcast partnership
• The best way to ensure a truly integrated campaign is to find an idea that integrates your whole company. That defines your brand behaviour, from product development to how your delivery fleet looks. When you have this, integrated communications are just another consequence of the bigger idea by Muller & TBWA
• How marketing technology changed the game for Peugeot
• The National Lottery‘s effective marketing campaign – Why It’s Not A Game Of Chance
• Re-engaging customers after a turbulent few years! New Rules. New Requirements. New Approaches
• Effective Communication in the Age of Dialogue
• See how Channel 4 /Raw Television initiated Battlefront a new generation of interactive content
• The Domino’s Social Story
• Digital governance for a pan-European remit
• In performance marketing: How Mobile is changing the Affiliate Landscape
• TM Lewin: ‘Behind the Scenes’ business access through social media
• How to get 100 million fans inside the Emirates Stadium
• McCain – the effects of segmented creative on conversion rates in Customer Retention programmes
• How Naked Wines pioneered a ground breaking new business model and customer experience to become the UK’s fastest growing online wine retailer
• Nokia’s most successful Facebook campaign to date
• From innovation to communication: Building the customer into every element of your marketing strategy
• An opportunity to hear about WWF’s 50th anniversary communications programme. An integrated mix of events, promotions, campaigns, outdoor, online engagement, special products and PR.
• Book to Digital – Creating a digital brand from an annual guide
• Making the difference through integrated campaigns: St John’s Ambulance award winning ‘Life Lost’ Campaign

Sendible’s Presence

Our marketing manager, Heidi Thompson will be speaking at the show and it will be full of great information. The topic will be How To Cut Your Marketing Budget By 25%. This presentation will be on Tuesday 1st November from 12:00-12:25pm and will take place in Social Theatre 1.

Register Now!

This event should cost you hundreds of pounds but if you register now it is Free of Charge.

Join us at MediaPro 2011 in the Social Media Lounge, where the brightest minds meet to shape a new age of marketing integration.

One of the most common questions we get here at Sendible is “How does Sendible compare to HootSuite?” HootSuite is a great tool, but it does have limited capabilities for someone who really wants to dive deep into social media as well as online marketing or manage several clients. HootSuite is used primarily as a Twitter tool (although it does more than just Twitter), whereas Sendible is an all-around online marketing tool.

Sendible offers services that HootSuite does not including the ability to offer white label social media management and resell Sendible to your clients under your own brand. We also offer rebranding of your Facebook and Twitter posts so that they won’t say “via Sendible”. I have put together a list of the features and services that Sendible supports as well as those that HootSuite supports below.

In summation, HootSuite is a very useful social media tool, but if you are looking to do more than just basic social media and want to delve into online marketing, Sendible will be your best bet. For an unbiased second opinion, check out Max Goldberg’s blog post entitled “Hootsuite vs. Sendible, or Why Paying To Use Facebook Is Amazing” as well as this comparison post from Inkstained Knuckle.

If you’d like to submit your own review comparing Sendible with other products, please send an email to info@sendible.com and we’ll be sure to link to your site from this post.