Tim Hill

Sunday October 21 2018

Social Status is proud to be a winner in Westpac’s Businesses of Tomorrow Awards for 2018

Launched by Westpac (one of Australia’s largest banks) in 2017, the Businesses of Tomorrow program seeks to identify and celebrate the Top 200 most promising businesses in Australia shaping the future.

We’re honored to be the only Australian social media tech company to win the award which speaks to the strength of the product and capabilities that Social Status has built which now serves over 3,000 marketers and advertisers globally.

Businesses were assessed by Deloitte and chosen by a judging panel based on their potential to help tomorrow’s customers, economy and society. The panel consisted of high profile leaders including David Lindberg (Chief Executive of Business Banking for Westpac), Lyn Cobley (Chief Executive of Institutional Banking for Westpac), Alison Deans (Director of Cochlear), Simon Cant (MD of Reinventure GRoup), Tim Fung (CEO of Airtasker) and Prof Ian Harper (Dean of the Melbourne Business School).

As part of the prize, we took part in a 3-day “Take on Tomorrow” program run by Melbourne Business School with inspiring lectures from some of Australia’s brightest minds including Bernard Salt, Mark Ritson, Lisa McInnes-Smith and Scott Bales (pictured below).

We met other incredible companies and founders from a range of diverse industries. The thing that they all had in common was an infectious enthusiasm for the future, for technology and for the opportunity that lies ahead as markets shift, industries get disrupted and audiences evolve.

By Tim Hill

Sunday May 13 2018

Social Status is proud to be recognized by FinancesOnline in their latest 2018 Awards for the best Social Media Analytics software.

Social Status has won both the Great User Experience Award and Rising Star Award for 2018 in the best Social Media Management category. FinancesOnline is a leading B2B software review platform. This recognition is given out to products that provide outstanding solutions for companies across a number of different categories. We’re so delighted to be acknowledged as a leader in the Social Media Analytics category globally.

Social Status is a best-in-class social media reporting platform that delivers insights through PowerPoint presentations. The application offers you in-depth insights about your profiles, ad accounts, competitors, and influencer performance. – FinancesOnline Review

Social Status scored 94% in customer satisfaction and 8.0 in FinancesOnline SmartScore, putting us among the top providers in Social Media Analytics. The SmartScore system evaluates the following elements:

Functionality
Collaboration Features
Customization
Integration
Ease of use
Support, security, mobility and media rating

FinancesOnline highlighted the three key challenges facing marketers and advertisers that Social Status solves:

Automating social media monthly, quarterly and weekly reports
Understanding insights from both paid & organic performance
Tracking and quantifying the performance of competitors and influencers

As a result of the awards and positive reviews, Social Status has been catapulted in FinancesOnline’s distinguished rankings. We’re now officially among the best Social Media Analytics solutions in market. Cited by reviewers were Social Status’ report automation capabilities, integrations with Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter for monitoring performance of brand accounts, and many other robust features for quantifying, measuring and reporting on social performance.

Check out the full analysis on Social Status features by FinancesOnline.

To see the power of Social Status for yourself, create your free account today.

By Tim Hill

Thursday August 11 2016

Originally published on Medium.

It was one of the longest federal election campaigns in Australian history. While the media scrutinized marginal seats, poll results and key battlegrounds like Western Sydney; there was another key battleground that was equally important, if not considerably more important: social media.

We here at Social Status love data. So we naturally decided to look into the world of Australian Federal politics on social media during the election campaign. We tracked all posts published by the official Facebook pages of the Federal politicians and political parties during the election campaign and what we found surprised us.

Looking across thousands of Facebook posts during the campaign there was one post that clearly stood out. With a 23% engagement rate, it was the single highest engaged post across all federal politician posts during the entire election campaign: Barnaby Joyce holding a $2 bag of tomatoes with the caption “Just catching up with a bag full of cousins at Bingara.”

For those not up to date with the ongoing Barnaby Joyce and Johnny Depp feud, this was the inciting incident on the Jimmy Kimmel Show about a week prior:

The moment in question is at 04:54

What clearly shone through was the off-script, unexpected approach in response to Johnny Depp being interviewed on Jimmy Kimmel Live calling Barnaby “inbred with a tomato”.

Barnaby’s ongoing feud with Depp cut through Mediscare, tax cuts, NBN and negative gearing. As Aussies, we love a bit of self-deprecating humor and I think as marketers and advertisers, we forget how powerful this national pastime is.

Facebook talk about creating “thumb-stopping” moments in the Newsfeed and what Barnaby published was the epitome of that. When you look at the proportion of Shares vs Total Interactions, you can clearly see this content had a huge amount of viral reach.

It was a great response, totally unexpected on the campaign trail and importantly the tone was Barnaby through and through. The post humanized him and cut straight through the election wallpaper posted by the majority of the other candidates.

How can you humanize your message and bring a bit of unexpectedness to your content strategy?

By Tim Hill

Thursday June 30 2016

(originally published on Marketing Magazine)

Last year, our friends at Buffer outlined a list of the ’61 key social media metrics’. While it was a comprehensive list, it highlighted the number-one challenge existing in the marketing community today: how do you quantify the business value of social media?

The problem

Today, social ROI remains an elusive concept to describe and communicate in most organisations – but it shouldn’t be. With real-time metrics and high performance tracking, why isn’t it effortless? Why don’t we know the answer to the ROI question?

Tech advancements, such as Facebook’s Pixel, have enabled us to measure and track all the way through the marketing funnel, but we’re now swimming in an ocean of metrics. This is Facebook’s ad reporting options screen, circa June 2016:

There are no less than 231 reporting data points. While this is fantastic if you’re a data scientist, its completely overwhelming if you’re one of the 50 million businesses using Facebook.

Beyond Facebook, the problem is complicated exponentially across multiple social channels. All the social channels conveniently define ‘standard’ metrics in different ways. For example, Twitter’s engagement rate is calculated differently to Facebook’s. So when trying to compare apples with apples you usually end up with a fruit salad.

The solution

SocialROI.org is an initiative founded with the goal of open-sourcing a framework for measuring and reporting on social media performance.

The Social ROI framework is based on the traditional marketing funnel, first used in the 1960s. Why rely on a 50-year-old funnel to measure social media? Because it provides us with a universal language for communicating the value of social that anyone in an organisation can immediately understand.

Six pairs of metrics are used which relate to each part of the funnel, from ‘Reach’ at the top of the funnel through to ‘Action’ at the bottom. Each pair consists of a total count and a rate pairing. For example, at the ‘Interest’ section of the funnel the Interactions metric communicates a total count and the engagement rate metric communicates a percentage of the interactions against the reach. These metrics are inherently cross-channel compatible because they’re based on primary interactions.

Making the funnel work for you

With the SocialROI framework defined, the next step is deciding which parts of the funnel to focus on. This is a really important step because this decision will impact everything you do on social media, including: what kind of content to post, how to support it with paid spend and how to measure its performance.

Every organisation has different internal priorities and processes. You’ll have your own stakeholder expectations to balance, in addition to your own goals for social media. The easy answer is to focus on the whole funnel – awareness to action. But there’s no right or wrong answer here.

As an example, most FMCG brands focus on the top half of the funnel so their social activity is all about reach and engagement. If you look at ecommerce brands, their focus is much more around the bottom of the funnel so their social activity is heavily skewed towards clicks, conversion and revenue.

What now?

The Social ROI framework is an open source project, meaning it’s designed for you to take and use in your organisation. Download the assets at SocialROI.org

The goal is to help marketers measure and quantify their social media performance in a standard way across all social channels. We hope it will assist with communicating the value of social media to your stakeholders through weekly, fortnightly or monthly reports.

By Tim Hill

Sunday May 10 2015

Last month our friends at Buffer published a great list of 61 Key Social Media Metrics. Cherry-picking a handful of metrics or KPIs that your business cares about is a great way to put theory into practice.

In this post, I’d like to share our list of what we believe are the 6 most important social media metrics you should be tracking and reporting on weekly, fortnightly and/or monthly. The great thing about these particular metrics is that they are channel agnostic. So no matter what social platform(s) your business uses, they will all be relevant.

We call this the Social Media ROI Framework:

The metrics are overlayed on the typical AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) marketing funnel. Despite the fact that the funnel is over 50 years old, it is nonetheless a great way to communicate the value of these metrics to everyone in the business.

Let’s look at each metric in detail:

Metric	Calculation
Reach	Unique people who saw your posts
Engagement Rate (ER)	(Post interactions / Number of posts / Community size) x 100
Community Growth Rate (CGR)	((Community size this period - Community size last period) / Community size last period) x 100
Click Through Rate (CTR)	(Clicks on links / Posts with links / Community size) x 100
Conversion Rate (CVR)	(Website conversions / Clicks on links) x 100
Revenue	Total revenue generated from social posts

Reach

This is an important number to give the boss because it should be the biggest number you have. Over time it will decline as organic reach inevitably continues to be crunched. If you see organic reach dropping, it may be time to consider paid reach and the amazing potential it has.

Engagement Rate (ER)

ER is your best measure when answering the question about how effectively your content resonates with the audience. ER is your finger on the pulse of content performance. If you see advocacy interactions like Shares and Retweets going up, you’re on to a good thing.

Community Growth Rate (CGR)

As marketers transition their social strategies to more of a paid model, CGR will continue to be important because your community should be one of the most cost-effective audiences to reach. If your community isn’t large, they will fatigue faster. Growing this base is really important in the new world of social as a paid channel.

Click Through Rate (CTR)

This is where we start to get down to the pointy end of the AIDA funnel. CTR will give an indication of how effect your content is at driving visitation to your website. If your objective on social is purely engagement then perhaps this metric won’t be as important to you. But for the vast majority of marketers, there will be pressure to prove the business value of social media. Comparing the CTR of social against your other digital channels like e-mail, display, paid search etc is a great way to communicate that value.

Conversion Rate (CVR)

The Conversion Rate is one of the most important metrics sitting right at the bottom of the funnel. This answers the ROI question and will really help you communicate the value of social to the business. Even if you don’t sell online, CVR is still absolutely applicable. In fact it should work for every single social marketer. Think of the kind of conversions that exist on your website, be it filling out the contact form, downloading a document, viewing a key page, signing up to your newsletter, etc. Like the CTR, you should benchmark your CVR against other digital activity, especially paid search.

Revenue

This metric will only be relevant to marketers who sell products online and represents the aggregate revenue generated during the reporting period. This metric is pure social ROI.

Benchmarking

Whether you report weekly, fortnightly or monthly, you will need to track each metric against your performance during the previous period. As the legend in the chart above implies – ER, CGR and CTR have the added benefit of being able to be benchmarked against competitors. This will provide a great way to set future performance targets, rather than just plucking numbers from thin air. It will also allow you to answer that question of whether your performance is actually good or bad. Without competitive benchmarking you won’t have any context upon which to answer that question.

To assist in automating your benchmarking and reporting, get started with a free Social Status account now.

We’d love to know what you think of the Social Media ROI Framework. Tweet your thoughts and make sure to include the #socialstatus hashtag.

By Tim Hill

Saturday January 17 2015

I speak to a lot of social marketers and I always enjoy the ensuing conversation after asking the following question: What’s more important on Facebook? Social media engagement or Fan growth?

The thing is, social media engagement and fan growth are both important but in 2014 I noticed a trend of marketers dropping fan growth altogether to focus purely on engagement. Allocating zero ad spend towards acquisition activity became a badge of honour in the marketing community, suggesting the content was so good that it organically resulted in acquisition as a by-product of its creative brilliance. Of course there’ll always be some level of organic acquisition but unless you’re Old Spice or Red Bull, the scale just won’t be there.

Why paid acquisition is important to build social media engagement

A key ingredient of effective Facebook marketing is having a mix of audiences you can target. For most marketers, your lowest Cost Per Engagement (CPE) on boosted posts should be to your fans. After all, these people have indicated an interest in your page and are much more likely to be receptive to your content versus people that aren’t fans. However if your fan base isn’t large, they may fatigue over time if you advertise to them frequently.

There will likely be times when you’ll want to reach a broad set of people beyond your fan base, say during a marketing campaign for a specific period of time. One of the most effective ways of doing this is targeting derivative fan audiences such as Friends of Fans and Lookalikes.

As the name suggests, Friends of Fans are people who are friends of your fans. People tend to associate with others who share similar interests, lifestyles, beliefs or values. This is the case online as much as it is offline. Friends of Fans are a powerful way to leverage the “network effect” of your existing fan base.

Lookalike audiences are people who share similar characteristics of your fans. When Facebook launched Lookalike audiences in 2013 there was much excitement about its potential. You can create a few different types of Lookalike audiences but Fan Lookalikes are a great way to turn a base of say 10,000 people into a new audience of 150,000.

Running paid acquisition activity refreshes and builds your fan base over time and by utilising these derivative fan audiences such as Friends of Fans and Fan Lookalikes you can exponentially reach more of your target users through your initial acquisition investment.

You may be thinking to yourself, “But I can already reach a large amount of people if I target by demographic and interest”. While it’s true that you can reach 56,000 Australians who are aged between 18-49, female, in a relationship and like Italian cuisine; you will likely find these audiences to be broad and may subsequently struggle to be relevant to them with your posts. Because of this, you will expect to see a higher CPE on this broad targeting when boosting posts.

That’s where the Friends of Fans and Fan Lookalike audiences come in. By using these larger audiences you can then overlay the same demographic and interest targeting and reach much more relevant audiences which should deliver lower CPE than broad targeting.

How to acquire new fans

Assign a monthly spend on Facebook advertising then think about the split between how much you’ll allocate to boosting posts and how much you’ll allocate to acquisition. If that split is currently 100/0, I’d encourage you to experiment with an 80/20 split or even a 70/30 split for a bit of a #yolo experience.

First, set up a Page Like Ad:

Upload or choose up to 6x images in a landscape aspect ratio (1200px x 444px if possible) that visually bring to life your brand. Facebook will automatically run all ad variations to your chosen audience and serve more of the most successful variation:

Write a short line of copy that succinctly sums up the value to the user of liking your Facebook page.

When it comes to targeting, make sure after you’ve set up your Page Like Ad that you click the “Create Similar Advert” button so you can run the same ad to a different audience. This will help you ascertain which audience is best for acquisition. You’ll want to keep your eye on Cost per Page Like once your ad is live.

Action list

If you haven’t already done so, go to the Audiences section of Facebook Adverts Manager and start creating some lookalike audiences from your existing fans
Test post boosting to your fans, friends of fans and lookalike fans and assess CPE performance across the different audiences to build your social media engagement
Test acquisition posts against friends of fans and lookalike fans to asses Cost per Page Like
Finally, let us know on Twitter how much of your Facebook ad budget do you allocate to engagement and acquisition using the #socialstatus hashtag. Is the split 100/0? 80/20? Or maybe even 50/50? … we’d love to hear from you

Tim Hill

Social Status is proud to be a winner in Westpac’s Businesses of Tomorrow Awards for 2018