For most business owners social is a toy. The marketing equivalent of that friend we all have outside our professional lives that you just don’t talk to your work colleagues about. Even though they are really the life and soul of the party.

But things are changing. A recent Forrester survey unlocked some startling stats about how we are all discovering things online.

Discovery is Google’s heartland. The very thing it has built its empire upon and yet it seems that a seismic shift is occurring. According to the research piece almost 50% of those in the 18 to 23 bracket used social as their primary discovery engine in the last year.

Those stats should make Google think very carefully indeed about its future strategy and how to keep its users, and advertisers, happy.

For a marketer such information should be impetus to think very seriously about strategy, and where to invest that budget in the next few years as we are finally given another way to access audiences at scale online.

Tipping Point

As powerful as that survey is, however, it is not enough alone to get you to invest hard fought marketing dollars on social, but for me there is an even more powerful argument brewing.

As we know, the ability to intelligently target consumers has always been the zenith for marketers. To do it well you need to be able to collect, and then slice and dice, information about the people using your platform.

Google’s been pretty good at this to date, as the propensity to buy has always been high from search queries. Social, however takes that data to a whole other level.

It is this, and the fact that in attempting to monetize the social space themselves the likes of Facebook and Twitter have opened the door for all of us to do the same thing with our own social audiences that really does suggest that a true tipping point has now been reached.

Is Google walking a dangerous line?

The problem for social until now has always been Google’s dominance, specifically its unrelenting focus on making search the only place you need to look to find your audience.

Until recently, few would have argued with that mantra. But things are changing.

The level of flux in organic SERPs and shrinking margins in paid are making many people look again, not just at their strategy generally but at the trust they have put in the brand for so long. I talk to business owners weekly who say they have ‘had enough’ of having their eggs in one basket and want a ‘safer’, more diverse, strategy.

Combine that with the fact that social now offers both audience size and access to the right people within it and the scales begin to tip significantly. Let’s look at that picture in more detail now.

Social’s key trump card

Until very recently social has been perceived as very much a ‘creative’ game. One for progressing conversations and engaging with people but not for making money directly. And while this is still very much a big part of the tactical piece there is now a layer of science sitting above it, which it critical to the success of any strategy.

That layer is all about the collection and interpretation of the right data to inform the entire marketing strategy.

As search marketers we have always known the power of data in informing strategies that convert into sales. Digital marketing is, after all, about not having to guess any more as the data is there to inform the strategy.

Social data takes that insight to a whole other level. Richer and more connected than whatever search can throw at us, it tells us such things as:

1. The age breakdown of our audience.
2. How often they interact with our content. (this post digs deeply into this)
3. Precisely when they want that content and in what form.
4. What other passions or interests they have.
5. Deeper demographic data.
6. Plus much more.

All of the info above can be obtained to a certain depth within Facebook's Insights interface. A guide to how that works can be found here.

Google is concerned by this and the subsequent ability to target advertising into that space. It’s one of the key motivators behind the creation of Google+ alongside the obvious use the data has as a tool to power its personalisation and semantic plans.

Access is improving

Add better and more robust access to the platforms and we suddenly start to see why social is becoming so attractive. Facebook in particular has started to change mindsets around commercialization of social too and that opens the doors to all marketers to follow suit.

And with APIs opening up and becoming more robust, analytics improving and self-serve ad systems launching, we now have the keys to access the audience.

Where should you invest?

The question now is where should you invest and begin to execute a strategy that returns positive ROI.

The simple answer is to view social not as a ‘community management’ project, but as a science, designed to attract precisely the right people with the right content and to engage with them long enough that they convert. Consistently.

Facebook, Facebook, Facebook

Choosing the platform to center your strategy on is tough, but through testing and experience it has become clear, to me at least, that for 90% of businesses Facebook should be the commercial hub of your activity.

We have spent in excess of £500,000 on social advertising over the past 18 months and it's that activity that has taught us the value of Facebook from an ROI perspective. It also lacks any real competitor in real terms as a central, all-encompassing social audience aggregator.

Google+ has no real part to play as a pure social play platform. There is no doubting the potential there for search benefits, but outside of tech industries it is very much a wasteland at present.

Twitter is useful as a distribution channel and, if you lean on its ad functionality, it has a place as a broadcast medium, but past that its strength really lies in being used as a customer service tool.

Pinterest is another worth considering, especially if you work in a creative industry, but again its one-dimensional content USP and lack of access makes it a limited option, for now.

Others like LinkedIn are working hard to improve the way they surface content and curate but they still have a long way to go. Sponsored content is certainly a step in the right direction.

And that leaves the king of them all. Facebook. A platform with the three key characteristics required for success:

1. Access to a large audience (1 billion+ and counting).
2. Access to data (to understand and measure marketing efforts).
3. The ability to target and refine strategy based on user interest.

The question then is: “How do I go about making a platform, where I regularly see people sharing pictures of their favourite cat, work for my business?” That’s what we will dig into now.

Three phase strategy

Structure and process is key to making any marketing strategy work and social is no different.

There are three key stages to any social plan and they are:

• Audience Growth
• Engagement
• Monetization

Without any one of the three you are doomed to failure and what is even more important is the fact that this is no linear process. You need to work consistently on all three, cycling through them all one by one to ensure growth and improvement is possible across all of them.

Growth

The first stage is the most important as without enough of the RIGHT people (and we’ll come to that) you simply won’t be able to monetize to a level where the project can be seen as a success.

That does NOT mean aggressively acquiring fans from anywhere. We have had clients come to us with 1 million 'Likes', complaining that they can’t monetize. The answer to why always sat very squarely with the type of people they had attracted and a content strategy that simply was not aligned to the right people.

You are looking for a relatively small audience in reality, but one that engages regularly with your content.

But how do you find those people? The answer is actually simpler than you think.

Digging into the data

Those that have access to the Facebook API are a lucky bunch. The data available out the back door is rich enough to make any Google engineer’s eyes water.

While search engines spit out fairly two dimensional, quantitative data around search behavior, social gives so much more. It tells us about the people. Their passions, relationships, loves and hates.

For any marketer that is rocket fuel.

And the great news is that you can not only look at what your audiences are interested in, but also what other brands' audiences, and even general interest 'sets' are into (such as 'digital marketing' as a whole). That means you can spy on your competitors, which makes the data even more powerful. And if you have pumped your account full of cheap 'fans' and want a cleaner view you have the ability to simply look at similar brand audiences for the answers.

But you haven’t got API access right? Sure, but there is still hope and it comes in the form of Facebook’s Power Editor.

While rarely publicized, this little gem of a tool allows the user to dig into and segment data based on pages or groups of ‘Likes’, which means for the marketer that you can understand, in granular detail, more about your audience’s interests or those of your competitors. More ‘stuff’ about what they care about as people.

It's accessible to all and to get it all you have to do is follow this simple step-by-step to install it on your account. It does require you to use the Chrome browser at this stage but that will change in time. It's a free addition to your account and does not require you to spend money to use it either and 'free tools' are always a friend to all marketers!

We use Power Editor to segment by setting up a series of adverts with different targeting - similar to A/B testing. This allows us to choose different targeting for each segment, and in turn it gives us the estimated reach for each interest set. Capturing and correlating this data allows us to draw great insights in terms of audience interests.

By finding out how many fans of a Page ‘Like’ certain interest sets, such as football related pages you can quickly work out generalist interest sets and from that even correlate against the average Facebook audience to discover if the brand or Page has a high percentage of football fans, for example.

To help explain how such data can be used let’s examine the Moz and general digital marketing audience. For this purpose the digital marketing audience is defined as the people who 'Like' Digital marketing Pages on Facebook.

Below you can see clearly that the digital marketing audience correlates nicely with the overall Facebook audience (the dark blue line is the general audience and the light blue line is digital marketing). No great surprises so far.

But where it begins to get really interesting is when we start looking deeper; at what other interests the digital marketer has.

Again we can see here the general FB audience in dark blue and how interest sets vary against the digital marketing audience.

We can clearly see the digital segment over-indexes insanely around business, gaming, sci-fi, mobile devices and, interestingly, cycling, while it is clear that celebrities, pop music and fashion are really not that exciting for us (does that suggest we’re uncool?).

Diving deeper still we can extrapolate specific topics of most interest and we end up with something that looks a little like this:

As you can see we love Mashable and Steve Jobs (no surprise there) but the Wall Street Journal, Game of Thrones and Walking Dead may not be quite so obvious. Having this kind of info at hand gives you the ability to really target paid, owned and earned activity precisely where it will have most effect.

Using the insight

All the data in the world is irrelevant though if you have no way of using it in your day-to-day activity. So how does knowing this help?

In simple terms knowing who you are writing for or advertising to means that you can tailor your ‘content’ specifically at them, improving engagement and click through.

Paid media

In paid it means that you can be MUCH smarter with your spend and it opens up a whole other world to your targeting.

Forget looking to target people that just like ‘SEO’ or ‘digital marketing' and look instead for what other interests they have. Run campaigns that capture them in ‘other’ places where they are likely to be; where their interests over-index against the average person.

If I were lucky enough to be a Moz marketer, for instance, I would absolutely look to target some social campaigns around the sci-fi audience. We know there is a high correlation between that market and digital and you’ll also pay less per click for the privilege – reaching the ‘same’ people for less and therefore improving the potential ROI of any campaign.

By targeting sci-fi fans you get the opportunity to reach those same 'digital marketers' in a less competitive space and those people that are not into the subject matter are immaterial anyway as they will simply 'ignore' the advertising, which is not a problem when you are paying Cost per Click, of course.

Content strategy

For content too this offers incredible levels of insight. Historically I had always been one of the very worst offenders when it came to believing that my creative content ideas were the best. That came from spending a decade in print, working ‘blind’ in terms of audience insight. My ideas were the best ideas going on in my own head.

The reality though, is that with data like this available you no longer have to guess, or rely on your own twisted understanding of what your reader may like.

I ensure that the data is integrated into the initial and ongoing brainstorming process each and every time to keep ideas tied to interests we know are likely to be engaged with and consumed. You can see that ideation process below and where data fits into it:

Engagement

Growth is one thing. Creating enough engaging content consistently is entirely another, however, and while you cannot engage without an audience, without engagement you have little to no chance of monetizing or organically growing your reach.

And to do that, on Facebook, at least, you must bow down to the majesty of Edgerank.

Edgerank

The majority of you will be more than aware of Facebook’s algorithm, but for those that don’t it is the ‘thing’ responsible for what you see and don’t see within your News Feed. And while internally Facebook says it no longer uses 'Edgerank' and that the algorithm governing feeds is now more complex the three key pillars still very much exist.

I’m not going to go in the complexities of that right here. This site does a great job of that should you require more background.

The basis of it is that the more you interact with a post, or a person, the more likely you are to see more posts from them in the future. And visibility means prizes, as we know only too well from search.

So, how can you better create content that resonates, aside from utilizing the data already discussed?

Use of the following content ‘tips’ can certainly help in my experience:

Top tips

• Images – Almost all social networks are geared up to push visual content. It makes them more interesting and it is proven that images provoke more powerful, emotional responses than text.
• Competitions – But we’re not just talking ‘free iPad’ here. They only work well when the prize is closely tied to the insight (so a more thoughtful prize based on their ‘Likes’) and these further tips also help.
• Exclusive offers – Being able to make your Page feel ‘exclusive’ by creating bespoke offers is good because people share for two key reasons: 1. To show off. 2. To help a friend, and you benefit from both.
• Curation – You do not need unlimited creation resource, as good curation is very powerful too. Play the newspaper editor role and filter the ‘trash’ so your audience doesn’t have to. They’ll thank you for it.
• Listening – Not a content ‘type’, but being plugged into what is being talked about has long been a key social topic. Your reason for doing it though is NOT to sell, but to help. Get as close to your audience as possible.
• Timing – The beauty of social data is real time feedback. You can see what works! To test on Google+ I like Timing+, but for Facebook, the focus of this piece and our strategy, Pageplanner is a great, low cost option.
• HIPPO – I’m passionate about this one, and not because I like big grey animals, but because HIPPO stands for 'Highest Paid Person’s Opinion'. Or more importantly their involvement in the Page. If they are visible you win trust from your customers and the hearts and minds of your business in taking social seriously. Get them to write a weekly post or host a webinar or chat.
• Webinars – A great way to combine a winning content type, in video, with thought leadership. Webinars allow you to put across brand values personally through social.
• Geo-location of content – Few think about segmenting content strategy by geography, but on a Page with a lot of followers it can be a killer strategy. Refine posts based on where the reader is will do wonders for engagement. Again, tools like Page Planner can make this really simple.

Validate effectiveness

All of the above work to greater or lesser degrees in different markets. The beauty of social though is that you can very quickly learn what works for your audience thanks to real time engagement insight. Facebook’s own reporting tool gives a view on this and we have created our own version, which also allows you to add in other Pages, so you can keep an eye on competitor strategies within the same view, as you can see below:

Monetization

For business it is the value of what ‘comes out the other end’. You can have all the fancy, soft metrics in the world, but without the ‘Ker-ching!’ moment the value is lost on most.

The great news is that the commercialization of Facebook has opened the door to all marketers and made it more acceptable to start looking at ways to monetize.

Editorial V Ads

And that brings us back to an age-old battle: one between editorial and advertising/commercial ‘content’ to a content driven audience.

It is a battle that has been fought for decades at newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations as media companies attempt to maximize revenues without sacrificing audience.

And we are now going to have to get used to it in digital, past simply juggling how many ad spots we have on our site. Commercialism within content goes much deeper than that.

So, how do you get it right in social? The great news is that the real time engagement data is available, as explained earlier, and getting it ‘right’ is simply a case of playing with the relationship between editorial posts and more commercial ones.

Below you can see a screenshot of a social client we work with and you can see more clearly the difference between the two post types.

On the right you have a ‘commercial’ post, linking back through to a pre-order on the website and this sits comfortably with the ‘editorial’ piece on the left.

Try adding a commercial post every fourth post to begin with and then work from there, monitoring engagement rates and fan counts for signs of drop off. As soon as that happens reduce it and stick to that ratio.

Vertical Pages

For those without an ‘off page’ monetization opportunity there is also a sneaky little model you can try for yourself.

I’ve been playing with a small handful of Pages myself, building content strategies and investing in some fan acquisition activity to build up relevant niche audiences around such things as parenting and finance.

Once those pages are established and you have an audience of around 5,000+ people you can follow that same ad/editorial model replacing the commercial link-to-site with a simple affiliate link. That way you can begin monetizing via the affiliate route.

Measurement

Of course, no monetization project is complete without the measurement piece and the good news again here is that our ability to measure social’s impact on the bottom line has improved drastically too in line with the genre’s own path towards commercialization.

Google Analytics and other analytic packages now help us understand clearly not just the last click, but much more of the funnel so we can truly measure social’s part in any conversion. As the channel is now being used increasingly as a discovery channel, knowing that it may have played a part at the initial interaction stage can make your social numbers more reflective of its true value.

Softer metrics

And then there are the ‘softer’ metrics that should have monetary values assigned to them. ‘Likes’, comments, shares and impressions should and can be tracked for GA easily now thanks to the _trackSocial method. This feeds more info on that engagement through to your analytics reports so you can better understand the value interaction brings.

Paid and organic

You can also separate out paid and organic social campaigns easily enough in the same way you would within search by making use of the Google URL builder. This allows you to create bespoke URLs for specific campaigns, allowing you to measure everything from fan acquisition campaigns through to individual content projects with ease.

Takeaways

It’s clear then that the combination of changes to audience behavior, in the way they discover new things, and social’s increasing maturity as a channel that ‘accepts’ commercial content means a tipping point is close.

Combine that with Google’s current obsession with change and the channel is becoming a serious option for those looking to vary traffic sources. And with all the tools now in place and a mass of data available to inform our decision making perhaps it is time to invest?

Top 5 Takeaways

1. Find a way of digging into your audience’s social data and leverage that information to understand them based on their interests. The more you know about them the more effective your marketing will be.
2. Ensure that a thoroughly thought our content strategy sits at the heart of those marketing efforts and powers your social channels. That strategy should include ideas created from the above insight.
3. Test content types regularly based on engagement rates to refine your strategy. That way you are not guessing what your audience wants to see.
4. Set up a thorough measurement strategy from the very start. That way you can truly understand the value that social is bringing to your business; at every point within the buying funnel.
5. And above all: Take social seriously. It’s growing fast and with access improving it really can become a primary traffic and revenue source for your business!

And if you want to refer back to anything in this post we've created this eBook on the topic for you. You can download it for free by clicking on the link.