January 2021 – Arachne

Apple’s iOS 14 Update and your social strategy

Apple have released iOS 14 across their devices, with one very important change that will affect your social strategy.

App Tracking Transparency

With iOS 14, when you open an app that tracks your activity across other apps and websites, you’ll be prompted to either Allow the tracking or Ask the App not to Track.

We’ve tried to find the numbers that are opting out of tracking. Nothing has come up so far, but we’re pretty confident that a sizeable majority will be opting to tighten up their privacy. Especially when they’re prompted to do it.

And Facebook seem to be feeling the pinch already, with this rebuke of Apple:

“[Apple are] using their dominant market position to self-preference their own data collection, while making it nearly impossible for their competitors to use the same data”.

What changes are taking place?

As App Tracking Transparency is rolled out, apps won’t be able to collect data from websites and other apps, which is used to build audiences for advertising. As developers update their iOS apps, they need to apply App Tracking Transparency. This seeds App Tracking Transparency throughout the iOS ecosystem, depriving advertisers of third-party audience and behavioural data.

It also explains why Google hasn’t updated their iOS apps since early December.

What does this mean for Social Advertising?

Without this third-party data, advertisers will find it more difficult to obtain and target audiences that are beyond their sphere of influence. For example, a ticketing business will find it harder to connect to fans of performers that haven’t purchased through them before.

First party and second party won’t be affected, but connecting first and second party data to third party interactions will.

Content, Content, Content. Content is King

In 1996, Bill Gates wrote that Content is King. In 2021, twenty-five years later, it’s still true. Creating interesting organic content that garners engagement through sharing and other forms of participation will build your audience. And audiences find user generated content more authentic than brand generated content.

A renewed focus on developing engaging branded content and nurturing positive and authentic user generated content is needed.

Finding User Generated Content

Content can be anywhere on the social web, across social networks, forums, tube sites and image sites. You can’t be across all of the locations, so you need a social listening strategy.

The good news is that a Topic Profile in Social Studio with some well targeted keywords will uncover this for you. Not only that, you’ll discover your product evangelists, detractors and even keep tabs on your competition.

We’d love to help you get social listening setup for your organisation. Talk to us today to go through your needs.

Social Studio & Marketing Cloud Release Jan 2021

There’s some new releases coming to Social Studio and Marketing Cloud, and we can’t wait to jump in and take a look. With the release notes just being published, here are the enhancements we’re most excited about.

Social Studio

Multi-Factor Authentication

Social Studio and Social Studio Mobile now support Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), further protecting your social accounts. This can be enabled in Admin, with your users being prompted to set up MFA when they next login.

Enhanced Single Sign-On

Administrators can now enforce Single Sign On (SSO) across users in Social Studio. Once SSO has been setup in Admin and tested, set SSO as the required login method. While, improving the trust and security of Social Studio, it’s also easier for users login, too.

Marketing Cloud

Datorama Reports for Marketing Cloud

Coming February, this addition to Analytics Builder gives you detailed insights and analysis for emails and journeys. If you’re a Corporate, Enterprise or PRO customer, with Discover enabled in your account, you’ll have access to a whole new level of dashboards, scheduled reports and pivot tables.

Customer 360 Enhancements

There are lost of updates here, including unifying customer records based in their device and creating data streams from your web sites and mobile apps! We’re sure you’ll find something in the thirteen enhancements to help you build better audiences.

Use WhatsApp in Journeys

Using a new journey activity, you’ll send WhatsApp messages to your audience and automate responses. These can be personalised with Content Builder and the API partnership with Sinch to improves how your conversations flow.

AMP-Powered Emails

Improve the accuracy and relevance of your emails highly personalised and interactive content based on opening times. From March 1, Corporate, Enterprise and Pro accounts will be able to build out AMP emails through Content Builder. Find out more about AMP Emails at amp.dev.

We’re a Trusted Marketing Cloud Trainer

Today, we were re-certified by Trailhead University to run the Build and Analyze Customer Journeys using Marketing Cloud (MKT101) class.

This five day course takes you through the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, from setting up the platform to configuring multi-step journeys.

Along the way, you’ll learn all about compliance and regulations, email marketing best practices, the Marketing Cloud data model as well as testing and troubleshooting techniques.

For anyone looking to get a start on Marketing Cloud, or if you’re using Marketing Cloud day-to-day, this course builds up your knowledge of the platform and email marketing, making you an important asset to any marketing communications team.

We’re really excited to provide training to Salesforce Marketing Cloud customers on behalf of Salesforce and look forward to seeing you in class soon.

If you’d like to register for this course, please visit Trailhead University or speak to your Salesforce representative.

Why You Need a Social Listening Strategy.

2020 saw a dramatic increase in the use of social networks. This was across many facets, with the audience using online social networks to connect with friends, get latest news and connect to brands. They also talk about their experiences with brands. A lot.

“It used to be that if you made a customer happy, they would tell five friends. Now with the megaphone of the internet, whether online customer reviews or social media, they can tell 5,000 friends.” – Jeff Bezos, Forbes 2017.

The challenge for your brand is that there are literally millions of places that the audience can talk about you. Review sites, forums, comment sections, news sites and blogs plus many more can all be used.

You can’t be in all these places at once, but you don’t want to miss out on the valuable insights that can be gained.

That’s why you need a social listening strategy.

What Can Social Listening Do?

Social Listening taps into conversations that happen across web 2.0 properties, which are sites that allow audience participation, such as creating content or sharing media.

A social listening strategy uses keywords to hear conversations on these sites. Keywords are based around brands, products, key people, campaigns or even competitors. To refine the strategy, we focus on specific web properties, exclude words and phrases, or join words and phrases together.

Once the keywords are selected, your social listening strategy shows these mentions in a Dashboard Report. This shows the volume of mentions, the sentiment of the audience, the networks used, top words used by the audience and much more.

You can use filters to show a number or reports that focus on different products, competitors or a specific audience type, with insights informing the copy written, advertising strategies and networks to focus on.

Get Started Today

It’s estimated that only around 8% of brands are using Social Listening and getting setup is straightforward with low risk. Contact us today and we’ll use our decade of experience to get the best social listening strategy working for you.

Facebook is changing Pages. What that means for you.

Facebook announced some pretty big changes for Pages last week. We’ve looked at what’s coming up and we REALLY love the focus on engagement, with a dedicated News Feed, Q&A format and the removal of the Like button.

No More Like Button

This is a massive change, but one we are very much looking forward to. Facebook now considers the Followers of a page the primary metric, meaning the audience will need to be engaging with the page, not clicking “Like” once. In our view, this gives a much clearer indication of how a content strategy is working, what topics the audience is interested in and how healthy the audience is from a sentiment standpoint.

This will take some adjustment, especially for brands that see “Likes” as important, but we feel that this is an opportunity to start measuring engagement, topics and sentiment to be prepared for the change.

Dedicated News Feed

Changes to the News Feed reinforce this focus on engagement, with the Page being able to participate in conversations. Your page will be a public figure, able to interact and engage with the audience, as well as find other Pages, Groups or content to consume and share.

Your Page will have a lot more visibility, with interactions from the Page, such as comments or replies, pushed towards the top of the comments section, and the audience will be able to engage with and follow the Page from the comments section, too.

Q&A

Facebook now provides a Q&A format. When a Page answers audience questions on a topic, the answer becomes swipeable content that can be browsed. This is a great opportunity to gather common questions asked and develop a strategy for quick responses. If you’re using Social Studio, this will develop your Standard Engagement Responses strategy, speeding up you response time.

We’re excited to see how these changes affect how brands report and develop content for their audiences. The focus on audience engagement is definitely a positive sign. Although some brands may see a downturn in engagement initially, our take is that this will lead to better content and better audience outcomes.

Speed Up Response Times with Social Studio

Since Covid-19, usage of social networks has been on the increase. This has seen more consumers use social networks to connect with brands for support and service. And the audience expects fast response times, with one hour the ideal response time for Facebook. Here, we’ll take you through some simple steps that can be implemented quickly to speed up response times.

Post Labels

Adding a Post Label to incoming social content does two things. It gives your team more information about the post, speeding up how they can route and resolve the issue. It also provides a foundation for reporting, so you can understand what issues your audience is concerned about.

We recommend setting up a small number of post labels that cover all your most common audience queries and we generally try to limit this to around ten labels. This removes the need to scroll through the labels, speeding up the process further.

If you’re unsure what Post Labels you’d like to use, we’d recommend a Topic Analysis that will examine your incoming social content, establishing the subject of each post.

Classification & Status

Classifications let you specify what a post is about, such as “complaint” or “compliment”. They’re designed to give a broad idea of the post’s subject, while the Post Labels add more colour to the definition. The Status lets you set where in the workflow the post is up to, such as “New Post” or “Reviewing”.

In Social Studio Engage, the Classifications and Status can be modified. This lets you customise Social Studio to work according to your processes and terminology. Unifying the platform to your processes provides clarity to your team and reduces miscommunications.

Don’t forget that your team members can set up their own Engage Templates that focus on the posts that they need to monitor through the Post Labels, Status, Classifications or Assignment.

Standard Engagement Responses

The Post Inspector in Engage lets you respond to posts, but you can also set up Standard Engagement Responses for common questions, such as operational hours and contact details. Your team members can quickly adjust the Standard Engagement Response to suit the question or tone, and typos and other mistakes are minimised.

Engagement Macros

Although Post Labels, Status and Classifications are really handy for interpreting and actioning the post, they still need to be added to the post. Often, this is the domain of the Community Manager and it can get overwhelming when there are large volumes of posts to manage.

Engagement Macros let you specify the which attributes you would like to assign to a post, such a Post Label, Status and Classification. Once the Engagement Macros has been built out, the macro can be applied to a post, or multiple posts, with a single click.

Social Studio Automate

If you want to truly speed up your response times, you can automate much of the processes around assigning Post Labels, Status, Classifications and Assignment. Social Studio Automate listens to content in the post and determines how to manage the post through a series of rules. If you’re managing a large audience, or a number of social accounts, Social Studio Automate can free you of the administration and process side of community management, letting you focus on delivering the best customer experience.

If you’d like anymore information, or help setting up Social Studio, we’re happy to help.

What is Social Studio?

Social Studio is part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud suite. It gives you the ability to combine all your social accounts and team members into one platform, making it a lot easier, and faster, to publish out content, engage with your audience and analyse social content to develop actionable insights.

Who uses Social Studio?

Community Managers can run their team through Engage, ensuring that their team are focussing on the posts that are relevant to them. Using a customised workflow, they’ll be able to identify audience concerns and sentiment, proactively resolving issues before they escalate.

Brand Managers can quickly see campaign tracking, getting a handle on the attitudes of audiences through Analyze reports. Deep diving into the data can produce detailed Topic and Sentiment reports, giving you insight into content and audiences.

Marketers can quickly deploy and track posts and associate them with a wider campaign through labels. Using Social Listening, you’ll monitor your social channels, as well as your competitors, to driving deep insights into what the audience needs.

Social Studio Integrations

Integrations are the point of difference between Social Studio and other platforms. You can use Social Listening to create Advertising Studio audiences, provide Social Customer Service with a Service Cloud integration, automate processes with Social Studio Automate and visualise social content with Command Center.

Implementing Social Studio

We’ve got over a decade of experience implementing Salesforce social platforms. Over that time, we’ve developed a streamlined implementation process that builds out your solution as well as enables you across the platform.

Talk to us today about getting up and running on Social Studio.