Chelsea Allenby is a Digital Marketer of 9 years and Managing Director of Allenby Digital Ltd, an online marketing agency she set-up in 2015, specialising in social media and content marketing. www.chelseamarketing.co.uk
At the start of every year, we take a look at how social media has changed over the past 12 months and where it’s heading for the next 12. As ever, the dynamic nature of social media means there’s always something new to learn. We also want to take this opportunity to give you some direction so you can either make a start with a new social media strategy or improve your existing social presence.
Visual First, Text Second
Instead of thinking about the text part of any post (be that a tweet, an Instagram post or a Facebook update) and then finding an accompanying visual, you need to flip this around. Visual should always come first. What is the message you are trying to send and what is the visual (image or video) you want to use to express that? Social media is completely visually driven. Take Instagram for example, most users will scroll through their feeds looking at images and videos without reading the captions. Only when a post really stands out will they click or expand the caption to learn more about the accompanying text.
Unique Content
Invest in a good camera. You need unique content and you can’t get away with simply snapping an average looking photo and uploading it to the likes of Instagram. It’s a swamp out there, bad content gets sucked in and it dies. There is so much being shared on a daily basis, you have to stand out. It’s always the risky content that pays off. The crazy, jaw-dropping images and video clips that always win. Don’t be afraid to step out of the norms and share something totally different from what everyone else is doing. It doesn’t always have to be about the food, even if #Pizza is trending!
Video is King
It’s predicted that 84% of all global internet consumption will be video by 2020. This is astounding, but it makes perfect sense. A video is the most engaging type of content you can share. It’s the simplest form of media to digest, so from a consumer’s point of view it’s easier to learn new things or even willingly take in promotional material when its’s via video.
If you’re looking to increase engagement levels across social media, put all your focus on video. Even one video post a week might deliver more impact than 5 other posts with images. If you have the resources, try live video. Engagement rates are even higher when it comes to a live video.
Live Video
A good example of this is back when Buzzfeed utilised Facebook Live in a completely new way to broadcast exploding a watermelon with rubber bands. At the time, it was very innovative and there wasn’t a lot of content like it. During the live broadcast there were over 800,000 people watching it live and after just a week the video had racked up over 10 million views. This was a new, fresh and exciting way of engaging an audience. These are the types of campaigns we can learn from. People like excitement and they like things they can directly get involved with, even if that’s guessing the number of elastic bands it will take to explode a watermelon!
Watch us explode this watermelon one rubber band at a time!
Publiée par BuzzFeed sur Vendredi 8 avril 2016
You have far more opportunities with live video because you have an active audience in front of you at that very moment. You can run a live competition, show things as they are happening your restaurant (such as the chef or staff, behind the scenes).
If you don’t have the resources to go live that’s absolutely fine. You can still rule the game just by creating great video content and thinking about your images and visual aspects before anything else.
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