The Spin Cycle
Pithy PRognostications From A Recovering Journalist
Use Twitter Analytics To Engage Your Audience
Seeking better ways to improve your brand through Twitter marketing?
One of the best social media strategies is to use diagnostics like Twitter Analytics as a roadmap to success. Here are four ways to shift your brand into high-gear from Social Media Examiner:
- Tailor Your Content to Audience Interests
Tweeting content that appeals to your audience’s interests can draw people to your feed and encourage them to click and share your content.
To get to know your audience, go to your Twitter Analytics and click the audiences tab at the top of the page. By default, you’ll see charts tracking follower growth and demographics. There are five tabs that you can click to see data about your audience, such as what devices and wireless carriers they use.
The Interests bar graph, which is available on the Overview and Lifestyle tabs, ranks popular topics and indicates what percentage of your audience is interested in those topics.
You can find out the interests of users who took part in your campaigns, viewed or interacted with your tweets, and converted on your website. You can also see this data for different personas, such as parents, Millennials, and users with annual incomes greater than $100,000.
Once you understand more about your audience’s interests, you can create and curate content that will appeal to them. For example, suppose you’re a digital marketer for a social analytics company. When you look at your Twitter analytics, you discover your audience has an affinity for cars. With this information, you create content that breaks down the social profiles of different car brands to identify the best industry practices.
You’ll also want to retweet influencers, share articles from niche publications, and develop multimedia posts that relate to topics your audience enjoys. Regularly tweeting content your audience is interested in will not only boost engagement, but also help you grab your followers’ attention when they’re scrolling the news feed.
- Schedule Tweets Based on Your Audience’s Location
You can increase clicks, retweets, and comments if you schedule your posts when your target audiences are online and most active.
To find out the best times to tweet, click the Demographics tab in the Audiences section of your Twitter analytics. The Demographics report gives you a snapshot of your audience’s gender, location, net worth, and more. You’ll want to focus on your followers’ Country and Region stats. You can also examine this data for audiences you want to pursue.
Have you ever earned higher-than-normal engagement by tweeting in the early morning or late at night? Your location data may reveal you were tweeting during a foreign audience’s peak hours. Using this information, you can adjust your schedule to better reach those followers and prospects based on a time zone.
For example, suppose the chart below shows the countries where your followers live. You can see a significant portion of them (18%) live in Egypt, so you may decide to post more often during the country’s workday and in the evenings to better connect with that audience.
Experiment with sharing relevant news from a particular region and articles from a region’s influencers. If one of your content pieces starts earning a high number of clicks and shares, schedule it throughout the day to reach users in other countries.
Scheduling content based on user location can help you increase engagement numbers and potentially connect with an audience you never knew about.
- Tweet Around Events
Share content that relates to holidays, conferences, and anticipated trends to add variety to your Twitter feed. Click the Events tab at the top of your analytics dashboard to see an expanding list of events.
Keep in mind that Twitter is still adding content to this section of its analytics. You should be able to find information about events in large countries and recurring hashtag trends such as #MotivationMonday.
To inspire post ideas, click an event’s name to load data about users and high-performing tweets. Depending on the event and audience, the type of content that garners the most interaction will vary. It can range from graphics celebrating holidays to news pieces and topical opinion articles. Be sure to look at the Tweet Highlights to discover popular hashtags to use.
Tip: Capitalize on the hype surrounding annual events by repurposing your tweets and longer-form material from past years.
- Replicate Key Characteristics of Popular Tweets
Study tweets with high impression and interaction stats to identify and replicate common qualities that fuel engagement. To access your top tweets, click the Tweets tab at the top of your analytics dashboard.
You’ll see a Tweet Activity overview listing impressions, engagements, and engagement rate (engagements divided by impressions) for each tweet. Click the Top Tweets tab to rank tweets by impressions.
Next, you want to assess your best tweets and look for common characteristics. Ask yourself these questions about each tweet:
- What tone does the tweet use?
- What hashtags are included?
- Are there videos or images?
- What is the call to action?
- If there’s a link, is it at the beginning or end of the tweet?
- When was the tweet posted? (Click View Tweet Activity.)
Create and schedule tweets that use some of the common themes you notice about your top tweets. Wait 24 hours and then check your Twitter analytics to see how the tweets performed. Repeat the process until you pinpoint qualities that consistently encourage follower interaction.
The goal of this analysis is to hit home runs with your tweets, rather than blindly swing at the ball.
Using Twitter analytics to inform your social strategy will help build a more engaged following. Event, audience, and top tweet data can offer ideas for click- and share-worthy content.
The free analytics dashboard is easy to use, allowing you to quickly locate and study important data. Click through the dashboard to see which metrics you can use!
Facebook to Allow Media, Marketers To Post Sponsored Content
For the past few years, as advertisers spent more money on sponsored content online, it was technically against the rules to post that content to Facebook unless part of a paid ad placement on the social network.
But the site is changing its tune. Facebook will now allow branded content to appear in all forms, as long as media companies and marketers go through a simple verification process, said Dan Rose, Facebook’s vice president of partnerships.
Advertisers and Web publishers will be able to post articles, videos and images that marketers have paid for to their Facebook pages. To date, they have only been able post such content within ad units. The new policy for so-called “organic content” applies to Facebook Instant Articles, video and even the new Facebook Live product.
This change should be welcome news to publishers like BuzzFeed and Forbes, which have made sponsored content a staple of their ad offerings. And for Facebook, the new policy should theoretically bring in more revenue.
Marketers and their media partners will likely run ads on Facebook to make sure that more people can see this sponsored content in their news feeds.
Branded content on the site will be required to feature a new icon designed to make it clear to consumers that the content comes from a paying advertiser.
Golden Mic | International Journalist Association Gets Results on Panama Papers Leak
After a yearlong investigation into a massive leaked cache of 11.5 million financial records, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has exposed the offshore holdings of 12 current and former world leaders and revealing how associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin secretly shuffled $2 billion through banks and shadow companies. The investigation also revealed details of offshore financial dealings of 128 more politicians and public officials around the world – known as the Panama Papers.
The far-reaching investigation was carried out by the ICIJ, German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and about 370 journalists from more than 70 countries.
The records show how a global industry of law firms and banks sells financial secrecy to politicians, fraudsters and drug traffickers as well as billionaires, celebrities and sports stars. The files expose offshore companies controlled by the prime ministers of Iceland and Pakistan, the king of Saudi Arabia, the president of Ukraine and the children of the president of Azerbaijan. They also include at least 33 people and companies blacklisted by the U.S. government because of evidence that they’d been involved in wrongdoing, such as doing business with Mexican drug lords, terrorist organizations like Hezbollah or rogue nations like North Korea and Iran.
It only took two days for Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson of Iceland to step aside after the disclosure of the shady bank dealings that involved him and so many more of his twisted, lying, deceitful – and fraudulent – cohorts. Instead of years between investigative journalism and justice, in today’s news world, revelations of wrongdoing can have immediate – and impactful results. For that, ICIJ grabs the Golden Mic!
Each week, The Spin Cycle will bestow a Golden Mic Award to the person, group or company in the court of public opinion that best exemplifies the tenets of solid PR, marketing and advertising – and those who don’t. Stay tuned – and step-up to the mic! And remember … Amplify Your Brand!