How Technology is Changing
Social Media Marketing
Three ways social software harnesses the power of scale
Contents
executive summary………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 1
INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 2
STRATEGIC PLANNING……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 2
A pricey proposition………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..2
A n eye to the future………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..2
St rategic advantages built right in……………………………………………………………………………………..3
ORGANIZATIONAL EFFICIENCY……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..4
Mountain Dew…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 4
Harness the full power of scale……………………………………………………………………………………………5
Annie’s Homegrown…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..5
St retch your editorial resources………………………………………………………………………………………….6
The Washington Redskins…………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 6
SOCIAL MEDIA RESULTS……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 7
G et optimal results with optimized technology.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7
Y ou can’t fix what you can’t measure…………………………………………………………………………………….8
S ix methods for measuring social.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Measure, monitor and analyze……………………………………………………………………………………………….9
Esurance……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 9
CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 9
executive summary
A healthy and growing fanbase is a social marketer’s dream come true. But, keeping all your fans
happy can quickly become a nightmare. Attention spans in the social space are short, and the
impact of any single interaction is fleeting at best. There’s simply no way around it, ongoing social
success demands a constant churn of unique and engaging content. How do leading social brands
keep it up day after day?
The solution is technology. And in the world of social marketing, technology is all about
the power of scale.
Marketing automation is finally catching up to the business technology curve, and some of the
most exciting and valuable advances are in social marketing software. As a marketer, it’s critical
for you to sit up and take notice, not only because technology can make your job easier and more
productive, but also because your influence over the technology you use is growing dramatically.
According to Gartner, 2011 B2B and B2C marketing budgets as a percentage of revenue were
almost three times as high as IT budgets, and the gap was expected to grow in 2012. Marketing
already makes 30% of its own technology purchases and influences almost 50% overall. What’s
more, by 2017 Gartner expects that CMOs will be spending more on IT than CIOs do.1
Because your role as a technology influencer and decision maker is growing, it’s more important
than ever that you understand exactly how different technology choices can affect your resources
and your results. To that end, this paper explains how social marketing technology allows you to
do more faster, at a lower cost, with better results, and greater insight. We explore the top three
ways you can use technology to empower social marketing managers and bolster a growing brand.
And we look at specific examples of how four leading brands use technology to help their social
marketing fly.
1 G artner, “By 2017 the CMO will Spend More on IT Than the CIO,” January 2012
By 2017 CMOs will spend more on IT than CIOs do.
1
Whitepaper | How Technology Can Take Your Social Where It’s Never Been Before
2
them? How can you use your planning tools most effectively?
How do you measure your results and benefit from what
you’ve learned?
A pricey proposition
If you turn to third-party consultants for their expertise, all
that strategizing becomes a pricey proposition. Social media
consulting fees can run up to $500 per hour, and monthly reports
and advisement can result in an annual fee upwards of $90,000.2
And keep in mind; those expenses are in addition to any
development and on-going management fees for social channels.
The right social marketing software will include the same or
better strategic consulting services at little or no extra cost.
Remember, a third-party consultant is happiest when you’re
paying for their help on a repeat basis. Having customers who
are satisfied all the time, on the other hand, motivates a good
social software-as-a-service business. When you’re using a social
technology to its full potential and growing your business as
a result, you’re more likely to expand your use of the product
and recommend it to others. Your success is a win/win for you
and the software vendor, so it’s in the vendor’s best interest to
provide efficient, high-quality strategic resources and advice.
An eye to the future
When choosing your social technology keep in mind that the
social media landscape is changing daily. That means your social
software should be forward-looking and strategic by its very
nature. Your vendor should have more than a great product
right now; it should also have a compelling vision of where
social marketing is headed and a plan to get you there. The best
social software:
• Quickly adapts to incorporate important new social networks
• Always complies with current social network formats and
requirements
INTRODUCTION
A post, a tweet, a pin, or an update are all simple and speedy
enough tasks to complete. But the social audience is a hungry
beast, and once you start feeding it you can’t afford to stop.
When you’re just getting started with social marketing, it may be
simple enough to log onto the separate social networks and create
every interaction by hand. But, if you’re doing social right, your
brand will soon gain traction, your fans will multiply, engagement
will increase, and the demand for content will take off.
Active social brands quickly learn that content demand always
outpaces content resources, which means you need to make
your processes more efficient and enable your team to work
faster. You need systems in place that seamlessly expand your
brand into new networks, regions and markets. You want to be
able to work quickly and efficiently with other departments or
sub-brands and with outside partners. And when employees are
busy with other projects, take a vacation, or move on to other
positions, you have to be sure new people can step in without
skipping a beat.
There are an incredible number of moving parts in almost any
social marketing initiative. But, to successfully grow a brand,
social media managers must be able to focus most of their
energy on the bigger social strategy instead of on the processes
and logistics of individual executions. This paper is organized
around the three key areas where technology can make that
happen: strategic planning, organizational efficiency and
social media results.
STRATEGIC PLANNING
With time and resources at a premium, every significant
social marketing effort should be planned carefully. Not just
to maximize its own results, but also to further the brand’s
overarching social strategy.
The questions you should ask are many, and the answers
are constantly changing: What campaign concepts are most
compelling? What best practices should you use to implement
2 Mack Collier, “Cost of Social Media in 2012,” January 2012
Escape supports all leading social networks,
including Facebook, Twitter, Google+,
LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest.
Escape clients get:
• A Escape strategist as part of your contract
• A quarterly review
• 3–6 white papers per quarter
• 3–6 webinars per quarter
3
Localizing a single campaign by hand is essentially the
same as launching multiple campaigns at once, which is a
time-consuming and tedious task. But localization is easily
manageable with the proper technology. Instead of launching
five campaigns in five different languages, you can launch one
campaign, with all of the relevant creative assets stored, that
automatically and dynamically adjusts itself to the relevant
language. Automated scheduling also allows you to post content
at the most ideal time anywhere in the world.
Compliance and regulation
If you’re like most people, you’ve signed up for so many online
accounts that you click right through the terms of agreement
without even realizing they’re there. When it comes to your
brand’s social properties, though, you need to pay attention.
Facebook’s terms provide a prime example of what’s at stake
and how complex the rules can be. To protect the reputation
and integrity of its social network, Facebook’s regulations
consist of thousands of words of legalese, all of which have
direct impact on the governance of your page and its social
activities. Items covered include everything from who may
access your pages to page naming conventions to how you
design your cover photos.
Every social network that your brand uses has its own set of
rules and regulations, and they all change constantly to keep
up with government requirements, product updates and other
developments. If you fall out of compliance, the pages that you’ve
labored on building up for months (and longer) can be removed
• Gives you timely social best practices resources like webinars
and white papers
• Provides strategists who are well versed in developing social
trends and how you can capitalize on them
Strategic advantages built right in
Some aspects of strategy are more technical than analytical, and
the best social technologies handle such issues automatically.
Two areas in particular where strategic functionality should be
built right into your technology are localization and compliance.
Localization
Every social marketer should be thinking about the future,
about expanding their brand into new markets or regions on
the way to becoming a 24/7 global brand.
You never know where you might find your next great customer
or market, and social media can give you efficient low-cost access
to people you might not be able to reach any other way. For
example, Argentina, Brazil and India may be beyond your physical
reach, but they also have the highest penetration of social
network usage plus the highest usage frequency and intensity. 3
But, to go global you need to localize your content. For starters,
you should speak your audience’s language—in Europe, for
instance, nine out of ten Internet users prefer browsing in their
own language.4 For maximum relevancy, you also want to be
sure you’re targeting the right audience at the right time with
the right message.
3 I nSites Consulting, “Social Media Around the World 2012,” September 2012
4 E uroBarometer, “User Language Preferences Online,” May 2011
Qatar ran a global social media campaign with Escape in five languages and
grew its community by 150,000 new fans in 30 days.
Social marketing software ensures that pages and applications stay in
compliance with constantly changing social network requirements.
Whitepaper | How Technology Can Take Your Social Where It’s Never Been Before
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You could tackle your campaigns one at a time using an agency
or in-house resources, but that’s an extremely time-consuming
and expensive approach. One Industry survey showed that the
typical agency cost of a short-term (1-3 month) social media
campaign in 2012 was between $1,500 and $20,000. A long-term
(3–6 month) campaign averaged between $25,000 and $75,000.6
The right technology not only makes it incredibly faster and
easier to create a campaign, it also allows you to run as many
campaigns as you want at a lower cost. Better still, the value you
receive goes far beyond just the value of the digital assets that
are created for a given campaign. The best social software helps
minimize or eliminate development costs, agency fees, strategy
consultation fees, and maintenance and management fees. And
it allows you to simplify processes, replicate procedures, and
easily create workflows.
With full functionality software, you can efficiently create
integrated campaigns across social networks by building pages,
scheduling and sending messages, running ads and viewing
results from a single interface. You’ll be able to deploy the same
content across multiple networks or create custom content
targeted to individual networks. And you can create custom
workflows that automatically notify team members when their
input and approval is needed to keep a project moving.
Mountain Dew
Mountain Dew, the popular soft drink brand owned by PepsiCo,
learned about the power of scalability when it wanted to launch
what it expected to be a simple promotion. Mountain Dew
had 80 Diet Dew bean bag chairs it wanted to give away to
customers, but was surprised to find out it was going to cost
tens of thousands of dollars to run a single contest.
Then Mountain Dew discovered that Escape’s technology
could help its social team do far more while spending less.
Escape gave them unlimited access to create multiple pages
in an instant, and the communities you’ve grown around them
can disappear. The best way to avoid this disastrous scenario is
to use social software that stays on top of the latest requirements
for you and has compliance built right in.
The best social software vendors constantly monitor social
network requirements and update their products accordingly.
To the extent that it’s possible, they prevent you from making
mistakes that put your social campaigns and communities at
risk. On the other end of the spectrum, they optimize templates
and functionality so you can quickly and easily exploit any
activities that are permitted.
ORGANIZATIONAL EFFICIENCY
Any marketer who tests the social waters realizes quickly
that there’s much more to social marketing than posting a
pithy comment whenever inspiration strikes. In fact, 59% of
marketers work on social more than 6 hours every week,
33% spend over 11 hours weekly, and 15% dedicate a full
20 hours or more to social efforts every week.5
Even if you’re part of the 59% right now, you’ll need to commit
more attention to your social initiatives to keep them healthy
and on track as they begin to gain traction. And the more
successful your efforts, the more complex the challenges you’ll
face. For example:
• What content will be most effective and where will you get it?
• How should you schedule your messaging?
• Who’s going to have editorial oversight?
• How long is it going to take to get everything created,
approved and ready to go?
5 S ocial Media Examiner, “2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report,” April 2012
6 Mack Collier, “Cost of Social Media in 2012” January 2012
59% of marketers work on social for 6 hours or more every week.
Cost of social campaigns without the
scale of social software:
Short-term campaign: $1,500 to $20,000
Long-term campaign: $25,000 to $75,000
5
and promotions across all the most popular social networks.
Plus, Escape’s technology came with unlimited user accounts
and built-in creative and technical services. Mountain Dew
also gained powerful analytics and the ability to free up brand
managers by letting them schedule posts ahead of time.
Harness the full power of scale
When it comes to organizational efficiency, social software adds
value in more ways than we can list here. To identify the greatest
benefits in simplest terms, though, we say that technology helps
you scale your content and scale your resources.
The one thing that can’t be stressed enough is this: The key to
social success is a constant churn of fresh and original content.
To maximize engagement, you need to create, launch and
maintain lots of great content all the time.
Basic communications like posts and tweets are an important
part of any ongoing social conversation. But, if you’re going to
grow and engage fans and followers and encourage sharing,
it’s essential to up the ante with a regular stream of fun and
rewarding interactive experiences such as polls, surveys,
contests and giveaways.
Creating a rich interactive experience from scratch is extremely
time and resource intensive, but social software makes it easy to:
• Launch a variety of campaigns on a variety of channels
• Keep the content visually appealing and on brand
• Create unique and memorable experiences
• Capture user data
Social software provides all the templates you need to create
customized tabs and applications for your social properties.
And these templates are already fine-tuned to optimize the
placement and impact of your interactive content.
Tabs allow you to add depth to your existing social channels by
including multiple landing pages and experiences on each site.
Applications let your users interact with your content and let
you capture user data so you can follow up with participants,
identify influencers, and gather information to build moreprofitable
relationships.
Annie’s Homegrown
Annie’s Homegrown is an organic and all natural foods company
based in Berkeley, California and is best known for its bunnyshaped
macaroni and cheese. To celebrate its new Rising Crust
Pizza, Annie’s sent a fully equipped pizza truck on a cross-country
Slice of Happiness Tour and promoted the event on Facebook.
To create its Facebook promotion, Annie’s combined two of
Escape’s 90+ page and app templates. When users clicked on
the “Request a Stop” tab on Annie’s main Facebook page they
were taken to a customized landing page where an entertaining
YouTube video explained what the tour was all about and
encouraged them to participate.
Beneath the video viewers could enter their information and
request a special detour of the pizza tour. If you were one of the
lucky winners, Annie’s rerouted its pizza truck to your town and
served up a pizza party for 120 people. The tour was a big hit,
generating over 325,000 likes.
Mountain Dew used Escape to run a sweepstakes that took users from Twitter
to Facebook.
Annie’s Homegrown used Escape templates to promote a crosscountry
pizza party contest on Facebook.
Whitepaper | How Technology Can Take Your Social Where It’s Never Been Before
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Stretch your editorial resources
Once you’ve figured out how to keep your inspired content
coming, you’re well armed for social success. But the battle is
far from over. In fact, it never ends. Every piece of content you
create is simply an invitation for engagement, just one step in
what you hope to be an ongoing relationship that’s rewarding
for both you and your customers.
Your goal is to spark relationships and then keep them going
strong, but the sheer volume of content it takes just to get
things started can make it nearly impossible to keep up with
the responses. Here’s what you’re up against:
• On average, every enterprise brand of 1,000+ employees has
178 corporate-owned social media accounts.7
• Businesses with over 40 different landing pages generate 10X
more leads than those with only 1–5 landing pages.8
• 70% of all fan questions posted to social media channels are
not responded to by brands. 9
These numbers raise three key issues that technology can help
you address:
1. Most brands have very few people responsible for managing
an overwhelming number of social accounts.
2. The payoff for creating numerous landing pages can be
huge, even if the pages vary only slightly in messaging or
other elements.
3. A staggering potential for social return on investment (ROI) is
being wasted, because social teams don’t have the resources
to follow up on the majority of conversations they initiate.
Social software can help you address these issues by making the
most of every resource available to your social team.
Use access control to increase your resources. Social software
allows you to give different team members different roles
and permissions, so you can maximize your resources while
protecting your brand. In other words, you can assign specific
responsibilities without providing unlimited access to your social
properties. For instance, you don’t want an intern responding
directly to customer comments or questions. But, you can use
that same intern to sort through the messages and queue
them up, making it easier for a senior member of your team to
respond quickly and appropriately.
Scale your messages. With the right software, you can create
content once and then post it simultaneously across multiple
pages and networks. A single person can add fresh content
to numerous accounts as quickly and easily as updating a
single account. And creating and maintaining multiple landing
pages requires a fraction of the work it would take if they were
developed one at a time. Flexible templates allow you to quickly
customize and go live after adding just your logos, images and
text—or they let you access the code and get more creative if
you have the time and need.
Filter conversations for specialized attention. Not all
conversations are created equal. You’d like to answer every
question and acknowledge every comment, but some you’ll
never get to. Others, you simply can’t afford to ignore. Software
filters let you use keyword or moderation checklists to flag the
messages that absolutely demand your attention. You can put
out fires like unhappy customers, or snap to attention if a hot
lead comes along.
The Washington Redskins
The National Football League’s Washington Redskins have some
of the most faithful fans you could wish for. The team has sold
out every home game since 1968 and has broken the NFL’s
attendance record for the last nine years running.
In a football season with new games and plenty of surprises
every week, the Redskins often need to turn on a new promotion
in a matter of days to stay relevant to their fans and provide the
excitement and sense of community fans are looking for. “If we
didn’t have a platform like Escape,” says the Redskins top social
strategist, “we’d have to spend a lot of lead time to build out
these pages, and that could take a month or more.”
7 A ltimeter, “A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation,” January 2012
8 E consultancy, “The Inbound Marketing Explosion,” March 2012
9 Simply Zesty, “70% Of Brand Fan Questions On Social Media Aren’t Responded To – Live at Le Web ’12,” June 2012
Escape clients:
• Save hours per day using geo-target presets
• Can schedule a month’s worth of content in
just a few planning sessions
• Receive unlimited access to Pages and
Promotions as part of a monthly fee
7
Prior to using Escape, the Redskins were also impacted by an
artificial resource crunch. Because Administrator was the only
role available to access the social accounts, the social team had
to be very careful about who could do hands-on work. Now
that Escape provides different levels of permission, the social
team can open up different roles to interns, designers, staff,
and even partners. With more people on the job, the Redskins
can respond to opportunities faster and make the best use of
all their resources.
SOCIAL MEDIA RESULTS
By efficiently scaling your efforts, social software provides
the immediate reward of reaching a larger audience. But it also
delivers better results in two additional ways that are equally
important. First, it helps increase lead generation, brand reach,
and brand advocacy by optimizing the technology that you use
to run your campaigns. Second, it provides comprehensive
and integrated measurement and analysis tools that give you
insight into your results, so you can continually adjust your
strategy and increase your success.
Get optimal results with optimized technology
When you work with an internal team or a third-party agency
to build complicated and customized one-use applications,
you may end up with a social campaign that looks great on
your desktop but falls apart online. There’s simply no way to
thoroughly test one-off applications and optimize them for
the best user experience. When they go live, these pages or
applications may even break due to unforeseen code changes
made by the social platforms themselves.
The result can be an awkward and inconsistent user experience
that causes users to abandon a campaign before they even
enter. Many custom applications also lack an optimized viral
functionality, and that means participants can’t easily share
the campaign with their friends and followers. Either one of
these issues can seriously slow the momentum of an otherwise
brilliant campaign—combined, these problems can stop a
campaign in its tracks.
Improved access control helps the Redskins get more staff
involved with their social.
Increase lead generation, reach
and advocacy.
Adjust your strategy to improve success.
Keep a constant eye on industry benchmarks, property and page
data, tab and promotion metrics, and referral sources.
Whitepaper | How Technology Can Take Your Social Where It’s Never Been Before
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When you build a campaign using social software, you keep the
ability to create something unique, innovative and on brand. But
you eliminate the risk that your end product will not function as
intended or that it will be incompatible with the social platforms
it was intended for.
The tab, page and application templates that come with
your social software have been used and tested hundreds or
thousands of times in live campaigns. They incorporate best
practices for all of the most popular and effective promotion
types. Their results are constantly analyzed and their coding is
continually updated and optimized to work perfectly with the
social networks they’re intended for. And, because sharing is the
key to social success, the latest and greatest viral functionality is
seamlessly built into the templates as a basic component.
You can’t fix what you can’t measure
In a recent survey by the Association of National Advertisers,
90% of U.S. marketers say they’re using social networks for their
marketing efforts. Five years ago that figure was only 20%.10
Despite this steady increase in adoption, 75% of organizations
lack a holistic measurement strategy for their social media work.11
Why is there such a huge divide between the number of
marketers using social media and the number successfully
measuring their results? An Altimeter Group survey sheds some
light on the subject by asking those responsible for measuring
social media results to identify the three biggest challenges
they face: 56% of respondents indicate the inability to tie social
media to business outcomes; 39% say there is a lack of analytics
expertise and/or resources; and 38% say they have poor tools.12
Six methods for measuring social
In its “Social Media ROI Cookbook,” Altimeter Group identifies
the six methods that organizations use to measure their
social results on a day-to-day basis. Three of the methods are
categorized as “top down” methods and three as “bottom up.” 12
Top down
The top down methods, which rely on the user to draw
conclusions based on their own observations, are:
Anecdote: Specific examples where it is known that social media
influenced a sale or had some other identifiable effect.
Correlation: Comparing two data sets to see if there may be a
relationship between them, for example the number of Likes
versus revenue.
Multivariate testing: Comparing a group exposed to social
media content with another group exposed to different content
or no content.
While top down measurements have their place, they are time
and labor intensive and fall far short of being able to provide
reliable and comprehensive data on a regular basis.
Bottom up
Bottom up measurements are technology driven and can
provide metrics that are instant, comprehensive and exact.
These methods are:
Links and tagging: Shortlinks, tags, custom URLs and cookies
identify when a user buys something from your site and where
they came from.
10 Association of National Advertisers, “2012 Digital/Social Media Survey,” July, 2012
11 A ltimeter Group, “A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation,” January 2012
12 A ltimeter Group, “A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation,” January 2012
13 A ltimeter Group, “Social Media ROI Cookbook,” July 2012
Compared to Escape’s top competitors’
clients, Escape’s clients see:
• 25% more people sharing their posts
• 21% more engagement with their content
Poor tools are one of the top three obstacles to measuring social success.
9
When it comes to service, Esurance takes advantage of the
personal assistance that’s built right into its contract. For upfront
strategic guidance or last-minute technical tweaking,
Esurance always knows exactly where to turn for help.
CONCLUSION
By its very nature, social is a medium that requires a higher
frequency of interaction than any other form of marketing. The
challenge may be daunting, but the payoff in terms of engaged
and loyal fans, followers, customers and advocates can’t be
beat. The good news for marketers is that recent advancements
in social marketing technology are making it easier and more
affordable to build, grow, engage, and monetize audiences
using innovative content that’s optimized for the most popular
social networks.
The key to success is social software that scales both your
content and your resources allowing you to:
• Create content once, then launch it everywhere
• Segment promotions, target content by region and language,
and schedule posts
• Control user permissions and access to make the most
efficient use of your social team and partners
• Test, measure, and analyze campaigns and competitors in real
time to adjust your strategy and ensure success
Direct commerce: Social commerce apps allow users to make a
purchase from you on Facebook, from links on Twitter, and via
other social properties.
Integrated: Specific apps that you purchase run in the
background and measure conversions, identify where leads
come from, score leads, and so on.
Measure, monitor and analyze
Integrated technology includes the measurement, monitoring and
analysis tools that come as part of your primary social software
product. Because these tools are designed from the start to work
with your pages and applications, they’re often able to give you
the most powerful, insightful and actionable measurements and
analytics available. Social software can provide:
• Property and page data for each of your social pages,
allowing you to analyze trends over time and across multiple
variables
• Tab and promotion metrics that let you quickly pinpoint
what’s working, so you can repeat successful strategies and
optimize results
• Referral sources, so you can identify demographic data
for campaigns and develop content that matches audience
preferences
• Audience engagement metrics for specific messages, so you
can fine-tune future messaging for maximum impact
• Industry benchmarks that help you understand your
performance in comparison to competitors
Esurance
As an insurance company, Esurance fully appreciates the value
of meaningful data and great customer service. So, it’s no
surprise the Esurance social team was looking for those two
things in its social software.
Esurance was able to get some data directly from the social
networks it was using, but that data wasn’t providing the deeper
insights necessary to understand what its fans and followers
really wanted. With Escape, Esurance easily gets up-to-theminute
data on all of its social properties at any time, and the
social team is able to run the analysis it needs to continually
optimize its pages, promotions and messages for better results.
Better yet, Esurance can now compare its social performance
with its competitors and adjust its strategy accordingly.
Esurance chose Escape because it needed deeper analytical
capabilities and high-end service.
http://www.escapebusinesssolutions.com | info@ escapebusinesssolutions.com
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