Growing Roots for Organic Reach

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Organic post

There has been a lot of discussion recently surrounding Facebook’s dramatic decline of brand’s organic reach. Facebook is now transitioning from an essentially ‘free’ marketing platform to a more traditional pay-to-play advertising channel. This change is forcing digital media marketers to shift their “obtain-fans-then-engage” mindset and restructure their social media marketing strategies.

Why the change?

After years of encouraging brands to build a fan base, Facebook is now changing the game and forcing brands to come up with new methods of reaching their audience. But why change the News Feed algorithm? Beyond driving revenue, Facebook wants to ensure that the most relevant content for any given user is what the user ends up seeing. They want to preserve the platform as a place for behavioral and observational engagement, rather than a promotional marketing platform for brands.

How to adapt

1. Refine your brand’s voice and make sure it connects

Is your voice frank, witty and intelligent? Or is it accessible, silly, and heartfelt? The drop in organic reach forces marketers to utilize data analytics to discover what voice and content exists at the intersection of their audience’s interest and their brand’s relevance. Look more closely at your customer information and engagement data to  get an in-depth understanding of your audience. Listen to conversational signals related to your brand’s topics. Forbes offers some great tips on finding your company’s voice.  Engage with your customers using your voice on other forums and establish thought leadership.

2. Optimize your page

Make sure your brand’s Facebook page is categorized correctly and all of the necessary page details are provided (phone number, location, business hours, about section, website). Nail down the time of day that would be best to reach your fans. Use analytics to test a variety of posts and measure their impact; capture those learnings and apply across all relevant channels.

3. Focus on quality

The quality of content that you share is now more important than ever. Post shareable links and photos that would be relevant to your fan base and brand. Shorten the links that you post and measure the results. Many marketers already use tools to shorten URLs on Twitter, but extending the practice to your Facebook will help understand what content is working and which pieces work across which channels.

4. Run hashtag campaigns

Create a content initiative that uses an ownable hashtag that can be incorporated across relevant channels like Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. Your audience lives a cross-channel digital life, so seek out creative ways for fans to engage with your brand as they move across all the channels they love.

5. Play along

Buy Facebook ads to increase brand awareness. Running a Facebook ad will increase your visibility many times over and will include users that would not have seen your posts otherwise. Ad spend might seem expensive, but if the content is engaging and you have optimized bids and budgets, you can realize excellent results and capture a larger owned audience in subsequent efforts.

How are you adapting to Facebook’s changes? Leave us a comment below and let us know how your brand is evolving its efforts!

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Digital Marketing to Diverse Audiences

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You’ve heard the news that Twitter is rolling out a redesigned user profile page. You’ve also heard claims that this is because Twitter is trying to emulate Facebook. While this might be true, we see a more interesting trend underneath this development: Twitter is trying to broaden its user base by reinventing its user experience. There are many fascinating implications to this (e.g. how does one reinvent a platform for broader usability? Will Twitter become less time-sensitive and more of a long-pulse content hub?), but I’d like to discuss what this means for brands trying to establish and grow a meaningful presence in the social ecosystem.

Twitter’s new profile pages can be seen as a response to the relative flatness of their user growth (and the risk of a flatness in advertising growth). In a recent investor meeting, CEO Dick Costolo admitted this, acknowledging Twitter was looking at ways to remedy this situation by trying to appeal to people who don’t currently see value in using the tool. Even the iconic retweet functionality might be removed in the name of appealing to potential users who don’t get it.

What is the significance of this move toward new and different users? Well, it raises a larger question: how do we market in an ecosystem that is getting busier, more diverse, and more personalized every day? Marketers will continue to see even more diverse audiences across the Twitter ecosystem, which means we will have to use even more diverse approaches to interacting with them.

This is a good thing. It’s an opportunity for us to employ a more strategic, segmented approach to our social media marketing. What is that approach? No more one-size-fits-all marketing. We marketers need to scale relevance. If we seek to establish, sustain, and grow an authentic relationship with our audience, we need our relationship to be rooted in a valuable exchange. We need to adapt this approach to each of our audience groups, especially newcomers. None of this is possible if we are messaging everyone as if they’re the same because they aren’t.

We need to listen, segment, and interact with our audience on their terms, and that is proving to be an increasingly challenging task. In my next post I will begin to unpack this strategy as a four-part process: locate, listen, launch, learn. In the meantime, here is the basic formula:

Locate: find your audience and understand their similarities, determining strategic various common categories (demographic, psychographic, contextual) that they might occupy

Listen: explore these groups, arriving at quantitative and qualitative insights; be prepared to know what they care about, how they behave in digital, how they’d like to interact with your brand, and how you can successfully add value to their lives

Launch: determine an engagement and content strategy that delivers this value in a repeatable, low-effort manner

Learn: optimize your engagement and content strategy by assessing performance and informing subsequent efforts

Tune in soon as we start to explore this process and how it fits into an integrated marketer’s daily workflow.

Caleb Bushner, VP of Marketing

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Big Data and Healthcare

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Big Data & Healthcare

Big Data & Healthcare

Last week’s #BigDataChat was about innovations in health care. From manipulating how we take in information about our own health as well as the circumstances that surround us 24 hours a day to the ripples that big data makes and will make in media, social and otherwise. Here we go.

I share your sentiments Jordan, but my inherent distrust of everything know no bounds so we may (perplexed inflection) not be on the same page. Q8 was a tricky one; on one hand the obvious answer, and also the altruistic solution, of sharing personal health information for the betterment of society has a strong case. But with great good comes the polar contrast and devious motivation, thus instigating my distrust. But this isn’t solely about my personal biases towards sharing public information. Overall, I enjoyed this chat, it was informative as t0 what we want as consumers and as individuals on the public health level.

We held a drawing at the end of last week’s chat for a complimentary copy of the O’Reilly book, Fitness for Geeks by Bruce W. Perry.

Congratulations Roxanne, all of us at Fractal Sciences hope you enjoy the book. We encourage all of you to join us again this Wednesday at 2:00pm PST for another awesome #BigDataChat.

The Team at Fractal Sciences

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Marketing and the Seasonal Shift, an ode to April 2nd

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Marketing and Seasonal Shift

Marketing and Seasonal Shift

We learn something everyday. Sure, the significance of what we learn is suspect at immediate inspection, but it’s the small things that can save you in the long run. And this is marketing. It’s war. We fight for the attention of the consumer. In the interest of better preparing ourselves for the battle, we’ve chosen to discuss the repercussions of seasonal change on marketing strategy.

Ok, so spending habits. We know our target year-round, till the end of days. But what about when your business is subject to nature? How do you keep moving, branching while and spreading your roots? The rest of our questions focused on discovering patterns around the wants and desires of what would make for a more desirable strategy.

This week was a fun one, as with all our #BigDataChat events. We encourage you to invite your friends and any fellow marketers that have questions about their marketing plans or if they just want to absorb some of the bits and pieces that we like to throw around. It’s humor, sarcasm, business and human nature wrapped up in the concise little treats that are tweets. Join us this Wednesday at 2:00pm PST for our next #BigDataChat.

The team at Fractal Sciences.

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Facebook is Throttling Marketers for Their Own Good

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Facebook Throttle

Facebook Throttle

The Implications of 1% Organic Reach Limits on Facebook

The words “1%” and “Facebook” tend to come together with scary consequences for Marketers. Last year, we learned only 1% of Facebook page “fans” engage with the brands they have liked. This year, we’re learning Facebook is driving toward a day when only 1% of brand’s posts organically reach their audiences. For Facebook and for companies that optimize ads the way we do, this is a potential mixed blessing, as brands will need to pay-to-play if they want to stay relevant on the platform. Facebook’s inclination toward profitability will force marketers to jump ship or get smarter about ad optimization and even more clever with the creative they post.

Creative posted to Facebook will need better messaging and better targeting

EdgeRank used to allow more content through to audiences, which meant each message could find an audience to share it. The narrower the audience gets, the more personalized the creative will need to be. This provides an incentive to target customer segments with creative content specific to them in order to induce sharing. For brands not looking to target as closely, the content published will need to be relevant and resonant with any 1% selection of their audience.

Renewed emphasis on creating stories for customers to post

Red Bull is brilliant for many things, and few of them are in the can. When Red Bull sponsored Felix Baumgardner’s leap from space, they created a piece of content fans could seek out and share to various networks, including Facebook. Regardless of whether Facebook throttles Red Bull’s organic reach, that video and rumors around it pervade the social sphere because users share it…with no additional cash investment. If your brand cannot fund a space leap, determining what you can actually do to encourage your audience to talk about you should be your focus. Smaller brands should consider inducing customers and staff to share stories on their behalf, or at least to share stories directly from the brand’s timeline.

Platform agnosticism

With the proliferation of so many non-Facebook avenues for engaging with customers, renewing focus on a breadth of networks and communities to express brand language and personality is critical. While many marketers operate on Twitter, engaging with brands and bots along with their customers, other networks like Pinterest, Polyvore, Tumblr, Medium, LinkedIn, YouTube, Vimeo, and Google+ provide alternate contact points for marketers to meet their customers.

Ultimately, Facebook is forcing marketers to better serve their customers with better campaigns and more creative ways to spread messaging across every customer touch point. We all like an easy win, but this might be good for our profession in the long run.

 

Jordan Baines, Director of Professional Services

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Data Mining the Internet

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To recap last week’s #BigDataChat we’re going to try something a little different, I’ve used Storify to log all the activity that took place (this one had our largest audience to date). But before jumping right in to things…

We’d like to thank Matthew Russell, @ptwobrussell, for both joining in on the conversation and providing some awesome feedback and responses to our questions. Fractal Sciences would also like to thank O’Reilly Strata for joining in and providing the raffle prize, a copy of Mining the Social Web by Matthew Russell.

#BigDataChat will be back on Wednesday, 3/26, at 2pm PST. We’re contemplating the ramifications of 3d printing on future market predictions.

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Generating Ownership of Earned Media

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Generating Ownership of Earned Media

Generating Ownership of Earned Media

By mid-2013, Twitter saw more than 500 million tweets per day. Your company tweets how many times a day because @guykawasaki said post more? They’re just tears in the ocean. Guy’s right, you should be tweeting more in order to get more responses, engagement, and velocity for the content you post, but how you engage is more important than how often.

Our handle, @FractalSciences, and our social media manager, @Carol_Stephen, tweet far more often than I do. When you look closely at the Fractal’s Handle and Carol’s own account, you’ll notice things like an incredible number of posts addressed to each member of our community. You’ll also notice #BigDataChat.

Few things are as effective as a tweet-up for generating lots of interest and are as close to genuine control you will likely see out in the wild of earned media. It’s also a fantastic way to do a lot of simultaneous interviews while also creating buzz around the content of a whitepaper.

We don’t just start with a clever hashtag and hope people arrive. We start with a dedicated group of people and actively invite others to join. The easiest way to generate a smart conversation around your brand is to start a smart conversation to be discovered.

We have also tried out a few tools that you might consider using for managing your tweet-up.

TweetChat: The interface is simple with cascading tweets as they come in and allows you to choose individuals you want to highlight. From the tool you can tweet, quote, retweet, and favorite. Many social media management tools have a cascading search function that will work similarly to this, but TweetChat adds one interesting wrinkle: it recognizes simple references like questions and answers indicated.

CrowdChat: More recently, we’ve stumbled on a tool that collects conversations into strings, creating a conversation tapestry like Storify. All the valuable content added by participants gets collected to use in whitepapers, blog posts, or other media. CrowdChat is accessible from Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. CrowdChat is currently in a closed beta but feel free to get a feel for it talking with us.

To see some of our digests from #BigDataChat, check out these entries from earlier in the blog:

1)     http://blog.fractalsciences.com/2014/03/10/data-visualizaton/

2)     http://blog.fractalsciences.com/2014/03/03/the-march-madness-conversation/

3)     http://blog.fractalsciences.com/2014/02/19/online-dating-and-big-data/

And to see us in action, join us every Wednesday, from 2-3pm Pacific Time online with #bigdatachat.

Jordan Baines, Director of Professional Services

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No Church In The Wild

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No Church in the Wild

No Church in the Wild

“Human beings in a mob
What’s a mob to a king? What’s a king to a God?
What’s a God to a non-believer who don’t believe in anything?
Will he make it out alive? Alright, alright, no church in the wild”

No Church In The Wild – Jay-Z & Kanye West ft. Frank Ocean

Marketing is having a crisis of faith. We know we’re collecting valuable data, but we aren’t able to fully bring that illumination to bear upon our daily efforts. We know it’s there, but we don’t always see it, and when we do, we don’t always trust it. There has to be a better way.

We know that our customers are using all sorts of channels across multiple devices for various types of digital interaction. And we know that smart brands need to meet those customers across all those touchpoints. So marketers have developed brilliant integrated strategies with robust tools and sophisticated data partners. So many tools, so many teams, so much data. So much potential. And it’s not being realized because the tools, the platforms, and the data are not talking to each other; they’re still operating in silos.

Yes, there is plenty of technical challenge to this, but anyone who has been enlightened by Design Thinking knows that a complete approach is really that of user workflow. Design Thinking requires us to place the user–the marketer–at the heart of any true solution. If we do that, we start to realize a radically more functional tool; one that streamlines a workflow as diverse and multi-channel as one’s audience, and as robust and real-time as one’s technology.

We built Fractal Sciences to do just this. By mapping to a marketing organization’s various teams and tasks we’ve brought data and design to solve for a modern workflow. Our platform exists to translate the collaborative vision of a marketing team into real-world applications with clear and measurable paybacks. By streamlining the components of various point solutions and automating the remaining tasks we’ve empowered marketers to focus on marketing again.

Our vision is one of technology that informs decisions rather than just filling data tables. This empowers marketers to focus upon customers rather than get bogged down in complexity. A solution that connects science with art. Now that’s something we can all believe in.

Lior Tamir, Founder and CEO & Caleb Bushner, VP of Marketing

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Data Visualizaton

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#BigData and Visualization

#BigData and Visualization

What’s new data marketers? Data visualization. I’d have to say a picture really is stronger than words, but I guess that really depends on the topic. But here is data land, where numbers rule supreme, a colorful little infographic will always be more appreciated than columns on data telling me where my business is going down. I like to learn that information through colorful spires or swirling lights with my eyes led to significant points of inquiry.  Eyes suffer fatigue and sometimes the data is just heartbreaking but maybe, just maybe, putting that data in the shape of a smiling face can inspire us keep on chugging. Or just crumble beneath the soul-crushing mockery.

@AuntRuby…I agree whole-heartedly. A good visualization draws the eyes in both the comprehensive nature of the data and the creativity in which said data is presented. We explore some examples around Q8 but since we received so many submissions during #BigDataChat last week, I’ve opted to post something later on this week showcasing some of the office favorites.

Again @LindaLSnell, I couldn’t agree more. Stats are agony that no one even bothers gift wrapping, Not that the buck should be passed in terms of making statistics more consumable, I’m sure we’ve all expressed the desire the see in a manner other than a spreadsheet (even if not out loud). I am no stranger to this task. If my language isn’t enough of a take-away, statistics, even the good ones, make me hurt on the inside.

The lies that we tell ourselves to get through the day. “Just a couple more calls and I’ve got a shot at a sale.” Ok, so maybe that last one isn’t as much a lie as it is wishful thinking (and maybe optimism is just one of those concepts truly foreign to my core). But I lie to myself to keep moving forward. Those are statements intended to keep my bright, sunny demeanor; data visualization and the subsequent misrepresentation does so much more than augments my mood. Misleading data distorts my reality and I can’t be the only one, we’re all human (and the cat). Just think of the shattering reality @Bigbonedcat suffered through at the hands of tuna distribution misrepresentation.

These days, pretty much everyone should be using data visualizations. @RigginsConst and @tracycopy rattled off a few industries within a few seconds of the question being posted. Most companies, if not all, are targeting some demographic and a market audience is probably one of the most visually depicted subject matters out there. Facebook put out a beautiful depiction of the user interactions happening across the world using the a map and filtering the connections through their signature Blue and White color scheme, courtesy of @Indasein. Q4 just solidified the need and scale of use data visualization has inhabited in modern business analysis.

I’m always on the side of the mad scientist. I want to be one, know one and/or work with one, mainly because of dreams of world domination fueled by laziness and a desire to not have to walk in an office (that I don’t own) anymore.  But in the more plausible/true reality, a data scientist would most likely benefit from a visualization lush with accurate data, diagrams and cost/benefit analysis and in that need would inevitably work towards realizing that specific depiction. It’s an already old reference, but the Google Trends’ calculation of the Earth running out of air comes off as a mad scientist plot…now the question is how to take advantage?

Comic books, cave paintings, the ideologies behind the logic of hieroglyphs. All of these are methods in which man has chosen to tell a story through pictures. It only seems natural to paint the story of a business’ rise and fall through pictures. @Bigbonedcat was (I’m assuming) looking for an immediate replay of ‘him?’ savagely going face first into tuna all while keeping tabs on the release of endorphins, serotonin, dopamine, etc. A relatively small story compared to, for example, maybe Facebook, Google or even Twitter’s rise. The visualizations that are being created daily on the smaller stories (and smaller victories) will culminate to compose a fantastic tale of success and loss.

People shouldn’t need a visualization to know not to text and drive. Sure while the act is innocuous when performed without repercussions, the alternative is absolutely mortifying. If the news isn’t doing it’s job then maybe a picture will; one can only hope.

I’ve posted a couple good tweets up here for Q8. It took a little while but eventually everyone started contributing an example. We’re definitely having another post with some of our favorites within the week.

We’d like to thank ‏@strataconf for joining us last week and providing a prize for a random draw.

Come join us this Wednesday @ 2pm PST for another #BigDataChat. Every one so far has been better than the last and we intend on keeping up the trend. Our engagement depiction is going to look tasty.

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The Onboarding

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How to Create a B2B E-Commerce Onboarding Strategy

How to Create a B2B E-Commerce Onboarding Strategy

Fractal Sciences is a complete and integral marketing platform that represents a new type of technology platforms. We help social media marketers to streamline a workflow that until today involved a complex and manual operation from multiple sources turning it into a simplified, functional process. The onboarding is one of the processes where marketers feel the significant benefits of bringing together all the essential tools for digital marketing under one platform.

Marketing as an industry has been feeling the winds of change in the recent past. The rate of technology change is constantly accelerating, and technologies like cloud or mobility are being increasingly mainstreamed. Marketers across all of the marketing industry segments are comfortable with new technologies and seem to have rapidly rising expectations from tools they are using.

Within the panorama of the client lifecycle onboarding a new customer to use a new marketing platform is always a challenging task. Heck, any new online marketing campaign whether SaaS software, hired agency, or in-house is complicated. A coherent structure that is applied across the system helped us develop a much more harmonious system amongst traditionally disparate management tools such as engagement and advertising to measurement tools such as social media analytics and web analytics.

Any marketing campaign requires a basic awareness of the marketing strategy and the defined business goal in order to succeed. To streamline a workflow so involved and complex is not an easy feat. And yet we belong to a breed of startups, with a Can Do type culture that is not looking for the easy way out, rather searching and finding the way to bring order, clarity and efficiency to existing complexity.

When we approached the problem of imagining Fractal Sciences we knew that in order to become great we must focus on making our customers successful. After all, you can’t trick someone into buying what you’re selling. Success speaks louder than words. This is why throughout the process we focused on making a simplified, informative, and functional platform.

The onboarding process is no different. While Fractal Sciences is a new technology, every component in the platform has been evaluated to make sure it is instantly familiar, with a simplified, informative, and functional design that defines the experience. Come join us – Be successful, even more.

Idan Benaim, Vice President of Strategy at Fractal Sciences

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