Social Media

Pursuing Reconciliation on Social Media & Handling Online Conflict in Redemptive Ways – Douglas S. Bursch

May 23

How should we use social media channels in redemptive ways? And how do we seek peace and reconciliation on social media when we get criticized for our ideas?

Douglas S. Bursch’s awesome new book “Posting Peace: Why Social Media Divides Us And What We Can Do About It” provides insights into our polarized social media streams, how social media impacts our thinking, and ways we can use more empathy in our social media conversations. He also provides us with a powerful framework on how to be peacemakers on social media — and how to seek reconciliation (even with those who we deeply disagree with). He says:

“Our ability to instantly respond or comment about anything and everything makes social media a highly charged, emotionally visceral enivronment. Wisdom and thoughtfulness thrive in contemplation, meditation, prayer, and introspection over time. However, the internet rarely encourages contemplative processing.”

This book convicted and challenged me to think more deeply about my own social media posts — and to think critically about my motivations for sharing certain viewpoints. He reframed my thinking on how I think about negativity on social media and trolling behaviors. He also revealed the selfish ways that I use social media (and often stay in my own echo chambers) — which doesn’t help me build empathy for those that I disagree with.

His pastoral perspective on social media helped me to see the ministry work that I need to pursue. He says:

“We must embrace our vital, sacred calling to live out the ministry of reconciliation in our social media contexts and recognize the strategic role we play in the formation of social media culture. To transform the culture, we need to be intentional in all of our online encounters.”

This book provided me with helpful insights on ways to think critically about every like, share and comment — and to remember my calling to pursue peace and reconciliation.

You can get your copy of Posting Peace: Why Social Media Divides Us & What We Can Do About It from InterVarsity Press or any of your favorite online booksellers. You can also learn more about his ministry at FairlySpiritual.com.

Social Listening is Vital for Understanding Issues That Matter to Our Communities & Predicting Social Trends

Nov 18

Social media monitoring is vital for understanding our target audiences and knowing what sort of content we need to create to be helpful.

Monitoring conversations also helps us avoid being tone deaf when sharing out social media posts. It’s important to be sensitive to the issues happening around us, which gets more complicated for global social management.

The trouble with analyzing social data is that it is time consuming work. The social tools can help us identify influential and important conversations around specific topics, but that’s the easy part.

Most of the time is spent reading through the conversations to understand the who/what/where/why on each channel — and also acknowledging sarcasm and meme humor that social tools have trouble analyzing. This is crucial work during times when specific trending issues need to be analyzed.

I’m thankful for tools like Brandwatch, BuzzSumo, Spredfast, Hootsuite, Keyhole.co, Radian6, Pulsar Platform, and others that I’ve used to help me with this process.

The next evolution of social listening will require more insights around predictions of how topics and issues may trend up or down over time and where. We also need better insights into social video stories (e.g. Twitter Fleets, TikTok), audio data (e.g. podcasts, SoundCloud) and live streams (e.g. Twitch, YouTube Live, IGTV).

Inclusive Digital Marketing: Don’t Confuse Representation with Portrayal

Nov 12

The November 2020 “Best Practices Guide for Inclusive Marketing” from eMarketer is brilliant.

It provides key insights into how U.S. consumers think about D&I in digital comms efforts from brands — and how different communities feel about their representation and portrayal.

The report addresses two separate categories that we need to think about as digital comms professionals: representation and portrayal.

Representation is vital to promote diversity and inclusion — but just because we represent different communities in social media posts or ads doesn’t mean we are portraying these groups properly.

You could have the right intention, but actually hurt a specific community by the way you talk about or portray their group.

This impacts every meme we create, every animated gif we use, and every photo or video we promote. Are we portraying a stereotype? Are we hurting a community group accidentally?

Leading with empathy means not assuming that we know and humbly reaching out to get counsel from different community groups on ways to better portray them on social media.

We all need more input. We all need to stop assuming we’re doing it right.

Here’s a key example from eMarketer:

“An ad aimed at the LGBTQ community that uses a stereotypical white gay poster boy, dance music, and the word ‘fabulous’ is offensive and doesn’t reflect the diversity of the community,” he said. “The same goes for an ad that features a person of color in a supporting or service role surrounded by white people.”

What can we all do to become more inclusive digital communicators?

Reach vs. Impressions: What’s the Difference on Social Media?

Nov 04

Defining an impression is tricky — and often confused with social media reach.

The way we define an impression can vary by social platform, type of content, how much of your content is visible on screen, and sometimes by how long the content is visible to someone.

Yeah, it’s sort of complicated.

There are impressions that require someone to see your video story for a minimum of 2 seconds, 15 seconds or even a specific amount of time (e.g. 25% of your video story must be seen on Snapchat for certain impressions).

There are also impressions that require your content to be visible for at least one second — and at least 50% visible on screen (e.g. YouTube thumbnails visible appearing briefly on your mobile device while you scroll).

There are too many definitions out there and I have to look up the definitions regularly.

This is why we should try to always provide exact definitions in our social media reporting and not assume that people know what an impression means.

In general, reach refers to the total number of people who see your content. Impressions refer the number of times your content was displayed, but that depends on each networks definition.

Social Media Metrics That Actually Matter: 4 Ways to Use Social Data to Drive Business Results

Oct 28

When I first started managing social media profiles for brands 15 years ago, we spent a lot of time working to increase our follower/fan counts. It’s what we reported on monthly and what we told leadership was important.

After all, fan count was a measurement of potential reach initially — and brands spent a lot of money to increase that reach count because more social media followers could mean more web traffic, music plays, email subscribers, leads and sales. But, as you know, that fan count metric started to become less important as social algorithms evolved and follower counts didn’t provide the reach and engagement it once did.

Fast forward to today and follower count is mainly just a vanity metric that doesn’t mean much from a social business perspective. It doesn’t guarantee reach or engagement — and it isn’t even a sign that your brand has a legit community. There are too many fake accounts, bots and people who randomly (or mistakenly) followed your page a while ago, but haven’t interacted with your brand in years.

So here are four ways to think about ways to use social metrics for business:

1. Ignore social vanity metrics (e.g. follower counts) and focus on the engagement metrics that impact your business.

There are many social data points that are helpful to analyze in order to improve social campaigns and content strategies, but not all are useful to driving social business results.

It’s important to step outside our social media roles and think about the data sets that are important and actionable for business leaders.

Here are some helpful metrics that you should consider tracking to for business results:

Web traffic from social channels
Revenue and sales
Leads & email subscribers
Reputation, brand sentiment, community growth
Customer care issues & complaints
Competitor analysis and industry issues trending

And, remember, the social data that you have access to evolves so make sure to keep an eye on new data points that can help you and your leaders in the future. For example, video watch times, peak live viewer counts, video CTR and completion rates can inform your future video social strategy on each platform.

Brands, Focus On Creating More Vertical Videos to Engage Your Mobile Audiences

Dec 07

We spend most of our time holding our phones vertically.

After all, most of our apps are designed for vertical usage. We can read faster and thumb through content easier when holding our phones vertically and texting is much easier with the smaller keyboard. [UXmatters Research].

4 Simple Ways Your Brand Can Use Snapchat (Without Creating Stories)

Nov 30

Many brands are struggling to find value in using Snapchat.

After all, it takes time to create stories (which quickly disappear after 24 hours) — and it’s difficult to grow a following.

That said, if your target audience is on Snapchat (and you don’t have time to create stories), here are four simple ways to leverage Snapchat without being an active storyteller.

7 Keys to Creating Compelling 360 Videos for Your Community

Nov 18

360 video is a powerful way to create immersive content for your community.

The beauty of 360 video is that it puts your viewers in control of the visual experience right from their mobile device. The viewer doesn’t need to use a special headset to get the benefits of watching 360 video.

That said, creating immersive 360 videos that will draw in your target audience requires a new type of storytelling that puts your viewer in control.

Here are seven ways brands are using 360 video to pull in viewers into their stories:

Brands, it’s time to embrace 360 video to help you create immersive content for your community

Nov 14

The adoption of virtual reality headsets is exploding thanks to the gaming community. It’s projected there will be nearly 171 million people using VR by 2018 and 500 million VR headsets sold by 2025.

And Goldman Sachs’ researchers predict that virtual reality and augmented reality will continue to expand beyond gaming and into healthcare, engineering, real estate, retail and live events.

Snapchat for Brands: Strategic Guide for Measuring Success on Snap Stories

Jul 13

How do you define success on your social channels?

In the past, brands would focus on follower count. After all, a big following meant more reach (and provided the appearance that you had a huge fan base). It was an easy number to focus on — and a number that could be easily increased simply by spending money on advertising. The more money your brand spent on social ads, the more followers you could get.

This success metric started to decline as social channels (e.g. Facebook, Instagram) changed algorithms to reduce brand post visibility. It didn’t matter if your brand had 100,000 fans on Facebook because you couldn’t reach them without spending money. Fan counts became vanity numbers — and didn’t amount to anything else.

This is why there has been a shift to focus more on engagement numbers (which should have been the most important metric all along). Follower count is only important if you’re able to reach and engage with them. And this is especially true on Snapchat. It’s not about your Snapchat follower count – it’s about snap consumption (engagement).

1. Ignore social vanity metrics (e.g. follower counts) and focus on the engagement metrics that impact your business.

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