April 2 @ 10:15am

An Event Apart Seattle 2018

She recently had an unexpected panic attack when asked for her job title, and she went through several like Art Director, UI/UX Designer, then settled on Designer… but honestly ‘Web Master’ fits what we do now a lot more than it did ages ago in the .com era…

We’re still in the first 10,000 days of the web. Social Media has only been a thing for 3000 days… we haven’t even begun! And there are some exciting times ahead. 33% of jobs don’t even exist right now that will in 2020!

Gary Vee says social media is a slang term for a collection of apps and sites that now dominate the end consumer’s attention in our society.

WE make these things, these sites… we need to take the power back and start doing what we do best.

Consensual Hallucination – we’re kind of putting social media to one side and said ‘that’s not our jam’ and we’re leaving it to the people who have risen up as ‘social media experts.’ We need to bring this back to being more human.

A while ago you had to actually SELL the benefits of the web to clients! Now we are in the business of ‘how can I help you? What can I do for you?’ Also we went through a period in web design where things were very sales and we had to bring it back to being more human. We’re in the same phase with social media right now… instead of ‘look at what I’ve got!’ with social media we need to get back to being more human. A lot of companies are putting their product at the front and center of their social media posts, and they need to be asking how they can focus on long term relationships and benefits for their followers.

1 hour and 48 minutes average spent daily on social media, compared to 15 seconds or less spent per day on the types of websites we build. That is a massive problem.

She’s encouraging:

Quarterly Design Reviews

Strategically planning social media campaigns and reviewing successes and failures quarterly

VANITY METRICS

There are these metrics that are purely for vanity but do not actually relevant to business or our customers… If you haven’t had conversations with your clients yet about vanity metrics and acknowledging them it’s time.

Google came to her hometown and she went because she was curious about how newbies were doing in social media and what questions they had.

There was a guy who sold paisley ties, a mortgage broker, and a guy who repairs washing machines… and they all asked the same question: How do I get my followers and likes up? There was this guy in the corner who raised his hand and said, “You need to post 3x a day to all social media channels, and then go into your competitors’ channels and use the follow/unfollow method with a bot.” ‘AHHHHHHH’!

Lesson: there is no place for personal bias in social media. People are going to discount a platform just because they don’t understand it.

Gary Vee encouraged going to less saturated channels, and

If you are a practitioner in the space, there is no time to ‘not get it’ with a new platform. If you’re not learning about it you’re already a little bit behind. (ie Snapchat)

Snapchat: very misunderstood.

A lot of people think it’s for ‘real youngsters’

It has 150M daily active users, while Facebook has 1.38 BILLION daily active users

Snapchat uses much more video

85% of Snapchat’s 158 million daily active users are between the ages of 18-34.

It’s non-intuitive user interface makes it really cool for youngsters who have the time to learn how to use it, and it’s super sticky for the youth while it keeps their parents WAAAY away.

The moment a social media platform has moms and grandmas on it, the youngsters go anywhere else.

Snapchat ads are actually a joy to set up, Facebook could learn a lot from that experience.

2018 – there’s still time left!

Let’s look for some quick wins for us as Web Masters:

1. VIDEO: By 2019 video will account for 80% of all consumer internet traffic. If you’re not using video in your marketing efforts you’re missing out on the fastest way to build engagement and increase ROI.

2. SSL Certificates: make sure your client sites are secured
3. Mobile Ready / load time for mobile
4. Epidemic of pop-ups: overlays, screen takeovers, and exit overlays, and notification requests from websites (allow / don’t allow). Google has started to lower the rankings of websites where content is not easily accessible. We can’t seem to get it right!

The other issue with pop-ups is that they often alert a customer that there are discount codes available. So, if they weren’t willing to give their email address in exchange for that 15% and just went on with their shopping, at checkout there is friction because they know you offer coupon codes and now they don’t want to pay full price. There is a huge problem right now with losing people at the checkout.

In many ways, for better user experience, you’d be better by being open as a brand for your discount codes (yoursite.com/discounts) instead of forcing them to go to search.

TRUE COST OF REMARKETING

This has an astronomical cost. We need to start designing for long tail conversions, meaning people aren’t willing to buy right now, or there’s a massive barrier to buying that we need to buy around. Anything with a certain price point or higher (like jewelry, a car, etc) will

Virgin Holidays asks for a small commitment in order to convert you as a customer… they ask for a small small amount up front because they know that if they can just get that small commitment the chance is you’ll buy the whole vacation (big $$).

Designing for longtail conversions for high value purchases is something we’re going to need to work on.

Let’s get into the nitty gritty about a few channels:

Facebook pixels – You need to have a Facebook pixel installed on your website… now! The amount of data this can collect is huge.

Facebook is so cheap for advertising right now! It’s not gonna stay like this…

Marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than those without video.

Organic facebook engagement is highest on videos (13.9%) and photos sitting at 13.7%, but Sarah found photos to be more like 6-7%. 50% of Facebook video content is viewed n mobile, and 85% are viewed without sound. There’s an app called SRT Edit Pro.

Facebook Live videos are 6x the engagement of regular videos. Worth looking at.

In January, the algorithm changed for Facebook slightly and Mark Zuckerberg said that you’ll see less posts from businesses and brands because they want to show quality content that sparks conversations between users.

She hears ‘ Oh, Facebook didn’t really work for us’ a lot. It’s not that Facebook advertising doesn’t work, it means if it’s not working for you, you haven’t got the creative right. There’s something wrong with the images / graphics / videos or you’re not hitting the right demographic.

An update to Facebook business means it’s now easier to run multiple creatives under the same campaign. You should do this – you should try out different images / descriptions.

There is a way to turn conversions off (probably accidentally) and then only see your ad’s performance by impressions which is YIKES!

Use:

to research keywords and long tail keywords

Underused part of Google especially for brick & mortar stores.

This can make a massive difference to small businesses.

700 million monthly active users – that’s over double the monthly active users of Twitter, and 3x WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

Instagram just changed their algorithms to push up posts from people whose content you like, people you direct message, and people you search for, and people you know in real life (probably from Facebook data or photo tags)

Social networks change their algorithms to deal with the “problem of success.” The become too popular, there becomes too much activity for users to find the most relevant content on their own, so they need to do work to bring that content to the top.

So it’s still on us to create good content and post it. The quality gate on Instagram has gone through the roof in recent years… so if you’re just taking pictures on your iPhone they won’t stand out (or they will in a bad way).

Hashtags are the plumbing of the Instagram ecosystem.

use: Hashtagify

Hashtags are not there for the users to read – they are left for discoverability and should ideally be commented separately from the accompanying post.

Posts that DO use hashtags have a higher engagement by 12.6%

Optimal amount of hashtags: 11

You can archive posts on Instagram! Why would you want to do that? Get something out of your feed that breaks your usual look or

Random techie tip: YOU CAN DO SCREEN RECORDING IN IOS!! Settings > Control Center > Customize controls. You’re welcome.

Use: Planoly is a great website for using Instagram. It enables you to visually plan your feed, upload & schedule posts, discovery user generated content, metrics

This is underpriced right now and is creating incredible value for brands.

Only 33% trust advertisements versus 90% peer recommendations.

The U.S. Influencer Marketing Industry is estimated to grow a huge amount

Micro-influencers (10-25k followers) are also affordable and effective.

The average sponsored post rate is $180, with an average engagement rate of 5.3% (very cheap at the moment).

The problem with social media right now is keeping up with content creation so we need a ‘design once use everywhere’ mantra. So what can we learn from people who are doing this the best at the moment?

Best friends Jen and Steph opened AWAY in Feb 2016, raised $20m in Series B funding and have sold $20m in bags since then.

The brands dominating social media aright now are those with the most agile teams who have exceptional storytelling capabilities while bringing value to their users. They take their users on an incredible storytelling journey.

What they’ve done is so simple. They’ve been exceptionally brave with their marketing by identifying what everyone has in common – travel! They’re selling a suitcase but what are they doing ‘a level above’? that’s their focus for their ads / posts (mainly that you can charge your devices / plug them into your suitcase)

They create travel guides!! This is about the long game and bringing value to the consumer. They’re saying ‘how can I help you?’ versus ‘look at what I’ve got’

They are doing such a good job creative engaging and beautifully art directed imagery, stop gap GIFs, and working with influencers that have a reputation for creating beautiful images and posts. Their Google display ads are eye catching and bold, they do great ads on the inserts of TSA security trays… All of the stuff they do is very polished, art directed across all channels.

Their product isn’t front and center of their posts do but it’s never far away.

Peter Pan + Cath Kidston product launch:

Their social media campaign and email shots were doing a great job building excitement for the day. They were seeding the Instagram with beautiful images the day before, the night before they sent our a teaser email. There was a real excitement building around the launch.

Then the launch day came, she got a password in an email, clicked on the shop (now open) and realized it was GATED. She had to wait 20 minutes or so to get on the website, which she always thinks is a terrible user experience. Then, she gets there AND THERE IS NO ADD TO CART BUTTON!!!!!! Not hiding, literally not there.

Users are exceptionally patient with broken websites… they typically presume it’s them not us that have done something stupid.

She watched Twitter go wild with users saying ‘Oh my gosh what’s wrong with my computer why can’t I buy things?’ and Cath Kidson’s team eventually got the add to cart button back, but then when you added to cart you got bumped back to the waiting screen!!

• Design your images early, use them everywhere and reuse as much as possible
  
• Ensure the network you are strategically pursing makes sense for your business. Be part of that tough conversation with your client where you decide which platforms make sense.
  
• Find your story for social media longevity. Keep up with content creation and go above and beyond what is expected for social media nowadays.