You can use many great tools to track page performance, including GTMetrix or Google PageSpeed Insights.

Once you have identified any problems, it’s important you work quickly to get them fixed, speeding your site back up and achieving optimum performance.

In this article, we’ll look at site speed optimisation, how it works, and ways to do it.

How is a webpage loaded?

Here’s the gist of how a webpage is loaded:

1. When a visitor clicks on a link to the website, the browser sends a request to access it.
2. If successful, the browser then downloads the page’s contents and its resources
3. It “builds” the page for the viewer, and then renders it to display on their screen.

Optimising site speed, then, is about making each of these steps as efficient as possible.

Site speed terminology

Dealing with site speed is a relatively technical area, and so there are a fair number of technical terms it will be useful for you to know.

Asynchronous loading

This is a method of loading a page using Javascript, where the Javascript code is processed simultaneously to the rest of the content. This means that even if the website vendor tag is slow to respond, the page itself will not slow down.

Rendering

Rending is the process of your browser parsing, generating and displaying HTML output in the form of a web page.

Minifying

This means removing unused or unnecessary code from your webpage without affecting how the resource is processed by a browser, enabling speed-up without losing any content or formatting.

CDN

This stands for Content Delivery Network. A CDN is a collection of servers distributed geographically, which work together to minimise loading delays by ensuring each user is as close to a server as possible.

Browser caching

This is when a browser saves certain files from a website onto the user’s computer so it can be reloaded quicker. The downside is a cache can build up in size, depending on the quality and quantity of sites visited by the user.

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

LCP measures how long it takes for the main page content to download. Anything outside that scope does not count.

First Input Delay (FID)

FID measures the time between a user first responding to your site, for example, when they first click on a link to it, to when their browser can respond to that interaction.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

This measures any unexpected shifting of website content such as fonts, images, videos and more, while the page is loading. Sudden layout shifts can cause slowdown and confusion.

How do I know if my site is slow?

There are a number of free tools out there which tell you about your site’s speed and performance – Google’s Page Speed Insights is a good, simple solution – however if you’re looking for something a little bit more comprehensive, what we have at Adzooma your ticket – and it’s entirely free!

Once you’ve connected your Google, Microsoft or Facebook account to the platform (again, for free), you will see a whole host of actions you can take to improve your ads in the ‘Opportunities‘ tab, including ‘Fix Landing Page’ as you can see below:

Once you click through to that Opportunity you will see exactly what is wrong with your landing page with an insight into Accessibility, Best Practice, SEO and Performance, and it’s Performance which is the one you need to keep an eye on. If that’s struggling, like shown in the example below, you need to look into remedying that. Thankfully, we’ll get on to how to do that later in the piece.

Why you should care about site speed optimisation

With all these technical terms flying around, it’s easy to get distracted from the main point; why you should care about site speed optimisation.

There are many reasons why it’s a vital part of any outreach strategy.

It could lose you revenue

Customers like using websites that work. It’s as simple as that.

Recent statistics have shown that most people expect websites to load in less than 2 seconds, and 40% of users will abandon trying to load a page if it takes more than 3 seconds.

When you scale these numbers up, that’s potentially a huge loss to your engagement.

Faster sites improve engagement and conversions

On the flip side, a faster site that works well can leave a good impression with your visitors, leading them more likely to engage, to return to your site, and to recommend it to others.

Site speed is also an accessibility issue, and a faster site will enable more people to engage positively with your business.

It’s a ranking factor

You may not be aware that site speed plays a part in your ranking on search engines.

Google and other engines will crawl your webpage and use its operating speed as part of their algorithms to decide where to place your site in their lists.

If your website is struggling to climb these rankings, and you’re not sure why that is, this could be the reason.

What is a good page load time?

As with most things, a good page load time is always comparative to other sites, and as technology improves, so will expected speeds.

However, at the moment, the threshold for acceptability lies at around 2 seconds.

If you are optimising your site to be as fast as possible, then aiming to load in 0.8 seconds or under will make your page load faster than around 94% of the web.

Ways to improve your site speed

1. Check how your page loads in different circumstances

The first step is to gather information about how your page is loading.

This will differ depending on the circumstances of the user who is loading it, so it’s worth trying different scenarios.

Knowing how your page loads on different devices or in different countries will help you to ensure your fixes are working across the board.

2. Reduce HTTP requests

If your page is having to make too many HTTP requests to load, this can slow it down and even crash the loading process.

There are many ways to reduce the number of HTTP requests, but the best ways are to streamline your site by deleting unnecessary images or reducing their size.

3. Minify and/or combine external files

A browser has to download these files to load the webpage, and if they are too large, then it can cause slowdowns and difficulties.

If you can minify or combine these external files into smaller packages, it will make them easier for browsers to process.

4. Defer JavaScript loading (asynchronous loading)

Asynchronous loading with JavaScript is a great way to solve slow loading problems, as it relieves the pressure from the website and allows the loading process to troubleshoot potential issues.

5. Reduce external scripts

Loading third party scripts is another means by which your website loading might become compromised.

Reduce the need for them by disabling any unnecessary calls to external sources, and transferring as many as you can to be hosted locally instead.

6. Choose the right hosting option for your needs

Hosting is often one of the most overlooked factors of website speed.

Most small businesses use a shared hosting plan, as it is cost-effective. However, it does mean that resources are shared out amongst multiple sites, reducing the bandwidth and RAM available to you.

If you can, consider a VPS or a dedicated server, both of which will give you more resources and enable quicker loading.

7. Enable compression

Compressing elements of your website, including codes such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript, can go a long way towards increasing website speed.

By making these packages of information smaller and more manageable, browsers will be able to deal with them faster and load your page more efficiently.

8. Enable browser caching

Enabling browser caching means that you are allowing browsers to save small elements of your site locally.

This means next time that user visits your site, the browser will not need to download all the information again, and the reload time will be much quicker as a result.

9. Reduce image sizes

Large and high definition images take lots of time to load and bandwidth to download.

They are one of the main culprits when it comes to slow website loading, as any browser will have to work extra hard to download the necessary information.

Seriously consider which images are essential to your website and if there are any you can delete while finding the balance between speed and aesthetic.

Reducing the size of any remaining images, by compression or actual size-reduction, will help to streamline the loading process and prevent any issues.

10. Use a CDN

Using a Content Delivery Network will also help users to load your website from wherever they are in the world.

Though the internet may seem nebulous, geographical location does play a part in the delivery of information.

Suppose you are aiming to reach users across the globe. In that case, CDNs will be particularly important as you route information through servers closer to your target audiences, allowing them to access your website’s data much more quickly.

11. Reduce the number of plugins you use

A plugin is a small piece of software that can contain several instructions for your website.

They can be instrumental in extending functionality and allowing your site to fulfil unique and exciting purposes.

However, if you have too many plugins in use on your website, they can clog up and lead to slower loading times as browsers struggle to deal with the information.

Streamlining your plugin use to the absolute necessities will help negate this issue.

12. Adzooma’s SEO Performance Report

Adzooma’s SEO Performance Report analyzes your website and identifies immediate actions you can take to improve. You’ll get an overall score out of 100. The closer to 100 you are, the better optimised your website is. You’ll then get a more detailed breakdown of your performance into 4 key areas, one being the site speed.

This section won’t just test the speed of your website, but also list actions you can take to prevent anything slowing down your website. The report is available to all Adzooma users, try the basic version for free to get a taste of what this report can offer. Not an Adzooma user? Sign up for free, here.

If you are closing a deal with a customer that is already familiar, retargeting reminds them to come back to you.

Whether a customer clicked away from your website or you want a customer to come back after a long time, retargeting is a fantastic way to pull in extra leads. And Facebook is a great platform to entice customers new and old in, but they also have useful options to help you retarget your desired customer base.

While it’s important to have a strategy to help you bring results, it’s also worth knowing how to use the right ideas to guarantee a retargeting action plan that will bring people back again. Here are five approaches to utilise Facebook ads to retarget customers.

1. Use urgency to persuade customers

The importance of crafting a relevant and attractive ad is essential. Incorporating a CTA stating that the offer “ends soon” or “buy now and save X amount” adds that all-important urgency to your ad. A CTA’s purpose is to encourage people to click on an ad right now. Urgency is nothing new, but it still utilities the power of persuasion, which is a tried and tested selling tactic.

2. Coupons and discounts

Coupons and discounts are part of the fabric of e-commerce and retail, but it’s also one of the best advertising strategies out there. For example, offers such as “free shipping on your first order” or “buy one get one free” help to identify significant prospects, and you can retarget your ads to reach them again.

Coupons and discounts work well, but it’s important to remember that while they can entice people in, they may not keep them. Using this in conjunction with an evergreen offer that you are already providing (without overtly informing the customers) can intrigue your prospects a little bit more and pull them in.

Special offers also work their magic at the checkout point. It acts as a call to action at the checkout that can encourage someone to click the all-important “purchase” button.

3. Give cart abandoners a nudge

If you have customers that are non-committal, you can call out this flaky behaviour without driving them away. Many people who put an item in their cart but then click away is all-too-common.

Fortunately, it just relies on good quality copy that speaks directly to the customer and provides a dose of friendliness. Depending on your business style, you may want to use humour like puns, as well as emojis to target the individual.

By personalising your message, stating something like “your cart is missing you” (with a at the end) helps to reach out to the customer. By speaking directly to your audience using second person terms such as “you,” it makes the entire process more friendly and warm.

4. Cross-sell with other products

Another way to gain reach with customers who are looking after a specific type of product can benefit from cross-selling. When someone buys an item from a particular set, for example, a golf club, you can use cross-selling techniques to suggest other types of clubs, golf shoes, balls, and caddies.

This approach is beneficial for keeping a customer onboard for the long haul, and Facebook has a guide and various tips to help you out. When you are looking to engage a customer, you can personalise the experience and sell complementary items. But it also helps you to get to know your audience.

By using cross-selling as a marketing tool, you are slowly building out customer journeys and offering solutions to problems customers may not realise they have. 

5. Reinforce customer loyalty

When you are looking to build a relationship with a customer, brand loyalty is crucial.

If you want customers to keep coming back to your brand, you’ve got to connect with them in ways that they find meaningful. There are many approaches that every business should take advantage of. The first one is to be responsive.

Companies like Starbucks engage directly with customers by replying to comments or sharing positive customer feedback to those individuals that posted a glowing review. But it’s also important to make your customer feel like they are a part of the business by giving them an exclusive sneak peek.

By giving them behind-the-scenes access, this will promote that sense of transparency so you can be open about your values. If you need to go one step further, you can use tools like Dynamic Ads to promote brand loyalty. By connecting your product catalogue to Facebook, it will use the algorithm to pick relevant products based on a user’s history.

Customer loyalty is not one-sided. We have to remember that building brand loyalty is an ongoing process which requires a wide variety of strategies. By increasing your engagement with customers online, you are reiterating the fact that you will be loyal to them if they are to you.

Conclusion

When promoting a business, it’s vital to increase your revenue using the right content that makes a significant impact.

When using retargeting tactics, it is a fantastic way to get first-time visitors to convert if they’ve clicked away from your website or store. Because Facebook is a hotbed of more than 3 billion users, retargeting ads on this platform is very easy to manage.

Facebook has a variety of retargeting options to help you get started, and using this platform can help to maintain relationships with your current customers, as well as gain new ones. It is the perfect way to build relationships with your customers and get those all-important conversions.

Retargeting is very useful, and it’s something your business needs to utilise.

But it’s also one of the most difficult to gain organic reach. Facebook has 2.7 billion monthly active users, and reaching the desired amount of people for your campaign isn’t easy. Facebook Ads can be a challenging platform (but we have a guide to help you with that), especially if you need to go into things like retargeting.

As many businesses find it easier to get professional assistance, this is where Facebook marketing agencies come in.

What do Facebook marketing agencies do?

Facebook marketing agencies offer a range of services to clients, including:

• Campaign planning and creation
• Facebook remarketing
• Targeted audiences
• Tracking and analytics
• Split testing and optimisation
• Improving engagement and reach

Facebook marketing agencies identify areas of growth and improvement and help clients to develop their campaigns.

With that said, here are 5 of the best Facebook marketing agencies to fit with your business goals.

1. Curious Conversations Marketing

Curious Conversations is a marketing agency that focuses on effective and compelling storytelling.

Services offered include:

• Establish and improving online presence
• Reputation management
• Notary services

At Curious Conversations Marketing, we’re not after your money – we’re after your trust to tell your story.

Any marketing company worth its salt is going to get you leads. You can even do this yourself by spending a bit of money in the online ads realm. Yes, you’ll get more leads, but the quality of those leads is up for serious debate.

If you’re looking to tell a story with your Facebook marketing and get people talking, Curious Conversations might be the right agency for you.

2. Reach

Reach offers a variety of advertising solutions including social media advertising. They know businesses see the benefit of using social media to engage with customers, and offer workable strategies.

One of their defining features is their Facebook+ service.

We’ll create and monitor the results of an ad campaign on the world’s biggest social media network. Our social experts will design an eye-catching ad for you and target them to the most relevant audiences, via our dedicated partner accounts.

Social users will instantly spot our reputable newsbrands and your business will be noticed with the added benefit of brand association, boosting credibility and driving traffic to your website.

Harness the potential of social media ads with Reach today.

3. Spread Like Wildfire Media

SLWF Media provides bespoke solutions to fit your needs, including Facebook marketing.

The team handles all aspects of Facebook marketing—analytical and creative. Alongside that, they also carry out the day-to-day tasks involved with campaign management such as data analysis and online community management.

Spread Like Wildfire Media believes that a marketing company needs to be flexible to accommodate for the needs of potential clients. That’s why we work with anyone from startups to SMEs and beyond! Our goal is to get your marketing to work for you so you can do it is what you do best.

4. SocialQ

SocialQ creates “content that resonates and media that reaches beyond platforms and algorithms”. They do this under 3 main categories:

• Branding – your identity
• Presence – your credentials
• Reach – your persuasion

While social media marketing can fall under all 3, SocialQ has placed social media strategy and management under Presence.

Their services focus on customer journeys through Facebook and other social media platforms, and finding what resonates with the modern consumer.

5. FirstFound

FirstFound has the distinction of being one of the UK’s longest running digital marketing agencies. The team has been helping businesses for over 20 years, building better strategies and achieving better ROIs through a variety of digital channels.

While initially starting as an SEO agency, FirstFound offers other services including:

• SEO
• PPC
• Social media (including a free social media audit)
• Facebook advertising
• Content creation
• Web design
• Web development
• Email marketing

Whether you’re looking to gain more followers, more site traffic (and sales) or boost engagement, FirstFound is at hand to deliver the results you need.

They start by getting to know you, your business, and your customer’s needs and then analyse your social media presence and brand authority to find areas of improvement.

Interested? Check out their listing on Marketplace today.

Conclusion

Facebook advertising is one of the most important methods of growing a business online.

It can be a goldmine for companies looking to grow quickly and exponentially. But if your business is not harnessing the power of social media effectively, you might need a social media marketing agency and Adzooma Marketplace can help with that.

With hundreds of agencies, freelancers, and services to choose from, you’ll find the Facebook marketing agency that’s best for you.

Try Adzooma Marketplace today.

That seems obvious but I want to emphasise how important clicks are, not only to CTRs, but many other metrics. Clicks are fundamental to CPCs (cost-per-click) and can affect your approach to audience targeting, your ad creatives, and general engagement.

Those clicks help to inform marketers what strategies to follow and how to deliver better results at lower costs but they don’t tell the whole story on their own. That’s why CTR’s do such a good job.

In this article, we’ll look at what a good CTR for Facebook Ads would look like, how to calculate CTRs, and how to improve them.

How to calculate CTR on Facebook

To calculate the CTR for your Facebook ads, you divide the total number of ad clicks by the total number of ad impressions. Finally, you multiply the result by 100 to get the percentage.

For example, if 1,000 people see your ad and 50 of them click on it, then your CTR would be:

(50 ÷ 1,000) x 100 = 5%

If you’d prefer not to calculate it yourself, there’s a way to find it in Facebook Ad Manager.

1. Log into your Facebook Ad manager.
2. Go to the top right of the page and click on ‘Ads’.
3. Make sure that you have selected the correct time period you wish to analyse.
4. Then click on ‘Columns’ for more options and find ‘Performance and Clicks’.
5. You will get another tab option named CTR. You can break down the numbers more if you go through each row. This will also show the amount of money you have spent on each ad.

The difference between “Clicks (All)” and “Link Clicks”

As I said in the introduction, clicks are important in paid advertising. But not all clicks are the same. Facebook Ads measures two types of clicks on its platform:

Link Clicks

Link Clicks are the number of clicks on links to particular destinations, whether they’re on or off Facebook-owned properties. (e.g. they could go to one of your dedicated landing pages).

To see your link click results broken down by page destination, go to Ads Manager and click Breakdown→ By action→ Link click destination.

Clicks (All)

Clicks (All) includes link clicks as well as clicks on other parts of your ad. Here are some examples of that:

• Post likes, comments or shares
• Clicks to a Facebook Page or Instagram profile
• Clicks to expand a photo or video to full screen

As Clicks (All) includes link clicks, this metric will be equal to or greater than your Link Clicks.

What is a good CTR for Facebook Ads?

There isn’t a clear cut answer and it constantly changes.

In 2017, Wordstream conducted a Facebook Ads study to find Facebook Ads CTR benchmarks which gave an overall average of 0.90%. But by industry, this figure ranged from 0.47% in employee training and job progression and 1.61% for legal ads.

Facebook has changed a lot in 3 years so this might not be accurate anymore. AdStage did a similar study in Q1 2019 and found the following:

• On Facebook Audience Network, an overall average of 0.99%
• On Facebook News Feed, an overall average of 1.33%
• On Facebook Messenger, an overall average of 0.78%

That gives a rough average across all platforms of 1.03%.

And, based on a Databox study from 2020, a good CTR for Facebook ads to them was between 2-5%.

Clearly the number keeps growing with time and every study undertaken.

How to increase CTR

Whatever the CTR has been or will be, the fundamental ways to improve your CTR will remain the same. Here are some tips to get yours back on track.

1. Know your target market

Study the audience you’re going for and spot the trends in how they use the platform, what kinds of things they are interested in and what kind of strategies work best. This means, what kind of ads will be more likely to be clicked on, such as video, CPC, or infographic posts.

2. Try video ads strategically

Videos are very engaging and they usually get lots of clicks. But you can be savvy in this. Firstly, you can have the video on mute automatically and, thus, the first click can be used to transport the user to the website. The second click can be to unmute the video. It’s a bit cheeky but you might win over some people rather than annoy them to the point they click off immediately. However, you can also have the sound activate automatically when the user hovers their mouse over the video player.

3. Use visuals that will engage users

Status updates can be very engaging if you include photos with them as the link itself. CTR can increase by up to 15% alone. This is so simple that there is no excuse to ever write a status update without putting an additional photo to go with it. It’s more eye-catching and it will also stop scrollers from sweeping past it.

For more Facebook marketing tips like this, read our following guides:

• 44 Practical Facebook Marketing Tips For Businesses
• 4 Tips For Creating Facebook Ads That Work
• How To Use Facebook Marketing for Small Businesses

Further resources

• Facebook Advertising Benchmarks for Your Industry
• [B2B Facebook Ads]: Ultra-Simple Way We Tripled CTR
• Case Study: How Facebook Ad Fatigue Can Destroy Your Campaign Metrics

Takeaways

We recommend that you keep paying attention to how Facebook is changing. In particular, how they are using their news feed to draw more attention to Facebook ads. The overall CTR has increased from a few years ago. However, it has dropped from where it was a year or so ago.

This could be because of the lack of diverse content in the ads or it could be the changes that Facebook is going through. As you may know, the platform is constantly in the news itself, with lawmakers considering putting changes into its status, of being either a free platform or publisher that curates content.

The bottom line is, you need to focus on more interesting ad formats, such as video ads. CPC or PPC ads are still important, but it’s best to start investing in memorable video ads that attract more users to stay and watch or click to see the potential reward that’s on offers, such as products or services.

For your status updates, always include a photograph or image of some kind. No more plain text and emoji statuses!

Video content has fast become a popular way for businesses to advertise and with Facebook video advertising, you can take advantage of that. This guide will help you discover how Facebook video ads can become a major part of your social media marketing strategy.

What is a Facebook video ad?

As the name suggests, Facebook video ads are Facebook ads in the form of videos. You can either create the video yourself or hire a freelancer or video marketing agency to do it for you. Then you upload the video to Facebook, add a video description, your daily/weekly budget, thumbnail, and target audience.

Do you need video ads?

Before you jump on creating video ads, you need to consider whether they’re worth your time and resources. A video can capture the essence of your business well, and in a social media feed, a video can be more eye-catching than a still picture is.

But they can take a lot of time to create and, if you don’t keep the video production in-house, you’ll have to hire a professional to produce and edit a video which costs money. That’s why you should weigh up the pros and cons before deciding.

What are the benefits?

Here are some of the reasons for using Facebook video ads and how your business could benefit:

1. Video ads are more engaging than image ads – According to 99firms, more than 4 billion video views take place on Facebook every day and 500 million viewers watch 100 million hours of video content on Facebook daily. That’s over 11,415 years worth of watched video content. Needless to say, Facebook video is popular and clearly engaging.
2. Video ads help you stand out from the crowd – Advertising is a saturated market, so any kind of advantage to stand out is worth taking. A video ad could entice potential customers and clients to click through to your website and subsequently, that visit could become a sale.
3. Audience targeting – A great thing about the Facebook Ads platform is that you can target a specific demographic that sees the advert. For example, if you want to target women aged between 20 and 30, you can do that with a Facebook ad.
4. You can set the budget – It’s crucial to set a sensible budget to avoid it running out through mismanagement. Set your daily and weekly budgets and make alterations as and when you need to.

Facebook video ad specs

As videos can appear in multiple ads types, you need to know the different specs and sizes. Here’s a list of them (as of January 2020)

Facebook Feed video ads

• Upload the highest res video possible
• Minimum dimensions: 600 x 315 (landscape) or 600 x 600 (square)
• Aspect ratio: Horizontal: 16:9, Square: 1:1, Vertical: 4:5 or 2:3, Full Portrait: 9:16
• Video formats: MP4 and MOV
• Max file size: 4GB
• Max length: 240 minutes

Carousel video ads

• Minimum resolution: 1080 x 1080 (but recommended to upload the highest res possible)
• Number of cards per Carousel Ad: 2-10
• Video formats: MP4 and MOV
• Max file size: 4GB
• Max length: 240 minutes
• Video thumbnails with 20% text or more could be rejected

In-stream video ads

• Upload the highest res video possible
• Aspect ratio: between 9:16 to 16:9
• Video formats: MP4 and MOV
• Max file size: 4GB
• Video length: 5–15 seconds
• Recommended to include sound
• Captions are optional but recommended
• Video thumbnails with 20% text or more could be rejected

Instant article video ads

• Upload the highest res video possible
• Aspect ratio: between 9:16 to 16:9
• Video formats: MP4 and MOV
• Max file size: 4GB
• Max length: 240 minutes
• Video thumbnails with 20% text or more could be rejected

Marketplace video ads

• Upload the highest res video possible
• Aspect ratio: between 9:16 to 16:9
• Video formats: MP4 and MOV
• Max file size: 4GB
• Max length: 240 minutes
• Video thumbnails with 20% text or more could be rejected

Audience Network video ad specs

• Upload the highest res video possible
• Aspect ratio: between 9:16 to 16:9
• Video formats: MP4 and MOV
• Max file size: 4GB
• Video length: 10–121 seconds
• Video thumbnails with 20% text or more could be rejected

Facebook Collection video ads

• Minimum dimensions: 1200 x 628
• Video formats: MP4 and MOV
• Max file size: 4GB
• Video length: up to 120 minutes (recommended less than 2 minutes).
• Video thumbnails with 20% text or more could be rejected

How to set up Facebook video ads

So now that you have your video ready and formatted, according to the specs, you need to set them up. Here are some quick tips to consider before you start:

• Like other ads, you can set different objectives. Facebook has a handy help page on what objectives support video ads.
• You canboost Facebook Page video posts.

Instructions

1. Go to Ads Manager.
2. Click + Create.
3. Select an objective that supports video and click Continue.
4. Choose your targeting, placements and budget and then click Continue.
5. Under Formats, select Carousel or Single image or video.
6. Upload your video to Ads Manager.
   • For Single image or video, click the Video/Slideshow tab. You can upload a video by selecting Upload video or Browse library to pick a video from your library. To use a slideshow, click Create slideshow.
   • For Carousel ads, find the Creative/Links section and click Video/Slideshow. Then, click Select video or Create slideshow.
7. Click Customise video and use the Crop tool to pick an aspect ratio for your video. Then click Apply changes once you’re happy.
8. To upload a thumbnail, click Customise video and then select Thumbnails. You can either upload an image or a still frame from your video. Then select Apply changes.
9. Once you’re done, click Confirm and your video ad will be published.

Facebook video tools and resources

There are plenty of resources online and on the help pages on the Facebook website to help you not only set up your adverts but also to get some ideas on what works and what doesn’t. Here’s a selection:

• 10 Excellent Examples of Video Marketing on Facebook
• 5 best practices to amplify your Facebook video ads
• Create stunning Facebook video ads with Biteable
• How to Produce Paid Facebook Video Ads for Mobile Like a Pro
• Stand out in feed: Optimising video creative on mobile

Sometimes with your business, you need the advert to be short and direct, whereas other businesses may benefit from more in-depth videos full of information and insights.

Conclusion

To conclude, we think that Facebook Ads could work well for your business and prove extremely useful as part of your social media content strategy. With this guide, you can create Facebook video ads that connect you to your audience, build brand awareness, and promote your products and services in the most eye-catching way.

What is a Facebook pixel?

A Facebook pixel is a snippet of code that you embed into your website that links visitors’ onsite behaviour to Facebook user profiles. It collects data to help you:

• Track conversions from Facebook Ads
• Make changes to current ads
• Build targeted audiences for future promotions
• Remarket to existing customers who have already been on your website in some capacity

By placing and triggering cookies on your site, it tracks users as they interact with your website. Pixels help users understand what people do and the actions they take and uses this data to target specific customer groups that will be engaged with ads later on.

Why you need a pixel for Facebook Ads?

As a way to understand certain customer groups, using a Facebook pixel provides essential information which you can use to create better Facebook ads and target your ads to the right demographics.

This data is invaluable because it helps to ensure your ads are seen by the right people who will engage with your services so you can improve your Facebook ad conversion, increase your ROI and boost your business.

Every customer is a potential one, even those that have visited your site before. 

How to use a Facebook Pixel

There are a few ways Facebook pixel can improve your Facebook marketing: 

1. Create your pixel

When you create your pixel, you will see the Facebook pixel base code on every page of your website; you add standard events to the pixel code on particular pages of your website, like the “add-to-basket” page or purchase page. If you aren’t savvy with code, you can enlist a developer and email your Facebook pixel code to them.

Follow these instructions to create your first Facebook pixel:

1. Go to Events Manager
2. Click Connect data sources > Web.
3. Choose Facebook pixel and click Connect
4. Name your pixel
5. Enter your website URL
6. Click Continue

2. Add the pixel code to your site 

You can place the pixel code onto the header of your website. The pixel is triggered whenever someone visits your website and completes an action like a purchase, and reports this back to you. There are three setup options to do this:

• Add the pixel manually
• Through partner integration
• Follow email instruction

Full details can be found on the dedicated Facebook pixel help page.

3. Track relevant events

The great use of Facebook pixel is the ability to track related events. There are 17 standard Facebook pixel events you can copy and paste a standard Facebook event code to keep track of important events. A few of these include:

• When someone completes a purchase on your website
• Signs up for a trial
• Completes a registration form on your site
• Enters their payment information onto your site
• Adds to their wishlist
• Starts the checkout process
• Uses the search function and interacts with your site

You can also use “custom events” instead of standard events to collect more details than what the standard events can provide, which use URL rules based on specific URLs or URL keywords. For example, if you are looking to set up a post-conversion page, you could do that by setting a URL rule, such as a “Thank You” page.

What can a pixel do?

1. Track conversions

You can see how people interact with your website after viewing your Facebook ad. It allows you to track customers across their devices and, if you want to optimise your Facebook ads for specific conversion events on your website, you can see results that are more in-tune with business goals.

2. Remarketing

A crucial part of engaging any customer base it the ability to target ads to people who have visited your site in the past.

The great thing about this tool is this is where you can delve deep into the customer’s needs, for example, if a customer added a product to their shopping cart and abandoned it, you can show an ad for that precise product as a gentle reminder.

3. Build audiences

It also gives you the function to build and tailor audiences to your specifications, by using the “Custom Audiences” function.

If you want to sell a specific type of product, like hats, Facebook pixel can tell you all the users who browsed for hats as well as when they did it, giving you a database of people who visited “hats” pages on your site in a certain period.

You can also create Custom Audiences based on numerous other factors, such as the amount of money people have spent at your store, to target people with more expensive taste. This is ideal if you have a backlog of luxury products to sell.

4. Unlock additional tools

There are extra tools you can use to target your ideal customer base:

1. The Lookalike Audiences function: where you can design Lookalike Audiences which reflect the characteristics of your ideal customers. It does this by using data to identify people who have similar traits as your site visitors in specified demographics, for example, if they are 25 to 35-year-old women who live in urban areas.
2. You can gain access to more Facebook ad tools and metrics: if you want to use additional functions like web conversion campaigns or dynamic ads, you need to install Facebook pixel.

Conclusion

Facebook advertising gives you many opportunities to engage visitors to your website long after they’ve purchased a product. The importance of converting new and old customers by using Facebook pixel as an analytics tool ensures you retarget and repurpose your ads to keep customers engaged.

As it provides various insights into your audience, their demographic, habits, and spending limits, by delivering ads to audiences who have either shown interest in your business gives them additional exposure to your business and increases the efficiency of your ad campaigns. 

Tweeting aimlessly and posting unplanned Facebook posts won’t offer anything useful to your customers. There needs to be thought, consistent effort, and continual analysis and adaptation in order to get the best results and make those all-important conversions.

But you might already have a strategy and it doesn’t seem to be working. Whether you’re a beginner, intermediate, or an advanced user, this guide will help you create a stellar social media plan.

What is a social media strategy?

A social media strategy is a plan of everything you want to do and achieve on social media, linked with your business goals. It will give you a detailed roadmap that determines:

• What content you will use
• What social media platforms it will feature on
• When you will share it
• How you will measure success.
• Who your audience(s) will be
• What their concerns and challenges might be
• How you can help them in your social media marketing.

A social media strategy is not a static document, but should be constantly evolving and adapting to meet different offers, changing audience demands and wider market conditions.

So, how do you go about putting together a social media strategy that works for your business? Here are 9 easy tips to help you.

1. Set your goals

How you approach your social media depends largely on what you want to gain out of it. The first step is to develop some goals you hope to achieve and effective social media metrics that can guide your activity (more on those in Step 3).

Examples of good social media marketing goals would be things like:

• Achieving a certain number of email sign-ups through Facebook
• Reaching a target CPA (cost-per-acquisition)
• Generating brand awareness on Twitter

These goals should relate to the objectives and KPIs in your business plan. You should also consider whether you’ll use paid or organic channels to achieve these goals. Both come with their advantages and disadvantages and we’ve written a guide to paid and organic social media to give this some more thought.

2. Find your target audience

Understanding your audience and what they need is fundamental to your success with social media marketing. You should never assume when it comes to the needs and wants of your audience. Luckily, there is a whole load of tools for social media analysis, and demographic data available to you to help you make informed decisions. No one platform suits every type of audience, so you must use the information available to help you target your content and spend.

A good way to do this is by creating customer personas. This will help you tailor your content and optimise your activities and strategy.

Think about the following demographics:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Income
• Interests
• Marital status
• Employment status

By aligning your product or service with different customer personas, you can plan out what content will resonate with those audiences and hit your targets.

3. Measure the most important metrics

Ever heard of vanity metrics?

They measure things like follower counts, page views, and subscribers. They’re called vanity metrics because they look good on paper but don’t tell a great deal about performance. A Facebook page with 100,000 fans might not get as much engagement as a page with 1,000 fans. You might get a lot of page views but your bounce rate might be very high, meaning they’re viewing the page and leaving without navigating to any other page on your site.

The only marketing that truly delivers is data-driven – so disregard those vanity metrics and dig deep. Ask yourself: what metrics are the most important measures of success to you? Some good examples of useful metrics are:

• Engagement rate – Facebook Insights can tell you which posts have the most engagement, including comments and shares. The same can be measured on Instagram with tools like Phlanx.
• Reach – look at a combination of your current audience growth and campaign reach to estimate a monthly average to strive for
• Bounce rate – Bounce rate is a web analytics metric and social media plays a role in that as you try to get social referral traffic. The average bounce rate from social traffic is around 54%, according to CXL but that can vary depending on the industry.

4. Choose the right social media platforms for you

If you know exactly who your audience are, then it’s far easier to determine the best approach.

According to a 5WPR report [PDF], millennials’ (defined as 18-34 year olds) daily use of Facebook is 77%, compared to 68% usage by 35-to-54 year olds and 52% of the 55-plus age group (aka “boomers”). If you target B2B customers then LinkedIn is generally a good port of call. Understand where your audience is having conversations about you or your industry and aim to be there contributing to the discussion.

5. Consider your tone for each

You may have to adapt your approach across several platforms. It’s not to say that you cannot use the same content across several social platforms, but you will need to adapt it for each – for example, asking more questions or doing a poll on Twitter, expanding the same subject into a blog post or a white paper for LinkedIn, and taking an image-led angle on the topic for Pinterest or Instagram.

You may think about creating a brand tone of voice document so that anyone who posts on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram knows what sort of tone and language they can use to keep things consistent.

6. Decide when and how you will post

Using a social dashboard can help you to keep all of your posts in check, but having some thought behind when and how you post your content will always pay off. You should know the best posting times for your audience and channel by analyzing the reach and engagement of your historic posts. Remember that you can prepare posts in advance according to a content calendar and use social media scheduling tools like Crowdfire and POSTOPLAN to push them out at the optimal times.

7. Research your competitors

Effective competitor analysis is the cornerstone of a good marketing plan, but if you haven’t been including your competitors’ social media channels in this, it’s time to start. Again, there are tools out there which can help you analyze what they are doing and gain insight (Sprout Social, Phlanx, Brandwatch, Buzzsumo). Don’t directly copy their content ideas, but you can look at what is working for them to work out what is likely to be popular for you to try.

8. Start organic, then try paid

The beauty of social media marketing is that there are different levels to it. If you build well-targeted, quality content that is shared appropriately, you should find some success just with organic, or non-paid for activity. Once you have enough of a track record to understand what is working well, you can boost this with some paid ads to gain you a share of the market.

9. Test, test, and test some more

It’s a good idea to test everything to understand exactly why it works or doesn’t work. You can use A/B or “split” testing to make minor tweaks with content and post and understand what works well. Over time, you can draw this information out into wider audience trends to inform your strategy.

Evaluate your work at least once a month to spot what changes there are, and consider using a social media dashboard to help draw out the information.

Conclusion

Your social media strategy guides the direction and purpose of everything you do on your social channels. The right one can entirely change the fortunes of your company, with minimal investment of advertising budgets required. Spending a little more time developing this strong foundation, and you could be on track for big improvements to your sales pipeline.

In this article, I will be looking at what Google Analytics is, giving tips on how to use it for social media, and metrics you should be tracking.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a web analytics tool that tracks and reports site traffic. As of 2019, Google Analytics is the most widely-used web analytics service on the Web.

Tracking is done with the use of a “tracking code”, which is a snippet of JavaScript added to any page you wish to be tracked. Once a user access a page, their activity is monitored but their personal details remain anonymous.

Data you can track

Some of the things that you can find out using Google Analytics include:

• How much traffic your website gets per page (page views)
• Where the traffic to your site comes from – e.g. Google, social media, direct links (traffic sources)
• The demographics of your visitors
• How long they spent on each page (session duration)
• Whether they left the page without visiting another page (bounce rate)

From this information, you will be able to tailor your content and identify areas of your site that users enjoy and visit often. You can also determine how people reach your site and improve your channels.

Why should you use Google Analytics with social media?

For any business to be able to connect and interact with their customers, they need to have a social media presence. Using Google Analytics to track and analyze your social media traffic can have many benefits:

1. It will give you the chance to identify which social media platforms link the highest number of visitors to your website.
2. You will then be able to decide whether to focus on using the social media platform that gets you the most visitors, or whether to adjust your posting strategy on the other platforms to try to increase visitors to your website overall.
3. You can also see if visitors are mostly unique or returning visitors. If you get a lot of unique visitors, you could decide to try and increase engagement with these visitors to convert them into repeat visitors. If you have a lot of repeat visitors, you may need to find ways to encourage new visitors.

If your visitors are engaged, you will be able to see how engaged they are by analyzing the amount of time that they are spending on your site. This will let you know if you are creating the right content for your target audience.

Set your goals before you start tracking anything

You can use Google Analytics to help you to improve the reach that your website has, your marketing strategies, and how long people stay on your website. However, to be able to make improvements, and start tracking specific analytics, you need to ensure that you make S.M.A.R.T goals.

S.M.A.R.T goals need to be:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Timely

Try to ensure that these goals will help with your company’s wider marketing strategy, and then create some strategies to help you meet these goals within a specific timeframe.

How to set up Google Analytics for Facebook or Twitter

To gather tracking data, you can either use Google Tag Manager or add a Google Analytics tracking code onto your website directly.

If you want to be able to analyze your visitors from different social media traffic sources individually, you need to create Advanced Segments. You can set up an Advanced Segment for each social media platform that you use so that you can easily compare the differences between them.

All you need to do is:

1. Go to any Google Analytics report
2. Click on Advanced Segments > New Custom Segment
3. Next, you should add a name for your segment, and terms as filters that match traffic you are getting. For example, for Twitter, it could be twitter.com, t.co, Tweetdeck, or bit.ly. For Facebook, it could be facebook.com or m.facebook.com.
4. When you are typing in your filters, if there is traffic that matches, it will be autocompleted by Google Analytics.
5. When you have added all of the filters you want, you then need to click the Test Segment button. If everything is set up correctly, make sure you save your segment.

Tips and metrics to track

Now that you know how to set up Advanced Segments for Facebook and Twitter, it’s time to investigate what metrics you should be tracking and the techniques to try.

Tip #1 – Use UTM parameters

UTM parameters are tags you add to the end of a URL which can be used to track activity from anyone who uses the link. That data is then passed through to Google Analytics for further analysis.

By adding UTM parameters to any link that you share on social media, you will be able to gain more detailed information. These parameters are often used as part of wider campaigns, to differentiate from regular traffic. From this data, you can analyses which social media platform brings the most visitors to your site, what content they view, what they buy, and much more. If you want to test out multiple ads, you could use UTM parameters to see which ad works best.

Tip #2 – Build a social media dashboard

Creating a social media dashboard within your Google Analytics can help you compare and contrast the performance of each social media platform you use. On a GA dashboard, we recommend you include referral traffic data and a breakdown of data from each social media platform.

Alternatively, you can use Google Data Studio to create a social media dashboard.

Track – Session duration for social media visitors

The amount of time that someone spends on your site can determine whether they like the content (although it can’t give a definitive answer on its own). Using session duration along with pages per session and bounce rate will give a better picture.

Experimentation is key. Is the copy good and perhaps the landing page you’ve linked to isn’t appropriate? Or have you seen good performance with the landing page elsewhere and maybe your social copy needs to be tweaked? Google Analytics can give a bit of insight but we suggest using a CRO tool for deeper analysis.

Track – Assisted conversions

You will be able to track the number of conversions that come from different social media platforms, so you can see which one assists the most conversions.

Collecting data from Google Analytics is one of the best ways to be able to track the number of visitors to your website from a range of different sources. It can help you to identify marketing strategies that work well with your target audience, and allow you to create and track achievable goals. It is an excellent tool that can enable you to boost traffic to your website, resulting in many more sales and a higher conversion rate.

Summary

Google Analytics is a must-have for all site owners. Combined with social media referral data, you can gain some fascinating insights to improve both your social media presence and the performance of your landing pages.

But it’s important to remember not to use metrics in isolation. Page views or bounce rate are enough on their own but mixed with session duration, page load time, or pages per session can give a more balanced analysis.

Here’s how to leverage the power of both for your marketing efforts.

What is organic social media?

On the surface, organic social media looks almost identical to paid social. It appears on your news feed in the form of posts but the difference is you don’t pay to promote it. However, organic posts only reach a small percentage of users and it continues to decrease.

What is paid social media?

Paid social is similar to PPC advertising where you pay to promote your social content. For platforms like Facebook Ads, you can tailor your paid campaigns to target specific demographics which isn’t something you can do with organic social. There’s a difference in goals as well – organic content is usually created for engagement and free promotion while paid content is mostly used to generate leads, sales, and brand awareness.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of each?

There are pros and cons to using organic and paid and you should weigh them up before deciding the best channel for your business.

Making them work together

I’ve spoken about organic and paid social media as separate channels but what if they could work as one strategy?

Organic and paid have the power to complement each other in multiple ways, In fact, one channel won’t work well nearly as well without the other. A good example of a company making organic and paid efforts work well together is Headspace.

Headspace is a mindfulness and meditation service, which it promotes through its app and online content.

On social media, Headspace shares tips and advice for its audience in an effective way that doesn’t fall foul of Facebook’s harsh algorithms. But its paid social content matches up with its organic strategy with clear and unobtrusive CTAs. It’s strong enough that you’ll click it but not so strong that you feel forced to do so. Much like the art of meditation.

Organic social isn’t enough on its own and paid promotion can help extend your reach and get more active users to your site. But without its audience and community aspect, paid social can’t fully thrive. Users will only pay for something if they think it’s worth it and organic offers better social engagement than an ad with a call to buy or download.

It’s about adding value to the user, not hounding them with sales pitches.

Social platforms to consider

Facebook is the most popular social network but it’s not the only one out there and not necessarily the best for what your business offers. Consider the following platforms (with approximate monthly average user figures):

Twitter

• Monthly average users: 330 million, as of 2019
• Good for: Easy setup for content promotion, paid or organic, less restrictive reach, hashtags can help push content to the right audiences
• Does it offer paid promotion?: Yes, Twitter Ads.

Pinterest

• Monthly average users: 335 million, as of Q4 2019 [PDF]
• Good for: Visual content; perfect platform for demographics interested in art and crafts, design, interior design, gardening, and fashion
• Does it offer paid promotion?: Yes, Pinterest Ads.

Reddit

• Monthly average users: 430 million, as of 2019
• Good for: Great for crowdsourcing opinions and building a community through subreddits
• Does it offer paid promotion?: Yes, Reddit Advertising.

Snapchat

• Monthly average users: 46 million, as of 2019
• Good for: Similar to Instagram so great for video content and the latest trends, good for targeting younger demographics
• Does it offer paid promotion?: Yes, Snapchat Ads.

LinkedIn

• Monthly average users: Over 260 million
• Good for: Professionals and businesses
• Does it offer paid promotion?: Yes, LinkedIn Ads.

Read: 16 Best PPC Alternatives To Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Microsoft Ads and What Is The Best Social Media For Professionals To Use?

Organic and paid social tools

There are plenty of tools that you can use to help with your organic and paid social media. Platforms and services like Hootsuite and Buffer can help automate and schedule content, saving you a lot of time and effort in the process. In order for paid social media to be effective, you want to know your audience inside and out, so using platforms like Google Analytics on your website can help understand who your target audience is. As a result, it can help make both organic and paid efforts more successful.

There are certainly different purposes for organic social media and paid social media. However, what’s similar is that they can’t work without one another. So it’s important that you continue to use both for your business.

And if you plan to use Facebook and its ad platform but don’t have the resources to manage every fine detail, you should try Adzooma. The platform’s Opportunity Engine uses artificial intelligence (AI) to find the best suggestions for your campaigns to boost sales and make Facebook management a doddle.

Conclusion

Before you jump into creating a hybrid social media strategy and maxing out your budget, consider the following questions:

• What do I want to achieve on social?
• What am I offering?
• What is my budget?
• What is my target audience?

Knowing the answers to these questions will help you shape your strategy and find the right balance between paid and organic. If you plan to experiment, try it with organic social and low-cost methods first, find what works and what doesn’t and then move onto paid promotion.

What is artificial intelligence?

Artificial intelligence (often shortened to AI) is a branch of computer science that aims to create machines that automate certain tasks and make them more efficient. AI is used in hundreds of industries around the world in different forms:

• Factories use robots to automate streamline processes and production
• Recruitment agencies use AI in intelligent software which helps to boost productivity
• AI is perfect for forecasting, useful in industries that need data on supply and demands and finding the best time to launch products

Social media users and the platforms themselves use AI extensively. For example, people have been using AI models as “influencers”. One such AI-generated influencer, Miquela, has over 2 million Instagram followers with the kind of feed that’d make a human influencer jealous.

The science of social media networks

When looking deeper into social media networks, you’ll start to see the science behind them. Used as a way to not only identify how users interact but as a method of identifying how companies can target consumers, there are so many elements that go into each application.

The technology

AI can facilitate the sharing of information, thoughts and ideas and give users quick access to content. That includes their own personal information, photos, and documents and content from news feeds.

Facebook, for example, uses a tool called Deeptext to interpret posted content and find its meaning. It does this with machine learning and then provides relevant ads to users based on that content.

Utilising a range of languages and operating systems including Python, PHP, JavaScript, and Linux, social networks can automate processes with increasing ease. It happens so fast, you’d think it was instant.

The psychology

Social media has had a profound effect on psychology. We spend hours scrolling through different pages, wanting to stay up to date with the latest information so we don’t feel left out (known as FOMO). When we post, we rely on three parts of our neural systems, according to a paper by Dar Meshi, Diana I. Tamir, and Hauke R. Heekeren:

• Social cognition (how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations)
• Self-referential cognition (how people process, store, and relating information to themselves, usually from external sources)
• Social reward processing (how people process the rewards we get from interacting with people and social situations)

On the topic of social media’s effect on how we think, author Nicholas Carr said:

“What psychologists and brain scientists tell us about interruptions is that they have a fairly profound effect on the way we think. It becomes much harder to sustain attention, to think about one thing for a long period of time, and to think deeply when new stimuli are pouring at you all day long. I argue that the price we pay for being constantly inundated with information is a loss of our ability to be contemplative and to engage in the kind of deep thinking that requires you to concentrate on one thing.”

Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: How The Internet Is Changing Our Brains

With these kinds of behaviours, along with other social and emotional influences that are picked up by social media networks, a never-ending AI-influenced cycle continues to spin with its users in the middle.

Customer behaviour

When looking more deeply into how businesses use them, you can clearly see the effect on customer behaviour. Businesses use social network graphs to adapt their social media strategy so that it suits their respective platforms. This, along with a better understanding of the psychology behind interactions and sharing on social media, marketers can develop content that generates higher conversion rates and build trust between them and their client base.

Benefits of AI in social media

Already, you’ll probably be aware of the ways in which social media marketing can benefit your business. But by effectively using AI in social media, there is a whole host of other benefits that you can take advantage of.

Automation

One of the biggest advantages of using AI in social media is its automation capabilities. Whether this is in automating content creation, content curation or another process, it will make your business far more productive. How? Well, not only will it speed up processes so that it can be ‘delivered’ to customers far quicker, but it will give your employees more time to spend on other aspects of their roles.

Other examples of tasks to automate in social media management:

• Social listening
• Social engagement
• Content scheduling
• Content republishing
• Analytics tracking

If you’d prefer not to use a tool, you can always use a social media marketing service to do it for you and many of the best agencies use AI at the core of their processes.

Measuring of performance

Another huge benefit of AI in social media is that it allows marketers to analyse and track every step that they take. From identifying the performance of an ad to tracking user-engagement and invaluable insights into content, it’s an advance in technology that businesses appreciate. Tools like Hootsuite, for example, give powerful insights to users about their customers and their choices.

But be warned: AI isn’t perfect. The data it uses comes from humans and if there’s any bias in the inputted data, there’ll be bias in the output.

Optimised content

As mentioned above, AI can do a great job of optimising social media content thanks to machine learning. By learning from the generated data, ML systems can create high-quality patterns that better content in the future.

How is AI used in social media?

AI is a key component in almost every social media network today. Let’s dive into how Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest utilise it in further detail:

Facebook

Facebook uses a variety of AI tools to heighten each user’s experience. Not only can they use that data to generate suggestions, but through machine learning, they use facial recognition that allows tag suggestions. This is particularly useful for businesses that want to target customers to gain recognition and gain publicity.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is another social media network that has long been using AI in their everyday processes. Its technology provides connection suggestions, targets posts to users, offers specific job recommendations and showcases better candidates for employers.

LinkedIn Talent Solutions is LinkedIn’s employer “marketplace” where they can find potential candidates for their job listings. Using AI with its LinkedIn Recruiter product, it creates “talent pools”.

Instagram

The first way that Instagram uses artificial intelligence is seen on its Explore page. Picking up trending posts and stories due to the hashtag that’s used, it presents them to you in a neatly wrapped package.

In 2016, the company changed its algorithm so its news feed was more value-based, rather than chronologically ordered, although that change has proved controversial. In its current format, the algorithm is optimised for each user, based solely on their preferences.

Pinterest

The main reason why so many users love Pinterest is because of the personalised content that it shows. An aspect that requires AI to work, without it, it’s fair to say that the network wouldn’t be as successful.

However, another example of how they use AI is through the new feature – Pinterest Lens. Through this application, it allows users to take a photo. Once this action is carried out, aspects of it are decoded, from the shape to colours. Based on the information gathered, it shows related results to the user.

The algorithms of social networks

Each social network uses a different algorithm and although we’ve briefly touched on these above, let’s go into a bit more detail.

Starting with Facebook, throughout the years their algorithm has changed depending on certain factors including trends and the demands of their users.

After recent changes, Facebook announced they wanted to use ranking signals in order to increase customer engagement. The overarching algorithm takes into account a user’s past behaviour through who they interact with, the media they post and how popular it was. Making the platform more transparent, they are now offering user’s more control over what appears on their homepage.

For Instagram alongside utilising AI within their algorithm to showcase trending posts on the home page, they also introduced a way of identifying spam and comments that are thought to be harmful.

This is done through the aforementioned DeepText technology. Moderating the content, it’s a step that’s valuable to both everyday users and marketers as it means that only genuine users can find their page. This is particularly important at the moment, as so many fake followers and trolls are constantly on the networking site.

Another feature that Pinterest introduced within their algorithm is PinSage. Based on neural networking, it ensures that every search you enter is related to the particular theme that you wanted to find. Not only is this convenient to users as it only shows them useful content, but for businesses as they are able to post content with high ranking keywords.

Competitive analysis

Businesses post on social media a lot – it’s just a fact. And because of this, it makes it easy for their competitors to create content based upon what content is already out there.

For example, if you’re thinking of creating a social media post, you could go onto your competitor’s page to see what they have already done. Staying ahead and countering their efforts, you can remain on top.

But as well as traditional social media monitoring tools (e.g. as a tool that alerts you when a business uploads a particular post), you can now use tools that have AI built-in. These give you the benefit of being able to identify any complaints on posts as it captures every social media post surrounding your competitor.

Social listening

Another element of social media in which AI is making a big impact is social listening. To put it simply, social listening is a technique that’s used to monitor a business’ social media channels. Picking up any mentions of the brand, related discussions or customer feedback, it’s something that’s available to do on all social media networks.

Through social media listening tools, organisations are able to efficiently analyse millions of conversations and effectively identify any patterns within the data. They can then use these insights to inform their customer service efforts, product development and overall marketing strategy.

A more efficient way of discovering this information, it’s replacing more traditional methods such as interviews and surveys.

Linking with this, is how AI can measure social sentiment. Through the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and computational linguistics, social media is able to analyse all of the social data it collects.

Image recognition

Image recognition technology that has AI within it will efficiently detect a brand’s exposure and allow for better metrics. Enabling companies to increase their visual appeal and aesthetic to customers on a more personal level, it increases engagement in the long run.

A technology that’s looking to transform social media marketing, it’s one that you shouldn’t ignore.

AI in social media analytics

Businesses will be pleased to know that there is now a variety of tools available that use AI in order to analyse social data. From consumer intelligence platforms to consumer feedback analysis tools, these enable businesses to gather the data before learning from it.

A web tool that shows exactly which social sites are driving the most traffic to your website, it will also help you to make long-term goals and make intelligent decisions – things that will benefit your company, as it could lead to higher revenue and profits.

Natural language processing (NLP)

NLP is a branch of AI centred on the interaction between humans and computers using natural language. Google is a major proponent of NLP and has an API for people to test it out. It allows not only for translation and word processing but to enable social listening, for the extraction of information and for customer service chatbots amongst other useful tools. Assisted by sentiment analysis, it allows businesses to market products more effectively.

Improves influencer strategies

Lastly, AI can be used within social media as a way of improving influencer strategies. A popular and effective marketing technique within the industry, it aims at boosting ROI and organic reach. But is only effective when it’s used correctly.

So how is AI helping with this? Well, AI allows marketers to choose influencers that are suitable to promote their products. Scanning through the millions that are available on the social media network, it makes the process far quicker. Something that’s essential along with regular management, you’ll know that you’re on the way to a successful influencer strategy that generates leads.

Need help with your social media?

Managing your social media platforms can be quite a time-consuming task. Here are our top social media management companies/tools that you can use to help:

• Crowdfire
• PromoRepublic
• POSTOPLAN
• Taplink
• Iconosquare
• Brand24

Final thoughts

Those are just a few examples of how AI works behind the scenes to influence social media networks. Something that will continue to change as the technology develops and evolves, the future is exciting for any business that’s harnessing it.

A fundamental part of how you increase customer engagement, generate leads and grow your brand, without it, it’s clear that your influence within the network would not be as powerful.