It’s a dilemma facing many entertainment industry marketers — how and when to pair organic content with paid social advertising. As more brands build social followers and engagement numbers continue to drop, many marketers are looking for new methods to get their message in front of new audiences.
A marketer might create a small budget to utilize Facebook’s Sponsored Stories feature or pay to drive search or display traffic to a social landing page, even promote a Tweet.
“It’s just another tool to get the message out,” said Kim Nguyen with Bradley Center in Milwaukee. “When you pay for an ad on Facebook, you can target your audience in terms of both interests, geography and demographics. It’s just a better tool for getting your message out there.”
Nguyen said she makes her decision based on the content itself — some events are so popular they don’t need help going viral. The Bradley Center just hosted the first two rounds of the NCAA Men’s Final Four and the interest for every post on the series was off the chart. But if a post is designed to drive interest in a slow-selling show or an event that needs help, then they’ll sometimes put a small budget behind it to get it going.
“We definitely see a difference when we promote the post,” she said. “We’re constantly testing our content against the ever-changing Facebook algorithm and finding new ways to drive interest.”
So what type of strategy should venues utilize when planning their social media advertising? Scott Burth with design and advertising group RealArt said the most common mistake among marketers is to rely on too much paid advertising, or none at all.
“It’s important to strike a balance between paid content and organic content,” he said. “On the one hand, there are brands that think they can buy their way into news feeds. They pay to boost the reach of posts or Tweets that push any message they desire.”
This strategy leads to unengaged audiences and can also cause social network visibility algorithms to penalize the reach of a brand’s future content, Burth said. This can lead to a waste of resources and worse, poor brand credibility. If consumers feel like they’re being baited into clicking on spam, they’re much less likely to click through in the future.
“On the other hand, we see brands that think they don’t or shouldn’t have to pay to reach social audiences. They figure they’ve invested in building an audience and they should be able to talk to it for free,” he said. “The reality is that social channels are filled with many people and brands competing for a limited amount of space.”
Understanding Engagement
“There’s no one metric you should rely on when trying to measure overall reach,” said Gavin Mulloy, Marketing manager for the Granada Theater in Dallas. “I’ve always told my staff that all of Facebook’s metrics should be taken into account when measuring the reach of any single campaign.”
Still, Mulloy admits he has his favorite metric — engagement.
“That’s the measurement of all your interactions, as well as your total reach and the percentage of fans that see your posts,” he said. “Engagement rate is always relative to page size — a venue with 1,000 fans is measured the same as a venue with 100,000 fans.”
For pages with a low follower count, engagement rates can fluctuate rapidly on a day-to-day basis. In 2012, Facebook issued a report noting that the typical Facebook post reaches 12 percent of a brand’s social audience. But as more brands begin to use the platform, that engagement rate continues to drop.
Jackie Chang is the director of Partnerships at Facebook. During a panel at the PACNet Conference in Newport Beach, Calif., she said that the tech giant was taking notice of dropping engagement rates for events and concerts, especially as they compete against more static ads for companies in the retail and services space.
“One of the things we’re working on is redesigning the way Facebook handles events,” she said. The popular calendar feature is utilized by many venues, but the problem is that there’s no differentiation between a friend’s party or other personal commitments and huge events like arena concerts and music festivals.
Chang said the company is rethinking the Events tab to give event promoters a special engagement channel for branding their offerings. The new tab is still in the design phase and could be available sometime in early 2015.
Choosing Between Paid or Organic
So how does one make the decision about boosting content? Burth has a bit of unconventional advice — only pay to boost content that has already gone viral.
“Before you pay to promote something with a boost or an ad, make sure its natural engagement has already taken off,” he said. “Paying to boost something that won’t extend far is a waste of your money. The beauty of Facebook advertising is that you can see what works best, and then add money after the fact.”
It’s important to outline concrete goals for the overall social strategy before the launch of a campaign. This will inform your paid strategy, he said.
“If you want to maximize campaign visibility and reach, you’d want to run ads to your campaign landing page or tab and optimize for clicks and traffic,” he said. “If you want to optimize for leads or form fill outs, then you’ll optimize your ads for conversion.”
Either type of optimization can be done automatically with the social media applications, like Buddy Media, Hootsuite or Wildfire by Google. Burth recommends beginning with a free application and experimenting with different platforms before settling on a set system.
Finally, Burth recommends developing a ‘real time marketing nest egg’ that an organization can easily access during moments that matter — it could be a reaction to a breaking news story, or an unexpected post that skyrockets in popularity.
“You can also use this nest egg budget when a piece of content is getting high organic engagement,” he said. “If you’re on Facebook, pay to promote the post. If you’re on Twitter, do a sponsored Tweet. If your promotion is running well, use paid search or display to boost traffic to the social landing page. Just develop a strategy to increase your reach during big moments, both planned and unexpected.”
Interviewed for this story: Kim Nguyen, (414) 227-0688; Scott Burth, (212) 683-7325; Gavin Mulloy, (214) 824-9933