We recently unpacked the various social channels and their best uses in our webinar “Let’s Get Social! Choosing the Right Social Channels to Move Your Digital Strategy Forward” (check it out here). During the webinar, we had some excellent questions arise that our resident social expert, Jennifer Walker, tackles to equip you with some social savvy.
Q: I’ve heard that there’s a lot of set up for Facebook Instant Experiences. Is that true? And is it more on the HTML side or graphic design side?
For Facebook Instant Experiences, it’s true that setup is very different from the traditional Facebook ads, but these ads can also support a lot of flexibility and creativity! The good news is that there is no HTML or coding needed since it is all built through the Facebook Platform. However, there are more detailed graphic requirements that need to be created to make these ads successful.
We have helped take the complexity out of the builds for our partners. The level of complexity in building ads can range from a handful of creative assets to more complex ads. We have helped partners with both. We have built ads with a more streamlined number of graphics and interactivity, but we have also helped partners build very complex, very interactive ads. It all depends on the partner and their needs.
When working on Instant Experience ads, we provide our partners with a list of standard assets and help them understand how these graphics will work together once in their ad. From there, our team builds out a draft for partners to review and give creative direction on. This will help us refine the ad until we are ready to launch. Alternatively, Mogo can help with the creative execution of your Instant Experiences, as well as all your creative needs. If you are curious, just ask your sales rep to walk you through some of the capabilities.
Our advice for anyone working with Instant Experiences for the first time is to keep is simple. It can be a little overwhelming when you go to build your ad, especially with all the customizable options. Keeping your first ad simple and the number of graphics lower will help you build out a great first Instant Experience.
Source: www.ditii.com
Q: Can you speak to the role of visual vs. audio in Instagram stories? What percentage of people actually listen with audio?
They both play very different roles in Instagram Stories. Facebook reports that over 60% of the Stories are viewed with the sound on! It just means that visuals and audio are combined to help engage audiences. In our perspective, audio helps capture the viewer and keeps their attention, while video/design helps tell the story you want your audience to see. When combining both, it really helps connect your audience more deeply to your message and your brand!
When building out your Instagram story assets, we advise partners to take both audio and visuals into account. For your visual elements, we recommend designing them as if the sound will be off so that your story can still resonate with or without sound playing. In terms of design, we tell them to use speed throughout the ad to keep the viewer’s attention, show different scenes or perspectives, bookend a story with your brand, and of course experiment with your design elements and approach. For audio, we recommend using that to help support your visual elements.
In order to achieve the best results and make the biggest impact, use both audio and visual elements in your stories. This helps engagement and makes your message resonate with your audience!
Source: instagram-press.com
Q: I’ve seen that Facebook suggests that 3+ minute videos gain more organic views, but you’ve said that the best length for a video is 15-30 seconds. Can you talk about that discrepancy?
Organic and paid media play two very different roles in the customer journey.
Organic media lives on your social media pages and reaches people who follow your pages/profiles. This audience is made up of people who have opted into seeing more content from you. It’s an important audience since they like your brand and want to get regular updates from you, so continuing a conversation with this group is important for your brand. Also, the content you post organically will last a lot longer on your profile pages allowing new or potential followers to discover it at a later date. Since you are reaching a more engaged audience who wants to see your content, Facebook’s 3 minute video makes a lot of sense. It means this audience is looking for more education-driven content, wants to learn more about a performance or brand, and is more comfortable consuming that type of content.
On the other hand, paid media is sponsored posts that allow you to extend your reach and influence past people who are following you. The biggest difference between the two is that organic content is free to post with a limited reach, while paid media requires a financial investment and reaches a much broader audience. In fact, paid media is a powerful tool to discover new audiences and nurture people who aren’t necessarily following your brand on social channels. This strategy allows you to run ads for a specific period of time since it doesn’t have the longevity of organic content. As for video length, since we are reaching an audience that may or may not engage with your brand’s content, we tend to see a real decrease in length of time someone is willing to engage with an ad. What we’ve found, with support from our Facebook team, is that people really only engage with video ads up to about 30 seconds. While you can post longer paid videos, it likely won’t perform as well. When advising our partners, we tell them to make their video ads 30 seconds to 1 minute max, knowing that the first 15 seconds are going to be the most attention-grabbing.
Lengthier videos do have their place in your marketing efforts, but with paid media the key is knowing how best to influence your audience in order to increase your return on investment.
Q: Are there any stats or facts to know about the effectiveness of using Facebook’s custom AR tool, Spark AR? Usage/penetrance/use cases?
For those less familiar with AR, it stands for Augmented Reality. It’s a creative feature that allows people to overlay visual elements to the images or videos you may be using in your media efforts. There are a few key examples such as filters that are applied to images or videos like this:
While we’ve seen faster adoption of AR on platforms like Snapchat, we know there’s going to be a growing interest in Facebook and Instagram AR amongst our partners. There’s major benefits to jumping into AR as an early adopter because there’s an opportunity to become a leader in the AR space! Here are some recommendations and best practices:
Test and experiment to find what resonates most with your audience. Use AR to support your customer journey. As an arts organization, think about providing your audience with an immersive, engaging example of your venue or event.
Facebook’s Spark AR is one of the tools that can be leveraged to help build out AR experiences. It’s a drag and drop environment that enables users to design and build the interactivity for their AR environments. With Spark AR you can build anything from environment enhancements (changing the background of an image), self-expression (changing someone’s face in an image), or create a fully interactive 3D experience. For more inspiration, take a look at the Spark AR site.
As the development and capabilities of AR continue to grow, we will see it layered into more and more marketing campaigns over time.
Q: Are there any specific arts genres that appear to be leading in social media campaign effectiveness? Example: Opera better than ballet? Symphony better than festivals? etc.
Is there a clear leader from a genre perspective? I would have to say no. Simply because it’s very challenging to compare apples to oranges – what performs best on social media is typically different for each. Each type of arts organization will have their own audiences, budgets, objectives, performances, and creative! It makes it hard to say definitively one performs better than another.
Since we work with all types of arts organizations, we have benchmarks across all of our genres that can be tailored to your geographic region or your specific vertical that can help guide you to understanding your personal performance.
Mogo uses key benchmarks to help enhance performance with things like refined targeting, data-driven optimizations, supporting or creating engaging ads, and applying the learnings from one campaign to the next to find growth and improvement.
So while there is no clear leader from a genre perspective, we do work with each partner to identify what success will look like for each individual campaign and use years of arts marketing learnings to provide partners top results.
Q: What do you think of Boosts vs Facebook Ads?
Boosted posts have their place in your media planning. It really depends on your goals, budget, and how long you want to promote your ads. Here is what we mean:
When you boost a post, you are paying to promote a standard timeline post on your page to increase its reach to audiences outside of your followers. This is the easiest way to advertise on Facebook. Unlike Facebook Ads, Boosts don’t have the same level of customization capabilities.
When boosting a post, you will get two targeting options:
- People who like your page and their friends
- People you chose through targeting
These include limited target selections like geo, age, gender, and up to 10 interest groups. This is good for quick, fairly broad targeting pushes. It’s not great for campaign and audience insights, learnings to apply to your next campaigns, or achieving the most effective reach.
Facebook ads will give you much more flexibility, such as the type of placements, campaign objectives, and more advanced targeting capabilities. Extended targeting includes pixels, specific URLs, CRM, and look-alike targeting, which often tends to drive the most conversions on all our campaigns.
We often work with arts organizations who run their own boosted campaigns. We will run their always-on conversion campaigns while their internal team focuses on boosted posts for announcements and quick event promotions, such as sales or one-day events. That way we are all working together on helping drive social success!
We hope that we’ve answered some of your burning social advertising questions. If you have more questions, please shoot us an email at hello@mogoartsmarketing.com or reach out to your account strategist if you are one of our partners. We look forward to continuing the conversation!