Social Media | Moontoast | The Leader in Social Marketing, Social Analytics and Social ROI

When you run a social channel as a brand, band, or business, you’re really the ringleader, rockstar, and emcee to a world-size pool of people. The show you bring to stage is going to determine how much and what segment of that pool will pay attention and fall in love with you. How do you start to deliver amazing experiences to an online audience? Be a gracious and entertaining host.

What does that even mean? All of the content you create and share should not be created from the perspective that you’re doing this for the benefit of the brand. You’re creating and sharing for them. The long tail result of great content is a growing fan base and increased brand awareness. Give people a great experience and not only will they build deeper relationships with your brand, but they begin to tell their friends.

Here are some ideas to help get you started:

Create a content calendar.
Follow the calendar.
Do two big things each month. This could be a sweepstakes, special sale, or free download of new music.
Do one meaningful thing each week. It’s easy to run mini-contests in which you simply give away product to a handful of fans.
Dish. Give behind-the-scenes content, useful tips, etc.
Be awesome regularly.

Big things get people’s attention. Little things keep them around.

Delivering happiness through social channels is all about creating interesting content and special offers that surprise and delight. By giving people access to special events online, you can easily capture new email addresses, acquire new customers, and generate word-of-mouth and brand awareness.

Moontoast’s Social Activation Engine is a platform that lets social media marketers create sweepstakes, contests, giveaways, and commerce offers quickly and easily to manage effective social campaigns. Our apps also tie back to our Social Analytics Suite to enable you to measure the performance of each and use that data to understand not only what fans react to, but also how you can better distribute the offers. We measure using DITE methodology (discovery, interaction, transaction, endorsement) to understand strengths and weaknesses of an offer. For example, a strong transaction rate but low discovery means you can increase revenue or leads by posting more often. High discoveries but a low conversion rate can mean you need to take a look at how compelling the offer is. Looking at these and other data in the Social Analytics Suite helps to drive better campaign performance.

For day-to-day content, here are some tips we’ve seen to be highly engaging:

Post big images. Bands can post images with song lyrics. Brands can post lifestyle or ‘results’ images from projects. Photos and videos also have a greater EdgeRank weight.
Go on-camera. Let people behind the curtain and see the face of the brand with behind-the-scenes content or even show the social team answering questions.
Pay attention to analytics. Some posts will get broadcast to more people than others. If a post is getting low impressions, share the post again at different times of the day to try to get more eyeballs on it.
Remember the feed. Social content appears in people’s feeds and then fall down and off the page as other content replaces it. People do not, by and large, visit a brand’s main page once they have Liked or Followed your brand; they don’t need to return as they then receive updates in the feed. The lesson here is to post content to reach a broad audience and don’t worry about posting too often. The half-life of a post is around 80 minutes.
Use the voice of a human, not a robot. Don’t be afraid to showcase a little (or a lot of) brand personality, not just in graphics or videos, but as the voice of the brand.

So there you go. Get into the habit of doing little surprises weekly and a couple bigger campaigns monthly. Take the stage and make it a great show!

Photo by Incase

There, I said it. It’s been said before and increasingly it’s become real due to the Social Revolution. As the revolution gains momentum, brands have the need to reach out directly to consumers because they expect on-demand engagement and offers.

Here are some consumer stats giving weight to this Social Revolution:

70% active online adult social networkers shop online (Nielsen)
23% of online time is spent on social networks (Experian)
68% of consumers say they use social networks when shopping online (Ogilvy)
6.3 - the number of retailers ‘followed’ by the average consumer (Social Commerce Study)
The average Facebook store sees a 10% month-to-month increase in transactions (Ogilvy)

Social consumers are there, conversing and willing to discover new brands, interact with those brands, transact directly and endorse the brands in increasing numbers.

The age of the consumer has the “Big Mo” with them! They are armed with more information and content than ever before. They have a voice to converse, share and comment on a particular brand. The social consumer is an empowered consumer with on-demand expectations. These expectations include finding unique content, engaging in differentiated offers, and connecting in the social experiences they are spending an increasing amount of their time in.

The purchase journey from discovery of a brand to consumer is still confusing. How do you engage them? How do you find them? What do they want? Will they buy? Will they endorse? Think about the myriad of items floating through the mind of the brand manager. They know the social market is big: $30 billion in 2015 according to Booz & Company. But how do they get to the consumer?

Moontoast has the answer. Our powerful engagement and commerce apps bring the necessary tools, methodology and insights to the brand manager to reach these powerful consumers. These apps follow a simple methodology:

Discovery - Reach out to multiple social and mobile networks to find the consumer.
Interact - Allow the consumer to engage with your brand on their time, in their environment. Whether it’s listening to a song, watching a video, or being presented with a unique offer, the consumer is in charge and can interact where and when they want.
Transact - Incent the consumer to take action. It could be as simple as an email capture for a free song, a sweepstakes entry, contest, or an actual purchase, all taking place without friction within the experience the consumer is in.
Endorse – Allow the consumer to easily comment on and share their experience, purchase, or interaction with their friends. This brings the brand additional potential consumer acquisition through their fans’ networks.

Moontoast facilitates this DITE (discovery, interaction, transaction, endorsement) methodology for the brands we work with. These brands understand the details of this methodology and its results through our Social Analytics Suite. It solves the brands needs to fulfill the consumer’s demands!

It might be tempting to buy into the field of dreams mentality that says “build it and they will come.” This simple statement really defines the attitudes and mindsets of a lot of business owners, marketers and brand managers today. There appears to be an assumption that once you open your store, launch your website or finish your Facebook brand page that consumers and fans will magically flock there.

Crazy, isn’t it?

We live in fast paced times where attention spans are growing shorter and shorter by the minute. We also live in the age of convenience. People stay in their cars and drive up to windows to get their food. If the line is moving too slow they speed off somewhere else, sometimes right across the street. There’s a Starbucks across from the Starbucks!

In the online world we call the internet, anything that is fast in the real world is only multiplied. For example, in 2011 150,000 new URL’s were launched every day! That was a 21% increase from only two years prior. Facebook is estimated to hit 1 billion users this August. That’s a lot of eyeballs!

With that kind of growth, it’s not hard to see that simply building and launching a website or webstore and expecting people to discover and engage with it is nothing short of a pipe dream.

At Moontoast we’ve come up with a pretty great solution to this problem. We took a different approach and said “why not distribute your marketing and commerce efforts into the channels where people are spending time online.” It’s not limited to only commerce, either. This is increasingly how consumers are expecting to receive offers and loyalty rewards.

Who are we talking about?

Everybody. Everywhere. All the time. Online.

It started with e-mail lists and official websites in the 1990’s, it continued with CPC advertising in the early 2,000’s and now we are full speed into the era of The Social Revolution. Feeds are king. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, YouTube and other social arenas are where everybody is spending the bulk of their time online.

The next generation consumer will expect to be able to sign up for contests, make purchases, vote on new products and any other imaginable transaction anywhere he or she wants. In fact, they probably won’t even be on a computer. They will want to buy those cool new shoes from their iPhone while they are commuting into work on the train. They will order concert tickets from their iPad while they are in bed at the end of a long work day. In the same way they post photos of the concert they are at on Instagram or food they are eating on Foodspotting today, they will interact with your brand in the future in any channel available. The question is, will you be there when they come?

The age of social is here. Your brand lives everywhere online. It’s time to transact like it. This is your opportunity and we’re here to help.