In order for a campaign to work, companies need to be ready for the onslaught of responses. Downed servers, unprepared fulfillment challenges, and unprepared customer service response can make a viral social media campaign falter. After all, hoping to go viral only works when you actually think you will. Here are some of the main points to consider when creating a viral campaign.

Use Social Media to Engage, Connect, and Reach Your Goals

If your content strategy isn’t well planned, your campaign won’t get off the ground. You can have a great giveaway, where the prize is a free trip or even a MacBook, but if your photos, text, and videos aren’t appealing, that effort will struggle to hit your goals and benchmarks. This is a mistake many marketers make — they believe any sweepstakes or free swag guarantees viral status, and that’s just not the case. Generally, content that goes viral isn’t even offering anything for free; it becomes popular simply because it strategically captures users’ attention.

Viral content tends to evoke specific emotions

Joy

• serenity
• cheerfulness
• delight
• elation
• ecstasy

Trust

• acceptance
• tolerance
• admiration

Fear

• timidity
• apprehension
• fright
• dismay
• panic
• terror

Anticipation

• expectancy
• attentiveness
• interest
• vigilance
• curiosity

Anger

• Rage
• Fury
• Hostility
• Annoyance

Disgust

• loathing
• revulsion
• dislike
• aversion
• boredom

Sadness

• sorrow
• dejection
• grief
• gloominess
• pensiveness

Surprise

• uncertainty
• amazement
• astonishment
• distraction

One great example of this is security camera Nest Cam and their #CaughtOnNestCam campaign. They highlighted real footage from customers’ cameras, which included everything from a bear sighting to funny package deliveries caught in the act. Because Nest relied on user-generated content (UGC), they also created a built-in trust factor. When users see actual customer-supplied footage, it makes them more interested in the content since it’s from real people just like them.

If you don’t want to go the UGC route, consider using humor or unique visuals to make your campaign pop. IHOP does a great job with its Tumblr page. They share visually appealing, modern shots and capture what’s trending online, so their Tumblr posts are regularly shared by other users. Their user base gives them an opportunity to not only grow ongoing engagement, but to have a built-in audience for special promotions and announcements about new menu items or seasonal promotions.

As you build out your campaign, create a goal for what you want your content to accomplish. Is it to attract more followers, increase the number of email subscribers, or improve sales? Then work backward to figure out which metrics would best track these goals. For instance, if a 25 per cent increase in product sales is your goal, getting a higher click-through rate (CTR) may be a good metric to track. (Just remember that tracking sales doesn’t always show the whole picture.) Increasing follower count usually coincides with increasing user engagement, so be sure to track the metrics that matter most to your goals as you build and roll out your campaigns.

Connect Your Social Media Campaigns to Email Marketing

Email campaigns work in tandem with social media campaigns to create a cohesive push toward your end goal. Use the same branding and visuals in your emails to reach users with similar messaging in multiple mediums. This helps ensure that users who may have not seen your posts on Twitter will see something similar in their inboxes. For users who have already engaged on social media, this repeat messaging can help increase conversions and brand recognition.

Companies often don’t realize their social media efforts aren’t working with email to drive brand recognition: It’s working to drive email subscriptions themselves. For this, an effective tie-in to email marketing are drip campaigns, which is a series of automated emails sent to customers over a specific amount of time when they complete specific actions, such as subscribing to an email list after clicking through a social media post.

At each step in a campaign, tracking metrics can help determine which aspects of the project are doing well and what needs to be improved or scaled to a greater focus. Email metrics that need to be tracked include open rate (the percentage of users who open the email), click-through rate (CTR), and conversions (are users doing what you want them to?).

Viral content tends to evoke specific emotions

• 48% to entertain
• 17% to express themselves
• 13% to make others feel a specific emotion
• 11% to educate or be useful
• 11% another reason

Use Social Media and Email Campaigns to Encourage Visits to Landing Pages

For promotional social media and email content that drives users to complete a specific action, such as buy a product or enter a sweepstakes, the proper landing page is key.

Landing pages should be designed and written to perform based on these three metrics:

1. Increased time on page: The longer time a user spends on a landing page, the more likely they are to buy the product (or perform the action you’ve deemed a conversion).
2. Increased conversion rate: If a landing page is optimized properly, the ratio of visitors to sales should increase.
3. Decreased bounce rate: A landing page should be intriguing and inspire users to explore other pages on the site.

For better metrics (especially conversion rate), include a call-to-action (CTA) on every landing page. Most marketers include a CTA button or banner in the middle of the page and at the end, though it can also appear in the text, depending on natural fit and length.

A good landing page can help make your social media content, especially any viral posts, turn into something worthwhile for the company. While a great viral video or tweet is good for brand awareness, it may not always translate into revenue. Set up a directive for your social media content in the form of a conversion goal, and then build the email campaigns and landing pages to support it.

Overwhelmingly , people prefer to share positive content

In one study of the top 1,000 articles shared:

• 69,3% were positive articles
• 23% were neutral articles
• 7,7% were negative articles

Do You Have the Resources to Run a Viral Campaign?

Some brands may not be prepared for their own viral success. When you build your content, landing pages, and email campaigns, make sure you have the proper resources in place to handle the possible load that millions of views, visits, or retweets could have on your brand. Some areas to prepare include:

Website Hosting

Can your hosting plan and provider support a sudden influx of traffic? Many well-intentioned brands can’t handle the load on their website, which causes it to crash. Make sure you have the back-end resources to be able to scale hosting as needed to handle higher-than-average traffic. Ask the experts what resources you need in order to scale properly.

Customer Listening

A viral campaign leads to more questions, comments, and interest in your business and its products. Can your social media and customer service support staff handle the probable increase in social media messages, support requests, or emails that come with a viral campaign? Build out a process for popular posts and make sure you have enough support. Otherwise, your popularity might backfire if customers get upset that you aren’t answering them quickly.

Proper Inventory

If your content features a specific product or service, do you have inventory in place? Your campaign may take off with more enthusiasm than you expect. If you only have a limited inventory, make sure you list a cap in the beginning of your promotions. This can be a benefit, as it appeals to the sense of fear of missing out (FOMO). For instance, “We only have 1,000 hoodies at this special price” gives a greater sense of urgency than “We have hoodies on sale for $9.99.” Estimate the amounts of your product you’ll need for your campaign ahead of time.

Additionally, consider other potential issues that could be unique to your business and its offerings. Imagine the best-case scenario and think about what you need to scale to that point. Even if you don’t hit your “dream” goals, you’ll be prepared just in case.

Create a Roadmap for Your Future Campaigns

If you have a viral social media campaign, don’t make a one-hit wonder. Evaluate what aspects of your campaign worked. If your conversion rate was higher with your email campaigns than Facebook ads, it may be beneficial to spend more time and resources on email campaigns than social media ads the next time.

Focus on the metrics from each project. What did well, and what was lower than your expectations? If you had a great conversion rate, but your website bounce rate was high, consider offering a few related offers or pieces of content to drive users to other areas of your site. If your sweepstakes got a lot entries, but not a lot of engagement, consider bonus entries for social sharing or UGC. Experiment based on what the data tells you in order to work toward regularly engaging content, not just a massive hit everyone will forget in a month.

Find more tips for using social media for your business in our ebook, “#Winning at Social: 4 Steps to Enhance Your Social Media Strategy.”

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Pulse is a news feed that publishes hand-selected content written and generated by LinkedIn users. Since sharing articles on your profile helps you gain exposure, you must use your marketing platform to listen, analyze, publish, and engage the right content at the right time; this will give you a higher probability of being featured.

When you post new content on LinkedIn, your goal is to have it featured on Pulse, which will drive profile views and professional networking opportunities. If your content is selected and published, your LinkedIn profile must be optimized with a professional headshot or logo, banner image, and completed individual or company profile in order to capitalize on the exposure. Use the tips in the infographic below to become a LinkedIn marketing powerhouse and capitalize on the site’s tools and features.

The Best Ways to Market Your Business on LinkedIn

LinkedIn Features that Help You Market Your Business

• Consider increasing your use of these features on LinkedIn to improve your company’s social media presence, and gain a larger audience and customer base.
  • Messaging: New, smarter messaging feature, helps you connect and unlock new opportunities
    • Easily message a connection on LinkedIn
    • Offers insights across the site to help you break the ice in any new conversation
      • Example: Showing people within your network at a company you want to connect with
  • Posts
    • Sharing articles helps you gain exposure in your LinkedIn Community
    • Tips
      • Post insightful articles
      • Articles can be your own work or pieces you find compelling
• Know what to post and create content worth sharing with Social Studio
  • Build more meaningful relationships with customers by tapping into the power of social media in your marketing, customer service, and sales organizations
  • Harness social conversations with your customers on a 1:1 basis
    • Listen
    • Analyze
    • Publish
    • Engage
  • Videos and Presentations
    • Display valuable content items in your profile
    • Tips
      • Easily post presentations from SlideShare or videos from YouTube
  • Recommendations and Endorsements
    • A collection of recommendations significantly enhance your profile
    • Tips
      • Seek endorsements that will add credibility to your profile
      • Try to get at least 5 endorsements
  • Publications and Projects
    • Highlight books or eBooks you wrote and published
    • Highlight your successful projects
    • Tips
      • Include a description, link, and who you worked with
  • LinkedIn community features allow you to communicate and collaborate with other LinkedIn users
    • Groups
      • Help you stay informed and keep in touch with people who share your interests
      • Tips
        • Create your own
        • Join groups that focus on your areas of interest or expertise
        • Participate and add value to the discussion
        • Can help to expand your circle of influence
  • Company Pages
    • Powerful research tool you can use to find companies to do business with—or research competitors
    • Tips
      • Create a page for your company to showcase your expertise
        • Include a description, your physical address, and web address
      • To further your company page’s value, post:
        • Targeted jobs
        • Recruitment videos
        • Information about products and services

• Advanced LinkedIn Marketing Apps
  • You can add advanced applications to your profile
  • These apps can boost your business by:
    • Creating brand awareness
    • Generating more leads
    • Expanding your network
  • Tips
    • On your company page, use apps to:
      • Sync your tweets with Twitter
      • Play a video with SlideShare
      • Add your blog with WordPress
• LinkedIn URLs
  • The platform automatically creates a default address for your pages
  • Tip
    • Customize it to create a branded address
• Optimize your profile
  • Headshot
  • Tip
    • Use a professional quality photo
    • Recommended size: 400×400 pixels
  • Banner image
    • Tip
      • Recommended size: 1536 x 768 pixels
      • Use the same branding as on other social media profiles
      • Offer a value proposition specific to your audience
        • Example: “Follow us to learn how to drive more sales”
  • Headline
    • Tip
      • Use a complete sentence
      • Offer a clear value proposition
        • For example: “I help business owners get the search visibility they need”
  • Summary
    • Tip
      • Avoid using flowery or subjective language
      • List:
        • Areas you specialize in
        • Awards
        • Guest-posting gigs
        • Areas of competency
      • Use relevant keywords people may use
  • Remember:
    • Use relevant keywords
    • Encourage employees to like your page and share your content

Conclusion

By actively using the features on LinkedIn and properly setting up your profile you can increase your reach and improve your business standing.

Segue

For more tips on using social media as a company, check out our free eBook, “The Business Leader’s Guide to Becoming a Social Business.”

The post The Best Ways to Market Your Business on LinkedIn appeared first on Salesforce.

Welcome to The Marketing Cloudcast. It’s the podcast where marketing leaders shoot straight about key trends, technologies, and topics in marketing today. And now, straight from the Salesforce marketing cloud, it’s your co-hosts, Heike Young and Joel Book.

Joel Book (JB): Well hello again, everybody. Joel Book here at Salesforce. It’s that time again: Welcome to another terrific episode of The Marketing Cloudcast. A lot of you have been writing and emailing Heike Young and I about your desire to learn more about social listening. And we have responded. And we’ve got a great guest to really take you behind the scenes of what’s happening in modern day social listening and social media in general. And to introduce you to our very special guest today, it’s my pleasure to welcome in my friend and colleague, Heike Young.

Heike Young (HY): Well, thanks so much, Joel. And yes, you’re right: We do have a social media expert on deck today. Occasionally, we like to bring in people from Salesforce as well. I know you’ve heard a lot of our customers, our partners at Salesforce, also, a lot of external marketing leaders. People who don’t work at Salesforce that have written some incredible books, or some of our favorite speakers who have inspired me and Joel at different conferences. We have just a pretty broad palette of marketing experts we like to feature on this show.

And from time to time we like to bring in people here at Salesforce who have a particular area of expertise that we think would be great to share with you. And so in this topic of social, there’s really nobody better at Salesforce to talk to you about it than Luke Ball. He is senior director for product management at Salesforce and leads our social listening products. He’s previously the director of User Experience at GroupSwim and just an all-around very smart guy in this field of social media. So, Luke, thank you so much for sharing some of your time with us today.

Luke Ball (LB): Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

HY: So, Luke, lay it all out for us. You’ve been working at Salesforce for how long now?

LB: I’ve been at Salesforce about seven years now. Just hard to believe.

HY: And have you been working on the social products that entire time?

LB: In a sense, although not the social products as we’re talking about today. I worked on our Chatter products for many years, so sort of internal social collaboration, before moving to our social studio product, which is focused on social media management and insights.

Tech, Brands, and Social Media

HY: Okay. Got it. So a lot of practice, a lot of experience in this area of social listening and social publishing for businesses. What would you say is kind of the state of social media today? We have all of these new types of technologies available. I think companies are becoming more comfortable with using social for their brands. What’s kind of the lay of the land?

LB: It’s a great question. Social — it’s always a rapidly changing marketplace and landscape. I think we’ve been through the conventional hype cycle and maybe even arguably the trough of disillusionment, but I’m seeing a lot of maturation happening right now. I feel like many businesses are finally beginning to realize the full potential of social and incorporate it into their business processes, into their strategies in a more holistic way. So it’s a very exciting time to be working with our customers in that regard, because, initially, it was all about, “Oh, this new hot thing.” And everyone is so excited about it and the potential for change is so huge. And after that initial excitement, I think a lot of people were left wondering, “How does this fit into my business, how does this fit alongside other channels, how does this fit into my processes?” And we’re really starting to — we’re in the beginning stages of fully realizing that, and I see businesses really adapting it into much more fundamental holistic way.

JB: You say social media has reached that maturation point. My take on it, Luke — I look at social media in the context of the overall multi-channel mix or omnichannel mix that brands use. And to me, social media seems to be the epicenter of innovation. Social media has become — and this is just my opinion. It’s like this amazing Swiss Army knife for customer engagement. Not only has it become the go-to channel for content publishing, for social listening — social media has become the epicenter of modern-era direct response advertising for demand gen. And now you’ve got this whole new area of products like Facebook Messenger that I think are really going to revolutionize e-commerce and even customer support.

LB: Absolutely. And I don’t mean to say by maturation point that it’s necessarily stabilized. I was thinking more in regards to how it fits into business. I think there was a lot of struggle initially, but you’re absolutely right. We see new networks coming up every day and more specialization of networks in terms of who they’re reaching and how. We’re seeing new channels emerge within social sub-channels.

Messenger is a great example and that sort of one-to-one communication channel. Look at Snapchat: I think that’s one that’s still emerging, and people are still trying to figure out how brands fit into that conversation in a meaningful, scalable way. Messenger, in particular, I think, is probably the one to watch this year. [There’s a lot of] traction in Asia with WeChat and the marketplace in ecosystem or platform that WeChat has developed into — looking into that as an example for the potential this can have in the U.S. And we’re looking at things like Direct Commerce, right through the channel. We’re looking at customer service. We’re looking at ways to automate and scale this with the addition of bots and active agents in the conversation, too, where you don’t require that high-touch human intervention that you do in traditional social channels. Where it’s absolutely a best practice to have authentic real individual answers to every question and you don’t want to automate.

In the world of Messenger and similar platforms, automation is a key cornerstone to that strategy and I think that’s something that we all collectively kind of have to figure out. If a customer is having a conversation with a bot and then transfers to a human, what is the sort of social protocol around that handoff? Do we make it invisible? Do we make it highly opaque so that the user understands what’s happening? I think there’s a lot of evolving social protocols around that and conventions that haven’t been established yet.

Social Media as Customer Service

JB: It seems to me that the evolution of social has happened at such a rapid pace, Luke, that many brands are really struggling to keep up and really think strategically about how to really use social in different phases of the customer experience lifecycle. Whether it’s for demand gen, whether it’s for content publishing, social listening, driving e-commerce, and, as you just spoke, now using tools like Messenger for advanced customer service and customer support. What’s your advice for brands in terms of really — maybe taking a step back and really beginning to understand maybe more strategically where and when social as part of their whole omnichannel strategy really makes sense, and why they may need to invest more resources in it?

LB: That’s a really challenging question. I couldn’t agree more. I mean, just to sort of reiterate your key point. Social media: It’s real time. It’s extremely high volume. And people are almost literally falling all over themselves to tell you what they think about your brand, your competitors, your industry, your products. And that insight is actionable. It’s scalable. And it’s something that doesn’t just affect marketing. So I think when I see companies who don’t think big enough about the opportunity — they think of this as a marketing channel, they think of it as an outreach channel, they’ve pigeonholed it into a specific organization in their business — they are missing the bigger story, I think. So I would encourage companies to take a step back from how they look at it as a marketing channel. And think of it as when you look at the value of the content and the insight that’s coming through here, both on an individual one-to-one level and at an aggregate level, how can that inform your business?

Social customer service is probably the most mature sort of extension of this. So we’ve had some brands doing this for five or more years now, where they treat social as another channel right alongside email, and chat, and phone, and web inquiries. And one of the things that’s great about social, for customer service specifically, is you can do it at lower cost per case, higher turnout. And when you satisfy that customer, when you make them happy, that has an amplification effect that you don’t get in a private one-to-one channel like the phone, right? When you make somebody happy on social, not only are you changing their experience with that brand — and I think we’ve all had that experience where you’ve had that really magical customer service moment and it changes your relationship with that brand for years to come, right? You are now brand loyal when they fix that problem for you.

JB: Do you think brands like Citi — I’m just thinking about AskCiti, which is their channel on Twitter, where they use Salesforce’s social listening tools to monitor conversations that are taking place there where people are posting questions to be responded to by Citibank. Do you think that brands like Citi and others — and Cisco does a great job with this as well — are they seeing tangible ROI now tied back to customer service? In other words, have they been able to take their customer care, customer support to a level where they are seeing big increases in customer satisfaction because of this ability to do more proactive sense and respond customer service?

JB: Oh, absolutely. I don’t know the statistics for Citibank off the top of my head, but a couple other examples are Activision and HP, who both use this for social customer service. So Activision has seen a 378 per cent ROI on social customer service. As I mentioned before, they can do it with lower staffing costs. They find handling social cases is one-third the staffing cost of other channels, which is absolutely mind blowing. They’re servicing 100,000 fans per day across 15 Twitter accounts, across 6 million fans. So that’s an amazing example of ROI of scale.

And social customer service really is the most concrete ROI because you’re talking about a cost center. You’re talking about things where you want deflection, where you want fast turnaround. Social is really a proven channel there. HP is another one that has actually seen tangible changes to their bottom line. They cut their response times by 60 per cent. They’ve seen agent engagement with customers increase 187 per cent with social customer service. And they actually experienced a two per cent increase in their net promoter score brand-wide that they attribute back to their social customer service implementation. Now that’s a bottom line stat for you.

HY: That’s incredible. Luke, you talked a moment ago about social service as a public act, which I think is a huge benefit of social customer service, right? Because when you provide those “wow” moments they really can get amplified and shared broadly across social networks. People can see that if you’re an airline that you answered that tweet in the person’s moment of need. And I’ve even seen those turn into PR articles. Someone will write an article up on Mashable. It’s like, “Oh, you know, Southwest stepped in and saved the day when this lady’s kid got sick back home and they turned the plane for her.” And it all started on social or whatever that might be. What are your thoughts? And I think that that’s a huge benefit of social services, that broad amplification. What are your thoughts on some of these emerging private channels like Facebook Messenger, like Snapchat, where interactions are happening privately between the brand and the person? They’re kind of just that real, true one-to-one type of channel. Do you see this as a separate subset of social? And any ideas what we might call that? Because I see them as distinctly different things.

LB: Absolutely. And I think, to a larger extent, that’s true across the board. We say social and we paint with a pretty broad brush, right? And that’s inclusive of things like Google+, arguably YouTube, Pinterest, which is obviously a very different beast from Snapchat, from Instagram, right? Every one of these networks — Twitter, obviously, and Facebook being mainstays — every one of these networks has its own qualities, its own social protocols, its own strengths and weaknesses, and core audiences. So using social customer service is another example again.

Often times, people will leverage Twitter for social customer service because they know that when their request goes out there, there’s a sort of a shaming aspect to it. And so if you don’t delight the customer, you’re out there and you are sort of publicly letting that customer down. Whereas in Facebook, there’s Friendgating, right, so the brands don’t participate in the same way. So on Twitter I could hear that somebody’s talking bad about my brand, and it’s okay and almost expected that I would insert myself in the conversation even if I wasn’t directly mentioned. On Facebook that’s not okay, that would be invasive and actually hard to do from their privacy permissions. So people go to different networks for different things.

I think if somebody is living in a messenger ecosystem, that’s just their preferred way of reaching out. Just the same way we talk about email or web inquires. Everyone has their own sort of way of doing it. Ultimately, though, whether it’s public or private, it’s that person’s experience with the brand and whether they amplify that directly from the place where it happened or just leave with that feeling of delight, that has resonance regardless. And that’s going to show up in other places in their life and in other interactions with other potential consumers.

The Social Media Center of Excellence

HY: Luke, one of the key social media trends that I’ve heard you talk about is what you call the democratization of social entities, organizations. Can you tell us a little bit about what you mean by that?

LB: Sure. This is a topic that gives me a lot of personal passion of giving more people more tools and more empowerment to do their job. So sort of a history lesson: When social was first coming out and mainstreaming with brands, we saw it being covered by a lot of agencies, right? People essentially farmed it out to other companies because they didn’t know how to get started, they didn’t know what to do. Then we saw the onboarding of social practice inside the brands and that was largely in their customer service teams, that was in their consumer insights teams, PR, etc., and then eventually a standalone social team whose existence was to be social. And that was a small team of practitioners who handled all the app-on content and marketing, all the inbound community management, the analyst who gleaned the insights from the social conversation. That was kind of chapter two or chapter three, depending on how you look at it.

Now we’re in chapter four, and this is where we see the social practice scaling out in the enterprise. So that team of practitioners from a couple of years ago is now becoming a center of excellence. Their job is now more about enabling, empowering, governing, and selecting the strategy and tools for the rest of their business to be successful at social. We call this the hub-and-spoke model. Where you have that center of excellence at the middle and then at the spokes, you have different sub-brands in the portfolio or you have different functional roles, or you have different geographies and regions that manage themselves independently. Or some combination of different groups of the organization who look back to that center of excellence to how to do it, but ultimately are masters of their own destiny. And that has huge implications for the tools that you use, where it used to be that team of social practitioners could use five, six, seven specialized niche tools for different jobs. [Someone] in marketing doesn’t necessarily have time to master those or know when to use which.

So you need a different set of priorities for the tools that you use. They have to be very user-friendly and easy to learn. Easy to re-learn if I’m going in once a month; I need to be able to pick it back up quickly. They need to be mobile first, have access on the go. They need to be consolidated so that I can get everything at one-stop solution, and they need to be connected. So ultimately, that business data needs to be able to flow not just from their social tool, but flow into the other places where they live.

So in the Salesforce example, that’s data flowing, for example, from Social Studio into Service Cloud. The agent is using their native tools, speaking their native language in the agent console without having to go to somewhere else. Pushing social leads into Sales Cloud, so that you can look at prospects coming in and the sales reps can see this inbound channel without having to master social tool. So it’s both a combination of making the tool more accessible, but also making the data more accessible — if that makes sense.

The Depth and Breadth of Social Media Data

JB: I think that’s one of the most exciting things I see happening right now Luke, is this cross-cloud solution approach emerging. And just going back at the example that you just cited, where that initial engagement or interaction or hand raise from a customer might start, generated through social media. Maybe they’re responding to an ad that was placed. Maybe they have just read a positive review about a product and they want to know more. And by being able to sense and respond, by a brand being able to do that, share that lead with the lead quality team. Once it’s sales qualified, push it out to the dealer or push it out to the sales agent for follow up, log that in Sales Cloud, and then really begin to use Marketing Cloud for lead nurturing.

I think that whole integrated, multi-cloud solution really opens up tremendous opportunities for brands that are now able to really leverage that data, leverage that insight, and then use technology to really automate all of this interaction in near real time with the customer and move that individual through every stage of the whole customer experience lifecycle. This is something we’ve dreamed about for a long time, but it’s alive and well and available today. I think it’s just awfully exciting.

The other question I wanted to ask you, though: You’ve talked a lot about data. What’s your take about how well or not-so-well brands are really leveraging this really, really rich data that is coming out of all of these social interactions that customers are having with the brand? Do you think they’re really capitalizing on that and leveraging that data as effectively as they could be? And if not, what should they be doing?

LB: I don’t think most brands are fully realizing the value of this data that’s coming in. I think there’s a short list of leaders who are. It’s sort of back to the point where you’re speaking of earlier, is taking a step back and looking at how social can impact every stage of the journey. We have customers listing for life events, right? So for retail brands, for consumer brands, life events are these huge moments in time where you can shift somebody’s loyalties and shift their awareness of your brand, and that can have resonance for decades to come. So you can listen for life events and then put that customer on a journey that starts with marketing but then turns into a conversion, turns into customer service. We have customers who are doing customer service and then when somebody tweets them or service issue, we actually go to all their outbound marketing activities and pause those journeys. Because there’s nothing more alienating than getting promotional materials when you’re angry or frustrated with the brand. So crossing those lines is really, really powerful, but most brands are not equipped to do that. In that regard, socials are very much a vanguard of this next generation of customer experience management, right? You break down those walls, those conventional boundaries of what’s sales, what’s marketing, what’s service, and, really, because people go to it for all those different reasons and it fits into so many parts of their lives, they don’t care about any of those constructs. They just have a relationship with the brand.

I wish there was an easy answer of how to fully realize that, but it really is looking across those conventional boundaries, looking across those functional roles and saying, instead of, “What can my company do in this scenario?” It’s flipping the lens I think really, and saying, “What does my consumer, what does my customer want from me, and how do I fit into their life?” And then structuring around that. That flip is absolutely non-trivial. That’s disruptive. That’s hard and that’s work. But thinking from a customer’s perspective in, instead of from a company perspective out, I think is fundamentally what it’s about.

The Future of Social Media

HY: Yeah. I really like what you said, Luke, ask not what our company can do for you but what my customer wants from me. It’s pivotal. Luke, it’s almost the end of the year here and it’s almost the end of 2016. I know many of us are happy to embark on a new year and a lot of fresh goals for our marketing and personal lives, whatever that might be — getting in shape, organizing the closet. For social media, what is maybe the biggest trend that you’re looking at for 2017?

LB: That’s a good question. I think we spoke about Facebook Messenger. I think this is a really big play for Facebook, and I think… I’m really curious to watch how it plays out and what influence it has over other networks and how it fits into people’s lives. I think it’s unclear if it’ll be the same kind of success that WeChat saw in China, if it’ll be something different entirely, so I think that’s definitely one to watch. I think we’re going to see more of these one-to-one networks like the Snapchats. That we’re going to see more of that closed network trend happening. We’re going to see more niche networks come out. And I don’t think there’s sort of a — thinking way back in time to the browser wars where there was going to be an eventual winner. That was the perception. I don’t think social media has that same king-of-the-hill moment. I think there’s room for a lot of different players to fit in a lot of different places. So I don’t see that trend changing at all. And then, I think the relationship of commerce to social is going to come to fruition in this year and just in the way that we’ve seen customer service in the last couple years.

HY: Lots to be excited about. Luke, where can people go to learn more about the products you work on, social tools for marketers from Salesforce?

LB: Probably the easiest thing is just Google Salesforce Social Studio or talk to your rep, and you can learn all about it. We’ve got a great product on web, on mobile, Android NLIS, and I’d love for people to get their hands on it and play with it for themselves because it’s really something.

HY: Totally agree. Luke, before we move into our final five segment with you today, I’d like to take a moment to share a quick message from our sponsors. Today, our culture is forged by constant connections: Mobile access to everything imaginable, like we talked about today. Many of those things, social media channels, right when we need them. And consumers today are supremely empowered with more information and choices than ever before. So what is that connected customer really look like, I mean who are they, and what do they expect?

Salesforce research surveyed more than 7,000 consumers and business buyers worldwide to find out. Now we’re sharing the results of that study in a new report, “The State of the Connected Customer.” You can download it now by going to sforce.co/hyperconnected, and you’ll discover the defining characteristics of today’s technology-empowered customers. You’ll also learn what your marketing can do to stay ahead of those changing customer expectations.

The Final Five

HY: So Luke, with that we are going to move into our final five. These are the last five questions we ask every guest on the show just to get to know them a little bit better. So we’re going to kick it off with this. Who would you say is your biggest influence professionally?

LB: That’s a really, really tough one. I feel like it’s a cop-out to say Steve Jobs, but there’s nobody who stands bigger in my imagination right now as I think about my professional influence.

JB: What do you find really most memorable about Steve Jobs? Because a couple of our other guests here at The Cloudcast have also mentioned Steve Jobs. What is it? Probably, maybe, the one thing about him and his management style or just innovation?

HY: His love of product [laughter].

LB: I don’t know if it was his management style necessarily. I’m a little bit more collaborative than he was more reputed to be. I think he was a product guy to his core and that’s something that really resonates with me. He thought a lot about what people needed. He thought a lot about what people didn’t know they needed. And that for me is probably what’s most inspiring.

JB: Yeah, I would completely agree with that. And maybe that ties in to this question number two here in the final five. Luke, is there one company that you personally have a brand crush on because you think their marketing is just absolutely rock star?

LB: This is kind of cheating because they’re customer of ours, but I do have a big brand crush on KLM. I think they’re on the shortlist of brands that’s really crossed those boundaries that we were just talking about. And if you’ll allow me to share a quick story, I just love this one.

JB: Sure.

LB: It’s about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Their frequent flyer program is called Flying Blue. They had an elite Flying Blue member in their lounge, and he went to get his favorite daily newspaper. It wasn’t there. He was upset. He tweeted KLM that his newspaper wasn’t there, and he didn’t like it. That system went into their social customer service system, Service Cloud. That customer record from his Twitter account was mapped up to his frequent flyer account, so they could see he was super elite. They routed that to the right program, the right agents who work it. They had mapped in their transactional ticketing system into Salesforce, as well, so they were able to see that he was on a flight that was leaving in 45 minutes, or whatever the time was. They then, using Chatter, reached out to the flight attendant aboard the flight, who had an iPad, who got the notification that this was happening and the customer had this need, she walked out to the kiosk in the terminal, bought his newspaper, and had it waiting for him on his first-class seat when he got on the airplane.

That’s a true story. It sounds apocryphal, but it’s true. That’s the kind of customer delight and customer experience that you can create when you think bigger about how your customer relates to your brand, and you have the right tools in place.

HY: I love the power of social for travelers. As somebody who flies a lot, myself, I can’t imagine doing so before social. It’s come in handy for me so very many times when I’m in a rush situation, and all I have is my mobile device and a few seconds to send off a tweet. But it’s just totally come in the clutch. That’s a great story. Luke, if you had 10 per cent more budget for marketing this year for Social Studio but you could only invest in one strategy or channel, what would you pick and why?

LB: That’s easy. Social channel for sure. I think I would pile it up, make sure that I’m getting my message out, and my story out on Facebook, on Twitter. Backing that up with ads because we know reach goes up 10 to 50 times with it boosting. And just making sure people understand the value of the story that we’re trying to tell.

JB: Absolutely. Luke, our listeners love to read, so question number four for you concerns what book would you recommend our listeners pick up and read, and why?

LB: If it was about social specifically, it’s a bit of an oldie but a goodie at this point, but Grouped by Paul Adams. I think really talks about the power of the social graph and some of the complexity and nuance in it. Just more generally, for me as a communicator, Dan Roam’s Back of the Napkin is a great book about visual storytelling, about communication, and how to change people’s ideas. I know you asked for one, I gave you two. Sorry, I cheated.

HY: Awesome. No, the more the merrier. I like the suggestions. I hadn’t heard of the second one and I want to look into it. Luke, what would you say if you could just pick one word alone to sum up the state of marketing, what would that be?

LB: It may be slightly negative, but I think the word is conflicted. I think we’ve talked a lot about the promise of where cross-channel marketing and omnichannel marketing. And omnichannel, really, consumer experience can go and I think a lot of brands have bought into that vision but are still really holding tight to the tools, the mentalities, the processes of the past. And it’s going to be a journey we’re all going to be on together over the next several years. But people have to resolve that conflict and every brand is going to have to do it for themselves.

JB: I think that’s a great way to wrap up our conversation today, Luke. I cannot tell you how great it’s been having you on board today. Thanks so much.

Folks, you’ve been [reading] our very special discussion with Luke Ball. Luke is senior director of product management here at Salesforce, where he leads our social listening products. Great session today. I want to also remind everybody that if you’ve enjoyed listening to this episode of the Marketing Cloudcast, Heike and I would really appreciate your going over to iTunes and rating us. We take those ratings and reviews very, very seriously. Also, we want to remind you that if for some reason you have not yet subscribed to the Cloudcast, do it today. Easy to do by going to sforce.co/cloudcast, and you can also find us on Google Play Music, Stitcher, or wherever else you like to listen to podcasts. So, on behalf of my colleague Heike Young, I’m Joel Book and thanks so much for listening, and we look forward to having you alongside for another episode of the Marketing Cloudcast real soon.

Learn how to connect social to marketing, sales, and service with Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud.

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Instagram “Stories”

Similar to SnapChat’s “My Story” feature, Instagram “Stories” let users compile photos and videos from one 24-hour period into a continuous stream. They are displayed chronologically, and then disappear at the end of the day. Once you submit your content to Stories, you can overlay text and emojis. So how can you use this fun feature for your business?

Take photos of new products and upload them to Stories to give followers a taste of what’s to come. Make a video tutorial of someone using a popular product, or film the production process. Engaging users with Stories will more than likely increase your Instagram followers, which drives more traffic to your site. You can also download and save any photos or videos you submit to Stories, and then share them at a later date.

Instagram Direct

Instagram took another page out of SnapChat’s playbook when it introduced Instagram Direct. (It makes sense considering disappearing content is the most popular feature on SnapChat.) Why wouldn’t Instagram want to capitalize on that success?

With Instagram Direct, users can put an expiration time on photos and videos. People who send content will be able to see when it is viewed and whether or not the person on the receiving end has chosen to take a screenshot. Consider using Direct to give followers a sneak peak of a new product. This will pique interest and drive some users to your website for news of the release. With Direct you can also customize the audience who views your content. (This feature is limited to only your followers.) Consider sending a disappearing promo code to a group of loyal followers, or make a video for a product you know will engage a specific audience. You can even send disappearing content through direct messages.

Instagram Live

Many social media sites, such as Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and now Instagram, have incorporated some form of live video into their platforms—and with good reason. Live video streaming has become an extremely popular way to engage users by giving them a “behind-the-scenes” look at employees, products, and services. Creating a Live video is more efficient and less expensive than writing a blog post. Plus people are much more likely to watch a short engaging video than they are to read through a long post. You can go live for up to an hour, and you can even send your followers notifications when you plan to begin a live session. Consider interviewing an employee live, or run a tutorial on how to use a popular product. Followers may also appreciate a live Q&A where they can post questions in the comments section and get them answered in real time. And if you just want to stream an event or discuss an upcoming promo, Instagram Live also gives you the option to turn off comments so followers can better focus on the content.

One element that sets Instagram Live apart from other platforms’ live capabilities is that once you finish streaming a session, it disappears completely. It’s not saved to your profile or any user feeds and it cannot be viewed again. For this reason, you may not want to spend a ton of time creating detailed, in-depth videos for Instagram Live. Instead, use it for quick previews or to gain traction for an event, and then direct your audience back to your website or blog where they can find more information that won’t disappear.

Conclusion

Incorporate one or all of these Instagram features into your company’s marketing strategy to increase brand awareness, gain followers, and boost engagement with your audience.

Learn how you can take your customers on a 1-to-1 journey with your brand with a quick demo of Salesforce’s powerful Marketing Cloud.

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From a lead looking at reviews and your website, to completing a form, reading an ebook, contacting a sales rep, or the myriad of other potential steps, you must consider the strategy behind making sure each step leads to another. Remember: As long as the person is in your sales funnel, you have the potential for a sale.

Awareness and Engagement

It is important to understand the impact social media has on exposure to new products and services; without it, they may go undiscovered. According to an article by Kimberlee Morrison for AdWeek’s SocialTimes, “At least once a month, 83 per cent of survey respondents heard about a brand or product on social media before they heard about it from any other source.”

That number underscores the power social media has on consumers. Furthermore, not only are posts reaching audiences, but audiences are then converting and making the purchase after seeing the post. Thirty-eight per cent of Facebook users actually purchase a product after liking or sharing it, and half of these purchases are made within one week of engaging with the post.

Engagement can lead to brand awareness, and ultimately the sale. The key, however, is making sure you do not lose people as they move down the pipeline.

Reviews and Product Feedback

When people become interested in your product and brand, one of the first things they are going to do is search for reviews and feedback. Reviews are one of the top things people take into consideration when purchasing a new product or service or switching providers. The top sources that people gather information from include:

1. Retail websites (i.e, if you sell your product on Amazon, they read the Amazon reviews)
2. The brand or manufacturer website (your company’s website)
3. Facebook
4. YouTube
5. Brand communities
6. Blogs
7. Pinterest

This list helps us to see where feedback is especially important. Of course, do not discount the value of reviews on Google or other sites, but focus on building up the positive feedback you can gather in these arenas.

Your Website

Once people see a social media post, like your product, and do a little investigating, they are likely to visit your website. This is when it is important to make a positive impression on your audience. Whether they order from a third-party site or directly from your ecommerce site, it is important that your website is up-to-date, user friendly, and relevant.

Today, people are not interacting as often with physical stores. Instead, they head to websites through social media posts, so your website is your image and it determines whether people decide to do business with you.

If you are a service or B2B company, you may not necessarily be selling products. This makes your website all the more important, as your social media post will lead them to your website—more specifically, to a landing page you created and optimized specifically for that social media post.

Inquiry Form

Once your social media post leads a visitor to your website, you likely want people to fill out an inquiry form. The goal is to get their contact information so that even if they do not convert, you can follow up with them.

Inquiry forms should be simple and straightforward. For example, their name, email, phone number (optional), and space to leave a message will often do. The best contact forms leave out unnecessary requirements and focus on making it easy for visitors to give you the information you need.

Contacting Your Sales Rep via Social Media

Social media posts can also lead to prospects contacting your sales team directly. With the CTA option of “Call now” on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, some users call the business directly rather than navigate the website. If this is the case, make sure the path of social media post to sales representative directly results in a sale. Train your sales team, and help them respond to social media traffic that contacts your company over the phone.

Completing a Purchase

The end goal of a social media post is to get a customer to complete a sale. It is nice to get traffic on your website, inquiries, and people contacting your sales reps, but if they don’t complete the sale, then you may not see the end result you want.

Part of the life of a social media post involves measuring conversions and seeing what leads to a sale. Which of these ideas give your business the most success? Are some of your posts more successful than others in getting your visitors to complete a purchase? If so, find out why and what you did well with that particular post. Researching what gets your audience to react the way you want them to—and measuring your success—is a big part in every social media campaign.

Learn how you can take your customers on a 1-to-1 journey with your brand with a quick demo of Salesforce’s powerful Marketing Cloud.

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Goal 1: Expanded Brand Awareness

Whether your business is freshly minted or mature, it’s important to get the word out to your customers about who you are,what your product(s) is about, and what makes you different from competitors. A good starting point is to create just one social media account, try Instagram or Facebook first, and then gradually expand to other platforms, including Twitter and LinkedIn. Then, once you become more familiar with how to use social media, make sure you maintain active accounts. Post tips and tricks, hint about promotions, offer giveaways—anything that makes people stop and pay attention. Once they do, they may repay you by liking, retweeting, and sharing your posts.

Goal 2: Increase Traffic to Your Website

Social media is a great way to get people to notice you, so use that extra attention to send followers to your site. Every time you post something on a social media site, direct users to a landing page on your website where they can take another action. If you announce a giveaway, ask users to visit your site and join your email list to be entered into the drawing.

Pro Tip: Make sure your website is easy to navigate and optimized for mobile so your customers don’t get frustrated once they land on your site. Google Analytics is a good way to check how many new visitors access your site via social media.

Goal 3: Improve Customer Loyalty

Loyal visitors are people who return to your website to make conversions multiple times, as opposed to those who visit, buy one product or service, and never return. It’s in every business’s best interest to turn first time visitors into loyal customers, and social media is a great tool way to make this happen. Create a marketing campaign that requires users to make multiple visits to your website in order to be entered and win. For instance, you could run a contest that asks followers to like a new post every day for 10 days. Social media is also a great way to gain new followers that could potentially turn into loyal customers. Think about creating a campaign that asks users to share a post and get two friends to follow your site in order for all three people to gain entrance to a drawing. Once you figure out how to get people’s attention, this post by the Social Media Examiner explains how to measure customer loyalty through social media.

Goal 4: Drive Customer Conversions

The end goal for every business should be to increase their conversions, whether that be product purchases, email signups, or any other action taken by a user on your website. There is a direct correlation between social activity and sales, so if you’re a businesses that likes to make money, tweet, post, like, share, and more to establish and maintain an online presence. Consider offering an email blog subscription or instituting a welcome pop up for new visitors. Don’t forget to include plenty of relevant calls to action throughout your site. It’s also not a bad idea to start a marketing campaign that requires users to sign up and/or submit their information to receive a promo code or other incentive in return.

All you have to do now is determine your business goals, get on social media, and get to work!

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LinkedIn is home to 4 million Company Pages. B2B businesses thrive on LinkedIn, but even direct-to-consumer companies may miss opportunities if they don’t treat LinkedIn as an asset to their social media marketing plans.

If your company doesn’t have a Company Page yet, here’s how you can get started quickly and easily.

Building Company Pages

You could just use your Company Page as a general branding tool, but if you want it to really drive sales, you have to bring your A game. Start with your products section, and move on from there.

Products and Services

Think of this section as a small catalog of your offerings. Use professional photos and copy like you would in a real catalog or on your website. Include calls to action (CTA) and purchase links for each item. Keep in mind that LinkedIn pulls the first product from this section and puts it in your sidebar, so make sure your first item is your most important or iconic in order to grab attention.

Reviews and Testimonials

One great feature of LinkedIn is the prominent section for reviews and testimonials. These are automatically connected to authors’ profiles, so potential customers can see exactly who left feedback.

So how do you get more reviews and testimonials? By asking for them: Reach out to your best customers, partners, and vendors. You may be surprised how many of them would be happy to help out a brand they love.

About Us

Don’t be fooled into thinking this section isn’t important just because it’s at the bottom. Many users know to scroll down if it’s what they’re looking for. Make this a quick, energized version of your website’s About Us page. This is also a great place to include SEO keywords to help people find your page.

The end of your About Us section is also the perfect place to use a CTA. If a potential customer isn’t ready to purchase, tell them how to find you, learn more, or interact further with your brand.

Cover Image and Logo

Just like your products need professional images, so does the rest of your profile. Start with high-resolution files, and make sure they are sized to fit. It’s a good idea to add a few words to your hero image, since your full company description will be at the bottom of the page.

Publish Content

LinkedIn has a great platform for publishing your content. Unlike other social media platforms, which simply allow you to plug your newly minted blog post in a fleeting feed of other tweets and posts, LinkedIn gives you the chance to feature every item you’ve published right there on your Page.

Invest in producing valuable content, then make the most of it by using LinkedIn to publish it.

Career Pages

While these pages might not directly help you drive sales, they do build your brand. Professionally minded consumers— LinkedIn’s specialty—may look at how you treat your employees and what you’re telling potential hires to learn more about the kind of business you are. Keep your branding message clear and consistent.

Promote Your LinkedIn Company Page

Okay, so your LinkedIn Company Page is complete and looks awesome. Now what?

Like anything else in business, the idea that if you build it they will come is a pipe dream. You have to tell everyone that you have an awesome LinkedIn page, and make it easy to get there. That’s why you need to put your LinkedIn information everywhere, including:

• Your website. Use the Follow Us button on your contact page, at the bottom of every page, and perhaps in a sidebar on your website.
• Other profiles. Encourage followers on other channels to check out your LinkedIn Company Page.
• In email. Whether it’s a marketing campaign or part of your signature, include a link to your Company Page in every email you send to make it easy for people to follow.
• Business cards, flyers, ads, and other marketing collateral. While we’re now squarely in the digital world, analog marketing is still alive, well, and effective. Whether you’re at a networking event or using mailers, include the link to your profile on all paper materials as well.

LinkedIn Company Pages serve as a great way to reach the professionals with a polished impression of your company. Set it up with care, then use it to bolster your image and improve sales.

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Finding the ROI is important, as marketers use over ten different types of social media sites. While most of these platforms are seeing slowed growth, Pinterest grew by 81 million users this year. Social media isn’t going away, and it’s important for businesses to take it seriously.

Professional marketing services can run between $4,000 and $7,000 a month. Since your total marketing budget should be between around 10 per cent of your total revenue, and your digital marketing is a substantial part, marketers must decide how they plan to manage their social media accounts. The most popular options are to hire a social media manager, a small marketing company, or a corporate marketing agency.

No matter your budget, a careful examination of your social media marketing budget is imperative. Create a strategy, consider your budget, and then find how to manage your social media in a way that’s right for your company.

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<p><strong>Click To Enlarge</strong><br /><br /> <a href=”https://www.salesforce.com/ca/blog/2016/12/better-spend-social-media-budget.html” _rte_href=”https://www.salesforce.com/ca/blog/2016/12/better-spend-social-media-budget.html” target=”_blank”> <img src=”https://www.salesforce.com/ca/blog/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2023/10/better-spend-social-media-budget-final.png” _rte_src=”https://www.salesforce.com/ca/blog/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2023/10/better-spend-social-media-budget-final.png” alt=”How to Better Spend Your Social Media Marketing Budget” width=”600px” border=”0″ /> </a> </p> <p>Via <a href=”https://www.salesforce.com/ca/” _rte_href=”https://www.salesforce.com/ca/” target=”_blank”>Salesforce</a> </p>

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Here’s how (and why) you’ll want to do just that.

What Are LinkedIn Career Pages?

LinkedIn may seem like it’s behind the curve when it comes to both organic and paid reach. It hasn’t been a product marketing machine like Facebook, which added business pages in 2007, and Twitter, which added promoted Tweets in 2010. Even though LinkedIn users are especially professionally minded, the platform simply isn’t set up to drive sales of products. Instead, LinkedIn is about professional branding.

Career Pages empower organizations to take their branding to the next level with highly customizable modules and tools. You can essentially turn jobs themselves into products, with benefits such as making extra money, feelings of fulfillment, and enjoyment during the workday.

How to Use Career Pages

How do you take advantage of the new features? LinkedIn will help you get started by automatically migrating content from your existing business profile onto the new Career Pages. This content includes your hero image, any open job opportunities, and employee testimonials. These items will automatically live under the Overview, Jobs, or Life tabs. You can take it from there by moving these items around and adding your own custom modules, such as:

• Company Leaders: Feature the executives in your company so users know who steers the ship.
• Photo Gallery: Help users envision company culture by posting photos of typical workdays, company events, and what your office looks like.
• Employee Perspectives: Here’s where you can show off articles and other materials created by current employees.
• Meeting the Team: Automatically display profiles of employees that each individual user may work with if hired.

Additionally, Career Pages offer the ability to feature a hero video, instead of simply a still image, furthering your ability to tell your company story to prospective hires. And, just like the other social networks, you can track your LinkedIn metrics such as visitor demographics, impressions, clicks, likes, and more to guide your marketing efforts for efficiency, engagement, and effectiveness.

The LinkedIn Algorithm

You’ve perfected your Career Pages to show your company in the best possible light. But what do potential employees see?

That depends on the user. Just as Facebook customizes each user’s feed based on their profiles, views, and engagement, LinkedIn customizes which parts of your Company Pages are featured for each potential employee.

For example, let’s say you added a module featuring who a potential employee may work with at your company. A user who currently works as an accountant will see the profile of your CFO, while a user who is currently looking for a position as a graphic designer may see the profile of a marketing manager or copywriter.

In addition, based on a user’s interests and behaviour, your company may pop up as a potential career option without the user performing a job search or inputting any filters into a search. This captures the attention of users who weren’t actively looking for a career change—that is, until the perfect job shows up in their feeds.

Benefits of Career Pages

Career Pages are up and running for many companies, and even during the platform’s early trial period the results were astonishing. Brands saw a 60 per cent increase in pageviews per visitor and a 175 per cent increase in job views. For companies that struggle to capture the interest of top candidates, this is huge. But there are other potential benefits as well.

Let’s say that instead of having trouble attracting candidates, you have the opposite problem: You have to wade through resume after resume for a single opening. Or perhaps you’ve had a high turnover rate in some positions. Now users see demographics, such as education level, experience, and skills, on who already works with your company, giving them a better idea of whether they’ll fit in.

LinkedIn’s new features show potential applicants a more well-rounded picture of what it’s like to work with you. When harnessed, those features could help the wrong candidates self-select themselves out of the applicant pool while drawing the right ones closer than ever.

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<p><strong>Click To Enlarge</strong><br /><br /> <a href=”https://www.salesforce.com/ca/blog/2016/12/benefit-using-linkedin-career-pages.html” _rte_href=”https://www.salesforce.com/ca/blog/2016/12/benefit-using-linkedin-career-pages.html” target=”_blank”> <img src=”https://www.salesforce.com/ca/blog/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2023/10/linkedin-career-pages-001.jpg” _rte_src=”https://www.salesforce.com/ca/blog/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2023/10/linkedin-career-pages-001.jpg” alt=”The Latest Benefit for Businesses Using LinkedIn: Career Pages” width=”600px” border=”0″ /> </a> </p> <p>Via <a href=”https://www.salesforce.com/ca/” _rte_href=”https://www.salesforce.com/ca/” target=”_blank”>Salesforce</a> </p>

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A look at optimization: How many slides should you have? How many words per slide?

The number of slides you have in your deck should fit your topic. Most decks on SlideShare feature anywhere from 30-50 slides. However, decks with over 1 million views range from hundreds to a handful of slides.

SlideShare recommends you have no more than 25 to 30 words per slide. The reasoning behind this is that people retain only a small part of what they see, and images often resonate more emotionally than text. As a presenter, you want your audience to retain your deck’s information.

When you worry about slide count or even word count, it’s often at a disservice to your topic and information. You should hone your content to fit the breadth of your topic: If you’re giving this presentation to a live audience, it should fit your time slot and that audience. You may make the choice to edit the deck for SlideShare.

Consider your SlideShare audience.

When you give a presentation, you’ve likely honed and tailored it to a specific knowledge level and demographic. However, when you upload it to SlideShare, you are opening up to a broader audience. This audience is likely less technical and less niche focused. That’s not to say technical and niche decks don’t find success on SlideShare—they just may require some extra marketing effort.

Consider the medium.

Many SlideShare fans now consume decks on their mobile devices instead of a desktop. When looking at a presentation on desktop, text of any size is generally easy to read. But on a mobile device, pinching and zooming too-small text takes the ease of reading away.

In addition to large text, bold images keep all eyes on your presentation. Images compel 45 per cent of viewers into continuing to flip through all your slides. You want your SlideShare audience to consume your entire deck.

Find the Right Topic for Your SlideShare Presentation

• Buzzwords and trends in your industry Title: Brian Solis’ buzzword: “disruption”
• Future trends and topics Title: Mary Meeker discusses future internet trendsNumbered lists
• Title: SOAP Presentations created a popular listicle
• Presentations about giving better presentations Title: Jesse Desjardins helps presenters create more powerful decks

SlideShare is a business-focused network, and business topics find the most success.

Entrepreneurs, technologists, marketers, and other business-minded people find presentations a captivating medium. So it’s no surprise to see certain topics stand out among others.

Buzzwords and other trends: You want to capitalize on buzzwords and other trends in your industry. Technologist Brian Solis has won on SlideShare by creating annual presentations focused on the trend of “disruption.” Others have taken on popular marketing and business trends such as content marketing (and how not to fail) or tough love to millennials in the workforce.

Future-focused: Entrepreneurs and business leaders come to SlideShare seeking future-focused topics. Venture capitalist Mary Meeker has build up an incredible following for her annual internet trends report. Year-over-year, this report has successfully pointed toward advancements in technology and other insights into marketing, use of computing devices, and hot topics. You may not have access to Meeker’s insights and numbers, but you can set yourself apart in your niche. For example, We Are Social dives into specific social media numbers and patterns across the globe. They understand how to convey direct insights in what their community wants, and they gain more audience by addressing often-neglected geographic locations.

Numbered lists: Like many other publishers, numbered lists attract attention on SlideShare. If your headline matches its promise with solid information to those seeking solutions, you’ll have a winner. Some popular presentations include:

• 10 Powerful Body Language Tips for your next Presentation
• 10 business models that rocked
• The 25 Basic Styles of Blogging … And When To Use Each One
• 15 Tips for Compelling Company Updates on LinkedIn
• The 3 Secrets of Highly Successful Graduates
• 40 Tools in 20 Minutes: Hacking your Marketing Career

Meta on presentations: Additionally, meta topics about how to build presentations and give better presentations perform well on SlideShare. Many of the most successful decks take a negative spin on slide design or stage performance, and then show you how to correct shortcomings. Marketer Jesse Desjardins combines both the idea of numbered lists, meta topics, and a negative spin in his successful SlideShare: You Suck At PowerPoint! 5 Shocking Design Mistakes You Need to Avoid.

Try for evergreen topics.

The vast majority of slide decks with 1 million (or more) views on SlideShare have been there for years. They also all solve or address ongoing business problems. Trends and hot topics fade after a while, but no matter how the world changes, here are some evergreen topics and successful decks.

Great Evergreen Topics for Your SlideShare Presentation

• Venture capital pitches Title: Rand Fishkin shares his company’s journey
• People management Title: Laszlo Bock on creating excellent company culture
• Storytelling Title: How Pixar tells powerful stories
• Human psychology Title: Daniel Goleman teaches the basics of EQ Learn programming
• Title: Ryan Bonhardt’s deck from Creator’s Camp

Venture capital pitches: Entrepreneurs love SlideShare, so it’s no shock that VC pitch decks go nuts in views. Most business pitches are done behind closed doors, which means that companies who are able to share and be transparent about their business and process acquiring venture capital are cherished. Software company founder Rand Fishkin’s VC pitch deck from 2011 continues to be sought after.

People management: Employers will always need employees, and making your people happy is as much an art as a science. If your company is known for being a great place to work, people want to know how the magic happens. Laszlo Bock, Senior Vice President of People Operations at Google, not only wrote a book about Google’s secrets to keeping and growing great talent, but he shared his major HR tips with the world.

Storytelling: Science and technology change and expand before our eyes, but the art of a great story is timeless. A great story makes for a great presentation, and we know many people come to SlideShare to learn about how to give better talks. So when storyteller Gavin McMahon broke down the components of Pixar’s greatest stories, it’s not surprising his deck has received 1.4 million views.

Human psychology: We’re fascinated by the way our brains work, how we think, and how we behave. We crave ways to learn how to read body language or make a power pose to build confidence. Moreover, we want to know this about ourselves. That’s why it unsurprising that coach Daniel Goleman broke down his deck, How emotionally intelligent are you?, with a question and self-assessment. Other evergreen psychology content has gone further with self-assessment quizzes.

Learn programming!: Technology changes, but the desire and aspiration to learn programming never seems to go away. Programmers, such as Ryan Bonhardt, know that breaking down fundamentals and the mystery of programming make great content.

If you’re unsure how evergreen your latest slide deck is, leave it up on SlideShare. Only time will tell.

Upload your deck the right way.

You always want to start out on the right foot, and that begins the moment you hit upload on SlideShare.

Upload a PDF of your deck: If you include non-standard fonts in your deck, your presentation won’t look as good on someone else’s computer or mobile device because it’s unlikely they’ll have your exact fonts. You can avoid weird fonts, which may run off slides or wrap in an awkward manner, by saving your deck as a PDF and uploading that instead. Keep in mind that PDFs will break any videos, audio, or animated gifs—you can always link to those videos or audio files, and if you really want to be ambitious and keep your multimedia, you can save each slide with text as an image and rebuild the deck.

Add context to your slides: Oftentimes, slides built for the stage are more visual with less text because you don’t want to be reading your slides to the audience. This means you’ll need to add extra context for the SlideShare crowd. This is additional work, but it is guaranteed to increase your relevance. Portent Inc. CEO Ian Lurie adds obvious black boxes to his slides with relevant parts of his speech.

SlideShare attempts to help you by grabbing text from your slides to put into a transcript below the deck. However, images and other features do not translate well. Jon Colman, Facebook’s Content Strategist, leads his viewers back to his website where he lists all the resources they can access to learn more.

Give yourself an SEO headstart: SlideShare has built-in optimization for search engine optimization, or SEO. Especially if you’re looking to build your personal brand, take advantage of this: Make sure your title explains what the deck’s about and isn’t just catchy fluff. Edit your URL to be friendly for the content. Hone your description for your presentation, and lose needless words like “in this presentation.” Add keywords, which, while they don’t affect SEO, will make discovering your work via SlideShare’s categories easier.

Brand it: The best presentations are quoted and “clipped” (SlideShare’s term for taking a screenshot). When people cite and show your work, especially when they clip a slide to use in their own materials, you want everyone to know it’s you. Make sure to including branding on each slide, such as your name, Twitter handle, or company logo.

Steps to Being Successful on SlideShare

• Share valuable content
  • Create something people want
  • Make it relevant
  • Rehash someone else’s content
  • Repurpose your own content
  • End with a call to action
• Use stunning visuals
  • Focus on the cover design
  • Make it beautiful
  • Use out-of-the-box compositions
• Have a marketing strategy
  • News jack
  • Leave them wanting more
  • Get shares from experts
  • Make sharing effortless

Hypercharge your views.

The most successful slide decks on SlideShare aren’t uploaded and then forgotten. Instead, they’re promoted.

Share them on social media and use proper hashtags: Don’t forget to share your presentations across your social networks. It’s even better if you can get your company to share with their audience, too. If it’s for a conference, share it on the conference hashtag or in the conference’s community. Make sure to promote it on LinkedIn (which owns SlideShare), where people already go to discover and learn about business topics.

Get featured: SlideShare employs human editors who pick the best content to promote on their homepage, in categories, and on their social media. There’s no way to make this happen. However, if your content’s relevant, uploaded correctly, and shared beyond just SlideShare, there’s a good change the editors will notice your efforts.

Embedding elsewhere and link building: Every deck with hundreds of thousands of views has gotten traffic elsewhere and outside of SlideShare. Clear facts and figures in your deck can make it easy to link to or embed. Traditional PR campaigns around your topic can build those views quickly. The Wall Street Journal did this with their Activate Tech and Media Outlook 2016 deck. Their deck was built for coverage; other publications like The Verge and Guardian, and niche industries like Social Media Today and Cinema Blend picked it up.

Try video: SlideShare lets you upload videos, not just decks. Users have posted everything from interviews to conference footage of them presenting. Because video isn’t traditionally what people look for, returns may be variable.

See your slides shine!

With a bit of extra work, your decks will stand out on SlideShare, earning more views, shares, and links over time. If you want to build your credentials on SlideShare and further your expertise in your industry, don’t overlook this valuable network: Upload your presentations and don’t miss the opportunity to give your deck an extra boost.

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<p><strong>Click To Enlarge</strong><br /><br /> <a href=”https://www.salesforce.com/ca/blog/2016/11/being-successful-on-slideshare.html” _rte_href=”https://www.salesforce.com/ca/blog/2016/11/being-successful-on-slideshare.html” target=”_blank”> <img src=”https://www.salesforce.com/ca/blog/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2023/10/successful-on-slideshare-embed.jpg” _rte_src=”https://www.salesforce.com/ca/blog/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2023/10/successful-on-slideshare-embed.jpg” alt=”A Detailed Look Into Being Successful on SlideShare” width=”600px” border=”0″ /> </a> </p> <p>Via <a href=”https://www.salesforce.com/ca/” _rte_href=”https://www.salesforce.com/ca/” target=”_blank”>Salesforce</a> </p>

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