Inbound and
Digital Marketing Insights

A recent study conducted by Social Fresh found that in 2016 found that nearly half of all companies surveyed outsourced part of their social media. The most widely outsourced task, social advertising, was completely outsourced by 17% of all companies and partially outsourced by 33%. However, there remain certain misconceptions about social media marketing that make people think twice about outsourcing it.

Facebook advertising has never been more important to have than today: the site’s algorithm strongly favors posts made by friends over those made by business pages, which makes it difficult for pages to gain as much organic reach as they used to. Facebook ads offer a means of extending brand visibility far beyond what organic methods can achieve.

Not all ads are equal, though. Depending on how you deploy them, you might not get the results you want, or get them as fast as you’d like to. And getting the best results out of your ads depends largely on four factors: targeting, using marketing funnels, selecting ad types, and optimising. 

Video has been a rising star in content marketing recently, and to say that Facebook has been using it well would be an understatement--the social media giant is among those blazing the trail. Facebook’s efforts to build video up as a medium started in June 2015, when its algorithm added expanded criteria for video ranking. In March 2016, it began prioritising live videos in the news feed. And now that 2017 is hitting its stride, they’ve made a few more adjustments: videos will now be prioritized based on completion rate instead of simple views, along with other adjustments to promote longer videos.

Google Plus has been the butt of digital marketers’ jokes for more than five years now. The infamous social media site is Google’s supposed answer to Facebook but it only has around half the user base of the social media giant. Surprising to many, however, is that Google+ is still alive and, if its recent wave of updates is any indication, it won’t be kicking the bucket any time too soon.

But are the updates enough to make Google+ relevant? We’re breaking down the latest changes to get to the answer. But as we do so, we’d like to take a different perspective: rather than see it as a lacklustre social network, think of Google+ primarily as a means of boosting SEO.

Most people, even marketers, mistake virality as the standard for success in a social media campaign. While fame is almost always a good thing, it wouldn’t immediately guarantee your campaign’s success—that would depend on your campaign’s end goal. What do you need to achieve? Reach? Clicks? Or ROI?

In life, you’d often hear the saying that a picture paints a thousand words; in today’s media, those pictures are more commonly known as ‘emojis’ (or, to use the Western version of the term, ‘emoticon’).