What made the world stop?

by Keely | in Industry, News | on 05 Oct 2021

Many of us will have vowed to cut down on our social media usage at some point since it became a mainstay of our lives. But to have it taken away altogether yesterday for over six hours proved that it had become a vital underpinning of our modern society.

WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook (all owned by the latter) are used by over 3.5 billion people for both personal communication and core business activities – what made these apps all fail and halt everyday life for so many of us?

In an official statement, Facebook cited a faulty configuration change for the outage, but what does this technical jargon actually mean?

There are two key aspects to internet routing when dealing with a company as large as Facebook – BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) and DNS (Domain Name System). We can think of BGP like a road map detailing the best way to get to a particular site, with DNS acting as an address system detailing to location (IP address) of each website. While smaller websites do not take charge of their own road map and address system, Facebook have a whole world of connectivity that they maintain themselves. This, as we can see, complicated matters.

All software systems need regular updates to continue running effectively, but when Facebook deployed their latest update yesterday, they effectively told the BGP ‘road map’ to remove all paths to Facebook. This then meant that there was no way to find each website address.

This affected everything that Facebook runs, so WhatsApp, Instagram and even Facebook’s internal servers; employees were locked out of access-controlled offices and had no access to email!

So that of course made it a challenging problem to fix. The people who could diagnose and sort it were both physically and remotely shut out.

While it hasn’t been confirmed, Facebook eventually had to physically travel to and manually reset the servers in California.

Most of us woke up this morning with relief to see our favourite apps fully functional again, but we’re sure that at Facebook everyone is focused on making sure this doesn’t happen again.

25 Mar
2021

Improving engagement with your LinkedIn content

by Keely | in Marketing, Social Media | on 25 Mar 2021

Your LinkedIn feed is probably packed full of insights from companies and people, and it can seem like a mystery as to how some content gets to appear at the top of your feed. Meanwhile your carefully crafted content never seems to get any engagement. While there is no silver bullet to perfect engagement, there are some methods you can use to increase the chances of your content getting seen:

Publish content within LinkedIn

The LinkedIn algorithm favours content that keeps users on the platform over content that sends them elsewhere. So, add videos using LinkedIn’s native video uploader rather than YouTube for example and publish articles within LinkedIn rather than linking out to an external blog.

Use captions

Most people will be watching videos with volume low or turned off, so it is important that they are able to still understand what is being said.

Publish both posts and articles

A post view can just be someone scrolling their feed and not looking at the post, whereas people have to physically click a link to view an article. This is a greater indicator of active engagement.

Track comments

Comments, rather than views, are a better indicator of the success of your content as this shows that people are actively engaging with your content rather than scrolling past it.

Utilise text-only posts

Text-only posts have been found to outperform every other content format, so it would be useful to prioritise these in your content plan. Also making text-only posts visually appealing – by adding emojis and bullet points, for example – increases engagement

Use hashtags

The more you use hashtags on a LinkedIn post, the better it categorises content and highlights relevant posts to each user. This will increase your reach and ensure that your posts are being seen by the right people
You can also pin hashtags related to your industry to see the latest updates on your newsfeed. This will allow you to connect and engage with others in the industry.

Encourage early engagement

If no one reacts to your posts within the 60 minutes of posting, then the chances are it won’t perform well. Try to get 20 reactions or comments in the first hour of a post’s life by encouraging employees to engage with the content as soon as it is published. You also need to make sure to reply to any comments on your post swiftly, as this engagement all contributes to the velocity of the post overall.

The best time to post

A bit of experimentation is always required to find the best engagement time as no one business will have exactly the same client base/demographic. Having said that, we can make an educated guess as to when there may be more traffic:

Working hours

As LinkedIn is a professional network, its users tend to browse their feeds during the prime working hours of 9am to 5pm. So, it’s best to post during these hours especially in the morning, as people are more likely to have time to log on before getting stuck into their daily tasks.

Commuting hours

In the same vein, another potential target is commuting time – 8am-9am and 5pm-6pm. As people are getting ready or winding down many will scroll their LinkedIn feed to stay on top of industry updates.

As you can probably imagine then, there tends to be less engagement with posts on the weekend and evenings. It is also probably better to avoid posting on a Monday too, as people tend to be too busy catching up from the weekend to have time to spare on social media.

Remember that these are only guidelines – depending on your business you may find that your post engagement bucks these trends entirely! But they are a good starting point to go from.

03 Mar
2021

A Practical Approach to ROI in Social Media

by Keely | in Marketing | on 03 Mar 2021

A strong social media presence can be a good way of generating business, but is there a way to clearly track how our hours spent cultivating the perfect content translate into new leads?

ROI means ‘return on investment’. Social media ROI represents the return on investment from your organisation’s social media activities. Historically it’s been a difficult thing to track and prove, especially since a lot of social media return is based on personal relationships and is long-term. Broadly speaking to calculate your ROI, you divide the overall value by the investment and times by 100.

Sounds easy enough, but how exactly can you figure out a total monetary figure for both your personal value and investment? Let’s take a look at what each of them can entail.

Value

What defines value will be different depending on your goals. These can include:

New followers
Link clicks
Online purchase
Contact form submission
Signups for newsletter
Downloads
Time spent on a particular webpage

Once you have a goal, there are a lot of tools you can use to track different forms of value:

Social Media Built-In Platform Analytics Tools
- Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all have tools that you can use to track likes, retweets, shares, new page follows over time and overall reach.
Google Analytics
- This is a free powerful source to get clear figures on form submissions, traffic, page views and conversion rates

These tools can help to give you additional metrics such as:

Average sale price
Lifetime value per customer
- This can then be used with the data to establish a monetary value i.e. if you can see that 1 in 10 people that view your blog post becomes a customer and your average lifetime value per customer is £100, then the value of someone viewing the post is £10.

To take a full value example, if your goal is to get more online purchases, then your main value metric will come from the number of purchases made as a result of clicking on a post link. If you see that half of clicks result in a sale, and the average sale price per customer is £5, then each post view is worth £2.50 in value. BUT that doesn’t factor in the very human element of social media, that of making a personal connection. The blog post that you write may not directly convert into a sale, but someone may remember your name as a result and months later could act or recommend you to someone else.

So, it can easily become quite tricky to track an exact figure. This is why it’s important to always think long-term with social media ROI. ‘Untrackable’ data such as the previous example can be gathered through customer feedback surveys and social media polls. You can also use your previous experience to estimate a figure for a certain value.

Using a combination of all of these methods will allow you to capture whether you are hitting your goals and will also highlight any additional value that your social media efforts can bring.

Investment

Investment is an easier thing to quantify, simply tracking and adding hours spent on social media then multiplying them by an hourly rate to get a clear figure. Activities can include:

Cost of tools
Paid advertisements
Planning and content creation

Once you have your figures, you can divide the value by the investment to see a clear ROI figure. This may seem complicated, and it is! But by regularly tracking your social media strategy in this way you can tailor your approach to what works!

Coming Soon

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