Here at ProMo-Cymru we’ve been looking at digital media and marketing trends for 2018. In the second of three articles, Andrew Collins, our Communication and Partnerships Officer, looks at the popularity of video, and especially the rise in live video.
It may come as no surprise, but video has long been the king online. This will continue to be true in 2018, with viewing numbers expected to increase yet again.
Pushing Live Video
The popularity of video online isn’t new, but in 2018 you can expect to see a real push on live video. Facebook know that when it comes to video, YouTube is the place to go, so they’re doing everything they can to beat their Google-owned competitors to the emerging live video market.
Facebook is so desperate to promote this, that last year they even took to television advertising to promote their new feature:
Join In
Are you wary of joining in with the popularity of live video? Are you struggling to see the benefits? One thing to consider is that this is what the people want. Video views are actually climbing while blog posts are declining. People want to consume by watching. A survey by Wyzowl (The State of Video Marketing 2018) found that, when offered the same content via text or video, 72% of users opted for video.
Perhaps more importantly, Facebook is prioritising all Live content. That means that you can counter the Organic Reach squeeze (see our previous article) by getting big numbers with your Live videos.
How to take part
You’ll need to use a tablet or smartphone, but all in all, it’s pretty simple.
The only key decision here is knowing when to ‘go Live’. Ideally, it’ll be whenever you have interesting content to share with people, such as if you’re out and about meeting people or hosting an event. You could also plan something more substantial as part of your next campaign.
Let’s use the RNLI as an example. The RNLI is looking for new volunteers to join them in emergency rescue operations. Wouldn’t it be great to live-stream a training mission, giving you – the viewer – the opportunity to see first hand what it’s like to be part of the team?
Or, for a slightly less ‘exciting’ example, let’s say you are advertising for a new job opportunity. As part of your job advert, tell your prospective candidates that you’ll be doing a live-stream tour of the office, in which they’ll get to see where you work and even get a glimpse of their prospective new employer. As users can also comment on the video (a feature you can turn on and off), you could end with a short Q&A with the panel, giving applicants the chance to find out more before applying.
Simple, but very effective.
This article is a part of a series of articles looking at digital media and marketing trends for 2018. We’ve previously looked at The Decline In Facebook Organic Reach and next time we’ll look at The Rise of Digital Assistants. Keep an eye on our website.
If you enjoyed this article and are interested in the work we do here at ProMo-Cymru then take a look at our other articles in the News section.
Everything starts with a conversation
ProMo-Cymru works towards building positive change and lasting relationships between individuals, families and communities. Providing innovative and creative solutions through meaningful conversations and digital technology. If you’d like to discuss how our TEC Model can help your organisation then get in touch.
Here at ProMo-Cymru we’ve been looking at digital media and marketing trends for 2018. In the first of three articles, Andrew Collins, our Communication and Partnerships Officer, looks at the decline in Facebook organic reach.
Reach is the number of times your message is seen by Facebook users. It is split into two categories:
– Paid Reach – The number of times people saw your message because you paid Facebook to show it.
– Organic Reach – The number of times people saw your message without paying Facebook.
A huge decline
For months now we’ve been warned that Facebook’s organic reach, that is the number of times you unpaid post is seen by users, was about to dwindle. Well in January, that warning became the harsh reality.
If you run a Facebook page, then you will likely see your reach decline by between 60-90%. That’s a huge decrease. It basically means that 75% FEWER people are seeing your posts.
That’s a problem for two reasons:
– Your message will not be seen by as many people as before, so you may get fewer attendees to your training course, or fewer people knowing about your new service or product.
– If, like most public sector projects, you report your Facebook stats to a funder organisation, you’ll see a dramatic reduction in your numbers, despite doing the same amount of work.
Solutions
Add media
There are still some tried and tested ways to maximise your organic reach. Make sure you always add at least one form of media to your post. That could be an image, a video or a link to a blog post from your own site, or elsewhere on the Internet. If you are copying a link, make sure that displays as a ‘Preview Snippet’ (like below) rather than just displaying the link address as text.
Use GIFs
Alternatively, why not try a posting a GIF – a low quality, small video file that plays several times on a loop. One organisation that uses GIFs really well to engage with their followers is Cardiff Blues. Their Twitter post below gained 38 likes/retweets and generated 6 comments, producing some GIF replies, and probably took just a few seconds to write. One word of warning though, GIFs are commonly used for comedic effect or to create excitement. Make sure you use them appropriately and don’t over-do it.
It’s pretty easy to include a ready-made GIF on your social media post these days. Look for the box marked ‘GIF’ underneath the ‘write new post’ box. Alternatively, try making your own. You can use a site like giphy.com, or film your own like the one below. Most new phones have an ‘Animated GIF’ setting on the camera app, just look in your settings or filters.
The only other way around the ‘reach crunch’ is to suck it up and pay the money. Facebook is lowering organic reach to force more organisations to pay up and, as such, it’s becoming more like the old-fashioned advertising streams of TV, radio and newspapers.
In the next few weeks, we’ll be looking at other digital media and marketing trends for 2018. We will look at The Rise in Video and Live Video, and the rise of digital assistants. Keep an eye on our website.
If you enjoyed this article and are interested in the work we do here at ProMo-Cymru then take a look at our other articles in the News section.
Everything starts with a conversation
ProMo-Cymru works towards building positive change and lasting relationships between individuals, families and communities. Providing innovative and creative solutions through meaningful conversations and digital technology. If you’d like to discuss how our TEC Model can help your organisation then get in touch.
The idea was to create a localised advocacy and support team for the people of Bridgend County Borough. The project aimed to assist people in finding appropriate social services, make sense of their options and help them understand their situation.
This is an area ProMo-Cymru already has significant experience in. We run similar advocacy projects, Meic and FamilyPoint Cymru, for Welsh Government.
As the project was the first of its kind in any Welsh county borough, there wasn’t a huge budget to take it from concept to completion. Fortunately, we had all the necessary skills in our team already. As well as having a dedicated Advocacy team, ProMo-Cymru also have a Comms team and Project Managers which built FamilyPoint from scratch.
Branding Bridgend Voice & Choice
Working with staff from Mental Health Matters, we developed a brand and identity for the project. This is where our designer, Augusté Poškaité was able to help. I’ll let her explain the process…
“When you’re creating a visual brand every detail counts: the right choice of colours, graphics and fonts. You need to make sure that everything helps to get the your message across. Bridgend Voice & Choice’s branding colours, two shades of blue, were chosen by the client. Blue is a smart colour for the brand, especially as Bridgend Voice & Choice is an advocacy and information helpline. It has a universal psychological impact: trust, stability and order. Blue also has a calming effect.
“To reinforce visual connotations with the services provided by the project, I wanted to make the logo look clean, sharp and simple – nothing too messy. We decided to use shades of blue for the background and a have clean white “line art” logo.
“The idea behind the design is people standing together to help each other. I wanted to create a logo that would give a sense of a caring community and would say ‘you’re not alone and we’re listening’. I used very simple line shapes that represent people. Next I laid them out in the way so it looks like people have their hands linked.
“The name “Bridgend Voice & Choice” had to fit well with the line art based logo too. To create resonating visual weight, I chose to use simple typography and thin lined font.”
Bridgend Voice & Choice’s Website
In October 2016, mobile web usage overtook desktop for the first time in the UK. That means that people now prefer to use their smartphone to view websites, rather than desktop or laptop computers. This poses a real challenge for web developers. We need to create websites that are easily accessible but also useable across a whole range of different devices.
With all this in mind, we knew it was essential that Bridgend Voice & Choice’s website was responsive. We decided to use the Bootstrap framework to achieve this. We also went with a one-page design as we felt this would be the best way to display all the information clearly and in an easily-accessible style.
This is consistent with all of Bridgend Voice & Choice’s branding. It ensures the user has the same experience and familiarity when on the site, no matter what device they use.
As well as being responsive, the site is small in size meaning it’s quick to load. A recent Google study suggested that 53% of mobile users will abandon sites that take longer than 3 seconds to load. So we know a quick loading speed is essential to ensure people actually visit the page.
The site’s main feature, as set out in the client’s brief, was to easily direct visitors to the multi-point helpline service. With this in mind, we made the text, call and instant message links part of the design of the site’s header.
Bridgend Voice & Choice complies with Welsh Government’s Welsh Language Policy. At ProMo-Cymru, everything we do is bilingual and we have our own in-house translation team. We were able to utilise this when creating the Bridgend Voice & Choice project.
Monitoring the success of Bridgend Voice & Choice
As we all know, proving a project’s success is incredibly important – especially when it comes to funding. Fortunately, we were able to provide the clients with two key tools to monitor their progress.
Our multi-touchpoint contact management tool, Call Handling, comes with its own analytics tool. Call Handling allows you to see real-time and historic stats for all contacts to your helpline service. You can easily segment the data to see how the contact was made – via phone, text or instant message. You can also filter by date and number of messages.
The other tool is Google Analytics. We installed this into the backend of the Bridgend Voice & Choice website, and it gives them accurate up-to-the-minute data about visitor information. You can find out how many people visited your website and how visitors found you (via Google search, social media, a referral from another website, or whether they went direct to the URL). You can also find out what device they viewed on (mobile, tablet or desktop) as well as almost anything else you could wish to know!
This data will be crucial to Mental Health Matters when it comes to proving the success of the project when applying for further funding.
We’re really proud of what we were able to produce for the client. Utilising the skills and knowledge we have in our team and working within the project brief, we’ve created a customer-focussed solution, with professional branding and a user-friendly website. All on a small budget.
The TEC Model has been at the heart of this process, from design and production to handover and delivery. This is what we mean by innovation and the TEC model. Highlighting how to engage and support through a human and digital approach.
Everything starts with a conversation
ProMo-Cymru works towards building positive change and lasting relationships between individuals, families and communities. Providing innovative and creative solutions through meaningful conversations and digital technology. If you’d like to discuss how our TEC Model can help your organisation then get in touch.
Facebook Pages, Twitter, Whatsapp, Slack, Messenger, Gmail… if you use just two of these, let me introduce your new best Franz.
At ProMo-Cymru HQ, we love social media. We love to communicate with others and spread some of the work being done by our projects and our partners.
What we don’t like, however, is how time-consuming and often laborious it is to do.
If you’ve ever tried using Chrome, IE or Safari to manage multiple social media pages for different projects, you’ll know exactly what I mean. Let’s say I want to share ProMo’s latest blog and chat with people who comment and reply. Easy. It becomes less easy when I then need to do the same for FamilyPoint Cymru. And Meic. And TheSprout. We’re also bilingual. so we make sure that we send out Welsh versions of all our social media posts. Added up it can quickly become confusing.
It’s such a pain switching between accounts and social media platforms to manage all our different projects. The alternative, tens of browsers, each logged in as something different, open at any one time and eating up all that precious CPU.
Say Hello to Franz
Yes, technically is in another messaging app, but hear me out…
Franz allows you to add each service many times. This makes Franz the perfect tool to manage multiple business and private accounts all at the same time. You could even use five different Facebook Messenger accounts at once, if some inexplicable reason urges you to do so.
One window, multiple accounts, multiple networks. It’s like it was purpose built for those of us in the third sector!
Including all the big hitters, Franz currently supports 34 networks/tools, and its library is always growing. Check out the full list below:
Not only is it completely free, but Franz will never read anything you type, send or receive. That means it’s perfect for your home life and/or your work accounts. Also, it works on Windows, Mac and Linux.
It solves a very real problem that communicators in the third sector face on an almost hourly basis
Having used Franz for over a month, I am a fully-fledged convert. It solves a very real problem that communicators in the third sector face on an almost hourly basis. Trying to monitor several accounts across several sites gets incredibly confusing and can lead to errors – Welsh messages posted on English pages, for example – but the clarity helps to avoid such mistakes.
Add that to the desktop notifications you receive for new messages, comments or shares and it really is the perfect tool.
About the author: Andrew Collins is ProMo-Cymru’s Communications and Partnerships Officer, overseeing and contributing to online content produced by FamilyPoint, Meic and ProMo Cymru. Specialising in social media content and analysis, he is an English graduate, qualified teacher and web designer.
Interested in working with Andrew, or attending a social media workshop, contact andrew@promo.cymru.
Andrew Collins, ProMo-Cymru’s Communications and Partnerships Officer, was recently fortunate enough to grab a cup of coffee with Aled Nelmes, Digital Marketing Consultant with Google Garage (and a very nice person, to boot).
He asked him a few questions about Google Garage, and what they can do for marketing geniuses-in-training.
Google Garage is a free service at The Tramshed, Cardiff till the end of April 2017. Drop in Monday to Friday anytime between 9am-6pm.
In a nutshell, how would you describe Google’s Digital Garage to someone who has never heard of it before?
I would say it’s basically a physical embodiment of the online Digital Garage. The online Digital Garage is a digital marketing course that Google has been running for a couple of years where you get a formal qualification at the end which is recognised by employers and other organisations.
So if you’re not really into online stuff or you find it unstimulating, you can come into the Garage. We hold seminars twice a week and one-to-one mentoring sessions everyday where you can get answers to more specific questions.
Who would go there and what sort of things can they expect to learn?
Anyone who wants to increase or improve their digital skills. We had someone come in who wanted to learn how to email their granddaughter in Singapore, to people who have several-thousand pound budgets and want to know the best way to spend it.
There’s no question too small and there’s no question too big – although we may get a bit scared if it’s really big!
How much does it cost? It all sounds very good, but I’m guessing there must be a catch?
That’s my favourite question! Absolutely nothing!
To be fair we do get a lot of people asking, “What’s the catch?”, but people come in with questions about their business, or about their passion, and they leave more excited to pursue that business or passion.
We like to think everyone who comes leaves happy – they seem to smile most of the time!
If someone came in, what sort of experience could they expect? Could you walk us through how they could spend an afternoon or a day in the Google Garage, what would it be like?
So you walk in, everyone’s very smiley! There’s a team of four of us on hand. You’ll be offered free snacks, WiFi, tea and coffee the lot – so even if you’re just a bit hungry and you use Google now and again, that’s all good!
You can come in and we’ll talk you through the different services we can offer, if you wanted a one-to-one mentoring session we’d set you up with someone who’s most experienced or skilled as to what you want to do. So, for example, I specialise in web building from a free and ‘DIY’ sense, but some other guys will specialise in Analytics or AdWords – we’ll set you up with the best option for you. And of course, it’s all for free as well!
Aled and the team
What would you say are the most common difficulties that organisations face online and any tips on how to solve them?
There’s two big issues we have. One is that a lot of businesses or charities think that to achieve a strong online following they have to have a lot of money. However, the reality is that because these digital services want your use – like Twitter, Facebook and Google – they will try to make everything as cost-effective for you as possible.
For example, we get a lot of people come in and say “I want to advertise”, so we say, “Have you tried Facebook marketing?” because with Facebook marketing you can directly send or aim an advertisement or post based at a specific type of person that you know is going to be interested in your product or service.
So you can filter it to things like age or place?
Absolutely. Age, gender, location, even interests! So you know you can nail it down and you’ll be spending nothing more than £10 and can get your message out to, potentially, a couple of hundred relevant people.
So let’s say that someone came to see you. They run a local family group and they wanted to advertise their community centre. The sort of people that use it are families, what would you suggest to them if they were to use Facebook marketing?
The first step would be identifying their market. So we’d use online tools, free tools like Trends and Analytics, to find out what kind of people are looking for your service and what kind of people are already finding your service and getting the most satisfaction out of it. We can then nail that down to a set demographic, a type of person, and then take them through very easy steps to create a template to aim ads at their community for very little money.
I’ve seen businesses build an online profile and just build their content right and analyse their market so well that they haven’t spent a penny. They set up a Facebook page with lots of interaction, they ask questions rather than just giving people information, they’ve got people interested in what they’re doing, stimulated by what they’re doing. Often you’ll find that once you’ve developed this online community you go, actually that’s enough.
So I talked about needing a little budget, but essentially to start, you don’t need to spend a penny. We get a lot of businesses that come in and realise that, which is really nice, really good to see.
If you had three top tips that people can use to improve their presence online, what would they be?
The biggest tip is don’t overdo it. I think a lot of business come in and say, “right, I’ve got a Facebook page, got a Twitter page, got a Pinterest page, got a Instagram page, got LinkedIn page oh and I’ve got a website, oh and I’ve got a mailout”.
…and it takes hours and hours to run them all…
Yeah! And we take a look through and say, well is anyone interacting with them? Have you checked your Analytics to see how many people are coming from these social media pages to your website? Then we’ll nail those down and say, right you don’t actually need that. So that’s a big one, don’t overdo it. Nail exactly where your people are and focus on that.
That then leads on to the next one, which is reflect your brand. So if your organisation has a very strong brand, especially if you have a very strong moral point, make sure your online presence reflects that. So you can keep that image, keep that vibe, keep that consistent.
The biggest thing is make the most of the free tools. We can form a digital marketing plan entirely for free. Make the most of those free tools, don’t jump straight into the big pay-per-click platforms until you’ve got a really solid community, social media and website. Make sure you’ve got strong platforms before you go spending megabucks.
Originally it was due to end 31st March 2017, but you’ve been given another month. How someone can get involved or arrange a visit?
People can just drop in Monday to Friday anytime between 9am-6pm. If you’re walking past the Tramshed on Pendyris Street in Cardiff (It’s just the other side of the river from the Cardiff Central train station), you can always just drop in.
If you want to book a session, or you want to book a seminar or one-to-one session just to make sure you’ve got that spot, you can do that just go to our website which is g.co/cardiffgarage and you can find everything out there. There’s a whole page where you can register for the seminars. Sometimes we have special events, where we’ll get specialised ‘Googlers’ from London or Dublin (Google’s Head Offices) and they’ll come in and give a specialised talk on how to get your business forward. They’ve been amazing, they packed out the place, so if you’re really interested in how to take your organisation to the next level, book those right now because they fill up really quickly.
Otherwise, just pop in. Like I said, we’re always a friendly face, the doors are open 9am-6pm so just pop in and say ‘Hi’.
Brilliant! Well Aled, thanks very much for your time. Cheers.
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About Us
In the last 30 years, ProMo-Cymru has developed services that range from information websites and community regeneration projects, to an advocacy helpline.
