Amplifying Your Influence

Amplifying Your Influence: How to Use Social Ads to Increase Your Value

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IT ME

Chris Curley is the Creative Director at Sensei Project. A former journalist, travel writer, and occasional pop culture critic, Chris has worked in digital marketing for six years. With Sensei Project, he helps create creative campaigns, works with influencers to connect them to brands and heighten their effectiveness in their field, and helps train companies’ marketing teams to embrace the future (while sometimes dragging them kicking and screaming into the present).

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THE CASE FOR SOCIAL ADS

You’re already an influencer, so why do you need advertising?

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Here are a few main reasons to consider having a social ads budget.

It can increase your value to the brands you work with

It can help you make a stronger case for future pitches

It exposes your work and brand to new audiences

You can drive more traffic to your blog in a directed way

Increase your multi-platform versatility

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First, let’s talk about reach. This audience knows that the older the platform, the more difficult (in general) it is to win maximum organic reach, which makes ad spend a must when attempting to even recapture your original audience. This is especially true on Facebook. But beyond that, it can essentially “juice” your organic reach, whether that’s on a video, a livestream, a photo or a link.

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A LITTLE GOES A LONG WAY

You don’t have to break the bank to get great results. This post at right had $100 behind it and reached nearly 200,000 people.

You’ll note it looks like that audience is largely organic, but it was the spend that it got it there. This 15x the average post reach for this particular client.

That said, you can move the needle on Facebook for as little as $10-15 per post.

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THE BRAND PERSPECTIVE

If you are going to plan on setting aside even a small budget when you’re working with a brand, go ahead and ask them what kind of results they’re hoping to get. You should already have an idea from your initial research and communications, but perhaps there’s a specific campaign, product, or angle they’re trying to highlight–which would give you an idea of where you might want to put some of that spend.

The better you can tailor your ads audiences to your partners’ needs, the more valuable you’ll be.

Furthermore, the better you can target segments of your audience, the stronger an argument you can make to broaden your travel horizons. If you have 350,000 and 50k are from U.K., but you can target and engage them, this creates a more persuasive argument for your value.

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DIFFERENT KPIs

One example of this is when promoting video or–less obviously– multi-image posts. These typically get fewer traditional post engagements on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram (i.e. Likes, Comments, Shares), but other key performance indicators (KPI) could be valuable to your brand partners and make these posts worth promoting.

For instance, in the post here which has a $25 spend behind it, traditional engagement metrics might say this is a 4% engagement rate (286/6976), but it’s worth counting those 264 photo views. After all, if an advertiser ran a promotional spread, a reader flipping through six pages is better than looking at just one.

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BEYOND IMPRESSIONS

As Influencers, you may not think about the opportunities of Call-to-Action ads, but if part of your platform is a blog, or you regularly present exclusive offers and opportunities for your readers, these ads can drive traffic much more efficiently than your standard post.

As part of your pitch, this is a value-add many don’t think about including.

Brands may be even willing to give you some budget to target your audience specifically in driving traffic back to their site; remember that brands can target your audience on Twitter themselves, but not on Facebook or Instagram Even if you don’t have an ads budget, it’s possible to negotiate brand sharing and boosting your post(s) thereby increasing your reach to a new audience.

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THE NITTY GRITTY | FACEBOOK/INSTAGRAM ADS

Say goodbye (mostly) to the Power Editor! Facebook has rolled 95% of the functionality of the robust but clunky and complicated power editor into their Ads Manager, making it easier than ever to run a variety of ads from the back end of your page.

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From here, you can create an unlimited number of saved audiences that hit different interest groups and demographics for using on Facebook and Instagram posts.

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Lookalike audiences are a handy way to raise your reach while staying planted in your niche.

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Once you have these audiences created, the hard work is done and you can access all of these via the “Boost Post” button, but with a much more robust and cost-efficient targeting than you normally reach using that action.

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ADS PLATFORM INSTAGRAM NOTE

Note: Facebook changed their ads platform defaults a couple of weeks ago to always make Instagram placements where the format allows. If you want to target one platform at a time (Facebook OR Instagram)–which is recommended–you’ll need to switch from automatic placements to manual.

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INSTAGRAM

Speaking of Instagram, a month ago, the platform quietly rolled out some new changes making their call-to-actions and website interactions more effective.

Call-to-action buttons now extend to the comments section, while videos will actually continue to play while the app loads in the link website (which you can see in the example at right).

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TWITTER ADS

Twitter ads have a lower ROI in general, but still have their place. The key is understanding how Twitter charges you to get rid of some of the noise. Twitter counts as an “engagement”:

Any click on the tweet Any click on any hashtag Any click on any @tag Retweets Likes A video “view” is 3-seconds watched

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TWITTER ADS

That said, Twitter’s “Cards” is an effective way to drive clicks to your website or an offer, and is great to set up and use when there is a specific article or action you want users to take that you’d have a harder time capturing in an organic tweet.

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TWITTER ADS

This is an “advertising” unit you can take advantage of without necessarily spending a dime. Article Cards integration in your blog means that links now create full clickable areas, increasing your CTR, while you can also pin important call-to-action cards to the top of your timeline giving them first focus (this is particularly good for special offers).

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WHAT’S NEXT?

Find a budget that works for you Choose a focus platform Start small Test, test, test

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YOUR CONTENT+

When you’re hired as an influencer, it’s usually because your community is made up of people that a brand wants to reach and because your content is compelling and desirable. Throwing social ads into the mix is just one of the tools in your arsenal to ensure everyone is happy with the end results.

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THANKS!

Thanks for listening – and being part of SITSum 2016!

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Amplifying Your Influence