Top 5 learnings from our Social | Media Day 2019

Last week, quintly hosted an exciting new event we called Social | Media Day – bridging the gap between social media marketing and the work of some pretty incredible news and media companies we partner with. At our HQ in the heart of Cologne, we welcomed 50 customers, partners and other industry heads from a ton of news outlets for a full day of great talks, learning and sharing knowledge.

At our last client event we noticed that we have many clients from the media industry that use our analytics solutions to help optimize their social media performance and it had got us thinking about how these companies often have the same challenges and could use a platform to exchange thoughts on a more regular basis.

So we took the chance to create a format where these companies get together, share their expertise, tips, thoughts on the industry and their work on social. Together with Burritos, that’s even better, we thought.

The agenda included 7 presentations and a panel discussion so we took the best and all the rest and wrote our findings here for you. 

If you’re thinking about your social media strategy, you’ll likely find some nice insights here. Read on!

Be enthusiastic, creative and authentic

Our day started great with Patrick Stenzel from the agency Bild- & Tonfabrik sharing his expertise on Instagram Stories for media companies. He talked about things to keep in mind when creating stories and showed us some best and worst practices from different media companies.

With a lot of bad examples in circulation - some that also really made us laugh -  he pointed out that Instagram and Instagram Stories in particular definitely shouldn’t be neglected. Marketers must be aware of the importance of this channel, give it the attention it deserves and really put work into it. It’s not something that can simply be done on the side.

“The essential for a great Instastory”, he says, “is knowing your audience.” Create recurring and entertaining stories in which users can take part in, like e.g. polls, games etc. Let them be part of the story, let them participate. Your audience wants to be seen!

Try using new tools to generate more traffic to your content

You want to be less dependent on Facebook? Torben Waleczek from Deutschlandradio might have a solution. He decided to use two additional tools to generate more traffic for his articles with minimal effort.

Flipboard is a news aggregator where users can follow publishers as well as magazines and specific topics and also like, share and comment articles. Torsten curated a specific Deutschlandradio magazine in Flipboard where he is sharing content and is able to reach a global audience.

Pocket is a read-it-later-service where readers can as well engage with articles. Publishers like Deutschlandradio can add Pocket to their site and app which makes it easy for their readers to save articles for later. Torsten finds it also very helpful, that Pocket allows you to analyze the performance on his content within the service.

His conclusion is that those tools are of course not replacing Facebook – but can be used as a great addition to generate more traffic.

How to track social media performance across 180 social channels with 34 million followers

How is a big media company with 180 social media channels working with social media analytics and data? Jan Quickels from media group RTL showed us their approach:

RTL is using quintly and Brandwatch, one of the leading social media listening providers. To bring data closer to the teams inside of the media group RTL, Jan’s team worked on a solution to display listening data side by side with analytics data provided by quintly. The Brandwatch Vizia integration allowed them to integrate exactly these data endpoints and showcase this data on screens in the office. This way, the team can see the most important social media KPIs throughout their workday – even when they are having lunch in the kitchen!

Learnings from analyzing 34 million posts posted by media outlets

As we concentrated on media companies for this event, our marketing lead Julian decided to analyze the performance of 4,584 profiles of media companies on Facebook with 34 million posts in total.

A really interesting finding is that 77% of all posts were link posts. But here’s the thing: Videos received 257% more interactions. Of course, media companies want to generate traffic with link posts but if they also want their fans to engage with their content, they should consider putting more effort in creating video content.

Julian also had some good news for everyone working at a media outlet: interactions are on the rise again since September 2018.

Yes, organic reach, growth and traffic still exist - in Facebook groups

If you’re still afraid to open a Facebook group, Sophie Wanke from Dumont Media Group may change your mind.

She decided to create a closed Facebook group for a niche audience of a daily newspaper. What did the publisher gain? Not only higher organic reach and growth but also more traffic.  She also states Facebook groups can furthermore be a great source for User Generated Content and give you the possibility for cross-promoting your posts. Editors can furthermore create closeness to readers in such groups.

The conclusion? Facebook Groups can be a great addition to your Facebook page!

5 Hacks for Facebook Performance Marketing

Have you always wanted some insights from a Facebook Ads pro? Jan Stranghöner from Social Marketing Nerds had us covered and presented 5 Hacks for Facebook Performance Marketing on our Social | Media Day.

“First thing that you always have to keep in mind”, he said, “is that no one is on Facebook to buy your products.” So don’t be too aggressive with your ads, rather try to inspire people – then try to convert.

Second hack: go for video views! Create different formats for every platform and also try Instagram Stories Ads as they’re still relatively cheap. Be aware that in one or two years Instagram Stories Ads will probably be overpriced – so you better act quickly before the big players will jump on the bandwagon.   

What can also be very effective is to retarget video viewers. That basically means that you generate reach from a posted video, absorb the relevant video viewers and set up another ad with them as your target group.

Did you know that you are able to plan your posts in advance and can create an ad before it goes live on your Facebook page? The advantage of this method is that your target audience can be built and improved early on. Also, your post already has interactions and views when being published.

The last hack that Jan presented is posting content on different accounts, also called cross-posting. The great thing about this method is that the target audience of both posts will be collected in one video.

The importance of listening

Why can a listening tool be important for local newspapers? Hannah Mondekamp from Rheinische Post told us about the creation of their own listening hub using listening data for Rheinische Post.  

 It can be challenging for a local newspaper to get access to relevant content, Hannah states. That’s why the decision was made to create a listening hub.  Personalized alerts can be set to get access to relevant news and be able process them immediately. Especially this aspect can be of importance for smaller media outlets. It makes them less independent of other news sources.

Panel Discussion: A critical look at the future of Social Media for media companies

Our panel discussion was all about predictions for the future of social media. We wanted to ask our panelists about their thoughts on what will be the next big thing in social media and what kind of content will be consumed and demanded by the users?

Jan Stranghöner (Social Marketing Nerds), Sophie Wanke (DuMont Mediengruppe), Franziska Hendreschke (Deutschlandfunk Nova) and quintly’s own CEO Alexander Peiniger shared their diverse and interesting opinions with us. Here are a few topics the panelists touched:

Trust

One topic especially important in the field of social media these days is trust. Media companies in particular have to work on earning back trust of their followers after the much-publicized privacy scandals in the last years, says Franziska from Deutschlandradio.  

In fact, one of the first questions that came up during the panel was if customers should feel betrayed by subliminal advertisements on social media such as Instagram Stories or newsfeed posts that are not immediately distinguishable from regular friends posts.

Jan pointed out that it’s really all about the product. His thinking was that if the product is good enough and you really exceed the customers expectations, only then could you have more freedom to do whatever you want. But the reality is the focus should always be on the customer.

The focus should be on the customer. Every company has to ask itself what the individual actually wants. Then do your best to achieve that!

Personal Branding

Sophie picked up personal branding during the panel. She says that journalists have to have an opinion and stand up for what they believe in. She thinks that it is important for them to get more visible, be it through YouTube, newsletters or Twitter.

Alex also believes that personal branding is getting more relevant but states that there still has to be a balance. Companies have to be smart about bringing the individual and the brand together. They have to be aware of the challenges that can occur. What happens if the employee that is out there on the social channels is leaving the company? That’s a question every company has to ask itself if it decides on an employee as their testimonial.

Jan also thinks that in terms of trust it’s very good for a brand if a journalist shows up in front of the camera. So is the solution to get more influencers rather than brands into the customers feed?

“But can you really expect your employees to be active on social media besides his daily tasks?” , asks Franziska.

Sophie’s opinion on that topic is the following: “Of course you can’t force someone, it rather has to be kind of a natural thing. So if you see that one of your employees has an affinity to social media, just ask them if they want to try it out and see where it goes”

Don’t forget that your brand or content should be strong enough for employees to actually want to stand behind it.

Data Centralization

Alex from quintly points out the importance that data centralization will have in the future. It will get more and more relevant to work on a strategy that brings all data together to get to an exact recommended course of action for a social strategy that will be successful.

Easy consumable content or more visualization?

For Jan from Social Marketing Nerds, visualization is and will be the key for success in social media.

“Creating lots of content in lots of different formats – the right one for every channel – that’s what the user wants to see and what also will be the biggest challenge for every company”, said Jan.

He points out that media companies should think about how they will manage creating video costs efficiently and how they eventually will measure the performance of this content. He also suggests that companies should be flexible and try not to focus on one or another social media platform too much, as the user behavior can always change quickly.

Alex’ opinion on this topic is a different one.  He predicts that in the near future users will demand content that’s easy to consume, like short summaries and everything that you can watch where no sound is involved. With all the content that is out there you need something that is consumable in a short amount of time.

Any thoughts? Feel free to leave us a comment.

If you would like to get the slides of the presentations, just send me an email. 

We can’t wait for our next event - stay tuned!