How-To Guide: Social Media and Blog

You can use social media and blogging to broaden the reach of your marketing campaign.

Paid Social Media Best Practices

Paid Social advertising refers to all forms of marketing within social media where advertisers pay for ad placement. Paid social is different than organic social media in that you can target and engage with audience who do not already follow you on the site. It often goes by other names such as "Sponsored Content" or "Promoted Content".

Download the full presentation on Paid Social Best Practices from Tableau's expert!

 

Paid social is not social media

  • Ads are being shown to people who don’t necessarily follow you, so you need to use the appropriate voice and messaging. Often different than how you speak to your customers/followers
  • You can turn ads off and “hide” a post if needed. However, when it’s shared, then it’s beyond your control
  • You should strive to check comments on a daily basis and respond where appropriate. However, because ads are only show part-time and can be hidden, there is less urgency than organic posts
  • Across most platforms, ads are shown a minimal amount of times to people. However, an ad you created 3 months ago can still be shown to a new person for the first time
    • Facebook: a person can see one newsfeed ad from your account once a day
    • LinkedIn: a person can see one newsfeed ad from your account once a day
    • Twitter: a person will only be served a sponsored tweet once

Paid Social is not display advertising

  • People can and will comment on your posts. You should engage with them (following your company’s social media guidelines)
  • Platforms reward ads and content that have higher engagements, like clicks, likes, shares, etc. Ads with high engagement are charged less, which decreases costs and increases performance
  • Content will become exhausted more frequently, resulting in lower performance and higher cost

Test constantly

  • Constantly test new imagery: product, people, colors, mono-tone, etc.
  • Headlines and body copy: edgy vs. practical, general vs. specifics, name dropping, etc.
  • Call to Actions: button vs. no button, different buttons, include in imagery, etc.

Other helpful tips

  • If promoting a video, have versions that are only :15 - :30 seconds long (link to full video)
  • Test and measure performance based on device: Desktop vs Mobile vs Tablet
  • When naming accounts, campaigns, ads, etc. forward think how you will analyze the data and how these names can be leveraged for segmentation (Ex: include region or country name/abbreviation)

Organic Social Media

The first step in creating a social media strategy is to identify the networks where your prospective customers spend the most time (i.e. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, industry and specialty blogs, etc).
  • Consider using Facebook, Twitter or Google ads to drive new visitors to your website, and to amplify the impact of your campaigns, events and webinars. Learn more about Web Traffic How-To.
  • Regularly promote events and webinars on your preferred social media channels and LinkedIn. If you have a guest speaker for a webinar, ask the speaker to share the information with their network.
  • Write blog posts related to your campaign, events, or webinars Valuable and educational blog content motivates prospects and customers to engage.
  • Use trending hashtags or hashtags created by Tableau that correspond to your campaign. As an example, #datatrends16 for the Business Intelligence trends campaigns.
  • Use @Tableau in social media posts to associate your marketing activities with people searching for more information on Tableau.
  • Add a picture or data visualization to your tweet/post. They’re more engaging!

Tableau Blog

The Tableau.com blog shares informative, fun, and insightful information about data visualization with its followers. Tableau employees from different parts of the company post to the blog, and special guests such as industry experts and partners contribute to the blog as well. The blog is not intended to drive sales leads.

If you have something to say about a Tableau.com blog post, you can link to it from your website, tweet about it, or share it with your email database. Please reference Tableau’s original post and build upon it with your own takeaways and thoughts. For example, a tweet about a Tableau blog post may look something like this:

Check out this great way to visualize data -- Tile Grid Maps in #Tableau https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2015/11/how-make-tiled-maps-tableau-… … via @tableau

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