Numbers Don't Matter, Influence Does

Gary Vaynerchuk

CEO, Entrepreneur, Investor, Best-Selling Author, Speaker, Jets Fan

The importance that people and brands place on follower counts or the impressions their content receives is grossly overvalued. I can’t say numbers don’t matter, but the value everyone places on these numbers needs to be reconsidered.There is just too much emphasis on the width of engagement—how many potential connections they make—rather than the depth of those interactions which, in my eyes, is far more important.

THE NUMBER OF IMPRESSIONS YOU HAVE DON’T ALWAYS TELL THE FULL STORY

The entire marketing world is blinded by the notion that more impressions always correlates to a successful piece of content (the sad part is, most of them don’t care about the business outcomes). For example, you might hear somebody say “500,000 people saw my YouTube pre-roll ad!” But, the truth is that they likely didn’t. What probably happened was that as soon as the ad started, the “viewer” clicked away to another tab or did something else until it was over. Or looked at their phone…. So even though they didn’t pay attention, the analytics still show that they saw it.

Not only can an impression count be misleading, but it may not even reflect a positive consumer engagement. There are companies I will never buy from again because their pop-up ads annoyed me so much—you know, the ones that havehundreds of extra “clickthroughs” because someone accidentally clicked on it 8 times because the “close window” icon was too small. While those extra clicks look like engagement, they were only expressions of frustration with the brand. That context gets lost when we are playing in a world that treats impressions as a be-all, end-all.

WHY YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA FOLLOWER COUNT IS IRRELEVANT

The same misconception can be applied to follower counts: they only matter if the audience actually cares and actively consumes your content. Followers can be absolutely everything or absolutely nothing.

Let’s say you have 20,000 followers on Instagram and 12,000 of them buy ten copies of your book because you posted about it. That type of conversion means you have an engaged audience consuming your content. That’s valuable.

On the other hand, let’s say you have 200,000 purchased fans. When you post something and it gets zero engagement, those followers have zero value because (1) they either don’t care about your content or (2) they’re not real. Either way, your follower count does not represent their real value to you.

Even the thought that a low number of followers can be considered “irrelevant” makes no sense to me. You can have 10, 10,000, or 1,000,000 followers and all it takes is for one post to be noticed by one person to cause a social media chain reaction. The absolute number does not matter. One retweet, one repost, one link in an email is enough to get the ball rolling.

WHAT MATTERS MOST IS THE ATTENTION, NOT THE NUMBERS

Instead of talking about how many people see your content, we need to be focusing on how much value that piece of content actually brings your audience. For a consumer to get excited about something, to be compelled to click an ad or watch a video, it comes down to caring about your audience’s attention. And in order for you to win, they really need to consume it. That’s the game.

In terms of organic reach, the #1 platform in the world right now is Instagram (even with the new algorithm). If you have 297 followers on Instagram, 150 of them are actually going to consume your posts. On the reverse side, someone with 3,000 followers on Twitter would not command nearly as much attention due to Twitter’s noise problem. For any platform, you need to understand the context of how your followers are consuming. Once you do that, you can reverse engineer how you can go deep to connect with that consumer and how that “impression” translates into actual interest.

For my newest book release, I sent free advance copies to over 1,000 Instagram influencers and asked them to post a substantial longform review with a photo. Not on Amazon, not on Twitter, not on their blog, but Instagram. Why? Because I day trade attention and I understood that this tactic was going to command the most amount of awareness.

Snapchat also has great organic reach right now. It’s the reason why I’ve been so excited for custom Snapchat filters and Story takeovers. When someone is using a filter or watching a Story, they have intent and you can be sure they’re paying attention. Remember, it’s about depth, not width. It’s not how many you reach, it’s how many you connect with.

Bottom line: I don’t care how many people see something, “I care about how many people see something.” Quality over quantity. Depth over width. Reach does not equal value and follower count doesn’t mean people are listening. We need to stop focusing on optimizing the number of views and instead concentrate on making each one of those viewers care about your brand. Because, at the end of the day, that’s the only way you’ll drive results to your end goal.

This article was originally published at www.garyvaynerchuk.com/blog

Lean on me The evolving world of growth and marketing

Annie Katrina LeeDec 38 min read

Lean on me

The evolving world of growth and marketing

There’s no shortage of articles about how to build a growth team, why you need a growth team, and the differences between marketing and growth teams. But, there aren’t a lot of articles about how these teams should lean on each other and ways to work towards the same vision. Why?

This was puzzling to me when I arrived in San Francisco to join my first startup — Pinterest — in 2012. “Growth” seemed to be the buzzword around the Valley, but when I boiled it down, the tactics were familiar. As a marketer, my job was to sell, position, drive results….and grow. Right?

Wrong.

Soon enough, I learned the ins and outs of the growth hacking community, and why startups gravitate towards them. What I didn’t comprehend was the friction between growth and marketing teams, and why people believed they were mutually exclusive.

I was determined to understand this dichotomy and somehow change this mindset. At Pinterest, one of our core values is “knitting” (pun intended). Knitting means taking the time to learn about other disciplines to help you make better and informed decisions. It’s not just about getting along with people or being nice, or as many big companies say “cross-group collaboration.” It’s about complementing skills and remembering that we’re all here to support the same goal.

Over the years, we’ve gone through rapid change and different ways of working with our growth team, but overall my experience has been positive. Sure, there’s tension, but it’s a healthy tension. The kind of tension that helps us build a better product for Pinners.

We’ve learned a lot. Some things worked, and some things didn’t — that’s the beauty of a startup. Our growth lead Casey Winters and I thought it would be helpful to share some of our experiences. Hopefully our story can help other companies create a productive working environment, regardless ofwhat stage of a startup you’re in.

Building the best user experience

In the early days of Pinterest, we spent a lot of time thinking about what brings people to the door (signups) and what makes them stick around long-term (preventing churn / retention). Ultimately, we identified that content is what Pinners valued. If people didn’t find content they cared about, they left. It became apparent that content was our currency — leveraging content and figuring out how we distribute was one way to think about driving growth.

We approached content as an art as well as science. Questions like “is the content good?” and “does it represent our brand” were just as important as “what topics are trending?” and “what performs better?” On top of that, we had to think about how to scale.

It was clear that both marketing and growth teams were trying to build a better experience for Pinners using content, so we focused on that.

Curated vs. personalized content

Email was the easiest channel to tackle first. It’s not the sexiest growth channel, but the scale was large enough to make an impact, and it allowed us to balance discoverable (curated things you might like) and relevant (things personalized for you based on algorithms) types of content.

After auditing the content in our emails, the gap was clear. Personalized content was well-covered, while curated content wasn’t.

We started a new email series that curated content based on seasonal topics, called editorial. The marketing team used data to identify topics that communities wanted to hear about and targeted Pinners who were active in those topics, while the growth team worked on ways to distribute content without annoying users.

One of our top-performing editorial emails

While these emails drove visits and activity on Pinterest, it arguably had a bigger impact in showing the possibilities of Pinterest, which is harder to measure. The challenge was that we didn’t have fantastic ways to control the delivery of email in general to Pinners. Some Pinners were receiving nothing, and others were receiving way more than they could anticipate. Editorial, in some cases, was piling on to a problem of engaged Pinners already receiving too much email.

Working together, we were able to standardize not only who should receive each editorial email, but prioritize it with other emails as well. Casey hacked together queries that limited email volume, and later, with a scalable system that limited emails for each Pinner based on their activity, their interests, and what they previously opened and clicked on.

Today, 20% of email engagement comes from editorial, driving an incremental volume of users who don’t churn and/or resurrect.

Boom. Knitting = winning.

Quality vs. quantity (traffic & signups)

Good growth teams care about driving acquisition. Great growth teams care about acquiring users who will stick around. To reconcile the number of signups with the right type of signups, we looked at our traffic sources and signup page to see where we could optimize.

For traffic, we began adding new landing pages that pulled together the best seasonally relevant content so users on search engines could find it. The first experiments went well, so the growth team built an internal tool to allow the marketing team to add new keywords on their own, based on our editorial calendar.

Keyword landing page for “Halloween Costumes”

For signups, Pinterest had millions of people landing on its home page without a complete understanding of what it is. Our previous home page did little to explain what Pinterest was or how you could use. The growth team built a new version of the home page focusing on visually representing popular use cases of Pinterest, which increased signup conversion by 10%. To continue optimizing, the growth team built a self-serve tool for the marketing team to swap out content based on seasonal use cases, which led to an additional 1–2% increase in conversion rate.

See, two heads are better than one.

Complementing skills

Marketing is great at identifying perception challenges and telling stories that can get others to understand the value of Pinterest. Growth is great at identifying the top opportunities in where to tell those stories. While growth can A/B test messaging until the cows come home, marketing makes sure we test the right messages that make long-term sense for Pinterest.

Conversely, marketing may be able to tell the best stories, but not succeed at driving the distribution of those stories. That is where the growth team can do the math and really understand if this will have the impact it needs to be worth the time investment.

Managing differences

I hear a lot of horror stories about growth teams hacking new ideas to achieve “hockey stick” growth, but lose brand equity in the process. At Pinterest, we value both our growth rate (how quickly we’re growing) and our brand reputation (how people perceive and feel about us). These goals tend to be at odds with each other, and over time, we’ve learned how to pick and choose our battles wisely.

Send a Pin email: Before and after

Our Send a Pin email is one example where we didn’t see eye to eye. We debated whether we should show the message in the email or make Pinners click through to see the message on Pinterest. Obviously, the latter option would lead to higher click rates, but what we didn’t consider was how much we’d annoy Pinners by adding an additional click to see content they’re interested in. So, we did some digging and looked at all the tradeoffs.

What we saw was that Pinners were only 1–2% more engaged by that one additional visit from email than Pinners who saw the message directly in their inbox. If we only looked at email clicks rates, it was an obvious choice: make people come to Pinterest and see the message. However, considering the small percentage, we decided it was not worth the tradeoff. We opted for our long-term gain (building trust with Pinners) vs. short-term gain (more clicks to Pinterest from this specific email), because we could always find ways to drive more clicks from other growth hacks, but it would be difficult to scalably build trust once it’s gone.

That’s how we manage through differences. We prioritize the Pinner experience first, instead of our own personal goals.

Practical takeaways

Teams naturally become siloed because of how people are incentivized. Organizations tend to reward people for results and impact. Results can easily be translated into things people can take credit for, versus how teams should work together to drive the impact everyone wants to achieve.

Our recommendation isn’t to drastically change the way you recruit or structure your teams. Whether you’re a CEO or a leader of growth and marketing teams, our recommendation is to create an environment where the two teams are incentivized to work as one. Here are some tactical ways to bring this to life — they’re no brainers, but they’re easier said than done.

1. Establish brutally honest role clarity: Identify strengths (ask questions! exchange your MBTI!) and build teams with domain expertise that complement each other. This will alleviate headaches down the road and avoid people fighting for the same projects.
2. Map goals together: Whether you’re creating weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly goals, make sure both teams are aligned on prioritieswell in advance. Goals should also reflect things that will help each other’s goals, including fluid resources if it makes sense. “Keeping headcount” is a slippery slope, but it happens way more often than it should.
3. Have frequent 1:1’s: In the beginning, frequent meetings can help keep everyone on the same page, especially in startups that are moving quickly. Get recurring syncs on the calendar, but don’t wait for meetings to connect either. Email, IM, text — whatever communication is preferred,use it and use it often.
4. Tag team meetings: This is a hard one, because it’s easy to have too many cooks in the kitchen. There’s a tradeoff, however, to not attending the same meetings. Information doesn’t flow as quickly, inaccurate assumptions are made, and you end up spending more meetings (ugh) to untangle misalignments. As the need for technical skills are increasing, the reality is that marketing is an unbundling discipline and growth is one of them. You can either make effort to collaborate early on or force yourself to clean up the mess later on.
5. Defer decision making: Assuming #1 is established, decision making should be easy, but making decisions tend to make people feel empowered and people can easily get caught in the “receiving credit” trap. Teams will build trust when they’re given opportunities to make a call about their domain expertise. Check egos at the door and know when to defer decisions to the right team.

Over the years, we’ve been working together on crafting a growth strategy that doesn’t tarnish our brand. It’s certainly not perfect, and still a work in progress, but we’ve learned a lot along the way. Whether you need to hire a marketer or a growth hacker first is a question that should be uniquely answered for each company. What’s more important, is how well they complement each other and their willingness to truly collaborate towards the same vision.

Thanks @onecaseman for contributing to this post!

StartupGrowth HackingMarketing

https://medium.com/art-marketing/lean-on-me-df6a152f649d#.c7jsrrnn1

World Surfing League ad sends chills down your spine

If you know your audience and have the right tools you can put together ads like this one that send chills down your spine and makes your hair stand up on your arms.

The Chaos Theory concept was created by award-winning creative agency Mistress and was directed by Dan DiFelice.
Read more at http://business.transworld.net/news/the-world-surfing-league-unveils-their-global-brand-campaign-you-cant-script-this/#ZUMwy2SG6Ws4cRfh.99

Best Times to Publish Content for Social Media Engagement

At AddThis, we’re constantly analyzing data from the 1.9B unique users we see per month across our network of over 15MM websites to learn how people are engaging with content. Last December, we published thebest times to post on social media during the winter holidays. That post, as well as a similar one we did earlier that year, proved so popular that we’re doing it again.

Knowing when your users are active on social networks is useful, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. We analyzed data in both the United States (US) and in the United Kingdom (UK) to search for peak social engagement times – when users were most likely to click and share content – on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. These findings are meant to help website owners get an idea of the best times to publish new content to maximize engagement on social media.

Social Media Engagement in the United States

In the US, most social networks see a spike in shares during the morning hours. Shares in this case don’t refer to shares on Facebook or retweets on Twitter – instead, these shares refer to content being shared to a specific social network from its original digital source through sharing tools (e.g. share to Facebook, share to Twitter). This trend is especially true for Twitter and LinkedIn, which are sites that tend to attract early birds. Shares to Facebook get started a bit later in the day, and shares to Pinterest happen mostly at night.

With shares occurring earlier in the day, clicks tend to happen a little later across all social networks, mostly in the late afternoon and into the evening. Twitter and LinkedIn get the most clicks in the afternoon, while Facebook and Pinterest drive traffic after 8:00pm.

Peak Times of Day for Shares and Clicks by Social Network
Use this information to get more of your content shared across social media and help drive clicks back to your website:

*All times listed above are in Eastern Standard Time (EST)

Peak Times of Week to Post for Maximum Social Engagement
While each social network has peak times of day for shares and clicks, they also have certain days of the week during which engagement spikes. When you put all that data together, you get specific timeframes for which you should aim to post content for maximum shares and clicks.

*All times listed above are in Eastern Standard Time (EST)

Users rest on the weekend, and so can you. Since demand for content isn’t as high on Saturdays and Sundays, save your best content to be published during the 9-5 workday between Monday and Thursday. Sharing and clicking activity tends to die down on Saturday and Sunday across all platforms…except on Pinterest. In fact, some of the highest click activity on content shared to Pinterest occurs on Sunday night from 9:00-10:00! Note that users aren’t as willing to share content on Sundays, but there is definitely a demand to see new pins.

Social Media Engagement in the United Kingdom

Unlike in the US, where clicking tends to happen much later than sharing, in the UK, sharing and clicking tend to happen within the same time period. This could be due to the fact that “Britons are slightly less digitally obsessed” or that social networks are blocked at many U.K. companies, resulting in less time spent on social networks overall, and less time spent during work hours. Much of the social activity in the UK occurs between 8:00-10:00pm GMT.

Peak Times of Day for Shares and Clicks by Social Network
The UK data is similar to the US when it comes to Twitter and LinkedIn (shares to these networks occur in the morning), as well as Pinterest (shares happen at night). The wild card here is Facebook. While users in the US tend to share to Facebook in the late morning and early afternoon, in the UK, that activity happens at night, from 8:00-10:00pm.

*All times listed above are in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)

Peak Times of Week to Post for Maximum Social Engagement
Like social media users in the US, those in the UK are spending less time engaging with social media during the weekends. However, the exception is Sunday nights for Pinterest users, when sharing content tends to spike on this platform.

*All times listed above are in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)

Use this data as a starting point to get to know your audience’s habits. You may find that – based on their gender, life stage or interests – they’re on a different schedule. With AddThis Social Sharing Tools, you can make it easy for visitors to share your content, as well as get in-depth analytics about how and when they’re engaging with your brand across different social networks. Get started!

Tags: social media, social media engagement

http://www.addthis.com/blog/2015/10/06/best-times-to-publish-content-for-social-media-engagement/#%2EVhYUrJZihHU%2Elinkedin