Just this past week I was having coffee with a friend who volunteers to manage all the social media and website duties for his church (bless them). They’re savvy and very good about getting their church on Facebook Live each Sunday and creating shareable content throughout the week.
I brought up Instagram Stories during our conversation and remarked at how “hot” Stories are from a marketing point of view compared to the FB Newsfeed or Instagram’s photo feed and how more churches need to be hopping on the bandwagon to increase engagement (if that’s your sort of thing).
I just happened to stumble across this iOS app today to make creating Stories easier… will have to give it a shot this week!
Templates You can choose from 40 templates of many different styles. All are 100% editable. · Text Styles There are 50 different texts styles you can add to your stories. All styles are beautifully animated. You can customize fonts, colors, sizes, positions and alignments. · No Account Required…
Source: Mojo – Create Video Stories
More and more of my clients on the nonprofit and church side are asking about Instagram Stories and experimenting with them in some form to help with outreach. Like anything on the web or mobile, it’s always fun to dive in and try things out. But there’s no need to reinvent the wheel if you’re looking to make the most of your time (especially given that most nonprofit marketing is done on a volunteer basis!).
Here’s a handy guide that makes some of the same points that I do with clients… shoot vertically, don’t take yourself too seriously, don’t be afraid of stickers, be afraid of hashtags, and (most importantly!) PLAN PLAN PLAN with a calendar that you’ll stick to…
Consider treating your Story like a TV network with scheduled programming for the week, or even recurring “episodes” that happen on certain days. Thinking in advance about what kind of content you’ll be sharing and how your Story will flow will help you craft a more addictive and consistent experience for your viewers.
Source: Instagram Stories: Everything Businesses Need to Know
For starters, this is the end of Instagram as we know it. Systrom and Krieger were deeply involved in day-to-day product decisions, and retained an unusual degree of autonomy over the company. For years, they were careful to the point of being obstinate. Even as they began to expand Instagram’s suite of offerings, they remained deeply cautious. (Features for creating groups of “favorites” and a standalone messaging app have been in testing for 15 months and 10 months, respectively.)
— Read on www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2018/9/25/17903556/instagram-founders-quit-kevin-systrom-mike-krieger-facebook
Within the advertising industry, the debate about whether advertising works on Facebook is not new. A survey last year showed over 60 percent of small business owners felt advertising on Facebook was ineffective. The lawsuit takes it a step further, saying Facebook is misleading advertisers.
Source: Does Facebook Really Work? People Question Effectiveness Of Ads : NPR
Like anything else, you do need some expertise to make Facebook or Instagram or Snap or Google or Pinterest ads work. We are finishing a period where these advertising companies have held that “ANYONE CAN DO IT! IT’S SO EASY! JUST SIGN UP AND TELL US WHO YOU WANT TO TARGET!” with regards to their ads and effectiveness.
But that’s simply not true. I could probably re-roof our home. But I’m not going to spend the time, effort, and money trying to do that job myself. I’m going to hire someone who knows what they are doing.
Same with social media advertising and marketing. That’s how I pay our mortgage (and for our new roof) every month!
I still firmly believe we’ll see a reckoning of sorts for social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter (and even Instagram and its lovely filters) where the network effect takes a backseat to quality interactions and we move away from hegemonic one-size-fits-all walled gardens towards decentralized and specified communities based on our preferences. Reddit is already pointing the way on this (partly):
The internet of old — composed largely of thousands of scattered communities populated by people who shared interests, identities, causes or hatreds — has been mostly paved over by the social-media giants. In this new landscape, basic intelligible concepts of community become alien: The member becomes the user; the peer becomes the follower; and the ban becomes not exile, but death. It is not surprising that the angriest spirits of the old web occasionally manifest in the new one. But what’s striking is how effectively they can haunt it, and how ill-equipped it is to deal with them.
Source: Twitter’s Misguided Quest to Become a Forum for Everything – The New York Times
For years, marketers have tried to attribute social directly to sales, but industry standards and consumer data reveal that their true focus should be expanding awareness and consideration.Think long-term, not quick fix. Think relationships, not attribution.
Source: The 2018 Sprout Social Index | Sprout Social
The biggest mistake I see churches and nonprofits make when engaging in an intentional “social media campaign” is counting the likes and hearts on Facebook, Twitter, or Twitter rather than measuring the engagement factor of relationships.
Only 14% of marketers polled say that they can attribute any revenue from social media. The same is true when a church or nonprofit creates a social campaign… focus on long-term relational signals, not short-term likes and favs.
