Cracking the social media enigma is getting harder, as these platforms make things more difficult for businesses. Users are feeling that their feeds are saturated with posts from businesses and social media networks know that this will damage their brand. We’ve got the information and advice that you need to keep your audience stimulated.
Less Business Based Posts
As of the end of 2017, Facebook have started to reduce the visibility of business posts. They feel that their users are more interested in what each other has to say, instead of what businesses are talking about. With the influx of businesses and advertisers, they’re worried that their users are posting less often as their feed is all business.
This means it’s going to be more difficult to get a wide reach with users that don’t engage with your page often. You will still be able to spend money to get the word out there, but for many gambling based affiliates this is expensive and the process of getting a licence is time consuming.
Using Facebook Watch
This on demand video service from Facebook initially launched in August of 2017. This is part of an overall move towards more video based content, which has been echoed across many platforms as video has proved more engaging for audiences.
In the US, they’ve announced their intention to snap up rights to sporting events, with revenue generated by advertisers. This would be a natural partner for those in the sports betting sphere and may potentially be cheaper than television based advertising.
Building Community Trust
Attention and trust in social media are at an all-time low, with fake news and false profiles rampant. There are a number of measures in place to restore this trust with users, but this is a difficult path for iGaming brands.
Increasingly, we’re getting our news and information from social media – if we don’t have any trust in them then we’re not likely to convert with brands using them. Building up the community and trust focus of the brand is important if you want to have users engage with your brand in a meaningful way.
Sarah Sangster of Sangster Digital , a social media expert who specialises in social media content and community building strategies emphasises the importance of building effective content to engage your audiences. “Content need to be stand out and be conversational worthy. Quality over quantity, on brand and targeted to your market.”
New Calls to Action
Facebook are always experimenting with new calls to action, to drive more conversions. They’re giving us more tools and ways to interact with our followers. Whether that’s with a fun GIF based poll or with a live video, we can experiment and assess the traffic that we bring through these methods.
Organic reach on Facebook is getting more difficult, though using video content has the potential to seriously boost your reach. Using cover videos and live videos will allow you to reach many times the users as you would with just text or a link. As we move through 2018, there will likely be a continued emphasis on this and new options for those using this kind of content.
Social Listening
There are lots of tools available on the market for social listening, which can improve your brand awareness. Listening for mentions of your brand and act upon them accordingly. This can also give you a heads up of which users are talking about brands like yours, which gives you a wider understanding of the industry as a whole.
You can use this extra information to fuel your social media marketing campaigns. If you see a lot of people talking about free spins, for example, then get some operator brands that offer them some publicity. Targeting the right kinds of users on social media will give you the chance to get a higher engagement and conversion rate.
This builds your brand up in the eyes of users, especially if you’re using trending topics. With a wider reach available through trending topics, you can bootstrap you marketing campaigns. This kind of reach can be paid for, but you might get a better return for your time as opposed to just paying for it.
As we move through this year, social media is likely to change at an even faster rate. It is getting tougher for brands to get their name out there and their reach to a satisfactory level, but if you invest your time into it – you can stay ahead of the curve.
You can meet Sarah Sangster at our Affiverse Bootcamp on the 21st March and take part in the intensive workshop she’s got planned for affiliate delegates – to help them growth hack their social channels this year.
