New trends in overseas promotion and operation of social media in 2019!

I have previously discussed the correct approach to overseas social media operations in 2018. So, what new trends in social media should we pay attention to in 2019? In general, new forms, challenges and ways of participation will add a lot of new gameplay in 2019. Below we will focus on three social media operation trends.

1. Social media rebuilds trust

Trends and the correct approach to responding

2018 was the year of a crisis of trust in social media. Facebook is under intense pressure from users and regulators to improve security, transparency and accuracy following the Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal and congressional hearings. Meanwhile, Twitter has faced controversy over the presence of bots on its platform and has removed millions of fake accounts.

The series of incidents has triggered sensitive nerves among consumers, regulators and the media, leading them to question the privacy protection, accuracy of information and ethical issues of almost every social media. According to a 2018 Edelman survey of more than 33,000 users in 28 markets, only 40% believed that social media performed well in controlling the spread of false information and malicious speech, while 60% said they did not trust social media companies.

The survey showed that only 40% of people believed that social media was effective in controlling fake news and malicious speech.

This shift brings new challenges and opportunities to companies' social media operations. Users have grown increasingly distrustful of many media outlets and influencers following scandals that revealed some of them purchased or forged fake followers. One of the trends is that users are more willing to trust friends, family and other acquaintances on social media, as well as some trusted traditional news media.

So, what is the correct approach for companies to deal with this trend?

Because of the trust crisis in social media, social media operations must be more humane.

Brands should focus less on pure exposure and more on high-quality engagement generated by users. For example, companies like Adidas and The New York Times are working to create intimate, meaningful conversations with smaller, more valuable audiences. They are creating communities and sharing insightful and researched content, then getting out of the way and letting passionate users engage with each other.

Here are some suggestions for responding to this trend:

1. Build Facebook groups around your core audience’s interests.

The key to social media operations is to create a space where users can communicate with each other, promote participation, get rid of the dilemma of one-way sales, and avoid using a large number of fierce hard advertisements to damage the brand image in the minds of users. I mentioned in my previous article that Facebook homepages are mainly used to publish general information about products, while Facebook groups are used to conduct in-depth operations targeting fans.

To operate a Facebook group, first you need to be clear about the purpose of establishing a group so that users understand why they join the group.

Build different Facebook groups based on different core audience interests. Public groups on Facebook are open to everyone, while closed groups can be found through search but require approval from an administrator to join. Finally, there are secret groups, which cannot be seen or searched by people outside the group. The only way to join is to be invited by a member.

For certain brands, secret groups can be an effective way to create a unique atmosphere and build relationships with users, especially in the context of a new product launch or special promotion. And because there is no prying eyes from the outside world (unlike the public view of fan interactions, comments, and likes on the homepage), group members will share their ideas more freely and be more active.

Users will express confusion about your product or service or where they need help in the group, which can help you develop or improve your product. If the same question comes up over and over in the group, you can add it to your company’s Q&A (Frequently Asked Questions), or publish a video or blog post specifically about that question. Because if group members ask these questions, other users may also face the same problem.

Facebook Groups are also a great place to test out new initiatives, like live video events or giveaways. Because it usually has a higher interaction rate than your fan page, you can try out new plans and see how your fans respond without worrying about the plan not being perfect. Many group members see themselves as part of the community. When officials reveal new and imperfect ideas to them, they are not only willing to actively give their opinions, but also feel that the officials trust them and are authentic.

2. Create a hashtag (#) for Instagram that aligns with your brand’s core values.

If you don’t want to fall into the vicious circle of low-price competition, you must realize the importance of brand building. Create a short, memorable brand tag around your product value to bring users with common interests together in your community and encourage interaction. The core purpose is to tell users that you are not simply selling products or services, but conveying a value or lifestyle.

For example, Herschel Supply has a popular brand hashtag for people who love to travel: #welltravelled. They encourage users to share photos of their products while exploring beautiful corners of the world. This move strengthens the brand's image in the minds of users, which is conducive to increasing users' recognition of the product and thus increasing sales.

Speaking of this, we have to talk about the trend of brands going overseas. In the past, "Made in China" was synonymous with low prices and poor quality abroad. Fortunately, this situation is changing. At the same time, we have also seen that many Chinese entrepreneurs going overseas are no longer limited to simply selling products or services to make money, but have also begun to focus on building their brands. It is foreseeable that the next decade will be an era of brands going overseas.

3. Work with micro-influencers instead of just big influencers or celebrities.

When planning marketing campaigns, consider using small and medium-sized influencers to improve the effectiveness of brand marketing. Unlike celebrities or influencers, micro-influencers have smaller but more engaged social media audiences. It is more cost-effective for brands to work with them because not only are the prices relatively low, but users will also feel more trustworthy, which usually leads to better results.

One of the easiest ways to find micro-influencers is to search through hashtags on Twitter or Instagram. This will help you find people who are influential in a certain field.

4. Conduct Q&As sessions with users via Facebook Live on a monthly basis.

To maintain your customers’ trust, it’s important to communicate frequently, proactively resolve issues, and be as transparent as possible.

Facebook Live Q&As are a great way to try this. By having someone talk to your customers in real time, they make your brand feel more human. And its advantage is that it is easy to manage and has a low budget. At the same time, don’t worry about how to interact with users at the beginning. The goal of regularly conducting Q&As sessions with users through Facebook Live is to interact with users in a real way.

2. Embrace the era of stories

Facebook's chief product officer, Chris Cox, shared a chart showing that Stories will surpass the News Feed as the main way people share content with friends in the next year. The nearly 1 billion users of WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat have increasingly chosen Stories to share content with friends.

Source: TechCrunch,

“Facebook Stories has 150 million daily users and is about to be commercialized”

The emergence and popularity of Stories reflects the transformation of social media from a text-based platform originally designed for desktop use to a truly dedicated network based on the mobile Internet, allowing users to capture and experience wonderful moments.

Stories are meant to be created and consumed instantly, with nothing more than a smartphone and your creativity. Because they are short-lived and disappear after a day. So, there's more room for fun and experimentation. Stories feel more real, immediate, and deeply personal, which is in line with the trend of the future.

Based on this trend, what is the correct approach to deal with it? Why are Snaps a product of the post-information flow era? I have already done a preliminary analysis in my previous article. Please check out How should social media operators respond to the arrival of the snapshot era?

3. Improve the ROI of social media advertising

Social media advertising such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter has become an important part of online advertising. The competition for paid social media advertising has become increasingly fierce. Marketers in many companies are increasing their social media advertising budgets, which increased by 32% in 2018 alone. According to research, one in four Facebook homepages now uses paid promotion, and Facebook advertising accounts for 23% of total spending in the US digital advertising market.

However, as we all know, the mainstream channels that many people use have passed the traffic dividend period, and the cost of buying traffic is getting higher and higher. In addition, with the migration of Internet content from text to pictures and then to short videos, fragmented consumption habits and fierce competition for user time have led to shorter and shorter user attention spans. Rising traffic costs and declining user attention span limit advertisers’ return on investment (ROI).

So, based on this trend, what is the correct approach to deal with it?

1. Understand and target the right audience, define your goals and corresponding metrics.

Your audience is the people in the population who are most likely to be interested in your product or service. Understanding your audience is key to increasing engagement. Each campaign should target audiences based on interests, occupations, relevant competitors, and previous interactions with your brand.

Social media ads have different targeting options, depending on the type of ad you want to create. If you don’t know who you should be targeting and why, this requires you to research your users to understand what their pain points are.

In terms of defining your goals and metrics, it’s important to demonstrate that social media has a positive impact on your business. That’s why every campaign should have goals and metrics that tie into your business objectives, and why you need to know how to measure.

Your metrics will depend on the type of campaign you’re running and the audience you’re targeting. For example, an exposure campaign might focus on impressions, while a conversion campaign should focus more on clicks.

2. Invest in high-quality content and increase investment in high-quality content through A/B testing.

With more and more brands competing for people’s attention on social media, average posts are no longer good enough. We need to create high-quality content to attract audiences.

Create eye-catching visuals that are essential for clicks and high conversion rates on social media. But producing high-quality social media ads takes time and money. In addition, for many startups going overseas, not every team has professionals who are good at social media advertising. And no matter how smart your advertising team is, it cannot predict what users will actually click on. This is why A/B testing is needed.

A/B testing of different images with the same title

A/B testing means launching two plans, A and B, for the advertising variables to be tested, such as different headlines or advertising images. After a period of testing, statistical analysis is performed on the data, and then the budget for the better-performing advertisement is doubled. This strategy will increase your ROI because you’re investing resources into something that’s already been tested.

To improve the effectiveness of A/B testing, you actually need to test more creative ideas. To address this, social media advertising teams need to get creative and improve the effectiveness of content marketing. More and more companies are paying attention to the construction of social media operation teams, including internal teams and agencies, and have cultivated content creators who are familiar with various social media platforms and know how to integrate videos, animations, graphics and other content forms to enhance the effect.

Spotify and Netflix are leading the way in creative social advertising that is both personal and entertaining, rather than just a bland banner squeezed into the feed. Because the ultimate goal of social media advertising is to generate user discussion and engagement, rather than simply "broadcasting" ads among the audience.

3. Embrace new ad formats.

Social media advertising is also constantly innovating along with the development trend of social media. For example, Instagram Stories ads have been around since 2017, but this year Instagram allowed the use of three photos or three videos in a row; Facebook Messenger ads now allow brands to connect directly with customers through instant messaging.

Actively embracing new advertising formats can improve results by satisfying consumer curiosity, while also reducing the fatigue that traditional advertising brings to consumers and reduces user interest in clicking. Below we take Instagram Stories ads as an example to illustrate the necessity and practice of embracing new advertising formats.

Instagram Stories Ad

Instagram stories ads appear in Instagram Stories, at the top of the feed. Instagram Stories ads themselves are also full screen and vertical, so when users view the ad, what they see on a mobile device is the content itself. When an ad ends, manually swiping over the video will start the next one. Aside from the “Sponsored” logo, they look just like regular stories. Therefore, like in-feed ads, it is difficult to distinguish them from other non-advertising content in the format and achieve a better immersive effect.

Guide users to swipe up to jump to the landing page

When users are interested in your snap ads and want to see more content, they just need to swipe up on the CTA arrow to jump to the target landing page. There are currently seven types of Instagram Story ad objectives, all of which can add CTA links, including:

1) Increase Brand Awareness: Increase awareness of your brand by finding people who are more likely to be interested in it.

2) Expand your reach: Show your ad to the maximum number of people.

3) Increase video views: Get more people to watch your video content.

4) Conversions: Driving valuable actions on your app or website.

5) App installation: Get more people to install your app.

6) Leads: Drive sales leads such as email addresses and phone numbers.

7) Traffic: Direct more people to your website.

You can design the landing page accordingly according to your promotion purpose to improve the conversion rate of your advertisement.

4. How to create Instagram stories ads?

In a new or existing campaign, select your marketing objective. Name your ad setup, then optimize your audience, targeting, and budget just like you would for a Facebook ad. Then, you need to switch automatic placements on, click on Edit placements and select Instagram stories. More tips will be discussed in a separate article later.

So far, we have discussed the three major trends in social media operations in 2019 and the corresponding strategies. I hope it will be helpful to you in formulating your overall strategy. But at the same time, we have to discuss implementation issues. On the one hand, having a correct understanding of the trend is only the first step. There is still a huge gap between strategy formulation and execution. Only when the execution is in place can the ideal effect be achieved. On the other hand, in the past 2018, we have also seen many companies encounter problems in social media operations and other aspects, which is worth learning from. Only by analyzing and solving these problems can we truly win in 2019!

1) Insufficient understanding of localization, strengthening localization awareness and mentality. This problem is more common for "air force" teams, that is, overseas companies that do not have a local office. The specific problems are that the understanding of social media operations is still limited to one-way publicity and promotion, there is no understanding of the preferences of target market users, and thinking about problems from a domestic perspective, etc. To solve this problem, the team needs to deepen its understanding of localization, including products, operations, and social media. In addition, the company's senior and middle-level leaders need to have the right mindset to go overseas.

2) Cross-team communication issues require the establishment of a communication mechanism. This problem is more common for startups that have just established local offices and are growing rapidly. Especially for startups operating in non-English markets, since talents in minor languages ​​are hard to come by, a lot of localization work cannot be done without them. However, talents who speak small languages ​​often do not have the background and experience in Internet operations and promotions. This naturally raises a question: how to guide local teams to carry out social media operations?

In the early days, many companies focused on buying traffic, and the advertising team was placed in the country, while the social media operation team was placed in the local team due to language factors. This dual structure easily led to the advertising team and the social media operation team not being able to work together.

In addition, the product and operation teams of many overseas companies are mainly located in China. Due to the above reasons, there are also communication problems with social media operation teams. The product team launched new features, and the operations team planned a series of operations activities. They worked hard, thinking that DAU and retention would increase rapidly. However, they found in the end that the data was not as good as expected.

Through simple surveys, we found that many users know very little about the new features of the product, and they are unable to start operational activities that require large budgets because the operating rules are too "complex". At this time, the product and operation teams were furious, because they found that the social media team had never promoted and explained this key new feature, and the operation activities were not understood by many users because the translation of a key copy was not localized enough. In fact, it is not bad to have discovered the problem. Many teams don’t know where the problem occurs and are looking for faults in other places. This is terrible.

On the other hand, from the perspective of the social media operations team, it’s not that they don’t want to do a good job, but because they need to connect with the publicity needs of too many departments without fully understanding each activity and function, resulting in their work being comprehensive yet extremely rough.

To sum up the three problems mentioned above, it can be summed up that they mainly involve solving the problem of cross-team communication. To solve this problem, we should first strengthen the construction of the social media operation team. It is best to recruit a local person with social media operation experience. At the same time, we can find one Chinese student who has the ability to speak a minor language and focus on cultivating his or her professional ability to serve as a link between the local team and the domestic team to solve communication problems. The solution to this problem is to ensure that the social media operations team does not become the weak link in the entire communication mechanism.

Secondly, the social media operation team should have a correct positioning and establish a reasonable mechanism for raising demands. I found that the social media team has a very low status in many overseas companies because they think social media is simply posting. A common scenario is "Hey, so-and-so, there will be an operation event tomorrow, remember to post on social media to promote it."

If everyone has this attitude, it would be wrong to blame the social media operations team for the poor participation in operational activities. Whether it is your company’s own social media operations team or you hire an agency to do social media operations, there will generally be a content release calendar to ensure uninterrupted social media content production. Therefore, if you suddenly make a release request, firstly, it may disrupt the original release rhythm of social media operations; secondly, it may affect the effectiveness of the activity due to the factors mentioned above or localized translation issues.

Therefore, I think the correct approach should be to establish a mechanism for raising demands. If there are important operational activities to be released, the social media operation team should be informed about a week in advance, especially the copywriting and specific activity rules and plans, so that the social media operation team can participate and integrate opinions from various parties. This will not only pool wisdom, but also change the past one-way and commanding communication model, thereby increasing the enthusiasm of the social media operation team.

Regarding the fact that new product features are not well known to users through social media, this may involve another issue, namely the communication problem between the domestic product team and the local product team. The author has communicated with local product personnel from some overseas companies and found that in terms of professionalism, compared with the lazy attitude of the locals towards social media operations and other work, they very much identify with the Chinese product team. After all, the Chinese are indeed hardworking and conscientious in their work. But they complained that they were excluded from many tasks and did not know much information about products. In the process of communicating with them, there is a word that needs to be emphasized: "transparency". They feel that the company is not "transparent" enough with information about the local product team. To put it bluntly, the company does not trust local products enough, or feels that their involvement does not need to be too high.

The problem here ultimately comes down to the attitude of company leaders towards localization and personnel, and how to manage the localization team. Do you value the opinions of local products? How to balance the suggestions of Chinese and local employees in decision making, etc. Maybe every company executive has his or her own considerations, but the author can only sigh that the team that can balance local and Chinese sides and integrate the opinions of different international talents to make decisions is more powerful, and such company leaders are indeed stronger in leading the team!

Many people think that communication problems are not a problem. After all, large companies have many departments and similar problems will arise. Some leaders with backgrounds in large companies hold this view. Here we need to briefly mention the background of the problem. As going overseas becomes a trend, more and more people want to catch the wave of going overseas. Many people who have worked in large companies have transformed themselves into middle and senior leaders of overseas startups due to their background in large companies. Some people think that the company has more important things to do, so communication problems will always exist and there is no need to worry about them. The author cannot agree with this. The company always has important things to do, but communication problems are not only related to the resolution of business problems, but also affect the cohesion and morale of the team.

Source: Overseas Operations