Category: Insights

We all try to keep our LinkedIn feeds up to date don’t we? We try to log in frequently to check-in to the oldest ‘big’ social network out there but let’s face it, for many of us it’s never our most used app or website. Well, this blog might change all that.

In October, LinkedIn announced BIG changes to their feed algorithm meaning not only will we be seeing some fairly different content when we log in, but we’ll notice our personal content getting a lot more attention.

What’s the update?

Let’s set the scene: LinkedIn has over 567m members who post more than a million posts, videos and articles each day. The thing is, it was the content from a select few (the most followed 1%) that dominated the LinkedIn feed meaning that lowly users like me (and probably you) didn’t get much of a chance of our posts appearing on feeds, let alone get engagement.

LinkedIn followed the common rule in social networks – the more engagement a post gets, the more likely it will appear in feeds, which means that key influencers like Bill Gates and Richard Branson, who have a lot of followers, get more engagement, and therefore appear in more feeds – which gives them more engagement, which gets them in more feeds and…well, you get the picture.

What those clever folk behind LinkedIn have decided to do is look at who is posting that content and evaluate how much a like, comment or share would mean to the author.

Following me so far? Ok – to use the examples that the social network have used themselves:

Source: LinkedIn

Why does this matter?

LinkedIn started as, and remains to be, a social network focused on individuals (professionals) connecting with each other; rather than organisations talking to their audience. Indeed, here at DTW, we champion individuals using LinkedIn over organisations – as seen in the employee advocacy work we do with our clients. It is this personal level that LinkedIn are bringing with this new change.

Therefore, if you are looking to spread your organisation’s message on LinkedIn, now is the time to do it from your personal profile, rather than your company’s.

What should communicators do?

1. When you’re posting content on social media, what is the main objective? It’s for your audience to read it, and engage with it. From DTW’s perspective, it doesn’t matter if that reach comes in the form of a company post, or an employee’s post, as long as that content is being read and engaged with.
2. Therefore, if you use LinkedIn as a platform for your communications, now is the time to think about enabling your employees to share that content in their own feeds and networks, as well as sharing it on your company page too.
3. It’s important to encourage employees to share your organisation’s updates and content on their own channels. This might be in the form of internal communications like an intranet or companywide email – either way, let them know the content is there. As part of this, encourage engagement on other posts that they see in their feed too.
4. This personal-level of sharing might be trickier to monitor as engagement on personal posts won’t appear in your company’s LinkedIn analytics. For us, it’s not too important (we all chat to each other about our posts), but if tracking ROI is a key objective for your organisation, there are employee advocacy tools out there that can help; like Smarp or Sprout Social’s Bambu.
5. We’ve helped clients build confidence amongst their employees to post on their company’s behalf, and using an employee advocacy tool, it can be easier for everyone to share content. With this new algorithm update, it’s a great opportunity to get engagement and recognition for it.

We’re really excited about this LinkedIn update – it’s a step forward to bringing social media back to being social.

Thanks for reading!

Jess

What are the golden rules for managing social media in a crisis? Our MD Chris Taylor takes a look at how the UK public sector is leading the way and picks out his five top tips for using social media in a crisis.  This article first appeared in ESPO’s Spotlight magazine. 

If you work in the public sector, one thing you can guarantee is that ‘stuff happens’ (other words are available).

Another certainty is that when it happens, there’ll be a whole load of people queueing up only too ready to put the boot in and give the local council, NHS trust or emergency services a good kicking and a heavy dollop of blame.

It was ever thus, and always will be. Today though, we have the added joy and immediacy of social media. So where do you start when it comes to managing social media in a crisis?

Five golden rules

Here’s our five golden rules for engaging with your communities on social media when that ‘stuff’ hits the fan.

• Plan in advance– if you’re stepping blinking into the sunlight without a pre-prepared and tested plan of what to do in a crisis then you’ve already lost. Think about involving your stakeholders and building and solidifying your key partnerships offline so you can all respond effectively and consistently online. You should also think about the channels that you will be publishing information on and who your audience is on each of these – carrying out an audit of your social media and keeping a handle on analytics on an ongoing basis is a good way of doing this.
• Be accurate– when it comes to reputation, being right is more important than being fast (though that helps too). Rushing to publish before you are sure of the facts or guidance won’t just make you look foolish – it can actually make a real crisis situation much worse if you give out the wrong information or guidance. A steady hand is needed on the ‘publish’ button. It’s also critical to be proactive in identifying sources of inaccurate information and responding appropriately to avoid miscommunication and confusion.
• Take ownership– if it’s your crisis, then you need to position your organisation as the key source of information – please follow us and share latest updates as we have them – the police in particular do a great job at this – but it’s a lesson we can all learn. It doesn’t mean you have to respond to every question – you can say we’re posting updates as and when we can confirm new information– it is a crisis after all. But do make sure the person heading up your communications is at the top table and informed at all times so the updates you do give out are accurate and consistent, and whoever is publishing that information follows an approvals protocol.
• Be authentic– don’t just live in a social media echo chamber. What you do and say on social media needs to link with your actions in the real world – it’s no good just saying you care for example – you need to do something that shows you care (and video and share it so the world can see you mean it).
• Be practical– think about what you’d like people to do and ask them (politely) to do it – people love to share and if your messages are simple and succinct (which they will be) you’ll find your online communities will be a massive help in spreading the word.

Remember, there is a silver lining. If you’re dealing with a major crisis or a challenging situation then you can guarantee your audience and community will have grown, which will give you greater reach and potentially greater influence when the smoother waters return.

DTW is an ESPO accredited supplier under Lot 9b of the 664 Consultancy Services Framework.

Chris is a Chartered PR Practitioner and a member of the national Council of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR). He has provided community engagement and PR support to transport projects like Mersey Gateway, Northern Spire and numerous energy-from-waste and other treatment facilities.

In this fast-moving age of multi-faceted digital channels, the most important thing organisations can do to build and maintain their reputations is get out into local communities and talk and listen to the public and stakeholders on the ground.

Twitter. Facebook. SnapChat. Instagram. YouTube. Yammer.

They all have their place in 21^stcentury communications, but here’s three better options for you when you are planning your engagement strategy.

Ears. Eyes. Mouth.

Starting by asking questions and listening is really important. I’ve not yet met anybody who likes being involved in a conversation where the other person just doesn’t listen to them.

Infrastructure projects usually get plenty of scrutiny from the public and the media. And quite right, too. In some ways, it’s easy to get people’s attention when you mention ‘£400m project’, ‘nuclear waste disposal’, ‘three years of traffic delays’ or ‘disturbing asbestos’, but it’s how you treat people that matters and, crucially, how you made people feel when you engaged with them.

The digital age gives us huge opportunity to talk (and just as importantly listen) to our stakeholders, but it’s no substitute for pro-active ‘on the ground’ engagement with real people about real issues.

Put simply, if you don’t invest the time and effort in pro-active community engagement, you’ll get the reputation that that approach deserves, and you won’t like it.

Here’s a tip. Flip it round, and genuinely engage with real people who have an interest in your project, and the benefits can be significant.

There are good examples all around.

The Queensferry Crossing open weekend and ballot generated huge excitement amongst communities right across the UK and beyond, and Mersey Gateway’s TimeBank scheme, where firms involved in delivering the project gave back thousands of hours of support on community initiatives, paved the way for new playgrounds, learning environments and opportunities for local people.

HS2’s Community and Environment Fund is creating visitor hubs and play areas already, and Crossrail’s wonderful Learning Legacy website has a whole suite of best practice materials you can ‘pinch with pride’.

In Sunderland, on the Northern Spire project, we’ve brought over 2,400 school kids on to site in the past year to help inspire them about future careers in engineering and construction, and to generate excitement about the project and educate about the benefits it will bring to the city.

For waste projects or others, where fear of the unknown is a big part of community concern, invest in taking community representatives to see another project you’ve delivered and talk to your stakeholders there.

So where do you start? Here’s seven simple principles to planning your approach to community engagement and public relations that any infrastructure project director should follow.

1. Invest in communications planning just like you invest in design planning– nobody dreams of starting construction work without a plan in mind, but far too many people still leave communications as an ad hoc task. Start with research and insight to find out what people think about your project, and what you actually want your communications to achieve.
2. Pretend you live around the corner– step outside the box and stop thinking like a construction team. What would you care about if you lived or worked close by? Inevitably, it’s the stuff that’s difficult to deal with – noise, disruption and delays, but often it’s also success, outcomes and local pride – tap into that by engaging with people, but don’t try and pretend the difficult questions don’t exist.
3. Be prepared to ask questions, listen to the answers, and act accordingly – unless your actions back up your thoughtful words then you have no credibility. All the examples given here need time and resource, but this is investing in your reputation. It’s not an optional extra.
4. Be open and pro-active– explain and advocate what you are doing, when and why. Sometimes that means walking into the unknown, but you are far better doing it on the front foot with a positive agenda. Go for public exhibitions and focus groups, rather than public meetings – public meetings very rarely do anything to inform the public and it is even less rare that they inform infrastructure developments. For most members of the audience they can be intimidating, rather than informative, and people rarely learn anything new. Drop-in sessions and exhibitions, on the other hand, give everyone (not just those with the loudest voices) a chance to ask their questions and understand the answer.
5. Expect the unexpected –in the past twelve months we’ve had infrastructure projects with short notice visits (not all at once) from the Royal family, Jeremy Clarkson, Pete Waterman, coverage in Vanity Fair and even tip-offs of protests planned later that day by Fathers for Justice. The speed of communications gets faster every year, and reputation often depends on quick action – no project exists in a vacuum and you need to be nimble and agile.
6. Measure your success– decide what is important to you and measure it. HS2’s community engagement strategy lists ten commitments that are the basis for measuring success. Simple feedback surveys are really important and let you track issues and report back to colleagues.
7. Listen to your communications team– a plea on behalf of in-house communications people everywhere. They are employed as experts in their field – this is their profession – so let them guide you.

No-one likes surprises – so make sure you have a ‘no surprise strategy’ for your important stakeholders. If you’ve got good or bad news to share, think about when, how and where you share it, and who your key community influencers are that need a heads up before the information goes public.

It’s about building authentic relationships with real people – and with your key media – so you have a genuine trust and dialogue that will get you and your project credit in the bank. Let’s face it, at some point, somewhere, something is going to go wrong, and you’ll need to deal with that. Far better to do it from a position of strength with an informed audience that knows your name and face than it is with a group of strangers who have no affinity with you.

A snappy Twitter feed and a dynamic Facebook presence might help you along the way (or not!), but to win hearts and mind you need boots on the ground and a team who can engage with the public.

Chris Taylor is a Chartered PR Practitioner and a member of the national Council of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR). He has provided community engagement and PR support to transport projects like Mersey Gateway, Northern Spire and numerous energy-from-waste and other treatment facilities. He will be part of the DTW team at the Infrastructure Show in Birmingham on 17 April.

This article first appeared on the UK Construction online website.

“It’s the end of days for Pages, the Facebook apocalypse” – Social Media Examiner

“the end of the Facebook News Feed as we know it” – Mobile Monkey

“Facebook feed change sacrifices time spent and news outlets for “well-being”” – Tech Crunch

These are just a few of the headlines from my social media news and insight sources that have appeared after Mark Zuckerberg announced that his first move to ‘Fix Facebook’ in 2018 is to change how the News Feed works.

Is it as bad as all that? Well, as Jon Loomer put it – we just don’t know yet.

What are the changes?

Breaking it down, here’s what Zuckerberg is saying:

1. People are better than Pages – he wants to encourage us to post more personal content, rather than just sharing videos and links, which he sees will create ‘meaningful’ conversation
2. He thinks the passive content consumption of videos and links is bad for our well-being
3. Posts from Pages and Publishers aren’t going to appear as much in News Feeds, even if they have a lot of clicks and Reactions

What does this mean for communicators using social media?

If you read through the announcements from Facebook, Mr Zuckerberg himself, and the more optimistic articles – it shouldn’t mean much. If you are posting content that is meaningful and will trigger conversation, your content should still appear in the News Feed.

If you read the analysis from other blogs (ones – it is important to point out – that rely heavily on Facebook for organic traffic to their websites), we’ve been backed into a corner where we can’t talk to our audience any more.

Here are 4 key things I’m taking out of this announcement:

1. General day-to-day performance of our page posts will go down. We will see our organic reach decline further
2. Comments will become the most valuable interaction on Facebook, clicks will not be ‘valued’ the same way in terms of engagement rate (BUT ‘comment bait i.e. ‘comment on this, tag a mate who does this’ will be punished)
3. Advertising will become more expensive. As the reach for Page Posts reduces, there’ll be more demand for the already jam-packed advertising spots available on the News Feed
4. Other platforms may become the best avenue for our campaigns. It may be that we find Twitter or LinkedIn offer a better alternative when it comes to talking to our audiences.

The important thing for us, as communicators, is that we remain flexible and adaptable in our strategies and campaigns so we make sure we get the most from social media to help achieve our objectives.

My thoughts

As marketers, this shouldn’t be a surprise, organic reach of page posts is next to nothing now anyway, but it’s always been pretty obvious that was Facebook’s way of forcing Pages to pay to have their posts seen. Is this another tactic to have us spend more money?

Most likely, but I think it is something more. Social networks evolve as user behaviour evolves. To me, it seems Mr Zuck wants to turn back the clock on Facebook and have it as it used to be… status updates about what we’re watching on TV, photos of our activity – back when Facebook was a platform for university students. But here’s the thing:  we are still sharing that content, just not on Facebook. We use the likes of Instagram and WhatsApp (which Facebook owns) to talk about our favourite TV show with our friends, and document the story of a great day out to our friends and followers.

I think Zuckerberg needs to stop trying to manipulate user behaviour, these things evolve. Facebook has evolved into a content discovery platform where we enjoy videos of cute wild cats, or interesting facts and articles about topics we’re interested in. Let it be that, Mr Zuckerberg. Let the users do and share what they want.

Last week Facebook released some new research it has carried out around the performance of video ads on its platform. <link to https://www.facebook.com/iq/articles/stand-out-in-feed-optimizing-video-creative-on-mobile>

The report makes for some interesting reading and highlights many of the things we already knew – such as video ads developed with a structure and narrative that caters for the way that users consume video on social media outperform content that has been developed for other platforms or has been adapted to try and make it a better fit for posting.

So, what can you do to make your video ads work on social?

1. Keep it short – the content that performs best on mobile according to the research is under 20 seconds in duration.
2. Early use of branding – in the age of the thumb stopping creative, we also need to ensure that branding is positioned prominently in the first two seconds. The research shows that there was a much higher recall of an ad where the brand was featured prominently in the first couple of seconds as opposed to an adapted ad which might utilise a logo watermark to convey the brand.
3. Know your audience – this isn’t necessarily a finding of the research, but it should go without saying that you should ensure you tailor your approach and creative to your audience (as well as making use of the tools available to target them).