Emma Scully
April 4, 2018
Laugh Tracks: Social Media Audit @elonLaughTracks
The Elon Student Television (ESTV) show Laugh Tracks is the youngest of five other shows in the ESTV family.
Social Media Goals and Objectives:
Collected Data
@elonLaughTracks currently has 128 likes and 130 follows with an average post reach (number of unique people who had the Laugh Tracks post on their feed) of 116. @elonLaughTracks’ Facebook post dataset ranged from June 2016 to April 2018, the lifetime of the show. The dataset included: date of post, post type, text in the post, linked content, all clicks, impressions, total reach, reactions, engagement rate, and feedback.
This data indicated that posts including links to YouTube content received more impressions (number of times the Page's post entered a person's screen including statuses, photos, links, videos and more), leading to a higher reach. The screenshot below shows the average reach and average engagement of all of the Facebook posts, claiming that followers prefer to engage with link style posts. Facebook users are shown to click on a post more when it includes a link or YouTube embedded video than a photo post.
The bar graph below visualizes the success rate of every Facebook post type @elonLaughTracks has published in the lifetime of the page. Posts with links to Laugh Tracks videos on YouTube are shown to perform better with organic impressions (not paid advertising) and total reach. Previous status posts have the poorest reach, leading them to receive little to no engagement.
A post from March 25, 2018 published at 10:30AM included a YouTube link to a new digital short. This post attained the highest total reach of all the posts with a reach of 783 and 1,134 impressions. The post had trafficked 57 clicks to the Laugh Tracks YouTube video. The shares consisted of two of the actors featured in the sketch.
A Facebook analytics feature, Posts, displays a week review of the times Laugh Tracks followers are online which can help when deciding what time of the day to post. According to the data visualization, Wednesday is the best day of the week to publish content because almost all of the followers log into Facebook that day. The best time of day to publish content ranges from noon and 9pm due to the high activity of the followers.
Recommendations/Strategy
As several social media platforms continue to compete with Facebook by adding new features or constantly updating their terms of use, the content of desire on Facebook also continues to change. Recent research has indicated that the general Facebook user is more likely to engage with posts with videos than images, statuses, or links.
Since January 2017, the average number of Facebook post engagements published by brand or publisher accounts has decreased a little over 20% (BuzzSumo, 2018)[a]. According the the study, posts including videos (not embedded hyperlinks) gain a little more than twice the level of engagement posts with links or images received. Video has become the most engaging content type on Facebook. In an analysis of the content of the most popular Facebook post engagements, these were the top five: Food, Fashion & Beauty, Animals (pets), DIY, and Humor/Funny. Laugh Tracks falls under the fifth most popular category, Humor/Funny. This analysis indicates that raw video content is more effective than YouTube/Vimeo links, and will increase a follower’s likeliness of engaging with the post.
Video length
The length of the video is key in hooking an engaging audience. Facebook data from 2017 reveals that video posts received higher engagement rates when the content is around 30-120 seconds long.
Some video content recommendations that would be successful due to this data:
Facebook live
Facebook Live is gaining back it's popularity after multiple scandals. I would advise the Laugh Tracks social media team to consider ‘going live’ during the taping of the show on Thursdays 8pm EST or a live tour of the tech crew behind the scenes. A Facebook Live data analysis shows that Live videos receive peak engagement up until fifteen minutes of the video.
video
The target audience of Facebook @ElonLaughTracks, college undergrads, utilize the platform to keep in touch with long distance friends and keep track of events/organizations. The audience has a short attention span for text and does not want to click on a link to watch a video, they want to watch the video right then and there. By creating shareable, entertaining, and relatable content to the target audience, engagement and following are more likely to increase. This data from other studies proves that videos posted directly to Facebook are more successful (higher engagement) because of the Facebook autoplay feature that automatically hooks a user.
Influencers
Social media influencers have become key players in digital marketing strategies. Brands locate influencers by their high following, quality content, appeal to target audience, and high levels of engagement. The actors featured in a sketch should become influencers of @elonLaughTracks. These show influencers would share @elonLaughTracks posts debuting their sketch to their Facebook feed, this will increase the overall reach of both the YouTube content and the Laugh Tracks account content.
promote
Laugh Tracks has a budget of $500 a semester. By utilizing the Promote feature the Facebook Business pages offer, you can select a specific target audience, location, and medium for a boosted post. There is also a budget and duration section that can be adjusted. With only $3, a post can reach over 1,600 unique users in just one day.
Time of day
The chart below categorizes every Facebook post down to the hour the day it was posted along with the number of clicks the posts in those time slots received. The posts to receive the highest number of clicks were around 10am with a total of 154 and 2pm with 133 clicks. By posting engaging content during these time slots, the engagement rates are more likely to increase along with the reach radius.
Facebook Tips Summary:
There are millions of possible posts that could appear on a user’s Facebook feed, and Laugh Tracks is limited by only posting six times within a four month span. By posting engaging and meaningful videos and links 2-3 times a week during peak online times, overall impressions will increase. It will be helpful to limit the number of links in a post to one because it might be overwhelming to the Facebook user.
Collected Data
Laugh Tracks’ Twitter, @ElonLaughTracks, currently has 68 followers and is following 75 accounts, which is significantly lower than their Facebook following. The account has an average post impression of 236 unique users. This dataset also ranged from June 2016 to April 2018.
The bar graph below visualizes the average engagements (total number of times a user has interacted with a tweet including clicks anywhere on the tweet→ #hashtags, links, avatar, username, & tweet expansion, retweets, replies, follows, and likes) including impression (number of times users saw the tweet on Twitter), total engagement, retweet, like, URL clicks, profile clicks, and hashtag clicks of every Tweet in the account’s lifetime. The graph shows that there is a noticeably larger average of impressions, but users are not engaging with the Twitter content. @ElonLaughTracks already has such a high reach that in order to increase engagement and following, the account needs to create content appropriate for this type of platform.
The tweet that received the highest impression rate of 465 was a post including the link to the first episode ever posted on YouTube which received a total of 19 engagements. This high impression rate could be due to the fact that it was the first publication of the show other than airing on the ESTV network. The tweets with the least impressions and engagements were those replica posts from the other social media accounts on Facebook or Instagram. Replica content posted on Twitter from these other platforms do not perform as well because Twitter users come to the platform to consume a certain type of media separate from the others.
The line graphs (below) visualize the number of tweets posted per month and the number of engagements per month for the tweets within that time span. This curated dataset and Twitter research reveals that by posting a consistent stream of tweets, followers will remain engaged in the content of the content. Also, this stream of posts make the content more likely to appear on a user’s feed due to the Twitter algorithm which is based on a user’s engagement habits.
About Twitter
Twitter is a social media platform where news (real or fake), blogs, customer service, and GIFs prosper. The good thing about this platform is how users can attain multiple uses and gratifications from one single platform. Twitter is also a good platform for conversation and mass messaging. Brands can utilize hashtags (#) that Twitter users around the world can search for and engage with the content. The more popular a hashtag is, the more likely it is to trend. Brands utilize this twitter feature to increase their overall reach in hopes of snagging more engagement and followers.
In a survey generated by the American Press Institute, 40% of Twitter users use the platform to keep up with the news/breaking news. Twitter is an ideal social media platform for Laugh Tracks to gain followers and share news about the show, like when a new episode is uploaded or who will be the next musical guest.
Recommendations
There are 330 million[b] daily active users of Twitter. A majority of these users are millennials who are looking to communicate with large companies, voicing their opinion on social topics, or simply to explore new content. The trends, @mentions, and #hashtag aspects of Twitter allow brands to communicate with users one on one which is very helpful when spreading media campaigns or brand awareness.
Tweet content
@ElonLaughTracks currently posts their content with GIFs, links to YouTube content, and #hashtags. I suggest continuing this strategy, but taking it up a notch. Tweet with only one link per post because it can become overwhelming to the user and they will most likely scroll past it if it looks like an advertisement. Looking at current Twitter research, by including a GIF or image in a tweet, increases the likelihood of a retweet by 35%. Other types of posts and their increased chances of engagement: videos 28%, quotes 19%, and hashtags 16%. Laugh Tracks needs to include popular hashtags so the post appears on screens searching through the trends section, include an excerpt of a sketch (under 30 seconds), or include a humorous quote either from a cast or crew member.
influencers
Similar to influencers on Facebook, enrolled Twitter influencers offer brands huge growth opportunities in following and engagement. I recommend requesting cast and crew members to tweet the link to their favorite sketch and include the mention @ElonLaughTracks to drive up the account’s following and profile views. The Laugh Tracks account can then retweet this tweet driving up the impressions even more. Research studies have show that influencers follow other similar influencers and once the tweet is exposed by one, it opens up to a world of influencers waiting to consume the content.
Listening to followers
A recent common practice of Twitter accounts has been the communication and interaction between audience and brand. By starting a conversation and asking a question to followers, engagement rates will increase and so will the number of followers. This is because the users who participate in the conversation are opening up brand awareness of Laugh Tracks to their own followers by just by a reply and mention of @ElonLaughTracks. There is also a poll type of tweet that engages users by asking them a question and offering them several choices to select. Once a user makes a selection, the poll reveals their vote amongst other voters. Engaging and fun participation posts will appear unique on a user’s Twitter feed, leading them to engage in the content. For example, @elonLaughTracks could ask users what sketch was more funny from a previous episode.
Video
The issue with posting a link style post to Twitter is that users must click on the play button to start the media. When a video is uploaded and embedded from Twitter, the video autoplays. This means that followers have to put in extra effort to watch the published content if it is through a link. By uploading the raw footage of a video, users are more likely to be grasped by the moving images and continue watching.
Collected Data
The Laugh Tracks Instagram @elonlaughtracks has 103 followers, follows 183 accounts, and has 25 posts from June 2016 to April 2018. The dataset used was scraped from April 2017 to April 2018. The account has an average total engagement rate of 21, an average of likes of 20 and an average of 128 impressions.
Engagement on instagram is defined as the total number of likes and comments. Instagram reach is number of unique accounts that have seen any of the account’s posts. Impressions are the total number of times the post has been seen. The bar graph below breaks down engagements and compares them to the average reach and impressions. This type of comparison is helpful to instagram business accounts because it allows the account to see how many saw the post and who chose to engage with it. The data projects higher impressions than follows which is good, but also shows a lower average reach than the number of followers.
Almost every post was an image or collection of images except for 2 videos. According to Instagram and Sprout Social, videos on Instagram receive more engagement than photos. Within this dataset a one-year time span, the account possessed the same following of 105 instagram accounts. The line graph below visualizes the % of engagement rate which takes the number of unique followers and divides it by the number of engagements. The data then showed that there are various gaps between the peaks(posts) in post engagements.
Instagram business profiles like @elonlaughtracks allows the account access to insights including activity, content, and audience. The audience data filtered followers into 24% male and 76% female this ratio could be due to the similar male:female ratio at Elon University. Laugh Tracks top follower age ranges make out to be: 73% 18-24 years old, 8% 25-34 years old, and 8% 45-54 years old. Elon makes up 27% of follower’s locations followed by 3% West New York. Followers are shown to be most active on average on Saturdays from 6-8pm.
Recommendations
Instagram is a platform for individual users to share excerpts of their lives and for brands to build an ‘aesthetic’ and promote to a large audience segments around the world. Instagram posts can be broken down into 4 different categories: shoutouts, promotional contests, brand building, and professional video/photo editing.
Time/day
The time of a post down to the minute matters with the changing feed algorithms of Instagram. If an account posts less than once a week during a downtime for their followers, they are most likely going to get lost in the algorithm, which risks engagement. One way around the algorithm is to constantly look at Instagram business analytics which analyzes followers’ most active times throughout the week.
Instagram stories have soared in popularity since the competitive aspect resembling Snapchat was released. Since Instagram stories are published at the top of the feed, users are more likely to click or tap through content. Stories also offer a poll for users to select one option over another, and once the poll is clicked, the user can see the percentage of votes that agree with their own vote. The more engagement a story receives, the more likely an account’s posts (stories and real posts) will appear. I suggest asking user’s who their favorite character has been or which character to bring back in the poll along with clips of the characters for reference.
When musical guests appear on the show, ask them to post a story saying they will be performing on @elonlaughtracks to increase overall profile clicks and awareness. Post a story with a photo/video clip of the next musical guest including their Instagram handle and an even engaging poll asking how excited the audience is to see the featured guest.
Live Video
The new-ish Live Video allows accounts to go live to all of their followers and more through mentions and hashtags. Usually when an account goes live, a majority of their followers are notified and the footage is aired as a completed story afterwards. It would be a good idea to go live right before a show and include the cast in costume, the set being put together, or the tech room preparing for taping.
Hashtags
I would also suggest establishing a brand hashtag to keep consistent with future posts and include that hashtag in the account bio. Hashtags in captions help in increasing reach and impressions through hashtag discovery and search. Research shows that instagram posts including at least one hashtag have a 13% higher engagement rate than posts without. However, the limit of hashtags before losing engagement is 11. Location tagging is another engagement increasing feature of Instagram because users can search by location and discover the post.
Instagram posts can vary from image(s), video, boomerang, and collage, and in a recent analysis, video posts are receiving more engagement. Videos on Instagram autoplay which could be an attention grabbing factor of videos leading to higher engagements. It is important to know that after 30 seconds, attention and engagement drop drastically. I suggest editing a clip of sketches that are under 30 seconds and posting them with a funny punchline in the caption along with 3-4 hashtags and a location for prime optimization. It is also smart to include captions on the video because 85% of videos on Facebook and Instagram are watched without sound.
Another popular strategy brands are using are called Instagram Takeovers where a cast or crew member takes over the account and posts several updates about their lives throughout the day. This type of marketing is successful because by posting multiple stories a day, the story will keep appearing towards the front of the slide of stories, making it more likely to be clicked on.
[a]http://buzzsumo.com/blog/facebook-engagement-brands-publishers-falls-20-2017/
[b]https://www.ilfusion.com/is-twitter-still-relevant-for-social-media-marketing-in-2018
