Creating ‘thumb stopping’ content for B2B businesses.
Luke Fitzpatrick�@lukefitzp
February 2022
Guest lecturer for MSc in Design and Development of Digital Business, University College Cork
A consultant for APCO Worldwide’s Strategy & Campaigns team based in London.
APCO is a strategic communications consultancy.
My expertise lies at the cross section between digital and creative. I work on a variety of tasks everyday from art direction to social media strategy.
Who am I?
Please ask questions�
Feel free to unmute at any time, there’s a good few slides so please interrupt me!
Raising your hand(s) also works.
P.s. there will be a lot of Office memes as it’s only fitting seeing as I work in one.
Why do you use social media?
There are stories to be told and consumed in the form of copy & creative whether that be news on Twitter or funny videos on TikTok. There is a start, middle and end to most of the content we consume. As a business you also have a story to tell.
However, social media wasn’t always made for businesses, it was made for people to connect but there are two things in 2022 that people seem to forget when managing social media accounts.
Stories to be told
Contents:
Storytelling
Let’s forget about platforms for a second on focus on how we plan to tell a story.
In the world of B2B business your clients usually have a lot of web content, reports they want downloaded and events they want people to attend.
All of these things improve their visibility in their chosen marketplace and social media channels can be a way for them to tell their story.
While not every social media post will follow a story and some stories are going to be told visually with creative it’s worth keeping this in mind always.
Story arc
The way to think about social media content.
A term first coined in the early 2000’s as websites adapted to the ever changing way we consumed media.
In 2022, it can be assumed that your audience is consuming media for the most part on their phones. Want proof? →
Screenshots from Facebook Ads Manager of a campaign we ran for *redacted client* in January of this year. Notice the max number on the X axis’.
“Mobile first”
Video platforms like TikTok and Instagram are definitely winning the hearts and eyes of everyone in 2022 but copy is still a vital element of social media
If you love to write, put in on a website**. For the majority of businesses, social media is a platform used to drive business.
Why on a website? People don’t have time to read lots text on their phones. (we’ll get back to this)
*Having a web strategy that ties in closely with your social strategy is also vital but today we’re’ just going to focus on social.
** Yes this slide is too long and I’m already sort of contradicting myself ha!
No one wants to read an essay*
Most people leave this part to the end of the process but should be considered from the beginning.
Social media is visual.
How many Instagram story, Twitter feed or LinkedIn ads have you seen recently that have just text and nothing visual whatsoever?
If you’ve seen any I bet you the text itself was visual using kinetic text elements. (see right)
Creative
Platforms
I told you we’d be back.
A screen recording of my Twitter feed. →
What do you notice?
Aside from the fact I mostly follow meme accounts on Twitter?
A screenshot of my niche Twitter feed^
Did you notice..
I don’t follow business accounts and my feed contains:
This tells us a lot, how is a business going to stand out from memes and short commentary?
Essays aren’t going to cut it.
It’s not about the platform, it’s about the story you can tell.
I know I said we’d talk platforms and so we will but we’re going to use that start middle & end and apply it to platforms.
For the majority of B2B businesses they use Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
But there are best practices which apply to all.
I love TikTok but it’s not really for businesses or least not B2B ones.
Unpopular opinion
According to research back in conducted by two leaders in the social media marketing space, Hootsuite and Sprout Social, recommend the following as a guide to character length:
That’s pretty short. The most updated version can be found here.
Source: The Ideal Social Media Post Length: A Guide for Every Platform by Hootsuite [LINK]
Short copy
Facebook and LinkedIn cut off longer posts with an ellipsis, forcing users to click “See More” to expand the text and read the entire message.
Every time you ask the audience to take action, a percentage of people will lose interest. It can be utilised though where necessary.
Content that demands less work—less cognitive energy—to consume and understand will enjoy higher engagement rates.
Short copy contd.
Sometimes (most of the time) we don’t even use the social post to tell the full story.
Clickbait works for a reason and so we use social media to encourage our audience to click the link.
Having a clear call to action is vital and usually clients want to know exactly how many clicks you’ve gotten them or what the CTR (click through rate) on a post is.
None of these are my clients but they are great examples ^^
Call to actions
Here is a snapshot of global social media usage as reported by Battenhall.
Sometimes figuring out which platform works for a business requires trial and error.
Other times it’s where your audience is such as if you’re aiming for a younger audience it could be TikTok (not my preference for B2B) but if you’re looking for grads maybe it’s LinkedIn?
Source: Battenhall’s Monthly Social Media Newsletter [LINK]
What platform do I use?
I was tasked with auditing a client’s Twitter accounts as well as competitor’s accounts to find out what others are doing well. In this case it’s Babylon Health - a digital healthcare company.
Not a client of mine, but really great example of how to do social media properly!
Work example (Twitter Audit)
Be honest with me, how often do you click hashtags?
I used BrewDog as a non healthcare company to help us look further afield. They do a great job at having:
Every time you ask the audience to take action, a percentage of people will lose interest.
Not a client of mine, but really great example of how to do social media properly!
Work example contd.
‘thumb stopping’ content
Let’s go back to a previous slide
I’m sorry.
Did you spot it?
Ads. Everywhere.
Over the last 5 years, social media platforms have been encouraging businesses to spend money on advertising.
However, ads need to be thumb stopping. They need to feel like normal content or else you won’t click them.
Does anyone recognise Tim Kendall on the right, ex-President of Pinterest?
It’s common knowledge that organic posts don’t receive as much engagement as they used to do.
With ads you usually have less copy to play with but applying those tactics above allow you to boost content easily. Boosting content is putting paid spend behind an existing post vs a ‘dark post’ which is an ad that doesn’t show up on a page’s home feed.
Social media is a pay to play space.
Pay to play
Source: “To Pay or not to Pay, That is the Question.” on Prosek.com [LINK]
But what if I don’t pay?
You can achieve success without ads but it is recommended that if you can, you set aside an advertising budget.
Each platform has their own ads manager which helps you plan and buy ads. They also provide free courses on how to use them!
What do you think of this ad on the right?
Pay to play contd.
We’re only scratching the surface..
We haven’t even touched on who our audience is?!
Understanding who your audience is plays a huge role in how you shape your strategy. If you don’t know who is interacting with your content how can you be doing a good job?
(f I don’t know why my audience are)
Who is our audience?
Doing research.
This includes everything from platform insights, desk research, paid testing and social media listening using tools.
Social listening is my favourite, it’s a way to monitor public conversations that are happening online.
They use Boolean Logic to formulate code to pull in results.
How do we find them?
You may recognise these from the search settings in JSTOR etc.
Social listening is used for more than just audience research, it can be used for media monitoring, crisis communications & much more.
Research contd.
Before working at APCO I worked for a SAAS (Software as a Service) company called Khoros.
Their main product was not social listening but one of their products was a social media listening tool called ‘Intelligence’.
Other examples include: Brandwatch, Talkwalker, Sprout Social and more.
Some examples:
Any questions?
Let’s connect! My socials are @lukefitzp.
There’s plenty more we could dive into such as the need for a good reporting structure and the importance of Community Management but you can view some of that in my deck from last year below. You’ll notice some formatting similarities!