5 Takeaways from Social Media Belfast 2019
Last week, a few of the team popped down to Titanic Belfast for the annual Social Media Belfast Conference. With an impressive speaker line up, here’s a roundup of some key takeaways:
1. Content is King, but Queen is listening
Donna Roddy, Digital Marketing Officer at Visit Derry spoke about the opportunities that opened up to them by implementing social listening, specifically around the hype of Derry Girls. They invited high profile celebrities to Visit Derry, home of Derry Girls when they tweeted about the series. They’re expecting a response from Gary Barlow any day now.
2. If you torture the data long enough it will confess to anything
There are so many metrics you can use to report on digital campaigns, you could make the data prove almost anything. Donagh Humpreys, Social & Digital Director at Thinkhouse, discussed the importance of completed video views as a metric, along with benchmarking against yourself when reviewing results over time.
3. Quality over Quantity
Ciara Burn, PR and Communications Manager at Dogs Trust Ireland spoke about how niche posts with low engagement were impacting the reach of the rest of their content. They implemented a new strategy with a focus on creativity and giving followers more of what they wanted to see. That, along with moving niche posts from organic to paid ads, saw their reach and objectives soar.
4. Think audience first
What you want to say and what your audience what to see on social media are often very different and is a challenge faced by James Coltham, Head of Digital Content for The Scottish Government. He talked about how understanding your audience, tailoring content for audiences and platforms, high quality creative and using creative hooks can all play a part in getting to harder to reach audiences.
5. Keeping up with the Joneses
Just when you think you’re on top of the latest formats and specs they go and change again. BBC Northern Ireland’s Content Editor Aoife McKevitt talked about the benefits of reading forums, sharing knowledge with peers, consuming content and following competitors to help stay ahead of the game.