Part 3 – What Is Social Media Friction And How To Reduce It

This is our final post in our series about social media friction. So far, we have covered the broad definition of friction and also detailed one of the most common types, Promotional/Results Friction.

In our final blog on this topic, we are going to take a look at what is often the most challenging category of friction, Process/Workflow Friction.

What Is Process/Workflow Friction?

My definition of Process/Workflow Friction is anything within your daily social media management processes and that is inefficient and requires diverting your attention from effectiveness.

Consider process/workflow friction as the required elements of your daily workflow that is not smooth, requires more time than it should or involves tasks and tools that do not seamlessly work together. Conversely, frictionless process/workflow would be having everything across your social media management tasks highly efficient and effective, leaving your time and focus on engagement, conversations and relationship building.

Consequences Of Process Friction:

Whether you are consciously aware of it or not, when there is friction in your daily social media workflow, your effectiveness and results are impacted negatively. Though we know that doing social media properly requires an incredible amount of time and resources, where your time is being spent is the crucial factor, not how much time you are spending.

Workflow friction in social media marketing typically manifests for one of two reasons. Though the reason you are experiencing friction in your daily processes matters, identifying friction points and reducing them should ultimately be the priority.

Workflow Friction Reasons:

1) Undefined Processes: Probably the most prevalent reason marketers experience workflow friction with their social media marketing is undefined processes. This can include things like a nonexistent strategy, improper strategy or misunderstanding of how to utilize social media effectively.

Without the proper knowledge and experience to execute effectively, strategy and process can become completely disconnected.

2) Incorrect Tools: The definition on insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Unfortunately, many social media marketers do just that. They are using a myriad of disconnected inefficient tools that result in numerous friction points in their daily required tasks.

Many of these tools and workflow issues inadvertently create additional promotional/results friction that only tends to compound the lack of results. An example is tools that are suggesting curated content for you based on what’s popular and already being shared by your peers. If you want results with your social media marketing, be sure you have control of content selection in an efficient way. There’s nothing that will more negatively affect your content curation strategy than sharing popular content everyone has already read and shared or worse, content that is not targeted to the audience you are trying to reach.

Finally, any tools that are automatically posting to your timelines, tagging other people or duplicating what you see others automatically posting, is creating friction in your social media results. Avoid all such tools if you want to reduce friction with your workflow and results.

Identifying Workflow/Process Friction:

Efficiency without improved results, does not impact your overall effectiveness. Reducing and removing friction in your daily social media management should manifest in not only improved efficiency, but also effectiveness and net, real results. It is extremely important that you understand this difference if you are going to get the most out of your social media marketing efforts.

Ask yourself a few questions:

Is your current workflow scalable? – In other words, are you able to scale up volumes, clients and required tasks without an impact on your time and resources using your current processes. If the answer is no, you have friction in your workflow.

Am I spending more time on process than I am on results? – If you are spending more than 35% of your time managing social media posting, hashtagging, scheduling, determining marketing message posts, etc, you have friction in your workflow.

As social media becomes more mature and platforms continue to make changes that affect your ability to reach your audience, being consistent, efficient and effective will become even more important. Identifying the friction you have in your workflow, tools and processes will be something that you can no longer overlook. The pain points that your social media management friction are inflicting on you daily will begin to show up in diminishing returns if left to continue. Identify and reduce the friction that is keeping you from realizing the achievable results that social media can deliver when done properly.

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Part 2 – What Is Social Media Friction And How To Reduce It

In our first post of this series, we attempted to define and detail social media friction and the general consequences it can have on your overall social media management and results. We also listed two of the main friction groups that most marketers need to focus on, which were 1) Promotional/Results Friction and 2) Process/Workflow Friction.

In this second blog post of this series, we are going to focus on the friction that often accompanies Promotion and Results.

What Is Promotional/Results Friction?

My definition of Promotional/Results friction is anything that hampers your social media marketing results.

Think of this kind of social media friction as anything you are doing or not doing that creates friction between your community and what you do/are marketing. Conversely, frictionless promotional/results would be having everything across your social accounts easily understood, discoverable and found.

Examples Of Results Friction:

1) Poor BIO – You are creating friction with your promotional results if your bio is done in such a way that people leave having no real idea what you do. This is a common friction point across the social graph.

2) No Link – If you are using social media for marketing and have no link in your bio, on your page or profile, you are creating friction between your connections and results. Along the same lines is having multiple links in your profile. Keep it simple and frictionless for your connections.

3) Bad SMO – Bad social media optimization of your website, blog or other web properties is a common friction point in social media marketing. Remove the friction by ensuring you have links to your social accounts prominently displayed on the top right of every site/page your audience visits. Make it easy for them to connect with you and your brand wherever THEY want to. Friction is making this a difficult task for your community.

4) Bad Landing Pages – Do you know where you are sending your connections when they click the link(s) in your personal and brand social accounts. Is there unified messaging on the pages? Are you confusing your prospects on social media with messaging on your website or landing pages that are unclear?

All of these examples can create friction that is effecting your bottom line results. Strive to create a frictionless experience for your audience and make everything easy to understand.

Identifying Results Friction:

Many of these friction points can be easily identified by simply reviewing your social accounts with these things in mind. Less obvious friction points can be discovered by paying attention to your audience and their interactions with you.

Are people asking what you do? – If people have to ask what you do, you have created friction with your social media marketing. If you frequently get this question, you definitely need to examine your profiles, messaging and landing pages to determine the friction points that are causing the confusion.

Do people seem uninterested in what you do when you bring it up? – There are usually two scenarios that cause this:

1) You have a product or service they don’t want/need

2) They do not understand what you do and don’t want to appear dumb by asking.

Here’s something to help you conceptualize frictionless promotional/results – “Conversion = Providing value greater than cost with a process that easily facilitates the customers decision” @fondalo

Social media marketing and management is challenging in and of itself. Making it more difficult to achieve results by adding friction between your community and what you do is liken to shooting yourself in the foot. Identify and the promotional/results friction that exists in your marketing efforts and take immediate conscious steps to reduce and remove them.

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Part 1 – What Is Social Media Friction And How To Reduce It

There are two absolutely required components for successful social media marketing, Strategy and Execution. When these important elements work together and are done properly, social media results are not only achievable, but they can be expected. Understanding and identifying the friction points that are inevitably present within these two components can be challenging. More importantly,  reducing the friction within your social media management is crucial to your social media success.

Unfortunately, there is a significant difference between strategy and execution. There is often an even wider gap between strategy and the ABILITY to execute a social media strategy efficiently and effectively. Often this chasm between strategy and execution is due to unidentified frictions in workflow, processes and tools being used in the social media management process.

Consider workflow to be specific processes, functions and procedures that are required in order to fulfill your social media strategy. These elements are made up of all of the tasks you do (or need to do) on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Clearly defining these tasks in detail and creating processes and procedures to implement them in an efficient and scalable way is what workflow is all about. Anything that gets in the way of that workflow causes friction in your ability to execute the strategy, do it efficiently or even achieve your overall strategic objectives.

So What Is Social Media Friction?

Merriam-Webster’s defines the word friction three ways: the act of rubbing one thing against another; the force that causes a moving object to slow down when it is touching another object; and the disagreement or tension between people or groups of people. Though some of use could conceptually tie some of these definitions somewhat theoretically to social media, they don’t quite fit.

My definition of social media friction is any process, workflow, tool or hindrance to the smooth and efficient execution of a comprehensive social media strategy. Furthermore, friction can also be any obstacle or resistance encountered by members of your community to engage with you, discover what you do or to buy or inquire about your product or services.

In social media, friction can be any function that resists the fluid momentum and execution of progress toward the overall goal objective or objective of a defined strategy. Am I getting too technical here?

There are typically two kinds of social media marketing friction that negatively impact effective and efficient execution.

1) Promotional/Results Friction

2) Process/Workflow Friction

Often times social automation or sales automation technologies are deployed in an attempt to reduce these two friction points, but if the wrong automation is utilized, they can actually increase friction with your audience. (More on that in later posts in this series)

What’s The Cost Of Friction?

Friction cost is the direct or even indirect costs associated with the friction within your social media marketing. Friction can include actual hard costs and fees for things like inefficient or ineffective tools or even additional staffing. Some of the more difficult to measure are opportunity costs, resulting from missed sales opportunities and overall lack of results with social media marketing.

Can Friction Be Good?

There are some mechanics in life and business where friction can be a good thing. For example, without friction you would not be able to deploy brakes on your car and bring it to a stop. In business, some bureaucratic friction is required for decision-making and spending in order to make such things more measured and controlled.

However, within social media marketing identifying and reducing the friction forces that hinder smooth effective execution is a sticking point that many overlook. During this series we will attempt to dissect the discovery and reduction of social media friction that many marketers face and provide some solutions that will enable you to make adjustments.

What are the main friction points in your social media management?

Read Part 2 Here

Read Part 3 Here

Scheduled Post Mixing Algorithm Arrives On Bundle Post

One of the features loved by our users is the Randomize/Auto-sort function on the export table. The existing app allows you to randomly scramble up to 100 schedule social media posts with a single click. It’s used to mix up numerous posts you have selected from various RSS feeds, blogs and content curation sources to ensure that you are spreading out the content from various sources or topics throughout each day, rather than grouping them from the same sources consecutively.

The existing Randomize automation feature is truly a random algorithm. Usually some manual drag and drop fine tuning is required to ensure that the 3-5 days of social media posts you are managing are spread out by topic and source of content. The system makes this an easy visual process by color coding all posts differently that are selected from each RSS feed or content source you are using.

Bundle Post Announces The New “Proportional Mix” Tool

Let’s break this down for you in detail…

New Mix Option – This additional sorting option will automatically and intelligently calculate the number of social media posts from the different feed channels you have selected for the export and the number of posts from each of those RSS feed channels and proportionally mix your scheduled posts.

The Mix feature is most useful when you’re scheduling social media posts from numerous feed channels and my content folders, where your export table has two or more colored content groups. When you click the new Mix button, the Bundle Post algorithm with calculate the number of colored posts from each RSS feed source and the percentage of posts as compared to the total number of posts on-screen. It will then mix up your scheduled posts (max 100) proportionally based on the percentages it calculated in the first step. Hit the Mix button once and you’re done!

The result of the new Mix function will be a substantial additional savings in time managing your scheduled, curated and marketing posts. You will need even less time using the drag and drop capability on the export table to ensure that your topical social media posts are evenly spread out across the 3-5 days you are scheduling. We are saving about 5-10 additional minutes on each muti-post scheduled export.

Just like the existing Randomize function, the new Mix feature is for Pro level accounts only.

Existing Auto-Sort – The existing Randomize function will remain active and can be used in conjunction with the new Mix option. Our testing shows that the randomize feature is now best used for content exports that are comprised of posts coming from a single feed, follow friday or my content folder source. For example, if you are doing an export for a specific my content campaign and only using content from that folder for your export, use the randomize function before exporting.

We have labeled the Mix feature as beta for the time being and may continually make improvements based on its use and the feedback from you, our users. Let us know what you think.

P.S. – We would like to thank @W_Goddard of @GoToMarketers for requesting this feature and our BundlePost staff for pushing us hard to get it developed and implemented.

How To Leverage Social Media Connections Into Prospects And Customers

Does this ever happen to you? You engage with a prospect quite a bit on social media. You are building a relationship and it’s time to tell them about your new product/service, etc. But you forget their name and/or twitter tag.  Or you want to mention someone and can’t remember their profile. Sound familiar?

The next step in social media is to more effectively manage relationships. Not just connecting and engaging, but ensuring that you know who your prospects and customers are at anytime, and having the right conversations with them every day. Sounds simple, right? It’s not…

Twitter lists and automated community management tools such as Commun.it are largely ineffective for this purpose. Lists have many limitations and are only useful within Twitter, among many other problems. Commun.it does little to actually manage or further prospect and client relationships beyond the annoying automated postings. So what do you do?

Social relationship management is something I have been interested in for a while. With a sales and marketing management background, CRM tools were always a must, but there wasn’t much that was designed for social media marketing. With the new Nimble software and recent integration with Hootsuite, the challenges of managing prospects, customers and relationships within the social graph have become a thing of the past for me and my team.

Check out this quick video of me using it to add a contact through Hootsuite!

Notice how effective and easy @Nimble makes managing relationships, conversations, prospects and customers? The ability to so easily add a contact, find their Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+ accounts is a dream come true! If you are not using a social CRM, you are missing out on opportunities to be effective and profitable with your social media marketing.

If you are a social media agency, this is a must have. In fact, let’s think about this…  Who should be using a social CRM?

• Social Media Agencies
• Marketing Companies
• Individual Social Media Marketers
• B to B Companies
• Software Companies
• Local Restaurants
• B to C Companies
• Everyone using social media for marketing!!

The bottom line is you must be more effective and efficient with your social media content, engagement, relationships and results. The proper social media tools like Hootsuite, Bundle Post and Nimble are required to achieve just that!