I recently sat down with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Senior Director of Analytics Tami Dalley to discuss the latest Marketing Cloud data report, "Strategies for Effective Wall Posts: A Timeline Review." You can listen to the interview below (Tami has a great Australian accent!) or read the text of the interview below the player.

Andrew: Thanks for joining us today Tami. Can you explain why your team decided to release this data report about a year after you released the first Facebook data report? 

Tami: First and foremost, I think it's because we're giant data nerds so we really love to do these type of analyses anyway. But truthfully, since timeline we're really interested to understand if the way brands are posting should change, and how that new design really had an impact on engagement rates across the board.

Andrew: What has timeline done for brands? What has changed?

Tami: We're seeing a lot of the same trends, even post-timeline. The one noticeable difference is the impact of visual content, photos and imagery in particular has become absolutely critical to brand success in terms of driving engagement from their audience. But in terms of best practices that have remained the same, it really gets down to good, fun engaging content that we'll talk about a little later.

Andrew: What are some of the biggest takeaways that you found in this report? 

Tami: I'll speak to a new finding and an old finding. We took a look for the first time ever at the use of emoticons at brand posts, which is a little bit controversial. We use them a lot personally when we're texting and emailing friends, but for a brand to use an emoticon, we've never analyzed that before. But we found when a brand did use an emoticon in their posts, they had 57% higher like rates. So to us that really communicated for brands to be human, and to be communicating with their audience like they are a friend. And an old finding which we were able to confirm that the trend still exists is the critical importance of keeping posts short and sweet. In fact we see often brands are posting fairly long posts. 75% of them are posting content over 80 characters in length, and we find if you keep your posts 80 characters or less, you have significantly higher engagement rates.

Andrew: What type of content should marketers post with timeline?

Tami: No big surprise, after timeline, visual content is really doing well. Your photo posts receive interaction rates that are nearly 40% higher than average. That can put a little bit of pressure on a marketer, because they'll say, 'Now I need to, instead of just putting out simple status posts, I need to go out, I need to source content.' But the one thing we did find that was quite interesting is video content actually performed below average in terms of interaction rate. So it's not that you need to go out and spend all this money creating these fabulous videos. Simple images can be just as powerful or more powerful than any other type of post.

Andrew: Are there broad pieces of advice that you can give to marketers based on this data?

Tami: I think the first step is to take a look at the data report and start applying some of these best practices to the posts that you're putting out as a brand, and then measuring the impact is absolutely critical to determining if this is a best practice that works for your business.

Andrew: What is the impact on the brand, what should they be looking for to determine whether this interaction is meaningful?

Tami: The answer is there's no right answer for how you should be measuring social. It's really critical to sit down at the beginning of your campaign, before you put a post out, and say what is the measure of success that I'm trying to drive for my business, and then measure it using that KPI. There is no one metric that's right for every business or right for every post, and it's really interesting how different techniques that move levers differently. So if your goal is really, the virality of social, you want to create content that has a really high share rate, so if you're not going after likes or comments, but you're doing after sharing, the type of content you post and the way you structure it should be different than if you're trying to drive comments, when you're trying to mine fans' thoughts and opinions. I would encourage marketers to identify what those goals are and not get to the end and say, 'oh snap, how do we measure all of this effort that we put into social.'

Andrew: Last question - Let's say marketers try out these best practices and they don't work, what do you say to the people who are frustrated by that?

Tami: Data analysis is absolutely key to answering that question. I think, so often, when we're trying to be in a creative space, we have these wonderful ideas that we birth, and then we never really go in to measure what's working and what's not. The first place I always look is, 'I must have done something that worked somewhere. Where was that, what was the content, what was resonating with my fans, and how can I replicate that again?'

Andrew: Thanks Tami!



Want to read the full report? Click to find our data report, "Strategies for Effective Wall Posts: A Timeline Analysis"