Tasty Videos Taking Over Your Facebook Feed

If you are on Facebook, I’m sure you have seen food content, primarily videos, on your feed. Either you follow pages with food content or your friends are sharing these posts. I personally have encountered numerous food videos from Tasty on Facebook.

Tasty was created in July 2015 and it is run by BuzzFeed; it is also one of Facebook’s biggest publishing brands. The focus of Tasty is on food lovers, targeting all food enthusiasts. Their Facebook page has over 73 million likes and each video reaches views in the millions count. It was averaged that each video gets about 22 million views in the first 30 days. In September, it was reported that Tasty had over 1.7 billion views on Facebook. This page is performing a lot better than BuzzFeed’s main Facebook page and it was stated that BuzzFeed’s Facebook success is “the fastest-growing part of theBuzzFeed Entertainment business in terms of monetization.” This is huge, and it is only going to get bigger because they really know how to target their niche audience.

Why has this page been so successful? Well the most obvious reason is its content. People really enjoy food, not only do people like sharing food content on their social media accounts, but they enjoy seeing food content. Tasty provides comfort food videos and some of these videos might remind them of their childhood.

Most importantly, Tasty has been so successful because their content is perfect for the platform. The videos are short and straight to the point, they last from 30 seconds to 2 minutes long; they include captions with the ingredients needed and instructions. These videos automatically play without sound, which is a Facebook feature, and consumers do not need to listen to the video in order to understand and enjoy the video. The only sound in these videos is music, which is obviously not necessary to understand the videos.      

Take a look at these two videos:

Most of their videos are like the ones above, they are very simple, shot from an overhead angle with hands doing all the work, they are fast paced and very visually appealing. But BuzzFeed is looking into doing new things with Tasty. Last week they started on a new series, “Tasty Stories,” which is a video series where celebrity chefs and other celebrities take part in sharing a favorite recipe.

The first video in this series was posted on October 20th, featuring chef Marcus Samuelsson. Take a look at the video below:

This video has received about 17 million views in just about a week.

Tasty is also on other platforms; they are on Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. But the most successful platform would be on Facebook. 

New Changes Coming to Facebook

Facebook is the social media platform that a majority of people uses. This platform is used for numerous things, including but not limited to posting and sharing pictures, updating your status as to what you are currently doing, live streaming, and asking friends and family for advice or recommendations for new places.

Facebook recently announced it will be adding some new features to the widely used social media app.  These new features include a recommendation option on a status, an easier way to find local events, and introducing a new way to connect with local businesses.

Lets take a closer look at these new Facebook features.

Recommendations

Since many users already turn to friends and family for recommendations, let it be for new restaurants, hair salons, or places to travel, Facebook is making it easier to ask for recommendations from your friends. Instead of having to post a status and ask for the best restaurants in town and sorting through comments, users will now be able to turn on a recommendations section when posting a new status. This will make it a lot easier for users to organize those recommendations all in one place.

Local Events

Facebook already has a section for events, where you can look for and discover events around you and see what events your friends will be attending. But now, it will be easier to find local events that would be of interest to you. Facebook has revamped the events bookmark; users will now be able to see and catch up on which events their friends are attending or hosting and look through event recommendations based on what is popular amongst your friends.

Interaction with Local Businesses

Facebook will also be introducing several new ways to interact with businesses, including the following:

• Order Food: Users will be able to order food directly from a business’ Facebook Page. The business must be using Delivery.com or Slice and users will be able to simply click the “Start Order” button to order their food. 
• Request an Appointment: For businesses that require booking appointments, such as a hair salon or a spa, users will be able to request a time and will also be able to see all the services the business offers. These businesses will then have to get back to the user via Messenger to confirm appointments. 
• Get a Quote: Some local bussiness’ Facebook Page will have the option of “Get Quote” button at the top of their Page that will allow users to instantly request a quote from that business. 
• Get Tickets to Movies and Events: Users will also be able to order movie tickets directly from the movie’s Facebook Page via Fandago. As for events, users will also be able to get tickets directly from the event page on Facebook, this is made possible through their partnership with Ticketmaster and Eventbrite. 

Facebook is now making it so much more convenient for users to do almost anything they need to do from just one app. There will soon be no need to jump from app to app to get certain things done.

All theses new features will be introduced to the US in the next couple of weeks and months, as well as other new features being introduced in the near future.

What is the Difference Between SEO and SMO?

SEO and SMO, are common terms in Social Media Marketing, but do we know what they mean? Well to start off, social media marketing is all about producing content that users will want to on their different social media accounts and this essentially helps companies or businesses increase brand awareness.

So, in order to be successful in social media marketing, some strategies should be considered. These strategies include SEO (search engine optimization) and SMO (social media optimization).

What exactly is SEO?

SEO is pretty much a set of strategies and techniques to help improve your search engine rankings so that more users see your site.

Many marketers develop and publish content in a certain way so that their content appears high in the search engine.

There are several ways one can increase exposure of a brand.

On-Site Optimization

Keywords: words that are embedded on the site itself, these keywords are read through the spider (or web crawler), which is an automated web program that gathers information from different sites. Once this information is gathered, the search engine will determine which sites are the most relevant to the user’s search query.

These keywords include:

• Meta tag: this is text that is only seen when viewing the source code page; it describes the page’s content. For example, the meta description should include keywords that will help users find your site, this description should be about 2-3 sentences and this also appears as the description with the search engine listing. 
• Title Tag: this is the title that appears at the top of the browser title bar and on search engine results. 
• Heading Tag: heading tags are classified ad H1, H2, H3, etc., with H1 being the bigger text in size, indicating that it is a more important heading. These heading are of course used to differentiate the different section of your site and/or titles of different sections. There should be different keywords in these headings.
• URL: a good URL will be static, meaning it will always stay the same and it should include keywords.

What is SMO?

SMO is a process of increasing brand awareness thorough different social media platforms. If the content that is published is relevant and engaging, other sites might link to the content and will lead to users to share that information.  SMO is more focused on encouraging others to share content, whereas SEO is more about finding ways to rank high on a search engine query. SMO can help improve the search engine ranking because there are many links involved in SMO, and that is what the web crawlers like.

In order for others to share content, the content should be entertaining, valuable, or interesting.
Here are some things to consider;

On-Site Tactics

Title: the title is very important, as is it the first impression; the title determines if the user will even take a look at your content.

There are different types of “hooks” that can be considered when coming up with a title

• Resource hook: this hook should be used for content that is meant to help the target audience.  For example, “10 Ways to Increase User Engagement”
• Contrary hook: this hook generated debate and allows for users to express opinions. For example, “Reasons Why PPC is better than SEO”
• Humor hook: this one is a given, most people enjoy humor if used in the correct context. 
• Giveaway hook: this hook includes a sales promotion and an incentive, such as a discount. 
• Research hook: this last hook offers some type of claim, can be some statistics that entice interest. 

Share Tools

When there are call to action buttons, such as sharing buttons, users are more likely to share that content, simply because it is easier. The share buttons can be linked to different social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, or Linkedin.

I hope you now have an understanding of the differences on SEO and SMO!

Building Brand Fans

I think it is safe to say that most companies or businesses have at least one social media account, if not more, to connect with its fans and promote its products and/or services. It is easy to create a social media account, but it takes a lot of work and strategies to make it work and make it visible and relatable to its audience.

There are many brands with millions of followers on social media. And there is a reason why they have such a strong following, they have fandoms. Such brands with strong fandoms include:

• Starbucks
• Coca-Cola
• Red Bull
• LEGO
• McDonalds 
• Nike Football

Yes, these are all big name brands, and the reason why they have a big following is because they have developed strategies to engage and build relationships with their audience, and ultimately creating a fandom. 

Ready to have a fandom for your brand? Here are some tips on ways to create brand fans.

Once a business has social media marketing strategies in place, the next thing that should be considered is building a relationship with its audience. Brands need to connect with the audience by building a persona and interacting with them by replying to comments and building conversations with them with that same brand persona or brand voice. This brand persona should stay consistent because it will make the brand more dependable and the audience or customers will trust the brand even more.

Business and companies should also be participating in friendvertising, which is essentially using social networks to build earned media and ultimately creating brand fans along the way.

When a business has a good amount of brand fans, it is easy to generate earned media. These brand fans are so loyal to the brand that it is easy and enjoyable for them to share, like, and just simply interact with the brand’s social media accounts. In short, earned media is basically the online word of mouth or it might be more appropriate to say word of mouse.  

Lets look at some Coca-Cola examples:

Coca-Cola is one of the world's most recognizable brands and a brand with the biggest social media following; they have a little over 99 million likes on their US Facebook page. Coca-Cola uses different tactics on their social media accounts, but they stay consistent, which is highly important. 

This simple Facebook post generated 2.7 thousand likes and 260 shares. This is easy earned media for Coca-Cola. 

The brand also has a lot of crowed sourced content. They have different campaigns where the audience gets the opportunity to participate and Coca-Cola shares this content. This is a great way of making their audience feel included and part of the brand experience. For example, their Share a Coke Campaign; this campaign allowed consumers to share pictures or videos of their Coca-Cola drinks with their names, friend's names, or family member's names. 

Coca-Cola is also great at interacting with its fans by replying to comments, questions, or concerns on social media. Even with its 3.2 million followers on Twitter, they respond to followers in a timely manner.

Not only is this great customer service, it is great customer engagement and interaction. It is a very easy way to make fans feel included. 

Coca-Cola is a great example of creating a relationship with its audience to create a fandom and loyal following.