DoLA crafts an ECP for craft beer and brews tons o' traffic.
 

We've now made it through an entire year of Winners of the Week, and 52 weeks later, they just keep getting better. This week, a tip of the hat goes to DoLA for their sudsy success in creating the LA Beer Week ECP.

As always, the numbers to back it up:

All of this is a fantastic example of getting the most out of promoting an event series. It's easy to get stuck in the rut thinking that ECPs are the sole domain of radio stations and blogs, but DoLA has made a habit of integrating them into deals with event series that need calendars.

DoLA has already been doing this for a while with the Twilight Concert Series, and joins the likes of other metros' previous success with calendars for event series, including DoNYC's SummerStage and Do502's Waterfront Wednesdays.

The main thing is to identify people that 1) have a sizable audience but 2) lack the tools to build out their own calendar. Always have an ECP in the back of your mind when working with these partners, since it can be a fantastic way to add an immediate audience boost on top of whatever else you're getting out of the relationship. 

Finally, a special runner up Winner of the Week to Nashville, who had their highest week of traffic in more than a year thanks to their Live on the Green FB post. The content got 15K organic reach and 65 shares, most notably from Mercy Lounge and by their own Rhea Foote in the Young Entertainment Professionals group. Great work guys!

Get to work landing your market's beer week calendar and then watch your stats climb in the below Weekly KPI Report:

Winner of the Week: Do502! Traffic is one thing you don't have to sacrifice on the solstice. Now that we've made it past the longest day of the year, it seemed appropriate to send the longest edition of the Winner of the Week. But spend 2 minutes reading, and you'll get all the infoyou need on overhauling your traffic-driving content game. First off, some stats on Do502's killer week: With over 11K sessions, Louisville had their highest week of traffic since launch. Far and away their biggest traffic driver was their stellar How To Do Summer page. Of their total traffic for the week, 27% of it (~5K pageviews) was to the summer content, making it nearly 3X their traffic to their homepage. And that's not even counting all the subsequent browsing after people land on the page and click into other pieces of content. Of the total traffic coming to their summer content, 85% of that traffic was driven by Facebook. So really, Do502's extraordinary traffic and subsequent Winner of the Week status can all be tracked back to this one post. That post got 42 shares organically, without a penny spent. How? Engaging copy that mentions specific value to the reader (Father's day ideas, free movies, local ice cream shops, etc.) Tagging of other FB pages with large audiences (like Flea Off Market and Iroquois) that are featured in the content, in hopes that they'll share. Custom eye-catching share image tailored to FB's dimensions Of course, Do502 could've gone even further to edit the headline and auto-generated link description text (as highlighted in this product update). But all told, a pretty nice Facebook win. Other metros had varying success sharing on Facebook. This is of course partially dependent on the metros' particular social audience, but can only be helped by sharing things correctly every single time.   Summer guide shares in order of organic reach: Do317: 5K reach (and 5K paid reach).  Buried the value prop in the link description text, instead of the main text, but great share image and good audience response. Do615: 1.5K reach. Great detailing of value, but no tagged pages or changing of headline/link description text. Do210: 1.1K reach. Brief detailing of value. Link text doesn't tell you much, and no tagged pages. DoLA: 448 reach. Value buried in link text under an auto-generated title. Do617:  441 reach. Shared as an image instead of as a linkshare. Makes it more difficult for a user to click through. DoTheBay: 341 reach. Value buried in link text. No tagged pages. Do214: 331 reach. Value buried in link text. No tagged pages. These seem like small things, but in the case of Do502, they can make all the difference between an average week, and a winning week. You can't produce content and expect people to click out of their feed on good faith; use all of the tools at your disposal to entice them to leave the comfort of Facebook and discover your glorious content. Spend some time brushing up on FB best practices, then click through to see your Facebook stats, your traffic stats, and everything in between in this week's updated KPI report:

Our biweekly Product Updates give you a rundown of all the features and bug fixes that are being deployed - plus one handy tip of the week.

We're barreling forth towards the beta launch of the app. It's going to bring a smile to everyone's face.

Last weekend, Do512 and Do617 got hit with an onslaught of spammy user-added events. The spammers made it past both our spam questions and recaptcha - and their events were triggering band notifications for artists like TV On The Radio that linked users to these undesirable events.

To stop the proliferation of these events, we disabled the ability for users to add events on the front end until we had a better gate-keeping system in place.

Last night, after assessing the situation, we added the ability for users with any permissions (such as Event Editor, All Star or Manager) to create events, bands and venues via the front end of the site. Users without permissions will see an error message that prompts them to contact CM@DoXYZ.com to attain the necessary permissions.

If a user reaches out to you (and seems legitimate), we suggest letting him/her know that due to spammers we had to turn off the ability to allow everyone to enter events. However, because you trust and love them and appreciate them supporting the site, you are giving them special permission to continue adding events. Until around two years ago, any user could edit any event no matter what their permissions were. That system rarely caused problems - and our current one will be much more restrictive than that.

We highly recommend navigating to your metro’s Radmin and granting Event Editor permissions to all of your key partners and users who regularly add events to your site.

We’re also going to be working with our product team to help you automate this process by:

Once this process is complete, we also highly recommend sending a mass email out to all of the folks that we automatically add - letting them know about the changes to the site and their special VIP permissions. This is a good reason to reach out to your core users and let them know that they’re important. We’ll send over their emails the moment once we’ve granted the permissions.

You will soon have the option to treat all weekly repeating events exactly like single-day events within your category shortcuts. For each category shortcut, metros will be able to pull all of their weekly repeating events out of the widgets and onto the main listings by checking the (soon to be added) "Include Repeating In Main Listings" check box in Radmin -> Content -> Shortcuts.

This is highly recommended for shortcuts such as Happy Hours and Karaoke / Trivia that feature mostly weekly events.

A couple things to note:

Also, the maximum amount of events that can be displayed in one ongoing and repeating event widget has been increased to 25. Prior to this update, these widgets only displayed 12 events - and some metros felt limited in the amount of content that they could surface within them.

Please note that this change will affect the widgets in both the main listings and the category shortcuts.

We squashed a bug that was preventing scrapers from checking the ‘free’ box on events that were identified as such when scraped. Content Managers will soon be able to once again filter their Approved Events by ‘Free’ to surface awesome events for their free lists.

Scrapers will now ‘obvious dupe check’ incoming ongoing events that share the same title, venue, metro and end date as existing ongoing events. This will fix metros’ issues with duplicate instances of the same exhibitions getting brought onto the site.

Exhibitions have historically given our system trouble because they are often not listed with a ‘Start Date’ on gallery websites, so our scrapers automatically set their Start Date to the current date and don’t correctly match them against existing approved events. But all of that that ends this week.

Dev has also put a lot of work into speeding up our listings pages - both on the app and on the desktop sites - so we can wow our Tastemakers with our new product.

You may already be A|B testing your email subject lines - but have you considered A|B testing the content of your emails as well?

MailChimp makes it easy to A|B test different pieces of content in your emails using merge tags - and doing so is helpful for learning how to best engage with your audience. We’d recommend checking out their documentation and then reaching out to us with any questions you may have.

Friends, metros, countrymen - lens me this year.

A handful of metros take home the prize this week, thanks to several markets taking advantage of lenses to drive traffic and dollars.

A digest of some lens highlights around the network:

If you look into the the past and future, you only get more examples of lens opportunities. DoTheBay launched five separate lenses when they transitioned away from Do415. Since then, their traffic to site has been up 92% compared to the year prior. And Do317 is hard at work building out lenses for their various neighborhoods, since they already have a presenting sponsor lined up.

The important thing to remember when building lenses is that they take a significant investment of time. So before going lens crazy, think about whether the lens will have a wide audience, andway more importantly, think about who will pay money to sponsor the content. The real advantage of lenses is that they afford you design flexibility and easy control of what ads appear where, which is a great recipe for tailoring content for a specific advertiser (see: Jack lens).

Check out your last week of stats, and start thinking if you can augment your audience and wallet with some lens action:

While there are exceptions to every rule, the vast majority of successful Facebook posts follow a set of certain criteria. Start integrating these tips below into all of your posts and you will see your engagement and reach continue to grow.

1. Post As a Link

Always post your content as a Link rather than a Photo with a link in the description. The terminology Facebook uses to describe the different kinds of posts can start to sound trivial, but the effect each has on performance is not.

When creating a Facebook post you have four general options -- post a Status (words only), a Photo, a Video, or a Link. A Link is just a Status with a URL pasted in it.

Pretty simple, but the important thing to remember is that Links reach a larger audience than Photos by rate of 2-to-1. 

The reason the Link format performs so well is that Facebook automatically generates a preview of your content using the page's metadata -- title, share image, description, and site name. Facebook has decided this format is the proper way for URLs to appear on the News Feed, and boosts Pages that post Links accordingly.

Pro tip: When you paste your URL into the Status composer, you can erase it before posting and the Link Preview will still appear (see other examples below). This is a great way to make your posts look cleaner while still using the Link format.

2. Use Accurate Title and Description

Sometimes the title and description metadata that gets pulled in by Facebook doesn't look that pretty. Or, maybe you want to test out a different headline based on the context you're sharing your content in.

Either way it's easy to edit a link's title and description copy before you post it to Facebook. Just click on either field on the link preview and make the change before you click "Post".


Pro tip: Since the post above was for a show announcement, Do214 edited the event page's title on the Facebook link preview to make it more engaging.

3. Use an Optimal Share Image

Now that you can set the share image for your pages directly from Radmin and the front-end, you can make sure the image that Facebook pulls in for your Links is always optimized for the News Feed.

Facebook's own guidelines specify that share images should be no smaller than 1200 x 630 pixels, and always maintain that 1.91:1 ratio. It should be said that our own cover images are recommended to be 1200 x 450 pixels (2.67:1), so failing to upload a separate share image could really hurt post performance.

The share images you choose should always be high-quality and capture what the content in the link is all about. Blurry images or images only slightly related to the content aren't going to capture your audiences attention. Also, you can use images with words and graphics, but they aren't necessary.

Pro tip: If you plan to boost a post through paid promotion, the share image cannot be made up of more than 25% text.

4. Use the Facebook Debugger

If you've ever been frustrated by the Facebook Link preview pulling in outdated images or description copy, you'll be glad to know that these problems can now be easily fixed by the Facebook Debugger tool.

Facebook's caching scripts automatically pull in metadata to generate those pretty link previews, but if you're sharing the link for the first time or you just updated the image, the scripts will not have had time to pull in the new metadata for your current post.

Thankfully, the Debugger tool can be used to force Facebook to fetch the updated share image, title, or page description. When in doubt, use this tool every time before sharing content to make sure everything will appear exactly how you want it to.

5. Use Conversational Tone, But Keep It Short

Studies have found that the most engaged-with posts are the ones that use a conversational tone, but are kept to 40 characters or less.

Think about it, you know this instinctively. Facebook is where you communicate with your friends, stay up to date with what they're doing, and share links they might find funny or interesting. The last thing you want to see in your News Feed is someone who posts a three paragraph essay about something they're trying to tell you to care about.


It's the same with your metro's audience. If you've followed steps 1-3 above, you're already going to have an awesome looking Link, so all you have to do is introduce it or tease it in a natural and conversational way. Let the image, title, and description do the rest of the talking.

6. Try Sharing At Off-Peak Hours

The most popular times for sharing content on Facebook are Monday through Friday, 10am-7pm. However, most engagements on workdays actually happen early in the morning (when people are drinking their morning coffee and scanning the News Feed) and night (while they're sitting on the couch watching TV or laying in bed trying to get to sleep).

Use this discrepancy to your advantage by scheduling certain posts to go live during these off-peak hours when there's less content being shared but more people engaging. TrackMaven recommends 5:00pm to 12:00am local time as an optimal time to post content.


Also, weekends are usually a down time for brands and publications to post content, but users are engaging on Facebook around the clock Saturday and Sunday. You do it yourself while you're waiting at a bar for a friend, standing in line at a show, or laying in bed enjoying a lazy Sunday.

So before you head out on Friday afternoons, remember to schedule a few posts to go live at strategic times on Saturday and Sunday.

7. It's Part of a Bigger Facebook Strategy

All of these tips are great for crafting the perfect post, but none of it matters if it's not part of a consistent Facebook strategy. Sorry if this bursts your bubble, but there's no way to game the system these days. Social media users are too savvy and you won't get anywhere by bullshitting them.

To become successful on Facebook (and all of us can become incredibly successful on Facebook), you need to get serious about what you want your voice to be and put out great, authentic content everyday.

The most successful Facebook Pages aren't the ones always trying to promote something or bait you into clicking through to their site. They post content that's funny, cool, interesting, useful, or relevant. They behave more like a friend than a company that's trying to sell you something.

Think about it, what's the type of local content you like to see pop up on your news feed? It's not the dry and boring stuff your daily newspaper posts, and it's not the corny stuff some local bloggers posts. It's stuff that speaks to you and your peers in an authentic way and makes you want to be a part of what they're doing. Post that.

DTB gets an unscenely amount of traffic.
 

While DoTheBay had some early successes ranging from unique giveaways to endless Bae puns, they secured Winner of the Week status thanks to another successful year in their hugely popular Scene Unseen series.

Of course, winning ain't nothing without stats to back it up, soooo:

This is the fourth iteration of Scene Unseen to date (check out 2014, 2013, and 2012), and continues to build on the formula of pairing bands from different "scenes" together for one huge party. Best of all, it's a tentpole event that DoTheBay can use to bolster their brand throughout the Bay and, more importantly, sell to a sponsor (like Spray).

And for those of you thinking that you couldn't do something similar in your market - check outDoNYC's Signature Blend Series. That program was sold to Jack Daniels and had bands from various genres and cultural scenes blended together into a night of good music. Sound familiar?

Take a few minutes to ponder if you could carry on the tradition of mixing musical styles in your city, and then dive into the latest edition of weekly stats below:

We've made a variety of upgrades to the platform to improve your site's organic reach:

We're creating pagination for all event collections. Our endless scroll (and "view more" functionality) was making it difficult for Google's bots to crawl through our content. So, we're replacing the "View More" buttons on all event collections with a more traditional "Previous Page" and "Next Page" model to optimize the SEO of your events. You'll be able to see this change live on your site tomorrow. 

We appended two links to your featured stuff: "(City) Venues" and "Artists In (City)" in order to make the content of these pages (i.e. - all of your venue and artist pages) more accessible to Google. Placing these links on your home page tells Google that they are important - and helps their bots locate all of your quality content much more easily.

Please note that you can still upload up to 10 'Featured Stuff' links - and these last 2 links will be automatically tacked on to the end of the list.

We're also adding canonical URLs to metro map pages as well as venue pages' 'past' and 'month' event collections. This is in an effort to disclose to Google any duplicate pages on our site (for which we are punished if not disclosed). One more way to make our SEO win.

Bug Fixes

By incredibly popular demand, we have implemented four new features to rapidly improve the speed of indexing (specifically with new venues). One of content managers' biggest pain points over the past few weeks has been the speed with which a new venue is indexed in our system. After a new venue is created, users have to wait for it to appear in search before they can add any events to the venue - so it is reasonable that CMs (and site users) want this to be as quick as possible.

In testing, these new improvements allowed the average index to complete in 10x the usual speed - and we trust that you will also see a remarkable change on your site. Please also note that the indexing speeds will continue to improve as we complete the migration to our new search provider, Algolia, by the end of the month.

The "Winners Notified" and "X of Y Confirmed" notices on Radmin giveaways will be fixed (as of tomorrow). Please note that the "X of Y Confirmed" notice will only appear if a number is entered into the "Slots" field during giveaway setup.

Cool Stuff

Tip Of The Week

There's nothing mythical about Sasquatch traffic
 

Accolades go out to Do206 for setting their own high water mark in email engagement last week, receiving 500+ more newsletter clicks than their previous record.

And while it's no surprise that the spike in interest was Sasquatch-related, the nature of the content is out of the norm. Was it a big giveaway? An exclusive look at next year's lineup? Avideo of the real Sasquatch?

Nope, nope, and nope.

Do206 managed to snag their highest click rate in over 3 months thanks to this content block promoting their photo recap.  

A total of 1145 unique recipients clicked Sasquatch-related content in that area of the newsletter, accounting for 49% of all the week's clicks. This link directed users to the Do206 latest page, with the top 6 posts (at the time of the email) all focusing on Sasquatch. An adjusted bounce rate of around 3% proves that people were then able to find the content they then wanted to peruse.

Of course, before you go wild filling your newsletter with big ol' photo content blocks, think "is this something that everyone, or at least the vast majority of my email list, will care about?"Photos from that repeating karaoke night probably don't make the cut.

In this case, Sasquatch is THE marquee Seattle music event, and drives more traffic to Do206 than anything else during the year. So think about what that one event is for your market, and start brainstorming ways you can keep milking traffic after it's over and done with.

And as always, check out all of your stats, email and otherwise, in the freshly updated Weekly KPI Report below: