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Thursday, September 14, 2017

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 9/6/2017

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 12:47 PM Labels:

Winners of the Week:
Metros Killing It On Instagram


We added Instagram likes and comments to the KPI Report last week, which has helped us all get a much better sense for comparative Instagram performance across the network. With that in mind, we'd like to congratulate Do210, DoTheBay, DoLA, Do512 -- who all posted more than 5 times last week AND averaged over 100 likes per post...

... and also share 10 tips for making the most out of your Instagram.

1. If you're not generating at least 5 posts per week, you're not posting enough.
  • We recommend 5-6 posts per week at the minimum and 25 at the maximum (so you're not overloading your users).
  • If your metro made less than 4 posts last week (we know who you are!), we challenge you to step up the posting frequency and make at least 5 stellar posts this week.
2. Engage with Hashtags
  • Last year, we posted this growth recommendation about winning your city's hashtag. This strategy is more relevant now than ever, since Instagram's feed has become increasingly based on an algorithm that rewards users for engaging with others' posts.
3. Be strategic with your captions.
  • Place important words at the beginning to make sure they don't get truncated.
4. Save frequently-used hashtags in your Notes app.
  • To copy them quickly on the go.
5. Hide your hashtags by including them in the comments of your post (example).
  • Or use dots and line breaks (example and excellent explanation in this article).
6. Consider posting whenever you're out at a bar, restaurant or patio.
  • These posts tend to perform extremely well (example), which makes sense because they appeal to a wide audience. They also help add personality to your brand and sell the fact that you are real people, out in your cities doing awesome stuff.
7. Post from parks, exhibitions and other notable landmarks in your city.

We recommend avoiding overused landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty unless you can put your own unique spin on the picture; everything else should be fair game. Examples of highly successful landmark posts from the past 10 days include:
These posts also help balance out the concert photography by making it clear to viewers that your site is about more than just music.

8. Leverage Instagram Stories
  • Stories appear at the top of your followers' feeds.
  • Stories are ideal for in-the-moment posts at events and other moments when you may not be able to get the perfect static shot.
  • Need some pro tips? This article has a bunch.
9. Mix it up with Boomerang posts.
10. Up your engagement rates by posting slideshows.
  • If you're unfamiliar with the process, this article is a very helpful how-to.
There is so much more to say about Instagram, and many excellent resources online to help youstay ahead of the curve. We like a lot of HootSuite's articles, especially those covering:
What questions do you have about Instagram best practices? Ask us!
Read More

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 8/30/2017

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 12:46 PM Labels:

Winners of the Week:
Cities Who Made Mayweather vs. McGregor Watch Guides


Last Saturday's Mayweather vs. McGregor boxing match was one of the year's most anticipated sporting events - and since it was only available to watch on pay per view and took place on a Saturday night, it was prime fodder for us to capitalize on by making watch guides.

Who made a guide?
  • Do214, Do312, Do317, Do503, Do615, Do816
Who didn't make a guide, but at least built a bunch of event pages for watch parties?
  • Do206, Do250, Do314, Do502, Do512, Do617
Who completely missed this opportunity?
  • DoLA, doNYC, DoSD, DoTheBay, HazTJ, Do210 and Do604
Who won BIG last week?
  • Do615: Made a guide; offered Do615 discount promo codes for one party; did a giveaway for another; and got a link to another on the Tennessean (part of the USA Today Network). The extra 2K pageviews from organic search alone helped propel them to their 3rd-highest week of traffic ever.
  • Do312: Made a guide with a highly-searchable title; racked up 12,319 page views on their fight content - 7,356 of which were from organic search. The fight guide was the most visited page on Do312 last week.
  • Do503 - Their guide was their 3rd most successful content piece in Do503 history; and was the most visited page on Do503 last week by a mile. Fight content accounted for 20% of Do503's traffic last week, which was their 4th-highest week of traffic ever.
What did we learn for next time?
  • Match your page titles to what users are most likely to search.
    • Do312's page, entitled "Where To Watch The Mayweather vs. McGregor Fight In Chicago", got 5,000 hits from organic search. Do214's page, entitled "Fight Night in Dallas", got 0.
    • If you're unsure of how to best optimize your page title for organic search, please reach out to Support.
  • Your city is hungry for this sort of content.
    • Do512, who didn't build a guide and still enjoyed 22,704 page views on fight content last week, had 803 people come in from Google and land on this old Mayweather vs. Pacquiao page.
  • If the event hasn't passed, then it's not too late to make a guide.
    • Producing this content ASAP is always preferable. However, it's important to note that 57% of the organic page views on Do312's guide occurred on the day of the fight.
How do you make sure your metro WINS in next week's email?
Did you guys add anything to the KPI Reports this week?
  • Why, yes, we've added columns for Instagram likes and comments, because it ain't just about followers. If your metros' IG stats are missing, then we need your password. Holler at us. 
  • We're focusing on establishing better tracking around social engagement across all channels, so stay tuned for much more here.
Read More

Tuesday, August 29, 2017

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 8/24/2017

1 comment: Posted by Anonymous at 2:39 PM Labels:

Winner of the Week: Do250


Oh, Canada! Last week, Do250 combined two tried-and-true audience growth methods, 'play the fest' contests and festival ticket giveaways, to record their highest week of Site Traffic and New Visitors to date. 

To do so, they prompted their audience to win VIP tickets to Legends Fest by voting for their favorite band to play the festival. Genius! The voting page ended up generating 60% of Do250’s page views for the week and propelling Do250 to their highest week of traffic ever.

Here’s how our Victorians drove so much traffic to that page:
  • this Facebook post (with all finalists tagged), which ended up being one of the metro's most engaging posts to date, and also drove 37% of the traffic to the page
  • this dedicated email
  • A canned email to all 15 of the finalist artists in the 'play the fest' contest, which in turn helped the artists to drive thousands of additional visitors to the page.
The canned email provided the contest finalists a shareable link and clear CTA to encourage their friends, family and acquaintances to vote for their band. Here's that email:

Hello Again!

We are stoked to let you know that you have been selected as one of the 15 finalists for the 2nd annual Play Legends Contest!

We have just announced you as one of our finalists, and wanted to touch base to give you a heads up, and to answer any questions you may have.

We will open the contest to the public to vote to help us curate the final spot at Legends Valley Music Festival at Sugar.

Your fans can cast their vote at: do250.com/p/play-legends
Voting closes Aug 20th at Midnight!
Each fan is eligible for 1 vote per day, through their facebook login.

We've attached a few graphics that you can use to help engage your fans!

Congrats and best of luck!

Do250 & Legends Valley

Do250 did four things exceptionally well in this campaign:
  • Creatively combining two high-impact growth techniques to win big.
  • Tagging all of the associated artists when posting on social.
  • Promoting a single initiative across multiple channels.
  • Personally requesting that all of the associated artists share the content.
Want help planning your next big campaign? Drop Support a line!

And Do250 wasn't the only metro with a big week last week. Do604 had their most unique email opens ever, Do312 made big leaps in site engagement, Facebook engagement, site traffic and much more. Let's crack open an ice cold Austin Eastciders and....
View Last Week's Stats
Read More

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

How You (and the Network) Did Last Week - August 15, 2017

6 comments: Posted by Anonymous at 1:51 PM Labels:

Winners of the Week: Do512


Check out this video that Do512 made to promote their Bloody Marys guide on Facebook. Do512's Social Media Jedi Ben Williams put it together in an hour using Animoto (which costs $22/month) with help from his intern Christelle.

Once posted, the video immediately exploded with engagement, earning over 8,000 organic video views before being boosted to earn 29,000 more.

Do512 plans to continue pushing out similar videos every week. Meanwhile, we're digging in from HQ to help you make your own short content-based videos and push them out quickly, no matter your team size.

It's important to note that in terms of cultural weight (the metric that we use to evaluate audience growth across the network) an engaged user on Facebook is worth the same as a site visitor, so you should absolutely be pursuing any opportunities to develop on-brand content that you can to grow this metric.

This week, our team is evaluating a variety of free and/or inexpensive services in the hopes of recommending one to become standard practice. We'll be back with more guidance to that end as soon as we can.

... and DoTheBay


DoTheBay is no stranger to making videos out of their content guides. But this week, we have a very special reason to shout them out:

Last week, we mentioned that our FKA 415ers had earned their highest week of traffic ever, largely based off of content initiatives like the Play 20th Street Block Party contest and Outside Lands Night Shows giveaways, which would continue to pay dividends in future weeks....

DoTheBay followed what was their highest week of traffic ever with an even better week last week: 121,992 total pageviews, up 12.9% from the previous week and up 111% from the previous year. Way to go, DoTheBay!

This huge win speaks to the value of creating content and partnerships that will pay dividends over the longest possible period of time. If you lock in a 'play the fest' or major festival giveaway, you should (A) keep it open for as long as you can and (B) develop an organized, multi-channel promotion plan for the entire duration of the contest. Let us know how we can help.

There were a lot of other wins from last week to celebrate across the network. We invite you to let us know what questions you have and how we can best serve you as you...
Read More

Wednesday, August 9, 2017

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 8/9/2017

No comments: Posted by Anonymous at 3:49 PM Labels:
Update! Your metro's monthly goals docs are updated for the month of July. Head on over to the Audience Development hub to check them out.
 

Winner of the Week: DoTheBay


If we had a tattoo for every time a "play the festival" contest moved the meter for a metro's growth, we'd be Jason Ricciardi!

Last week marked DoTheBay's highest week of traffic ever (!!!), thanks to a combination of the following (in order of traffic impact):

1. This Play 20th Street Block Party Contest, where musicians have been invited to submit their tracks to win a spot on Noise Pop's 20th Street Block Party lineup. The contest has 14,189 page views and 3,358 entries so far, and it's open through the 14th. DoTheBay General Manager Brett Leader mentioned:

We previously tried the band contest earlier in the year for Noise Pop Festival and wanted to give it another shot with 20th Street Block Party. This time, we're doing a lot more hand-holding with every artist who enters, so they fully understand how the contest works and how to rally their fans to vote. We're also pushing the contest harder in other areas than we previously did, which is resulting in almost double the amount of entries from the last go around. 
 
2. In second place, the tried-and-true Outside Lands Night Shows page, where users can win tickets to every single Outside Lands after party, earned The Bay a hefty 6,286 page views throughout last week. Brett added:

Part of the Outside Lands Night Shows success was that we sent a dedicated blast exactly when the shows got announced (even beating the festival with their email blast). We had similar success last year with the Treasure Island Lineup announcement. Definitely encourage other metros to leverage their festival partnerships and send dedicated blasts as soon as lineups are announced. 

3. And each of the following pages also earned over 2,000 page views last week: Free Admission Days Guide, Dog Surfing Championships, Outside Lands Festival Giveaway and the How To Do Summer Guide, propelling DoTheBay to their highest week of traffic ever (56,432 page views) -- plus 1,829 new email subscribers to boot.

Has your metro done a "play the festival" contest? What questions do you have about setting one up? Ask us! And then....
Read More
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Thursday, September 14, 2017

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 9/6/2017

Winners of the Week:
Metros Killing It On Instagram


We added Instagram likes and comments to the KPI Report last week, which has helped us all get a much better sense for comparative Instagram performance across the network. With that in mind, we'd like to congratulate Do210, DoTheBay, DoLA, Do512 -- who all posted more than 5 times last week AND averaged over 100 likes per post...

... and also share 10 tips for making the most out of your Instagram.

1. If you're not generating at least 5 posts per week, you're not posting enough.
  • We recommend 5-6 posts per week at the minimum and 25 at the maximum (so you're not overloading your users).
  • If your metro made less than 4 posts last week (we know who you are!), we challenge you to step up the posting frequency and make at least 5 stellar posts this week.
2. Engage with Hashtags
  • Last year, we posted this growth recommendation about winning your city's hashtag. This strategy is more relevant now than ever, since Instagram's feed has become increasingly based on an algorithm that rewards users for engaging with others' posts.
3. Be strategic with your captions.
  • Place important words at the beginning to make sure they don't get truncated.
4. Save frequently-used hashtags in your Notes app.
  • To copy them quickly on the go.
5. Hide your hashtags by including them in the comments of your post (example).
  • Or use dots and line breaks (example and excellent explanation in this article).
6. Consider posting whenever you're out at a bar, restaurant or patio.
  • These posts tend to perform extremely well (example), which makes sense because they appeal to a wide audience. They also help add personality to your brand and sell the fact that you are real people, out in your cities doing awesome stuff.
7. Post from parks, exhibitions and other notable landmarks in your city.

We recommend avoiding overused landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty unless you can put your own unique spin on the picture; everything else should be fair game. Examples of highly successful landmark posts from the past 10 days include:
These posts also help balance out the concert photography by making it clear to viewers that your site is about more than just music.

8. Leverage Instagram Stories
  • Stories appear at the top of your followers' feeds.
  • Stories are ideal for in-the-moment posts at events and other moments when you may not be able to get the perfect static shot.
  • Need some pro tips? This article has a bunch.
9. Mix it up with Boomerang posts.
10. Up your engagement rates by posting slideshows.
  • If you're unfamiliar with the process, this article is a very helpful how-to.
There is so much more to say about Instagram, and many excellent resources online to help youstay ahead of the curve. We like a lot of HootSuite's articles, especially those covering:
What questions do you have about Instagram best practices? Ask us!
Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 8/30/2017

Winners of the Week:
Cities Who Made Mayweather vs. McGregor Watch Guides


Last Saturday's Mayweather vs. McGregor boxing match was one of the year's most anticipated sporting events - and since it was only available to watch on pay per view and took place on a Saturday night, it was prime fodder for us to capitalize on by making watch guides.

Who made a guide?
  • Do214, Do312, Do317, Do503, Do615, Do816
Who didn't make a guide, but at least built a bunch of event pages for watch parties?
  • Do206, Do250, Do314, Do502, Do512, Do617
Who completely missed this opportunity?
  • DoLA, doNYC, DoSD, DoTheBay, HazTJ, Do210 and Do604
Who won BIG last week?
  • Do615: Made a guide; offered Do615 discount promo codes for one party; did a giveaway for another; and got a link to another on the Tennessean (part of the USA Today Network). The extra 2K pageviews from organic search alone helped propel them to their 3rd-highest week of traffic ever.
  • Do312: Made a guide with a highly-searchable title; racked up 12,319 page views on their fight content - 7,356 of which were from organic search. The fight guide was the most visited page on Do312 last week.
  • Do503 - Their guide was their 3rd most successful content piece in Do503 history; and was the most visited page on Do503 last week by a mile. Fight content accounted for 20% of Do503's traffic last week, which was their 4th-highest week of traffic ever.
What did we learn for next time?
  • Match your page titles to what users are most likely to search.
    • Do312's page, entitled "Where To Watch The Mayweather vs. McGregor Fight In Chicago", got 5,000 hits from organic search. Do214's page, entitled "Fight Night in Dallas", got 0.
    • If you're unsure of how to best optimize your page title for organic search, please reach out to Support.
  • Your city is hungry for this sort of content.
    • Do512, who didn't build a guide and still enjoyed 22,704 page views on fight content last week, had 803 people come in from Google and land on this old Mayweather vs. Pacquiao page.
  • If the event hasn't passed, then it's not too late to make a guide.
    • Producing this content ASAP is always preferable. However, it's important to note that 57% of the organic page views on Do312's guide occurred on the day of the fight.
How do you make sure your metro WINS in next week's email?
Did you guys add anything to the KPI Reports this week?
  • Why, yes, we've added columns for Instagram likes and comments, because it ain't just about followers. If your metros' IG stats are missing, then we need your password. Holler at us. 
  • We're focusing on establishing better tracking around social engagement across all channels, so stay tuned for much more here.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

Tuesday, August 29, 2017

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 8/24/2017

Winner of the Week: Do250


Oh, Canada! Last week, Do250 combined two tried-and-true audience growth methods, 'play the fest' contests and festival ticket giveaways, to record their highest week of Site Traffic and New Visitors to date. 

To do so, they prompted their audience to win VIP tickets to Legends Fest by voting for their favorite band to play the festival. Genius! The voting page ended up generating 60% of Do250’s page views for the week and propelling Do250 to their highest week of traffic ever.

Here’s how our Victorians drove so much traffic to that page:
  • this Facebook post (with all finalists tagged), which ended up being one of the metro's most engaging posts to date, and also drove 37% of the traffic to the page
  • this dedicated email
  • A canned email to all 15 of the finalist artists in the 'play the fest' contest, which in turn helped the artists to drive thousands of additional visitors to the page.
The canned email provided the contest finalists a shareable link and clear CTA to encourage their friends, family and acquaintances to vote for their band. Here's that email:

Hello Again!

We are stoked to let you know that you have been selected as one of the 15 finalists for the 2nd annual Play Legends Contest!

We have just announced you as one of our finalists, and wanted to touch base to give you a heads up, and to answer any questions you may have.

We will open the contest to the public to vote to help us curate the final spot at Legends Valley Music Festival at Sugar.

Your fans can cast their vote at: do250.com/p/play-legends
Voting closes Aug 20th at Midnight!
Each fan is eligible for 1 vote per day, through their facebook login.

We've attached a few graphics that you can use to help engage your fans!

Congrats and best of luck!

Do250 & Legends Valley

Do250 did four things exceptionally well in this campaign:
  • Creatively combining two high-impact growth techniques to win big.
  • Tagging all of the associated artists when posting on social.
  • Promoting a single initiative across multiple channels.
  • Personally requesting that all of the associated artists share the content.
Want help planning your next big campaign? Drop Support a line!

And Do250 wasn't the only metro with a big week last week. Do604 had their most unique email opens ever, Do312 made big leaps in site engagement, Facebook engagement, site traffic and much more. Let's crack open an ice cold Austin Eastciders and....
View Last Week's Stats
Posted by at 1 comment:
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Tuesday, August 22, 2017

How You (and the Network) Did Last Week - August 15, 2017

Winners of the Week: Do512


Check out this video that Do512 made to promote their Bloody Marys guide on Facebook. Do512's Social Media Jedi Ben Williams put it together in an hour using Animoto (which costs $22/month) with help from his intern Christelle.

Once posted, the video immediately exploded with engagement, earning over 8,000 organic video views before being boosted to earn 29,000 more.

Do512 plans to continue pushing out similar videos every week. Meanwhile, we're digging in from HQ to help you make your own short content-based videos and push them out quickly, no matter your team size.

It's important to note that in terms of cultural weight (the metric that we use to evaluate audience growth across the network) an engaged user on Facebook is worth the same as a site visitor, so you should absolutely be pursuing any opportunities to develop on-brand content that you can to grow this metric.

This week, our team is evaluating a variety of free and/or inexpensive services in the hopes of recommending one to become standard practice. We'll be back with more guidance to that end as soon as we can.

... and DoTheBay


DoTheBay is no stranger to making videos out of their content guides. But this week, we have a very special reason to shout them out:

Last week, we mentioned that our FKA 415ers had earned their highest week of traffic ever, largely based off of content initiatives like the Play 20th Street Block Party contest and Outside Lands Night Shows giveaways, which would continue to pay dividends in future weeks....

DoTheBay followed what was their highest week of traffic ever with an even better week last week: 121,992 total pageviews, up 12.9% from the previous week and up 111% from the previous year. Way to go, DoTheBay!

This huge win speaks to the value of creating content and partnerships that will pay dividends over the longest possible period of time. If you lock in a 'play the fest' or major festival giveaway, you should (A) keep it open for as long as you can and (B) develop an organized, multi-channel promotion plan for the entire duration of the contest. Let us know how we can help.

There were a lot of other wins from last week to celebrate across the network. We invite you to let us know what questions you have and how we can best serve you as you...
Posted by at 6 comments:
Labels:

Wednesday, August 9, 2017

How You (and the network) Did Last Week - 8/9/2017

Update! Your metro's monthly goals docs are updated for the month of July. Head on over to the Audience Development hub to check them out.
 

Winner of the Week: DoTheBay


If we had a tattoo for every time a "play the festival" contest moved the meter for a metro's growth, we'd be Jason Ricciardi!

Last week marked DoTheBay's highest week of traffic ever (!!!), thanks to a combination of the following (in order of traffic impact):

1. This Play 20th Street Block Party Contest, where musicians have been invited to submit their tracks to win a spot on Noise Pop's 20th Street Block Party lineup. The contest has 14,189 page views and 3,358 entries so far, and it's open through the 14th. DoTheBay General Manager Brett Leader mentioned:

We previously tried the band contest earlier in the year for Noise Pop Festival and wanted to give it another shot with 20th Street Block Party. This time, we're doing a lot more hand-holding with every artist who enters, so they fully understand how the contest works and how to rally their fans to vote. We're also pushing the contest harder in other areas than we previously did, which is resulting in almost double the amount of entries from the last go around. 
 
2. In second place, the tried-and-true Outside Lands Night Shows page, where users can win tickets to every single Outside Lands after party, earned The Bay a hefty 6,286 page views throughout last week. Brett added:

Part of the Outside Lands Night Shows success was that we sent a dedicated blast exactly when the shows got announced (even beating the festival with their email blast). We had similar success last year with the Treasure Island Lineup announcement. Definitely encourage other metros to leverage their festival partnerships and send dedicated blasts as soon as lineups are announced. 

3. And each of the following pages also earned over 2,000 page views last week: Free Admission Days Guide, Dog Surfing Championships, Outside Lands Festival Giveaway and the How To Do Summer Guide, propelling DoTheBay to their highest week of traffic ever (56,432 page views) -- plus 1,829 new email subscribers to boot.

Has your metro done a "play the festival" contest? What questions do you have about setting one up? Ask us! And then....
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