We’ve made it! Another year in the books for the Betsy bash crew and our amazing clients! Though 2021 had its challenges, our team has enjoyed the journey this year has brought as we continue to live in uncertain times. We’ve gained new team members and clients and said farewell to some, but we’ve loved all the memories made with each one.
As we say goodbye to 2021, we wanted to look at some of the hard data to see how our year shaped up within the world of social media metrics. We’ll look at some Betsy Bash numbers, but for us, the main focus is always on our client's pages and results. We want to see growth for their pages first and foremost, then we’ll worry about the Babes.
Audience Growth? Follower Count? Let’s see the numbers!
Social media is nothing without the people who use it, obvi! So that’s where we’ll start this off; how do our audiences look? How have they grown? For Betsy Bash, we have 10,605 followers across all our channels: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. As a business, continuing to grow your audience is essential to growing your business. It is sometimes a challenge to discover what would make someone want to follow your brand. A key question to continually answer is what type of content best represents your business while remaining interesting, engaging, and useful to your followers and potential followers? Audience growth can come from organic (posts on your feed or stories) and paid (paid ads) content; anything that gets your brand out there in front of people.
Throughout 2021 we have helped our clients amass an astounding total of 12,444 new followers. AURA Candle Bar is one such client that we helped more than double their followers on Facebook and Instagram. In 2020, AURA had only 94 Facebook likes and 766 Instagram followers, but after working with them through 2021, they now have 232 Facebook likes and 1,990 Instagram followers!
Are the people engaging with us?
The job doesn’t end once you get someone to click that “follow” button, a crucial part of success is creating content, paid or organic, that invokes action (engagement) from your followers. You want to encourage your audience to click the “like” button, comment, tag, or share with others. As internet-savvy millennials, we understand the difference between a big brand trying too hard and a genuine connection between a business and its fans. We focus on being relevant and remaining real and relatable for our client's content. This starts with creating strong, engaging content that resonates. Posts that get people excited enough to go “Awwww!” like this post of Boss Babe Lauren and her little pup Marley. Pro Tip: Cute dogs are always a winner on social! ;)
BB’s Tex-Orleans is a brand that understands their audience is more than just for marketing to; they are a community worth talking to and learning from. Sharing pictures of the BB’s community enjoying crawfish or just reminiscing on #ThrowbackThursday to celebrate the 10th anniversary of their opening. BB’s the brand, and the company wants to be a part of their fans' lives even outside the restaurant. We help make sure that BB’s can focus on the fun and the food while crafting content that keeps people coming back for crawfish, Tex-Orleans fare, Cajun-Fried Holiday turkeys, and more!
Engagement on social media is measured and quantified with three main statistics: Impressions, or how many times the content is seen; actual engagements, this means comments, reactions/likes, video views, share, etc.; and then the all-important link clicks, the number of times people click on links to go to your website or page—getting the most out of each of these statistics involves understanding your audience and what they want. We work with our clients to craft custom content that will get them the results they deserve.
Do they need to get their brand out there, so people see them? We can do that! In 2021 we had 16.9 million impressions across our client’s Facebook pages. Do they want people to engage with their brand on social media? We can do that! 606 Movers, a new Chicago-based moving company, started working with us in May. Before they worked with us, they only had 114 followers and 15 engagements on Instagram, but after only five months, they had 201 followers and 1,131 engagements!
How’s the community doing?
So you’ve got followers; they are engaging with your content, now it’s time to talk to them! Community engagement is something the Betsy Bash team excels at! We can respond to every comment, DM, share, or retweet in your brand’s voice, but we can also do outreach on your behalf. Community engagement outreach is spending time commenting on posts and content from people who may not be following you yet but share common values and interests of your target demographic. By researching hashtags, Facebook groups, and more, we can look for new followers for you!
With over 14,000 messages from loyal fans coming in during 2021, BB’s relied on the Betsy Babes to ensure everyone got answered with the same BB’s Tex-Orleans hospitality they’d receive by walking into the restaurant. Responding to every message or comment can be a daunting task for any business, whether you’re a local brick-and-mortar store like AURA Candlebar in Chicago or a multinational product brand like O-Cedar with customers all over the US and Canada. In just the last two months, we helped O-Cedar respond to over 2,000 customer comments, tags, and questions on social media.
Another great aspect of active community engagement is discovering UGC (user-generated content) when your followers post about your product or service. Often your followers would love for you to share their content directly on your pages. As our client, Back to Wild Adventures, for example, they are a hiking and outdoor adventure coordination service. Images taken during their hikes are an excellent and engaging form of UGC and can help further their audiences by resharing!
They’ve got mail! But are they reading it?
Another service we offer and do for our brand is writing blog posts and newsletter-style emails each month. Every business can benefit from including blog posts on their website as they are an excellent source of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), in other words, a way for people to find your website and business by searching for a related topic. Throughout 2021, we provided a blog and email service for our client, 606 Movers, and the email open rate was consistently 7% higher than the industry average of 19%. 606 is a local moving company in Chicago that loved to promote local events, businesses, and charities; these topics reaffirmed 606 Movers' genuine love and appreciation for the Chicago community while engaging their readers.
What about an email newsletter for a restaurant in the restaurant-saturated market of Houston? The industry average for email newsletters in the hospitality industry is 21%. Still, for BB’s Tex-Orleans, our curated emails have a 30% open rate and even higher for the last four months of 2021!
What’s marketing without advertisement?
Advertising on social media platforms is the best way to bring in people who may not ever find your pages organically. You may ask why ads are necessary if you are posting quality content? Your content is your home; it reveals to your followers who and what your business is all about, but if you don’t go out to that neighborhood bar or to that party you were invited to, how are you going to meet people to show them your home? Ads are that neighborhood bar/house-party; it’s how your brand will meet all of its new friends!
Smart Power Illinois was a public campaign we worked with in 2021 to encourage and educate people about green/sustainable energy and other progressive social issues. We helped them run ads to promote eco-conscious creators and other socially-minded movements. For Smart Power, our objective with ads was to maximize the number of people who saw them. With only a $3,144 ad budget, we reached 188,830 people! That breaks down to only a penny per person!
One of the more obvious reasons for advertising on social media is to sell, and we are pretty good at that too. Our advertising campaigns for AURA Candlebar drove a whopping 13,783 clicks, which led to 2,551 conversions throughout 2021! All those people were able to discover the experience of making their candle thanks to the Betsy Bash team!
Overall we’ve had a pretty great year, with pretty great results! We are looking forward to an even better year for Betsy Bash and our amazing clients in 2022!