Developing a Social Media Management Strategy for Nouchaline: My Fashion Blog
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Submitted By tinfey Words 4193 Pages 17
FALL 2011/2012
FINAL PROJECT:
DEVELOPING A SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGEMENT STRATEGY FOR NOUCHALINE: MY FASHION BLOG
MKTG250D/INFO250D
Presented to:
Leila Khauli Hanna
Dr. Nelson King
January 16th, 2012
Table of Contents
Executive Summary 4
Client Background 5
Existing Social Media Presence 5
1. Social Media (Open): 5
2. Specialized Networks: 7
Assessment of Current Operations 8
Coordination 8
Scrutiny and Accountability 8
Data Management 8
Scalability and Consistency 9
Summary of Existing Operational Complexity 9
Social Media Management Framework 10
Context 10
Culture 11
Process 11
Metrics 13
People 13
Policies 14
Business Goals 14
Social Media Strategy 16
FACEBOOK: 16
FEATURES: 18
CREATE A NETWORKFOR LEBANESE FASHION BLOGGERS 19
Recommendations 20
Appendix I: Social Media Assessment tools 21 21 21 23
\ 23
Appendix II. Stats of the Blog 24
Appendix III. Social Media Channels\ 25
Appendix IV: Reference and Links 27
Executive Summary
“Nouchaline: My Fashion Blog” is a blog that was launched in 2009, by Aline Chirinian. It is a platform on which Aline shares her personal style and views on fashion. The blog currently has had 59,606 page views, with over 1,080 followers across the different social media platforms. The blog’s goal is to increase the number of readers, and its brand awareness; in order to generate revenue in the near future. It hopes to achieve this goal by engaging more on social media and assessing all feedback in order to create more original content. Client Background
The client is “Nouchaline: My Fashion Blog”, a local personal fashion blog which was established in 2009 by Aline Chirinian (then called Alien’s Labyrinth, but later renamed to Nouchaline in mid-2011). The blog revolves around Aline’s personal style, inspiration and views on fashion. I have a personal professional relation with the blog as I’m the one who started it. The blog started out as a fun hobby, but has now turned into a big portion of my life. With the help of social media, I have some plans to expand the blog to hopefully one day generate a bit of revenue. Existing Social Media Presence
The blog’s social media presence is divided into two parts. 1) Networks that are open to all sorts of people, such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. 2) Networks that are specialized in a certain topic and are restricted to a certain community of people.
1. Social Media (Open):
[ Numbers last modified on January 15th 2012- Graphs and statistics in Appendix 1. ]
Facebook: 111 “likes”, 13 “Talking about this”.
Facebook is the newest channel that the Nouchaline blog has joined. The page has seen a steady increase in weekly active users. The Facebook page is mainly targeted at the Lebanese audience of the blog, and the likes are more than 70% from people in Lebanon.
Google Friend Connect: 164 followers
These are my readers whose majorities are fellow bloggers with blogger accounts. My following on Google Friend Connect, you get an RSS update on your dashboard or Google reader. I don’t have any statistics or analytics about my followers here, but most of my comments (on the blog) are by people who have followed by blog on Google Friend Connect.
Tumblr: 19 followers
Tumblr was joined out of curiosity; most of the fashion bloggers that I would check had a tumblr account so I thought I’d give it a try. I don’t have a lot of followers or traffic on tumblr mainly because I don’t really update and when I do, they’re mostly not original content but “reposts” of images I find inspiring.
Twitter: 768 followers
Twitter has been the most important channel for me and my blog. It has opened many doors for me, and has given my blog a lot of exposure. Interaction on twitter is very important to me, because you’ll able to send a message out and start a conversation with people with diverse views. It is highly engaging, and generates a lot of positive sentiment.
(I’ve included all the twitter analysis tools in the appendix)
2. Specialized Networks:
[ print screens of the profiles are included in the appendix ]
Bloggers: A network for bloggers, who blog in diverse categories and languages. It is a network for bloggers to discover and connect with each other.
13 followers, 4 reviews. 64 votes.
Featured as “Blog of the Day” on November 11, 2012.
Bloggers (not to be confused with Blogger) allows bloggers to connect with each other by creating a profile and having an RSS feed of your blog on your blogger profile. It is very popular internationally, and is very “welcoming”. Without having posted anything or having spent a lot of time on the network, I’ve gotten a lot of votes on each of my posts (which is directly updated through RSS). And my blog was even chosen as “Blog of the Day” on November 11, 2011.
Independent Fashion Bloggers: A network especially for independent fashion bloggers. It is a place where fashion bloggers from all over the world come to connect. It is a very supportive network which exposes your blog to the large online fashion community. This network is very important for all fashion bloggers to join. It helps you assess your blog and figure out what exactly you want to achieve by blogging. It is also a great place to get exposure; a lot of blogs want to have guest bloggers and features via this network. This is where a blogger was contacted to be featured on a blog.
Assessment of Current Operations
Coordination
Since the blog and all its social media extensions are run by one individual, a multidepartment coordination with different teams is not required. The individual must coordinate herself to the different tasks at hand and networks, and manage how to tackle each channel while still preserving the consistent persona of the blog.
Scrutiny and Accountability
The blog is currently not a business and does not generate revenue. But since it has plans on expanding later on in the year, more investment will be needed. At the moment though, free tools are used to assess its operations and the Return on Investment is not a monetary value, rather an intangible and valuable return in the form of experience and exposure to both the blog and the blogger.
Data Management
A blog’s readers are like its customers, and as a blogger you need to know who is reading your blog, in order to know what to post. Feedback from the readers is a very important part of blogging. There is a button which is popular among bloggers that says “Comments make me smile”, although comments are not your only form of feedback, they’re the best way to analyze sentiment towards a post and a great way to create communication between the blogger and reader. I always make sure that I reply to every comment, tweet, Facebook message and email. If I don’t receive a minimum number of comments for a post, I try to analyze what might have gone wrong and how I can improve.
Scalability and Consistency
Without social media, very few people would be able to find my blog and read my content. Social media has allowed me to reach out to people who might be interested and attain readers. After Google image and Yahoo image results, most of my traffic is generated by social networks. Twitter takes the lead, followed by Facebook. But how to make sure that what you’re sharing on the networks is being seen.
Summary of Existing Operational Complexity
Every few months a new social network pops up, and everyone jumps on board only to stop using it after a few weeks. A couple of networks remain giants, like Facebook and Twitter, and are vital to your social media presence. But there are other networks should are much smaller which could help drive to your blog. You need to decide if you should join the network or not, by joining there could be benefits, but you need to remember that it doesn’t end at the “sign up” button… joining a network takes time and effort. And you need to assess if the return by joining will beneficial or not.
Social Media Management Framework
Context
The number of fashion blogs online is astounding, and the number keeps growing every day. In order for a blog to survive the online world, it needs to differentiate itself and offer fashion blog readers something new. Fashion blogs are divided into different categories which are usually determined by the genre of fashion blog (street style –The Sartorialist, personal style blogging – Fashion Toast, celebrity style blogging –CocoPerez etc.), the number of hits per month (a successful blog which still has not reached its full potential like BrunetteBlogging.com has around 32,000 hits a month, where as an extremely successful blog like The Sartorialist gets more than 13 million hits a month! ( Amed, 2011)).
So when you start a fashion blog, you need to decide what genre you’ll be blogging about and therefor set your own goals. Benchmarking yourself to similar blogs like yours helps you realize what you would like to accomplish, and what to expect.
At the beginning, I didn’t really understand where I was going with my blog. I dabbled in different genres, but at the end of the day I was more comfortable with blogging about my views and style. When I started the blog, I had a competitive advantage over those who let’s say started their blog in the United States. A very large amount of personal style blogs are based there and most all offer very similar posts. But very few fashion blogs, let alone personal style blogs, existed in Lebanon in 2009. To this day the number of Lebanese fashion blogs (street style, personal, and celebrity) are very low, and the number of people who know what a fashion blog (in the first place) is very low. Lebanon will soon catch up with the world and discover what a fashion blog means and its importance.
Culture
Your online presence needs to have a persona which is translated across the different platforms of your social media existence. The persona of my online existence is me, which is then divided into different dub personas. My blog persona updates people on my style, my wishlists, major events in my life, with a little bit of ranting here and there. My twitter persona is the everyday me, I tweet everything from complaints to random thoughts, the weather, Lebanon and I often engage in conversation with my tweeps. Each platform has its own persona, which are all related and come together to create my total online presence. My blog has a very open culture; I’m pretty comfortable discussing big parts of my life and my photos. But then again, I am discussing ME which means that I need to be very careful what I say in order to not have information about me that might hurt me in the future or used against me, or just information that should not be made public.
Process
Each of the social media channels that are being used must ultimately be beneficial to your blog’s goals. The data generated on these networks (whether your own content or content by others) might be up to standard and also somehow meet your blog’s goals.
It is hard to define what my standard would be. But a couple of things that I look to are my monthly page views. I try to make sure that I’ve exceeded the last month’s views in the new month. I also look to see if people are actually reading my posts. I receive a lot of comments that go something along the lines of “nice blog, follow mine?” I don’t consider these comments a good thing; it means that these people aren’t reading my posts. But there are people who leave lengthy comments or who tweet at me with questions, then I know that people are actually reading my blog and that my effort is not gone to waste. I try to asses which types of posts are engaging, or what sort of wording and layout encourages people to leave a comment of click on the “like”/ +1 button.
Manage Social Media Partners
The different social media channels are like the partners of the blog. They need to be managed, updated and assessed just like the blog is. A weekly individual assessment is conducted by me to see what the Facebook interaction has been like, how many mentions I’ve received on twitter. If the sentiments are positive or negative, with the numbers are better than the week before or not.
Measure and Improve
The blog’s assessment is made by the free tools available online (all of which are available in the appendix). These are easy to use tools which show the data in a very visually pleasing way. They don’t provide extreme in depth information, but the information that they provide is sufficient for my assessments.
Metrics
As previously mentioned, the ROI of the blog is not a numeric monetary value rather intangible asset: experience and exposure. The blog objectives are related to increasing readership and page views, which is related to the ROI. I’ll be focusing on exposure because certain tangible evidence to it exists.
Since its launch in 2009, Nouchaline has had two sponsored giveaways. One in December of 2010, sponsored by ShopDilara (an online boutique, link in appendix), and one in November 2011 for the launch of the Nouchaline Facebook page (The Nokia N9 giveaway will be further discussed in the Social Media Strategy part).
• According to analytics by blogger.com (the blogging platform I use), Nouchaline received a little over 2,000 hits in November 2010 but after the giveaway in December 2010, page views were up almost 50%. (Google analytics are not present for these months, and the analytics of blogger for past months is not exact…)
• According to Google analytics (via Blogger.com) page views increased by 32.6% during the Nokia N9 competition launch, whereas likes on face book reached almost 100.
People
Since the team behind the blog consists of one person, all the changes and new technology/network uses must be managed by the same individual. It is important for this individual to always stay on track with all that is happening in the online world, and learn to quickly adapt and use the new technologies to the blog’s advantage. Also since the pace at which new products are being launched is very high, one individual can’t possibly be able to try all of them and be efficient in all of them. That is why it is important to monitor the competition and see what networks are becoming more popular and which have potential.
Policies
It might sound a little funny, but I do have some policies that I’ve set upon myself regarding the blog. They mainly revolve around posting, I must make sure to post at least three times per week. I should make sure that all my photos are properly edited (adjusting lightness, contrast etc.) to ensure good photo quality. All comments, tweets, emails, Facebook comments and messages must be answered in later than 24 hours of them being posted. All these little policies make sure that I stay on track of things and not get distracted.
Business Goals
Nouchaline’s main business goal is to expand its social media presence and increase its readership. This goal will take a long time, estimated to be about a year, much more than the scope of this project. But in order to achieve this larger goal, other mini goals must be achieved in a shorter period of time. At the end of the day though, all the goals are somehow interconnected.
1) Increase the number of returning unique visitors.
At the moment 69.80% of the visitors to the blog are unique. The goal would be to make sure that that number stays high, but to also make sure that those new people visiting the blog actually return to the blog.
2) Increase amount of time spent on blog.
The average time spent on the blog averages 1minute and 37 seconds. This is enough time for a reader to skim through the blog and read one to two posts. By increasing the amount of time spent on the blog, it is more likely for a reader to be linked to other posts on the blog. I recently added a widget called “Link Within”, which posts little thumbnails of other posts that are related to a post right under it (next to the comment button). Since I’ve added this widget, I’ve seen an increase in comments on old posts, which otherwise would have been harder to find for a reader. By being exposed to more posts, there is a higher likelihood for the reader to enjoy the blog more and decide to follow it via social networks, which in turn takes me to point number three.
3) Engaging more on social networks.
By engaging more with readers, I’ll be able to develop and maintain good relations with my existing readers and attain new readers. Readers would feel a more personal connection with the blog and the blogger, and would be more open to leaving comments and feedback (whether it’s on twitter, facebook, or the comment section of the blog).
4) Buy domain
Having a blog URL without its hosting link makes the blog more professional. This makes the blog easier for people to remember, and will have better search engine results. Domain registration is not costly at all (around 10 to 20 dollars a year), but I’m still not sure that it’s the right time just yet. Once the blog reaches just a bit more readers, I know that I’ll be making a good investment by buying my own domain.
Social Media Strategy
At the moment, since the blog is itself a social media entity and not a legitimate business, its social media strategy and business goals are quiet similar. The main business goal is to increase readership by expanding online presence and increasing brand awareness.
What “Nouchaline” has done:
FACEBOOK:
Creation of Facebook page
In October of 2011, I decided that it was time for the blog to have its own Facebook page. I felt that there was a group of people, specifically in Lebanon, who had an online presence who would find my blog interesting, but were not on twitter or any of the platforms that I was initially on to actually find my blog. I knew that the creation would be simple, but I had to get people to like the blog. I was waiting for an opportunity to launch the Facebook page when Nokia contacted me to have a giveaway.
Before the launch of the Facebook page, most of the readers were not from Lebanon. People had mostly found my blog through Google searches, twitter, and comments left on other blogs. With the launch of the Facebook page, I was able to target more of the Lebanese audience, by inviting my friends (some who didn’t even know that I had a blog) and their friends the Facebook page.
Launch of Facebook page with Nokia N9 giveaway
In November 2011, Nouchaline collaborated with Nokia Lebanon to giveaway a brand new Nokia N9 device; the giveaway was open only to Lebanese residents. It was a very simple and “typical” Facebook give way; I created three outfits inspired by the Nokia N9 device, people like their favorite outfit, the most liked outfit wins, and the winner is chosen from those who voted for the winning outfit.
This strategy is admittedly overused and considered a little annoying by some, but it was all that Nokia and I could come up with on such short notice. Our objective was to get around 20 to 30 participants, the actual number exceeded expectations with over 50 participants and 80 likes in the span of one week.
Facebook presence and updating
Getting people to like your blog’s page is only one part of your Facebook existence. Having appropriate and engaging content on your Facebook page is key in creating an interaction between the page and the “like”ers. Having a static page with only RSS updates from your blog is not enough to get people to visit your page and engage. You need to ask questions, post pictures, have sneak peeks for your blog. It takes almost as much effort to upkeep a Facebook page as it is to upkeep a blog. You must also remember that the Facebook page is created to drive traffic towards your blog and to enhance your blog’s experience. There’s a fine line between having a lot of interaction on your Facebook page while still visiting your blog, and by just having people look at your Facebook updates and never clicking a link to see the actual post on the blog.
FEATURES:
One of the most important ways to expand your online presence is by having others write about you, or by having you write for others with a link back. Being featured on a prominent blog or platform can do a lot for your blog, you’re being exposed on a level you haven’t been in before and this is a very positive thing for traffic and possible readership gain.
“Nouchaline” has been feature on two blogs (House of Antoinette, and Shades of Sexy Little Things), and in Crepaway’s HangOut magazine. These features increased the blog’s exposure, especially the feature in Crepaway’s magazine (managed by the same publishing house as TimeOut Beirut) which lead to PR agencies in Lebanon to take notice of the blog and invite me to cover many fashion events. It has also been selected as “Blog of the Day” on Bloggers.com, which generated a lot of traffic to the blog and a lot of activity on twitter (tweets, re-tweets and new followers).
CREATE A NETWORKFOR LEBANESE FASHION BLOGGERS
I thought that this would be a great way for Lebanese fashion bloggers to connect with each other, and for people to have a sort of online directory of Lebanese Fashion Blogs. It would be a place for the bloggers to interact and have joint projects. I planned on launching this network through my blog, but faced some technical difficulties and was pressed for time. But I will be creating this network in the coming months with a couple of my fellow fashion bloggers. The network will consist of a directory on my blog, along with a Facebook group for the bloggers. A badge will be placed on each of the blogger’s blog page, connecting back to the directory on my blog. If the number of fashion bloggers keeps growing, it can even be launched as a separate fashion network (similar to the Independent Fashion Bloggers website). The benefits of having this network for the bloggers will include: exposure, recognition, prestige and support. Recommendations
In order to achieve its goals, the blog must be able to fix a couple of problems. The first of which is posting consistently. This is a very hard task which I try to deal with, trying to juggle all aspects of my life. But in order to have the blog reach the success levels that I want, I need to take it a bit more seriously and give more time to creating posts and scheduling them for periods when I know I’m going to be busy and won’t be able to post.
Listening to feedback must be another point that I must focus on. I need to see what sort of posts is popular, why a certain type is not as popular as another. Improve the blog by writing content that people want to read and see, but can’t find anywhere else on the internet.
By improving on the two points I’ve mentioned, I believe that the major goal of the blog will be achieved. I can’t say how long exactly this will take, but I’m certain that it will happen. I look forward to the blog expanding and to see what path it will end up taking.
Appendix I: Social Media Assessment tools Figure 1 Twitter Grader Figure 2 Twitratr Figure 3 Twitter Reach Figure 4 Social Mention
Figure 5 Demographics of who is talking about the Facebook page
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Figure 6 Demographics of Facebook likes
Appendix II. Stats of the Blog Figure 7 Average time spend on blog Figure 8 An increase of hits because of Nokia N9 competition Figure 9 New visitors vs. Returning visitors
Appendix III. Social Media Channels\ Figure 10 Twitter Figure 11 Facebook Page Figure 12 Nouchaline Tumblr page
Blogs mentioned in project and Reference:
Amed, Imran. "The Business of Blogging | The Sartorialist." Www.businessoffashion.com. Business of Fashion, 3 Oct. 2011. Web. 2012. . http://sartorialist.com http://brunetteblogging.com
http://shopdilara.com
