Organization – Christie Digital Systems Inc.
Industry – Professional Audio & Video Solutions
Contact – Julie Vaishnav – Manager, Digital Marketing
Web resources – Christie , Buffer Social , YouTube, Facebook, SoundCloud
About Christie
Christie is a global manufacturer of display technology solutions offering diverse visual, audio and collaboration solutions for business, entertainment and industry and employs over 1500 people worldwide. Christie has manufactured and installed hundreds of thousands of projection solutions globally. The company has led the way in the film to digital conversion for movie theaters and continues to provide innovative technology solutions for cinema, education, government, theme parks, houses of worship, rental staging, control rooms, corporate, visualization and simulation.
Check out the video below to see how diverse Christie’s Pro AV technologies are. It clarifies why Christie is more successful when they post images and videos using social media.
Despite the plethora of installations and their vast customer base, gaining and keeping the mind share of previous customer’s is a challenge in any industry. Many companies are looking for ways to continue the connection with past customers while engaging new ones. Social media is that opportunity.
The majority of companies are using social media today to capitalize on the vast reach it provides. While it is great that your social media efforts are gaining thousands of brand impressions and front of mind visibility it doesn’t necessarily mean much to your bottom line. It is important to get the right impressions with the right potential customers.
The real success behind the right impression is engagement. Reaching people who are actively engaging with you is the prize we all seek but there is still so much more to engagement. There is the science of understanding the engagement you achieve and what you do with statistics that your efforts provide.
Metrics
Companies like Christie are generating a lot of data such as impressions, reach, interactions, engagement, clicks, time on site, bounce rate, exit rate, conversion rate and leads. Understanding what all these metric mean and determining how to interpret it, and how it can benefit your company can be a daunting task.
I referred to a BufferSocial Blog to clarify and understand these terms which most social media dashboards provide. For those already savvy in these terms feel free to skip through the definitions below.
- Impressions = a look at how many people saw your post.
- Reach = a measurement of the size of audience you are communicating to pertaining to likes or followers on SM platforms.
- Engagement = the total number shares, interactions, retweets and comments on a post.
- Visits vs. unique visits = Visits count each time a person visits your site or page, regardless of whether or not they have visited before. Unique visits count each person only once.
- Bounce rate = the percentage of people who land on your page and immediately leave, without viewing any other pages. The rate at which people leave your site after viewing only one page.
- Exit rate = the percentage of people who leave your site from a given page. It’s possible these people have browsed other pages of your site before exiting.
- Time on site = a measure in minutes and seconds of how long a visitor stays on your site before exiting.
- Conversions = the number of people who achieved a desired result. This could be paying for a product, signing up for a trial, completing a form, or any other goal you’ve set up for your campaign.
- Leads = potential conversions. These include anyone with the need or interest to pursue your product or service.
- Average engagement rate = individual post engagement compared to overall followers.
- Response rates = These can be measured in two ways, either as the speed with which you respond to comments and replies on social media, or how quickly your marketing or sales department follows up with leads from social.
- Inbound links = the number of sites linking back to your website or page.
With all that information available what is Christie doing to analyze the data and benefit from it? At the forefront of their social media communications strategy you’ll find resident expert Julie Vaishnav, Digital Marketing Manager. Julie manages all of Christie’s social media platforms including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. Working closely with her marketing colleagues Julie analyzes product launches, event communications and campaign plans. This initial analysis allows Julie to formulate a plan to help generate the best engagement within each of the company’s social media platforms.
In the video below Julie provides some insight into the company’s social media metrics.
Known for their world class visual display technologies, Christie followers are eager to see the impressive installations of their display technologies. Christie frequently posts images pertaining to sponsored events, customer installations, trade show participation and recently Christie posted a photo album on Facebook pertaining to the GITEX trade show they participated in, in Dubai. “We had 572 people reached – and a whopping 377 clicks and 16 likes/comments/shares. That’s a huge engagement rate of 68.7%; we only get this level of engagement on photo albums” Julie comments.
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Julie continues, “By contrast, a paid sponsorship of a product introduction, also did well on clicks but did way better on likes/comments/shares. See the M series post attached – 283 clicks and 350 likes/comments/shares” from another trade show in Las Vegas called Live Design International (LDI) that Christie participates in annually.
With the data available through Facebook Analytics it’s easy to see that photos command customer attention and engagement with product launches among their top engagement tools on Facebook and LinkedIn.
As Christie increases their social media impressions and engagement levels it has spawned a comparison of their print ad success vs. social media success and the respective costs.
Julie goes on to say she recently posted a 7 second video of a projection mapping display from their booth at the InfoComm Show in Orlando this past June and the 7 second video earned them over 4000 actions and reached over 18,800 people on Facebook. Compare that with a print ad in the show guide at the same show which is estimated to have 20,000 impressions based on attendees at the show (not including exhibitors).
Now compare the cost of the static ad at several thousand dollars – which provided no metrics or social sharing – with the cost of the video Facebook ad under a hundred dollars – which includes 4000 actions – and the definitive benefits of social media metrics are undeniable.
To learn more about social media metrics and the use and value of Google Analytics check out this podcast “Analyzing Your Content With Google Analytics: How to Know What Works” with Michael Stelzner and Andy Crestodina.
Lessons for others:
Not only is social media a more cost effective option for awareness, brand impressions, reach and engagement but the analytics that it offers makes it a better choice for marketers. While analyzing social media data can be very challenging, it has significant benefits and having someone on staff to summarize it will help your company evolve its social media strategy and continue to boost your social engagement.
Social media metrics need to be shared with executives so they recognize the significant role social media can play in the company’s success. Additionally ongoing social media data analysis can grow your marketing reach more significantly than print advertising. It’s essential companies invest, not just in social media, but in the data management and metrics. With the addition of dedicated staff, companies can more fully realize the value of social media.
Submitted by: SCapling , University of Waterloo
To contact the author of this entry please email: scapling71@gmail.com
If you have concerns as to the accuracy of anything posted on this site, please send your concerns to Peter Carr, Program Director, Social Media for Business Performance.