How to Develop Marketing Taste with Amanda Natividad, VP of Marketing at SparkToro

Right, like, how do you create KPIs when there's no click to track? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, so...

That's actually a very big question because this goes back to why is this happening? You know, like, why has there been this rise in zero-click marketing? Why is it more effective? And it's because of...

It's a lot of things at play, right? Like one is the social media networks will suppress your reach if you put in a link, right? Twitter confirmed this when they said, when Elon Musk acquired that platform and then showed the algorithm and showed that posts with links are coded as definite spam vector, right? It's already suppressed there.

LinkedIn has said before, we don't deprioritize posts with links, but we prioritize posts that don't have links.

So that's like, so you penalize posts with links.

And then very recently, Meta has even shown in one of their transparency reports that virtually all Facebook posts that get reach don't have a link.

They said it was 97.3% of posts reachable.

that are, that are surfaced a lot, don't have links.

And they've even, and some people have even shown or, you know, taken screenshots, which shows in their console at like, like your post has a link.

Like you might want to rethink that.

I mean, that's not the exact verbiage and you can look this up in a social media today article.

But it's now it's, it's advising like meta is actually advising people to not put posts in their captions, but rather to put it like in the follow-up comment to their post, right? So the social platforms are kind of starting to admit to this.

And what I'll say here is, this isn't even the rest of the argument, but what I'll say already here is, well, if you know your link is going to suppress the post, then you already know that fewer people are going to see it.

So what's the point? You know, like it's, why be so insistent on tracking your posts, tracking those clicks when you're going to kill your reach anyway, you know? The other reason is the issue of dark social, where we have found, we did this research in SparkToro like last year, which is when we found that most of the social networks will hide full referral strings, which means that even if you do get a click, then let's say you get a click from TikTok, then that traffic is gonna be marked as direct, which means you wouldn't even see the click anyway.

And that's 100% of links clicked from TikTok show as direct traffic.

And that is the case with like, you know, with Slack, WhatsApp, Mastodon, 100% of that is hidden.

And then some percentage of Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and LinkedIn referral traffic will, some portion of that will be marked as direct traffic.

So all that to say is you're If you're insistent on posting links in all your social content, right, you're going to kill your reach.

And even if you do get clicks, you're not going to see it.

So what I'll say now is that's where we're going to see this return to some of those early digital era KPIs of like impressions, right? I test this all the time in LinkedIn, for instance.

I know that if I have a post without a link, I'm going to get at least three times, if not nine times, the reach compared to when I do put a link in the post.

So I say optimize for your posts to get seen.

optimize to get seen and then make sure that you're driving home value to your prospects, your customers, so that over time they'll remember you, they'll trust you and then they'll convert when they're ready to buy.