6 Ways to Ignite a Social Media Content Fire

Here’s the problem: As of February this year there were 2 million advertisers on Facebook alone.

And, there are a bunch of ways for any advertiser to get the job done on a minimal budget.

That means glut. Honestly, no one’s going to care about your social campaign unless it differentiates itself. No one’s going to see you unless your content fire is bright.

How do you stand out? How do you prove you’re different?

Be the individual you are. Tend your fire so we can see it.

Take advantage of the following methods to make your social media content sizzle.

1. Make it a game

We play games with each other throughout our lives.

But let’s talk business gamification. The Executive Editor for IGN, Scott Lowe, identifies two key components of gamification for business:

• Unification: “Merging the action with the reward, instead of burying it under UI layers or even within a separate application”
• Careful Consideration: Understanding the user’s motivation for playing the game – “The user needs to feel personally invested in successfully completing the action that results in the gamified reward”

A network like Facebook is an excellent platform for gamification.

A famous example is A&E’s Parking Wars game.

The end result of this effort to market the show Parking Wars was a total of 1.5 million users.

The experience was unified because the user didn’t have to leave Facebook to access the game.

In terms of consideration, why are “users” on Facebook to begin with?

Parking Wars was so successful because users could play with friends. There’s nothing quite like social motivation.

2. Make viral tweets

Going viral is the Holy Grail of social motivation. And Twitter is a good place to seek the Grail because it’s so easy for users to retweet what your content.

As with everything in the social media world, there are no absolute predictors of what will go viral. Humans are an unpredictable bunch. But we do a lot of research, and there are tools.

One of these tools was developed by researchers at Cornell University. They developed an algorithm to predict what will be retweeted, and a program to determine which wording is more likely to garner retweets.

The key takeaways are:

• Don’t be shy: Ask for a retweet
• Know your audience: Speak in their language
• Write newsy headlines: Create buzz
• Words matter: Express emotion
• Name names: Rep your crowd

3. Get visual

Words are important, but if no one can see you, your words won’t mean as much. On any social media platform, getting visual is a must.

The photo-sharing app Instagram is the fastest growing major social network, with 26% of U.S. adults among its users.

On Twitter, tweets with images get 150% more retweets.

For brand pages on Facebook, posts in the top 10% include photos. These posts account for 87% of total interactions.

To find out what visual content has gone viral on Facebook, first do a graph search for businesses in your niche who are on Facebook.

Compile a big list. Then use a tool like the Post Planner Viral Photos feature (disclaimer: it costs $7) to filter out the images that have gone viral.

Naturally, you’ll adapt. You’ll learn from the stuff that has gone viral.

And then you can get down to the business of creating and curating your own visual content.

4. Create memes

Researchers at Indiana University Bloomington found you can predict the virality of a meme by analyzing the structure of its retweet network.

Early on, if the meme is retweeted by a more diverse community of users, it’s more likely to go viral.

The researchers were able to use this analysis to predict which memes will go viral with over 60% accuracy.

When you create memes and infographics for your business, think diversity. Create images someone would want to look at even if they know anything about your business and niche.

The main intent should be to entertain and educate – not advertise. Advertising is the result of just how damn good your content is.

Google “free meme maker”.

Imgflip is just one of the many options. For our purposes it should do fine.

Choose to upload your own image. Or choose from the list of images directly below the button.

After you’ve uploaded the image, add text at the top and bottom. You can even choose to add a scumbag hat. (Author confession: this is a meme of me with a scumbag hat.)

Check the “Private” box if you don’t want it floating around online (probably a good idea so you can control dissemination). Play around. Then hit “Generate Meme”.

5. Create infographics

Canva and Venngage both have great infographic apps.

This template’s called “Sweet Blue”. You can access a template easily after hitting “Create Infographic” once you’ve logged in to Venngage. Or you can start from scratch.

When you’re in template mode, single out a section by clicking on it.

Then click delete up top. Next, drag over the Title Text box from the left.

Then insert yours.

Just like with memes, play around. Add interesting info and images.

Again, the most important thing to remember about infographics is that you are competing with loads of informative and entertaining content.

Attempts at blatant advertising should be shunned. Attempts at slighting the competition should be equally shunned.

6. Create videos

Facebook now places videos at the top of News Feeds, prioritizing this type of content over any other. They play instantly when you scroll down the screen.

In a recent development, Snapchat plays video ads too.

This is one more way, out of hundreds, to differentiate yourself on social media.

But how? Loads of advertisers use videos. You’ve got to learn from the best.

Joshua Hardwick, Managing Director for video production company ShortyMedia, has 4 Rules for a Video to Go Viral:

• Evoke emotion: Stoke the fire
• Portray your brand without overly promoting: Be clear about who you are
• Have a marketing plan: Lead the viewer to a possible point of sale
• Have concurrent branding/marketing efforts: Don’t make a video in a vacuum

These rules could apply to any type of content marketing.

There really aren’t scientific formulas for this. Where we’re going there are no roads – just great social media content.

So let’s all sit down and watch a favorite, excellent example again. And again. And again.

Guest Author: Daniel Matthews is a writer, part-time social worker, and musician who loves to explore topics ranging from technology to business culture and psychology. He has written for Social Media Today, Triple Pundit, Smart Data Collective, and YFS Magazine, among others. You can find him on Twitter @danielmatthews0

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Using SEO To Maximize Your Content Marketing Strategy

The panda is watching.

When it comes to a Google search – a whole lot of factors play a part in where you turn up.

But thanks to the 2011 Panda Updates these factors no longer include low-quality, ‘thin’ website content that is stuffed with keywords. If your website is seen as “high-quality” in Google’s eyes, these Panda updates will reward your website with ranking boosts, and more importantly – traffic boosts.

For example, the image below shows that sites like Ebay were slammed by the Panda update in 2014, which caused them to lose over half of their organic traffic almost overnight. This is due to the website being full of duplicated & thin content, ads, and links to other product pages within the website.

Image courtesy of SEMRush

What does this mean for your content marketing strategy?

Content marketing is becoming increasingly popular in the digital marketing space, and as we can see above, Google is rewarding websites that are offering high-quality content. This means that including what Google considers as “best practices” in your content marketing strategy, will ultimately help your website rank in search engines.

Where do you begin?

For this process to begin you will need a website. Thankfully, there are a number of website builders and web hosting sites that make this a relatively pain-free process. To get started, here is a list of the top five website builders and another of the top five web hosting companies. It is important to choose the best supplier for your website’s goals, since each service has its pros and cons.

Now let’s talk about optimizing your website and its content to Google’s standards.

Keyword Opportunities

Once you have decided on a web-hosting service, next is keywords. Keywords are the lifeblood of your website’s visibility, as they are what Google uses to understand exactly what your site is talking about.

With this in mind, it is of high importance to analyze your target audience and ensure your website is passing the correct signals to Google. There are a variety of factors that play into choosing the correct keywords to target.

•  What does your website provide?
• Who does your website cater to?
• Local? Global? National?

These are all questions that need to be asked during the beginning keyword analysis stages. Once these questions are answered you can use tools to ensure they are the best keywords to target, based on the competitive nature of the keyword(s). 

Tools for the Job

Moz’s Keyword Difficulty Tool – Below we see a screenshot of Moz’s Keyword Difficulty tool.

Searched is the term “social media”. At first glance we can see the top ranking websites for this keyword are enormous, high-authority websites, like Wikipedia and The New York Times.

Trying to outrank these websites is essentially impossible. It would be a better idea to target more long-tail keywords such as, “how to design a social media campaign” which is much more attainable to rank in the top 10 for.

User Experience

Google is constantly changing their algorithms to help better the search engine results, and user experience is something they care about. While designing your website you must ensure your website can be “crawled” by Google. This means you must structure your website in a way that Google and your customers can navigate your website’s content efficiently, and know exactly why they are looking at each specific page.

Another important component about usability and Google’s ranking factors is responsive design.

Responsive design is ultimately a website’s ability to be viewed on both PC and mobile devices. As PC sales have recently dropped by 9%, an awareness of the mobile world has grown exponentially.

Guess who’s watching? Google.

Since this mobile trend, Google has released an algorithm update, “Mobilegeddon”, which has caused websites that lack a responsive design to seemingly disappear from their rankings. Therefore, responsive design is clearly a must-have in today’s online world.

Tools for the Job

Browsershots – Browsershots allows web designers to see how their webpage will be viewed on any internet browser platform. This will allow you to analyze the responsive design of your website across all browsers and make tweaks where necessary.

Content

Is the content on your website worthwhile in the eyes of Google?

As content marketing is becoming increasingly relevant, it is important for a website to regularly provide quality, informational content. The days of stuffing content with keywords and hoping to increase search engine rankings are over.

Google recognizes these tactics and is actively penalizing websites who do this – don’t do it no matter how tempting it is! Providing worthy information to your audience is a necessary tactic to maximize brand loyalty and is one of the many traffic driving assets of an optimized website.

Once you have created a piece of content for your community it is important to treat the release as a grand opening. However, the ultimate takeaway here is to provide great community engagement and get your content in front of the people who want to see it.

If you are providing high-quality information to your readers this will assist in building a trusted brand around your website, and Google will take notice of this behavior. If Google sees your website as a useful source, then it will want you to be the answer to the community’s questions in the search results.

A win for both SEO and your content marketing strategy.

Tools for the Job

HubSpot SEO – HubSpot SEO will allow you to design content with search engine optimization in mind. This tool will analyze your content, and suggest improvements based on Google’s ranking factors.

Sum up

Overall, it is very important to keep up with Google’s updates and ensure your website is relevant to both your customers and Google. Doing this will help launch your content marketing efforts into the realm of success. Thank you for reading!

Let’s continue the conversation in the comments and/or on twitter: @Trvshlvrd_RR.

How do you incorporate SEO into your content marketing strategy?

Guest Author: Taylor Tomita is a creative writer and musician residing in Boise, Idaho. He loves all aspects of marketing and social media, and spends too much time researching these topics. In his free time you can find him creating music or exploring the town in search of good pizza. Follow him on twitter.

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Search vs Social: Where Should You Be Spending Your Advertising Budget?

It’s a battle that is heating up (but has been going on for years).

Everyone seems to have a different opinion or way of looking at it.

So what’s the best way to spend your marketing budget; search engines or social media?

Paid ad spend has been strong in 2015, with the US market seeing 26% growth year on year, whilst growth in PPC budgets from existing users continues to grow at around 70% year on year (as way of contrast only 6% of businesses actually report using search advertising to drive website traffic).

Social spend in comparison has also been rising consistently, hitting 27% last year and is expected to hit 29% in 2015 ($19.5 billion).

In mobile, search still dominates, with Google receiving over 3.5 billion searches each day, and continuing to dominate mobile ad revenues, collecting 35% in the U.S, compared to Facebook’s 17%.

Digital ad spend on the whole across search, social and mobile has never been greater, and it is only going to grow as web usage worldwide, especially mobile, continues to grow. In fact, advertising revenues are expected to grow 10.7% annually to reach $194.5 billion by 2018 (just $20 billion behind predicted TV advertising growth).

Statistics aside for a moment, it pays to take some time to think about which is the superior marketing strategy for you; search vs social?

To really answer that question will depend a lot on the nature of your business, your customers and what you are trying to achieve.

Social networks

There’s no escaping the huge growth of social media and the ability for it to get your ads or content in front of a lot of people.

Its power to influence consumer decisions and generate leads for B2C and B2B is certainly in evidence as well (54% of B2B respondents in a CMO study said they’d generated leads via social media). But proponents of search ads will point to a lack of ‘intent’ in social media users and less reliable conversions as a result.

Pros

• You don’t have to guess at your audience. Their gender, age, location, interests, work, friends and so much more is provided for you. Discovering your target demographic has never been easier.
• Peer endorsements can mean an instant conversion. 75% of individuals aged 18 – 26 use recommendations on social networks when deciding on a product.
• Your reputation is in your hands. With social networks, your positive response to a negative review is not merely instantaneous, but how you handle the situation is witnessed by a broad web audience.
• It nurtures brand loyalty. 71% of consumers are more likely to make purchasing decisions based on what they discover about brands on social media. Making social media a great opportunity for create life-long customers.

 Cons

• A large number of consumers don’t have a social profile. Unless you know that your target audience is on social media, you could be throwing advertising money down the drain.
• Most users of a social network are there to ‘socialise’, not to shop. As a result, your conversion rates on social networks are going to be a lot lower than search where ‘intent’ is more implicit.
• It can be time consuming, with up to 64% of digital marketers spending six hours or more on social media each day.
• It is incredibly difficult to set metrics and define your return-on-investment (ROI). Social media can be great for business, but with few direct conversions it is difficult to determine exactly how it is profiting your brand.

Search engines

Search is, and remains, the most powerful and trackable medium for digital advertisers with tried and tested methods for generating traffic and measuring conversions and ROI.

Critics will point to the increasing cost of PPC on platforms like Google Adwords, as a result of fierce competition over competitive keywords. This aside though, search advertising remains one of the most popular options for advertisers.

Pros

• Most consumers who discover your brand through a search engine are there with the intent to buy, resulting in increased traffic and higher conversions.
• Search allows for targeted marketing. You don’t have to go out looking for your target audience; the keywords they use direct them to you.
• Using analytics you can find out exactly what words and phrases consumers are searching for and alter your keywords accordingly. There may, for instance, be 50,000 consumers searching for ‘dog restraints’, but over two million users looking for ‘dog leashes’.
• If you don’t have the time, or expertise, to raise your site’s profile in organic listings, paid ads allow you a practical way to get your brand and products in the SERPs.

Cons

• Competition is fierce. It requires a substantial investment of resources and time, especially in a world where SEO algorithms are continuously changing.
• No guarantees. It’s been shown that 75% of searchers are unlikely to scroll past the first page so if your brand isn’t able to compete at the top, either in organic or paid, then some of those competitive keywords you really wanted to rank for may be out of reach indefinitely.
• It pays to rank well for organic search as well as for ads, but with link building and other SEO tactics, ROI isn’t instantaneous. SEO is an investment and it can take a long time before you see the results of your efforts.

So where should you invest your marketing budget: Search vs Social?

Well the get out of jail free answer is surely; why not both? Your customers are probably using both and the existing infrastructures of search and social are already beginning to merge.

Good social media habits can help to boost your organic rankings, while new social network advertising options can reveal a lot of information on keywords, target audiences and competitor activity, which in turn can feed back into your paid search campaign.

Social networking, after all, is terrific at building brand awareness and establishing credibility, whereas search is better at creating conversions.

A consumer is going to be much more likely to click your ad if they recognize your brand name from social media.

Used together, social and search can quickly become greater than the sum of their parts.

Guest Author: Thomas Coppen is the Technical Director and founder of Bristol based online advertising specialists Keel Over Marketing. Founding the company in 2012 Thomas has gone on to secure a client base that spans America, Australia and Asia, as well as Europe. You can connect with Keel Over on Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus.

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35 Cool Social Media Facts You Should Not Ignore

Social media seems to have been with us forever.

In fact Facebook has turned ten!…that is an eternity in tech. Social media is so old that the fun police have turned up and are threatening to ruin the party.

The no rules and the dope smoking, beer swilling social media parties have started moving into the board room. The swinging 60′s of social have started to be invaded by the serious suits.

The politicians are now even pushing for social media privacy and protection laws. The lawyers have also joined. So don’t post anything too controversial on Facebook.

You may get sued. It is becoming legislated and legal.

At the big end of tech town, companies like IBM and Oracle are investing big bucks and building Enterprise software for social. It is now all about process, management and control.

How boring is that?

But in 2008 when I joined Facebook and Twitter, it was the wild west. There were no textbooks for social and people just leapt on and started playing. Tweeting with someone on the other side of the world who you didn’t know was so cool.

But questions were asked

When there are no rules then the general population feels a bit uncomfortable and starts asking for directions. The command and control economy is still embedded in our psyche.

How many times should I tweet? Is posting on Facebook once a day enough? Should I start a blog or is micro-blogging enough? Can I use my Facebook page like a website?

But maybe it’s time for social to grow up and develop some rules and guidelines and become accountable.

Is that bad?

No. It is time for the social zealots to become more responsible and the return on investment question is not to be shouted down but to be taken on board. It is not just about engagement. That is just the start of the conversation. Social media needs to convert engagement and trust into real leads and sales.

Is it a tad more boring?

Maybe.

There are some new social toys

But there is a still a lot of fun to be had for people who love shiny new toys.

This year has seen the emergence of some exciting new social platforms that remind me of the time I discovered social for the first time. Meerkat and Periscope have introduced us to live video streaming.

When I first used Periscope to observe someone in London streaming their walk to work while chatting it was was bizarre, confronting and very voyeuristic.

Just last week I joined Blab and watched as 4 social media pundits held a late night chat fest while sipping some wine and downing some cans of beer. This was done with 200 people on the virtual reality sidelines cheering, commenting and asking questions.

Conversations and questions centred around how engaging the live global video interaction was and would Blab rule in this connected world.

This engaged global connectedness that social brought us is still intoxicating.

But will these new platforms be game changers?

This question is often asked.

But at the end of the day it comes down to asking some key questions that need to be raised without wearing beer goggles.

• Could they drive more traffic? Not sure at this stage but looks like it may not be worth all the focus, time and the effort for achieving that goal.
• Will they provide more engagement with your prospects and customers? I think the answer to that is a big yes.
• Is it worth the time? Maybe and maybe not. That then begs the question of where and how should my time and resources be best spent.
• Can they make more money for your brand? That is maybe not what a social media purist wants to hear but the CEO will want to know.

The Pareto principle needs to be applied here.

If 20% of your efforts produce 80% of the results then being distracted by shiny new toys could be a tyre spinning exercise. Fun for sure but not a good use of resources.

At the end of the day they will be useful tools to consider for your marketing in the midst of many others.

The growth rates were astronomical

The growth rates at the beginning of the social media revolution were astronomical. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and other social networks grew at rates that hadn’t been seen before in a web world.

That pace has slowed and it is much more organic in 2015.

That is except for some of the new kids on the block such as Periscope, Meerkat and Blab.

One significant driver of social media growth and engagement in 2015 is the impact of smartphones. This is due in part to the populations in developing countries using mobiles as their primary internet device.

So what are the social media facts as we approach the end of 2015.

Facebook facts

Facebook still rules the social media world and is consolidating its dominance on a lot of levels. Sheer size, social advertising spend and dominating the mobile screen are just a few.

Here are some Facebook facts:

• Facebook has over 1.49 billion monthly active users
• Revenue hit $4.042 billion for the last quarter (second quarter 2015)
• For the the first time Facebook had 1 billion users log on in one day
• Mobile-only monthly active users have now reached 655 million
• Mobile advertising revenue is now at 76% of total earnings

Twitter facts

Twitter was always an accidental social network. It was never intended to be social. It was originally designed as a private internal messaging service for a podcasting company.

It is a technology experiment that escaped.

• 316 million monthly users
• 500 million tweets per day
• 80% of active users are on mobile
• 4,100 employees
• 50% of the employees are engineers

One other little known Twitter fact is that if you tweet more you will get more followers.

Source:  Agorapulse 

YouTube facts

YouTube has been with us since 2004. In 2005 it was acquired by Google for $1.5 billion. This is when Facebook got started. Facebook is now on a mission to replace YouTube as the largest video platform on the planet.

Here are some YouTube facts to ponder.

• Over 1 billion users visit YouTube every day
• Over 100 hours of video are uploaded every minute
• 25% of views are from mobile devices
• 6 billion hours of video are watched every month
• More content is uploaded in 60 days on YouTube than all 3 major U.S. Networks generated in the last 60 years

Source: Internetmarketingdojo.com

LinkedIn facts

LinkedIn was a little slow to the content marketing party and only introduced a publishing feature for all its members in 2014.  A new tool called LinkedIn Elevate is being trialled to help companies leverage their content by making it easy for companies to increase sharing of their content via their employees.

We will see how that pans out in powering companies to build more engagement. In the meantime here are some of the latest LinkedIn facts via Linkedin.

• 39 million students and recent college graduates are on LinkedIn
• 380 million users
• Total annual revenue is 0ver $2.8 billion
• Add 2 new members per second
• 8,700 employees

Instagram facts

Instagram is still one of the fastest growing social media properties. The reason. It’s mobile and visual which are two of the fastest emerging trends in social media marketing.

It is not just for images and photos and individuals can also post 15 second videos and has recently removed its ban on rectangular images.

Here are some Instagram facts.

• Over 400 million users
• It is estimated that Instagram will bring in $595 million in mobile ad revenues in 2015
• Mobile ad revenues are projected to surpass Google and Twitter by 2017 at $2.81 billion
• It is estimated that 9ver 27% of the U.S. population use Instagram in 2015
• 90% of Instagram users are younger than 35

 

Pinterest facts

Pinterest has been one of the most female dominated social networks since its inception. That has continued. Many of its images are about fashion (4.5 billion pins), recipes (1.7 billion) and home related images.

• 73 million global users
• 85% of Pinterest users are female
• 53 million monthly unique user in the USA
• There re 1 billion Pinterest boards
• 50 billion Pinterest pins

The new social toys

Despite social media maturing there are still some new toys that are filling niches and also leveraging emerging technologies and faster data networks.

Here is a quick look at some of the fast emerging social media platforms. What isn’t surprising is that they are mobile, video centric and live. It is all about engagement.

They are live streaming video apps that drive a lot of engagement and make sharing fun and highly engaging.

Meerkat fact

Meerkat allows you to broadcast live video from your mobile. This app launched in 2012 but broke through into public consciousness at SXSW in March, 2015. It then had a direct competitor launched a few weeks later.

The latest facts about the app that are hard to get due to its non-disclosure:

• It had an estimated 2 million users in May, 2015

Periscope facts

Periscope was Twitter’s answer to Meerkat and shortly after launching it also cut off Meerkats access to it’s API and service that made its growth trajectory much more muted.

• It announced on August 2 that it had reached 10 million accounts just 4 months after launch
• 40 years of video are being watched every day
• Daily active users – approximately 2 million

Blab fact

Blab only launched in April.

It allows up to 4 users to run a live video streaming conference that can be watched from the sidelines by others. The best way to describe it is Google+ Hangout for mobiles. It can be recored for later use and is a lot of fun. It feels like a mobile stadium. A few people on the stage and onlookers sharing feedback via questions and chatting visibly via text on the side column.

Signing up to Blab.im from your desktop is as simple as using your Twitter account. At this stage the mobile app is only available for the iPhone.

A lot of the top bloggers and social media early adopters have been hosting “Blabs” over the past few weeks. It’s fun and highly engaging.

An interesting Blab fact: Blab is a new start-up launched by the founders of Bebo. Bebo was a social network started in 2005 by Michael and Xochi Birch and bought by AOL in 2008 for $850 millon when it had reached 45 million users. It went into decline and was bought back by the couple for $1 million in 2013.

 

 

 

 

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