Stephen Darori is a Social Media Expert,Author, Publicist,Finance and Marketing Whiz , Strategist ,Journalist, Editor Prolific Blogger. Editor. You can follow Stephen Darori on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and other Social Media Platforms.
Stephen Darori & Associates has led major Social Media and Digital Campaigns for wide ranging clients that have included Hilary for America, the Democratic Party ,Democratic Alliance ( South Africa), Fortune 1000 companies and Shabbat.com
Showing posts with label Content Marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Content Marketing. Show all posts
One morning a few years ago I finished my bowl of cereal, put everything away, started brushing my teeth while simultaneously putting on my shoes, and heard my roommate laughing at me from the couch. Suspicious of anyone even remotely happy at seven-something in the morning, I demanded she explain herself but all she said was, “open the fridge.”
There was the box of cereal, sitting beside the orange juice. I opened up the cupboard and—you guessed it—there was the carton of milk, sitting beside the canned beans. Derp.
In my defense, I had been up working until midnight the night before. But that wasn’t unusual. I was averaging 55 hours a week of work as a social media manager, alongside weekends packed full of events, hobbies, and social obligations. I was a getting burned out.
This mindless little mix-up in the kitchen is one of the more humorous ways stress can manifest itself, but according to the Mayo Clinic, burnout can lead to far more serious consequences, including insomnia, depression, anxiety, heart disease, and more. As she exhausted herself building The Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington once fainted in her office. She hit her head on the desk and broke her cheekbone, requiring five stitches around her right eye. “It got me thinking about what kind of life I was leading. I was getting four to five hours of sleep a night. I had to slow down and reevaluate the choices I was making,” she said.
Here are five ways I’ve learned to avoid burnout, along with tips from our community and the social team here at Hootsuite.
1. Structure your time
Logging in and aimlessly hitting refresh on your social media networks all day is a surefire way to get overwhelmed and worn down. Instead, structure your time by assigning parts of your day to specific activities.
For example, set aside one hour per day to do each of the following tasks:
Review new mentions and posts, answer questions from followers, and resolve customer service inquiries
Find and share relevant content from followers
Post new content on each platform
Schedule posts for the evening, the weekend, or an upcoming campaign
Structuring your time on social media will not only make you more efficient, it will keep you focused and working with purpose.
2. Share the workload
Your social media accounts are your babies. I get it. You put energy into feeding them and proudly watch them grow as a result. You want to keep them close. But finding ways to collaborate with other people on your team can take some of the weight off your shoulders and significantly help reduce burnout.
Sharing the workload on social media doesn’t have to mean handing over the keys to your accounts and letting someone else post on your company’s behalf. Here’s how you can collaborate in Hootsuite while keeping your social media accounts safe and secure:
Set permission levels
Give limited permissions in Hootsuite to a colleague who can help create posts for social. This will allow them to draft messages that you can easily approve, edit, publish, or schedule for later.
“Create specific search streams that focus on different topics or business areas,” says Gabrielle Maheux, social channel lead at Hootsuite. “This will help you filter out what’s important, and make it easier to share the workload with your team. For example, you could create a stream based on keywords related to sales enquiries. Then assign those posts to a sales representative in your organization.”
Share assets
Add a content source—whether it’s Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, or others—and you’ll be able to access images from that source and add them to your posts directly from the ‘Compose’ box in your dashboard. This is a great way for PR, design, and marketing teams to collaborate and make your life easier by supplying you with content for social.
3. Give your eyes a break
Our mental and physical states are inextricably tied together. If one burns out, the other is sure to follow. While you’re spending hours and hours a day staring at your laptop, tablet, or phone screen managing social media, remember that your eyeballs are doing just as much work as your brain. And in case you think I’m just here to nag you about the same advice you’ve heard countless times already, here’s some science to back me up. According to a report by The Vision Council, it only takes two hours in front of a screen for your eyes to begin suffering from “digital eye strain.” This can lead to issues like dry and irritated eyes, neck and back pain, and headaches (or as I like to call them, “party poopers”).
Every couple of hours, take a moment to rest your eyes. Try to limit your screen time right before you go to sleep, but if you’re dead set on tucking yourself into bed with your computer (I know how you social media managers roll) then at least make an effort to reduce the blue light being emitted from your screens. Andy Au, social marketing lead at Hootsuite, recommends the f.lux app: “It adapts your monitor to the time of day. So the color temperature is adjusted to reduce eye strain during night use, which can help stop sleep disruption.”
If you’re an iPhone user (with iOS 9.3) you can use the Night Shift mode, which changes the colors of your screen, making it more yellow at night. This will help reduce the glare of your screen at night and (ideally) make it easier for you to sleep after looking at it.
4. Give your brain a break
Being a social media manager requires an exhausting mix of creative and strategic thinking. Much like your eyeballs, your brain deserves a break every once in a while too. “Having a peaceful place to let your mind wander with nothing to distract you can help you refocus,” says Au. “Allow yourself to get bored. You do your best thinking in the shower for a reason.”
We also asked some of our Hootsuite Ambassadors what they do to give their brains a break and avoid social media burnout. Here’s what they said:
“The main thing that helps me is cooking meals for me and my son.” — @Sergio_Sosa
“I run a lot. It keeps my mind clear and it makes me unable to use my cell phone for a least an hour.” — @FrankTheStep
“Going outside for fresh air, taking a deep breath, and listening to my iPod. Particularly songs that inspire me and get me pumped!” — @Brandizzlinyo
“When I want to avoid a burnout I either turn to Netflix or plan a trip with my family and/or friends.” — @ChicaAlerta
5. When you log off—stay off
Full disclosure: I’m notoriously bad at this. I struggle not to check my email while making dinner or race to Twitter the minute I wake up in the morning. I understand the omnipresent temptation of the internet, the allure of a dormant iPhone. But logging off and avoiding social media for an extended period of time (i.e. more than a couple hours) is one of the best ways to reset, clear your mind, and avoid burnout. Here are two key components to making offline time a reality:
Protect your time and energy
There’s no getting around the fact that social media managers sometimes need to be available around the clock. A crisis may arise in the middle of the night that you need to handle. Your business might be able to build some brand awareness or gain new leads from live-tweeting an event happening on the weekend. As a social media manager, you need to be available when these things happen. But you don’t need to be available at midnight on a Thursday because an overzealous executive has a “great idea for a Tweet” that they’ve decided needs to go out immediately.
Establish expectations about your availability after regular work hours. Make a plan with your manager about how you’ll recoup your time and discuss what you need in order to make the demands of your role sustainable.
Schedule posts in advance
Burnout can happen extra quick if you’re a social media manager trying to keep a global audience engaged at all hours of the day (or night). The good news is that although you need to sleep, your social accounts don’t. It won’t replace the need for a real human being who can listen and respond in real time, but scheduling posts will at least help ensure your brand is visible on social no matter what time zone you’re operating in.
Scheduling is especially effective if you have an upcoming campaign that you can plan for in advance, such as a product release or company announcement. Using Hootsuite to schedule posts for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram will help ensure your campaign is being properly supported on social, even when you’re taking a well-deserved internet respite.
It’s easier than ever to create and share content.1
In fact, we all create and share content regularly for both personal or business reasons. This simply means that there is a vast amount of professional and amateur content out there for everyone’s consumption. It’s crowded.
The result is that it can be quite difficult to catch the attention of an audience when you need to. If you want to catch your audience’s attention with content, one of the best ways to do so is by making it visual.
Visual content has proven to be among the most efficient and effective ways to communicate a message. It is in fact, your best chance to go viral if you want to gain the attention of an audience at scale.
So if visual content is the best way for you to stand out, how do you best leverage its power? What types of visual content work?
Before I answer that question, let’s take a step back…
What do you stand to gain from creating great visual content?
The article ‘5 Ways Content Marketing Can Benefit You’ outlines what you stand to gain from using better content marketing.
The highlights are as follows:
Generate more leads
Shorten your sales cycles
Become recognized as a leader in your industry
Better search engines rankings
Give you an advantage over your competitors
When using content marketing, visual content is mainly used to create visual cues that complement the information or message you are trying to present. The idea is to make the information;
Easier to understand and digest
Easier to share, and
Easier to reference
With this in mind, there are several different types of visual media content that you can use in different circumstances to effectively convey your message.
It is important to also mention that depending on your objective and the scenario in which you are delivering the content, different types of visual content will be more suitable for your specific case in point.
Below are the main types of visual content, which if used appropriately can easily help you go viral.
The different types of visual content that can go viral
1. Infographics
The epitome of visual content is the infographic, and it should therefore be a great place to begin our list.
The infographic crystalizes a lot of information into one easily viewable visual that is less intimidating and easier to understand for any viewer or reader.
In fact, in the social media realm, infographics are liked and shared 3 times more than other any other type of content. Additionally, 60% of content marketers are predicted to use infographics in 2016 as compared to last year.
Probably one of the main reasons for this is that using infographics in content marketing is known to increase profits by as much as 12%.
These are all valid reasons for why infographics are essential, but here are an additional 10 Reasons for Why Infographics are important.
Infographics are best used when you have a lot of statistical data that you want your audience to visualize, or if you want to breakdown lot of ‘hard-to-understand’ content into a more understandable and easily viewable format.
2. Eye-catching Images and photos
Photos and images are important for several reasons. For brands, they allow audiences to put a face on a brand and therefore make your brand more relatable. Additionally, using photos to show ‘behind the scenes’ of a brand can help audiences better understand and become more curious about a brand.
Photos can also be very helpful in showing off your products and services. In this case, the use of photos is especially useful if you want to show your products in action. This is probably one of the biggest contributing factors as to why 90% of the general public say that images influence their buy-in and purchasing decisions.
When using photos and imagery, be sure to reflect your brands unique selling point. Additionally, be sure to capture the brands values through color imagery, composition and so on. If you use relevant images, it has been found that you will be able to drive 94% more views than if you don’t have any images in your content. Plus, 65% of the information in images is more likely to be retained after 3 days.
3. Videos
Mixing up your visual content is quite important. In as much as images and photos are quite often the main drivers for visual content, video should also be used whenever possible to give a voice and sound to your content.
This YouTube video has some useful information on “How Video Content Marketing Can Grow Your Business”:
Here are some important statistics to keep in mind when considering the use of video:
64% of shoppers are more motivated to purchase a product after watching a video about it
If you use the word ‘Video’ in an email, the likelihood that the email will be opened will increase by 19%. Additionally, the click through rate of the email increases by 65% and the rate of unsubscribing to your email list will reduce by 26%
In a survey of ‘Video Marketing Statistics & Trends’ it was predicted that 74% of all internet traffic will be video by 2017
There are several reasons why video should take a leading role in your content marketing plan.
Some of the reasons include:
Improved SEO
Customer retention
Higher engagement
Stronger emotional connections
Learning about Video SEO is also essential in tackling Video Content more effectively.
4. Call-to-actions (CTAs)
A call-to-action is a way to influence your audience to do something or take some action after attracting them to your content. You can ask your audience to ’click here’, ‘buy now’, ‘follow us’, ‘share’, ‘add to cart’, ‘subscribe here for a free gift’ etc.
You can use imagery, color and hierarchy to grab your audience’s attention and cause them to take action. CTAs are best used to call attention to exclusive content, events, offers and sales. There is a lot of untapped potential in the use of CTAs since it is known that 70% of businesses fail to use them.
On the other hand, those that use CTAs can benefit quite significantly from their use.
5. Inspiring quote cards
A visual representation of a quote can be quite an inspiring way to create emotion and therefore motivate an audience to take action, or feel a certain way about a brand or product.
By using a brands palette, typography and other visual cues to tailor the quote to your message, you can create quite an impact with a quote.
Above is a great quote that is an advert by Target on Pinterest.
Another important aspect about quotes is that they are quite easily shareable through several different platforms, and especially through social media.
An advantage of using inspiring quote cards is that they are quite easy to create and yet can quite easily go viral if done in the right way.
6. Data visualizations and graphical data
Data visualizations include charts, maps, diagrams, graphs and so on. If you take the time and effort to make sure that your graphs are not only easy to understand, but that they also pass relevant and tangible information, then they can quite easily go viral.
Data visualizations are best used to represent facts, figures and extrapolations, when audiences may need to see trends or patterns about certain data. When using data visualizations, it is best to use data that reflects your brands imagery.
An important statistic to have in mind about data visualizations is that 40% of people understand and therefore respond better to visual data as opposed to plain text.
The image above is a data visualization of Macrometeorites by Roxana Torre which shows the number of recorded meteorites over time.
7. Screenshots
Screenshots highlight something that you want to draw attention to that might otherwise not be noticed. They could also clarify something to your audience so that it is easier for your audience to follow along. If you want to increase understanding, annotating screenshots can add yet another layer of clarity.
The use of screenshots can be used for everything from instructional content to showing live captures of information that you want to share. Such as reviews and testimonials of products or services by customers.
If you for example use screenshots to show off your positive reviews and results from other customers, you will quite easily attract more attention and build confidence in your brand, product or service.
In research done by Dimensional Research investigating the impact of customer service on customer lifetime value, 90% of respondents were influenced by positive reviews when making a buying decision.
8. Tutorials and question-answer visuals
Tutorials can include anything from ‘life hacks’, to recipes, to visual step-by-step instructions. They can also be in the form of videos, images, text or a combination of these.
In a book written by Levie, W. J. & Lentz, R. titled ‘Effects of text illustrations: A review of research, Educational Communication and Technology’, they state that, people following directions with text and illustrations do 323% better than people following directions without illustrations.
Question and answer type visuals on a similar note are known to help bridge the gap between businesses needs and consumer wants. Asking your audience questions that stand out from text in a very visual way, is not only attention grabbing, but also sparks a conversation and encourages engagement.
9. Quizzes and visual puzzles
Like questions, another great way to encourage your audience’s engagement is through quizzes and visual puzzles. Through quizzes and visual puzzles, you can easily construct a smart and prudent tone for your brand.
Quizzes and puzzles also help to spark creativity for more consumption or better consumption of your products. They can be used to bring more clarity to abstract knowledge about a product by making the information more practical and useable. This will in turn encourage adoption and use of a product that is otherwise difficult to relate to.
10. Memes and comics
A great way to end this list of visual media content that can easily go viral is by talking about memes and comics. Everyone loves a laugh, and in the internet world, there are few things that have more cause for laughs than the memes we love.
As far back as in 1999, due to the use of memes like the dancing baby, site visits jumped from as little as 4 visits a day to 15,000 per day. This is a very respectable figure even by today’s standards.
The importance and power of visual content
As mentioned earlier, using the appropriate type of visual content is the key to sending it viral. That being said, some of the strong points for why visual content is both important and powerful in almost every use-case are as follows:
Visual content is essential for customer retention
Visual content is vital for creating an immediate impact especially when you have limited time
Visual content can foster better understanding and reduce confusion for readers who took the time to read your post
Visual content is simply more stimulating than any other form of communication. The brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text
Visual content grabs attention and creates better engagement since it is able to tell a complete story at once. It also easily evokes more emotion.
Visual content can help to establish a strong selection criteria and a structure for decision making that favors your brand or product over a competitor
Considering how much time people spend on social media everyday, it’s kind of funny (or is it sad?) that most of us find ourselves too busy to actually update or improve our profiles. Many of us have a profile that includes an old email address, an ugly or blurry photo, or, probably the worst of them all, an old job title. You’re not making the best impression when your LinkedIn profile says you work at Pepsi, but your Twitter profile has you at Coca-Cola.
We are busy, but so many improvements to your social media profiles can be made in just a few minutes. Below, we take a look at 12 quick ways to improve your profiles that, altogether, shouldn’t take you more than an hour.
Time to close that game of Solitaire and get to work.
Before you can tweak your profiles, you need to have profiles to tweak. Hootsuite recently launched a brand new social media education program, Hootsuite Academy, to help professionals develop the social media skills they need to succeed in their careers. One Hootsuite Academy course specifically covers setting up and optimizing social media profiles. Sign up for free to access it today.
General tweaks Optimize your profile and cover photo sizes
We’re pretty spoiled by the quality of online images today. Gone are the days of visible pixels. Today anyone with a smartphone can take a pristine image of just about anything, including their own mug. Which is why there’s no excuse for you to have a stretched out, distorted, or pixelated face as the profile photo on any of your social media accounts. Not only are these images hard to see and confusing, they reflect poorly on you or your business. (“You couldn’t even be bothered to take one nice photo? Either you’re lazy or you suck.”).
Take a few minutes and optimize your profile photo and your cover photo. This means ensuring that photos fall within the dimensions recommended for a certain network. Often all it takes is a quick crop.
Many people think that a square is a square, or the social networks will make sure the image fits right. In reality, you never know when profile images will be reused elsewhere on a social network. How will it look when expanded? How does it look when it’s really small in people’s streams? How does it look on mobile compared to desktop? The social networks provide us with optimal image sizes knowing that these photos will be used in a variety of instances. You should probably trust them.
Standard image sizes for major social networks are as follows: Facebook profile picture: 180×180 pixels Facebook cover photo: 851×315 pixels
Once you’ve optimized for size, you can even go so far as to optimize the picture itself, using a survey to judge how competent, likable and influential you’re perceived to be. This post by Andy Raskin will walk you through the process, although you’ll probably have to invest a little more than 30 minutes into this one. Make your profile photos consistent across social networksReid uses this photo everywhere
Do you really like some photos of yourself and hate others? We all do. Let’s face it: we’re not always ready for our close-up. So how many of your profile photos are current images you actually like? Right. That’s exactly why you should be using the same profile photo across all of your social networks.
You might feel like, ‘yeah, that’s me,’ but your followers on Twitter have a far less intimate relationship with your face, and might not recognize you at a glance in a different photo, say on Facebook or LinkedIn. Recognition is key, especially as people quickly scroll through their feeds. For this reason, having consistent profile photos will increase your chances of having people follow you on different social networks.
If you’re controlling social accounts for a business, you also want to maintain consistent profile photos to reinforce your brand. The more people see your logo as they scan their various social networks, the more likely you are to be top of mind when they actually need your product or service. Untag yourself from bad photos
While we’re on the topic of photos, none of us are going to share terrible photos of ourselves. There’s just no reason to make yourself look bad. However, today’s social networks empower other users to share these terrible photos on your behalf, through tagging. Being vigilant about tagged photos can help you quickly clean up your profiles and project a more professional image on social media.
First, you should always be aware of your photo tagging settings. Make sure your settings reflect your own policies or interests, in terms of who can tag you in photos and whether or not you want to approve them in advance.
Facebook allows you to review and approve tags on your photos, and untag yourself from other photos
Instagram allows you to approve photos you’re tagged in before they appear on your profile
Twitter allows you to restrict who can tag you in photos, and remove any tags
Second, you want to regularly check your tagged images. Let’s face it: there are going to be some bad ones, so quickly untag yourself. People might ask why you wouldn’t just shut off tagging altogether. Well, there are benefits to allowing people to tag you in photos, especially for businesses. On Instagram, for example, you want customers to tag your business in photos of your product or service, so that they appear in the “photos of you section.” These tagged images are valuable for engagement purposes, and provide additional photos of your product for anyone scanning your profile. Don’t close off this source of content; just be aware of it and spend a few minutes cleaning things up. Make your names consistent across social networks
As with your profile photos, consistency is key when it comes to your names and handles on social media. With photos, the consistency is really about recognition. While that is one reason to have consistent social handles, in this case the real driver is searchability.
When you want to mention a brand on Twitter, for example, you probably just throw an @ symbol in front of their name and start tweeting. It’s kind of frustrating when you realize that their handle isn’t just their company name, but some mishmash of words with city names or area codes or SEO terms or anything else.
A simple handle that just reflects your name or your company’s name will increase the chances of you being mentioned. It also makes it easier for people actively seeking you out to find and follow you. Add keywords to your profile for SEO
What do you want to be known for? Is it family law? Curtain sales? Comedy? Whatever your niche is, it’s essential that you make yourself searchable. When people Google or Facebook search curtain sales, you want your face to pop up. Believe it or not, simply adding relevant keywords to your social profiles can go a long way to helping you get there.
Identify the terms people search for the most when they’re looking for a professional in your niche or industry. Tools like SEMrush can help you with that task. Once you’ve identified your terms, take a few minutes and insert these keywords into your social media profiles. These terms should appear in your LinkedIn job title, job description, and skills. It should appear in your Facebook and Twitter bios, in photo names, interests, experience, and just about any other category that isn’t your name, since that would be a little obnoxious.
Don’t just drop these terms in haphazardly. Work them into your bios in a way that’s logical, professional and actually describes how you relate to these terms.
Then watch your profile visits grow. Fill in every bio field
While you’re busy adding keywords to all of these fields, you should probably take the time to make sure that all of the fields are actually filled out.
Leaving fields blank is a surefire way to a) come off as unprofessional, b) come off as lazy, or c) make people think you don’t really care about social media. It has been so long since most of us set up our social media profiles that many of us have no memory of leaving sections blank or skipping over things. I, for one, am guilty of skipping profile building entirely to simply start using the network as soon as possible. Things have changed on the social networks, and things have changed in my career, so it’s worth going back and ensuring everything is filled in and up to date.
Open that little “edit profile” tab on every social network and see what fields you’ve missed. You might be surprised to see, for example, that Facebook has no less than seven sections in the “About Me” tab. That has probably grown significantly since you first signed up. Do the same on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and every other social network. Fill in the holes and strengthen your profile. Your current and future followers will appreciate it. Link to your other social media profiles
One of the fields in a few of your social profiles will probably be “website.” Many of us take this field too literally, and just drop in our website before moving on. Don’t stop there. Use this field to link to your other social profiles as another means for cross-promotion.
The opportunities for cross promotion are there. There might not be an easier way to quickly improve your accounts. Ask a few friendly clients for reviews or endorsements
Social proof is an extremely powerful social media tool. People trust their friends and family far more than any advertisements. Having positive reviews on your social media profiles can go a long way in earning people’s trust and increasing your chances of turning strangers into followers, and followers into business.
While 30 minutes might not be enough time to actually get reviews up on your profiles, it is definitely enough time for you to write messages to a few of your brand advocates or friendly clients, asking them to leave you positive comments.
LinkedIn makes this easy, with their endorsements section. People can endorse the skills you’ve added to your profile, or actually leave unique endorsements. The latter are very powerful, if they’re willing to put in a little extra time to write you one.
Facebook pages have a visitor posts section where people can highlight the good work you’ve been doing. On Twitter, you can take a positive Tweet about your business and pin it to the top of your stream, so that anyone visiting your profile will see it. Plus, you can always ask for endorsements and actually turn those into content you can share on your profiles (think an Instagram or Pinterest photo of a quote from a client).
Whichever way you slice it, it only takes a few minutes to ask someone for their feedback. This quick act can pay off huge in social proof. Network-specific tweaks Pin a Tweet promoting your last blog post
Have you pinned a Tweet on your Twitter profile? Think of a pinned Tweet as an addition to your profile. Unlike other messages, this particular message won’t be going anywhere until you decide it will. It won’t get buried in the flood, and disappear into the Twitter archives. This Tweet occupies prime real estate, one of the first things people see when they look you up.
And to think, most people don’t even have a pinned Tweet.
We mentioned pinning an endorsement to your Twitter profile above, but you can use pinned Tweets in several different ways. Choose a Tweet that promotes a strong piece of content you or your brand has created, and includes a piece of rich media like an image or a video. This could also be your latest piece of content, if you’re looking for a quick traffic boost. Or maybe you’re running a new marketing campaign. Pin a Tweet pointing people to your microsite, your sale page, or your gated webinar/white paper/demo. Having a sale? Pin your discount code at the top of your business’ profile. Looking for feedback? Make your pinned Tweet a question and prompt people to reply.
There are no real limitations on what you can pin. But pin something. Otherwise you’re just wasting one of your Twitter profile’s biggest assets. Add media to your LinkedIn jobs
LinkedIn isn’t the most visually appealing of social networks. People tend to focus less on videos and gifs, and more on the concrete stuff that’s going to get them hired. That’s fair, since you probably wouldn’t share that cat gif on your physical resume either. However, there’s a reason digital resumes have grown in popularity: they allow you to showcase more of your work, and to do so in compelling ways.
A prime example of this is the media option in the experience section of your LinkedIn profile—one of the most widely underused features on the social network. The media option allows you to showcase your work. In other words, rather than telling people that you worked on a huge project or wrote a blog post, you can show them through an image and a link to the work. Including media within your profile will help people get a more extensive picture of your experience, all while adding a little bit of visual appeal to your profile.
Fun fact: you can also add media to the “Summary” and “Education” sections as well. Take a few minutes and spice up that online resume. Then watch the job offers roll in. Rotate the link in your Instagram bio
Instagram might just be the social network with the least detailed profile. Fill in your name, bio, and website, and you’re done. It should come as no surprise, then, that many businesses don’t see Instagram as anything more than an awareness tool. They don’t see how they can use it to drive leads, drive business, drive web traffic and other vital business functions. This common complaint is being addressed by many savvy users in a very simple way: rotating their website link.
Although Instagram only supports one link—the one your choose for your profile—there’s really no limit as to how often you can update that link. Smart businesses have rapidly figured out that they can change that link every time they have a new promotion or campaign. Post a new photo to support any online initiative you want, then in the description, say “see our profile for a link to this campaign!” Then change the link. It will take you about 30 seconds to update, and can help turn your Instagram profile into a real business asset. Like relevant pages from your Facebook page
We all know that Facebook encourages us to share our interests with our followers. Not many people consider this decision strategically, though. When you make your interests or the Pages you like a public part of your profile, you’re giving people another means by which to judge or analyze you. If those likes are “One Direction” and “Glee,” you may not be giving off the impression you’re going for.
Have a look at your Likes and interests and delete or unlike anything you don’t want people to associate with your brand, or your company’s brand. Then, consider the things you do want to be associated with. These could be: Industries or fields, like “marketing” or “finance” Partner brands or industry leaders, like “Mailchimp” or “Unbounce” Thought leaders, like “Guy Kawasaki” or “Richard Branson” Positive interests or associations, like local charities or unions Casual interests you’re proud of, from local sports teams to public speaking
Updating your interests is an easy way to tell people a little more about yourself and your business in a way they can relate to. Publish a post on LinkedIn/Facebook NotesOne of my own posts on the LinkedIn publisher
It wasn’t too long ago that LinkedIn made its publishing platform open to all users, a move that turned the social network into a quasi-blogging platform. With the success of LinkedIn’s publisher, and of Medium, it comes as little surprise that Facebook recently revamped its Notes feature to potentially compete in this front.
What many users fail to realize is that, in order to promote these tools, LinkedIn and Facebook allow you to incorporate them into your profiles. When you publish a post on LinkedIn, it will appear on your profile in the “Posts” section. This important real estate is a major incentive to start writing posts for your LinkedIn audience. The same can be said of Facebook, which allows you to include Notes as a profile section, and notify your followers when you publish a new one.
Utilizing these tools is an easy way to extend your reach and impress profile visitors. Think of it like your own mini thought leadership program. And, while it takes more than 30 minutes to create a new piece of content, you can easily use these tools to promote or tease existing content on your blog or website. Copy the first paragraph or two into a note or LinkedIn post, then tell people to visit your site for the rest. In just a few minutes, you will have added content to your profile and turned it into a source of traffic for your web properties. Not too shabby.
Wanna be a Content Marketing Superhero – Types Of Media You Need To Master
Campaign marketing is the essence of any traditional promotion for almost any brand or business. Summer sales, Easter sales and stock clearance sales. The list goes on.
But there is another type of marketing that is often overlooked.
Continuous marketing.
Other naming options? “Marathon” marketing, “Forest Gump” marketing and “Always On” marketing. On the global web that never sleeps this content marketing strategy is key to success.
Silence is not golden for content marketing superheroes who want to stand out and save the world and their business.
Google and social networks don’t tolerate silence
Think you can just use content every now and then? A blog once a month, a Facebook post once a week and Twitter every second day?
Do that and the search engines will think you are irrelevant. The obsessed social fans will think you have taken a holiday or maybe even died.
So, campaigns are still vital but “always on marketing” is now essential.
The content marketing beast needs to be fed. The search engines require tickling and the prospects need to be reminded that you are alive and kicking online.
Content needs to move to get discovered.
Brand building requires more than unique content, mind bending insights or ideas with gravitas. It needs to ripple across the web. Dropping into inboxes, events, LinkedIn and online conversations.
Just having it sit on your site is not enough. It needs to go on a journey.
Content has many goals
It was a conversation in Dublin over a pint of Guinness.
A discussion about the transforming content landscape. Led by Buzzfeed and Snapchat. In a noisy world that has the human attention span below that of a goldfish we are almost required to resort to the inane to capture the initial response.
Now we need to add a bit of augmented reality. Pokemon Go. Also add a dose of scarcity. Content that only lasts 24 hours, Snapchat and Instagram stories.
Read and view it before it’s gone!
Get your attention with cats and babies and then I will send the serious stuff!
So content has a few goals to achieve.
“Content needs to educate, inform, entertain and inspire”
Content creation tension
Content marketing has a constant tension between what can be seen as two polar opposites. Attention seeking and trust. But they have to work together.
Buzzfeed and the tabloid press are kings of the clickbait headlines that begs for attention. Trustworthy quality content – In old media this is investigative journalism and all that surrounds it. The world and the marketer needs both.
As content marketers we often want to get that piece of content to go viral. So how far should we go with using babies and cat videos? There is no right or wrong answer.
For the sake of simplicity we can break up content marketing tactics into 3 types.
A: Traffic generation – Tempt people to click through to your website, blog or landing page and share.
B: Engagement – The strategic use of educational, informative, entertaining and inspiring content that builds credibility, trust and linking
C: Conversion – Capturing those all important leads and producing sales is the real end game for traffic and engagement. Otherwise it is just noise.
But the reality is that they don’t stand alone and they are often woven together in a matrix of attention, engagement and a call to action. Although some are better than others at traffic generation and some stand out for engagement.
Let’s dive in and discover what are the different types of content that will help make you a superhero for your brand.
Traffic generation
Web traffic is the foundation for success online. It is the oxygen that a blog, a website needs to grow, survive and thrive.
So what types of content can drive traffic?
#1. Photos and images
The mobile obsessed world we live in has made this a core tactical skillset for the modern marketer. Using screenshots, authentic and personal content. Images that touches hearts and minds. Pictures that pose a question, pique our curiosity or intrigue.
Buzzfeed’s photo of a young girl standing in front of a burning house with a devilish grin is one of those.
According to knowyourmeme.com, the original photo was posted to Buzzfeed on October 27th, 2008 with a follow up post the next day highlighting the best derivatives, followed by similar posts on Digg, TrendHunter, eBaum’s World Forum and Best Week Ever. Over the years, it appeared on Cracked and also the Huffington Post.
Millions of views.
Photo source: Knowyourmeme.com
2. GIF’S
Using acronyms without explanation is babble and gobbledygook.
So what does GIF mean? An animated GIF is a “Graphics Interchange Format” file that is a graphic image on a Web page that moves. That’s it.
Attention is in short supply and content marketers need all the tools and tactics they can nab for standing out.
Moving images, automatic starting and pop-ups can be annoying. But there is one thing you can’t argue with. They grab you attention.
GIF’s sit in this category.
via GIPHY
GIFs can be used on Twitter, included in side banners and even in email campaigns.
Dell ran a GIF centric email campaign and discovered that it increased engagement on every level.
Source: Marketingsherpa.com
Compared to its previous campaign benchmarks eithout GIFs these were the results :
6% increase in open rate
42% increase in click rate
103% increase in conversion rate
109% increase in revenue
The part I like is the 109% increase in revenue. That’s what I call a boost in ROI.
If you want to start using GIF’s today here are 3 free resources.
Makeagif.com
Gifmaker.me
Imgflip.com
3. Mini-infographics
These work well on Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. Embed them in blog posts and people love to share them.
It’s light snackable content.
It’s the start of brand awareness building. Its the equivalent of the baby or cat image for the quasi intellectuals.
This one tweet with an infographic received 70 retweets, 26 likes and 26 link clicks for a total of 126 total engagements. It generated those all important clicks to the blog and sharing.
4. Headlines
Headlines are the shortest type of content that we have in our marketing toolbox.
But don’t be beguiled by what at first seems a simple skill that you should ignore. They are maybe your most important tactic. It’s where the customer seduction begins.
David Ogilvy the “Advertising Guru” was known for agonizing over the headline.
Why?
Because 5 times more people read the headline than the article, advertisement or your post.
What are some headlines that work?
There are many formulaic headline types. And these work for ebook titles, blog posts and news articles. They are required for video titles, white papers and even downloadable PDF’s.
Here are some to try out.
Large listicle – “The Ultimate Guide on How to get More Blog Traffic: 100+ Tips and Tactics“
Curiosity gap – “He Was Found Freezing And Dying. Yet Somehow The Last Photo Made My Entire Year”
How To’s – “How to Grow an Email List: 3 Case Studies on How Silly Online Quizzes Produce Serious Business Leads“
Negative – “Why You Should Forget Facebook“
Benefits – “5 Extremely Actionable Tips to Improve Your Content Writing“
ViralNova’s headline specialty is the curiosity gap tactic. You might not want to take their tactic that far. But the use of people’s innate curiosity to drive traffic and engagement is a proven winner.
Most boring industries struggle to write those attention grabbing headlines. It’s seen as superficial and below the dignity of a serious industry. But it’s a tactic you can’t ignore if you want to make it bigger online.
Engagement
Traffic is one thing and cats, GIF’s and babies photos have maybe got your audience’s attention. Now it’s time to keep them on the page or start to believe that you are indeed a superhero.
What types of content have an edge in achieving this marketing goal?
5. Long form content
When digital marketers started to discover the power of content to improve SEO they started posting high volumes of blog posts. This was the quantity part of the SEO equation. But this also led to poor quality. Google then adapted its algorithms to reduce their effectiveness. It added tweaks that gave more value to quality content long form content.
Today we are seeing the rise of long form content from 1,000 words plus that have 2 major benefits for brand building and marketing optimisation
Positions your brand as the expert in your industry
It impacts search engine optimisation and link building for building website authority.
Great examples of this tactical content are sites like Buffer, Neil Patel and Canva.com. This post below on the “Design School” blog on Canva is over 3,000 words
On our blog we have a standard of 1,000 plus words for all guest posts. Often they are 1,500-2,000 words.
6. Short videos
These can entertain, educate or sell. My blogging course on Udemy was built on videos where were none went over 7 minutes. This was based on their engagement research.
Other research has shown that 2 minutes is optimum for maximizing engagement when you are not training but maybe just entertaining.
My keynote speaking showreel is no longer than 2 minutes.
Buzzfeed has taken social short video to a whole new level with it’s new division – BuzzFeed Motion Pictures.
Frank Peretti (Buzzfeed’s CEO) said the company’s “little experiment” began when Facebook started allowing autoplay for in-feed videos.
A big part of this experiment is their “Tasty” Food network and is a great example of pushing your content to its own platform and also publishing on the world’s biggest social network.
It is maybe the top performing video channel on the planet with over 360 million viewers a month. The Facebook auto playing videos are mostly under 2 minutes.
This one video has nearly 15 million views and counting.
7. Live streaming video
Thinking like a publisher for many means producing a book, a magazine or a newspaper. Then it expanded to bloggers but the game has got a lot bigger. Innovative content marketing has expanded the range to much more.
Welcome to “Live Streaming Video”
Live streaming video is one of the hot content trends. It sort of started with Google+ hangouts, Periscope hit the scene about a year ago and now Facebook Live is now trying to eat everyone’s lunch.
A fun example of what could be called a “highly engaging” Facebook Live video is Candace Payne’s “Chewbacca mask” video where she tries it on in her car in the parking lot and laughs herself stupid after buying it at Kohl’s.
It currently has received over 160 million views. So from engagement to sales. The mask sold out at Kohl’s, Walmart, Target and ToysRUs.com
What is great about this type of content that moves from engagement to sales is that it is not over produced and it’s not about selling.
It’s about starting with engagement. But there is no guarantee that it will go viral like this did.
8. Podcasts
Engagement with the written word is one thing but listening to someone’s voice is visceral, magnetic and very human. That is the power of the podcast.
But Podcasts as content do not travel well on the social web. They are maybe close to the bottom of the sharing type content bucket. So building an audience first on either social or email with other more viral shareable content is recommended.
So for building trust, credibility and engagement they are hard to beat. Pat Flynn is one of the masters of this content genre.
9. Crowd sourced content
What is the biggest challenge for a content marketer?
It is a simple two word sentence. Content creation. Creating quality content takes time and resources.
One solution? Technology.
Software as a service platforms have made this possible to do at scale. Because at the end of the day content creation is one of the biggest challenges for bloggers and businesses.
Second solution? Trade attention for content.
If you have built up a blog or website that already has traffic then you can give that all important traffic and attention to other writers and new bloggers. This is guest writing. Often done for free to help up and coming bloggers and marketers to ride on the back of a credible site that already has traffic.
Conversion
This is a big topic but we will distil it into the top types of content reknown for turning traffic into leads. Here are five that you need to master as a professional digital marketer.
10. Landing pages
Landing pages are often not seen as content. But they are an optimal intersection of a range of multimedia. Headlines, copywriting, videos, color and images. And with a call to action that is designed to generate a response.
To produce the right reaction they can use a range of tactics including scarcity, social proof and tempting value.
If you want to generate a tangible return on investment for your online marketing efforts then these are “ROI- 101”. Essential and necessary. They can be short and long.
Where do you use them? Everywhere.
Ebook opt-ins, registering for webinars, video sales letters and when launching a new product, an online course or a new book
Simple can work well.
SumoMe recommends that you use very minimalist landing pages for capturing email optins. Sometimes as marketers and designers we try and be too clever. You’re just trying to achieve one thing. An email sign-up.
It’s not complicated.
Image source: SumoMe
Landing pages in the past were major projects and expensive to design and create. Hire a designer, hunt down a copywriter, invest $2,000 and then wait for weeks for the developer to code the web page. That was the norm. Today with technology like Leadpages you can create them in minutes.
You can also see what are are the top performing landing pages based on the data. And conversion rate is the metric you need to be watching.
11. Webinars
Educating and building credibility and engagement at scale is what webinars do well. They are a combination of verbal and visual content. As a business you can use them to educate and even make special offers at the end of the presentation.
But they can be used to supercharge your conversions. When you collaborate with an influencer or non-competing business partner they are one of the fastest ways to grow an email list. So how does that work?
You provide the content (the webinar slide deck) and they then market it to their email list and social networks. To attend the webinar they have to enter their email address. You can add several hundred prospects to you customer database in a few days with this conversion content tactic.
Here is an optimum design that I used from Leadpages to create the landing page for the webinar that I ran with a good friend of mine Tom Poland.
What you will need:
Email marketing platform – MailChimp, Aweber or Infusionsoft
Webinar software or app – GoToWebinar or WebinarJam
Leadpages landing page – You can use the GoToWebinar registration page but it is far from optimum
Powerpoint or Apple’s Keynote for the visuals
12. Ebooks
Ebooks are still one of the top performing lead magnets.
I have found that as a content opt-in tactic they surpass almost any other type of content. The downside is that a good one takes time to write and design.
The best performing ebooks tend to be created around one of the biggest pain points that your prospects and potential customers have. Often for a small business in a digital world it is getting traffic to your website.
My top performing ebook is “101+ Tips to Grow Your Web Traffic” that has been downloaded over 40,000 times. So…if you haven’t got it then you can grab it >>> HERE
#13. Copywriting
The ultimate goal of copywriting as used in advertising is to sell products. They are at the sharp end of the content marketing funnel.
Great copywriting will touch hearts and minds. It gains attention. It invokes or suggests a response.
It is required for landing pages, blog posts, tweets and even sent with that image or photo (just to name a few). But email is one of the the core media types that requires skilled copywriting. It uses the power of words alone to cut through the clutter that bombards us every day.
It was an “aha” moment for me when after writing an email to market a conference I received a reply I will never forget.
The email:
The response:
It was the best “No” I had ever received.
But getting an email in return as if you had written to them alone is when it seems worthwhile. That is the magic of copywriting that touches a human heart.
And that is the true art of sales copywriting.
#14. Interactive content
It was in 2008 I stumbled upon Hubspot and discovered their website assessment tool. I registered and checked it almost every day to see my blog was progressing. It was the most powerful engagement content I have ever discovered then and since.
According to ION interactive Quizzes, calculators and assessment tools are some of the top types of interactive content and Buzzfeed uses them a lot.
Source: Chaosmap.com
Let’s have a closer look at quizzes.
Quizzes are one of the most shared types of content on the web. According to BuzzSumo data the average quiz gets shared 1,900 times. And one of the top shared quizzes (with 4 million shares) was “What Color Is Your Aura”
One of Buzzfeed’s most popular with over 2 million views is “Why Are You Single”
However, they have a more serious superpower. Converting traffic and sharing into an email. So how effective are they in turning traffic and engagement into leads and sales?
According to a case study where Media Vision Interactive ran an Interactive content focused campaign where they increased their warm leads by 300%.
Graphic source: Mediavisioninteractive.com
More resources:
How to Grow an Email List: 3 Case Studies on How Silly Online Quizzes Produce Serious Business Leads
One last thing
You may have the best images, articles and videos in the world but if no one can see or find your content then you are wasting your time.
Content marketing is two words and content is just one of them. So create, publish and start hustling.
Reid uses this photo everywhere
One of my own posts on the LinkedIn publisher
