There are many barriers that keep marketers, advertisers, and business leaders from personalizing content; technology, resources, data, bandwidth, and more. The good news is that each of these barriers can easily be overcome.
In this post we discuss why the vast majority of businesses should not be concerned with the latest round of Facebook News Feed changes.
What is good content? Understanding and agreeing to the universal characteristics of ‘good content’ is critical for anyone involved in the planning, creation, and measurement of content.
Social reach does not necessarily equate to influence. Thinking holistically about the array of people that can have significant influence will strengthen your social media activity.
YouTube recently launched Community to enable content creators to engage audiences in new ways beyond video. What does this mean for business?
Facebook recently changed the News Feed algorithm, which has once again resulted in a decline in organic reach for publishers. But is this all bad news for business?
Live video is a HOT topic. Here are 8 considerations to maximize the success of your business or brand’s foray into broadcasting live video.
The introduction of a Facebook-esque feed algorithm on Instagram isn’t something you should be losing sleep over for your business.
There are important considerations to take into account when identifying the social media networks that are right for your business.
Frequently, when hashtags are being discussed – in blog posts, books, whitepapers, as part of campaigns, in meetings, or wherever – their importance is held so high that I find it verging on laughable.
A hashtag, plain and simple, is a tool for sociability.
Facebook recently announced a new advertising product that will surely be of great interest to small and medium sized businesses: local awareness ads.
It may seem counterintuitive, but there is actually good reason for why the content your business’ social media audience wants, is not the content your organization should be creating and publishing.
Why are we all so eager to spend as little time as possible on our business’ social media marketing efforts?
There tends to be a strong correlation between the time, energy and effort put toward implementing a smartly crafted social media strategy, and expected results.
Facebook announced late last week that they are testing a new method for people to discover and buy products directly on the platform, and there’s good reason to be excited for this potential new feature.
It is important to be clear about the distinction between strategy and tactics because misinformation leads to bad decision-making. There is too much at stake for this to not be perfectly clear.
There are numerous tools and services available that make filling your social media feeds with content incredibly easy, but just because it’s easy, doesn’t necessarily mean you should use them.
Failure is not an option, it is going to happen, which includes some of your efforts on social media. And that’s okay… it’s maybe even good.
Investing in social media customer service support and responding to consumer feedback can have a dramatically positive influence on purchase intent, and not just for the consumers you interact with.
There’s amazing social media content to be shared that is entirely link-less, and we could be doing our businesses, or the brands we work on, a great disservice by publishing so much link-ridden content.
What if the solution for declining organic reach had more to do with user behaviour than complicated News Feed algorithms?
Thinking small about social media marketing is about dedicating yourself to affecting real business results in small increments, day after day, for great long-term impact.
Google+ may have just been validated as a bonafide social media heavyweight, right alongside the likes of Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn – and yes – even Facebook.
It’s time again for an other episode of 3 LINKS, where I share some of the better blog posts that I’ve read in recent history on the subjects of social media marketing, content marketing, traditional marketing, business, or anything related.
Whether it’s the New York Times publishing online ads, or it’s you and your business publishing social media updates, we are all responsible for the content we publish and need to take responsibility to ensure its integrity, even if it’s already been scheduled.
The same video uploaded twice, by the two parties responsible for its production respectively, with very different results. Why?
The impending organic reach apocalypse might seem like doom and gloom, but there are some things you can do to prepare your business for this seemingly inevitable event.
Creating meaningful social media content on an ongoing basis is a common challenge for SMBs, large corporations and agencies alike.
As they frequently do, Facebook has relatively recently made some changes to their platform that have changed how you go about activating targeting options for Timeline posts.
“Now, When a Page tags another Page, we may show the post to some of the people who like or follow the tagged Page”. – Facebook
Real-time marketing is here, and it has been here, to stay. There is huge opportunity for businesses and brands to interact with their audiences in real-time.
Businesses and brands, however, shouldn’t one day per year get a ‘real-time war room’ together and hope for some serendipitous opportunity to present itself, or worse, shoehorn their message into a less than memorable moment.
The real reason I’ve historically been so interested in the Super Bowl really has nothing to do with the competition on the field, but more to do with the competition for consumers’ attention and wallets, the advertising. And I know I’m not alone on this front.
It’s been a while since I’ve published a 3 LINKS post featuring recent articles that I’ve found to be interesting, useful, entertaining or inspiring, but alas, here we go:
As the volume of content being created and published continues to explode, finding every opportunity to place your content in front of as large a proportion of your audience as possible is of utmost importance to maximize results.
You shouldn’t simply follow best practices.
Of the 104 articles published on the RGB Social blog in 2013, the following 10 received the most number of views.
Setting goals and objectives to guide your social media marketing activity is critical to ensure that your efforts are making a meaningful and positive impact on your business.
Without well-defined goals and objectives, there is no way to determine what success looks like, no way to measure success, and no way to optimize. In short, without established goals and objectives, you’re completely flying blind.
No matter how much time you spend thinking about every conceivable scenario that might play out on social media, it is impossible to think of them all.
Opportunities arise, competitors emerge, trolls attack, sites go down, preferences change, and sometimes, pigs fly.
This is the nature of social media and the world in which we live and our businesses operate. Things change fast. Really fast.
It’s no secret that people are making more purchases, and purchase decisions, online. Consumer purchase behaviour is undergoing a dramatic shift that is getting more pronounced every day, and unprepared retailers are seeing declines as a result.
Over the course of the last week or so, there have been several revealing statistics released to support that consumers are not only spending more time shopping online, but that brick and mortar shopping behaviour is being influenced by digital interactions, which of course includes social media.
While you’re undoubtedly busy planning your personal social schedule with family and friends, now is also a perfect time to be planning your social media activity for the coming weeks. Planning can be critical to ensure you’ve got your ducks in a row for when you inevitably take a bit of time off to enjoy the season, and to sustain activity and engagement with your audience during this time.
If we stop thinking about the ‘return’ of ROI as end sales, and start thinking about ‘return’ as a sum of the value of all of the relevant aforementioned factors – which ultimately lead to sales – then calculating an ROI of social media can be much more achievable; not simple, but achievable.
Believe it or not, while I took the week off of social media, the world kept spinning, my business survived, my face didn’t melt off, and no other catastrophes occurred as a direct result (as far as I know anyway).
By their nature, best practices tend to be generalizations. Typically, they don’t specifically address your unique situation, opportunities and challenges. And getting too caught up in following best practices can affect your comfort and willingness to take a chance and do something amazing that may be contrary to conventions.
The observation of Remembrance Day shouldn’t be seen as a social media opportunity. If you want to pay tribute to the soldiers that have served your country on your organization’s social media properties, it is my recommendation to do it tastefully, in a tone that is appropriate for the day, and keep it solely focused on honouring those deserving of being honoured.
The secret is out! Running promotions on social media can be an effective way to reward existing fans of your brand, further prove your brand’s promise, and attract new people to your brand.
To maximize the ROI of running a promotion, however, you’re going to want to promote your activity to boost awareness and attract a maximum number of relevant participants.
If you know where to look and who to talk to, there is a great deal of inspiration to be found for content creation, and it’s probably sitting right in front of you.
Here are 5 places to find inspiration for content ideas to keep things fresh and valuable for your targeted audience.
Nobody cares that you have an account on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube.
If you’re solely broadcasting and republishing readily accessible information, nobody will care because there is no added value to ‘liking’ your Page, following your business, or subscribing to your social media channels.
Choosing a prize, or creating a prizing structure for your promotions should be carefully thought through so that it builds on your brand’s core value proposition, is attractive to your targeted audience, and rewards existing consumers in a way that is of contextual relevance.
It’s probably not surprising that a concert series put on by Apple would be pretty fantastic, but there are many more facets to what makes this killer than just the sheer scale of the month-long event.
Most businesses that invest heavily in social media tend to forget one key component to maximizing their success in developing direct relationships with their audience;
They forget to be social.
Four ideas for how to run promotions on your business or brand Facebook Timeline.
Here we are with another installment of 3 Links, a collection of three blog posts on social media, digital and content marketing related topics that I feel are worthy of your attention.