What live streaming and content lessons can non-outer-space-faring-rocket ship-building organizations learn from the SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch and Tesla Roadster collaboration?
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.
Curating content is an amazing way to fill your content pipeline, but frequently is lazily executed, not well thought through, and in some cases, is abused.
Consumer behaviour and consumption habits of video content across devices and platforms is constantly shifting, so keeping a finger on the pulse of those shifts allows us to better plan our own video content, and anticipate results.
Frequently, we gauge brand-related success on social media on awareness, perception, affinity, or other similar measures.
But, is this good enough? Is this what we want for our businesses and brands?
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’s control over the content that appears in users’ news feeds has rightfully been a hot topic of late, but the impact this has on our social media marketing efforts is really only half of the story.
The other half of the story, of course, is the impact it has on users.
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.
There are many ways that you can use social media to great effect that have absolutely nothing to do with creating content.
The problem with ‘engagement’ is that it doesn’t tell us much at all. It’s not really a definitive indicator of anything except that someone clicked a button, or mashed a few keys on their keyboard.
Use of Pocket has been beneficial for me both personally and professionally, and if you’re looking for a solution to help you to navigate and organize content more efficiently, I implore you to check it out.
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?
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.
YouTube shouldn’t be viewed solely as a video publication platform.
It should be just as socially driven as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or any other social media network.
The same video uploaded twice, by the two parties responsible for its production respectively, with very different results. Why?
Creating meaningful social media content on an ongoing basis is a common challenge for SMBs, large corporations and agencies alike.
“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
It’s clear that engaging your business’ audience on mobile social media is becoming increasingly critical.
The trouble I find many businesses have isn’t about realizing that mobile is an important platform on which to have a solid presence, however, it’s how to establish that presence, and where.
If you don’t know PewDiePie, just look at any list of top subscribed YouTube channels and look toward the top of the list.
With over 22 million subscribers – only bested by YouTube category channels for ‘music’ and ‘popular on YouTube – Worldwide’ – there’s no arguing that this is what ultimate YouTube success looks like.
There are actions you can take to support your content, amplify its success, enhance your returns from having made a meaningful contribution, and maybe even increase your chances of having subsequent guest contributions published.
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.
Visible Measures reported that Super Bowl ads saw a total of 370 million online views last year, and ads released ahead of time received between 200-600 percent more impressions than those that didn’t
So, this is all well and good, but what can be learned from this phenomenon and applied to your business?
In effort to shed some light on how Twitter can help small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), Twitter engaged Market Probe International to conduct research in hopes of proving how their platform can lead to real business results.
Some interesting findings emerged that – surprise, surprise – demonstrate that Twitter can indeed have a positive impact for SMBs.
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:
In my experience, job descriptions tend to kind of just… well… be job descriptions.
What I mean by that is that they’re not exactly the first thing that businesses think about when conceiving of ways to push their business forward, promote and lead innovation, build and sustain brand advocacy, and ensure employees and coworkers are driving forces behind organizational social media success.
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.
Google’s YouTube Rewind video and compellations of top trending videos serve as a great way to remember, and in some cases discover, what people have been paying attention to over the last 300-some-odd days, and to gain some perspective of where video content may be headed in 2014.
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.
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.
3 Links is pretty simple; I collect a series of three blog posts on social media, digital or content marketing that I feel may be worthy of your attention. Simple as that.
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.
Success isn’t about the thousands of people that read your blog but never take action. Success is about the one person who reads your blog and makes a purchase.
The people around us influence our behaviour, and the same holds true on social media.
Failing to properly promote your content means you’re missing out on maximizing the ROI of your social media and content marketing efforts.
So, what to do?
Consumers’ brand preference and purchase intent is being influenced in the pre-market stage of their purchase path. That is, they are making critical decisions that will influence their purchases even before they are thinking about making a purchase.
Powerful stuff.
One of the most exciting things to me about social media marketing is the number of times I get to say, ‘sure, let’s try it’.
Unlike traditional media, ‘trying something’ on social media often doesn’t require a commitment of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Putting a firm rule in place to tell you how long your business has to capitalize on an opportunity to publish relevant content is near impossible. This said, there are a couple of guidelines that you can take into account to help you out.
There are some amazing businesses and brands pumping out absolutely killer content every day, though I can’t think of many that do it with such regularity as Red Bull. This article will showcase the awesome episodic video content series ‘Imaginate’ by Red Bull, featuring Danny MacAskill.
How many articles have you read about how to write the best blog titles for SEO?
Lots? Yeah, me too.
Well, here’s another idea; how about writing blog post titles with an aim to captivate and compel prospective readers to click on your post, and so that they will have some sense of what they are investing their time to reading?
It’s roughly 1 year, and 100 posts ago today, that I started the RGB Social blog.
This blog most certainly remains in its infancy, and I still feel as though I’m just getting started, but I thought this as good a time as any to reflect back and share a bit about my experience with it thus far.
There are a huge number of variables that are influenced by the quality and value of your content, so it’s understandable that you might feel compelled to obsess over every detail of your latest video, photograph, blog post, Facebook update, tweet, pin, or podcast until it is absolutely perfect.
But, when creating social media content, the pursuit of perfection – for most businesses – will yield diminishing returns.
There are many factors that affect a video’s likelihood of ‘going viral’, and many of which are either beyond your control, or take huge amounts of time or financial resources to achieve.