by seller_bot | Nov 25, 2016 | Our Blog
There are many among us who started online marketing in a time where social media was still not a requirement of being online, and certainly not of running a business. Now, even the smallest of freelancers know that interacting with and going after clients on social media can mean a huge boon to their bottom line.
That said, it could be really easy to just try and be ‘everywhere’ and then not end up actually getting any traction on the platform we choose. Let’s be honest here, social media platforms come and go, and the ones that are popular are crowded, while the ones that aren’t overcrowded yet are a risk because they never will be. New or old however, all social media platforms have certain types of content, and by extension people, that will do well on them. Further, different audiences tend to be in different places when spending time in the online social world, which is an important consideration. Let’s take a look at how you can break down a social platform’s viability for your business.
First of all, are your target customers even there? If your targets are middle-aged men, Pinterest is probably not going to be that valuable to you. While broad awareness is great, being good at social media takes a lot of time, and you want to be focusing that time in areas where it’s most likely to result in leads (right?). Evaluate the demographics of who spends their time on a platform and make sure there’s overlap with your target market.
Next, evaluate whether you will be good at producing the type of content that does well there. Depending on the platform you’re looking at, you can probably find a way to search for or hunt down posts that are popular and getting lots of engagement. These should give you an idea of what performs well. Take note of the format (picture, video, etc.), and also the content itself (what words are used? Are words used at all? Etc.).
Everyone has different skillsets, and if neither you nor anyone on your team has the skills to create great content of that particular type, it might be a tough journey for you. For example, if you’re not good at framing images or thinking up what makes a potentially mundane picture more interesting, then Instagram might not be a great place to be.
Finally, if you are good at creating the type of content you see as necessary on the channels you want to be on, you need to map out how much time you’ll have to dedicate it. People by and large follow the people who put the most time into creating the most interesting content, so it’s important to evaluate if you’ll be able to compete.
Granted you can meet all of those criteria, well, give yourself the green light and start making moves!
by seller_bot | Sep 25, 2016 | Our Blog
Social media is a cliche these days. People know they need to “be on it” and they know they need to “get serious about it”, but when push comes to shove very few people are giving their channels proper attention. It makes sense, too, results are generally slower on social but they come with the added earned bonus of often building more loyal customers.
Additionally, customers simply expect more of the brands and people that they choose to do business with these days, and communicating in a personal manner is part of that expectation. So, besides just “being there,” here are a few tried and true tips for social growth from the guys and gals at the top.
1) Keep your social making sense for each platform
Make sure that the social you put out isn’t lazy. Specifically, don’t use the autoshare feature to other platforms just because it exists. If it looks like you don’t care about creating anything actually interesting on your Facebook page because every single post is an automatic copy of a post from Instagram, it makes the value of being on Facebook pretty negligible: If it’s clear you don’t care about your page, why should other people care to interact with it, let alone click through on your more promotional posts?
2) Try out a new platform at every opportunity
Yeah, a lot of platforms flop, but do you know how well the first few people who started doing really well on Instagram did? Or the first 10 people to start ‘funny meme’ type pages on Facebook? Early adopters have the chance to make an absolute killing on social, so it’s worth spending a couple of weeks or even months trying out new things as they come along. If something becomes the next Twitter or Snapchat after you laughed it off a year ago, you’re not going to be happy with yourself.
3) Reply to everything
People love feeling appreciated, so make sure you take advantage of this psychological trigger in your social interactions. If someone has opted to tweet at you, or send you a message somewhere, they’ve basically opened the door for you to have a free interaction with them and start building a rapport – take advantage of it!
Plus, you never know whose eye you’ve caught and what opportunities might arise from taking the time to get back to them. That alone makes it worth taking the chance – if a big shot caught something of yours, paying attention to them for 10 seconds might just land you a huge opportunity.
4) Have a better schedule than the next guy
Of course, you can’t go wrong with being better organized than the guys and gals you’re competing against. Seriously, too many people “wing it” in social. Instead, try to source content for 3-7 days out. When you release original content, use a tool like CoScheduler to have it shared every week or two for the next several months.
by seller_bot | Sep 1, 2016 | Our Blog
Heard of a Facebook dark post? Yes? No? Either way, we’re going to have a discussion about them today. Dark posts, a colloquialism for Facebook’s unpublished posts ad product, are a way to post things from your own Facebook page that can show up as posted by your page, but only to certain people.
Alright, so you know how normally when you publish a Facebook ad, you choose which people will see it? You can dig down into all kinds of demographics and information to help make sure that you’ve tailored an ad to specific audiences. Dark posts allow you to dig into that same type of targeting, but within the people who like your page.
For example, let’s say you have a clothing website with 3,000 Facebook likes. You want to promote a sale you’re having on all products, but know that it won’t be relevant for women to see ads with pictures of men’s jeans in them, and that you’re not going to sell many dresses by showing them to your male audience.
So, instead of compromising and creating a more general post that will be seen by everyone on your page, or creating two separate posts for men and women and publishing them both (ensuring everyone sees one post that’s not relevant to them), you can use a Dark or Unpublished post instead. You can make it look like your page published a post about dresses for everyone, but really only the women who like your page will be able to see, read, and engage with it (like, comment, etc.). On the other hand, the men on your page will think you posted an ad for men’s jeans and be able to interact with it accordingly.
Here’s another example: As a marketer who helps people with Pinterest marketing but also Twitter marketing, you could create completely different posts that target the fans of your page that you feel are most likely to be using those platforms in their marketing efforts. The possibilities here really are endless.
Unpublished posts can be created in a couple of different ways, but Facebook is working to unify them so that there aren’t so many tools to create similar ad products. For example, there has been a lot of confusion in the past over whether to use the standard Facebook ads page or their ‘Power Editor’ to create your ads, leading to many tutorials getting confusing when people find themselves in a completely different interface than the screenshots they’re trying to follow.
Unpublished or Dark posts are also important with the recently diminished organic reach of Facebook pages. For the same reason boosting a post became so popular, Dark posts help you better reach people who might never see your content unless they explicitly come to your page (and most people prefer to just hang out in their own timelines, understandably). Except Dark posts are an even better option, since you can help keep them from being shown to people they aren’t relevant to, and thus help keep your page’s engagement score from dropping.
by seller_bot | Apr 15, 2016 | Our Blog
Content marketing is nothing new, and while it’s going to evolve into new formats and platforms throughout 2016, as it always does, but it’s definitely not going anywhere. If anything, more and more people will jump on board, especially as more traditional ad formats continue to fall short or become exorbitantly expensive.
People don’t like to be sold to, and the techniques, which used to be secrets within advertising circles are now common knowledge, meaning that most people are savvy to ad techniques and ignore them all but completely. That said, just ‘doing’ content marketing is not going to get you very far. In fact, the number of blogs out there with tens or even hundreds of posts but which still have zero engagement is astonishing. The reason for this is that people love to jump on the bandwagon of content marketing, but very few take the time to learn how to do it well. If you want to know how people get hundreds of shares on their blog posts and drive real traffic, well, look no further:
1) Do it better than anyone else has
There’s a technique in content marketing coined by Brian Dean called the Skyscraper Technique. The idea is to find a topic someone else has written a good article on and which has been shared around a lot, and then write something even better. Like, really dig into it. If they wrote 7 tips on how to market on Instagram, you article has 52. The main reason people don’t take this approach is that they are lazy, or they don’t feel they have the time, but here’s a secret: Creating 14 daily blog posts will lose out to one blog post that took 14 days to create, every time. It’s simply a matter of being honest about what is good enough to be shared. If it doesn’t blow you away, it’s not going to do it to anyone else, either.
2) Promote even more than you write
Once you got an epic piece of content, your job is far from over. In fact, many people recommend spending as much as two times as much time on the sharing and promoting of your blog post than you do on actually writing it. All of a sudden, you’re only writing one blog post per month, but it’s performing better and getting you more traffic than if you’d written several fire-and-forget pieces. People don’t just find great content, especially when you’re starting out, so you have to do everything you can to put it in front of their face.
3) Reach out to those who care (and who matter)
Once you’ve got your blog post out in the world, get a hold of experts and those who have a following and who might be interested, and ask if they might be willing to share with their social channels. Now, here’s the kicker: Make sure there’s something in it for them. Working with influencers in your market is about leverage, so if that means you have to offer some free services or skillsets in exchange for a tweet, so be it.
All of this is to say that if you want to have content that performs better than average, you’ve got to be willing to put in better than average time and effort… and that’s just true of anything, isn’t it?
by seller_bot | Mar 30, 2016 | Our Blog
Content marketing is nothing new, and while it's going to evolve into new formats and platforms throughout 2016, as it always does, but it's definitely not going anywhere. If anything, more and more people will jump on board, especially as more traditional ad formats continue to fall short or become exorbitantly expensive.
People don't like to be sold to, and the techniques, which used to be secrets within advertising circles are now common knowledge, meaning that most people are savvy to ad techniques and ignore them all but completely. That said, just 'doing' content marketing is not going to get you very far. In fact, the number of blogs out there with tens or even hundreds of posts but which still have zero engagement is astonishing. The reason for this is that people love to jump on the bandwagon of content marketing, but very few take the time to learn how to do it well. If you want to know how people get hundreds of shares on their blog posts and drive real traffic, well, look no further:
1) Do it better than anyone else has
There's a technique in content marketing coined by Brian Dean called the Skyscraper Technique. The idea is to find a topic someone else has written a good article on and which has been shared around a lot, and then write something even better. Like, really dig into it. If they wrote 7 tips on how to market on Instagram, you article has 52. The main reason people don't take this approach is that they are lazy, or they don't feel they have the time, but here's a secret: Creating 14 daily blog posts will lose out to one blog post that took 14 days to create, every time. It's simply a matter of being honest about what is good enough to be shared. If it doesn't blow you away, it's not going to do it to anyone else, either.
2) Promote even more than you write
Once you got an epic piece of content, your job is far from over. In fact, many people recommend spending as much as two times as much time on the sharing and promoting of your blog post than you do on actually writing it. All of a sudden, you're only writing one blog post per month, but it's performing better and getting you more traffic than if you'd written several fire-and-forget pieces. People don't just find great content, especially when you're starting out, so you have to do everything you can to put it in front of their face.
3) Reach out to those who care (and who matter)
Once you've got your blog post out in the world, get a hold of experts and those who have a following and who might be interested, and ask if they might be willing to share with their social channels. Now, here's the kicker: Make sure there's something in it for them. Working with influencers in your market is about leverage, so if that means you have to offer some free services or skillsets in exchange for a tweet, so be it.
All of this is to say that if you want to have content that performs better than average, you've got to be willing to put in better than average time and effort and that's just true of anything, isn't it?
