Snapchat Has Raised $485 Million More From 23 Investors, At Valuation Of At Least $10B

 Back in the day, we reported that messaging app Snapchat* was raising over $100 million in a round led by Kleiner Perkins. And then the WSJ reported that it was $20 million, which left us wondering why a growth round would be so small in terms of total principle. Well, it turns out it’s not. Snapchat has raised a much bigger amount: Nearly $500 million in aggregate, according to an… Read More

Snapchat’s New Year’s Eve “Our Story” Will Be Its Biggest Yet

 Snapchat is preparing to launch its biggest “Our Story” feature yet this New Year’s Eve, documenting worldwide celebrations using curated user photos and videos from cities like New York, Dubai, St. Petersburg, Russia and more. The company says it expects to process hundreds of hours of footage to create this New Year’s Eve collaboration, which will be in the… Read More

The best photos and Vines you shared with us in 2014

There are many lenses through which to you can look back on 2014 — the year in pictures, in quotes, in news stories.

And then there's the art you shared with us.

Through each of Mashable's 38 photo challenges, 28 Vine challenges and two #MashMeets, we witnessed the immense artistic talent in our community. The responses we received for each challenge — from wilderness photography and faceless portraits to claymation and mini-movie remakes —were truly inspiring

See also: 7 biggest marketing and media trends of 2014

We’re especially thankful for our active followers and fellow collaborators on Instagram and Vine; we hit the 100,000 followers milestone on both platforms this year, and much of that credit goes to you Read more...

More about Photography, Instagram, Social Media, Mashable Photo Challenge, and Pics

Your hidden Facebook photos were never really hidden. This app finds them

Hiding photos on Facebook may not actually work as well as you think it does.

Picturebook, a browser extension now available in the Chrome web store, claims to allow you to "view hidden photos of anyone on Facebook"— even if you aren't friends with them

See also: How to find old Facebook posts

Sounds like a Facebook creeper's dream, right? But though Picturebook's description is technically true, it is also misleading

No app or browser extension — this one included — is able to change the privacy settings of someone else's photo. What Picturebook is really doing: surfacing photos that you could have seen anyway, even if a user tagged in them hid them from their timeline Read more...

More about Facebook, Social Media, Tech, Google Chrome, and Chrome Extensions

Wedgies.com Raises $700K For Its Social Media Polling Tools

 Polling startup Wedgies.com (yes, that’s really its name) is announcing that it has raised $700,000 in seed funding led by Greycroft Partners. Co-founder and CEO Porter Haney told me the company’s goal is to “legitimize web voting,” and its approach is to bring those polls to social media: “Think about what Gallup or SurveyMonkey would look like if they were… Read More

5 Ways to Create More Content Today

Throw a rock and you’ll hit a marketer talking about content marketing (please note that our Legal friends advise that you don’t try this at home). Much like social media has matured over the last five years, content marketing is still maturing and everyone is trying to understand and harness the power of useful, relevant, and valuable content.

The problem is, you will never have enough content. Ever. As our products and services change, so do our prospects and customers. You may have totally new personas to market towards in a year. The funnel may have an extra stage that needs content. The days of spray and pray marketing are over. We, as prospects, are too smart for that now. We want what we want. I don’t care what someone else wants. To that point, Nielsen recently found that 74% of customers are frustrated that web content doesn’t map to their interests. This is a problem for us as marketers.

If we aren’t the best teachers providing the most educational value, one of our competitors will step up and fill that need. That means they’ll get the business too.

Recently, Marcus and I joined up to do a webinar to walk through 10 ways you can create more content today to be the most helpful and effective teacher in your industry. That should be our goal as content marketers – provide relevant and valuable content to individuals. We’ve taken those ideas and stories and turned them into an ebook with more detail to help you create more content now. You don’t need a new hire or more budget, but hard work, some elbow grease and maybe a slightly different view of what content you should be creating.

Here is a recap:

1. Brainstorm with entire staff on questions they hear every day. “They Ask, You Answer”- Ask your friends in Sales, Support, Account Management and Marketing how many questions they get asked per day. Odds are – several dozen questions are answered every day. In many cases, the questions are answered in great detail since they usually involve a customer or a prospect. But, most of this happens on the phone or via email exchange and then you move on to the next one.

Have a brainstorm session with all of your colleagues and write down all of the questions they can recall answering. For each of these questions, you should create a piece of content. For most folks, this results in hundreds of blog posts from “content” that was happening every single day.

Marcus shared a great example from Des Williams who runs a lighting and landscaping company. After reading a blog post about this technique, he sat down and came up with 70 questions in less than an hour. Below is an actual picture of the end result. Assuming that Des and team answer one question per week on their blog, that gives them fresh, relevant content for almost a year and a half. This isn’t rocket science, but something that most of us never get around to doing.

2. Interview your colleagues and partners- While we’re on the topic of tapping into the expertise of your co-workers, another useful way to create more content is to interview them. Literally. Compile a list of questions (or take the resulting ones from the tip above) and let everyone pick what they’d like to answer. Set up a camera or book a videographer to join you in the office for a couple of hours. Invite a couple of partners to participate as well.

The end result will be some quality video content that can be used as is or edited to include whatever you’d like to add – intro, outro, links, etc. These videos are great content assets because you can use them on YouTube, Vimeo and your website. Take a little bit of time or spend a little bit of money and you can transcribe all of the answers and turn each into a text blog post with an embedded video. For a few hours of work, you’ll have a heap of content to use as you see fit.

Here’s an example of how Compendium, now part of the Oracle Marketing Cloud, did that. You can see a consistent background in the office and lots of folks chiming in on questions around content marketing. This happened in two hours.

Another way to do this is to have someone interview an expert on camera. You may have a colleague with deep expertise and knowledge that you can talk about instead of trying to have them type it out or write it down. Marcus helped The Hybrid Shop do this by interview extremely smart folks about hybrid vehicles and all of the questions around them. This results in a natural conversation that is very relevant for anyone considering buying a hybrid vehicle.

3. Have a Content Marketing Workshop- According to Content Marketing Institute, only 34% of CMOs feel like they have an effective content marketing strategy. 

The reason many companies have problems when it comes to this shared vision, culture and buy-in comes down to a lack of understanding of 3 essential questions:

▪What is content marketing?

▪How is it done effectively?

▪Why should each individual within the company be a part of it?

When it comes down to it, companies that take the time and effort to ensure their staff (content marketing participants) can clearly articulate the answers to these three questions will, in a very high percentage of the cases, experience exceptional results.

4. Interview your customers- We talked about interviewing your peers earlier, but don’t forget to tap into the advocates you already have – your customers. Depending on the study, most research shows that more than 70% of people online consult reviews or ratings before a purchase.

Giving your customers a platform to share their experience benefits everyone – your customer, your prospects, and you.

Find a way to get in a room with your most passionate customers and get out of the way. Let them talk. Ask questions. Understand how they use your product. What was the Sales process like? What results are they seeing? Why did they pick you?

There should be tons of questions you’d love to have answers to and this is the best way to get them. Build strong rapport with your advocates and find ways to help them too. Shorten the video as needed, post it on your site and video sharing sites, and include a link to their website (with their approval of course). You’ll be well on your way to providing valuable information to your prospects and further enhancing the experience of your customers.

5. Host your first company blogathon- One content exercise that Marcus encourages is a company blogathon. Think of it as an all hands on deck content creation session. They can be customized to fit each company and their goals, but let’s take a look at how Kirk Drake, CEO of Ongoing Operations structured and ran their first blogathon and see how it worked for his business.

Kirk took three steps towards creating more content with his entire company.

1. He had everyone brainstorm every question around the business. What have they been asked? What do they wish they knew? What makes them unique?
2. Questions were assigned to employees and they were each given 90 minutes per day to create content.
3. The team did that for three days, totaling 4.5 hours per employee.

Those three simple steps led to more than 100 quality blog posts. In less than one week enough content was created to publish two blog posts per week for the entire year. Customers and prospects of Ongoing Operations will now have new content to consume each week with answers to their most frequent questions.

When Kirk was asked how this impacted his business, it was rather monumental. By his estimates, this contributed $500,000 to $1,000,000 in year one.

Let’s recap…90 minutes per day per employee for three days led to almost $1,000,000 in revenue. This is something any company can do! Now go!

For more content inspiration tips, check out the Modern Marketing Essentials Guide to Content Marketing.

 

Twitter Experiments With Engagement Stats Directly In Tweets

 Want to know just how many people actually care about what you’re tweeting? A new Twitter experiment spotted by ex-Twitter platform head Ryan Sarver will show many you how users are clicking on the links in the updates you post, with a handy link directly in the expanded Tweet view in the iOS application. As usual with Twitter’s features, this is limited to a small sample pool of… Read More

How Well Do You Know Entrepreneurs? Take the Quiz to Find Out!

If you study business and entrepreneurship, you undoubtedly admire those who have reached the top. People like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Marissa Mayer, Mark Zuckerberg, and many others reached the echelon of the business ranks and created products that millions of people use everyday. They’ve put in the time, work, and have gone through the […]

12 beautifully eerie photos shot in the dark

A nighttime landscape, a winding road through fog, candlelit portraits and creatures crawling in the dark — these are the kinds of photos we saw in this week's Mashable Photo Challenge.

We asked you to photograph darkness, a theme that is fairly open-ended. Whether that meant spooky images taken on Halloween or surreal black and white shadow shots was entirely up to you

See also: In pictures, Halloween celebrations worldwide bring out ghosts and ghouls

Linnéa Wilhelmsson, an Instagram photographer from Gothenburg, Sweden, was our guest host

"I'm so impressed with the submissions," she said. "Some were really spot on with the theme, and captured something very thoughtful and mysterious." Read more...

More about Photography, Night, Halloween, Social Media, and Apps Software

5 Productivity Tips and Tools for Lazy Content Marketers

In the American workplace, few things are valued as highly, or pursued as aggressively, as productivity. On average, Americans work more hours than just about any other industrialized nation in the world. They spend more hours at the office, take fewer vacations, and even go to work when they’re sick.

For many, this isn’t a choice – it’s just what they have to do to survive. For some, however, the cult of productivity has become an all-powerful idol, and one that businesses all over the country fervently worship.

Work-related stress has become a badge of honor. Employees regularly boast of how early they come in, how late they stay, and how little vacation time they’ve used. Even in casual conversation, many Americans simply can’t help mentioning how hard they’re working.

Admit it – if you’re reading this at work, you’d probably rather be somewhere else, and that’s exactly how it should be. There’s more to life than work. This school of thought doesn’t mean you have a bad work ethic, it means that you see work as what it is – a means to an end.

If you’re a content marketer, you’re likely familiar with the pressures of life in the trenches, but in today’s post, I’m going to show you another way – several, actually – of doing things. Don’t get me wrong. I like my job, but as the old saying goes, I’d rather be fishing.  

The very definition of a “no-brainer.”

Here are some tips (and tools) that can help you get more done in the office so you can spend more time out of it.

Productivity Tip #1: Eliminate Distractions

It’s amazing how much you can get done if you stop procrastinating and actually sit down to work. I can usually write a 2,000-word blog post in a day. However, when you factor in constant distractions such as email, meetings, and the insidious temptation of internet browsing, writing a blog post can quickly become a task that spans several days, if not a week.

If you need to sit down and write something, sit down and write something. Don’t check your email. Keep meetings to a bare minimum. Resist the temptation to tweet about how productive you’re being. Just sit down and get it done.

The Tool to Help You Do It: RescueTime

If you really can’t stop checking the headlines or sneaking a peek at Twitter when you should be writing, give RescueTime a shot.

This software program tracks your computer usage and shows you exactly how you’re spending your time. It also offers optional features such as site blocking for specified periods of time, alerts, goal tracking, and other productivity tools.

Image via rescuetime.com

Before we go any further, it’s important to note that I’m not recommending you use RescueTime (or any similar programs) so you can become one of those insufferable people who need to account for every waking second of their day. As I said in the introduction, I want to show you how to get things done while you’re at work, not find new ways for you to stay late and get even more done.

Don’t lose sleep about how many minutes of work you “lost,” or what you could have accomplished in a given period of time – use RescueTime as a tool to get some work done so you can go out and enjoy your life when 5 p.m. rolls around.

Productivity Tip #2: Simplify Your Writing Environment

Wendell Berry is one of my all-time heroes. In addition to being an incredibly prolific and talented writer (with more than fifty books and counting to his name), Berry is a farmer and a passionate advocate for agriculture who still makes time to tend the fields of his farm in rural Kentucky every single day.

One thing Berry does not have in his Kentucky farmhouse, however, is a computer.

Although using a typewriter is impractical for content marketers, there’s a lot to be said for simplifying your writing environment. If you write using Google Drive, you’re only a tab away from a world of enticing distractions, whereas navigating the needless complexities of Microsoft Word can feel more like a punishment than anything else. However, you still need to actually write if you’re going to publish new content, so what can you do? Strip away everything that stands between you and your copy.

The Tool to Help You Do It: OmmWriter

Admittedly, when I first heard about OmmWriter, I was skeptical. However, after just a few days, I was sold. I personally don’t use this free program for every writing project, but when I need to make some serious headway, OmmWriter is awesome.

OmmWriter is a minimalist writing program that offers you the Zen-like peace of a completely unobtrusive interface. In fact, much of OmmWriter’s UI actually fades from view while you write, leaving you with just a calming background, a cursor, and an optional ambient soundtrack.

I find OmmWriter to be a great tool when drafting. I’ll often do the lion’s share of a rough draft in OmmWriter before taking it into another program for polishing and restructuring. It doesn’t support image insertion, hyperlinking, or other features you’d expect from a word processor, but it excels at removing obstacles between you and that all-important first draft.

Productivity Tip #3: Be Ruthlessly Organized

Nothing wastes more time – and thus pushes your deadline beyond the point of reason – faster than disorganization.

It’s GOT to be in here somewhere…

The longer you have to spend looking for research, links to relevant articles, or anything else, the longer it’s going to take you to finish your post/white paper/whatever. More time equals more work. This is great if you get paid by the hour, but if you’re salaried (or a freelancer), this is death. If you’re going to rock it as a content writer, you need to be great and fast.

The Tool to Help You Do It: Evernote Web Clipper

No blog post about productivity would be complete without a mention of Evernote. Specifically, I’d like to recommend the Web Clipper tool, which makes Evernote even more awesome.

 

For longer or more in-depth writing projects, Evernote’s Web Clipper is a blessing. It allows you to save literally anything you can find on the web – images, text, video, multimedia, .gifs of cats – into easily accessible bulletin boards for later review.

Web Clipper can be synchronized across multiple devices, so no more emailing links to yourself or hunting for that graph you saw but forgot to save. If you find and clip something on your desktop, you can access it from your phone and vice versa. You can also add a Web Clipper button to your web browser, allowing you to quickly and easily save everything you need for your next smash-hit content project.

Productivity Tip #4: Get in the Zone – and Stay There

You’ve probably experienced “the zone” – that peculiar state of hyperconcentration in which time seems to slow down and you get more done than you actually thought possible. It’s a magical place, and one that lame self-help productivity “gurus” are always talking about. However, finding the zone is one thing; staying in it is another thing entirely.

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man…

Getting – and staying – in the zone requires a certain atmosphere, namely one in which you can concentrate and eliminate the bustle of the environment around you. Unfortunately, with most modern offices being open plan (despite the seriously negative impact such environments can have on workers’ mental health), it’s hard to eliminate external distractions.

The Tool(s) to Help You Do It: Rainy Mood

First, get yourself a decent set of headphones, then fire up your laptop/word processor and keep Rainy Mood open in another (minimized) tab.

Rainy Mood is a website that plays a looped audio track of a heavy rain storm. This might not sound that exciting, but it’s remarkable how the simple sound of rain and the occasional rumble of thunder can drown out office noise. You can also set music to play in the background if the rain alone isn’t enough to block out the sounds of noisy coworkers – yeah, those guys.

Coffitivity

Not a fan of Rainy Mood? Prefer the background bustle of latte machines and the low murmur of conversation? Then check out Coffitivity, a similar site to Rainy Mood that offers you the (possibly) soothing ambient noise of a coffee shop.

Coffitivity has several settings to cater to different preferences. For example, you can specify the site to play the low-key hum of an early morning coffee shop, or the more boisterous background of a university coffee shop at lunch time. If you want to enjoy the atmosphere of your favorite coffee place without having to worry about your laptop being stolen while you go to the bathroom, Coffitivity might just be the answer.

Productivity Tip #5: Conquer Your To-Do List

Admit it – you’re terrible at multitasking.

Don’t worry, we all are. Several studies suggest that humans simply aren’t built for doing multiple things at once. Rather than beat yourself up over your limitations, embrace it and get on with your life by using a to-do list program.

The Tool(s) to Help You Do It: Todoist

Despite its terrible name, Todoist is one of the best list management applications on the market.

Available in both free and premium versions (Todoist premium has an annual subscription fee of $29), Todoist offers several excellent tools for keeping track of what you’ve got going on. It’s a cross-platform tool that integrates with virtually all the programs you need it to (even Mozilla’s aging email client Thunderbird), and can sync across multiple devices. Overall, a rock-solid to-do management app that can help you get more done in the office.

Any.do

Although Todoist is robust and fully featured, it might have a little too much going on for the minimalists out there. If you’d rather use a free app without all the bells and whistles, check out Any.do.

I use Any.do all the time, and it meets my needs perfectly. Add tasks, set reminders and flag items by importance, then simply swipe across each task to strike it through and mark it done (and then experience the immense satisfaction of a complete to-do list). What more do you need?

Taking Care of Business

These days, we’re all working harder, for longer – but it doesn’t have to be that way. Hopefully, these tips and tools have given you some ideas on how to get more done in the office so you can spend more time with the people you care about, doing what you really love.

If you’ve got any suggestions on how you can be more productive at the office, let me know in the comments. I’m always looking for ways to get more done – when I’m at work.

Reform Your Content Marketing

Halloween may be over but the season of the witch, if you will, lives on. And it is in this season where many marketers, be they B2C or B2B fall prey to the deadly sins of content marketing.

Fear not marketers for we are here to help guide you from this dark side where deadly sins abound. In our new eBook, The 7 1/2 Deadly Sins of Content Marketing (And How To Avoid Them), we illustrate each deadly sin along with a remedy to cure them as well.

In our post last week, we talked about the first three of these deadly sins of content marketing:

1. Making It All About You. The focus should be always on your customer. Quite simply they do not care about you, they care about what you and your product or service, etc. can do for them.

2. Not Adhering To The N.A.S. Doctrine. AKA the Not Always Selling Doctrine. In other words resist the temptation to try and sell something via every single marketing communication you have with your customer or prospect.

3. Wrong Church, Wrong Pew. Do you know your customers and prospects? I mean really know them? Or are you basically shooting blind, hoping for the best? Those of us in the real world know that far too many brands and businesses simply do not know who their customers are and therefore cannot target them in the first place with their content marketing strategies.

Today we'll discuss sins 4 through 6:

4. Forgetting The 3Rs Of Content Marketing. Never mind Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic, far too many brands big and small forget to repurpose, reuse, and recycle content.

5. Failing To Plan. If you fail to plan you plan to fail. It can't be any easier than that, right? So why do so many marketers fail to create a content marketing plan?

6. On The Wrong Track.You track every other marketing campaign. So why would content marketing be any different? Establish your goals then track and measure your content marketing efforts to ensure you’re meeting or exceeding those goals.

Stop the Sinning Now!
Regardless of how many of the deadly sins of content marketing you have been committing, you can be reformed by downloading The 7 1/2 Deadly Sins of Content Marketing (And How To Avoid Them) today. 

How Much Would You Pay For An “Undo” Button On Tinder?

 Tinder is moving forward with a testing plan for Tinder Plus, a new paid version of the app that brings premium features to users and finally starts a revenue stream for the growing IAC-owned dating company. With the paid version, users will have access to two new central features of the app, Undo and Passport. Undo lets people go back on the person they just swiped left on, a highly common… Read More

5 Easy Google Analytics Reports to Help You Increase Conversions

Google Analytics is a powerful ally in boosting your conversion rate. A lot of conversion rate optimization strategies begin with user testing and serving variations of the same web page to a relatively small subset of visitors. That’s like a doctor prescribing medicine before making a diagnosis. You need to find the problems that are […]

Six Ways Target Could Respond to the #AlexFromTarget Trend

Imagine that you’re a typical high schooler. You throw on your red team t-shirt and khakis and go to work on a Sunday like any other teen in America. You’d like to maybe get enough gas money to go out and be a clown on Friday night with the rest of your friends. You come […]

Tip: The Secret Sauce of Instagram Hashtags

Last week, the team from Piqora joined us at the Social Fresh Conference to discuss marketing on Instagram and Pinterest. During their presentation, they shared a stat about Instagram hashtags that surprised and intrigued me:

12 tips to dominate National Novel Writing Month

November is for writers

No, that's not another lame T-shirt slogan (though, maybe it should be). November is National Novel Writing Month, wherein eager writers aim to author 50,000-word novels between Nov. 1 and midnight on Nov. 30

See also: 10 Pro Tips for Writers Using Social Media

Using the NaNoWriMo site, participants can track their daily writing goals, earn badges when they meet word counts and broadcast progress. But the social movement has expanded beyond the nonprofit's online community. Thousands of people contribute to the #NaNoWriMo hashtag every day, charting their progress and looking for tips from other writers — though we see a lot of procrastinating, too. (You know who you are.) Read more...

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Mashies tickets are officially sold out

With just 24 hours to go, tickets to tomorrow night's 2014 Mashies at Gotham Hall in New York City are officially sold out.

We'll be revealing the year’s most outstanding examples of digital media in more than 20 categories, from Best Branded Facebook Page to Best Viral Video.

The event, which will be hosted by comedians Jake Hurwitz and Amir Blumenfeld, will also feature special guests, surprise entertainment and more.

Didn’t get your ticket in time? We'll be using the event app Topi to showcase the work of the Mashies finalists and to provide networking opportunities at the event. You can use this app to check out the winning campaigns, even if you can't attend the Mashies in person. Download Topi for iOS or Android, and enter code "MASHIES" to get started. Read more...

More about Marketing, Media, Social Media, Mashies, and Mashies 2014

How A/B Testing Works (for Non-Mathematicians)

A/B testing is a great way to determine which variation of a marketing message will improve conversion rates (and therefore likely improve sales and revenue). Many of you use A/B testing already, but you may need some help understanding what all the results mean. My goal here is to explain the numbers associated with A/B […]

Should You Repost Your Blog Content on Other Websites? A Data-Driven Answer

You spend hours, if not days, writing a great blog post. The last thing you want is for it not to be seen, right? So, what do you do to ensure it gets seen? You share it on your social media profiles, tell a few friends to promote it and then repost the exact same  [click to continue...]

3 Case Studies Profiled at Social Fresh West

Social Fresh West 2014, billed as the “secret weapon for social media success,” wrapped up in sunny San Diego last week. This much anticipated conference brought together some of the brightest marketing professionals, thought leaders, and trendsetters in the social media space.

The presentations were intentionally brief, focused and engaging, featuring marketing and media experts like Elani Tavantzis of Lilly Pulitzer and Oracle Marketing Cloud’s own content and social media director, Chris Moody. 

A common theme that emerged throughout this two-day gathering was how important it is to constantly listen to your own customers, rather than just follow the best practices or rush to adapt the “latest/greatest” new practices.  To build your business and enhance your brand, you have to simply listen to and customize to your customer. 

As social media marketers, we are challenged daily between following what we know as “best practices” in our industry vs. what would be best for our customers and for our brand. So how do marketers find what’s best for their brand? One answer: social listening.

Here are three case study examples profiled at the conference for their social best practice takeaways:

HP and the Power of Social Listening
One of the speakers who embraced the power of social listening was Paula Berg, digital media manager at Hewlett-Packard. She followed the words of her leader, CEO Meg Whitman:  “Good strategy is as much the art of exclusion, as it is inclusion.”

Berg decided to turn directly to their customers to ask what and how they wanted to be “fed.” The answers she got were contrary to known best practices for social media, the daily feeding schedule of posts. HP customers were most concerned with the steady cadence of posts. They clearly stated that they didn’t want or need to hear from them everyday.  Rather, they wanted their content all at once, condensed and concise.

HP created their own online magazine, Hpmatter.com, where customers could turn to once a month to get their dose of content.   

Berg noted: You are your own brand expert in addition to these takeaways:

1. Strategy is as much about inclusion as it is exclusion.

2. Your audience isn’t average.

3. Nobody knows your business as well as you do.

4. Ask your customers if you need to.  Listen carefully.

TV Land Learns Social Listening Lessons via Trial & Error
Sue Funke, social media brand manager at TV Land, faced a similar problem – what do you do when what is known to be the tried and true best social media practice gains no traction or engagement?

TV Land tried posting a still frame photo from one of their shows each day on Facebook and saw zero or negative engagement. They tried a variety of content scenarios with relatively low or negative engagement on both Facebook and Pinterest. They listened to their own customers and decided to try posts of lyrics to TV theme songs or popular songs from the show era.  The results were incredibly positive. For Pinterest, they created images with quotes from the scripts of their shows and saw improved engagement. 

Funke and her team learned through trial and error what their customers wanted to see that triggered their social engagement. Listening to your customer and not going with traditional wisdom of proven practices in the social media and marketing space is invaluable. What floats the boat of customers for one business or brand doesn’t work for everyone in the social media sphere.  Sometimes posting a fun photo simply isn’t enough – you have to be able to connect with your customers.

Arby’s Uses Social Media to Listen to their customers for Ad strategy  

Josh Martin, the director of digital and social media at Arby’s, relayed similar experiences about the power of listening to your customer through the real time interaction social media provides. 

Through social media, the Arby’s team noticed their customers talking about loving their sauces.  By providing this real time customer feedback to product development and the brand marketing team, the “Saucepocalypse” campaign was born.  Several posters were created that told stories of the apocalyptic impact on people not having their sauce. 

Arby’s had a repeat experience in picking up similar comments through social media about meats other than roast beef.  This valuable feedback came from their own customers when they launched their “Meat Mountain” campaign poster showing all different meats other than roast beef. Their customers mistakenly thought it was a new sandwich and through social media, indicated they were anxious to try it. Thus the birth of Arby’s new $10 Meat Mountain sandwich. 

For more takeaways from Social Fresh, follow the event discussion on Twitter with the hashtag #SocialFresh. How are you actively implementing your social media listening into your engagement plans?