Saturday, January 31, 2015
Heat and Solar Energy
How to Learn to Code for Free! Plus 9 Other Top Performing Posts in January 2015
Has anyone else already broken their New Year’s Resolution or is that just me? Oh well, the WordStream blog has continued to thrive so we’ll just pretend that makes up for the missed yoga classes and diet regime where I ended up at Chipotle “by accident.”
Image from Flickr
Next year, I say we all agree to make a resolution to no longer make resolutions because who really sticks to these nonsense, unrealistic life-changes anyhow?
January’s been a busy month! Between battling blizzards and planning Super Bowl parties, who has time to keep up with the WordStream blog? No need to worry! I’ve outlined the top performing WordStream blog posts in the month of January:
#1: 7 Places to Learn to Code – for Free!
WordStream founder and CTO, Larry Kim’s, seven free resources on how to learn to code free of charge tops the list! Larry declares his degree in electrical engineering and ability to comfortably code to be his biggest competitive advantage over his undeniably successful 10-year internet marketing career. So are you up for the challenge? Use these free resources to learn the skills of coding and get a step ahead in your professional career in 2015.
#2: The Complete Guide to PPC for Startup Marketing: 9 Tips to Grow a Startup with Paid Search
This post (by yours truly) goes in-depth into specific PPC tactics startup marketers can use to kill it at paid search. Working for a startup isn’t all that it is cracked out to be. Startup marketers face unique challenges like stretched bandwidth and limited resources, so how does one make time to maintain profitable paid search campaigns? I spoke with some local Google-glass wearing startup marketers (including my sister) to gain insight on successful PPC tactics for startups to grow their businesses with limited budgets.
#3: 6 Strategies to Add to Your Social Media Marketing Plan for 2015
The average person spends 4 years of their life looking down at their cell phone! Shocking, or is it? In this post I detailed 6 strategies that will take your social media marketing plan to the next level in 2015. This is the new and improved version of my 2014 social media marketing strategies post so check it out and implement these tips because I’m beyond confident that your target audience spends a large chunk of their day (and life) on social media.
#4: 25 Restaurant Marketing Ideas: Tips & Strategies to Win in the Food Business
Are you a restaurant owner? Or just a foodie curious about marketing? In this post, Megan Marrs, provides 25 creative restaurant marketing ideas to help your business intrigue the stomach growling winers and diners searching for their next favorite eatery. Everything from becoming an Insta-ham to building your restaurant’s brand identify, these tips will ensure that reservations will need to be made several weeks in advance!
#5: 15 Tips for Filming and Editing Marketing Videos
WordStream’s blogging guru, Dan Shewan, has taken a step back from the large quantity of posts he typically writes each month to focus on other forms of content. Dan fans, do not worry! He will still be writing witty and informative posts for WordStream’s blog, but is now focusing a larger portion of his time on a new form of content – videos. Who doesn’t love a great video? But producing a video can be quite intimating. Check out Dan’s 15 tips to edit and produce quality marketing videos.
#6: The Do’s and Don’ts of Retargeting Ads: Top 3 Tips to Optimize Your Retargeting Campaigns
Retargeting, cool or creepy? WordStream’s, Navah Fuchs, dives into the three ways to take your retargeting campaigns to the next level. The goal of retargeting ads is to ensure long-term customer engagement, retention, and repeat purchases so use these tips to do just that with your stalking, I mean retargeting, efforts.
#7: 10 Instagram Marketing Tips to Make People <3 Your Brand
As my personal favorite social media platform, I couldn’t resist writing an Instagram themed post. I’m truly addicted to the social app and for good reason. They recently reached 300 million users, surpassing their older cousin Twitter! But how can marketers stand out on this platform? I’ve outlined 10 tips to make people fall in Insta-love with your brand, with lots of visual examples from brands that I <3.
#8: The Content Marketing Expert Guide to Analytics & Metrics
What’s the best way to measure the effectiveness of your content? In this post, Larry outlines tips for the experts that will help you learn how to quantify the success of your content. These measurement insights, formulas, and valuable resources are sure to get your content analysis on an accurate and insightful track.
#9: The Internet of Things Is Already Here – and There’s Nothing You Can Do About It
Another fascinating post by Dan Shewan – the Internet of Things; “a world in which all manner of devices, from smartphones and tables to refrigerators and thermostats, can share data freely among themselves via the Internet and offer us unprecedented control over our surroundings.” Is that mind-blowing or what? As Dan reminds readers, the Internet of Things has been around for years, but Dan dives into why search marketers should be paying closer attention now more than ever before.
#10: 4 Email Marketing Mistakes that Make Your Members Hit ‘Unsubscribe’
The dreaded “Unsubscribe” click! This is something all marketers are constantly trying to steer their leads away from. WordStream’s, Elisa Gabbert, provides four major faux-pas that companies are making in their email marketing campaigns followed by how these mistakes can be fixed to avoid clicking that dreaded unsubscribe button.
About the Author:
Margot is a Content Marketing Specialist at WordStream with a background in PPC, SEM, content and digital marketing. She enjoys running and eating ice cream during her free time (not simultaneous although that would be impressive). Follow her on:
Twitter: @ChappyMargot
Google+: +Margot da Cunha
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/margot-da-cunha/30/3a7/14b
6 Productivity Hacks For Content Marketers #socialtoolkit
Friday, January 30, 2015
The Beginner’s Guide to Podcasting
How Gail Goodman Optimized Constant Contact’s Funnel To Build the $1 Billion Email Marketing Empire
Thursday, January 29, 2015
A Marketing Process That Built Two 7-Figure Companies in Three Years
Imgur Releases A Fast Video-To-GIF Converter
Here’s an embarrassing secret: Before today, I’d never made a GIF.
I mean, obviously I’ve seen them, laughed when they’ve been passed along, and made a note so that I could share them myself later. I’ve even searched for them once or twice on Giphy. Read MoreWednesday, January 28, 2015
6 Steps to Ramp Up Trigger Marketing
Are you in the "old habit" of aligning customer communications solely around your marketing calendar, product launches, and company events? Are you finding that’s not really working for you anymore? That’s probably because customers today have high expectations from the companies they engage with. It’s the era of buyer-centric digital marketing. Customers expect us to know who they are, understand their challenges as much as their goals, and anticipate their future needs. And when we engage with them, they want us to interact on a personal level that is responsive, highly relevant, and consistent across all channels. To be honest, the customer has every reason to expect this from us. In today’s digital world, companies have access to the tools, data, and skills required to create a highly personalized digital experience.
One modern marketing tactic, which puts the customer in the center of the digital experience and harnesses the power of marketing automation, is triggered programs. Triggered programs are based on a customer’s profile data, preferences and digital body language. They engage with the customer, when the customer is ready to engage and help to increase the speed in which he/she moves through the customer lifecycle.
"Old habits die hard," sings Mick Jagger, but don’t worry, getting started with triggered programs and becoming a "trigger happy" marketer is much easier than you think.
Here are 6 simple steps to help get you started with triggered programs:
Step 1: Define and map out your customer’s lifecycle. Assess all the different stages that your customer goes through when making a purchase, such as identifying the need, conducting research, purchasing the product or service, and so on.
Step 2: Identify opportunities to implement triggered communications at every stage of the journey. You want to create programs that give your customers the right information at the right time so that you can help move them through the customer lifecycle. Determine which type of email communications you can build into your automated triggered programs that will align with your customer’s lifecycle stages identified in step 1.
Need some ideas to get started? MarketingSherpa created a list of the most common types of B2B and B2C triggered email programs:
Top 10 B2B triggered email programs
1. Thanks
2. Welcome
3. Transactional
4. Post-purchase
5. Triggered based on website behavior
6. Activation
7. Up sell/cross-promotional
8. Date triggered
9. Event countdown
10. Win-back/re-engagement
Top 10 B2C triggered email programs
1. Welcome
2. Transactional
3. Thanks
4. Up sell/cross-promotional
5. Activation
6. Date triggered
7. Post-purchase
8. Triggered based on website behavior
9. Event countdown
10. Win-back/re-engagement
Step 3: Prioritize your triggered programs in order of their importance. While there are seemingly endless opportunities to create triggered programs, you will need to prioritize them based on the biggest impact they have on revenue, profits, and customer loyalty. If you are new to marketing automation, consider starting with a simple triggered campaign, like a welcome nurture program.
Step 4: Design your trigger program. Define the goal of your trigger program and what success looks like. Start mapping out the message flow and define trigger rules based on the data available. Conduct a content audit and be sure to include only content types and communication channels that are relevant to your audience. Modify the campaign flow based on the contacts tracked behavior and engagement with your content.
Step 5: Establish communications rules. When you have multiple trigger and nurture programs in place, you want to make sure to establish communications rules, which determine the priority of different programs, as well as the frequency in which contacts can be emailed. You don't want a new prospect to enter your database and suddenly receive five emails within an hour. You will see how quickly the unsubscribe rate will sky rocket, if you don’t build rules around your communications architecture.
Step 6: Measure success and continuously optimize your trigger program. Define your success metrics. Some common ones include: unique click-through rates, active contacts and form conversion rates. Create a baseline which you will use to measure the success of your trigger program. Start tracking and analyzing the results from your trigger programs. Come up with a set of recommendations on how you could optimize your trigger program.
If you are just getting started with trigger programs, or want to further develop your knowledge on this topic, request to have the Engage Customers with Trigger-Based Programs Facilitated Discussion with a marketing advisor today! Oracle Marketing Cloud customers can check out our full menu of Facilitated Discussions!
Search Engines and Brands Now Most Trusted for News (and You Can Be, Too)
What happens when the largest generation of humans on the planet decide they just don't trust traditional media anymore?
They turn to Google.
Edelman's most recent Trust Barometer trust and credibility survey spells big trouble for mainstream media, which is now two percentage points less trusted by the general public than search engines as a source of news and general information. It's the first time mainstream media has fallen behind online search in Edelman's annual study.
The difference is greatest among millennials, 72% of whom prefer search engines as their most trusted source of information.
When it comes to business news, newspapers have declined sharply as a first source for information, a first source for breaking news, and even as a source for confirming or validating news. In fact, the only place traditional media is holding steady against search engines is with television, as a first source for breaking news.
Even then, you can see that people prefer to go online and verify the news they see breaking on TV:
So this is all fascinating, right? But what does it mean for businesses?
Your Customers Find Your Business Authors More Credible Than Journalists
According to Edelman, if a person uses your company or your products, they find your business authors more credible than journalists or even NGOs (non-profit agencies)!
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that things like this (headline from Mediaite) haven't helped mainstream media's credibility:
Or this, from The Guardian:
Or this example from just this week, which made all kinds of media look stupid for gleefully promoting an End of Days snowstorm, even going so far as to give it the name Juno (headline from Global News):
What is even happening with the news? That could be a book on its own, but the Coles notes version is this: decline of print, questionable news media ethics from the top down, hypercompetitive print advertising market in decline, yadda yadda.
What it means for you, dear marketer, is a massive opportunity to step in and offer readers a credible and more trustworthy alternative.
So Your Brand Wants to be a News Outlet…
If you aren't actively blogging and participating in a comprehensive content marketing strategy, you're missing out on a huge opportunity to get information in front of a receptive audience.
Edelman's study underscores the importance of current events coverage as part of your blogging strategy. Of course, you want to offer evergreen content, as well – this one blog post we published on email subject lines in March 2014 earned 200,000 visits by the end of the year. Optimize these helpful, informative and timeless posts for search engines and you'll enjoy a steady stream of traffic to them for years.
Adding news and current events on your business blog gives you fresh content to engage readers on a regular basis and also:
- furthers your brand's reputation as a trusted authority,
- shows topic and industry expertise,
- and enables you to appear in search engine and social search results for trending topics.
When you're blogging about current events, try to offer a unique perspective, advice, or commentary. This post, for example, was about a study that supposedly showed that Google AdWords don't work. Larry shared his opinion about it, but also offered readers tips to help them do better in their AdWords campaigns and avoid seeing the same results as eBay. It was something different and earned over 33,000 views, most in the week it was published!
Sharing your opinions and advice gives your brand content personality and helps your content stand out from mainstream media coverage. You want readers to come to appreciate your point of view.
Credibility in Brand Reporting is #1
The most important aspect of your brand-as-news-publisher strategy, of course, is winning and earning that reader trust. To do this, your content must be accurate. Fact-checking in mainstream media has dropped off big time in recent years as media outlets compete to break news in real-time, which is certainly a factor in their declining trust score.
You're probably not connected enough to have many "firsts," but you can always do better. Let them duke it out for the first tweet or sensational headline about a breaking news story and focus your efforts on building out a story people will actually want to read.
Here are a few other tips to help your brand capitalize on the brands-as-publishers trend and win readers for news stories without sacrificing trust:
- Keep your editorial efforts separate from marketing. Just as advertising and editorial were traditionally separate in mainstream media (though the lines have been blurred big time with native advertising), so too should brands establish an editorial team for news free of the influence of marketing. Your other content can be integrated with marketing, but avoid it with news.
- Always fact-check – always. Find multiple sources to verify information, but understand that sometimes, even that isn't enough. With the Blizzard 2015 story, for example, nearly every media outlet in the country echoed the doomsday predictions. It's easier to verify something that has already happened, so approach those speculative stories with extreme caution, lest you become part of the echo chamber.
- Don't edit after publication. People hate that. If you realize you made a mistake in your reporting, add an "Edited" note at the bottom of the article and explain your edit. Credibility is instantly shot if people realize you're changing your posts after publishing them.
- Learn how to cite sources. This applies for images as much as written text and quotes. Always explain where the information you're reporting came from and link back to the original source, where appropriate. Get your bloggers and blog editor familiar with either the Chicago Manual of Style or the APA version.
- Employ SEO best practices in all of your blog content. Is there any point in all of this work if you're not promoting your blog posts and optimizing them for search? Clearly, this is where people (especially millennials) are looking for information. Set yourself up to be there.
Becoming a trusted source of news is a great undertaking for brands, but the benefits can be massive. Incorporate news into your business blog schedule, even if you can only manage a post or two a month and gradually build from there. It's worth it!
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
5 Ways to Differentiate Your Marketing Content
Editor’s Note: Today’s post comes courtesy of Simon Jones, a vice president at Blanc & Otus, a communications agency headquartered in San Francisco, where he leads the development and execution of integrated communication programs for some of the world’s largest technology brands. He has managed teams in Europe and North America, led the integration of social media for B&O for the best part of a decade and is the architect behind B&O’s brand journalism program. Follow Simon on Twitter @mrjonesinsf. The following post originally appeared under the headline '"Don't be Content with Your Marketing Content" on the Blanc & Otus "Above the Fold" Blog.
It’s a cliché that I personally dread, but in 2014, content certainly made a strong claim to the marketing throne. It was as if everyone that worked in any flavor of marketing job suddenly thought, we need more content in our lives. We need to produce more. And we need to talk about it more.
One problem. A lot of that content was…well, how can I put this? Not exactly worth sharing. This thing is, with so much content being produced by so many people every minute of every day – the stats are kind of crazy – the bar for what constitutes “good content” keeps rising. Mark Schaefer’s Content Shock concept analyzed the situation perfectly in what must have been one of the most talked about pieces of content on content of the year. And that post was from January 6, 2014.
Despite the obvious diminishing margins of return, marketers still wanted more. It was the key to unlocking the value of social media. It would transform SEO. It would engage audiences in new and exciting ways. It was very cool stuff and like Oliver Twist, all you needed was more. Except that wasn’t really the case.
Marketing content had already been increasing like crazy for years. It was just 2014 when it seemed to become vogue. But instead of looking for simply more content, brands should have been looking at things a different way. After all, simply writing more newsletters, automating social media feeds, producing more infographics or launching more company blogs/magazines/YouTube channels/LinkedIn profiles/Facebook pages/carrier pigeon programs (well, that one might work) was never going to be more than a very short-term solution.
So as we enter another content-full year, I wanted to share some thoughts on how we are helping our clients differentiate their content storytelling:
1. Be Targeted: Funny how we often miss the most obvious things. And while I know the obligatory goal of any piece of content is to go “viral,” you haven’t got a hope in hell if you start by targeting the masses. All too often sweeping statements are used to describe target audiences – “IT decision makers” and “the C-Suite” are classics – when in reality, we need to really invest the time to understand exactly who we are hoping to talk with. What are they interested in at work? What are their interests outside of work? Where do they go to find information? Who do they trust? What makes them laugh? By answering those kinds of questions, you suddenly have a wealth of information to inform your storytelling.
2. Be Real: I was going to call this authentic, but that in itself felt a little fake. As if the aim of your content is to engage an audience in some way or another (in other words, the aim of 99.999% of all content marketing), then it has to be like a real conversation. That means the content won’t have marketing messages masquerading as stories. It could reference interesting data/insights your competitors have shared. It will be designed for the real world rather than your executive suite and it may not even refer to your company, product or service at all. Crazy? Maybe. Interesting, different and shareable? Definitely.
3. Go Visual: Simply put, a picture tells a thousand words. You can no longer afford to ignore video and other visual assets. In an increasingly mobile and social world where your story might have a solid five inches of real estate, they are now the price of admission. And don’t just think infographics. Think instead about the cool content you share with your friends – everything from gifs and Vine/Instagram videos to video-embedded content and video storytelling. A couple of great examples are GE’s cool #6secondscience and #GravityDay campaigns and the YouTube Rewind series.
4. Integrate It: Yes, it’s cheaper. Yes, it’s simpler. Yes, it’s faster. But just producing standalone pieces of content is, in most cases, a waste of time. Content now needs to not only integrate visual and written assets, but also be a fully integrated part of your social, SEO, PR and advertising strategies. Don’t just think in terms of “one-offs” and instead take a leaf out of the HBO or Showtime book and think of entire series. That gives your audience something they can rely on, a reason to come back. And what’s more, developing content should be a core part of your team’s skills, because with so much integration required, outsourcing content to separate departments or teams is counter intuitive at best.
5. Be Part of It: Don’t be the person that walks into the bar and immediately tries to change the conversation. Listen, watch, care, and ask. We have talked a lot about the power of the right question, but great content is about more than just that. It needs to be in the right voice, be relevant to popular culture, timely and something that people not only find helpful, but also enjoy. A tough ask, but we now have the listening and measurement tools that give us unprecedented insights into our audience’s likes and dislikes. By using that information correctly, content can be constantly fine-tuned.
That’s right. It’s a lot of work. But when we get it right, the payback is huge. And of course, telling a story that gets people talking is the really fun part about our jobs, and with all the changes that have taken place in PR, we now have more opportunity to do that than ever before. So rather than just focusing on “more” content in 2015, think bigger and look at how you can produce “different” content. It will lead to a very different year.
Is Snapchat about to become a publishing powerhouse?
For Snapchat, it isn't enough to have 100 million users sharing ephemeral photos every month. With Snapchat Discover, a long-awaited feature unveiled on Tuesday, the Los Angeles-based startup wants to be a hub for media content, too.
Snapchat Discover allows media companies to publish content to a new section of Snapchat. Staying true to the app's ephemeral nature, that media content disappears after 24 hours
What remains to be seen is whether reader interest will vanish that fast, too.
See also: Snapchat breaks into media with Discover
At launch, there are 10 partners: CNN, Cosmopolitan, the Daily Mail, ESPN, Food Network, National Geographic, People, Vice, Yahoo! News and Warner Music. Each partner currently publishes a batch of content called a "daily edition," averaging between 5 and 10 stories. Read more...
More about Media, Startups, Social Media, Apps Software, and MobileThe best of the blizzard in photos and Vines
An all-out blizzard has slammed the northeastern U.S. with a thick blanket of snow, and it just keeps getting worse.
More than 5,500 flights have already been canceled. Several states have put in place travel bans for the sake of safety. Even major transit systems like the MTA, MBTA and Amtrak have suspended their service for Tuesday. This storm is no joke.
But even so, there were souls brave enough to make the trek to parks, bridges and rooftops just to get that one solid capture. From slushy streets, to snowmen, to portraits under falling snowflakes, we curated our favorite photos and videos shared using the hashtag #MashaBlizzard. Read more...
More about Weather, Vine, Instagram, Snow, and Social MediaMonday, January 26, 2015
Facebook Censors Blasphemous Pages To Comply With Turkey’s Demand, But Won’t Publish It
When Google and Twitter receive legal threats from countries to censor controversial content or have their services shut down locally, they often publish them on ChillingEffects.org for transparency. But today when Facebook followed Turkey’s legal order to block Pages that defamed the Prophet Muhammad from Turkish users, it kept the demand private. Rather than get banned, Mark… Read MoreFacebook quietly rolled out a bare-bones app in emerging markets
While 1.6 billion people around the world take the latest and greatest smartphones for granted, many in emerging markets remain tethered to older devices.
That's likely why Facebook quietly rolled out Facebook Lite, a lightweight Android version of the full app, to eight countries last week. It isn't nearly as sleek, but it's not intended to be; on Google Play, Facebook plugs the app as being "efficient with data" and "designed for 3G networks and areas with limited network connectivity."
Case in point, Lite takes up less than 1 MB of space on phones, a fraction of the 27 MB the full app uses. Facebook rolled out the app in Bangladesh, Nepal, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and Zimbabwe. Read more...
More about Facebook, Smartphone, Facebook Lite, Developing Countries, and Social MediaTop 10 social media acquisitions of 2014
Sunday, January 25, 2015
What Marketers Need to Know About the Pinterest Update
With a projected valuation by investors at $5 billion, Pinterest, the image and discovery focused social media network, knew it was time to follow in the advertising footsteps of their older social network siblings and compete for marketers’ ad dollars. According to comscore, Pinterest has about 70 million active users who visit the social scrapbooking mecca at least once a month.
Over the past 9 months, Pinterest rolled out a beta advertising program to a few select brands to try on their new ‘Promoted Pin’ feature for fit. There has been a lot of marketing chatter following the brand's January 1st open invitation to all brands to participate in this evolving, but very promising advertising platform for consumer brand marketers, hopefully also luring even greater interest from investors.
The 411 on Promoted Pins
So how exactly do Promoted Pins work? You choose the pin you want to promote, select keywords, define your targeted audience, allocate your budget and select a start and end date to your campaign. “Pinterested” advertisers can add a tracking pixel to the promoted pin to narrow in on their target user, whether broad or geo-focused. Pinterest is naturally concerned in striking a balance between their loyal users who covet organic pins and these promo pins, cautious not to over-saturate, slowly eroding the “home-spun prideful” creativity and individuality at the heart of this still growing bulletin-board network.
Pinterest will try to ensure the quality of the promo feeds via a Smart-Feed algorithm that will analyze, sort, and score the highest quality pins to spoon feed the most valuable, visual appealing promo pins at the top of the users specially prepared “daily meal.”
Not much will change for pinners. These promoted pins aim to look like any other organic pin, but they are paid ads. The whole idea is for these promoted pins blend in with all the other organic content. Users will be able to tell whether they are looking at a promoted pin by small text at the bottom of each pin reading “promoted pin.”
So what does this mean for marketers?
Although results are limited from the select beta test group, brands using the Promoted Pin function saw roughly a 30% jump in earned media. Joanne Bradford, Head of Partnerships at Pinterest, says that these Promoted Pins performed just as well, if not better than regular organic pins. Pinterest embodies an evergreen platform, meaning pins are continually shared and last forever, unlike the standard news feed on other social media platforms. This type of landscape is beneficial for both Pinterest and marketers because these promoted pins have the potential to extend and perform even after a campaign ends.
Pinterest not only has great hopes for promo pins, but also has plans in the works for creating new brand ad platforms, all reliant on continuing to make all the right moves to fine tune their targeting abilities and stay focused on their loyal pinners. As one of the younger siblings in an elite social media family, Pinterest has the distinct advantage of learning from it’s older siblings like Facebook and Twitter what works and what doesn’t, what turns users on and more importantly, with pinners what turns then off. Joanne Bradford sums up the Pinterest mission to stay on track to build a scalable business for partner brands, “This year we’ll provide the best ads canvas with the most actionable insights to reach and engaged and passionate brand-centric audience.”
10 clever Snapchat puns you'll want to replay over and over
Some Snapchat creations are too funny to disappear into the ether.
We salute the savvy souls who saved this selection from deletion. You can get inspired to create your own funny, punny Snapchats with our list below.
Have you seen any other amusing Snapsterpieces that play on words? Any other hilarious puns worth sharing with the world? Let us know in the comments below.
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments. Read more...
More about Social Media, Features, Humor, Mobile, and PicsHeating Your Home With Solar, But Without Panels
With rising energy costs and massive stress on our electrical grids, solar is gaining in popularity. Not everyone realizes you can heat your home without buying big panel systems. Heating Your Home With Solar, But Without Panels – Gain You can use solar energy to heat your home through a concept known as gain. While ...
Saturday, January 24, 2015
Get Great Tips About Solar Energy From Experts Who Know!
Solar panel installation is a green solution. This is an investment that is important. You have to understand if it will fit into your budget. Continue reading to educate yourself about solar energy so that you can decide whether or not it’s the right choice for you. If you’re prepared to stick with the investment ...
Friday, January 23, 2015
Our year on Snapchat: A journey into telling 10-second stories
Ever since Mashable launched its Snapchat account last January, we’ve been doodling, exploring and experimenting with the ephemeral storytelling app.
We joined Snapchat to reach our audience in a new way, but we soon found that it's an extremely powerful tool for delivering visual stories. Snapchat is effective because the sharing process is simple and raw; with an estimated 100 million monthly active users, it has become a major player in the always-evolving world of social media.
We began with a plan to reconstruct content from our site in creative ways, cover live events and provide our followers with concise, original narratives. From tech reviews to longform features, communicating with our audience through Snapchat grew uniquely personal. Read more...
More about Startups, Social Media, Snapchat, and Snapchat StoriesDo Podcasters have to Blog? (FS089)
Thursday, January 22, 2015
Twitter Pleads With Power Users To Stop Using Instagram So Much
Twitter appears to be sending out a message to a group of very high-profile users suggesting that these users post photos directly to Twitter instead of sharing through Instagram. Mashable secured a screenshot of the prompt, which shows the aesthetic differences between sharing an Instagram link and posting a photo directly through Twitter. In 2012, Instagram shut off Twitter Cards… Read MoreWednesday, January 21, 2015
Twitter Officially Launches Its “While You Were Away” Recap Feature
Twitter’s “While You Were Away” feature, which helps you catch up on tweets that you missed, is officially launching on iOS today (with Android and web coming soon).
The company previewed the feature at its analyst day last fall and started rolling it out at the end of December. Read MoreFive Ways Twitter Analytics Can Make You A Better Marketer
Twitter caused quite the stir a few months back when it unveiled its long-awaited analytics platform. For hardcore tweeters, Twitter Analytics offers a tantalizing glimpse at data we’ve been dreaming about getting our hands on for eight long years.
If you’re anything like me, Twitter Analytics will soon become your latest obsession – I’ve spent hours poring over the wealth of data provided by Twitter Analytics, and it’s already changed the way I think about Twitter and how I leverage the power of Twitter in my social campaigns. In this post, I’ll give you a guided tour of Twitter Analytics and show you five actionable insights you can apply to your social and content strategies, so let’s dive right in!
1. Find Out How Many People Are REALLY Seeing Your Tweets
As you’d expect from an analytics tool, you can examine Impression data from within a specified date range by clicking on the date range button in the upper-right corner of the page. This setting defaults to the previous 28-day range, but has been set to December 12 – January 12 in this example:
Once you’ve set the date range, the Impression data timeline will adjust dynamically to display the data from the specified date range. You can also look at a month-by-month snapshot of your data by selecting the desired month from the list.
The Impressions data timeline is color-coded, with blue bars representing organic impressions and yellow representing paid impressions from ads, promoted tweets and the like.
Although this is a great start, Twitter Analytics restricts the maximum possible date range users can access to any given 91-day window. This could be frustrating to users who want to see large-scale changes in performance, particularly if they implemented major changes in their accounts. Still, for most users, the maximum 91-day period should be fine – but it’s something I hope Twitter will improve in the future.
2. Figure Out If Your Paid Promotions Are Worth the Money
As I was combing through my own data, I noticed that the effectiveness of my recent paid promotion experiments wasn’t as great as I thought it would be.
I’m not spending a lot on these experiments in paid promotions (around $100 per day or so), and I haven’t been running them for long, but as you can see from my Impressions data, my Promoted Tweets haven’t had a huge impact on the number of impressions. Sure, more people saw those tweets than probably would have if I hadn’t paid to promote them, but the impact isn’t all that great. This tells me I either need to spend more on promotion, or rethink which tweets I pay to promote (or both).
Obviously this might not be the case in your account, but it’s interesting that Twitter’s own data may result in advertisers being more discerning about their advertising spend. Hopefully, it’ll also make Twitter more transparent about the service’s viability as an advertising platform.
3. See How People Are Actually Engaging with Your Tweets
Twitter Analytics’ Engagements data is where things start to get tricky. Twitter considers all interactions with a tweet as engagement. This means that the single number presented in the tweet list format can be a little misleading, or at the very least, deserving of further investigation.
As you can see in the screenshot below, this tweet (of a photo I took during a recent visit to Google in Mountain View) received 141 engagements – but what does this mean?
To see the specific engagement metrics for an individual tweet, simply click on it. This will open a secondary window with the real data.
This is where you’ll see a detailed breakdown of your engagement metrics. As you can see, this tweet received 79 embedded media clicks, 33 link clicks, 9 Favorites, and 7 Retweets, among other interactions. This lets you quickly and easily see how your followers are interacting with your content. It’s great to see an at-a-glance number of the total “Engagements,” but this data is potentially much more useful!
Twitter Analytics doesn’t offer any engagement filtering options, meaning that – for now – we’re stuck with this aggregate total of all interactions as the benchmark for our engagement data. Hopefully this is a feature we’ll see in the future.
One thing that was immediately obvious to me was that tweets with images perform so much more strongly than those without. I’ve long suspected that this was the case, but I had no idea how much of a difference including images in your tweets can make.
Something else I noticed was that a lot of people will retweet without actually clicking on the link in a tweet. If you want to get a lot of retweets (and who doesn’t?), you have to create tweets that people are comfortable sharing without necessarily reading.
4. Experiment with Topic Engagement to Create Killer Content
Most content marketers limit themselves to using Twitter solely as a promotional tool. Don’t get me wrong – Twitter can be invaluable for promoting your best content, but it can also be used to gauge how well certain content will perform on social long before you sit down to write a full blog post.
Recently, I came across an interesting graphic and tweeted a link to it:
As you can see, Twitter Analytics helped me find the data about engagement for this particular tweet. Tweets with images always perform more strongly than those without them, but this one had an engagement rate of 8.0% - significantly higher than many of my other tweets.
With that in mind, I wrote up a piece focusing on the graphic for my column at Inc. magazine, which performed very well. It was shared thousands of times, whereas the average Inc. magazine article gets around 650 social shares.
Since it only takes a minute or two to compose and send a tweet, doing so and checking your Twitter Analytics data is a great way to identify new topic areas that really resonate with your following.
5. Learn More About Who’s Really Following You – A LOT More
With Twitter promising advertisers access to detailed demographic data, it should come as no surprise that Twitter Analytics’ audience data is among the platform’s most valuable and useful sections. To access it, click on “Followers” in the top menu.
This is where you can learn a great deal about the people who are following you.
At the top of this report, you’ll see a chart that plots your follower count over time (which is hopefully trending up, as mine is). Unlike the date range data in the Impressions report, your followers graph goes back much further. In this instance, the data being displayed begins on August 6 2012 until January 12 2015:
I’ve only really started using Twitter frequently in the past year or so. I always suspected that being more active on Twitter and engaging with other users would help increase my following, but I had no idea how fast my follower count would ramp up – it took me about six years to attract my first 8,000 followers, but I’ve picked up the remaining 29,000 or so in the past year!
Beneath the follower timeline graph is where the real action is. This is where you’ll find all sorts of demographic data on your followers, including interests, location, and the other types of Twitter users your followers are following.
As you can see, most of my followers are interested in marketing, located in the United States, and a sizable majority are male. It’s not really shocking that three of my top five cities are the country’s top hotspots for entrepreneurship, but I was a little surprised to see Philadelphia rounding out my top five. I guess the startup scene in the City of Brotherly Love needs more attention!
Winning @Twitter with Data
There are a lot of articles out there telling you the best time to tweet and the perfect type of tweet to encourage engagement, but if Twitter Analytics shows us anything, it’s that you should rely on your data, not somebody else’s aggregated interpretation. What works for someone else might not work for you. Take a long, hard look at what tweets are resonating with your audience and build on that. Do more of what works, less of what doesn’t, and your Twitter profile will become more engaging.
How are you using Twitter Analytics? I’d love to hear your tips and tricks!