Where Does Blogging Fit Into Your Content Marketing Strategy?

If you’re in marketing, you know two of the largest buzzwords in recent years are “content marketing” and “blogging.” But how do you develop a content marketing strategy and where does blogging fit into that plan? Read on to find out.

Before you begin, it’s important to get the basics down first. Companies may define aspects of their content marketing strategy differently, but the concept is generally the same:

1. Set content marketing S.M.A.R.T. goals. Don’t dream about your goals, put a plan in place to achieve them. To ensure you stay on track, make your goals specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely.
2. Define your buyer personas. As defined by HubSpot, a buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based off research and data from your company’s current customers. The better you know your persona, the more successful you’ll be in your content marketing efforts.
3. Decide which type of content works best for your business. Based of your buyer persona(s), decide which content will resonate best with them like blogging, ebooks, white papers, podcasts, etc.
4. Create an editorial calendar. Once you have the type of content you want to create, it’s imperative you put a plan of attack in place to develop and promote this content. Scheduling plans out at least 90 days in advance will help to ensure you’re on track.
5. Market your marketing. What good is your amazing content if nobody knows about it? Get it into the hands of your buyer personas through social media, email, blog (SEO efforts), and so on.
6. Measure your results. The beauty of digital marketing is that it’s so easy to monitor your results. Keep an eye on your analytics and base your efforts moving forward on those results. See what works and what doesn’t and optimize from there.

So where does blogging fit into this content marketing strategy? You’ll find that no matter what your business is, blogging will work well for your company! Blogging should be used as an awareness-stage piece of content that educates your audience and answers questions and pain points they may have. Blogging contributes significantly to your content marketing strategy by providing the following benefits:

1. It helps to drive traffic to your website. Every time you write a new blog post you’re adding another indexed page to your site, which Google and other search engines love! It proves your website is active. Each page you add gives you another chance to be found in search results (which is how most people look for content these days).
2. Blogging can get you discovered on social media. If you create great content on your blog, people will want to share it via social media (you should share it on social as well to your personas). The more people share, the more visits you’ll get, and the more it will help your SEO results.
3. Blogging increases conversion. How you may ask? You can add lead-generating CTAs to your blog posts that direct to landing pages with relevant content and offers your visitors can convert on. The more blogs you have, the more people will see you CTAs, which increases the odds of conversion. More site visits and more leads? Blogging is a win-win.
4. Blogging establishes authority. If your answering common questions and solving your persona’s pain points in your blogs, people will start to look at you as a leader in the industry and will begin to trust your company. The more a person trusts your company, the more likely they’ll be to turn into a customer someday.

Blogging is a no-brainer when it comes to your content marketing strategy and fit’s into your plan from the beginning. No company is too small to not blog and no company is too large. How has blogging helped with your content marketing strategy?

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Could Facebook be a factor in the next election?

Studies in America suggest that the social networking site has the tools to 
influence voter turnout

There are two things about 2015 of which one can be reasonably certain: there will be a general election in May and it’s unlikely to produce an overall majority for either of the two big parties. In those circumstances, small, localised events might have big implications: a Ukip candidate shoots his mouth off about, er, non-white people; a Labour candidate turns out to have an embarrassing past; a Tory garagiste cannot differentiate between sexual harassment and bum pinching. The kind of stuff, in other words, that could affect the outcome in a finely balanced constituency.

Which brings us to social media and the question of whether the 2015 general election could be the first one in which the outcome is affected by what goes on there. Could Facebook, for example, be a factor in determining the outcome of some local constituency battles?

Far-fetched? Maybe. But the question is worth asking because in the 2010 US congressional elections, Facebook conducted an interesting experiment in social engineering, which made some of us sit up. The company collaborated with some political scientists to see if a social network could persuade apathetic American voters to get off their butts and vote. And the answer was yes.

The methodology used was simple enough. Sixty-one million Facebook users were shown an icon containing a link for looking up polling stations, an “I voted” button to click to announce they had voted, and the profile pictures of up to six of their Facebook friends who had indicated they’d already done the same. The icon and button were inserted in the newsfeeds of tens of millions of users, while others were shown either a generic get-out-the-vote exhortation or no message at all. Then the researchers cross-referenced their subjects’ names with the day’s actual voting records from precincts across the country to measure how much the Facebook voting prompt actually increased turnout.

The Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain summarised the findings thus: “Overall, users notified of their friends’ voting were 0.39% more likely to vote than those in the control group, and any resulting decisions to cast a ballot also appeared to ripple to the behaviour of close Facebook friends, even if those people hadn’t received the original message. That small increase in turnout rates amounted to a lot of new votes. The researchers concluded that their Facebook graphic directly mobilised 60,000 voters, and, thanks to the ripple effect, ultimately caused an additional 340,000 votes to be cast that day. As they point out, [in 2000] George W Bush won Florida, and thus the presidency, by 537 votes – fewer than 0.01% of the votes cast in that state.”

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In itself, the experiment was innocuous: after all, in a democracy encouraging people to vote can only be a good thing. But Facebook is a big data company and what such companies do is experiment on their users all the time. Most Facebook users probably have no idea that what appears on their newsfeeds is determined by algorithms, which are constantly making guesses about what they might want to see – and determining what Facebook wants them to see.

So far, so unremarkable: that’s the manipulative reality of social networking services. What’s more interesting is that some of these ongoing user “experiments” may have emotional or political dimensions. In one such study, for example, an experiment involving 660,000 Facebook users showed that “emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness”. It provided “experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion is sufficient) and in the complete absence of non-verbal cues”.

So Facebook can influence the emotions of its users. Could it also influence their interest in politics? Micah L Sifry, the co-founder of Personal Democracy Media,reports that in the months leading up to election day in 2012, Facebook made a change to the newsfeeds of 1.9 million users in order to see whether it could influence those users to become more interested in political activity: it did this by increasing the number of hard news items that appeared at the top of a user’s newsfeed. The results were a “statistically significant” increase in the amount of attention users paid to government-related news.

None of this amounts to any kind of smoking gun. But, given that social media clearly influence behaviour in many other areas of life, it seems implausible to imagine that when it comes to politics, they don’t have any impact. Which means they now wield power of an unaccountable kind. In an election period, we fiercely regulate broadcasters’ coverage of the campaign to ensure “balance” and “fairness”. Should we now do the same for Facebook? More importantly, could we?

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Pinterest Interests: What Marketers Need to Know

Do you need an easy way to find new content to pin?

Would you like to see pins from people other than those you follow?

Finding good content to repin has always been crucial for Pinterest success. The solution is to follow interests on Pinterest.

In this article I’ll explain how to find and use Pinterest interests to improve visibility and engagement.

Why Explore Interests?

One drawback for many businesses on Pinterest is that there are only 32 specific and 6 broad categories available to search for pins.

Businesses whose products or services don’t neatly fit into one of these categories have to do additional searching on Pinterest to find relevant pins to share with their followers and new boards to follow.

The answer is to follow interests, and the pins come to you.

Interests are collections of pins about a specific niche topic from a bunch of people who aren’t necessarily following each other. Interests can be followed just like boards and accounts, and once you follow an interest, you begin to see pins related to that specific topic in your own feed.

#1: Find and Follow Interests

The option to Explore interests used to be included in the menu by the search bar, but is now gone. Here’s how you can locate interests today.

Explore Interests on a Desktop

At the time of writing this article, it’s not possible to search for Pinterest interests on your computer. The only way to discover interests is to find someone who’s already following them. To do that, go to any Pinterest account. Under their profile information (toward the right), locate and click the Following number.

When you click Following, a new page will appear. If the profile is following any interests, you will see them here. If not, the page will be blank. From this page you will also be able to see the boards and the accounts that user is following by clicking the tabs.

After you find an account that’s following interests, click one of them and a new screen will appear. Here you will see hundreds of pins related to that interest: some pins will be from accounts you follow, others will be from profiles you don’t follow. You’ll also see how many followers that interest has, as well as the profile images of eight accounts that follow that interest.

Below you can see some of the interests Social Media Examiner follows on Pinterest. Notice that they are much more specific than the Pinterest categories and are much more relevant to a social media–based business.

When you find an interest board you’d like to follow, just click on the Follow button underneath the title. Now you’ll see pins from this interest in your Pinterest feed.

To help you find even more interests to follow, Pinterest recommends seven others related to the current interest topic.

As previously mentioned, it’s not possible to search for interests on the desktop version of Pinterest. You need to find pinners in your field who already follow interests. To get you started, here are interests followed by Social Media Examiner(as previously mentioned), Neal Schaffer and Tailwind.

Explore Interests on Mobile

The recently updated iOS Pinterest mobile app added a way to search for interests, but you have to know where to look.

Both Android and iOS interests searches start similarly to the desktop process. First,find a pinner. Next, check their followers, and if they explore interests, look around. (Android users, select About then Following to get to Interests.)

While Android users are limited to finding interests through trial and error, iOS users can do a proper search once they locate any pinner who follows at least one interest.

If you’re on iOS and don’t find an interest you like under a pinner’s profile, just select the plus sign to do a search.

Follow the interest you like, and those pins will appear in your feed.

#2: Create a New Interest

The ability to create your own interests, especially at this early stage in the functionality, is particularly helpful for people in niche industries.

If you search for an interest using your iOS app and it doesn’t yet exist, here’s how you can create it with the push of a button!

Once you create an interest, it will populate with pins related to the keyword or phraseyou use in the title or description.

Uses for Interests

Not many people are aware of interests, which gives businesses exploring this tactic an advantage.

While pins in the feed from interest groups are a great additional source of repinnable content, there are many other benefits to incorporating interests into your Pinterest marketing:

• Increase visibility. If you use the proper keywords in your pins’ descriptions, they could become part of multiple interest groups. Your content will be seen by more users who are likely to follow you.
• Discover new people to follow. The profile images shown on an interest page constantly change. Click on, research and follow other interest followers to discover a great up-and-coming resource or connect with a new potential client who’s followed an interest related to your business.

• Engage easier. Once you start following appropriate interests, relevant content will come to you in your home feed. By commenting on, repinning and liking those pins, you have an easy way to engage with people you don’t follow on Pinterest.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a better way to find and pin content more regularly, discovering interests is a bit challenging, but certainly worth it.

What do you think? Do you use Pinterest interests? What cool discoveries have you made? Do you have any recommendations for Pinterest profiles that are following great interests? Please share your thoughts and recommendations in the comments.

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10 Successful Facebook Marketing Examples

Is your Facebook engagement dropping?

Need some inspiration to pump up your Facebook marketing?

As the Facebook news feed continues to change, it’s important to figure out how to make the platform work for you.

In this article I’ll share Facebook pages from both large and small brands, and tips to incorporate their tactics into your Facebook marketing plan.

Discover ten brands successfully using Facebook.

#1: Qatar Airways

Qatar posts a number of pictures about football (soccer in America), which is what their fans care about. Fans are very responsive to questions and posts on the company’s page, as well.

Post about things your fans care about.

Qatar also changes their cover photo often, which is a great way to promote something new.

Change your cover photo with a new message to your fans.

Key Takeaways: Post what engages your audience and change your cover photo often.

#2: Dove

This inspiring video helped Dove get close to half a million views and thousands of likes, comments and shares. In the video they hardly mention the brand. This isn’t a commercial—they’re telling a story.

Create and share videos, since video gets more engagement on Facebook.

Dove also encourages tagging by asking their fans to tell a story about someone who means something to them. Tagging someone else in a post can also be a great way to help get the word out about a timeline contest (for more on this, see #9).

Inspire your fans to tell you a story.

Key Takeaway: Post a video that will help your fans or inspire them.

#3: Oreo

Oreo continues to dominate Facebook with their delicious cookie. It’s almost too easy. Beautiful images combined with recipes and a creative use of hashtags also help.

Great visuals combined with a useful recipe make for huge engagement.

The #OOTD hashtag stands for Outfit Of The Day. It’s widely used. Notice in the illustration below that Oreo isn’t hijacking the hashtag, rather participating in a fun way.

Use hashtags creatively and have some fun.

Key Takeaway: Add an image or montage that shares a tip or tells a story.

#4: Humans of New York

Humans of New York is a bit different as a brand in that it started as a photographer telling stories. It developed into a book and a movement to connect on a deeper level with individual people who live in New York.

Tell stories and share photos that illustrate them on Facebook.

Each day, they share several posts that tell people’s stories, along with their image.

Use stories to inspire and connect with your audience.

Key Takeaway: Tell your fans a story about your brand directly in a Facebook post.

#5: Agilent Technologies

Agilent is a B2B company that uses their Facebook page to tell where their instruments are being used. They brand their images and make them eye-catching.

Brand your images, so they grab your fans’ attention.

Agilent also connects people to the brand by sharing personal information. For example, they featured their longest-serving employee with then-and-now photos and a link to her story.

Help your audience get to know your brand by featuring your employees.

Key Takeaway: Tell a story about one of your employees.

#6: Girls Who Code

This non-profit does a great job of mixing up the posts on their Facebook page. They keep fans up to date about what’s happening with their mission.

Keep your audience connected to news about your successes.

Girls Who Code also entertains their fans with games.

Is your Facebook engagement dropping?

Need some inspiration to pump up your Facebook marketing?

As the Facebook news feed continues to change, it’s important to figure out how to make the platform work for you.

#7: Stella and Dot

Stella and Dot is a network marketing jewelry company using their page to promote their products and share information. One thing they do very well is cross-promote to their other channels, such as Instagram. When you connect to your audience on multiple channels, it improves your chances of being seen.

Cross-promote your posts to your other social channels.

The company also provides shareable images to inspire their audience. Quotes are a great source of inspiration.

Provide inspirational images and quotes for your audience to share.

Key Takeaway: Cross-post to other social sites, where your fans connect with you regularly.

#8: Neil Gaiman

While you might not consider an author a brand, these days authors are brandingthemselves, as well as their work. Neil Gaiman does a great job of getting personal with his audience.

Use humor to show your personality.

Key Takeaway: Get personal on Facebook.

#9: Illegal Pete’s

This restaurant has a small fan base, but gets good engagement by running contests.

Run a contest to get higher engagement. Have your fans tag their friends in the comments.

Illegal Pete’s also connects to their fans via the Postmates app.

Find new ways to connect to your audience, such as with an app.

Key Takeaway: Run an engaging timeline contest and give away something small to the winners.

#10: Starbucks

With more than 37 million fans, the Starbucks Facebook page is in the top 10 brand pages.

One of the things Starbucks does right is they give people tips to help them use their products.

Give people tips about your product.

Starbucks shows holiday-themed images that are a little different and fun.

Catch people’s attention with unusual photos.

Key Takeaway: Create and post unusual images to catch people’s attention.

Over to You

It may be more challenging to get organic engagement on your Facebook pages these days, but it’s not impossible. Pages are still a great way to connect with your audience where they hang out.

To get more engagement, likes and shares, inspire your audience; use great graphics and video; make your information shareable, useful and fun; and cross-promote to other channels. Plus, show your personality throughout your Facebook marketing.

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Are you making these 5 social media mistakes in your business?

Social media can be a very effective marketing tool for every type of business but people underestimate the amount of thought and effort it takes to do social correctly.

Bianchi PR, a firm that specializes in automotive suppliers, studied the social media efforts of their top clients and found that there was plenty of room for improvement.

James A. Bianchi, firm president said,

“Auto suppliers – like many other business-to-business sectors – are using social media, but most of them are way behind consumer-oriented sectors in terms of strategy, content and engagement. Every supplier I’ve talked with is intensely curious about how his or her company compares with peers and what they can do to boost engagement.”

If you’re not in the automotive biz, keep reading anyway; these are tips everyone can use.

The study begins with a baseline. From this chart we see that LinkedIn is the social media powerhouse but companies are only posting there an average of 3 times a month. Facebook and Twitter are close enough follower wise but again, look at the posting numbers; less than twice a week on Facebook and every other day on Twitter. Interesting. YouTube – barely a blip.

From there, the study talks about the top 5 social media mistakes automotive suppliers are making.

1. Posts do not include enough visuals. Although video and images boost audience engagement significantly, only 53 percent of supplier Facebook posts and less than 15 percent of Tweets, for example, included visuals.

Visuals are tough. It takes extra time to find an appropriate image, especially if you’re looking for a generic, legal photo. On LinkedIn, it’s not a big deal but more people like and interact when a Facebook post has an image. On Twitter, photos used to be special but now they’re the norm so you have to keep up if you want to stand out.

2. Posts do not share enough earned media coverage. Although coverage in trusted media outlets is viewed as the most credible of all content, less than 10 percent of all supplier posts shared such coverage.

This is the most interesting point in the study. I always think it’s redundant to share these types of articles on social. It sounds so self-serving to say look what Important Website said about our company today. But it makes sense, especially in the B2B context. If a leading industry magazine writes about your fantastic widgets, that’s news that should be shared on social.

3. Too many supplier posts are self-promotional. While the rule of thumb is a company should post one update about the company for every three that are about the audience and its interests, suppliers are doing the opposite – with 50-75 percent of supplier social media posts being self-focused.

This is the flipside of mistake #2. Sharing good press isn’t the same as 10 posts a week that shout ‘look at me, look at me’. If you want people to follow you on social, you have to give them information they can use from a variety of sources.

4. Suppliers are not using LinkedIn enough. Among the four platforms reviewed, LinkedIn typically gives suppliers their largest audience (average 30,000+), yet the top suppliers average only three LinkedIn updates per month.

I already said what I have to say about that.

5. Suppliers need to embrace more interactive posts. Interactive posts which allow the audience to express themselves and participate – such as contests, polls, surveys, trivia or opinion questions – tend to encourage the most audience engagement, yet less than 6 percent of supplier posts were of this category.

Oh my, this is a toughie. We all know we need to be more interactive but it’s no fun, and kind of scary, when no one replies. That’s going to happen, but you have to keep asking. I get the most responses on simplest questions on Twitter. Try it, put it out there and then try it again. It’s hard to get the party started, but once people begin to respond on social, more followers will join in.

That’s it from Bianchi PR. Now it’s time to ask yourself the question; are you making any of these 5 social media mistakes? If so, the time to fix it is right now.

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7 Basic Social-Media Tips to Set Your Marketing Right

When it comes to marketing your brand online, if you’re not on social media -- and doing it right -- you’re missing a huge opportunity. That said, busy entrepreneurs and other professionals often have a difficult time navigating the quickly growing world of social media.

Fortunately, we’re here to your rescue. Here are some helpful tips to get you off on the right foot.

1. Know thy social platform.

Just as there are recipes for favorite foods, there are formulas for effective posts, tweets and #latergrams -- depending on the social site. Having the right mix of pictures, questions or quotes can make the difference between a post going viral or going into the void.

2. Be yourself.

Business is, ultimately, all about connections -- and not just the professional networking kind. If you want your message to resonate with customers, give them something relatable and human to connect to. With everything being automated, it might not come so easily, but it’s well worth the effort.

3. Watch out for common mistakes.

Before you can capitalize on what’s going right, understand what you’re doing wrong. Thankfully, there’s a handy list of common mistakes for you to familiarize yourself with and avoid like the plague.

4. Use the tools of the trade.

Believe it or not (and why not, really?), there is technology out there to help you make the most of tools you’re already using. From Tweetdeck to PinAlert, there are tools to help you optimize each specific network. After all, what works for LinkedIn doesn’t work as well on Pintrest. These are the tools you need in your social media toolbelt.

5. Embrace new networks.

At the beginning, the next big thing is just some new thing that nobody’s paying much attention to. Myspace was king of social networks before some new site named The Facebook came on the scene, for example. There are benefits to being an early adopter of new networks, whether that’s Google+ or some other yet-unnamed platform, because you never know which one will take off. Get in on the ground floor of a new social network when you can.

6. Be open to change.

The New Year is almost upon us, and that means new strategies where social media is concerned. Sure, it’s different from what you’re comfortable with right now, but it might also be more effective.

7. Consider other avenues, too.

Social media is a great way to create awareness and customer outreach. Still, it is not the only way to put your business out there. An investor would tell you to diversify your portfolio. This is also accurate advice in regards to your marketing strategy.

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#CrimingWhileWhite: White people confess crimes on Twitter to highlight police racial bias

Social media campaign comes after months of racial tension in the US

White people have taken to Twitter to expose US police prejudice, confessing they got away with crimes that African Americans would probably not.

Posting using the hashtag #WhitePeopleCriming, some people are confessing to serious crimes such as grand theft auto, others smaller driving violations, and some recounting times when black friends were disproportionately scrutinised or punished.

This social media campaign comes following three high-profile incidents of police violence against black men — Eric Garner who was killed by a chokehold by New York City police officer in July,Michael Brown who was shot 6 times by an officer in Ferguson, Missouri in August, and 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was shot and killed in Cleveland late last month.

Garner was caught illegally selling cigarettes, 18-year-old Brown had robbed $50 cigarellos from a shop, and Rice had been playing with a pellet gun — all crimes (or, in Rice's case, not a crime) that white people would not likely be killed over, the Twittersphere is arguing.

This campaign stands in contrast to the findings from a Pew Research poll in which twice as many black Americans than white Americans think the Michael Brown shooting says something about larger racial issues in American.

70 per cent of black respondents said police do not treat people of different races the same, whereas the majority of white respondents say police are "good" about race.

Here are some of the best #WhitePeopleCriming:

Drunk driving speed demon

I was pulled over doing 88 in a 45 after having 3 beers. I was breathalyzed and did not pass, but I got no ticket or dui #CrimingWhileWhite
— Anthony Carmen (@nthonyCarmen) December 3, 2014

Boyfriend swears at cops

White BF told cop who stopped him for speeding to "f**k off." Let go with a warning and a "good night." #crimingwhilewhite
— Anne B (@abroshar) December 3, 2014

Tween carjacker

At 13 I stole a car with my friends & drove it 2wks before we got busted. Only one charged was black. #CrimingWhileWhite
— Cecily Kellogg (@Cecilyk) December 4, 2014

'Illegal alien' gets the blame

In high school I got in a 3 car wreck that might have been my fault. The cop told me it was the "illegal alien's" fault. #CrimingWhileWhite
— Elizabeth (@oceana_roll) December 3, 2014

Stop and search profiling

My 13yo son and his friends were loitering at Walgreens recently. Only his black friend got searched for shoplifting. ~ #CrimingWhileWhite ~
— Dave Hoover (@davehoover) December 4, 2014

How the police will respond to #CrimingWhileWhite

Police are really upset about the #CrimingWhileWhite phenomenon, but they've decided to let everyone off with a warning.
— Frank Conniff (@FrankConniff) December 4, 2014

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