Happy New Year! As we pack up our holiday celebrations and look forward to new business strategies, consider this one of the most important pieces of content to integrate into your plans. Our friends at Social Media Examiner have given us social media marketingpredictions for 2016. They rallied 14 leading experts to advise us of upcoming changes to watch and be prepared for in 2016.
I especially like Peg Fitzpatrick’s Prediction, which gives online marketers a recipe for posting valuable content. By following her recipe, you will connect your online assets and dramatically increase your social influence, as well as your pagerank. This approach gives your content a serious competitive advantage to show up on Google’s first page:
Visuals Customized By Platform Become Critical
Peg Fitzpatrick
“Visual marketing will continue to grow in 2016, making it absolutely necessary for brands to have a solid plan for visuals including multimedia such as long- and short-form video for YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, as well as graphics for blog content.
“Creating anchor content for your website and breaking it into contextual pieces to natively post to each platform will be essential. For example, one long video will be embedded into a blog post, tweeted with graphics, and a tip from it will be shared as a graphic on Instagram and a Pinterest quote. These will all lead to the blog content”
More Expert Predictions for 2016
Here are 6 more snippets of the 14 expert predictions from the Social Media Examiner’s blog post:
“The most valuable social media interactions will happen in private, controlled spaces.” By Mitch Joel, president of Mirum (formerly Twist Image), the author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete.
“A year from now, your tweets won’t appear in the streams of all of your followers. Organic reach will be throttled, Facebook-style, but you’ll have plenty of options to boost the visibility for a small price.” By Andy Crestodina, a co-founder of Orbit Media.
“More social networks will start charging for traffic. Their algorithms are continually becoming harder to leverage via organic means, so if you want maximum traffic you’ll have to spend money on ads.” By Neil Patel, co-founder of Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics, blogs at NeilPatel.com.
“2016 will be the year where more companies implement adaptive social. The more we engage and collaborate with external and internal social media users for business, the more we need to adapt to their communities and needs for ultimate success.” By Neal Schaffer, the founder of the Social Tools Summit, the Social Media Center of Excellence, Maximize Social Business and author of Maximize Your Social.
“Brands will need an image strategy that works across their primary platforms, tailored for Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. Tools like Canva for Work and Relay allow brands to quickly and easily create a suite of images.” By Donna Moritz, the founder of Socially Sorted.
“We’ll see the wide-scale adoption of cost-effective virtual reality devices that will enable fully immersive 3D experiences that are live. Much of this will be enabled by low-cost 360 cameras like the Ricoh Theta, combined with economical devices like Google Cardboard that transform the smartphones everyone already owns into a virtual reality device. This represents an entirely new opportunity for marketers to give factory tours and any other form of in-person experience imaginable.” By Michael Stelzner, the founder and CEO of Social Media Examiner and hosts the popular Social Media Marketing podcast.
Read the rest of these stellar predictions – and position yourself to be a leader online in 2016.
For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Marketing and Social Media.
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About Lisa M. Chapman:
Lisa Chapman helps company leaders define, plan and achieve their goals, both online and offline. After 25+ years as an entrepreneur, she is now a business and marketing consultant, business planning consultant and social media consultant. Online, she works with clients to establish and enhance their online brand, attract their target market, engage them in meaningful social media conversations, and convert online traffic into revenues. Email: Lisa (at) LisaChapman (dot) com. Her book, The WebPowered Entrepreneur – A Step-by-Step Guide is available at:
Note to Self: Organize my social media management.
But how?This article delivers the best tools for you to organize and incorporate efficiencies in your social media marketing in 2016. Whew – what a relief!
Effective, efficient social media management is crucial to having a solid social media marketing strategy. If you are a social media manager, you probably already know the importance of having management tools, and this trend is growing increasingly.
The tools you use can help you achieve a number of tasks like content discovery, content scheduling, and social media monitoring. You can gain more followers, increase engagement and of course grow your business by using the right social media management tools.
There is a large variety of tools that can help you manage your social media accounts. Let’s dive in to see what some of these tools can help you accomplish.
Talkwalker
Talkwalker is a powerful social media monitoring tool and has advanced big data crawling capabilities. In fact, Talkwalker’s search index covers over 150 million sources in several different languages. If you are using Talkwalker, you simply need to specify your brand, any related topics that you would like to track and your competitors. Talkwalker gives you upto 100 influencers for any project that you might be working on and also for various media types.
Even though Talkwalker is quite an advanced tool in what it offers, it is quite easy to use and is very user-friendly. You will not have to go through any type of training to understand how the tool works.
The process of analysis is quick and the tool’s search engine allows rapid searches which sift through millions of data sources. You can control the findings and receive multiple combinations of results that are based on your findings. Also, the tool lets you create custom templates for daily, weekly, or monthly reports.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a great tool for beginners who are trying to manage their Twitter account. Twitter can be overwhelming sometimes with posts moving by really quickly. You can never be sure if you have tapped into every opportunity possible on Twitter. With TweetDeck, you can search for various keywords and easily spot conversations where you or your brand is being talked about.
TweetDeck even lets you monitor hashtags and also lets you add multiple accounts if that is something you require.
DrumUp
DrumUp is a stylish social media management tool that can completely take over your social media activities for you. The tool can help you curate content that aligns with your business. You can input specific keywords in the settings page of the tool. For example, if your business deals with real estate you can specify keywords like residential/commercial real estate, home ownership, property investment etc.
The tool will provide relevant story recommendations and if you would like to narrow down your search even further, you can add negative keywords as well. DrumUp gives you the freshest content recommendation on the web and is a great alternative to other curation tools.
Most of all, it lets you schedule and share your newly discovered content on various social media networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It even lets you create custom posts that you can schedule at a desired time.
Mention
As important as it is to create and curate content for your social media pages, it is also important to understand the impact your content is making on social media. With Mention, you can get an overview of your brand and track the overall performance of your social media marketing strategy. All you need to do is put in brand-related keywords into the tool, and you can find out the number of times your brand has been mentioned.
Mention also sends across real-time alerts whenever there is a mention of your brand and you can find out if the mentions are positive, neutral or negative. This way you can keep an eye on your brand’s online reputation and fix any potential damages if necessary.
Pocket
Similar to Instapaper, Pocket is also a bookmarking tool that allows you to save links to blog posts, articles, videos and more. The tool currently has over 17 million users and has been picked up really well by audiences.
Once a link is saved on Pocket, it automatically gets saved on your phone, computer or your tablet, which means you can access your links across all platforms. More importantly, the saved links can be accessed even when you are offline. If you like an article on Twitter or any other similar application, Pocket lets you save links directly from these applications so you don’t have to look it up on your browser and then save.
Feedly
Content hunting days are finally over! The Feedly Reader is an amazing tool if you need to find content in a short period of time. With the News Reader by Feedly, you can add feeds from various blogs and websites and the content will stream right through to your reader. You can set up several categories like food, travel, marketing, social media, photography and more. Once the content starts streaming in, Feedly organizes it neatly into categories.
Using Feedly, you can share the content on Facebook, Twitter or your LinkedIn pages. However, it does not give you the option to schedule the content. If you have particular topics of interest, these are marked with hashtags so that they can be easily discovered later on. Also, the content on Feedly comes from high-authority sources so you can be rest assured that it is good quality content.
Social Mention
Social Mention, a real-time search platform, tracks over a hundred social media websites to help you monitor your brand and how it is being talked about. It is a great listening tool as it provides in-depth analysis of data and measures influence using four different categories. These categories are passion, strength, reach and sentiment. Getting started is simple, and all you have to do is enter your website’s or your product name and it can gather results for you. These results can be used to judge your brand’s impact.
Instapaper
A bookmarking tool can always make life easy. However, Instapaper can offer much more than just a bookmarking service. If you are one of those people who stumble upon some great articles but don’t get time to read them at the same time, Instapaper is a tool you should definitely add to your toolbox. This tool can save links for you so that you can come back to them, when there is more time on your hands.
If while reading you come across parts that are interesting, you can highlight and add comments to the particular paragraph so you can remember it the next time.
Followerwonk
If Twitter analytics is something you are interested in, Followerwonk is a must have. It is the best tool to help you optimize your visibility online and boost your social media growth. The tool allows you to compare and contrast your social graph to other competing brands to see how your brand is doing and what you can do to improve your marketing strategies.
Followerwonk also makes influencer marketing really simple by letting you search Twitter bios and categorize them by location, number of followers, overall influence and more. It also provides rankings for influencers which can help you make marketing related decisions as well.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is probably the easiest tool you can work with if you are just starting out with analytics. The set up is super easy and once it’s done, you can start monitoring websites for engaging content and also look for brand mentions. You will have to enter specific keywords related to what you want to monitor, and Google Alerts will send you real-time alerts once it finds a match. The best part is that you can receive these alerts in your email and you can set it up so that every time there is a new source mentioning your brand, Google Alert will notify you right away.
If you are a content marketer, you can keep track of trending topics that are popping up so you can create around it. This way, there is a higher chance of the content getting picked up quickly by your audience.
In Summary
There are a lot of tasks that make up social media management. You need to create and curate content for your social media accounts, publish the content at the right time and of course track the impact that your content has on social media. The above-mentioned tools can surely make those tasks a little easier for you while letting you get the most audience engagement as you can!
Author Bio:
Aditi Prakash is a blogger at Godot Media, a leading blog writing services firm. She writes extensively on content marketing and social media marketing. She also has numerous guest posts on various other blogs.
For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Marketing and Social Media.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. When it comes to social media marketing, a picture could be worth a thousand likes or comments. Adding an image to your blog post or a social media post can instantly catch the attention of your audience and draw them to your posts. Social media networks are increasingly becoming very photo-centric with the rise of networks like Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr.
Why do visitors flock to these websites? It’s because they provide a lot of eye-candy and a welcome change from all the textual content that visitors might generally encounter on other networks. However, when you do add images to your posts, be very careful with image licenses and attribution formats. The last thing you want is to run into a legal hassle for using a copyrighted image, and lose a lot of money that you could have instead put to good use.
Finding free-to-use images
If you are searching for free-to-use images using Google Advanced Image Search, you can actually specify the type of image that you require through Google’s advanced search option. When you type in your search, use the drop down menu on the row entitled, “Usage Rights” to choose the kind of image license you would like to look for.
Types of usage rights:
Free to use or share: Allows you to copy or redistribute its content if the content remains unchanged.
Free to use, share, or modify: Allows you to copy, modify, or redistribute in ways specified in the license.
Commercially: If you want content for commercial use, be sure to select an option that includes the word “commercially.”
However, there is a limitation in the way Google recognizes these licensed images. When you do find the right image, you will want to do some research to make sure that the image is, in fact, free to use. Some images may require you to attribute the source when adding it to your post. Google will not be able to warn you of these requirements, so it’s always better to dig a little deeper yourself.
If you use an image with a usage right “free to use or share” you can use the image and share it with others as long as the image is not modified in any way. However, if the image is under the “free to use, share and modify” right, it allows you to modify the image if necessary. If you wish to use the image for commercial purposes, make sure that you pick an image which contains the word “commercially” in the usage rights.
Picking a copyright free image
If you manage a blog and want to add an image to your posts, start your search by looking up websites that offer free-to-use images. You can also use licensed images, however, these images require appropriate permissions and attributions. There are various websites and stockphoto databases where you will be able to find copyright free images.
Before using any of these images, it’s always wise to double-check the image license so that you can avoid any problems later on.
Websites that offer free-to-use images
Here’s a list of websites that offer free-to-use images.
Life of Pix – This is a website owned by a creative agency, and offers free high-resolution images without any kind of copyright restriction. Every week you will be able to see new images.
Picjumbo – offers high-resolution photos from various categories like weddings, technology, food, people and more. New photos are added to the website on a weekly basis. Images from this website can be used for personal as well as commercial needs.
Pixabay – offers vectors, images as well videos that you can use for free. All the free images that you find on Pixabay are also free of any copyrights and have been filed under Creative Commons CC0.
Freepik – similar to Pixabay, this website also offers vectors, images and icons that can be used for free. You can use the image, however, it is required that you attribute the source of the image in your blog post.
Godot Media Gallery – this gallery by Godot Media allows you to download high-resolution images for free. You can find images from several categories like architecture, business, cityscapes, people and more.
Flickr – On Flickr, you get access to a vast library of images that are categorized under a variety of usage licenses like creative commons, commercial allowed, modifications allowed and more. However, use of these images requires attribution.
StockSnap.io – attractive high-resolution stock photos that are free to use under the Creative Commons CC0 license – no attribution necessary.
Canva – if you are having difficulty finding the right image for your post, you can create one using Canva. Once you are happy with the image that you have created, you can download it and use it on your post.
Free Footage – if you are require video footage for your project or posts, this website will give you a range of free video footage from different categories
Free Video Footage – you can download FREE video footage or audio footage from this website, and it also allows you to use the footage without any attributions.
Author Bio:
Apurva Jog is a Content Writer at DrumUp, a social media management tool. She has penned down several articles related to social media management and content marketing. When she is not writing, she is usually catching up with anything that is trending in the social media sphere.
For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Marketing and Social Media.
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About Lisa M. Chapman:
Lisa Chapman helps company leaders define, plan and achieve their goals, both online and offline. After 25+ years as an entrepreneur, she is now a business and marketing consultant, business planning consultant and social media consultant. Online, she works with clients to establish and enhance their online brand, attract their target market, engage them in meaningful social media conversations, and convert online traffic into revenues. Email: Lisa (at) LisaChapman (dot) com. Her book, The WebPowered Entrepreneur – A Step-by-Step Guide is available at:
Books for Social Media Marketing, Book Marketing, Building a Business Online and MORE!
Do you need a great gift for family or a friend who has a dream to build or grow their online business?
Help ignite that fire with awesome books that take you step-by-step through the process – and cut through the clutter.
We are bombarded online with thousands of messages every day. Confusion reigns. But no more! Any of the books below are terrific, on point, and written by the best in their field. You can confidently choose from any of these and know that you have chosen a gift that hits the bullseye and provides tremendous value.
Just click on the Title Link to go straight to the book’s Amazon information page to learn more about it and place your order!
New 2015 edition of the bestselling social media marketing book
Marketing your business through social media isn’t an option these days—it’s absolutely imperative. Inside this bestselling guide, you’ll find out how to apply the marketing savvy you already have to the social media your prospects are using, helping you to reach and keep more customers, make more sales, and boost your bottom line.
Includes updates on the latest changes to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, blogging, and more
Offers tips for showcasing your company with a customized Facebook business page
Presents step-by-step guidance for setting up a social media marketing campaign
Shows you how to use analytics to assess the success of your social media campaign
If you’re a social media strategist, website manager, marketer, publicist, or other employee who is in charge of implementing and managing an organization’s social media strategy, this comprehensive resource is your one-stop guide to all things social media marketing.
Open the book and find:
How to make the business case for social media
Guidance on plotting your social media marketing strategy
Tips for managing your cybersocial campaign
Strategies for getting your content to your prospects
The best ways to leverage Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other sites
Ways to profit from your business presence on social media
Techniques for using social media in mobile environments
About Jan Zimmerman & Deborah Ng
Jan Zimmerman is the owner of Watermelon Mountain Web Marketing and has helped businesses of all sizes use online marketing and social media tools for more than 15 years.
Deborah Ng is a professional blogger, freelance writer, community manager, and social media enthusiast.
How you can make serious money from your fiction or non-fiction book
This book shows you step-by-step how you can enjoy writing, publishing and marketing your book so that it becomes an enduring bestseller. Written by an established and successful international #1 bestselling author (Dee’s second book reached position 150 out of 7 million titles on Amazon and all her books are in the top 100 bestselling books in their category on Amazon several years after being published), Dee sells thousands of books worldwide. You’ll find practical, effective and powerful tools and tips on every page. The author shares her award winning templates including press releases, book launch invitations, speaker biographies and more so you can create yours effortlessly. You’ll find out how you can identify your readers so that your content is appealing and relevant and, your marketing hits the spot every time.
You’ll learn how to market your book on a zero or shoestring budget using social media and traditional marketing to get phenomenal results. You’ll also learn the insider secrets of approaching professional reviewers (shared by a highly esteemed professional reviewer of fiction and non-fiction books) and how to get dozens of genuine five-star reviews on Amazon and other review sites to boost your book sales further still. You’ll also find out how to hold a packed out book launch that costs you nothing. With this book, you’ll understand exactly how you can make serious money from your bestselling book on a step-by-step basis whether you’re writing fiction or non-fiction.
About Dee Blick
Dee Blick is a Number 1 bestselling author and a multi-award winning Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. Dee has 32 years’ marketing experience gained working with talented individuals and small businesses from all sectors. She is an author who definitely walks her talk having penned three bestsellers on a zero or shoestring budget. Dee is also a professional speaker, invited regularly by global brands to speak at their events as well as to more intimate gatherings of authors where she loves sharing her tips and ideas. Dee is an ambassador for AuthorCraft, which enables authors of all genres to gather, share ideas and inspire one another.
Maybe you’re a first-time novelist looking for practical guidance. Maybe you’ve already been published, but your latest effort is stuck in mid-list limbo. Whatever the case may be, author and literary agent Donald Maass can show you how to take your prose to the next level and write a breakout novel – one that rises out of obscurity and hits the best-seller lists.
Maass details the elements that all breakout novels share – regardless of genre – then shows you writing techniques that can make your own books stand out and succeed in a crowded marketplace.
You’ll learn to:
establish a powerful and sweeping sense of time and place
weave subplots into the main action for a complex, engrossing story
create larger-than-life characters that step right off the page
explore universal themes that will interest a broad audience of readers
sustain a high degree of narrative tension from start to finish
develop an inspired premise that sets your novel apart from the competition
Then, using examples from the recent works of several best-selling authors – including novelist Anne Perry – Maass illustrates methods for upping the ante in every aspect of your novel writing.
You’ll capture the eye of an agent, generate publisher interest and lay the foundation for a promising career!
About Donald Maass
Donald Maass is the author of 17 novels. He works as a literary agent, representing dozens of novelists in the fantasy, crime, mystery, romance, and thriller categories. He speaks at writer’s conferences throughout the USA.
“Launch” is the treasure map into that world—an almost secret world of digital entrepreneurs who create cash-on-demand paydays with their product launches and business launches.
Whether you have an existing business, or you have a service-based business and want to develop your own products so you can leverage your time and your impact, or you’re still in the planning phase—this is how you start fast. This formula is how you engineer massive success.
Now the question is this—are you going to start slow, and fade away from there? Or are you ready for a launch that will change the future of your business and your life?
Review
“This is not just a book. It’s a license to print money. (Okay, maybe I’m overstating it a bit, but not by much.) I used Jeff’s Product Launch Formula to create a seven-figure-plus business I absolutely love. And unlike some successful entrepreneurs, he holds nothing back. It’s all here—a proven strategy, real- world examples, and step-by-step instructions—everything you need to create a business you’re crazy about while making an incredible living doing it.” —Michael Hyatt, New York Times Bestselling Author and Founder of PlatformUniversity.com
About Jeff Walker
Jeff Walker has literally transformed the way stuff is sold online. Along the way he’s become one of the top entrepreneurial and marketing trainers in the world. But it didn’t start out that way…
When Jeff started his first online business, he was a stay-at-home dad taking care of two small children. The “business” was launched from the baby’s changing room – and it started with a free email newsletter sent to 19 people. That was in the Internet Dark Ages of 1996.
After that humble start, Jeff quickly developed an underground process for launching new products and businesses with unprecedented success. But the success-train was just getting started – once he started teaching his formula to other entrepreneurs, the results were simply breathtaking. Tiny, home-based businesses started doing launches that sold tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even millions of dollars in sales with their launches.
The proven entrepreneurial model that breaks all the rules:
Build your audience first. Then create your product.
This is the simple but profoundly successful entrepreneurial approach of one of today’s most creative business minds.
A pioneer of content marketing, Joe Pulizzi has cracked the code when it comes to the power of content in a world where marketers still hold fast to traditional models that no longer work. In Content Inc., he breaks down the business-startup process into six steps, making it simple for you to visualize, launch, and monetize your own business.
These steps are:
The “Sweet Spot”: Identify the intersection of your unique competency and your personal passion
Content Tilting: Determine how you can “tilt” your sweet spot to find a place where little or no competition exists
Building the Base: Establish your number-one channel for disseminating content (blog, podcast, YouTube, etc.)
Harvesting Audience: Use social-media and SEO to convert one-time visitors into long-term subscribers
Diversification: Grow your business by expanding into multiple delivery channels
Monetization: Now that your expertise is established, you can begin charging money for your products or services
This model has worked wonders for Pulizzi and countless other examples detailed in the audiobook. Connect these six pieces like a puzzle, and before you know it you’ll be running your own profitable, scalable business.
Pulizzi walks you step by step through the process based on his own success (and failures) and real-world multimillion-dollar examples from multiple industries and countries.
Whether you’re seeking to start a brand-new business or drive innovation in an existing one, Content Inc. provides everything you need to reverse engineer the traditional entrepreneurial model for better, more sustainable success.
About Joe Pulizzi
Joe Pulizzi is founder of Content Marketing Institute, the leading education and training organization for content marketing, which includes the largest in-person content marketing event in the world, Content Marketing World. Joe is the winner of the 2014 John Caldwell Lifetime Achievement Award from the Content Council. Joe’s third book,Epic Content Marketing was named one of “Five Must Read Business Books of 2013” by Fortune Magazine. If you ever see Joe in person, he’ll be wearing orange.
If you are currently struggling with getting traffic to your website, or converting that traffic when it shows up, you may think you’ve got a traffic or conversion problem. In Russell Brunson’s experience, after working with thousands of businesses, he has found that’s rarely the case. Low traffic and weak conversion numbers are just symptoms of a much greater problem, a problem that’s a little harder to see (that’s the bad news), but a lot easier to fix (that’s the good news). DotComSecrets will give you the marketing funnels and the sales scripts you need to be able to turn on a flood of new leads into your business.
Reviews
“Russell has spent over a decade successfully starting and scaling companies online. This book takes the best of what he’s discovered from over 1,000 unique split tests, tens of millions of visitors online and broken it down into a simple process that ANY company can use to geometrically improve their traffic, conversions and sales online.” — Anthony Robbins
“Russell is not a ‘pretend’ expert, but someone who has actually built one of the most successful businesses I know teaching entrepreneurs how to employ online marketing in their business that achieve exceptional results.” — Bill Glazier
“I sit now, as infrequently as possible, in meetings with young online marketing people demonstrably devoid of any disciplined thinking. They are full of opinion and youthful hubris but very short on facts. I do not want to share a foxhole with them or depend on them. I would risk it with Russell.” — Dan Kennedy
About Russell Brunson
Russell Brunson is a serial entrepreneur who started his first online company while he was wrestling at Boise State University. Within a year of graduating he had sold over a million dollars worth of his own products and services from his basement! For over 10 years now Russell has been starting and scaling companies online. He owns a software company, a supplement company, a coaching company (his successful roster of ‘heavyweight clients’ includes such legends as Richard Branson, Tony Robbins, Dan Kennedy and Bill Glazier). Russell is one of the top super affiliates in the world. DotComSecrets was created to help entrepreneurs around the world to start, promote and grow their companies online.
Didn’t see what you want?
Shop for More:
For your convenience, I’ve set up segmented bookshelves of top books, authored by Subject matter experts and leading trainers for these categories: Small Business & Entrepreneurship, Marketing & Sales, Marketing, and Web Marketing.Just click on any of the links below to scroll through a diverse selection of books that will ignite any business – and online or offline marketing – for your business or that of a friend:
… with new tools and insights to achieve online business success. Step-by-Step, these are powerful tools.
Happy Holidays!
For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Marketing and Social Media.
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About Lisa M. Chapman:
Lisa Chapman helps company leaders define, plan and achieve their goals, both online and offline. After 25+ years as an entrepreneur, she is now a business and marketing consultant, business planning consultant and social media consultant. Online, she works with clients to establish and enhance their online brand, attract their target market, engage them in meaningful social media conversations, and convert online traffic into revenues. Email: Lisa (at) LisaChapman (dot) com. Her book, The WebPowered Entrepreneur – A Step-by-Step Guide is available at:
Take Back Control and Make Better Decisions Online
Have you ever stopped to consider how many hours you spend in front of a computer screen each day? Or how such prolonged computer interaction deeply influences us, especially in subconscious ways?
Most of us may be just too busy to be aware of the visual biases and behavioral patterns that influence us while we absorb and process information on a screen – hour after hour, after day, after week, and so on. The most sophisticated marketers strategically design their content and Calls To Action, and know exactly how to design a web page that leads us to make the decisions they want us to make.
Businesses can influence customers—for better or for worse—by something as simple as how their web or mobile sites are designed, where information is placed, the colors and white space used, and how products are described. Some companies that do this well, while others do it less so well (Amazon is one of the worst!)
Online vs. Offline Decisions
You may be surprised to learn that the choices, decisions and purchases you make online can be very different from the choices you would make offline. Those strategically planned online influences often lead us to make decisions that we might not make offline – even if they are ultimately expensive or harmful.
For instance:
You’re more likely to add bacon to a pizza order if you’re online.
You will probably get lower scores if you take the SAT on a computer.
You might buy an item located on a screen ‘hotspot’, even if better options are available.
You’ll probably overvalue a product you’re considering, if you shop using a touchscreen.
You Can Consciously Make Better Decisions Online
“I have devoted my career to studying the mistakes people make so that we might learn to avoid them.” In his latest game-changing book, Shlomo Benartzi, behavioral economist and UCLA professor, researched and recently published, The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behavior
His mission is to help individuals make better decisions online.
Benartzi writes about the many ways our brains process information differently on a screen versus in real life, and the impact these differences can have on our buying habits, health, financial planning, and more.
Benefits of THE SMARTER SCREEN
“This book is about how we think on screens” Benartzi summarizes. It’s a book about behavioral solutions and practical tools that can improve our digital lives. Using stories and case studies, we learn how profoundly we are affected, and even further, how to anticipate the marketers’ and designers’ intent.
Benartzi offers specific tools for triggering behavioral attention on screens. We learn how webpage design can make us smarter. And think better – in order to empower our own actions and succumb less to the intended manipulation.
Can THE SMARTER SCREEN initiate meaningful, sustainable change?
Possible Scope of Change – a Billion People?
“… My hope is that we can use the scale of technology to bring more fixes to more people …. using the reach of the digital world to quickly contact vast numbers of people with minimal effort” offers Benartzi. “In fact, influencing behavior on screens can be so efficient and effective that I believe we have a chance to help a billion people think smarter and choose wiser. That’s right: billion. With a b.”
The end result is that we need to update our behavioral toolkit for the digital age. This book will give you the tools you need now, at least if you want to nudge people the right way on screens.
It’s Time Has Arrived
It’s high time that consumers, business workers and the public in general become aware of these powerful and largely manipulative influences in order to make decisions in our own best interest, whether individual or business.
It’s time to raise our awareness, our consciousness, and think more independently on-screen.
Internet Retailer has issued a new industry report covering their predictions for retailers’ and brands’ online spending in 2016. Below, I’ve highlighted some of the points and graphs that are relevant and vitally important to all online retailers, from solopreneurs to major brands.
According to Zak Stambor, Editor of Internet Retailer, “In (our) first-ever digital marketing survey, the results of which are included in this special report, we find that many retailers are boosting their digital ad spending, and they’re spreading those dollars around to a variety of channels. As they do so, they’re also looking for ways to make their messages more relevant to shoppers.”
Image Source: THE NEXT DIGITAL MARKETING WAVE, Internet Retailer
Ads Get Personal
“While digital ad budgets are growing,” Zak says, “marketers still must spend wisely. Increasingly that means tailoring just about every digital marketing campaign to individual shoppers.”
For example, men’s apparel retailer Bonobos Inc. sends a lot of emails, between one and five acquisition and retention messages a day. Email is their main thing. And it is clearly targeted based on segmented email lists.
The segments are based on likelihood of purchasing specific products, colors, styles or sizes.
In 2014, the company ran a test to determine how effective its targeting strategy really was in increasing sales. It sent the same email to two different lists – one email list that was determined to be inclined to buy an item promoted through the email, and one email list that was a completely random cross-section of all undifferentiated email addresses. The result? The segmented list was four times more likely to purchase than the random list.
As a strategy to increase revenues, targeting and retargeting are the focus of Bonobos online ad spend, consistent with other online retailers.
Digital Ad Spending
“And it isn’t just email where retailers are spending more; 66% of respondents increased their overall budgets this year— including 24% of all respondents who boosted their spending more than 20%. That growth continues an ongoing trend. U.S. retailers’ digital ad spending jumped 14.4% last year—from $9.574 billion in 2013 to $10.957 billion,” according to eMarketer Inc., who expects spending to rise another 16.8% this year to $12.802 billion.
IMage Source: THE NEXT DIGITAL MARKETING WAVE, Internet Retailer
The Power of Digital Referrals
According to a recent Nielsen Co. survey, 92% of respondents said they trusted referrals from people they know, and that same study found that shoppers are four times more likely to buy a product when a friend has referred it.
Additionally, the lifetime value of a customer who has been referred by a friend is 16% higher than that of the average customer, according to a University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business report. So why aren’t more retailers deploying customer referral programs? “Retailers have an awareness of referral programs, but there is a lack of clarity around the potential impact of referral on their business,” says Chris Duskin, vice president of marketing at Extole, a referral marketing firm. “Many retailers aren’t yet dialed into the fact that there is a marketing platform for customer referral programs that has the same power that marketing platforms have for search and email, for example. Refer-a-friend isn’t merely a widget or a homegrown effort anymore.”
As more retailers begin to implement digital marketing campaigns that take an integrated multichannel approach, Duskin says they should expand those efforts to include customer referral programs. “Today, many retail marketers are utilizing vast amounts of data to very specifically target their customers,” he says. “That’s where the opportunity lies.”
“To be successful in referral, retailers need to get started quickly, take advantage of the immediate opportunity, and expand to grow the program beyond what most people even realize is possible,” Duskin says. “They need to shift to a ‘customer journey’ way of thinking and fully understand the much more complex relationship they have with their customers today. It’s not as much a challenge as it is an opportunity.”
Image Source: THE NEXT DIGITAL MARKETING WAVE, Internet Retailer
Retargeting
Retargeting consumers across the web via display ads—which 27% of Forrester respondents listed as one of their five top customer acquisition channels—can be one way to stretch a budget because the consumers a retailer is targeting have already expressed interest in a brand’s products, says Courtney Lear Wallace, director of digital marketing and e-commerce at online-only apparel retailer Unique Vintage.
“There’s so much noise out there that you have to be relevant,” she says. “A message that’s based on something a shopper looked at can be incredibly effective.”
This post is courtesy of Internet Retailer and THE NEXT DIGITAL MARKETING WAVE.
For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Marketing and Social Media.
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ABOUT Lisa M. Chapman:
Lisa Chapman helps company leaders define, plan and achieve their goals, both online and offline. After 25+ years as an entrepreneur, she is now a business and marketing consultant, business planning consultant and social media consultant. Online, she works with clients to establish and enhance their online brand, attract their target market, engage them in meaningful social media conversations, and convert online traffic into revenues. Email: Lisa (at) LisaChapman (dot) com. Her book, The WebPowered Entrepreneur – A Step-by-Step Guide is available at:
Do you remember when the power supply to a much-anticipated Superbowl Game was interrupted? This was followed by a Tweet from Oreo, the ever-popular cookie manufacturer, with an image captioned, “You can still dunk in the dark”.
The post was re-tweeted more than ten thousand timesin an hour and proved to be a huge boost to the Oreo brand’s online reputation.
Social media trends are nearly impossible to predict because they are often based on real-time events. A company called Sickweather was able to pinpoint the geographic origin of illnesses based on public Tweets and Facebook updates of people in those areas, proving that there may be ways to monitor social media and gain insight into the possibilities the future holds.
Yet no tool can predict more generic social media trends that are truly spontaneous, like the one that was spurred by Oreo’s #dunkinthedark. So your best approach is to use a few of these social media tools to help you track current trends and really capitalize on them.
Current HOT Social Media Trends
While we’re talking about trends, here are the top three that seem to dominate the social media scene:
Relationships between customers and businesses are becoming more personal: Customers value businesses which maintain a personal relationship with them more than businesses that are only keen on promoting their products or services. In fact, a survey by Fractl and Buzzstream found that 45% of the respondents would unfollow a brand on social media if it posted too much promotional content.
More visual content is being generated and consumed: The popularity of video websites like YouTube and Vine has led to a huge increase in the production and consumption of short video content, which manages to deliver a message or start a conversation more effectively than regular textual content. The staggering growth of sites like Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest also reflects the increasing popularity of visual content as a medium of communication.
Businesses are using content curation for social media management: More and more people are considering the online presence of a company to determine its reliability and credibility. The content that businesses post to their social media accounts now reaches a much larger audience than ever before, prompting them to turn to content curation tools to ensure that they have a steady stream of good content.
Clearly, it would make a huge difference to your business’ bottom line if you are able to establish and maintain a strong presence on social media. There are many social media management tools which you can use to improve the impact that you make on your audience.
Here are five such tools which would aid your social media marketing efforts:
DrumUp.io – Discover And Collect Interesting, Meaningful Content
DrumUp.io is a content curation and scheduling application which helps you discover interesting content that you can share on social media. It supports Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter accounts and allows you to manage all these accounts through a single dashboard eliminating the need for you to log into each of them separately. The content suggestions are based on the keywords you set for each account and can be changed at any time based on your preferences. The design of the app is minimalistic and clean. It allows you to queue suggested posts, as well as custom posts, and schedule them for sharing days, weeks, or even months in advance.
2. Easel.ly – Create Compelling, Original Infographics
The task of creating infographics is made much simpler with this tool, where you get ready templates over which you simply have to drag and drop your content. The images created are high quality ones and it makes presenting data visually extremely easy. The interface is very intuitive and requires almost no time to understand and master.
Even functions like layering (which is quite complicated in Photoshop) is much easier to perform on Easel.ly. There are also hundreds of pictures that you can browse while you are building your infographic. If you are not an experienced graphic designer you can use this tool to create great visual content.
And don’t forget to Pin your infographic!
3. Followerwonk – Analyze And Build Your Twitter Influence
Followerwonk gives you the ability to analyze your Twitter profile and get many useful insights. Once linked with your Twitter account it gives you a detailed report about who your followers are, the geographical region they belong to, their social authority, the total number of followers you have, the number of tweets, the number of new followers, unfollows and other such data. The analysis tells you which topics generate the most engagement, helps you identify influencers and also gives you a better understanding of your audience. It is an invaluable tool when you are trying to market your service or product.
IFTTT is probably one of the simplest automation services available. Simple tasks like receiving an email to remind yourself of a task or an upcoming event, saving important content to Dropbox, or cross-posting a Tweet on Instagram can all be automated on IFTTT. The tool simply uses the icons of these services for you to create automated processes, which the website calls “recipes”. Once you have created a recipe, you can change any of its parameters or even choose to turn it off. The tool also allows you to browse through public recipes of other people
5. Canva – Create Graphics With Drop And Drag Technology – EASY!
Another awesome tool to create visual content, Canva makes it easy for you to design original images for your Facebook, Instagram and other social media posts. The tool lets you choose from hundreds of thousands of existing high-definition photographs, posters, advertisements and other such content templates. Functions are very intuitive, making it easy to add text and layers to your images.
While it’s a good idea to establish your presence on multiple social media platforms, the content you share on them will have to be tailored to each specific platform. Using social media tools will make managing multiple accounts a stress-free task. Try out different tools to see which ones would be most useful to you. Do not hesitate to explore new applications, as they might provide exactly what you are looking for. The ultimate objective should be to make social media management less time-consuming, which in turn will let you invest more man-hours in the core functions of your business.
Have you tried any of these tools? Which are your favorites and why?
Author Bio:
Tejas Veeramani is a blogger at Godot Media, a popular content service firm, where he writes about content marketing and social media marketing. His other interests include music and gaming.
How did an $11,000 social media campaign return USD$2.5 million for a tiny town in Europe?
Tucked away in the peace and quiet of the Swiss Alps is a small hamlet called Obermutten. Being one of smallest towns in Europe with only 80 residents, it would have continued to remain in obscurity if it weren’t for a certain Facebook campaign. In attempt to attract more tourists the residents announced that they would print a picture of every person who liked their Facebook Page and pin it up on the town’s noticeboard. So, their investment of just $11,000 on a campaign that went extremely viral helped the town earn $2.5 million in return.
While such viral campaign ideas may be hard to come by, maintaining a steady presence on social media is, thankfully, much easier. No really, it is – if you use content curation tools.
How do content curation tools help?
It is important to share new and interesting content on a daily basis to keep your social media audience hooked to your brand. Original content not only helps you improve your rankings in keyword searches, but also lets you establish thought-leadership within your industry. However creating content is not an easy process as it takes a significant amount of time and effort.
Considering the volume of content that is continuously shared on social media, content curation will help you maintain a steady presence, without having to spend as much time and effort as you will have to in the case of content creation. It gives you the distinct advantage of being able to stay active, without having to spend hours on end creating one social media post after another. Businesses around the world have been quick to adopt content curation for the same reason.
Content curation tools let you achieve greater levels of efficiency in social media management by helping you discover, organize, curate, schedule and share interesting content for the purpose of social media marketing. Let us have look at some of these content curation tools that are creating waves in the social media world.
DrumUp uses advanced Natural Language Processing and machine learning algorithms to generate a fresh stream of content everyday, for a given set of keywords. It lets you manage multiple social accounts from a single dashboard, saving you the effort of having to log in to multiple accounts. The recommended content can be reviewed and scheduled for sharing on social media, days, weeks or even months in advance. It lets you add custom posts to queue of scheduled content and supports Image uploads as well.
Feedly gathers information and articles from various sites to collate them into one attractive GUI that serves as your homepage for all the information that is pertinent to you and your business. Feedly provides you with real time trending articles and blogposts, which you can then individually share on your social accounts. The RSS reader lets you choose your preferred sources for content, and you can add or delete items to your list of sources as per your requirement.
Bottlenose acts as a real-time search engine, bringing you the latest trending topics and data analytics for content on social media. With access to real time information, Bottlenose lets you share the trending content with your audience, thereby increasing your chances of being first one to break some news. All you have to do, is enter a search term for which it will return results based on relevance and social influence. The tool also lets you create alerts for topics that are of interest to you.
Realtime by Bitly or rt.ly is an interactive application that lets you conduct a real time search of every link available on Bitly and returns a list of the hottest trending topics. You can even add a filter to these topics to sort by social network, topic, and language. Realtime also lets users bookmark articles for future use.
Try these social media management tools out and see which one fits your purpose the best. Using these tools you can save a lot of useful time that you can in turn invest in your business’ core functions, the ones that cannot be outsourced.
About the Author
Jessica Davis closely follows the social media and content marketing space, and writes about it extensively. She represents Godot Media, a leading copywriting services firm. You may also enjoy these articles that Jessica previously contributed:
Are you looking for fresh, interesting ideas for your blog?
Well, if the U.S. government feels that certain topics are important enough to publish for US citizens, chances are that you’ll find something of value on those .gov sites as well.
A great source for valuable, targeted articles and content can be searched and used almost verbatim from: www.usa.gov. The federal government cannot copyright their content – it is public domain information and may be used by anyone for any purpose. But be careful – the content must be written by a government agency, and NOT in collaboration with a private or state source.
.GOV material is generally not copyrightable. HOWEVER, if the content came from a non-government source such as a collaborating organization, then that content is probably under the collaborating organization’s copyright.
Be careful to look for the copyright symbol. In its absence, look for information that states specifically that it is NOT copyrighted and may be used.
Many times, the .GOV source wants to be credited. Listing the domain Home page in our manual under “Resources” should be sufficient to satisfy this request. Note that this is a request and not a requirement.
State sites may or may not be copyrighted. Most state sites are copyrighted. Again, look for evidence of the copyright symbol or other such declarations related to copyright.
Examples of Great Information for Blog Posts That Come From .Gov Sources:
Go to: www.usa.gov – You can search for specific topics or keywords to find .gov content. Information is also categorized this way (copied directly from usa.gov website):
Find answers to the most popular Post Office questions.
Now, click around to find meaningful, helpful information that will benefit your followers.
Write your post, but don’t use duplicate content. If you do, Google will recognize it as duplicate and will not search it. Duplicate content has no chance of showing up in Google’s search results!
You can also turn these into a Tweet, Google+ post, Facebook update, etc.
Go ahead and give it a try! We’ll all learn some interesting and useful things in the process.
For More Legal Information About .Gov And Copyrights, Review These Resources
RESOURCES: Summary of Use of GOV Material and Copyright Implications
If you finished reading this post and you think it’s valuable, others will too.
So please take 5 seconds (!) to share on Facebook, Twitter or your favorite social scoop. Thanks!
For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Marketing and Social Media.
.. _____ ..
About the Author:
Lisa Chapman helps company leaders define, plan and achieve their goals, both online and offline. After 25+ years as an entrepreneur, she is now a business and marketing consultant, business planning consultant and social media consultant. Online, she works with clients to establish and enhance their online brand, attract their target market, engage them in meaningful social media conversations, and convert online traffic into revenues. Email: Lisa (at) LisaChapman (dot) com. Her book, The WebPowered Entrepreneur – A Step-by-Step Guide is available at:
Today, an active social media presence is indispensable in order to stay above the competition. Unfortunately, most people don’t have time to painstakingly go through piles and piles of content to discover something relevant for their audience. Fortunately, however, there are apps that can do this for you. By cutting down the time you invest in social media management, these apps let you concentrate on your business rather than on what to tweet next.
DrumUp is a FREE content discovery and scheduling app that’s gaining traction among social media managers. The app uses NLP and data mining algorithms to find stories of interest for your audience and queues them for sharing through Facebook and Twitter. You can edit the content before it is posted. Not only is it totally easy to use, but it also lets you manage multiple social accounts.
Postling acts as a centralized dashboard and lets you post content on multiple social media accounts. Targeted at small businesses, Postling lets you track your presence on Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Tumblr – you name it. The app sends you an email every day detailing any social media activity, such as a new Facebook or Twitter comment. These are easy to skim through and let you decide what to respond to. The app also informs you about which of your posts are most effective. Pricing starts at $10 per month.
Feedly lets you subscribe to a variety of sites based on your interests. Depending on what collection you choose, posts from the sites selected will appear on your newsfeed. You can then share the posts you think are relevant to your business through Facebook and Twitter. It is simple, easy-to-use and has a minimalist interface. The basic package is FREE, and you can upgrade to Pro for a measly $3.75 per month
4) SumAll:
SumAll is an analytics app that assesses your various social media accounts and provides data and insights on them. The FREE version allows you to add unlimited accounts and sends you a daily and weekly update with all the stats and info. It gives you clear access to all the data in a single dashboard. The App supports a wide range of platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
Juggling various social media accounts is not only exhausting but eats into time that you can otherwise use more effectively. Everypost offers a solution to this problem by posting your updates across various social media platforms. It comes with a neat tool called a ‘Twitter text shortener’ which basically shortens your tweets and makes them suitable for Twitter. The Personal plan is FREE, and the Pro is $9.99 per month.
Deciding which Twitter-centric app to choose, considering the never-ending options, can be a daunting task. But if you are looking for something streamlined and organized, this is the app for you. Tweetdeck organizes friends, trending topics, searches and other activity into columns so that they are easy to manage. Like Everypost, Tweetdeck comes with a ‘TweetShrink’ and makes overly long updates Twitter-friendly. Tweetdeck is FREE!
HootSuite integrates up to three social media platforms, offers basic analytics and reports, lets your schedule posts and manage two RSS feeds on its FREE version. You can post updates to various platforms, track them and reply to comments all from one place. It is comprehensive and systematic in its organization and gives you the ability to monitor the visibility of your business. It also lets you delegate tasks to your social team, ensuring that you don’t overlook a potential customer. Hootsuite’s paid plans start at $9.99 per month.
The app lets you manage and schedule your Tweets right to the minute. It closely monitors Twitter’s tweet stream and emails you a digest of any replies you may have received, mentions and retweets. You can manage up to five Twitter accounts for FREE. It also has a ‘Tweet purge’ option that deletes all your previous tweets and lets you start with a clean slate.
The struggle for small businesses to stay relevant is slowly, but steadily becoming a non-issue. With apps that discover relevant content and help you schedule it, sometimes right to the minute, social media is longer something that only big companies can use to its maximum potential.
ABOUT Antara Krishnamurthy:
Antara is currently pursuing a degree in media and communication. She is passionate about digital social media marketing and writing blog posts. Connect with her on Facebook : www.facebook.com/antara.krishnamurthy
If you finished reading this post and you think it’s valuable, others will too.
So please take 5 seconds (!) to share on Facebook, Twitter or your favorite social scoop. Thanks!
For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Marketing and Social Media.
Lisa Chapman helps company leaders define, plan and achieve their goals, both online and offline. After 25+ years as an entrepreneur, she is now a business and marketing consultant, business planning consultant and social media consultant. Online, she works with clients to establish and enhance their online brand, attract their target market, engage them in meaningful social media conversations, and convert online traffic into revenues. Email: Lisa (at) LisaChapman (dot) com. Her book, The WebPowered Entrepreneur – A Step-by-Step Guide is available at:
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“Visual marketing will continue to grow in 2016, making it absolutely necessary for brands to have a solid plan for visuals including multimedia such as long- and short-form video for YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, as well as graphics for blog content.
out Novel 1st (first) edition Text Only
and 
. He has extensive experience applying behavioral economic insights to the real world, having increased the savings rates of millions of Americans through his work with Richard Thaler on Save More Tomorrow, and has advised many government agencies and businesses.
