There are many different components in play when it comes to increasing a website’s conversion rates; but in 2016, few are more important than visual elements. While the wrong visual techniques will turn visitors away, the right strategies will encourage them to stick around. Here are some pointers for modernizing your approach to visual elements. […]
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iPhone Renamed Out with the old and in with the new…at least that’s what a leak from Pacific Crest supply chain revealed in a note last week. In the note, it hinted that Apple is ditching the number series and the next iPhone will be called iPhone Pro. The note also hinted that Apple will […]
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Although it might sound like something out of a classic Aldous Huxley novel, the concept of social blogging is perhaps something best described as a blurry world between social media and conventional blogs. In a day and age where everything has a name, a buzz word and is set within clearly defined parameters, social blogging […]
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When starting a new website, the tenet you will hear most often repeated is that content is king. When users visit your website or your social media presences, they expect to find content that is interesting, meaningful to them and updated daily. Fresh content, whether the product of blogging, article writing, press releases or simply having […]
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Times when one could have simply set aside a portion of one’s income to place it in bank and hope to amass a respectable fortune are long past – today an investor should take into account numerous different factors and correctly choose time to put his money into a particular area, at least if he […]
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As everyone says…
You need to build an email list.
Email marketing provides the highest ROI for most businesses at $40 for every $1 spent (on average).
I’m sure you see a ton of content on a regular basis that shows you different ways to build that email list. Great.
But how much do you see that tells you how to interact with that list effectively?
I think it’s safe to guess not much.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you had questions such as:
While I can’t show you all of that in a single post, I’m going to show you 7 different types of emails that most businesses can send.
These types of emails are emails that your subscribers and customers will enjoy getting, will interact with, and will help you build strong relationships.
It’s nice when someone, whether a close friend or a relative stranger, goes out of their way to do something nice for you.
As a website owner with an email list, you’re hopefully somewhere in the middle of that friend-stranger spectrum in the eyes of your subscribers.
If you can do something for your subscribers that they really appreciate, it will do many important things:
The question then is: what can you give them?
For most businesses, an exclusive offer is the best thing they can give.
Let’s go through a few real examples and then some more general situations.
First, you can offer a live event that only your subscribers are invited to. Not only will the event be valuable because it’s live, but it will also be well attended because it’s exclusive.
Bryan Harris often does this, so it must work well for him. For example, here is an email with an offer to attend a private mastermind:
He sends a few emails leading up to the event and one or two at the last minute. They aren’t complicated—just a brief description of what to expect in the event.
What else can you offer subscribers? Another thing of value that doesn’t cost you much, if anything, is early access.
Matthew Barby created a WordPress plugin and sent this email to his subscribers, giving them free access to it:
That’s a pretty sweet offer. In reality, Matthew is also gaining his first group of users, which is another win for him.
If you’re launching any big guides or tools, consider getting early feedback from your subscribers.
What else can you offer?
Be creative. If you can think of any other ideas, tell me about them in a comment at the end of the article.
Take care of your subscribers because your list is one of the most valuable assets you own.
You can give value in many ways. Some may be big gestures (email type #1), but even small things go a long way.
If someone is on your list, that means they’ve already told you that they like your content (if they signed up from a blog post, for example).
However, just because they want to hear your thoughts and advice doesn’t mean all your subscribers want it in the same way.
Typically, you’ll email all your subscribers about any new content you create. When you do this, consider giving them alternative ways to consume the content. Make it as convenient as you can.
For example, Tim Urban created a long post about SpaceX. He then sent out this email to subscribers:
On top of the regular link that he had already sent his subscribers, he sent this email with two other options: a PDF version and an audio version.
It takes a fraction of the time to re-create the original content in a different form, but it adds a lot of extra value.
Nathan Barry offers another way to make your content more convenient.
After he hosts a webinar, he uploads it to YouTube and sends an email with a link to all his subscribers.
It’s something that I know most subscribers really appreciate, and it also exposes his webinar to those subscribers who forgot to sign up for the event.
Convenience typically comes in the form of different mediums of content.
If you wrote a blog post, particularly a long one, consider emailing it to your subscribers with more than one version:
Or if you created a video, reformat that into:
You don’t need to create all the formats. Just think about which ones your subscribers would like most and which make sense for the content you made.
Think about your subscribers’ email boxes.
Day after day, they get several emails from friends, families, and businesses they like.
What do most of the business emails consist of?
About 90% of business emails fall into these two categories.
And it’s not that those types of emails aren’t valuable to your subscribers—because they are, but some subscribers will get fatigued by them.
If you’re looking to maximize your subscriber happiness as much as possible, consider sending emails that focus on nothing but teaching something interesting to your subscribers.
No links to your content or anyone’s website.
No asking for replies—just a clear show of value.
Bernadette Jiwa is known for her story-telling talent.
She sends out this exact type of email I’m talking about on a regular basis. Sometimes her emails have links underneath, and sometimes they don’t.
Here’s an example of such an email (yes, that’s the whole thing):
It’s short but gives her subscribers an interesting thing to ponder, which helps them tell better stories (their goal).
It’s a nice break from overwhelming amounts of content (which I may be guilty of myself).
Email newsletters are nothing new.
Any email sent out on a regular basis that summarizes what’s been happening on a site can be considered an email newsletter.
They’re supposed to consist of highlights.
But like the name implies, they need to consist of the very best of your site.
Whether you have user-generated content or content produced by your writing team, highlight emails are an option.
However, make sure you’re not including everything. But don’t select content randomly either.
You should be giving previews of the most popular content on your site for that particular time period.
For example, Quora (the question and answer site), regularly sends users the most upvoted questions from their feeds.
Here’s what it looks like:
I would guess that these are automatically generated by the most upvoted questions during the week.
One goal that every email marketer should have is to form deeper relationships with subscribers.
Admittedly, this is difficult. It’s tough to break down that barrier over email only. You’ve probably never met your subscribers, and by default, they think of you as just another business.
Even if they like your business, most subscribers will still be skeptical about your claim that you care about them and not just their money.
One thing I encourage businesses to do is find employees through their email list.
I’ve done it before, as have many others. Here’s an example of Ramit Sethi sending an email to his list while looking to hire for more than 10 positions:
When you do this, you make it clear that you think of them as people whom you respect and who you believe have valuable skills.
And it’s good business too. Your subscribers likely have an in-depth understanding of your business and obviously think in similar to you ways (since they like you).
Even if someone doesn’t apply or doesn’t get hired, it’s clear to them that you’re looking to develop partnerships and relationships with people on your list.
It’s one way to break down that barrier a bit and become more than “just another business.”
Many bloggers suffer from the “curse of knowledge.”
The curse of knowledge is a fairly old concept. It basically states that it’s hard to understand what lesser-informed people are thinking.
If you’re an expert in math, it would be hard for you to even fathom that someone doesn’t understand something like basic calculus.
It’s the reason why some people are geniuses but absolutely awful teachers. Conversely, someone who just learned something can often teach it best because they understand the perspective of someone who doesn’t know it.
Let’s apply this to your subscribers and content.
Over the years, you might write hundreds of pieces of content. At that point (possibly present day), you’re naturally going to assume that your average new subscriber is more informed than they used to be.
For me, as an example, it’s easy to assume that every new subscriber understands on-page and off-page SEO as well as concepts such as white-hat and black-hat link building.
From that perspective, it’s hard for me to send them my advanced guide to SEO because I’m assuming they already know everything in it.
Chances are, though, your average new subscriber won’t change much over time.
And it’s very likely that my average new subscriber could benefit from more general SEO knowledge before I get to the specific tactics I currently write about.
The autoresponder “crash course”: If you think that this is a problem, one way to fix it is with an autoresponder sequence.
Think of what an average subscriber knew even a year or two ago, and make a list of what they need to learn to get up to speed with the rest of your content.
Then, put together an autoresponder sequence that you send to all new subscribers, where you showcase your old content that teaches these basic concepts.
For example, if you sign up for Wordstream’s list, a PPC optimization business, you’ll get a few emails like this:
The guides are all older content, and the field may have advanced since it was written, but the fundamentals hold true, and new subscribers will greatly appreciate learning them.
The takeaway from the “curse of knowledge” is that you’re probably giving subscribers a bit too much credit. Don’t assume they’ve read every single post you’ve ever written—because they haven’t.
Don’t be afraid to send emails featuring the best of your older content.
You need to give subscribers incentives to open that next email.
There are many ways to do this, but one way is to build hype in advance.
Think about any popular TV show. They show previews for the next episode in commercials and at the end of episodes.
These get you excited, and you make sure you watch the next episode.
Brian Dean does a similar thing really well, but for content.
For example, he sent this email to subscribers:
In that email, he shared his story about struggling and then finally succeeding with SEO.
It’s an interesting story that draws you in and makes you curious about the specifics of his success (building hype).
At the bottom of the email, he teases subscribers with bullet points that outline what he’s going to show them over the next few emails:
Right at the end, after building that hype, he tells them to watch out for his next email in which he’ll send the first post about how to succeed with SEO like he did.
You’d better believe that he had a fantastic open rate on that email.
You can do the same. When you’re planning to publish a big piece of content or a new tool, first send an email that focuses on the benefits of it.
If possible, tie it into an entertaining story to suck in your subscriber even more. That will only add to the anticipation.
It’s not enough just to build an email list—you have to use it effectively.
Emails are a great personal way to communicate with subscribers and customers.
Use as many of these 7 types of emails (where they make sense) to start building more meaningful relationships.
If you’re having trouble deciding exactly what to send to your subscribers, just fill me in on your situation in a comment below, and I’ll point you in the right direction.
If you are running a business, you know better than people around you how important marketing is for business. However, it is quite surprising that many business owners don’t understand the big difference that that separates B2B marketing from B2C marketing. Of course, there are many things similar in both the types of marketing but […]
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In the world of e-commerce and social media, trying to decide which web host company to go with can be tricky. With all of them promising 99 percent uptime, around-the-clock support, and unlimited resources, there must be a way to cut through the red tape and make a decision. Right? As a side note, have […]
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Drama at Baylor University. The Waco, Texas school has been caught mishandling sexual assault cases. Specifically cases regarding football players. Reports are saying that the university was encouraging students to not report accusations and essentially just sweep it all under the rug. Not okay. Yesterday, the university announced that President Kenneth Starr, would be […]
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Are you able to describe the differences between shared, virtual, dedicated, and cloud hosting? Do you know what you should be looking for when browsing potential hosts or what would happen if you pick the wrong solution? If the answer to all of these questions is no, you will probably end up with a web […]
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Millions of users are addicted to social media apps and websites and among these are the kids in a greater number. Kids are extensively using the social media, and even they admit that they share such stuff and content their parents would rebuke them after seeing. 80% do sexting when they get smartphones, and 70% […]
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There is an app for just about anything you could possibly think of, from games that keep you entertained, to apps that help you find jobs and real estate, and even apps that help you know exactly what first aid procedures to take during an emergency. But did you know that there are also many […]
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As an entrepreneur, you invest a great deal of time, effort, and resources into making your dream a reality. This requires proficiency, time management, and commitment, not just on your end, but also on the end of your team. Achieving all this on your own can prove to be challenging. Fortunately, some smartphone apps can […]
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Snapchat Valuation Hits $20 Billion Strap on your seatbelts folks, because Series F of investing for Snapchat is full of high-rolling dollar signs. Within five months, the Los Angeles-based (Silicon Beach) startup racked in $1.8 billion worth of funding to increase their monetization efforts. Form D doesn’t tell us how much the company is actually […]
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At Buffer, we love to see new stats and research about how to best share to social media and drive engagement. And as a brand on social media ourselves, we know just how challenging it can be to post engaging content across multiple channels.
To learn more about how brands are tackling social media in 2016, and importantly, to discover what’s working, we decided to study what types of posts brands were sharing the most of on social media.
We examined over 100,000 accounts, which consisted of over 14 million tweets and two million Facebook updates to figure out how brands have been sharing to social media over the past 12 months.
Here’s how it broke down…
After looking at over 16 million updates over 12 months, covering Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google +, Facebook and Twitter, we found that brands posted primarily to Facebook and Twitter. It makes sense seeing as both social networks have the largest active audiences of the group according to this study.
Here’s the breakdown of percentages:
This data was super-interesting for us as we love to experiment with posting schedules frequencies. We found that brands posted to Twitter more than any other network – which feels about right considering the more real-time feel of Twitter.
I was a little surprised to see that Facebook is the only other network where brands post an average of once per day.
For this part of the study, we looked at how many engagements (clicks, likes, shares) each post a brand shares gets on average across Facebook and Twitter. We found that Facebook video appears to be leading the way here (by a considerable margin, too) and photos are still leading the way on Twitter.
It’s interesting to see that links appear to be driving more engagement than photos on Facebook at the moment. It feels like this could be due to their visual nature, now when you post a link, a large image is displayed, as is meta data from the post, giving brands plenty of opportunities to grab user’s attention as they scroll through their news feeds.
Here’s an example:
A cool way to potentially further increase the success of links on Facebook could be to create specific headlines and descriptions for your post. Here at Buffer, we use a neat tool called Yoast to choose the image, title, and description that’ll accompany a link when posted to Facebook:
Twitter have recently made similar adjustments with links pulling meta data into the timeline. Could this lead to a boost in Twitter link engagement? Maybe. But for now, it feels a little like Twitter has a noise problem, with images being one of the few ways to stand out in the timeline.
social media lessons we’ve learned from this studyDespite all the excitement surrounding social video, the data shows that video is still underutilised by many brands.
On Facebook, video gets three times as much engagement as any other kind of content, but in the 7 posts that brands share on Facebook per week, far less than 1% are videos. Of the remaining 99%, 80% are links and 19% are photos.
The lesson here could be to experiment with sharing more video on Facebook, especially with Facebook’s new live feature, to see how it affects brand engagement.
While brands share links often, on every social network at least 50% of the content is links. For Facebook and LinkedIn over 80% of the content is links, and on Twitter it’s just over 70%.
However, looking at the data around engagement, links are second to Video on Facebook and second to Photos on Twitter for most engaging types of content.
For many of us, driving traffic back to a website via links is a key part of our social media strategy. I’d be curious to see whether mixing up more non-link based content could actually increase the engagement for links when they’re posted. For example, on Facebook, posting more videos could increase engagement and reach meaning more users may see links when we publish them.
According to this 2016 study, 59% of LinkedIn users don’t visit twitter, 83% don’t use Pinterest and 13% don’t use Facebook. Which means that unless you’re capturing them on Facebook, LinkedIn users could be a completely untapped market for you.
According to our study, brands post to LinkedIn only 3 times per week, whereas in this small business guide by LinkedIn, they share that posting 5 times a week, on week days, allows you to reach 60% of your audience.
Pinterest looks like it might be a lost opportunity for some brands as well. According to this recent Shopify study, two million people save product pins every day and 87% of Pinterest users say they have purchased something they found while pinning.
Despite the potential on Pinterest, brands are only posting to pinterest 4–5 times per week, whereas they could be posting that many times in a day. Top brands on Pinterest have experienced steady growth by adopting a multiple-times-per-day posting strategy.
Thanks so much for reading! I’d love to hear how our findings feel to you…
I’d love to hear what’s working for your and any thoughts you may have in the comments below. I’m excited to join the conversation.
Creating great content is pointless…
…unless you’re getting it in front of your target audience.
You do this by using any one of a number of promotional tactics to reach your target audience on a variety of platforms.
Most of these platforms can be grouped together, and that’s where we get marketing channels. A promotional tactic can then be applied to most of the platforms in the channel.
For example, social media is a marketing channel, consisting of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Depending on whom you ask, you’ll get different answers to the question of how many marketing channels there really are.
The number gets even more complicated if you consider that there are many offline marketing channels as well.
However, for most of us, the number of channels doesn’t matter.
What does matter is that there is a handful of core channels that are by far the most effective digital marketing channels.
That’s what this post is all about.
We’ll go over the six main digital marketing channels you should at least be familiar with. On top of that, I’m going to show you how to evaluate each channel to determine whether it’s worth your time.
The real power of studying channels: If you want to learn this stuff because you love marketing, that’s great. But there’s also a great practical reason for you to want to learn it.
Once you learn how to identify the best marketing channels for your business, you can study them and create content for those specific channels (and sites in them).
By targeting content towards a specific audience, you’re much more likely to create something they’ll love and want to read.
There are very few websites that wouldn’t benefit from search engine traffic.
No matter what industry you’re in, some of your target customers are using search engines to search for something.
That doesn’t mean you should necessarily spend all your time on SEO. It’s not always the best channel, but it’s one that you must research.
What you should be looking to do at this point is just some basic keyword research. Afterwards, you can do some more advanced keyword research with these resources:
Here, we just want to see the general number of searches your target audience does every month.
For that, the Google Keyword Planner will work just fine.
Start by entering some broad niche keywords. For example, “content marketing” or “social media marketing” if you were starting a blog like Quick Sprout.
Look through the list that comes up, and see how many keywords have a significant search volume (at least a few hundred per month).
While you’re missing out on a lot of keywords using this simplistic method, you want to see at least 50 keywords worth targeting.
If you don’t know where to start when it comes to searching for keywords, find a close competitor in your niche.
Then, enter their URL in the website field of the keyword planner instead of typing in keywords.
If they have a WordPress blog, you can typically add “/feed” to the end of their blog URL to get a more complete set of keywords.
For example, instead of entering:
enter:
That will give you a set of really broad keywords, and you can enter any of those into the tool to get a list to analyze.
When you identify a marketing channel, you first want to make sure you can actually reach your readers through it.
After, you need to decide if it’s ideal for your business. All channels have their strengths and weaknesses.
SEO, for example, can provide you with steady, high-quality free traffic. The downside is that it is hard to earn that traffic, can take a long time to get, and requires an upfront investment.
PPC, on the other hand, allows you to drive the same type of traffic (if you’re using AdWords) from day one of publishing content. There are also many more platforms you can use other than search such as Facebook advertising, LinkedIn advertising, or even a small network like 7search.
The downside is that it’s expensive, and if you don’t have a solid conversion funnel in place, you’ll end up wasting that traffic and losing money.
When can you use paid advertising? Another benefit of PPC is that you can use it for virtually any niche.
If there’s search traffic, you can advertise on Google or Bing.
If it’s most popular on social media, you can advertise there.
If you have a significant content promotion budget (on an ongoing basis), PPC is an option at your disposal.
However, if you don’t already have a solid sales funnel, be prepared to lose money.
Your time should mostly be spent optimizing ads and conversion rates of your content (readers into email subscribers). From there, you’ll need to determine the best way to sell to those subscribers.
If you’re starting a blog, I sure hope there are at least a few other, remotely similar to yours, popular blogs that already exist.
If not, there probably aren’t many potential customers reading blogs in that niche, and you’re wasting your time. The one exception is if you’re writing about a very new topic that has just started growing.
These blogs are usually seen as competition, but they don’t have to be.
A reader is not an all-or-nothing asset. A reader can follow multiple blogs.
If you give blog owners an incentive, you may be able to get them to allow you to get your message in front of their readers.
How?
The main ways are:
For now, you want to find as many of those blogs as you can.
It’s pretty easy these days. Start by Googling a phrase like “top (niche) blogs.”
You’ll probably find at least a few results, featuring long lists of blogs in your niche.
Write these down somewhere.
You can also head to Alltop, find your niche in the menu bar, and then write down the blogs that come up:
Traffic is king: There’s no point in doing a guest post on a site with very little traffic. Even if your post is great, you’ll only get a few readers from it.
Your next step is to estimate the traffic levels of each site you wrote down.
Visit each site, and look for:
It’s hard to know if a site has a lot of traffic, but if it’s getting 5+ comments or 100+ social shares on each post, it has enough to consider partnering with.
Filter out all the low traffic sites. If you still have 20+ sites left to potentially work with, then these blogs are another channel you can target.
Social media sites are usually hit or miss.
Some niches, like fitness, food, fashion, and even marketing to a degree, are highly shareable.
In order to use social media effectively, you need those extra followers and readers you get from “likes” and “shares.”
That’s why you don’t see a lot of asphalt companies or paper companies killing it on social media. It’s really hard to create shareable content in those niches.
To see whether it’s viable for your niche, you can use Buzzsumo, a tool I’ve mentioned many times before. Not only will it show you if your niche is popular on social media, but it will also tell you which social media sites to focus on.
Type your niche into the top content tool. If the results seem irrelevant, add quotation marks around your keyword:
In addition to the core keywords, I recommend typing in a few related keywords for more data.
You’re looking for two things here:
While there may be a few fluctuations, you’ll see that there is a pattern when it comes to the most popular social networks. You’ll want to focus on the most popular ones if you choose to use social media.
Forums have been around since the start of the Internet and continue to play a big part in most users’ online lives.
While getting readers from forums doesn’t scale very well, it can be very effective when your blog is new and you need that initial audience to write for.
On top of that, it’s free—other than your time investment.
Here, you need to find out whether there are any popular forums. To do so, Google for “(niche) + forum.”
You need a minimum of one highly active forum. You want to see 100+ users a day making new posts.
Check out the first few results, and see if any meet that criterion.
You can usually scroll to the bottom of a forum to see how big it is.
Turns out, there actually aren’t any good content marketing forums – bummer.
If you run into a case like this, you do have the option of expanding your scope (“marketing forums”), but it’s usually better just to move on.
Some might group question and answer (Q&A) sites with social media sites, but I think they’re distinctive enough to warrant their own section.
The biggest Q&A sites are Quora and Yahoo Answers.
Just like forums, these don’t scale well, but they can drive a good amount of traffic to your blog (if you include links in answers).
One bonus is that your answers will rank well in Google for long tail search terms (which are usually questions), which will send you consistent traffic in the future as well.
Head to Quora, and start typing your niche into the search bar. You’re looking for a topic that is exactly the same as yours or close to it (click it):
Quora provides follower statistics on each topic page on the right. If a topic has a good number of followers (say 20,000+), it’s active enough that you could focus on it as a marketing channel:
As a side note, here’s my post on using Quora for marketing.
Now that you have a good grasp of the ways to determine whether you could use a channel for marketing, it’s decision time.
Take a look at each channel, and first decide if your audience uses it (as I’ve shown you).
Then, consider the relative popularity of each channel, your budget, and your goals, and determine the top 1-3 channels.
You don’t want to try to target too many channels at once. Instead, focus on one or two, and put all your resources into using them effectively.
If you need help doing this, I’m happy to try to point you in the right direction. Leave me a comment below with as much detail as possible, and I’ll try to help out.
It would be impossible to believe if someone says there are businesses that cannot benefit from the internet. Similarly, it would be difficult to digest that someone on the internet cannot benefit from social media. It’s the social media that keeps the internet running and alive. There are all types of websites on the internet […]
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Google Wants To Eliminate Passwords Android users can forget all their passwords with Google’s most recent project. Project Abacus is Google’s new thing to reinvent security and eliminate passwords. Project Abacus works by using sensor data from your phone to verify security. Working with a developer API called Trust API, they want to verify your […]
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Providing IT support over the phone or instant messenger is challenging to say the least. Just think about the last time you tried to help your parents with a computer issue over the phone—#Frustrating. Yet, there is an easy solution. Video conferencing can make IT professionals look like rockstars. The trick is to have the […]
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Since its inception, social media has continuously played a vital role of helping people interact with each other. From the viewpoint of businesses, it changes the way in which companies interact with their potential customers. In fact, the social media has become an extremely powerful platform for business organizations to reach out to their target […]
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What was once a rumor that Twitter would update its 140 character count guidelines is now official in the social media sphere:
Twitter announced Tuesday morning that within the next few months, usernames, quoted tweets, photos, and other media attachments will no longer count against the tweet’s 140-character limit.
Twitter co-founder and chief executive Jack Dorsey told the BBC that “It doesn’t make sense to anyone. People have had to work around it. That just looks ugly, and it’s confusing.”
This big, new Twitter update will surely change the way people use Twitter personally and how social media marketers use Twitter for business.
Now that it’s imminent, let’s jump into what the newest Twitter update will mean moving forward and how marketers can maximize those 140 characters for your business or brand.
We’ve come a long way over the past 10 years! What began as a simple 140-character text message has evolved into a medium that allows people and businesses to express themselves with everything from photos and videos to polls to animated GIFs.
just setting up my twttr
— Jack (@jack) March 21, 2006
So what exactly will be featured in this newest Twitter update?
How many times have you written what feels like the perfect Twitter update and the second you add the obligatory animated gif of a puppy doing adorable puppy things, the character count falls to -1? If you’re anything like me, it happens nearly every single time.
Twitter’s recent announcement details that when your tweet includes attachments like photos, GIFs, videos, polls, or Quote Tweets, that media will no longer count as characters within your tweet!
Every single character in a tweet is super important, especially when you only have 140 characters to work with. Being able to add highly engaging media attachments in tweets without having to sacrifice any characters at all means that we’ll soon be able to use the full 140 characters to craft the best updates that we possibly can, with more context than ever – this feels like a massive win for social media marketers everywhere!
When replying to a tweet, @names will no longer count toward the 140-character count. For now, we want to emphasize the word ‘replying’ here since we know that those will definitely be free characters. However, when it comes to the initial @name tweet, there are some conflicting reports on how Twitter will be counting those characters – most seem to believe that those will indeed count against your allotted 140 characters.
For marketers, this will make having conversations on Twitter so much easier, especially when replying to several people at once.
It’s not uncommon for a Twitter conversation to pick up so many usernames that it makes having an actual conversation nearly impossible (Hello, Twitter canoe!). This change in @replies will allow marketers to continue that conversation without sacrificing the quality of the tweet due to a rapidly shrinking character count.
Twitter is aiming to simplify the rules around tweets that start with a username. Currently, if you want to broadcast a tweet to all of your followers that starts with a @username, beginning the message with a period is the common practice. Without the initial period, only people who follow both you and the person you’re tweeting at will be able to see the message in their feed.
With this change, all new Tweets that begin with a username will now reach all of your followers. This means that you’ll be able to drop that first period at the start of the tweet and have it reach all of your followers, despite it being directed at a single user. Bonus tip: you can use that extra character to add a happy face emoji to your tweet
If having your reply being transparently visible to all of your followers isn’t quite enough emphasis, you can now double-down by retweeting yourself. This will push that tweet back out for all of your followers to see (again!).
This update to Twitter adds some powerful new tools for smart marketers as well. Retweeting key business or brand messages will now be easier than ever and with Quote Tweets, you’ll be able to repush an older message and add some new context to the tweet. If a really great tweet goes largely unnoticed, perhaps from the timing of the tweet, using these new features will allow you to give that update a second, or even third chance!
Twitter says that these updates will be available to all users over the coming months and they further explain why they’ve made the announcement but haven’t quite flipped the switch yet:
The updates have a significant impact on Tweets, so we want to provide our developer partners with time to make any needed updates to the hundreds of thousands of products built using Twitter’s API.
They’ve also announced that in addition to all of the exciting changes that we’ve covered here, there are even more changes in the works!
I’d love to leave things with a quote from a recent blog post of ours on How We React When Our Favorite Social Networks Shift:
Our favorite, apps, social networks and products are all going to change. Change is necessary for survival and innovation. Sometimes the change will sit well with us, overtimes it may not. But, as marketers, the key learning here is that we need to adapt to these changes if we want to continue to maximize the potential of social networks.
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How are these upcoming changes to Twitter going to affect your content strategy? Do you think these are positive changes for the platform, or would you prefer things to stay as-is? If you could make any other changes to Twitter, what would you do?
I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences in the comments below!
No matter what the size of your business, social media definitely has a place for you. With that being the case; what are you doing to take advantage of all social networking has to offer? Most importantly, what are you doing to protect your investments in social media. Specifically, making sure you’re not opening the door […]
from Darlene Milligan http://ift.tt/25e8l3E via transformational marketing
Kevan Lee, October 2015It is our greatest marketing asset.
And we just keep changing it.
And now things have changed again. We’ve flipped the switch, and our new design is here.
From where it started with Leo over five years ago to where it stands today, the Buffer Social blog has evolved a great deal over the years, and we’re extremely grateful to have built up a great reputation and sizeable audience along the way.
The Buffer Social blog now attracts over 850,000 readers and averages over 1.1 million sessions per month. But it certainly didn’t come easy, and it took some trial and error before we found a recipe that started to pay off.
The Google Analytics screenshot below, helps to illustrate our story:
Towards the end of 2015, we revealed that we’d lost nearly half of our social referral traffic. And the discussion around this post made us realise that if we want to continue growing, we need to see change as a necessity. We need to continue to push ourselves and figure out how to keep reinventing ourselves to stay ahead of the curve.
This new design is our latest experiment and in this post, I’m excited to go into detail about different sections of the new blog design and share some of the thinking behind our content strategy.
Let’s jump in!
Here are some of the new elements to look out for:
We have over 900 posts on the Social blog, and next to a visual refresh, the main goal of this redesign was making content more discoverable. We felt that a lot of the great stuff we’ve published in the past can get a little lost and that we need to signpost better where particular types of content can be found.
A brainstorm during the retreat gave us the idea to approach the social blog as a toolbox. A reference blog and knowledge hub. And the Discover block at the top of the homepage is aimed to make it as easy as possible to find what you’re looking for when you come to the blog.
You can use the search bar to discover content based on keywords you’re interested in learning about, for example, “Twitter Marketing” and you can also click on any of the categories below the search bar. Popular categories have also been added to the bottom of the homepage to make it easier to discover content about your favorite topics too:
Under the Discover block, we’ve transitioned from a one-column layout to two columns, highlighting more than just the latest piece of content and guiding you through our latest articles on subjects like social media marketing, design, and the latest news and trends.
As we thought about the various blogs we have here at Buffer (Social, Open, and Overflow), we realised that they served very different purposes, and a one-size-fits-all post style may not work across the board. Sometimes our content has an editorial flavour, and sometimes it has more of an educational angle. The new design allows us to tell stories more effectively with the help of a couple of article formats.
Toolbox articles will mainly be used here on the Social blog. They’re geared up to support our social media marketing and content tips articles.
Magazine articles have an immersive heading with a full-width photo as the background and will mainly be used on the Open and Overflow blogs, as well as on any more editorial-lead posts here on the Social blog.
In October 2015, we shared our marketing manifesto, and we’ve now evolved a section of the manifesto into our Editorial Mission Statement:
“Treat every piece of content with the utmost care. Every single piece of content is the only one that matters.
Every single piece, we have to feel like “this is going to be the one.” Not all in the same way, but all in their own unique way of redefining excellence for their own area. And then, only some of them will be the true breakout hits and most of them won’t. But that’ll be the only way for us to truly create a space of excellence.”
– Buffer Editorial Mission Statement
This mission statement will serve as a constant reminder to be vulnerable and create content that we truly believe will stand out and attract everyone’s attention. It’s also a promise to every reader of the blog, whenever you visit us here, you’ll know that we’ve put everything into the post you’re reading.
In a previous post we discussed the five ways that a blog can change and grow (though there are probably more) and our content strategy is largely based on answering these five questions:
Below, I’d love to guide you through how we’re currently approaching these challenges.
On the Buffer Social blog, we strive to deliver content that helps readers solve a problem or challenge they face in their everyday work environment. This can come in many forms: sometimes it’ll be a “how-to” guide on using the latest social media tools, other times it could be a list of great blogs or marketers to follow.
We tend to break down the topics we cover into four types of posts:
Keeping a pipeline of posts we feel can break through the noise and stand out can be quite a challenge. Kevan has covered our idea curation process in detail before, but I’d love to share quickly how we keep our editorial Trello board full off (hopefully) great ideas to write about.
As Buffer continues to grow and evolve, so does our audience. We’ve not been too persona focused thus far on the blog, but it feels like our audience has changed a little over the past 6-12 months.
A while ago we shared a breakdown of who we felt our current and future readers may be:
It now feels like we’re learning towards the ‘future’ vision of who we’re writing for. During the coming months, I’d love to spend some more time on customer research for the blog to identify who our readers are and what content they’re particularly excited for.
We feel that a blog post should be as long as it needs to be. For us, this tends to be ~1,500-2,000 words per post. But we use the word count as a target, more than a restraint. If a post is 1,200 words and filled with great content, excellent, let’s not expand on it just to fill a word count quota. Likewise, if a post is 3,000 or more words and fully covers an in-depth topic, that’s great too.
We like to go into detail and give customers everything they need in one place. We include details on functionality, how things work and how to implement any ideas or strategies we discuss in the post. We love for our readers to be able to read and post and instantly know how to use what they’ve learned to benefit their business.
This is the recipe that has been proven to work for us. But we need to continue to experiment and try new types of content to push on and continue to grow the blog.
Over recent months, we’ve experimented more with news and trends, alongside our more traditional in-depth pieces on social media marketing and had a few spikes off success:
Our news experiment has provided us with some great learnings and intuition about which topics and trends we should jump on and write about as soon as they break.
Some areas I feel we could do more with include:
There’s always a bit of unease and discomfort in trying something a little out of the ordinary when you have a recipe that you know can work. But we’re excited to continue trying new things.
Talking point: I’d love to hear what you’d like to see more of from Buffer? Please let us know in the comments below this post.
After over five years of writing about social media, you’d have thought we might have covered every topic in as much depth as possible. But the great opportunity with depth is that social media continues to evolve as does our perspective on social media and marketing.
We’re seeing many of the established social platforms switch from organic to paid networks. We are continually having to learn new things and test new techniques. Everything changes, constantly. First, it works, and then it doesn’t.
We have a lot still to explore when it comes to depth. Maybe we need to expand beyond our blog posts; create more downloadable guides, more videos, more courses.
What would you like to see from Buffer? Let us know in the comments
The way we approach creating content on the blog has changed a great deal over recent weeks. We’ve switched our editorial board to focus more on our workflows.
Here’s how it used to look (with a column for each different category of content):
And here’s our new board:
With this new board we’ve tried to reflect the editorial process a little more, and as posts transition from idea to finished article, they progress along the board. We also use Labels within Trello to signify the category of each post.
One of our key focuses during Q2 2016 and beyond is to ‘think more like a publication’. For us, this means:
Often, it’s the small details that take a post from good to great. And by ensuring we have the correct editorial system in place throughout the process from pitching to publishing feels like a great way to ensure we feel like “this is going to be the one” every time we hit publish.
Thanks for reading! If it wasn’t for you all, we wouldn’t be able to do what we do and have such a blast managing this blog. I’d love the chance to learn from your experiences here and to know how all of this feels to you:
How can we keep improving the Buffer blog for you?
What do you think of the new design? Is there anywhere we could improve?
Feel free to drop any thoughts at all in the comments. It’d be great to hear from you!
