I’m going to start with a couple of incredible statistics, though you’ve probably seen them before.

Facebook has roughly 1.06 billion monthly active users (Source: CNET)

Facebook has roughly 680 million mobile monthly active users (Source: CNET)

I’ll do the quick math for you; that’s well over half of Facebook’s monthly active users that are accessing the world’s most popular social media network on their mobile devices.

Why should you care about this?

Well, the fact that over half of all people are going to be consuming your content on mobile devices, should impact the format of content you choose to produce, and be considered when measuring and analyzing the performance of your business’ Facebook updates.

Plain and simple, the user experience (UX) of consuming different formats of content varies on mobile devices versus on a PC. The experience of consuming photos and text, for instance, does not suffer on a mobile device. Video, however, requires a time commitment, strong connection speed, and device processing power that is inconsistent at best on different mobile platforms and networks.

Here are a few things you can do to maximize the UX of consuming your content and considerations that should be made when analyzing performance:

Adjust your content mix to ensure it is mobile-friendly

A bit of a no-brainer, but important none-the-less. We are all well aware that photos tend to garner the highest engagement rates of all content types on Facebook. This is fantastic, as the UX of consuming photo content on mobile devices does not degrade versus consumption on a PC.

Even when planning your photo or image-based content, remember to account for a wide array of mobile devices and screen sizes. Impactful and vibrant photographs that are a standard size will look amazing on most mobile devices, whereas lengthy infographics that requires scrolling for days to view in entirety will be a complete pain to view on most devices.

Don’t overlook the power of text updates

Text-based updates on Facebook aren’t typically thought of as being particularly exciting or effective.

Did you know that text-based updates receive the second highest engagement rates on average of any type of content?

Again, the experience of consuming a text update on a mobile version of Facebook does not degrade versus consuming it on a PC. Consider investing more time and energy in your text-based updates. You’ll be rewarded for your efforts by seeing higher engagement rates from mobile users.

Modify performance expectations for content that isn’t mobile-friendly

A result of so many Facebook users consuming content on mobile devices is that some types of content may appear to underperform – video, being a prime example.

When assessing the performance of your content that isn’t mobile-friendly, it will be worthwhile to modify expectations to account for lower engagement from mobile users.

You can get a sense for the proportion of your audience that may be consuming your content on mobile devices by viewing your Facebook Insights and checking out your ‘Like Sources’ to see how many are from mobile. This certainly isn’t perfect, but it may give you an idea of how many community members are predisposed to checking their Facebook news feeds on non-PC devices.

_

As the technological landscape continues to shift, and users consume increasing amounts of content on non-PC devices, it’s will be increasingly important to the success of your social media marketing efforts to cater to these users by optimizing your content to provide a great mobile user experience.

How do you cater to mobile users of Facebook with your content?

Have you noticed higher engagement rates with certain types of content?

Conversely, have you noticed particularly low engagement rates with certain types of content?

It would be awesome to chat with you about this more in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial

Original Article

When creating video content, it’s natural to want it to go viral to maximize your earned media.

It’s easy to get so focused on achieving viral success that the core objective for your video content is for it to go viral.

This is what dreams are made of after all.

The problem is that achieving the kind of viral success that we’ve all seen other videos accomplish, is that it isn’t as simple as creating killer video content, posting it on YouTube, and then watching your view count skyrocket.

There are many factors that affect a video’s likelihood of ‘going viral’, and many of which are either beyond your control, or take huge amounts of time or financial resources to achieve.

Many branded viral videos achieve that status by being supported by a sizable seeding campaign. When a video is produced, companies will invest huge dollars in paid media to drive views of their YouTube content, pay to have high-profile sites and blogs host the content, and will put PR initiatives in place to raise the profile of their content to garner more views.

This type of seeding program can cost huge dollars. Consider this, I recently ran a YouTube TrueView campaign and achieved a cost per view (CPV) of roughly 5 cents.

Pretty good right?

We’ll, it is. But if you wanted to achieve 1 million views, you’d need to invest $50,000 in paid mediato hit this milestone.

What about seeding video content amongst your own community, you might be thinking?

Good thought, but again, there’s more to this than meets the eye. Let’s consider the success that some large brands have had in recent history. Evian and their latest ‘viral hit’ Baby&Me is bearing down on hitting 50,000,000 views on YouTube. 50 MILLION!

Now, take a look on their Facebook Timeline at the number of actions their cross-promotional updates have achieved. Just a ballpark guess, maybe 4,000-5,000 actions. Maybe. Pretty awesome, but this surely can’t account for the 50 million views the video has achieved.

So, you’ve got to think that there are some serious dollars being invested to seed this content or drive views via paid media.

How about Red Bull and their viral success?

Well, Red Bull has a massive social media community; right around 38,000,000 fans on Facebook, and a bit over 1,000,000 followers on Twitter.

With a community of this size, and with the incredible volume of content Red Bull produces, they do have a greater chance of organically seeding content and having it go viral.

But, how did they acquire all of these fans and followers? I can tell you that many organizations pay big dollars on Facebook ad buys to acquire fans. Typically, a cost of $1-2 per fan acquisition is thought to be average when doing so through advertising. So, even at $1 per fan, many large communities have probably invested big dollars to acquire these staggering numbers of fans.

We’ve also got to factor in the cost of sustaining a publication calendar as robust as Red Bull’s. They have an in-house media production division, pay large sums of money to sponsor the world’s top extreme athletes, sponsor many high-profile competitions and events, and more. They’ve invested so heavily in these areas, that they’ve achieved near-ubiquity in extreme sports. All of these things that contribute to Red Bull’s ability to regularly achieve viral success cost huge sums of money.

_

The purpose of this article isn’t to discourage you from dreaming big and creating amazing video content, but rather to help you focus your attention and effort on what is truly important.

When producing video content, make sure you’re adding huge value to your existing audience. They’ll love you for it and it will help you to convert consumers to loyalists, and loyalists to ambassadors.

If your aim is to grow your audience and acquire new consumers, then consider a seeding program for your content. You don’t need to spend tens of thousands of dollars, or millions of dollars to achieve great results. Be smart with the advertising dollars you have, invest time and energy to understand who your target audience should be, and you’ll see new people joining your communities in no time.

What measures do you use to gauge the success of your video content?

Have any of your videos gone ‘viral’? If so, how did you accomplish that?

It would be great to chat with you more in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial

Original Article

Astronaut Chris Hadfield has successfully returned from a 5-month mission as commander aboard the ISS and has undoubtedly inspired a generation through his unprecedented use of social media and content creation.

If you haven’t followed his exploits, not to worry, he has bestowed upon us an absolutely amazing library of content on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

When reviewing the history of his busy orbital publication calendar, it became clear that there are many important lessons and reminders about social media and content development that businesses, brands, marketers and advertisers can benefit from.

Here are 7 things that stood out to me from Chris’ success on social media:

1 – Even a tweeting astronaut needs a little help from a social media team

Chris’s son, Evan, was responsible for helping is father carry on conversations, post updates, link to related content, and more.

Establishing, nurturing and engaging social media communities can be significant work and can benefit from having multiple people not only contributing to day-to-day management, but also to strategy, content ideas, creative approaches to using social media platforms, content curation, production management, and more.

2 – It’s okay to laugh a little

With relative frequency, Chris posted updates that were light and humourous.

Humour is a fantastic way to entertain an audience, demonstrate personality, add variety to your content mix, make yourself seem approachable, and attract new audience members to your community.

3 – Even if you’re in space, you should remember that your audience is on Earth

Virtually all of Chris’ social media updates satiated the appetite of average people to learn the fundamentals of what it is like to experience living in space.

Oftentimes, the best performing educational content will not be the most advanced. The reason why most people seek out information online and through social media networks is because they don’t have a deep understanding – such as formal education or vast experience – of the subject matter that is of interest to them. Therefore, they’ll benefit most from what you might consider to be fundamental.

4 – Plan ahead to optimize your production value

It is clear that some of the content Chris produced while on the ISS was pre-planned, and it showed in the production value (view Chris Hadfield’s fantastic reimagining of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”here).

Planning the creation of content affords you the ability to think about optimal production techniques and processes, refine ideas, edit for superior quality, be comfortable and confident in your performance (if applicable), assemble a team to assist you, and achieve greater production value than would otherwise be possible.

5 – Involve your community of Earthlings

Throughout his mission, Chris responded to questions, video conferenced, and encouraged his audience to engage with his content.

It seems a bit silly to say, but don’t forget that social media should be social. Businesses and brands frequently operate in a vacuum on social media, treating it more like a broadcast platform than a tool through which to interact and engage with their audiences. Be social and get your audience involved.

6 – What seems mundane to you, can be fascinating to others

Many of Chris Hatfield’s most popular social media content is of his everyday experiences in space, which proved to be fascinating.

You are an expert in your field for a reason. You have experience and knowledge that others do not possess. You probably are chalk full of information, ideas, and experiences that your audience would find fascinating for you to share, even if to you it seems mundane and relatively basic.

7 – Add value by offering a new perspective

When you think of an astronaut engaging an audience on social media from space, you probably think they’ll be focused on the stars, planets, the vastness of space, and more otherworldly things. While Chris could have published content about these things, he chose to focus much of his attention back at Earth, effectively giving us a new perspective on ourselves.

Sometimes there is huge value to offer by giving your audience a new perspective on subject matter that is familiar to them. Whether you are creating content, or refining the value proposition of your business, try not to overlook what your consumers might think they already know, and try offering them a new view on the familiar. It can be extremely powerful.

_

What are your most memorable moments of Chris Hadfield’s mission and activity on social media?

Let me know in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial, it would be fun to geek out with you about this.

When you get your business blog started, it’s tempting to invest in a custom blog design, theme customization, or other features that will set your business’ blog apart from the rest.

My advice on this is quite simple; DON’T.

Don’t pay anything from a tech or development standpoint to get your blog up and running, particularly before you’ve figured out exactly what you will be blogging about, how your blog will contribute to your business goals, how you plan to convert your readership, and have experience blogging for some time.

There are a huge number of free options

WordPress, Blogger, and Tumblr are fantastic blogging platforms, and for basic features, they’re free.

When you’re getting started, don’t feel pressure to invest in something that is beyond your needs. Even free blogging platforms offer incredible feature sets and options for customization.

It might take a wile to determine your needs

It’s incredibly difficult to determine exactly which features are going to be desirable and useful for your blog and to your consumers until you get started and see how it is going to evolve and grow.

Spend time utilizing a free blogging platform so you will better understand which features will be most valuable to invest in when the time is right to customize your blogging experience.

Establish blogging as part of your routine

The number of custom designed blogs I’ve seen that haven’t been updated in over a year is staggering.

Before making a significant investment in you business’ blogging platform, make sure that blogging is going to be something you can sustain, and that will yield real business results. When you do, you’ll better understand your potential ROI and will be able to make informed decisions about your investment.

In time, you might find more cost-effective solutions

Robust developer communities support many of the large blogging CMS platforms. This means there are a huge number of developers and designers who are sharing their themes, templates, designs, plug-ins, and more for incredibly affordable rates, and in some cases for free. Chances are that even if you have very specific requirements in mind for the function, format or features of your business blog, that there is probably someone out there who has already developed a low cost solution that you can take advantage of.

Instead of rushing into making decisions about every last detail to do with the design and function of your blog and relaying those to your developer, take your time to see if there are more affordable solutions that you can implement. Chances are, there will be.

At the end of the day, your business blog is all about value

The value you offer consumers with your content should be the focus of your business’ blogging efforts, not the minutia of every little detail of design and functionality.

When you’re just getting started blogging for your business, don’t get caught up in all of the bells and whistles. Instead, focus on producing killer content that is going to build, sustain, engage and provide value to your current and prospective consumers.

_

Instead of investing heavily in the custom development or design of a blog for your business, invest resources in producing absolutely killer content for your targeted consumers, and promoting that content through relevant channels. The results you will achieve by providing valuable and engaging content will far outweigh the results you can achieve by paying to add the one or two features or design flourishes that you’d ideally like to see on your blog.

Be patient in the short-term and develop blogging to become an integral part of your business’ value proposition. When you’ve gained enough experience to see what works and what doesn’t, you’ll be in a better position to make wise investment decisions for customizing your business’ blog for you, and your consumers’ needs.

What blogging CMS do you use for your business?

If you use a common blogging CMS, what features or limitations would you love to see implemented?

In your experience, what has been the single most valuable aspect of blogging for your business?

It would be great to chat with you about this in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial

Original Post

Your business’ social media community can be an invaluable asset when working through product or service development.

The engagement and activation of your community can assist with virtually every stage of product development including idea generation, concept screening, concept development, commercial viability analysis, beta testing, and commercialization and launch.

There a huge number of ways that your community can contribute to product development, so I’ll just highlight a few to serve as thought-starters for the next time you plan to expand your product or service offerings.

Social listening for idea generation and analysis

Social media platforms such as Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and Pinterest give you the ability to listen to your consumers and those within your target demographic to learn about their wants and needs, what they are hoping for from you and your competition, what trends are relevant to your business, how your consumers use your products, and more.

Not only can this information be used for idea generation, but also it can be invaluable when analysing your ideas and developing criteria for screening the gold from the pyrite.

Polls and surveys for idea generation, screening, concept development, and testing commercial viability

Tools such as Facebook polls and Survey Monkey can be used to survey your social media communities and very specific sub-segments of your consumer base to dig deeper into specifics that will lead to strong idea generation and direct feedback to screen those ideas. The benefit of these tools is that you can ask participants very specific questions, resulting in very specific answers that should help to move your product/service development process forward.

Polls and surveys can also be used when you’re past the idea generation phase of your product development process to narrow in on desirable features, potential usage behaviour, identifying likely consumers for this new product/service, and more. All of this information can be invaluable when developing your concepts, testing for commercial viability, and moving into concept or beta testing.

Community involvement and feedback during iterative testing

Who better to test your products as they’re being developed and refined than individuals within your social media community? So long as you’re not developing a top-secret product offering, members of your community will likely be thrilled at the opportunity test and provide feedback on your latest products as they’re being developed. Depending on the category in which you compete, and the loyalty of your consumers, those chosen to participate may even see this as a reward.

Conversely, recruiting loyal members of your competition’s communities to test and provide feedback is a great way to gain a broader perspective on your concepts.

Launching with confidence, pre-established consumer excitement and anticipation

When it comes time to finally launch your new product, you’ll be able to do so with increased confidence that it will be a commercial success. Involving your social media audience will have helped to ensure that your product development efforts were focused on producing something that will be desirable.

Also, by involving your social media audience in the development of your product, you will have effectively pre-established consumer excitement and anticipation for your launch. Your product development process will have become a story that loyal and highly interested consumers will have followed, shared, and conversed with others about. Your product development can be incredibly effective for feeding your content pipeline.

_

Frequently the product development process is done in isolation, secrecy, and with limited consumer involvement. In a business landscape where consumers have increasing power and input into business and brands’ definition and success, it only seems logical to involve them when creating offerings for them.

How do you use social media as a part of your product or service development process?

If you have used social media for this purpose, what advantages have you experienced?

What difficulties have you experienced from trying to involve your audience?

It would be great to chat with you about this more in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial

Original Post

Do you have access to Facebook’s targeting options for your timeline posts on your business or brand Page?

Funnily enough, I’ve found that this feature isn’t enabled by default for many Facebook Pages, which means you may need to make a few adjustments to gain access.

If you don’t have access to Facebook’s timeline post targeting options, no worries.

You can fix this by adjusting your privacy settings. Skip to the step-by-step instructions below for how to adjust your privacy settings to be given access to this powerful feature.

Being able to target an audience for your Facebook updates can be incredibly powerful.

It allows you to create and publish content for your audience with added context, which will make your posts all the more valuable. Also, if you have messaging or content that is only relevant or valuable to a portion of your audience, you can target your updates specifically for them, so as to not spam the rest of your audience and risk dreaded ‘unlikes’.

Targeting your posts is win-win for you and your consumers.

Benefits of targeting your posts include higher engagement and interaction with your content, and your audience will see greater value in the content you provide to them, which can lead to greater brand affinity, loyalty, virality, or stronger purchase intent to list a few.

Currently Facebook allows you to target based on your audience’s gender, relationship status, educational status, interests, age, geographic location, and language.

Following are step-by-step instructions for how to gain access to Facebook’s powerful timeline post targeting options on your business or brand Page:

STEP 1: In the Admin Panel, click on the ‘Edit Page’ drop-down menu

STEP 2: Click ‘Edit Settings’

STEP 3: Ensure you’re on the ‘Manage Permissions’ tab

STEP 4: Check the ‘Post privacy gating’ check box

STEP 5: Click ‘Save Settings’

That’s it! Those few easy steps and you’ve unlocked a whole new world of possibilities for your business or brand on Facebook.

If you have just gained access to Facebook’s targeting options, how do you plan to utilize them?

If you’ve been using Facebook’s targeting options for some time, how have you effectively been using them?

It would be awesome to chat with you about this in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial, so please don’t be shy to share your thoughts.

Original Post

The reality of social media and content marketing is such that no matter what business you are in, you are also in the publication business.

Publishing meaningful content is incredibly important for businesses to cultivate, maintain, and grow their business. A strong digital and social media presence can be a deciding factor for many consumers who are increasingly looking to digital and social platforms to assist them with their purchase decisions.

To develop a strong social media and digital presence, it is critical for businesses to create and sustain regular publication calendars.

The regularity that each business publishes content is really dependent on your respective audience and what platform you are publishing on. For some businesses this could mean publishing content several times per day, and for others it could mean once per month, or longer.

Regardless of how frequently you need to publish new content, it is absolutely necessary that you do so with dependability, and that the content you publish is strategically relevant to your business. Creating a publication calendar can assist with both of these things.

Following are a few of the reasons why creating and sustaining a regular publication calendar is imperative:

Keep consumers interested and involved with your business

Think about the websites and blogs that you visit on a daily basis. It’s likely that they’re constantly being updated with interesting content that is relevant to you. If those sites weren’t updated frequently and dependably, you probably wouldn’t have the same interest in them as you do.

When establishing a publication calendar for you your business or brand, ensure that you’re going to be providing new content frequently enough to keep your audience interested, engaged, and coming back for more.

Dominate search results

Search engines index some types of content independently. Blog posts and videos are prime examples of content formats that appear this way.

If your business or brand is producing content in accordance to a regular publication calendar, your business is going to be more likely to dominate search results for your business, industry, category, and related search terms. Ultimately this will lead to greater exposure, an influx of leads, and if you are able to convert, sales.

Feed your content pipeline

This is an obvious one, but still worth mentioning. Creating a publication calendar for your brand will help to keep content creators in your organization organized and focused on producing content on a regular and ongoing basis. This will result in a steady stream of material to feed your content pipeline.

Show consumers that you’re in business!

Have you ever arrived on a business’ website, blog, or social media network to see that their last content update was 7 months ago and thought, ‘I wonder if these guys are even in business anymore’?

Even if you haven’t thought exactly this, it leaves consumers with a negative impression of a business or brand when they appear to an ill-maintained digital or social media property. It can read as a lack of enthusiasm, dedication, or commitment to your business, which are all thoughts you don’t want your consumers to have.

The simple solve is – you guessed it – to create a regular publication calendar and stick with it. If you’re going to be publishing new content relatively infrequently, it might be worthwhile communicating your schedule in a highly visible place such as your ‘About’ page so visitors will understand when they should check back in for new content.

Continuous improvement and provision of value

Another great benefit to creating and maintaining a regular publication calendar is that it will keep you thinking about your business, consumers, category, products, services, innovation, and any number of ways you can provide value to your consumers through social media.

This will force you to stay relevant, to develop and grow the way you think about all aspects of your business, and your consumers will thank you for it by seeing you as a trusted source of value and leader in your category. Results of this can include increased brand affinity, loyalty, strengthened purchase intent, and more.

_

There are a huge number of benefits that publishing content on a regular and ongoing basis can afford. Creating and executing against a well-crafted publication calendar can help to keep you, your social media team, and social media contributors organized and working to maximize success.

How does a publication calendar help your organization stay organized on social media?

Have you ever had a negative experience from not employing a publication calendar?

What are the greatest benefits that you have experienced from executing against a publication calendar?

It would be great to discuss this with you further in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial

Original Post

Real-time social media marketing can be incredibly powerful as it adds elements of context and relevance to your social media content and audience interactions.

The challenge for many organizations is that existing processes can stand in the way of engaging and interacting with audiences in a timely manner. Process by its nature takes time, and virtually strips organizations of being able to act in real-time.

Opportunity identification, legal reviews, running approvals up the ladder, creative ideation, risk assessment, production, organizing and rallying a team to create content are a few of the factors that can grind execution of the best intentions to a halt.

All of these components are important, but to capitalize on real-time opportunities on social media, certain planning and preparation will need to be in place. Also, in some cases, concessions or modifications might need to be made to your organization’s regular processes.

Following are a few suggestions and ideas for how you can prepare your organization to be equipped engage in real-time on social media:

Pre-establish roles and responsibilities

Pre-establishing roles and responsibilities will keep your team organized, focused, and ready to act. When an opportunity is identified you’ll be happy to have your team chosen and roles established so you can get straight to producing something amazing instead of figuring out who’s going to be doing what.

Set guardrails as a team

Consider working with all reviewers and decision makers on a set of guidelines to abide by for any real-time social media marketing efforts. Chances are that there is a fairly well defined set of dos and don’ts that can be applied across the board, regardless of context. If these are set from the get-go, you might be able to reduce, or even eliminate, review timelines down the road.

Organize an expedited process where possible

Getting all decision makers, reviewers, and legal advisers on board with expediting their respective processes to pass a piece of content is of utmost importance. If there are parts of your existing process that just can’t be changed, ensure that everyone involved understands just how critical timing is for real-time marketing to be effective, and perhaps they’ll be able to help with determining how to expedite their contribution to the process.

Create and publish now, apologize later

The fastest way to work through process is simply to eliminate it. Depending on your organization’s tolerance for risk, you may find that the best approach to real-time social media marketing process is to virtually ignore the bottlenecks, publish your content without all previously necessary reviews and approvals, and should anything go awry, work to solve that problem later. Hopefully if you have done due diligence to establish guardrails, you can avoid any issues.

Open your lines of communication

One of the main points of real-time social media marketing is to open the lines of communication between your business and your consumers to carry on a dialogue or conversation in near real-time. To facilitate this, your internal lines of communication will also need to be opened and streamlined. Save yourself precious time by finding opportunities to cut through hierarchy, politics, and any other circumstances that tend to slow or cloud internal communications.

Gain the support of senior leadership

Having someone in a senior leadership position as a strong supporter of your team and efforts will greatly ease your ability to act swiftly and minimize roadblocks. If you are not in a senior leadership position yourself, and need to gain the support of someone who is, try to recruit him or her by demonstrating the value of real-time marketing, and by showing them how it can be executed without spiraling out of control.

_

In order for real-time social media marketing to be practiced effectively, processes need to be adjusted, and in some cases, recreated. Every business will have unique needs for process, so you’ll need to determine what works best for your organization and adjust accordingly.

What processes does your organization have in place to facilitate real-time social media marketing?

How do you work through process in a timely fashion to allow for real-time social media marketing efforts?

It would be great to chat with you about this more in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial

Original Post

When determining how to manage social media marketing efforts, many businesses – particularly smaller businesses – default to putting the intern in charge.

And why not?

They have time. They’re young and ‘into social media’. They have 1,000 Facebook friends, and 2,000 Twitter followers.

They’re perfect, right?

Well, not exactly. Putting an intern in charge of your business’ social media marketing is all but a guaranteed recipe for disappointment. Here are a few reasons why:

Do you expect them to fully understand and drive results for your business?

In order for social media marketing activity to generate real results for your business, a solid understanding of your business is required. Sure you can have others assist with developing your social media strategy, but at the end of the day, the person/people responsible for bringing it to life on a day-to-day basis, and those who will be engaging and interacting with your audience, need to know how to do these things in meaningful, impactful, and strategically relevant ways to your business.

Do you think they’ll be able to correlate all of your business’ functions and apply them to social media activity?

Activity on social media tends to yield the best results when it works in concert with other business functions such as marketing, advertising, sales, human resources, operations, customer service, and more. Simply put, for interns or junior employees to be able to draw connections between all of these functions and correlate them to appropriate efforts on social media will be all but impossible for them to pull off with any level of effectiveness.

Are you expecting them to be champions of social media for your organization?

Particularly in organizations with small social media teams, or perhaps no social media team, you need individuals involved to be real champions for your social media marketing efforts to ensure they are sustained and carried out with dedication and integrity.

Additionally, they should be able to fulfill responsibilities including the delegation of content creation, work with individuals that are resistant to contributing to your business’ social media activity, measure, analyze, interpret and make learning from analytics applicable and actionable, justify resources for social media to management, and many more. If your interns can fulfill these types of responsibilities, I’d love to know where you’re finding them.

What results do you expect to achieve in the next 4 months?

By their nature, internships are limited term employment and learning opportunities for those who fill them. Social media, on the other hand, requires long-term and consistent investment and effort. Needless to say, it’s far less than ideal to have to train someone new to fulfill your business’ needs on social media every three to four months. Also, it’s incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to achieve long-term goals without long-term leadership and consistency.

_

These are just a few of the reasons why putting an intern in charge of your business’ social media presence is not advisable. Just like any business function, achieving real results through social media requires experience, expertise, strategy, problem solving, management, project management, and many more qualities that just aren’t characteristic of, or found, in your average intern.

In your opinion, what are some of the drawbacks of putting an intern in charge of a business’ social media efforts?

If you’ve hired or assigned an intern to manage your social media properties, how did it work for you?

If you have any thoughts on this, it would be great to chat with you more in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial

Original Post

A blog post shouldn’t just be a blog post.

Any time you put the effort into writing a blog post, you should consider how to deconstruct it into several pieces of shorter form content to feed your business’ social media content pipeline.

I’ll describe how you can do this and a few things you should consider for each social media platform here:

Facebook, Google+ & LinkedIn

Each blog post should at the very least be cross-promoted on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn or whatever social media platforms your business is utilizing. Instead of just posting the title to your blog post, try also sharing a key point, or posing an interesting question to drive engagement.

A word of caution here is to not over-promote your content on these platforms. Limit your cross-promotion to a single post on each of these social media networks so you don’t come across as spamming your audiences’ timelines.

Twitter

Get the most out of your blog post by also cross-promoting it on Twitter. In addition to tweeting the title of your article with a link, schedule follow-up tweets to share each of the key points, statistics, and otherwise tweet-worthy anecdotes.

The number of tweets that can be created from the contents of a blog post is dependent on how many points of value you’re able to extrapolate. The key here is to ensure that each of your tweets can stand on its own as being of value to your audience.

Pinterest

Pinterest might not seem at first like an obvious social media network through which to extend the value of your blog post, but there are often opportunities to share content from your blog here as well. Create images that highlight key points, lists, ideas, how-to’s, or other information from your blog post.

Similar to Twitter, the number of Pinterest pins that can be created from your blog post is reliant on how many individual points from your blog post alone can provide value to your consumers. When creating Pinterest pins, ensure that the content you will be sharing from your blog post is enhanced by the added visual element that is inherent on the platform.

YouTube

Your blog posts can be reimagined as scripts or speaking points for YouTube videos. Video content can be created to touch on all of the points included on your blog, or you can create a series of shorter vignettes to engage your consumers with more bite-sized content.

Alternatively, your blog posts don’t need to be the beginning and end of a conversation. YouTube can be used to dig into certain points, provide additional context, highlight practical application, or interview others to gain their perspective on your content.

_

In addition to placing a huge amount of effort into creating content that will provide value to your consumers, you should also be focused on how you can get the most value from the content you create. By deconstructing your blog posts into content for your business’ other social media properties you’ll be able to extend the reach of your content by reaching different consumers on different platforms, and you’ll be able to save your social media and content marketing teams a huge amount of time creating content.

How do you deconstruct your blog content for use on other social media networks?

It would be great to chat with you more about this in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial

Original Post

Having a steady flow of engaging and valuable content is a constant challenge for most businesses and brands.

The time and effort required to produce incredible Facebook updates, powerful tweets, stunning pins, captivating videos for YouTube, and longer format blog posts is a challenge that many businesses find overwhelming.

Social media and content marketing require incredibly hard work if you are going to experience the full benefits they have to offer. That’s just a fact.

A result of businesses coming to this realization, I’ve found that many turn to content curation as their primary method of feeding their content pipelines. There’s a ton of great content being published all the time about every imaginable topic, so why not share that with your audience? Right? Well, there are drawbacks to this.

While you might assume that based on what I’ve just written I’ll be going on to preach the virtues of content creation, there are actually pros and cons to exclusively applying one approach over the other to engage your business’ audience.

Before I get to providing a recommendation about creating versus curating your business’ content, I think it’s worth exploring the pros and cons of each.

CONTENT CREATION

The benefits of content creation are numerous to say the least.

• The content you create is exclusively yours.
• Consumers who enjoy your content will need to come to you as the source, and return for more.
• The value you offer will be unique to your audience.
• You will be more likely to build a stronger, more loyal audience.
• You will be able to directly demonstrate your business’ knowledge, expertise and experience.
• It is possible to very specifically tailor content to your target demographic.
• The content you create can be optimized for search to give your business better search engine rankings.
• The tone, voice and personality of your business can be showcased.
• Your content can work toward addressing your business’ unique goals and objectives.

… and on.

On the flip side, there are many reasons that keep some businesses from creating their own content on an ongoing and regular basis. And these reasons are completely legitimate. Again, not a comprehensive list, but here are some of the downsides.

• Content creation can be incredibly time consuming.
• It adds an extra layer of pressure to sustain regular creation of content.
• It can take a great deal of time and dedication before your business can experience real measurable success through content marketing.
• The creation or rich multimedia content such as audio, video or still imagery can be expensive.
• Depending on the category in which your organization competes, and the nature of the content you create, you can be opening your business up to criticism.
• You are providing your audience with only a single perspective on the subject of your content.

CONTENT CURATION

Finding relevant content to your business, posting it to your social media channels, and engaging with your audience around other organizations’ content can be amazing for your business’ social media channels for reasons of its own.

• Content is incredibly abundant.
• It’s less time consuming to curate content than to create it.
• You can likely post with greater regularity if content is curated.
• It’s easy to offer your audience numerous perspectives on a given subject.
• Sharing other peoples’ content is inherently social; always a good thing on social media.
• There are many tools that are available to make curating content incredibly efficient.

Similar to just about anything in life that is relatively easy to do, curating content as your business’ primary method of engagement on social media has its drawbacks.

• Curated content will never be demonstrative of your capabilities, expertise or experience.
• By featuring others’ relevant content, you could inadvertently be promoting your competition.
• Your content calendar can become a bit of a slave to the content being created by others.
• Engagement with curated content can be lower than with content you’ve created by virtue of the fact that your audience could be engaging with it elsewhere.
• It might be more difficult to achieve your business objectives by solely posting curated content.

WHAT TO TAKE FROM THIS

Creating unique social media content for your business, and curating relevant content for your audience, are both valid approaches to filling your content pipeline. This said, there is no single approach that will yield the best results.

You may want to experiment with the balance of content you publish that is created by your organization versus curated. Factors that influence this ratio are likely to include the time and resources you have to put toward creating unique content, the level of organizational support you have for social media and content marketing, the value that can be gained by developing relationships with other content creators, and your business objectives to list a few.

Providing your audience with a healthy and manageable mix of uniquely created content and curated content will maximize your ability to consistently provide value to them while also demonstrating what your business is all about.

Do you find it is typically your unique content, or curated content, that your audience is most interested in?

How do you balance the content you create with the content you curate?

What keeps you from either creating your own content, or including curated content as part of your social media strategy?

It would be awesome to discuss this with you in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial

Original Post

There are amazing businesses and brands producing absolutely killer content every day. This post will highlight the awesome video, ‘Ship My Pants’, created by Kmart to raise awareness of their free online shipping, what makes it so amazing, and present a few strategies and tactics that can be applied to your business.

What they did

Kmart found an entertaining way to introduce a relatively dry offering – free online shipping – with video content that will play well on traditional media and online.

Watch it here:

Why it’s killer

Whether you find this video humourous, crass, smart, or just downright stupid, you can’t deny that it has injected Kmart into the consciousness of consumers who probably didn’t even realize they were still in existence.

With the onslaught of noise that advertisers and marketers spew out each and every day, Kmart found a way to get noticed and generate conversations on social media in the meantime. As of now, the official ‘Ship my pants’ video has reached over 6.7 million views in just five days on YouTube, which is pretty killer.

What can be applied to your business?

Try something new

Opportunities in social media and content marketing are abundant, but if you’re not ever willing to try something new, you’ll never know how just how effective your efforts could be. A beautiful thing about social media and content marketing is that even if you try something new and it flops, you can cut it, learn from it, and move on. This is the worst-case scenario. Best-case scenario is that you try something new and your audience loves you for it. So, why not try something new?

Behave like an underdog

A funny thing happens to many businesses when they’re leaders in their category. They get complacent. They stop pushing themselves. They stop reinventing themselves. They leave themselves open to the competition changing the game on them. You should do everything possible to push your business to behave like an underdog, even if you’re on top. If you can gain a leadership position within your category but you keep pushing yourself to be better, your competition will always be playing catch-up.

Don’t let greatness be a one-off

It’s easy to get high on success, even if it just strikes once. When you’ve done something amazing, it’s important to enjoy your success, but you can’t stop pushing. You need to figure out how to continue adding value to your consumers, or the effects of your success will quickly subside, and you’ll be right back where you started.

Create multi-channel content

Maximize your investment in both time and resources when creating content, and consider all of the channels on which that content can add value to your audience. If you’re creating video content, consider how it will work for your YouTube, Facebook, digital advertising, and mass media advertising audiences. With a bit of forethought you can more efficiently produce your content, feed your content pipeline, and fill your paid media.

What do you think of Kmart’s ‘Ship your pants’ video content?

Have you seen any killer content recently that you’d like to share?

It would be great to chat with you about this more in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial

Original Article

Not to take away from the amazing results that can be achieve by reaching a large and highly targeted audience with your blog content, but not every benefit of maintaining a business blog is dependent on having huge readership.

The reality for most business blogs, at least when they’re first starting out, is that readership can be low… very low.

It can be discouraging to those who are contributing content, and working like crazy to keep a blog afloat to not see unique visitors, page views and subscribers come in droves from the get-go.

Additionally, it can be tough to justify the ROI of your business’ blog to supervisors, management or ownership without having incredible reach.

If this feels familiar, don’t sweat it. There is huge value to be had in maintaining a business blog, even if your readership is low.

Demonstrate knowledge, expertise and experience

Direct prospective consumers or clients to your blog so that they can learn about your depth of knowledge, expertise, and industry or categorical experience. You don’t need massive readership for these incredibly targeted visitors to your blog to experience value from their visit.

If your content is compelling and created to differentiate your business from the competition, you can expect huge conversion rates from these limited visits to your blog.

Feed your social media content pipeline

An article on your blog isn’t necessarily just an article on your blog. A single article can easily be reverse engineered into updates for Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn, a multitude of tweets, inspiration for your next YouTube video, a series of Pinterest pins, and more. Needless to say, a single blog post can feed your social media content pipeline and translate to huge value across the various social media properties you are engaging consumers on.

Supplement pitch or RFP submissions

Many pitch and RFP requirements dictate what material is to be submitted, which limits opportunity for some organizations to showcase their the full breadth and depth of their capabilities. While decisions under these circumstances are typically supposed to be made based only on officially submitted materials, it would be negligent to think that there isn’t accompanying research done on contending businesses such as yours. Take advantage of this by strategically posting content to your business’ blog to support or prop up key capabilities, demonstrate relevant thought leadership to the RFP requirements, or otherwise supplement your case to be awarded the business you’re pitching for.

Have you ever been discouraged to continue putting effort into your business’ blog?

What value have you experienced as a result of maintaining your business’ blog?

It would be great to chat with you more about this in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial

Original Post

There are many great sources of information about what Google TrueView ads are, about the value they offer, the various types of TrueView ads, and generally how to use them. However, after the searches I recently conducted, there aren’t a great number of sources to inform you about the results you can achieve with TrueView ads.

This is the information gap I’m hoping to help fill by sharing my recent experience with these ad units, and I’ll share a few tips toward the end of this article.

Admittedly, I don’t have worlds of experience with Google TrueView ads, but I was recently challenged by a friend to help to generate relevant views on their small business’ video content and we decided together to put them to the test.

For context, this business is just getting started strategically utilizing social media and currently does not have a huge community. Also, their presence on YouTube is virtually non-existent, meaning they have literally zero subscribers (yet).

RESULTS

Here are the results of our test-buy of YouTube TrueView ads:

          Investment – $250

          Views – 5,500

          Cost per view (CPV) – $0.045

          Impressions – 32,500

          Click-throughs – 437

          Cost per click (CPC) – $0.57

To achieve these results I really didn’t do anything overly special. I spent a bit of time working through the targeting options – which are robust – and set up my campaign to run through my budget as quickly as the network would allow. I ended up spending the $250 in roughly 2 hours.

Overall, I was fairly happy with the results. The CPV seemed reasonable, I was happy to achieve a CPC that is competitive to Facebook’s suggested bid for my targeting selections, and I was very happy with the targeting options.

On the flip side, I was a little disappointed with the lack of engagement by way of likes and comments, though the content we were pushing could probably be optimized to encourage increased engagement, so I’m eager to test these ads with different content.

TIPS

Despite having limited experience using these ads, I do have a few tips or suggestions to consider when diving in:

1. You can burn through cash

If you want to run a campaign with a longer duration, set your daily spend to allow for it. Otherwise, you’ll burn through your dollars in no time.

2. Google will charge you more than you want to pay

If your campaign is successful, Google will automatically run your ads to exceed your daily spend by 20%. This doesn’t make much sense to me, but you can account for this by setting your maximum daily spend to a total that is lower than your budget.

3. Not all ads are created equal

Of the various types of TrueView ads, there’s something about the ‘in-slate’ ads that makes them feel less valuable to me. With the promise of a 10+ minute video on the other end of viewing an ad, I think consumers are more likely to put up with watching an ad and aren’t necessarily openly opting into watching your video content. When setting up your ad buy, all options are automatically selected, so if you want to avoid running ‘in-slate’ ads, you’ll have to deselect those manually.

4. Give your video content a fighting chance

Don’t feel guilty for promoting your content with paid advertising. I find that particularly with small business owners, they feel a sense of pride or obligation to grow their audience organically, without the help of paid ads. The reality is that most video content that garners a huge view count has a number of traffic and view drivers including paid media, supporting advertising campaigns, PR, influencer support, seeding programs, and on. Use the tools at your disposal to give your content a helping hand.

There you go. I hope this article helps you out with predicting the results you can achieve with TrueView ads. Also, if you’ve got some killer video content to promote for your business or brand, I recommend at least experimenting with these ad units.

Do you have any experience with TrueView ads to share?

Is there a particular TrueView ad unit you’ve had particularly good success with?

It’d be awesome to chat with you about your experience in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial

Original Article

Spring has sprung – at least it has here in Toronto – and there’s no better time to do a little spring-cleaning of your business or brand’s social media presence.

Take a few minutes out of your busy day to make sure that your social media presence is doing your business justice and ensure that no consumers stumble across anything that is out-of-date, embarrassing, or will leave them with a negative impression of your business.

Here are a few things you can do quickly to ensure that your social media presence is giving your audience and consumers an amazing first impression of your business or brand:

Delete profiles on social media properties that are inactive

Social media is an ever-changing landscape. It seems that there is a ‘new Facebook’ being introduced on a quarterly basis, and other smaller networks being launched almost every month. If you’re like me, you’re quick to register profiles to check out these new platforms to see what they’re all about. Also, sometimes it’s decided that the utilization of a certain profile is no longer strategically meaningful to your business, so you stop updating on that network.

The problem here is that these profiles frequently will outlive our interest in maintaining them. Take a few minutes to delete any profiles you’ve set up as your business or brand that are not actively being updated, and that you’re not actively engaging your audience on. The benefits of doing this are twofold: first, you’ll be able to forget about these profiles and focus your attention on the social media properties that are yielding the best results, and second, you’ll eliminate the chances of new consumers having a negative first experience with your brand by landing on one of these dead profiles.

Update profiles

When is the last time you updated the profile or ‘about’ page on your social media properties or web site? It’s probably been a while, right? Take a few minutes to review your profiles on each social media property to ensure they are giving consumers an up-to-date view on what your business is all about, what you do, and what value you’re offering your audience for sticking around to engage with your business or brand.

Also, when’s the last time you updated all of the visual assets on your social media properties? While there certainly is value in featuring a consistent profile picture to maintain instant recognition of your business or brand when it appears in news feeds or timelines, updating your header or cover images is a great way to give your profiles a fresh look, more accurately reflect your offerings, and give your consumers a more up-to-date sense of what your business stands for.

Cross-promotional links

It’s probably worth doing a double-check on all of your cross-promotional links to ensure none have broken for any reason, and also to ensure that you you’re not linking to any of your newly unregistered or inactive social media accounts. Who knows why, but for some reason, every now and then I’ll find one of my own links has broken and needs to be re-linked. Maybe you’ve had a similar experience, maybe you haven’t, but it’s worth checking out.

Transition to new social media page/channel layouts

On an ongoing basis, social media networks are updating the layouts of their pages. We saw this last year with LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and more. There have been several other high-profile updates made this year, so if you haven’t transitioned to the new page layouts, now might be the time.

Earlier this year, Google+ gave users the option of featuring a massive header image. Check out Tiffany Tcheng’s article for details and sources of inspiration here.

Also, YouTube is currently transitioning to a new channel layout with unified header image area that scales automatically for different devices – PC, tablet, mobile and television. Check out YouTube’s Channel Art Guidelines here.

Do you have any additional social media spring-cleaning tips to share?

How do you ensure your social media profiles and presence stay up-to-date on an ongoing basis?

It would be great to chat with you more about this in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial

Original Post

Do you think it’s possible to create truly unique, compelling content on social media for your business or brand?

Consider this; every single day there are…

1,310,000 new blog posts published – on WordPress alone (source: wordpress.com/stats)

200,000,000 tweets (source: blog.twitter.com)

422,000,000 Facebook status updates (source: thesocialskinny.com)

50,400 hours of video uploaded to YouTube (source: thesocialskinny.com)

40,000,000 photos posted to Instagram (source: washingtonpost.com)

Needless to say, there is a glut of new content created each and every day. Even the most imaginative businesses, brands, agencies, and other professional content creators can have a difficult time finding ways to make their content stand out from the rest.

With the sheer volume of content being created every second, you really shouldn’t beat yourself up about this. Inevitably, even the content you haven’t even thought about creating yet, has probably already been produced somewhere, by someone, on one platform or another.

And if you do manage to think of something truly unique, chances are that someone is probably thinking a similar thing to you at that very moment. In fact, some of the most important thinking in history was being conceived by different people, in very different places, at virtually the same moment in time. The telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell, right? At virtually the same time Elisha Gray patented his design (more examples of these occurrences here and here).

Crazy, right?

How can you possibly create content on an ongoing basis that is going to be unique, that people are going to want to consume, and that you can truly feel good about?

Believe it or not, there is good news. There are actually a couple of surefire ways that you can make your content stand out, and they’re easy to apply.

Authenticity

Create content with your own voice, and in your own style. Don’t pretend to be something you’re not. People will see through it and your content will suffer as a result. No matter how much content is being created every day that might be similar in nature to yours, you are the only you. So, exploit that as a key difference.

Experience

The experience you, your business, or brand has accrued can be another differentiator when it comes to content creation. Nobody has the same experience to draw upon, apply, and share with their audience. Use all of this to your advantage and give your content a fresh perspective – yours. Also, demonstrating your experience is proof of your capabilities and expertise, both key to any consumer making a purchase decision.

What do you think, is there such thing as truly unique content?

How do you go about applying authenticity and your experience to your content?

It would be great to chat with you more about this in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial

Original Article

When creating content, you need to be laser-focused being relevant and creating value for your target demographic.

Despite this being a bit of a no-brainer, I frequently find that there is a tendency for some businesses and brands to gravitate toward creating content that is relevant to them, and not necessarily their audience.

This is actually understandable.

Chances are that you’re in the business you’re in because you have a deep-rooted passion for it, because you’re good at what you do, and because you’re incredibly knowledgeable in your area of expertise.

So why not write about it, photograph it, film it, make infographics about it, pin it, tweet it, podcast it, and get that knowledge and passion out in any way possible?

Well, the problem is that as fascinating as every detail of your business is to you, it might not be of any interest or value to your consumers.

I’ll use my own circumstances as an example to illustrate this further.

The ideal target for my content includes business decision makers, entrepreneurs, brand managers, marketers, or anyone holding a similar position.

If I created a blog post about how to juggle the management and content creation for multiple social media communities, each for a different brand, it might be interesting content and it is certainly relevant to me, but for the average business owner, marketer, or brand manager – the intended target of my content – it is completely irrelevant. The people this content would likely appeal to include those employed at social media marketing agencies, advertising agencies, community managers, and the like.

I would completely be missing my mark.

If you find yourself making decisions about what content to publish based on how interesting it will be for you, how proud you are of one of your accomplishments, how it will make you look good, or anything that is very you-oriented, then you’re not putting your audience first. Relevance and value to your audience needs to be the single guiding factor when creating your content, even if it means holding something back that you think is amazing.

Have you ever published content that in retrospect hasn’t been relevant to your consumers?

How do you ensure your content will be relevant and of interest to your audience?

As always, it would be great to chat with you more about this in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial

Original Post

So, you’re addicted to growing your social media communities with promotions?

It’s understandable.

You can grow your likes, followers, or subscribers at warp-speed. Which is pretty awesome; particularly when you’re trying to justify your social media marketing spend to the bigwigs upstairs, or the time and resources you pump into social if you’re a small business or start-up.

What’s the problem then?

I’ll tell you that I’ve worked with more than one client who is pretty dead-set on running social media promotions in perpetuity to sustain rapid rates of fan acquisition. The lure of fan acquisition is strong, and as the promotion kicks off, advertising dollars kick in to drive traffic, and it gets picked up on deal and discount websites, a drove of new people arrive looking for a hand-out.

But then they leave. They leave with alarming velocity. Like vultures after a carcass has been picked clean.

When a promotion lapses, newly acquired fans, followers or subscribers leave because the thing that attracted them to the community is of short-term interest. You can’t really blame them, can you?

I’ve seen promotional programs run their course, and for every 1,000 new fans, followers, or subscribers acquired, roughly 250-350, or more, immediately recede with even more running for the hills shortly thereafter. Let’s face it, with recession rates this high you are hemorrhaging fans.

To combat this, marketers sometimes come to the conclusion that they need to continue running social media promotions. This just propagates and prolongs the issue, and costs lots of money in the meantime.

The good news is that there are several ways to reduce your dependence on running social media promotions for your business or brand. Here are a few:

Get back to the basics of social media marketing

At this stage of the game, virtually everyone knows the basic recipe for social media marketing. Create killer content, engage your audience, encourage participation, get involved in relevant discussions, and on. You’ve read enough articles to know the drill, so do it. Put your social media promotions on hold, and reinvest the dollars you’d put toward prizing and fulfillment to creating something amazing, that will be of long-term value to your consumers, that people can identify with, and that will generate discussions. That should be a good starting point.

Buy into the true value of social media marketing

You absolutely will want to grow your social media audience to critical scale, but number of fans, followers, and subscribers is one small piece of a greater value equation of social media marketing.

Think about how you can convert fans of your brand to loyalists through ongoing engagement. Think about how you can prove your expert knowledge to prospective consumers conducting research about your business online. Think about how you can reduce customer service costs by assisting people en masse through your social media channels. Think about how you can conduct research through social media to reduce your product development costs. I’ll stop there, but the ways that you can measure the value of your social media marketing efforts should be more varied and numerous than just how many fans you’ve acquired.

If you truly buy into the full value of social media marketing, you’ll be more likely to move your sights beyond fan acquisition as your sole measure of success, and therefore, be more willing to ditch promotions in favour of more meaningful and activity on social media.

Make a mission of educating the bigwigs on the value of social media

Okay, okay… maybe you understand the true value of social media marketing. But, do the guys upstairs in the corner offices? Sometimes the over reliance on social media promotions focus on fan acquisition can be strongly influenced by others.

If the guys upstairs, your supervisors, or your owner doesn’t truly understand the full value of social media marketing, you’re going to have a difficult time selling them on how to properly engage, grow and sustain your social media communities. It might be time to make a mission of educating and training them. Organizational buy-in is a must to be successful on social media, and typically that starts at the top.

Have you experienced the same rapid fan acquisition and correlated recession as described above?

Have you had success retaining fans acquired from running a social media promotion?

How have you grown your social media communities to critical scale without the use of promotions?

It would be awesome to chat with you about this, or anything for that matter, in the comments or on Twitter @RGBSocial

Original Post

I’m noticing a bit of a trend.

What I’m noticing is that with an increasing number of business owners and marketers buying into the power of social media, that there is also a bit of a trend away from traditional media.

And by traditional media, I’m including online ads, mobile ads, and other similar media options, not necessarily just newspaper, print or other such archaic media.

Are you noticing this as well?

Clearly, there are some really simple explanations for this occurrence. Budgets are budgets, so if you increase your spend toward your social media efforts, you’re going to have fewer dollars for traditional media. Also, you have limited capacity to think about and focus on your business – there are, after all, only 24 hours in a day – so if you’re focusing your attention on social media, you have less attention to give to media and advertising. I’m sure there are more, but I’ll stop there.

This said, planning and investing in social media and traditional media shouldn’t be mutually exclusive. In fact, there can be huge benefits to planning the two in tandem. Even if your focus has dramatically shifted toward your social media and content marketing efforts, I urge you to consider how traditional media and advertising can help you achieve your social media goals, which remember, should be linked to real business goals.

Promote your content

You can be producing the best, most relevant and meaningful content imaginable, but if nobody consumes it, it will have literally zero impact. Promoting your content with traditional media can drive incredible traffic to your content, and can probably be more targeted and efficient than you might think.

IMPORTANT CONSIDERATION: When developing creative to fill your media placements, be sure to showcase or clearly indicate the value that you are offering in the specific piece of content you are hoping to promote. Pair this with a compelling call to action and you’ll be well on your way to generating a huge influx of traffic to your content.

Establish your business’ positioning and grow your communities

Advertising through traditional media can be an amazing way to establish your business’ positioning. If your positioning is meaningful to your targeted consumers, this can increase the conversion of your media impressions to social media community growth.

Additionally, a result of the investment required to purchase media space, for many businesses a proportionate investment in advertising creative is also justifiable. The benefit of this is that with a few dollars at your disposal, you might find that you’ve got production options available that will help you further solidify your business’ positioning, thus increasing the aforementioned conversion even further.

IMPORTANT CONSIDERATION: Try to think of your business’ advertising in the same way you think about social media content. Make sure it adds value to your consumers by making them feel something, think something, or learn something. If you can accomplish this with your ads, you are again going to be able to increase your conversion of media impressions to social media community growth and exposure.

Increase the ROI of your social media efforts

Social media marketing is an investment. For many businesses, they are lured to social media with dreams of overnight international fame and wild success. The reality, as you know, is that it takes an incredible investment of time and resources to build and sustain meaningful activity on social media.

Driving traffic to your social media properties with traditional media can be a great way to put the growth of your audience into overdrive, which will give you more people to engage with, to share your content, to provide their input and feedback, and generally it will make it easier to accomplish your goals. Yes, you will be making an investment in traditional media, but your existing investment in social media will yield greater returns.

IMPORTANT CONSIDERATION: Ensure that your traditional media dollars are being spent wisely by creating a media plan that is laser focused on your target demographic. You can broaden the reach of your media, but if the audience you are advertising to falls outside of your target demo, overall efficiency will be low and returns on the influx of traffic to your social media properties will be hurt.

_

So, don’t discount the value of traditional media and advertising just because you’re having a bit of success with your social media marketing. As discussed, traditional media can contribute significantly to your social media efforts by promoting content to broader audiences, establishing your business’ positioning, and can increase the ROI of your social media marketing efforts.

Don’t think of social and traditional media as being mutually exclusive. They are, in fact, incredibly complimentary, and when used together properly, can yield results greater than what will be possible independently.

How do you use traditional media and advertising to enhance your social media marketing efforts?

It would be amazing to discuss this with you further in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial

Original Post

Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s pretty ridiculous that I’m writing a blog post about not writing blog posts.

Anyway, indulge me, and maybe you’ll find something of value here.

Typically I like to write for this blog as my publication dates approach every Monday and Thursday. It allows me to write about the things that I find to be relevant in the moment, and pass along as much of that information to you.

As I’m sure you can relate – particularly if you work for, or own, a small business or start-up – life and work can get a little crazy at times. Work piles up, due dates approach, new opportunities present themselves, and who knows what else.

Things get busy, time is at a premium, and something has got to give.

For me, today was one of those days. Just unbelievably busy, but busy with great things. Lots of work and lots of opportunity. So, I worked on those things because they are important and took priority over pumping the same amount of time and effort into my blog that I typically do. And that’s okay.

It’s easy to get hung up about executing a social media strategy and ensuring that you never miss the publication due dates you place upon yourself. While it really is a good idea to get in the habit of making social media a part of your regular routine, you shouldn’t let other business obligations slip as a result.

So, what does this mean for you?

Don’t worry about ensuring that your social media activity is executed with 100 percent precision. Producing killer content and having high-quality interactions on a regular basis are important, but if you miss one of your own publication due dates, don’t sweat it. People will value the experience they have with you on social media, and they’ll stick around. Most people probably won’t even notice.

Social media is only going to work for your business if your business is in amazing shape. So make sure it is. Don’t sacrifice your ability to handle more important business-related responsibilities for social media. If you’re spending all sorts of time on your social media marketing, or writing for your blog, but you’re not making things happen for your business, your priorities are probably out of whack and it’s time to re-think how you’re going to achieve your broader business goals.

Have you ever caught yourself prioritizing social media activity over things that are probably more important?

Let me know in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial

Original Post

I read a great article recently titled, ‘6 Habits of Remarkably Likeable People’, on Inc. Read it.

Awesome, right?

Immediately upon completion, it struck me that there are a huge number of parallels between the habits of remarkably likeable people, and traits that make businesses likeable on social media.

There’s a fair bit here that I’m hoping is highly applicable to your business. So, I’ve included a high-level description of each habit, and paired it with how to apply this to your social media marketing efforts to great effect.

1 – They lose the power pose

HOW THIS MAKES PEOPLE LIKEABLE: Standing tall, shoulders back, deepened voice, firm handshake. You know the drill for asserting yourself. The problem is that this posturing makes meeting people more about you than the other person.

The key to being likeable and opening yourself up to others is to show respect, be approachable and relaxed. It shows that you are equally happy to be meeting the other person as they are to meet you.

HOW YOU CAN APPLY THIS TO YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING: Any time you’re making decisions on social media with your business as top priority, your priorities are out of whack.

What do your consumers want? What will they find valuable? What do they want to talk about?

Rather than dictating a monologue, start real conversations, and find ways to provide real value, and your consumers will respond with greater involvement and engagement.

2 – They embrace the power of touch

HOW THIS MAKES PEOPLE LIKEABLE: “Appropriate touch can be powerful… It can break down natural barriers and decrease the real and perceived distance between you and the other person.”

HOW YOU CAN APPLY THIS TO YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING: While you can’t literally touch anybody on social media, you can work toward breaking down barriers between you and your community. You can accomplish this by ensuring that your community knows the people behind your business or brand. By humanizing your business, you’ll be able to develop deeper, more genuine relationships with your consumers.

3 – They whip out their social jiu-jitsu

HOW THIS MAKES PEOPLE LIKEABLE: “Remarkably likable people… get you to talk about yourself without you ever knowing it happened.

… ask the right questions. Stay open-ended and allow room for description and introspection.”

HOW YOU CAN APPLY THIS TO YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING: Shift the focus of your conversations on social media to focus on your consumers.

What are they into? What motivates them? What excites them? What do they want from you?

When your conversations and content is too self-centred, consumer attention will wane as the value of your engagement and interactions will feel one-sided and promotional by nature. No matter your business, you aren’t operating to serve yourself; you should be operating to serve your consumers or clients. By focusing your attention on your consumers, you might even learn something from them to make your business even better.

4 – They whip out something genuine

HOW THIS MAKES PEOPLE LIKEABLE: “… Don’t be afraid to show a little vulnerability. People may be impressed by the artificial, but people sincerely like the genuine.

Be the real you. People will like the real you.”

HOW YOU CAN APPLY THIS TO YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING: Try to remain open to your consumers’ criticism, suggestions, ideas and contributions. They are, after all, responsible for your business’ success or failure, so if they have something to say, don’t dismiss it as inconsequential, embrace it and be appreciative that you have consumers who care enough to engage with you. Remember, whether they consciously do this or not, what they’re trying to do is make a business they have interest in, even better.

5 – They ask for nothing

HOW THIS MAKES PEOPLE LIKEABLE: “You know the moment: You’re having a great conversation, you’re finding things in common… and then bam! Someone plays the networking card.

And everything about your interaction changes.

Put away the hard-charging, goal-oriented, always-on [kind of] persona. If you have to ask for something, find a way to help the other person, then ask if you can.

Remarkably likeable people focus on what they can do for you – not for themselves.”

HOW YOU CAN APPLY THIS TO YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING: I love this point. I don’t think there’s a whole lot of interpretation and adaptation required here. This pretty well defines how businesses should behave on social media. It’s all about adding value to your consumers, not broadcasting your business-centric communications.

6 – They “close” genuinely

HOW THIS MAKES PEOPLE LIKEABLE: Closing on “… Nice to meet you… is instantly forgettable.”

Instead, “close” with a reason why it was nice to meet them, and “… smile: not that insincere salesperson smile… but a genuine, appreciative smile.

Making a great first impression is important, but so is making a great last impression.”

HOW YOU CAN APPLY THIS TO YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING: I’ll admit that I struggled with this one a bit. The reason I struggled is that ideally you aren’t ever ‘closing’ a conversation on social media, you’re simply putting conversations on pause until the next time you engage with your consumers.

This said, you should focus on making each of your interactions with your consumers meaningful enough to ensure they’re left with a lasting impression that will draw them back to your community in the future. Again, think about how you can you add value for your consumers’ and do just that.

IN CLOSING…

So, what should you make of all of this? Well, probably that positioning your business on social media as being likeable is remarkably similar to being likeable in the real world.

Ensure that your business is open, honest and approachable. Don’t fall into a trap of producing content that is cool for your business, but has no meaning or value to your consumers.

And finally, provide huge value. Your consumers have invested their time to interact and engage with your business on social media, so live up to your end of the bargain and give them something of value in return. If you do it well enough, they’ll be inclined to stay connected with your business in the future.

Again, this post was more than inspired by Jeff Haden’s article on Inc, titled ‘6 Habits of Remarkably Likable People’. It’s a great article, so please check it out and let Jeff know what you think.

As always, it would be great to chat with you about your thoughts on this in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial

Original Article

‘I want to shut down my Facebook page because I don’t want to deal with all of the negative comments that people have to say about my business’

Have you ever heard something like this?

Have you ever thought this?

If you’ve thought it, please, take a moment to hang your head in shame.

I’ve recently had discussions with several friends and colleagues who have shared stories of their clients wanting to remove their business from social media because they don’t want to have to address negative comments, the headache that trolls can cause, criticism from their loyal consumers, or simply because they don’t have time to address these concerns.

The very thought of wanting to ‘remove your business from social media’ is completely missing the point.

You can’t remove your business from social media.

All you can do is remove yourself from the discussions that are going to happen about your business, regardless of whether you’re participating or not.

Just because you ignore issues, doesn’t mean they’ll go away

Consumers don’t limit their online expressions of discontent, enthusiasm, or other opinions on businesses to only those with a Facebook Page, Twitter timeline, Pinterest board, YouTube channel or blog.

They have their own blogs, their own Facebook profiles, Twitter feeds, message boards and almost numerous other options for sharing their experiences, opinions, and perspectives on your business.

By not engaging in social media, you’re willingly being ignorant to these discussions and removing your ability to participate, make things right, and in some cases, defend yourself.

You can learn from negativity and apply it to improve your business

Consumers complain and spread negativity for a reason; they’re unhappy with your business. Sure, trolls exist, and some people are just inclined to complain, but most consumers have legitimate criticisms when they take their frustrations online.

Even when consumers are being negative, this is can be positive for your business. For every single person who expresses their criticism online, how many consumers are biting their tongue, vowing to themselves that they’ll take their business elsewhere in the future? It’s worthwhile to listen to what they have to say, and to view this as an opportunity to improve your business.

You can set the record straight

On occasion, there are consumers who express concerns on social media who are doing so unjustly. Maybe their negative experience was an anomaly, maybe they used your product improperly, maybe they didn’t set your service staff up for success. Whatever the issue, being able to receive these complaints also gives you opportunity to set the record straight and help those consumers out with their problems.

This will not only help the consumers you’re directly connecting with, but future consumers will be able to see these interactions and have greater faith that you are going to support your product or service, which can positively influence their purchase decisions. You might be able to avoid these issues or complaints in the future by creating record of your interactions, as a sort of FAQ or troubleshooting guide.

In my opinion, there is exactly one reason why engaging in social media could be viewed as a negative, and that one reason is that you no longer want to be in business, or no longer care about the future success of your business. This isn’t to say that the success of your business is entirely dependent on social media, but the perceived downsides are actually incredibly positive in most situations.

Have you ever been frustrated by complaints or negativity expressed on your social media properties? If so, how did you handle that situation?

If you have anything you’d like to add or discuss further, please feel free to do so in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial

Original Post

There are amazing businesses and brands producing amazing content every day. This post will give props to BMW and specifically a concept vehicle rendering they recently created for Eli, a 4-year-old fan of the brand.

What they did

This was an amazing case of BMW listening, identifying an opportunity, and responding accordingly.

Jalopnik, a popular automotive and automotive lifestyle blog, recently posted an article about Eli, a 4-year-old nephew of a dedicated reader, and the incredibly imaginative details about his dream car. The car was to be a BMW, have 42 wheels and be 42 wheel drive, be powered by 19 Porsche engines, and have 3 steering wheels, to list a few of the features… oh, and the trunk was to be filled with toys so you can play in it. The article can be found here.

BMW, recognizing this as an amazing opportunity to make the vision and dream of a 4-year-old fan come to life, created an awesome rendering of what this car might look like. The rendering was posted to Facebook with a special note to Eli. Check it out here.

Why it’s killer

BMW listened and identified an opportunity to reach one fan, a fan that is a 4-year-old boy. By doing this, not only have they made a lifelong fan of Eli, but they’ve likely increased affinity amongst all who were witness to this story, humanized their brand, and successfully generated meaningful conversations in the Jalopnik community.

Also, talk about crazy levels of engagement; 3,250 shares, 668 comments, and 7,666 likes. Looking back at average engagement with BMW’s previous 10 Facebook updates, this represents 1,806 percent higher than average shares, 1,268 percent higher than average comments, and 369 percent higher than average likes. Wow.

What can be applied to your business?

Keep your ear to the ground

Listen to the chatter that is happening about your business or brand. What you hear might surprise you, and opportunities will present themselves to engage your audience.

Be open and flexible about those whom you engage

Sometimes the best way to engage your audience might be to engage people who typically fall outside of your target demographic. Finding engagement opportunities that are atypical can turn everyday content into a story that a broader audience can identify with.

Try something new

Even if your content strategy performs exceptionally well for your business or brand, occasionally try new things. Becoming complacent is a great way to lose the attention of your audience, so give them new conversation starters to rally behind, new content to engage with, a new perspective to ponder, and on.

Have you seen any killer content recently? If so, please share, I’d love to check it out.

It would be great to chat with you more about this amazing content in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial

Original Post

The value for any business or brand of attracting only the most relevant followers and fans on social media – be it Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube, or any other platform – is easy to understand.

Your efforts on social media will be more strongly focused on potential consumers.

You can expect higher conversion rates.

Engagement and interaction with your content will be more meaningful.

Conversations started on your social media properties are more likely to be amplified.

… and on.

I’m sure you get it, it’s pretty 101.

So, what’s this article all about then? Why would you ever want to attract irrelevant fans and followers on your social media properties?

There are a few reasons actually:

Attract relevant fans by providing social validation

It takes guts to be the first, or amongst the first, to do anything. You might be judged. You might be unsure of your decisions. For prospective fans and followers who are relevant to your business, a sizable social media community – relevant or not – can act as social validation to join your community. Ultimately, attaining irrelevant fans and followers can serve to attract a greater number of relevant fans and followers.

Build a sense of momentum and gain increased organizational support

I don’t need to tell you that there are more important metrics to gauge success on social media than fan or follower acquisition. This said, there are still a huge number of people that think of social media as an alternative broadcasting platform, and therefore view the number of fans and followers on social media properties as being equivalent to potential media impressions.

This is the wrong way to think about social media marketing, but if they’re not easily educated, let them think this way (for now anyway).

If you can build the number of fans and followers on your social media properties, you are going to be more likely to convince these kinds of people that you are gaining traction through your social activity, and will therefore be more likely to gain increased organizational support. This could be manifested through increased financial investment, additional resource allocation, or greater access to potential sources of content. All of these things could positively impact your social media marketing efforts.

I acknowledge the number of counter arguments to this, but in some cases, the path of least resistance can allow you to do things you wouldn’t be permitted or supported to do otherwise.

Encourage those working on your social media properties

This is particularly relevant for small social media communities in their early stages of growth. For anyone who has registered a Twitter account, started a Facebook Page, written for a blog that isn’t well established, or undertaken any similar activity, you know it can be discouraging to think that you’re expending incredible effort for virtually nobody to be seeing the fruit of your labour.

Picking up a few fans or followers can be incredibly rewarding, relevant or not. Even as your communities grow, acquiring new fans can be encouraging and psychologically rewarding, and can help sustain high levels of effort and enthusiasm to keep working toward more important objectives and KPIs.

_

Despite the positives I’ve listed in this post, I would never encourage you to go out of your way to acquire irrelevant fans or followers for your business’ social media communities. Also, I would never try to convince you that the value of an irrelevant fan or follower is anywhere close to a highly relevant, targeted fan or follower.

Under certain circumstances, however, there are actually benefits to having your communities grow in whatever way possible. You should embrace every new fan or follower, and recognize that even though they might be relatively inconsequential to directly helping you achieve your objectives, they might help to positively influence others who will make a greater impact. They can lead to the acquisition of more relevant fans, they can help to build internal support, and they can encourage sustained effort toward greater objectives.

If you have anything you’d like to share or add to this topic of conversation, it would be great to chat more about this in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial

Original Article

Creating content and engaging a multilingual Facebook community presents many obvious challenges, though none of which are insurmountable.

I live and work in Canada, which means many of the national clients I’ve worked with require that all marketing materials and content for social media be created in English and French. While this can sometimes prove to be challenging, there are a few tips and considerations that can make your life easier and help to sustain the impact of your content, no matter what language it is in.

Following are 3 tips for managing your multilingual Facebook Page and creating awesome multilingual content:

1 – Use the native tools that Facebook provides to target by language

Facebook provides a tool that controls who can see your posts. When posting to multilingual communities, you’ll want to limit who can view each of your posts based on peoples’ language preferences.

There are a few reasons why this is important; you don’t want to annoy consumers with posts that aren’t in their native language, you don’t want the content your consumers are interested in to be pushed down your timeline, and you don’t want irrelevant content cluttering your consumers’ newsfeeds, which could result in an unlike.

So, how do you control the content that can be seen based on users’ language preferences? Here’s a quick 1-2-3:

Click on the Public button.

Choose to target by location/language.

Type the language that your consumers should speak to view your post.

2 – Take cultural differences into consideration when creating content

Depending on the category in which you compete, there might be cultural differences that you’ll want to take into account when creating content for your Facebook community.

For instance, I live and work in Canada where we have two official languages – English and French. When creating content for French-speaking Canadians, who largely reside in Quebec, it can be helpful to know that they tend to have a much more cheeky, irreverent, and over-the-top sense of humour than English-speaking Canadians. Also, French-speaking Canadians tend to identify more strongly with products and services that have local roots.

Take time to learn the cultural nuances between your consumers who speak different languages, and how you can address those differences to create the best possible content.

3 – Don’t simply translate your content, adapt it

You create your content in language X, and you need it in language Y, so you should just have it translated. Right? Not exactly. A lesson I’ve learned more than once is that it’s not quite that simple. In different languages, there are many words that take on new meaning when they are translated, or contextually don’t make the same sense they do in the native language of your content. This is why it really pays off to have your content adapted by someone who is familiar with the linguistic and cultural intricacies of your targeted consumers. It could be the difference of your content being a hit, or a complete bust.

Do you have any tips or tricks on how to manage and create content for a multilingual social media community?

It would be awesome to chat about your thoughts in the comments, or on Twitter @RGBSocial

Original Post