Author: Christopher Wellbelove

The idea of sharing other people’s content may still be alien to some marketers. Like it or not, it is an essential part of making sure your social media feed is followable and shareable. This is especially the case if you don’t have a regular stream of engaging content of your own.

I have used the 80/20 rule for sharing: 80% other people’s content and 20% of your own. Though if you don’t have a great deal of content I would go further. I would look at as high as 95% of others people’s content.

Why would you do this? On social media, you need to demonstrate that you are a trusted source of interesting content. You will then gain followers and they will look out for your posts. When you post your own content, as a trusted voice, they are more likely to click on and view your own content.

This does not replace the need for developing your own content. Marketers recognise whilst content curation is important, posting your own is not far behind.

Words are not enough. A weird way to start a blog – but in the battle for attention images are everything.

Video, infographics, photography and animation are key to capturing your audience’s attention. In social streams, you are competing against a whole range of exciting messages. To fight for attention you need to stand out in those streams. This is where these visual tools can come to your rescue.

Research has found that 79% of marketers recognise that video will increase in importance. In all the visual formats, mentioned in the graph below, marketers predict they will increase in importance. Video clearly topped the poll.

Don’t believe me (or my fellow marketers)? A few stats that might help…

• Posts with videos attract 3X more links than text-only posts
• Tweets with images earned up to 18 percent more clicks – 89 percent more favourites –  and 150 percent more retweets
• The number of videos appearing in Facebook’s news feed has increased 3.6X (Nov 2015)
• Facebook posts from brands that included images earned 87 percent of all engagements

With the fastest growing social media channels visually based, the trend is set. Marketers need to adjust their strategy. They also need to adjust their budgets.

This infographic shows how we are changing, and how you need to adapt… or get left behind.

Talking about the weather is a common British trait, however recently it seems we are constantly having the ‘worse weather ever’ according to some media outlets, and it’s not just climate change that is to blame.

The media is well known for its sensationalists headlines, obviously designed to help sell newspapers. As the media increasingly transfers their focus to the digital age they are moving to a modern equivalent – Click Bait.

Click bait is described as ‘content, especially that of a sensational or provocative nature, whose main purpose is to attract attention and draw visitors to a particular web page.’ It is often a successful short term strategy in driving traffic to your website – however in the long term this tactic can diminish trust and damage your brand.

Back to the weather – as the headlines have shown this winter we have constantly been sold stories of impending doom, where often we have suffered from little more than what just is Winter.

And it is tempting to do this. I have seen that by sharing stories of impending doom about the upcoming weather these posts receive higher than normal rates of engagement and sharing. This in turn results in higher levels of organic views on Facebook as it’s algorythm sees these stories as interesting and shows them more often.

But is this a long term tactic for driving traffic? Maybe eventually people will wake up to the fact that many of the warnings simply don’t happen aka The Daily Express ‘Four Months of Heavy Snow’.

We can only hope that more people will realise and stop clicking these links, oh, and that the weather get’s better.

Photographic memories have always been precious, and like the printed versions digital photographs are at risk from fire or other losses. If you have only saved your digital photographs on a local drive, then if this drive fails you could quickly loose images that can never be replaced.

Backing up your digital photographs is the best way to make sure those moments in time are kept whatever happens. Watch this video where I tell you the best ways to make sure your digital memories are kept secure.

With the number of social media users projected to reach 2.5 billion by 2018 I would hope by now that even the most ardent social media denialists will be able to accept that social media is not going anywhere soon.

Businesses extensively use social media as part of their activities including for customer service, where efficiencies and savings can easily be demonstrated; and for marketing where both paid and earnt activities can have a huge impact on the reach of a campaign.

Despite the use of social media by businesses maturing, still many struggle to measure the impact of their social media. They struggle because often it is difficult to accurately attribute the benefits of particular activities, especially where you have activities across a number of mediums. It is easy to count the number of followers, retweets, post likes etc actual impact on the bottom line that you can directly attribute to social media is harder and sometimes impossible to record accurately.

If you are experiencing the challenge of measuring the impact of social media on your business, as you can see from this survey by the CMO you are not alone. However as the share of marketing spent on social media increases the need to measure becomes even more important.

Important things to look at when measuring social media:

• Put measurement in from the start of your campaign, not an afterthought
• Agree what you are measuring against – what good looks like – otherwise the social media denialists will move the goalposts
• Accept somethings cannot be measured accurately and see these as indicative measures
• Attribute indirect influence by measuring trends over time
• Keep it simple – by attempting to measure too much you will end up measuring nothing

Finally social media can be of huge benefits to your marketing activities, however where it cannot provide the measurement you would like to see – ask yourself if your other activities could provide that information before dismissing using social media for that purpose.