Category: General

C&G baby club UK have produced this fantastic video around the making of a song ‘to make babies happy’.

With thousands of shares already it is a great example of how you can create great content without blasting your brand all over it.  But it’s approach once again challenges traditional marketers approach of telling people about their product and expecting them to rush out and buy.

So where is the benefit you may ask? Whilst they do not mention C&G Baby Club in the video – which points to soundofhappy.com the website does, providing that brand impression. By being less ‘in your face’ in the video people are more likely to view and share the video – especially compared to say a video just talking about their products.

Baby food for thought you might say…

‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ now it’s ‘A picture is worth a thousand clicks’ and ‘A video is worth a million pictures’.

Without an image on your web page if someone shares it on social media it is less likely to be clicked and therefore less likely to be shared.

Along with static images short, concise, informative and fun video content can help you massively increase your reach. Important to remember it’s not just about creating a video, there are millions of videos on YouTube with just tens of views,

Important to remember it’s not just about creating a video, there are millions of videos on YouTube with just tens of views. It’s about videos with useful content for your customer helping build trust and putting you at the front of their mind when they come to buy.

Together with great benefits that social media brings, it can also be challenging. Social media can bring negative comments, often with good reason. But how do you tell the difference between a valid negative comment and a troll? When is a comment worth responding to or when is it not?

This infographic is extremely useful in giving you a decision tree for when and if to respond. Beyond this businesses need to look at how feedback from social media can help an organisation by changing business practices and identify opportunities.

A couple of extra things to consider:

• Never respond in anger (or after alcohol?). If the comment has annoyed you then maybe write down what you want to say, walk away and come back when you have calmed to see if what you were going to say still stands.
• Be the better person. Others will read the comment and your response and you need them to come away thinking that you are being more reasonable.
• Remember people don’t necessarily believe overly negative comments, and sometimes will come to your defence when people are unreasonable.
• Keep perspective. Many of the worse trolls on Twitter have very few followers and even follow themselves from other accounts to give themselves some following. Even if someone has a few hundred followers the number who will see the post will be tiny – by responding you could be giving a troll a much bigger audience.

Even prior to the EU referendum I had struggled how to deal with some of the people I am connected with on Facebook, who on reflection I would prefer not to be. I spent months, weeks and the last few days seriously considering what to say. Here are my words that I shared publicly on Facebook.

Following the EUref normal Facebook service has been resumed. Where I will continue being anti-racism, pro workers rights, supporting the Labour Party, for equality and full of hope for future generations.

If you don’t like my posts, do us both a favour and do the simple thing and select unfriend. We can return to exchanging cards at special occasions, smiling and doing small talk at social events – it’s what we did before Facebook so why change that.

And if you share ‘Britain First’ posts I will not bother writing to you asking not to post this crap anymore. Family, colleague or friend – I will block you. This is not because I don’t believe in democracy and debate. It’s because there is no debate in hate. You are regurgitating the vomit of some of the most hateful aspects of our society and if anything the EU ref taught me it is we need to stand up to and expose these views and those who hold them louder than we have ever done before. We need to call hate – hate, a racist – racist, a sexist – sexist… Guessing you get the trend. Otherwise we allow these views to grow again with far more dangerous consequences.

If you don’t understand my view, you don’t understand me – so go on, go on – do us both a favour. For all those that do, thank you for your friendship even though we may often disagree – as a great woman said – we have more in common than that which divides us xxx

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.