Cutting Through Content Clutter with One Social Thing
Posted on 17. Apr, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, content curation, Convince & Convert News, Convince and Convert, Email Marketing, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
Besieged by blog posts, articles, and columns about social media and content marketing? I have a solution.
Last week, I wrote about our new blog and editorial calendar, coming soon to this very space. Today, news of our brand-new email service….One Social Thing. (www.OneSocialThing.com)
One Social Thing takes content curation to its logical conclusion. The Convince & Convert team (with help from you, read on!) figures out the single most important and interesting content about social media and content marketing, and sends it to you at the end of every day.
That’s it. The easiest to digest, most useful email update service around (we think). And of course, it’s free.
Here’s a sample of One Social Thing, so you can see the clean lines and smell the rich, Corinthian leather.
If you’re already a subscriber, thanks for your support. If not, please give it a try!
Help Create One Social Thing with #OneSocialThing
We spend a ton of time every day seeking and reading and evaluating content for our Twitter, Facebook, and One Social Thing programs (and soon, Google +). But we don’t see it all. If you find something you think is a MUST READ in social media and content marketing, please tweet it out with the #OneSocialThing hash tag. Not necessarily breaking news (we’re not Mashable) but the most important/useful thing of the day.
If we use your suggestion in an issue, we’ll mention you in the email (with a link), and tweet our thanks. Maybe something else extra-special for folks that really get behind One Social Thing.
Thanks as always for your trust, loyalty, and attention. I don’t take it for granted. One Social Thing is a new concept, and I’d LOVE your feedback on it.
Cutting Through Content Clutter with One Social Thing
Posted on 17. Apr, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, content curation, Convince & Convert News, Convince and Convert, Email Marketing, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
Besieged by blog posts, articles, and columns about social media and content marketing? I have a solution.
Last week, I wrote about our new blog and editorial calendar, coming soon to this very space. Today, news of our brand-new email service….One Social Thing. (www.OneSocialThing.com)
One Social Thing takes content curation to its logical conclusion. The Convince & Convert team (with help from you, read on!) figures out the single most important and interesting content about social media and content marketing, and sends it to you at the end of every day.
That’s it. The easiest to digest, most useful email update service around (we think). And of course, it’s free.
Here’s a sample of One Social Thing, so you can see the clean lines and smell the rich, Corinthian leather.
If you’re already a subscriber, thanks for your support. If not, please give it a try!
Help Create One Social Thing with #OneSocialThing
We spend a ton of time every day seeking and reading and evaluating content for our Twitter, Facebook, and One Social Thing programs (and soon, Google +). But we don’t see it all. If you find something you think is a MUST READ in social media and content marketing, please tweet it out with the #OneSocialThing hash tag. Not necessarily breaking news (we’re not Mashable) but the most important/useful thing of the day.
If we use your suggestion in an issue, we’ll mention you in the email (with a link), and tweet our thanks. Maybe something else extra-special for folks that really get behind One Social Thing.
Thanks as always for your trust, loyalty, and attention. I don’t take it for granted. One Social Thing is a new concept, and I’d LOVE your feedback on it.
Forget Content Curation, Focus on Original Content in 2012
Posted on 14. Dec, 2011 by Joe Pulizzi in Blog, content creation, content curation, content marketing, content strategy, journalists, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
Brands and media companies have been “curating” content for centuries, but 2011 saw the phrase content curation rise near the top of the content marketing stack.
I can’t tell you how many marketers have approached me regarding their “content curation strategy” for 2012.
Let’s right the ship folks.
Content Curation is NOT a Strategy
I still use Rohit Bhargava’s 2009 definition of a content curator:
Someone whose job it is not to create more content, but to make sense of all the content that others are creating. To find the best and most relevant content and bring it forward.
In some way or another, all brands should be curating content in their industry…both to position themselves as expert resources and to help move prospects and customers through the buying cycle. But content curation is a tactic you deploy, just like doing a webinar series or developing a custom magazine. Smart content always employs a touch of curation (just like the best magazines have been doing for decades).
A content marketing strategy involves a number of goals (see below), of which content curation can play a part (full content marketing research here).
So, If Everyone is Curating…
There is no doubt, especially with the rise of Twitter, Flipboard and other tools, that more brands are employing curation techniques. Great…but at the end of the day, we need something to curate. Compared to the creation of valuable, relevant, long-form content, curation is simple…and that’s the differentiator for you.
The real opportunity in 2012 is for YOU to be the source material. You become the media company. With so many curators out there looking for great content to spread, the opportunities for quality, “must-have” industry content has NEVER been more in demand.
Your 2012 Checklist
- Yes, you can and should use content curation techniques, but this should be secondary.
- Focus on the true pain points of your customers and start planning content series around answering those pain points.
- Find the content curators in your industry and form relationships with them. They’ll help you spread the word about your great content.
- Define your content marketing team and workflow now.
- Hire more journalists!
The original post is titled Forget Content Curation, Focus on Original Content in 2012 , and it came from The Content Marketing Revolution .
Create Content With Purpose!
Posted on 27. Oct, 2011 by Jeffrey Smith in Blog, content creation, content curation, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
Today’s topic is creating content with purpose (adding fresh content on your website) which serves a dual purpose for SEO and user engagement. Both are equally important and necessary in the grand scheme of the evolution of your website.
Create Content With Purpose
The first short-term purpose is to generate a surge of present-tense traffic. Even if your new page or post generates 25 new visitors to your website in one day, reaching 100, 200 or 500 visitors per day is scalable by the introduction and syndication of new and / or relevant content.
The second long-term purpose content creation serves is the ability for each page you create to age and transform into a powerful hub page (replete with PageRank, link-flow and ranking power) which can funnel link juice to more critical (spoke in the wheel) commercial pages with the express intent of getting those pages into the top 10 spotlight.
As traffic and mileage may vary from website to website depending on the subject/topic, demand and/or authority of your website; in the instance of SEO Design Solutions, I know that I can generate additional 300-400 fresh visitors per day from one blog post over the average ambient traffic we receive to our website from the aged legacy content it houses.
The other added benefit is the more content you have the more PageRank and authority you develop. The takeaway is that creating qualified, rich, engaging content not only wins you points from search engines, but will insulate your website from vacillations (rising and falling) if minor algorithmic changes threaten the relevancy and ranking landscape (if you were relying on off page backlinks alone).
A proper SEO campaign should always involve the introduction of fresh/relevant content. Not so much to obfuscate links or link building as much as the on-page justification of giving search engines a reason to rank a website higher (from being a genuine resource).
Search engines are based on a basic principle (1) crawl, index and store content and then (2) use that content to query against (with 200+ relevance and recency filters) to determine which group of websites are (a) trusted and (b) authoritative enough to rank in the “authority set” – the top 10 results.
Aside from the two points made above about creating more traffic and leveraging pages eventually to foster additional buoyancy for landing pages. Content (and the quality and relevance of the content) is truly one of the more prominent metrics that search engines use when deciding who wins the click (as a result of where they are positioned in the search engines index).
On page internal linking opportunities are also a side benefit of strategic content creation. By spanning the topical nodes of synonyms and other related phrases that pertain to the topic, you can sprinkle phrases in landing pages and / or supporting pages which you can use for internal links.
These internal links carry more weight in the algorithm than links found in common areas like the footer, sidebar or navigation and a page that is a PageRank 3 internal page (for example) passes equally as much weight through a link as a link from another website/page from outside the website. This means the more pages in your website that have trust, relevance, PageRank/Link-flow or authority, the less you need to depend on backlinks to get ranked.
When you understand the premise of theming your content (creating a main topic and nesting supporting keywords, articles and / or pages), your own website becomes a powerful on-page dynamo that is capable of fueling less competitive keywords through tactful internal links.
Also, when considering that your website is only as strong as its weakest page, leaving no page behind and giving it a function to act as a supporting page that links to more commercial landing pages or sculpting that page as a destination is a great alternative to each page fending for itself with no continuity or links from contextual linking or navigation.
In either case, the entire corpus of documents benefit (as the whole becomes stronger, more relevant and more interdependent) if you are leveraging the premise of tactful content creation and keyword occurrence. The occurrence of a phrase can become a link to the appropriate landing page.
Once you cross the tipping point for on page internal links, the page becomes buoyant. Don’t believe me, just think about the cohesiveness of Wikipedia and it’s no surprise while they are one of the most dominant websites in Google’s index ranking for millions of keywords as a result of their on-page structure and internal links.
While you may not have a website the size of Wikipedia (most don’t), you do have the ability to create fresh content and also syndicate that content to social media sites, article directories, RSS aggregators and more to (a) generate more traffic and (b) cultivate relevant internal links which boost page level trust and PageRank and eventually domain authority for the entire website.
In closing, here is an alternative to content creation it’s called content curation and our friends at Network Empire are teaching a course “Premium Content Curation” for those of you who are interested. Pass it along and as always, I hope you found this post useful and informative.
Related Posts
- Consumers Surf with Purpose
- Consumers Surf with Purpose
- What is the Purpose of SEO?
- What is the Purpose of SEO?
- If You Want Quality Traffic, Create Quality Content!
3 Internet Marketing Trends You Don’t Want to Miss
Posted on 27. Sep, 2011 by Lee Odden in Blog, content curation, content marketing, mobile, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social business, Social Media
The web is flush with change and innovation. Gone are the days of linear information flow and incremental growth. Content flows in every direction through a variety of platforms, formats and devices. The mass adoption of the social and mobile web have facilitated a revolution of information access, sharing and publishing at a scale never before experienced.
Access to information for discovery has traditionally been most associated with search. According to comScore, Google handles over 11 billion queries a month. But did you know, Twitter delivers over 350 billion tweets each day? Facebook is now over 800 million users and Google Plus has had a flood of new users as well, with estimates now approaching over 50 million. Social media is ripe for discovery as well as engagement.
In an effort to distinguish themselves, many pundits in the search marketing and social media industries have treated each channel independently. Of course that’s not the reality of user experience and information discovery. Consumers and buyers move back and forth between social recommendations, search engines and social search on their journey to discover, consume and share information as well as to purchase.
Understanding the interplay between search, social media and content translates into opportunity for brands and marketers to engage an active internet marketing strategy that celebrates diversity of channels vs. silos – provided such efforts are customer focused.
The future of internet marketing brings the best of these disciplines together. To meet consumer needs, whether it’s B2B or B2C, it’s inevitable that PR will know SEO and Social Media Marketers with be versed in media relations.
Relevance, timeliness and sharability is the win with modern internet marketing. That means better content and better visibility in all the places customers might be looking or influenced by. It also means a better experience in brand / consumer interactions.
For example, searchers expect not only to find what they’re looking for on a search engine, but to interact with the results through commenting, rating, joining as well as buying. Purchase is just the start of social engagement with customers that extends across a lifecycle from prospect to evangelist. Adaptive internet marketing pays attention to those customer needs and creates a dynamic cycle of social and search interaction.
To that end, here are three areas in particular that I think internet marketers should pay attention to in the coming year:
Content Marketing: Creation & Curation - Many brands have begun adopting a publisher model of marketing through content as evidenced by the growth of “content marketing” and “content curation”. This will only continue and get increasingly competitive for those that can afford to scale original content and media. The sheer volume of content out there now is overwhelming (we now record and transfer 23 exabytes of data every 7 days). Social publishing platforms online and though mobile/tablet devices makes it incredibly easy to create and share.
However, original content creation is expensive to scale and challenging in the long term. Content curation will continue to grow as an efficient model for marketers to engage consumers as a source of signal amongst the noise.
Mobile and Tablet Explosion – It’s almost cliche to include Mobile in a prediction post because it’s been the “hot pick” for so many years. The days of reckoning for mobile are finally here. As of late 2010, more Americans own mobile devices than computers and Google’s timeline for growth of mobile match that of Google’s own search engine’s hockey stick growth. The mobile web (including tablet devices) is becoming as viable a marketplace as the Internet we’ve known over the past 10 years. Search, social, local and apps all offer opportunities for customer acquisition and engagement on mobile devices. Social networking is one of the top 3 uses of mobile phones and as apps and tablets proliferate the market, more time will be spent there and away from personal computers. Marketers must fish where the fish are.
Social Business – When you add up the impact of the social web on overall business outcomes, it’s easy to see why companies like IBM and many others are adopting social business models. Beyond Marketing, social communications, technologies and engagement manifest and facilitate in every aspect of a business’s operations from Customer Service to Legal to HR. Companies that incorporate social media literacy and empowerment from within will empower their employees, partners and customers to act collectively on behalf of the brand.
With each of these areas of focus lies an important consideration for how brands will connect people with content and experiences that create awareness, confidence, relationships, sharing and conversions. I’m a firm believer that search and social are inseparable as means of discovery that lead to valued business outcomes like sales. Pay attention to content, mobile and social business as you make internet marketing and business development plans for 2012 and beyond. Where do they fit within your go forward marketing strategy? Or are you already there?
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Caring, Consistency, and the New Relationship Marketing
Posted on 15. Sep, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, Book Reviews, content curation, content marketing, interviews, Mari Smith, personal branding, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media books
Jay: Hey, everybody. It’s Jay Baer from Convince & Convert. I’m joined
today by a very special guest, my pal Mari Smith, live from
San Diego.
Jay: You are always awesome. You are always awesome. I want to see you all bummed out and sad sometime because no one has ever seen it. It’d be like seeing a narwhal or a unicorn or something like that.
Mari: Occasionally. I have my moments.
Jay: So, you’ve got a new book coming out in mid-October. Tell us all about it.
Mari: I do. I’m very excited about it. It’s called The New Relationship Marketing
I’m really, really excited because it’s the fusion of what we all know is the technical aspects of social media, what buttons you press, what tools, what stats to measure, all the kind of left brain hard skills as well as something that I’ve really honed a lot over the years, which is the soft skills, the people skills, which is crucialfor real success, in my opinion, in social media online and offline. It’s having skills like empathy and really being able to listen and read between the lines and expressing genuine care and compassion for people, regardless of where they come from. It’s really interesting.
It’s like the whole essence is about leveling out the playing field, if you will, so that brands, businesses of all sizes literally can friend their customers and prospects. I like to think of the acronym B2C and B2B as really being more like P2P now, people to people.
Jay: Do you find that as more and more people gravitate towards social media and start to use the tools and the shortcuts that we lose some of those soft skills, that we misplace those? Look, I can set it on HootSuite or Buffer and forget it, and it’ll fire out automatically, and then we start to lose some of that human touch. I feel like, in some ways, it’s becoming more about the media and less about the social.
Mari: Yeah. I 100% agree, and it’s really interesting. As you and I both know, social media as an industry per se has matured or is maturing. It’s so very young. Actually, Gary Vaynerchuck has this great metaphor. I think he says the Internet, not just social media, is a baby but it has a maturity. I heard him say
this once at an event: It’s a baby with a mustache.
Jay: It’s true. I started online in 1994, which is really early in this game, and that’s a long time, kind of, but it’s fewer than 20 years.
Mari: Right. Well, but the social aspect of it actually was the paradigm shift because businesses are missing out if they think they can just use these tools. There are some terrific tools, HootSuite for example, but if you think that you can just automate, set and forget, you’ll get some results. But it really will not be the same kinds of results if there can be some genuine interaction and someone in charge of that in the company, that could be outsourced, who’s listening and paying attention because you know why, the consumer has come to expect it. They will take their dollars to the company that engages with them and treats them like a real human being, not just a number on a list.
Jay: Yeah. What’s really interesting though is my book, in part, is about speed and having to do things faster as a company. I find that those two things tend to sometimes work at cross purposes. So, customers expect us to be faster as a company, but yet they also expect us to engage with authenticity and with empathy and with caring. It’s hard to do both of those things at the same time, isn’t it?
Mari: It is. It actually is, and there are some tips that I talk about in my book that would be rapport building skills, like using people’s first names. Believe it or not, a person’s first name is the sweetest sounding word in their entire vocabulary.
For example, if somebody’s Twitter handle includes their name, you can still say, “Hi, Jay @JayBaer. It was great chatting with you today, Jay. I really, really appreciate you.” Using people’s first names in any correspondence where it feels natural. If you do it every time and always at the beginning or whatever, it’s going to look forced and contrived. But, naturally, you’re doing your best to communicate online, the same way that you would in person chitchatting with a friend. And even, it’s not necessarily as you scale and get larger as a company or a brand or a person, not having to think that you have to respond to everybody because it’s not humanly possible. It’s not really scalable, but if you respond to enough people in a day in a warm, friendly, sincere way and with the rapport building tips, people can really feel when you’re genuinely giving and helping them versus like, oh yeah, by the way P.S. we can help you and buy our product, and here’s a link, always turning into a sale.
To me, you can accomplish a lot in a short period of time when you are consistently showing up as that genuine and caring person. There are many, many people and brands that do a great job of this.
Jay: I’m glad you mentioned consistency, because a lot of people spend a bunch of time in a row on social media, and they lock it down for two hours or three hours. Then, they go away for the rest of the day or for a week, and it becomes this very staccato participation wave where they’re overwhelmed by it and then they’re not involved at all. I suspect that you recommend the opposite, more of a sustained level of involvement. Is that true?
Mari: A hundred percent. It’s funny. I was just doing a session earlier, and one of the questions I got asked was about how much time a day should you spend. I always find that an awkward question.
Jay: That’s a hard one, yeah.
Mari: Well, it just depends on how much time you have available, what your goals are. What resources do you have available? But, I’ll guarantee you this. If you focus more on consistency versus the amount of time where it is a certain amount, literally you are showing up, it’s more of a consistent presence.
Jay: One of the things that I do to sort of take advantage of how people do dive in and dive out of Twitter, in particular, is a lot of times when I’m tweeting posts of my own, my own blog posts and things like that, I typically tweet those within three minutes of the top or the bottom of the hour, because I figure more people are checking Twitter right before their next appointment or right after their appointment ended.
So, I’ve actually tested it, and I’ve seen a lot better results in that six or seven minute window right before and right after the top of the hour than at 4:22 or 4:44, things like that, when people are probably involved in some sort of a meeting.
Mari: That’s a great tip. That’s an awesome tip. I love HootSuite for Twitter. I use it every single day because you don’t necessarily get penalized or anything for using a third party on Twitter. You do a little bit on Facebook, but it’s great for that scheduling.
Another tip right on the back of what you just shared is one time recently, and I think it’s maybe KISSmetrics that had done this infographic. I’ve lived in the States for eleven and a half years now, and I never knew this. It said 80% of the American population lives in the Central and Eastern time zones, and I’m in Pacific so I maybe start tweeting around 8:00 a.m. Well, it’s already 11:00 a.m. on the East Coast. So, I started to back it up a little bit and program some tweets to go out at 5:00 and 6:00 a.m. my time, and noticed like you better traction for that, too.
Jay: One of the questions that I think is on a lot of people’s minds right now, especially with the release of Google+, is more more? Is doing more in social media, or participating more with relationship marketing, is it a linear relationship? The more time I spend, the better off I’ll be. If I’m in Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and Google+, is that inherently better than just being in a couple? I get that kind of question from thought leaders and business owners all the time, and it’s a hard one to answer. What do you think?
Mari: Brilliant question. I love where you’re going with this. Ultimately, it is a personal choice, and the great equalizer is time. We only have 24 hours in a day. Unless you’re a brand or you’re doing real well financially and you just feel like forking out tons and tons of money to community managers so that they can be responding on your behalf, not necessarily as you but for you,
great, my hat’s off to you.
I have great admiration to mention Chris Brogan’s name again. I was a little shocked at first, but I did have some admiration that he just put a sign up on Facebook when Google+ came along. He’s like, “I’ll move. If you want to interact with me, I’m over here.” He’s the first to admit, he never really fully embraced Facebook. For myself, it’s totally different.
Jay: Yeah, almost the opposite, right? That’s always been your place.
Mari: Exactly. I’ve always just been madly in love with them. They are my first love. It was challenging for me in the last – what’s it been now – about six to eight weeks since Google+ really first launched because I was excited. I was saying to people, my God, I’ve never been this excited since May of ’07 when I first got on Facebook.
The cool thing I found, even though there are many, many thought leaders, many experts are on Google+ and they’re sharing voraciously, I found to get some tremendous mileage at one post a day. One post a day, that’s it. That’s the thing we were just saying. The consistency is there.
So, right now I am managing my own presence on Google+ and Twitter. I do all my own tweets. But Facebook is where I implemented a whole new campaign recently, thanks to something I learned from Jeremiah Owyang about scalability. He talked about how it’s really challenging for brands and businesses to use social media as a customer service mechanism because it’s a bottomless pit.
You keep throwing money at more community managers, and it just keeps scaling and scaling. His recommendation was to create a customer advocacy program. I’ve actually recently implemented what I call my MVPs or Mari’s Valuable Peeps. I have about a half dozen members of my community, who totally for free, out of the goodness of their heart, are answering questions for me on my fan page.
I give them exposure in exchange. I drive people to their sites and their pages. They get business because they’re in a slightly different business, doing fan page design. You’ve got to find what works for you.
Jay: The thing is those people will rise to the challenge. They’re hungry for an assignment, and that is very much what AOL did back in the day when AOL found themselves with tens of thousands of chat rooms, back when that was the thing, pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter, pre-MySpace.
So, you can’t, as a company, have 10,000 paid moderators, right? It just doesn’t pencil out. So, they said, “Okay which of you people who are totally into goldfish or Harley-Davidsons, or whatever this is about, wants to be the king of the geeks? Raise your hand. Congratulations, you’re the moderator.” It makes a lot of sense. It’s a smart strategy.
Mari: You can do that. You do that on a fan page on Facebook because people can post as their own fan page.
Jay: One of the things I like a lot about the book, and I’ve had a chance to read most of it, is you talk a lot about having a brand positioning for yourself, right? So, knowing what role you play, not in an artificial way, but what role do you play in these communities? In your case, you are the relationship marketing expert. You are the Facebook marketing expert. Everybody who knows you knows that, and you are extraordinarily good at staying consistent about what it is that you do and the value that you offer. However, I see a lot of people doing that poorly, as I’m sure you do as well. So my question is: What do you think is the bigger mistake, inconsistency of effort or unfocused branding?
Mari: I would probably go with the latter, because I think you literally only have a few brief seconds to make a first impression. If you’re all over the place, you’re saying you wear six different hats, you’re an expert in this, you also do that. You have 40 million links for people to check out. It’s like too much already. You look like someone who is not focused and is not clear. People will much prefer to do business with a specialist than a generalist. Once you get that piece locked down, you know what you stand for. You’ve got your focus in place, which I always love to have the acronym focus stand for “follow one course until successful.”
Jay: To be a true relationship marketing expert, can you do that as a content curator, or do you have to be a content creator? Curation is all the rage now. Everybody wants to go out there and show people what are good resources versus what are not good resources. It’s valuable, and I do a lot of it, as you do as well. But can you really get to where people want to get by just doing curation, do you think?
Mari: Well, it’s a brilliant start. Somebody who may be making a career transition or they really want to establish themselves as a thought leader and become an authority. I love how the root word of authority is author. If you want to be an authority in a niche, author more, write more. It doesn’t mean you have to have a published book. Eventually, you might, but write more content for blogs, for your social profiles, for commenting, etc., but in addition you want to be a great curator.
The key distinction from the relationship marketing standpoint is you want to put yourself into the curation. Don’t just hit retweet, retweet, retweet, and forward, forward, share. Actually make a little comment.
Jay: Fantastic. The book is amazing. People are going to benefit from it so much. I’m looking forward to it hitting the bookstore shelves
(in mid October) it’s The New Relationship Marketing from Mari Smith.
The root of authority is author, everybody remember that. And follow one course until successful. Everybody remember that. Thank you very much for the time, and I really appreciate it.
Mari: And you, likewise. Thank you.
New Research Finds the Curation vs Creation Sweet Spot
Posted on 06. Sep, 2011 by Tristan Handy in Blog, content creation, content curation, Guest Posts, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media marketing, social media measurement
Whether you’re on a first date, meeting new people at a dinner party, or making it rain on Twitter, it’s just not a good idea to go on and on about yourself. It’s just awkward.
Conventional social media marketing wisdom suggests that brands should avoid being overly self-promotional. Thus, brands seek to “be a part of the conversation” by sharing links that are relevant to their followers but often not specifically about their products and services. This act of finding good content and sharing it is known as content curation.
Contrast this with another nugget of conventional social media marketing wisdom: that “content is king” – that the best thing that a social media marketer can do is create content that people find valuable enough to share with the world.
But…isn’t promoting your own content akin to talking about yourself? And isn’t that rude, and thus ineffective?
This creation-vs-curation paradox inspired me to look for some answers in the data.
Analyzing 150,000 Social Media Posts
The data behind this analysis comes from a sample of customers’ activity on Argyle Social, a social media marketing software provider. (Full disclosure: Argyle is a Convince & Convert sponsor and my employer. Also: we’re hiring!)
The selected sample included more than 150,000 tweets and status updates from more than 1,000 Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts between November 2010 and July 2011. Our customers are typically professional marketers representing a range of company sizes across most major industries.
Examining Typical Sharing Behavior
The graph below shows the sharing mix across all companies in our sample.
In short, 30% of the companies in our sample are curation-focused: 75% or more of their posts link to third-party websites. 13% of companies are creation-focused: most of their posts link to their own websites.
There are clearly a broad range of strategies employed, although companies tend towards strategies dominated by content curation, with 2/3 of companies linking to others more frequently than they link to themselves.
Which Works Best, Curation or Creation?
The real question, though, is what should companies be doing? What is the optimal content strategy, creating or curating? To measure that, let’s look at the impact of content strategy on click rates and conversion rates.
When looking at clicks, curation clearly dominates. Posts linking to third-party sites generate 33% more clicks than posts linking to owned sites. This makes sense — the very best content on the Internet is typically not going to live at yourcompany.com.
However, if you’re looking to drive conversions, content creation is the optimal strategy. Posts that link to your website have a 54% higher click-to-conversion rate than posts that link to third-party websites. This makes implicit sense, since conversions happen on your website. If you’re not driving people to your website and giving them good content to read when they get there, they’re not going to convert.
But the choice isn’t really between creation and curation — you should be doing both. The question is really what mix of those two strategies you should employ for maximum clicks and conversions?
Part of a Balanced Social Media Diet
To dig deeper into what mix of creation and curation works best, I’m going to revisit the behavior segments that I outlined above. What kind of results are companies in each of these segments seeing?
Curators = Companies that link to third-party sites 75% or more of the time.
Companies in this group focus very heavily on curation and rarely, if ever, link to their own content. Their results bear this out: they generate a lot of clicks, but very few conversions.
Balanced = Companies that link to third-party sites 50-75% of the time.
Companies in this group employ a balanced strategy of content creation and content curation. Their clicks per post are lower than Curators, but they generate significantly more conversions.
Self-Promoters = Companies that link to their own content 50% or more of the time.
Companies in this group link to their own content a majority of the time. This negatively impacts their clicks per post, and this reduction isn’t made up by an increased conversion rate.
It’s clear from the data that companies in the Balanced category achieve the best results overall. They generate 20% fewer clicks per post than Curators, but their conversion rate is 10X higher. I’ll take that trade any day.
The Creation and Curation Sweet Spot
We already determined that linking to your site 25-50% of the time generates the best results. But what if we look at the practices of the top five companies in generating clicks and conversions? What are they doing that has been so effective for them?
The top five companies in our sample that generate the most clicks link to their own sites 37.9% of the time. And the top five companies in our sample that generate the most conversions link to their own sites 41.6% of the time. This feels like a pretty solid sweet spot.
Lessons Learned and Takeaways
After digging into the numbers, the optimal balance for most companies is to link to your own content between 25-50% of the time, with 40% being the ideal mark.
But beware the law of averages! Just because these numbers are true of overall does not mean that they are the best numbers for you. Outliers exist.
My favorite example of an account that breaks the mold is one of our customers, TiqIQ. TiqIQ is in the business of publishing deals on sports tickets via social media. Almost every one of their posts links to a site where visitors can purchase tickets from them, so they almost never curate. However, their click and conversion rates are off the charts, because their audience is specifically following them to receive these deals.
If you’re new to social media marketing, a 40% content creation rate is a good place to start. But make sure you measure your own efforts and find out what works for your company.
About the Author
Tristan Handy is the Director of Operations for Argyle Social, a social media marketing dashboard that helps businesses create real returns from the social channel. Follow him on Twitter @jthandy.
Content Curation – 5 Ways to Succeed…Eventually
Posted on 23. Aug, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, content curation, content marketing, content sharing, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
Content curation is the art and science of finding and sharing quality content on a specific topic. Curation helps you build an audience. You then have a larger group of people with whom to share your own content, and who can spread the word.
Many among the Twitterati have built their followings in large part through content curation. Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer publicly states his Twitter strategy is “find good shit and share it.” Talk about a commitment to content sharing!
With the endlessly flowing Twitter stream, you have to tweet at least semi-frequently to maximize visibility. Many content curators tweet eight or even 10 times daily. Content sharing is today’s preferred method of content curation. And it works. 25% of tweets contain link s, but 56% of retweets contain links . Hmmm.
Content Curation is a Long and Winding Road
Other than the time commitment, the task of content curation is relatively simple. Recognize, however, that content curation is a long-term social media strategy. You don’t become a reliable and trusted source for content sharing ov ernight, or even in a few weeks. And it doesn’t work for everyone. Here are 5 factors to doing content curation successfully:
1. Identify Your Audience
Whom are you trying to attract? What kind of audience are you trying to build? What content sharing can you engage in that’s truly useful?
2. Focus Your Content Sharing
Based on the audience you’re trying to attract, their interest/needs, and your own business goals, pick one or two topic areas about which you’ll share content. The content you share has to be on topics that your audience cares about and is likely to read. 70% of people will only ever click on one topical category , so choose carefully.
When you market yourself as a content curator, you have the same challenges as a brand. You need to convey your message clearly. This is one instance where you want people to apply a label to you: “The IT guy,” “the social media expert,” “the restaurant critic,” etc.
3. Curate Content That is of Impeccable Quality
As a content curator, you are marketing yourself as a supplier of good information: a funnel that filters out the crap and promotes the gems. The more people can count on you and the quality of your content sharing, the more they will eventually support you, reshare and click on your links, and recommend you to others. Quality is a differentiator as a curator.
4. Curate Consistently
Share on a regular basis. Sharing regularly and frequently gains you visibility.
Here’s one of the biggest challenges in consistency: keep your content at the level you originally targeted. If your audience is people who are new to online marketing, make sure you share content for novices. Don’t start sharing content that will only make sense to people already immersed in online marketing. If your audience is small businesses, don’t start sharing content on enterprise issues.
5. Brand Yourself, not Your Company
In general, you want to brand yourself as the curator, using your real name. Ultimately, social media is about people, not logos. Companies try to “humanize” but people don’t try to “corporatize”.
Also, circumstances change. When you establish a personal brand via curation, you can carry that brand into your next job or business. The value of your curation work accrues to you, while also benefiting whatever business you happen to be involved with at the moment.
Neicole Crepeau is a blogger, columnist at { grow }, and the creator of CurateXpress , a content curation tool. She works at Coherent Interactive on social media, we bsite design, mobile apps, & marketing.
Content Marketing News that Works for You
Posted on 06. Jul, 2011 by Joe Pulizzi in Blog, content curation, content marketing, curata, Junta 42, Junta42 Events, News, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
Okay, so you are a marketing professional interested in the practice of content marketing. How do you keep up on the latest content marketing news?
You could follow hashtags on Twitter?
You could set up a Google Reader feed?
You could subscribe to every marketing newsletter and pick out the best content-marketing related content?
You could follow a few content marketing pundits and wait for them to share the news?
Yes, these things will all work, and do work…but they are time intensive.
That’s exactly the reason why the Content Marketing Institute created a dedicated Content Marketing News channel, in partnership with PR Newswire using the Curata platform.
If this sounds like the right solution for you and your company, here’s how to get involved:
- Subscribe to Daily Email News Alerts here.
- Follow @thecontentnews on Twitter.
- See the latest news on the Content Marketing News channel itself.
Let me know what you think and how we can improve the site.
For more detail on how and why this was developed, here is the original content marketing news story on CMI.
42 Content Marketing Experts Lead Junta42′s Final Top Blogs List
Posted on 13. Jun, 2011 by Joe Pulizzi in Blog, blog lists, content curation, content marketing, content marketing experts, content strategy, Junta 42, Junta42 Events, junta42 top blogs, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, top blogs
After more than three years producing 11 comprehensive Top Content Marketing Blogs lists, we’ve decided to hang it up. Today’s release of the Top 42 Content Marketing Blogs (as we know it) will be our last.
Why you ask?
When we began the Junta42 Top 42 Content Marketing List back in late 2007, content marketing as we know it was just being born. Frankly, most marketing professionals didn’t know what content marketing was or how to use it. Marketers didn’t understand the impact that content marketing would make on the practice of marketing. The reason we developed the Top 42 list was to bring attention to some amazing thought leaders around the content marketing practice area and bring awareness to this thriving and important practice.
Our first list in January of 2008 featured 81 blogs. Our current list features over 450 (we could easily have more).
This was a tough decision, but in our minds, the goal of the Top 42 list has been accomplished. Now it’s time to move onto other initiatives.
Today, content marketing is the dominant phrase for the creation and distribution of compelling and relevant content to attract and/or retain customers (see this post). While there were very few resources to help marketers years ago, there are now more every day, including the Content Marketing Institute, Chief Content Officer magazine, and the industry event, Content Marketing World (in which you’ll see many of the Top 42 speak by the way).
A Sincere Thanks
First, I’d like to thank all the Top 42 bloggers. You are the ones that, day in and day out, spread the word of content marketing. You shared your expertise with the goal of truly helping marketing professionals understand how to communicate more effectively. You did it! My thanks first and foremost go to you.
Second, I’d like to thank Janet Robbins, the lead researcher for the Top 42 Content Marketing Blogs. Janet helped put the formula together for grading each and every blog, and put her time in every quarter to make this happen. The Top 42 would not exist without Janet, and I want to thank her immensely.
Through the Years
Big congratulations goes to Jay Baer of Convince and Convert for taking the number one spot for the second time. Jay joins repeat offenders Brian Clark from Copyblogger and Lee Odden from TopRank (yes, you’ll see all three at Content Marketing World as well as former Top 42 winner Andrew Davis of Tippingpoint Labs). Here are the winners of each release dating back to January, 2008.
Release #11: Convince and Convert
Release #10: Online Marketing Blog
Release #9: Brian Solis
Release #8: Convince and Convert
Release #7: Online Marketing Blog
Release #6: Tippingpoint Labs
Release #5: Marketing with Meaning
Release #4: Online Marketing Blog
Release #3: Copyblogger
Release #2: Copyblogger
Premier Release (January 2008): Nigel Hollis (Millward Brown)
How We Score
The Top 42 scores are calculated using a combination of 1) Relevance to Content Marketing, 2) How much the blog adds to the Content Marketing conversation, 3) Google Page Rank, 4) blog consistency and 5) previous ranking.
For the complete list of Junta42 Top Content Marketing blogs, click here.
The Final Junta42
Top 42 Content Marketing Blogs List
1 Convince and Convert
2 TopRank Blog
3 Brian Solis
4 Conversation Agent
5 Marketing Experiments
6 Copyblogger
7 Social Media Examiner
8 Inbound Internet Marketing Blog
9 Social Media Explorer
10 Heidi Cohen
11 Post Advertising
12 Web Ink Now
13 Grow
14 Influential Marketing Blog
15 Ducttape Marketing
16 Digital Marketing Blog
17 Drew’s Marketing Minute
18 Marketing Interactions
19 Direct Marketing Observations
20 Conversation Marketing
21 Logic+Emotion
22 Tippingpoint Labs
23 The Conversion Scientist
24 Sparksheet
25 DreamGrow Social Media
26 Branding Strategy Insider
27 Spyrestudios
28 Vertical Measures
29 IdeaLaunch
30 FASTforward Blog
31 Daily Fix
32 PR 20/20
33 ReelSEO
34 Vertical Leap
35 Damn! I Wish
36 Word to the Wise
37 Social Media Magic
38 B2B Bloggers
39 eMedia Vitals
40 Engage
41 Optimize This
42 How Soon is Now?
Thanks again to all of you who have supported and shared this important list of content marketing experts. We’re sad to see it go, but happy about the future of content marketing!
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