Insights From Buffer's Social Media Marketing Report 2016 / 2017

Ok - here’s the skinny from a study of over 1200 marketers surveyed by the lovely people at Buffer.

Video

Still low hanging fruit - if you can get into it, even if it means pushing yourself out of your content zone, it’s going to give you a big advantage on your competition.

As with everything it takes time to get good at it so the sooner you start, the better - and hey - once you have it down - it's way easier to produce than text!

Facebook

Still huge & now most definitely a pay to play channel for businesses.  So long as you have a compelling offer, Facebook ads are the most cost effective way to get an idea in front of a potential customer.

Short & Sweet!

That's it - there's another 8 points that the report highlights and if you've got the time you can check them out here:

https://blog.bufferapp.com/social-media-2016

But for most of you on this list, if you do something in your marketing that advances your interaction with Video and Facebook you'll be heading in the right direction.  Give me a shout if you need some help with strategy or execution.

Dealing with Loss or Grief? Listen to this, it really helps you feel better.

Image Credit: Unsplash

Snapchat Is Growing Up - Here's Why

So Snapchat just secured another $1.8 Billion in funding after making $59 million in sales in Q4 last year. It has well over 100 million daily users, is growing fast and most people on this list have no idea what it is or how to use it.

Here’s What I Know To Be True

If I use a social platform - like Twitter or Instagram - and I see that a business I’m interested in is also on the platform - I will check them out.  I will spend more of my time looking at the business and potentially interacting with them.

The thing is that over time, social feeds have become a lie, nothing more than a carefully curated version of what the poster wants you to see.  This is as true of Business’ feeds as it is of that annoying friend on Facebook who seems to live the perfect life.

Honest Is Better Than Perfect

In a world saturated by marketing messages that don’t live up to their promise, people are hungry for the truth - the real, unedited, uncontrolled version of who and what you really are.

Snapchat’s ephemeral nature rewards immediacy and places a heavy ROI on high production values.  It’s winning the social wars because it’s the network that provides the truest and fairest reflection of what a person or small business is actually like.

Markets Form Where People Are

I wrote about Snapchat at the beginning of March with a recommendation that unless your target market was Millennials you didn’t need to be on the platform - I also said that recommendation may change over time.

With over 200 million people and usage growing rapidly, I don’t think as marketers you can ignore it any more.

Feeling a little down? Listen to this, it really helps you feel better.

Image Credit:#Snapchat me, Ryansings by Ryan Nagelmann on Flickr

How To Build A Super Targeted Audience

The Past

Door to door salesmen - telesales calls during dinner - cultural memes that millennials don’t even know about, existed for a reason - they took a B2C product and put it directly in front of the consumer.  Aside from being massively inefficient, such an invasive approach pissed more people off than it pleased.

The Now

While ads on billboards, television and websites solve for efficiency and invasiveness, they lose out on relevancy.  Programmatic advertising is certainly more targeted but the ads are already super annoying as they follow you around the internet like a lost puppy.

The arrival of social media delivered the opportunity for digital door to door marketing, but just as before, people found it to be invasive and annoying and of course it took forever.  While targeting influencers to share your message is more efficient and brings secondary benefits, the sheer volume of content makes it hard to cut through the noise.

The Way

If you could identify the customer who was interested in what you had to offer and find a way to connect with them directly without freaking them out and coming across like a stalker - wouldn’t that be awesome?

I’m playing with a number of different tools but the one that’s really beginning to stand out is The Dao - http://darwineco.com/dao/.  Originally conceived as a research tool built around IBM big data and cognitive technologies,  I’m using it to develop an audience of people who are talking about what I have to offer.

If you’re interested in learning more about your market and building your own audience, I highly recommend checking it out.

Feeling a little down? Listen to this, it really helps you feel better.

Image Credit: Yin Yang - Wikipedia

Triple Your Content’s Visibility Without Creating More

Follow this flow:

• You spend time creating good content - a blog post / a video / a killer image, etc
• You let people know that your content exists by sharing it on social media and in your newsletter
• If people like it they form a deeper relationship with your brand and may even share the content with others, widening your brand’s reach.

Pretty straightforward right?

The thing is - the average lifespan of a Tweet is around 18 minutes - a Facebook post around 2 hours, which doesn’t seem terribly long considering the amount of work you put into creating the content in the first place.

Super Quick Win For You And Your Customers

Share your content more than once.

That’s it - that’s today’s tip - thank you - I’ll be here all year.

Super Quick Bonus Win For You And Your Customers

Share your old content again.

Mic drop!

Quick Caveat

Be smart about this, you don’t want to come across as a screaming narcissist constantly promoting your own content.  There’s ways of doing it that will work for you and your followers - give me a shout if you’d like some help.

Written while listening to: Joy Theme Development from music2work2

Image credit: Boom by Pierre-Louis Ferrer on Flickr

Listening For links

I love this shot.  

It says everything you need to know about listening.

Look at the body posture, the size of the eyes - she’s laser locked and her entire attention is focused.

When done right, listening is an all encompassing behavior.

Good Listening Equals Links

The way to get people to notice your content is to interact with them in the digital world.  

• Interact with the wrong people and nothing happens as they don’t care about your content.
• Interact poorly with the right people and still nothing happens because now they don’t care about you.
• Interact well with the right people and your content gets shared.

The trick to identifying the right people AND finding the right way to interact,  is to be a great listener.

You Know How To Do This

Here’s the screen-cast from January:

4 minutes on how to listen strategically.

In the ideal world you would spend as much time listening as you spend on content creation and publishing.  

Imagine If You:

• Allocated time every day to listen
• Added “Hours spent listening” to your KPIs
• Set a quarterly target for listening

How much further would your content reach?

Quick Caveat

This approach only works if:

• Your digital footprint is in order
• You have a regular content production cycle
• What you create is actually good

Written while listening to: The Bench 173 Bpm Flow - Session 1 | 1014 by music2work2

Image Credit: Listening by fs999 on Flickr

What I learned by focusing on my music business

After a challenging few months I’ve started creating again.  These are some of the things I’ve been playing with to drive visibility:

Periscope

• Yes I’m excited about it
• Great for live performances but also great for “Ask the Expert” type videos
• Immediate feedback and interaction makes it addictive
• Massive reusable content, a single “scope” delivers:
  • 1 Periscope video, 1 Katch video, 1 YouTube video, 1 native Facebook video, 3 Tweets, 1 Pin, 1 G+ post and you could even take a screenshot and send it to Instagram too!
• It’s the wild west out there - watch out for cowboys and snake oil
• It’s not for everybody

Hashtags

• Gaining in importance as content production tools proliferate and the sheer weight of content requires organization
• Super popular on Instagram and likely to become similar on Periscope
• Worth investigating what hashtags are relevant to your business - there are tools that help you do this for free
• Periscope / Twitter integration becomes challenging re amount of hashtags required

Twitter and Narrow.io

• Twitter’s purchase of Periscope was a genius move
• Narrow.io is a smart automated system that grows your followers based on deep keyword analysis
• Early indications look good re quality of new follows
• $7 a month and totally worth it for music2work2

Takeaway for you guys

No amount of digital marketing is going to grow your business if what you’re sharing and promoting is lame.  There is no doubt however that the more you produce, the easier it becomes to promote and the faster you learn what works and what doesn’t.

If you feel you’ve got a content spurt coming on - let me know!

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Written while listening to: The Bench Development - 163 bpm - Periscope by music2work2

Image Credit: music2work2