Digital transformation is one of the most important trends over the past decade. But what is it, exactly? And why is it so important? In this blog post, we will answer those questions and more. We will also highlight some of the top traditional media outlets writing about digital transformation,…
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Attracting Audience Attention
How to Attract an Audience with Creating Captivating Content
To be successful, every business has to tell its stories.
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But just pushing content onto the web is meaningless if it doesn’t interest the audience. In an online world bursting with billions and billions of pages of content — with new content being added every minute.
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how do you ensure you’re creating compelling content that generates views?
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Whether it’s defining the details that will capture interest, timing your posts to grab the most views or choosing the right venue for your message, there are strategies that will help your online voice be heard.
1. Cater Content To Customers
2. Choose The Best Platform For Each Message
3. Write Step-By-Step Guides
4. Round Up The Experts
5. Answer The Questions You’re Always Asked
6. Take On Trending Topics In Your Industry
7. Pitch Solutions, Not Products
8. Integrate Insightful Interviews
9. Livestream For Authenticity
10. Tap Into Holiday Spirit
The Death of Microsoft’s LinkedIn’s SlideShare
In 2016, SlideShare had over 70 million unique visitors per day, and it was listed by Alexa as one of the top 100 most visited websites in the world. At its peak, it was such a powerhouse that Obama used the network to post his birth certificate. It also stood for years as a premier B2B social channel: In 2015, author and marketing expert Jay Baer referred to it as “content marketing’s secret weapon.”
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Top content creator and SlideShare investor Dave McLure hasn’t posted to the channel in over 11 months.
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HubSpot, the content marketing powerhouse that posted over 60 presentations in 2017 and reached over 500,000 users, has posted only once in 2018, reaching a total of just over 1,000 users.
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So what has caused this exodus of power users and decline in social-media prominence? A perfect storm of shifting parent-company priorities, insufficient revenues, and a user base largely outside of the US.
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Kit Seeborg, author of Present Yourself: Using SlideShare to Grow Your Business, was responsible for most of the content curation the users loved, she stressed how important human curation was to SlideShare.
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The curated content was a huge hit. It was also one of the drivers of SlideShare’s email list, which, at the time of LinkedIn’s acquisition of SlideShare in 2012, was growing by 250,000 new subscribers each week. After the sale to LinkedIn, the curation process remained a critical part of community-building, until 2016, when the program was ended. Since then, the homepage has changed very little, which was a major clue to marketing insiders that LinkedIn was giving up on SlideShare.
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During 2016, the team of editors who had been curators for SlideShare were moved off the product to support other LinkedIn projects, such as Pulse. The SlideShare company page on LinkedIn is now blank, with only a few remaining engineers listed as employees.
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Host your own content. There are new plugins for websites which allow you to host your slides on your own website and allow easy sharing and embedding.
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Microsoft may create a social PowerPoint for 365. That is speculation, but now that LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, and with the recent move to put Office in the Cloud, we could potentially see a new social aspect of PowerPoint in the future.
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Use Prezi. It’s an alternative to SlideShare, but it does require you create content in Prezi’s own software rather than in PowerPoint; that requirement can be a pain for some.
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Use Google or Dropbox or ISSUU document sharing with their built-in presentation handling.
- First, traffic to Slideshare has fallen off considerably. This is despite the fact that three-quarters of all content marketers are creating more content than ever, according to the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs. To be sure not all of that content is in the form of presentations and ebooks that are found on Slideshare.
- Second, Slideshare has jettisoned their editorial team, for the most part. At its apex, part of Slideshare’s appeal was its curation, including regular promotion of new and interesting presentations to the site’s home page in the “Today’s Top Slideshares,” “Featured Slideshares,” or “Trending in Social Media” sections.
- Third, Slideshare now appears to be making puzzlingly awful customer experience decisions. I have no idea if this is correlation or causation.
Top Content Creators use the title “How a Brand Does Something”
How (Brand) Is Doing (Something) to Achieve (Result) to Draw a Bigger Audience
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Brand name recognition
Nielsen wanted to determine why people purchased specific products. What did it find? Brand! -
Influencer involvement
These articles are, by definition, exploring how awesome these companies are. They’re literally saying, “If (brand) does it, it must be worth trying.” The brand gets external links, a huge trust boost, and an increased brand awareness it probably doesn’t need (but never hurts).
5 steps to use this article model
1. Identify an innovative company or thought leader
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Identify a business that doesn’t feel too out of reach. Avoid megabrands such as Apple, Coca-Cola, or Salesforce, as it’ll be tough for your reader to relate to the strategies they’re implementing.
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Identify a business implementing innovative or interesting strategies. It should be doing something worth writing about. Your article will be harder to write (and less interesting) if you pick a big brand name that isn’t doing something exciting.
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Target a business doing something interesting related to your business. There’s no point in getting people excited about a strategy that doesn’t relate to your business.
2. Start your research
3. Reach out to a representative
4. Go a step above with design
5. Promote to specific influencers
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Research the influencers before you reach out to them to better
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Learn if they are interested in content similar to what you’re doing.
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Follow them on social media.
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Then reach out to the influencer and Personalize the outreach.
Influencer Marketing Tools used by industry experts
- Sort results by their reply ratio and average retweets, plus highest domain authority if they have a website
- View the recent links they shared so you get a sense of what interests them
- Use the advanced search function similar to how you would in Google
- Click the ‘View Links Shared’ button to see the influencer’s most popular shared content
- Then you can save and organize these influencers into any number of outreach lists. They have another feature to help you build an audience of Twitter users who’ve shared content from your domain, which you can then use for targeting in a Twitter ad campaign, if you want to stay visible to people who’ve already been influential for you- these people have retweeted once, so they’re much more likely to again than any other random person, which makes that ad money well-spent.
- This latter helps you reach both medium and lower-degree influencers. The influencers with the most power are the hardest for companies to enlist and influence themselves, so it’s very important to also have a plan for accessing and working with medium and lower-power influencers.
- It also sheds light on quite a few things including domain authority and several metrics regarding influence on Twitter.