Amplified Content Marketing

by Michael Stuart

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Social media Best posting times

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Social Media Image

Social media marketing centers around getting the attention of your present and prospective customers.

What is the best time to post on social media?

“The best time to post on social media is when your customers (both present and prospective) are online”.

When to post on Social Media in 2020

Social media eCommerce trends indicate that the use of social networks for eCommerce is on the rise with an estimated global eCommerce sales of $4.5 trillion by 2021, a 246.15% rise. Hence, questions like why post on social media and what are the implications of not posting on social media are becoming more and more irrelevant. Now, the only question that needs to be answered is when to post on social media for maximum engagement.

Best time to post on social media in 2020 – Facebook

  • It is more or less safe to post on Facebook on weekdays between 1 pm to 4 p.m. for those who would like to indulge in a bit of online shopping during lunch hours at work.
  • The best time to post on Facebook for online retail brands is not one single time slot but rather a few optimum times are present:
    • Wednesday between 11am-3pm
    • Thursday at 2 p.m. and 4 pm
    • Friday between 10 am to 3 pm
  • Weekends are usually considered to have the lowest engagement rates for consumer goods brands.


What to post on social media for your business: A Guide for FacebookSince Facebook’s audience is highly coveted by online businesses simply because of its sheer reach, you could have a regular flow of informational content, industry news and updates, and product promotions. These will generate brand loyalty and increased sales. Remember to have an effective CTA to your posts on Facebook, like Steam Horse Dry Goods Co. below. The post is crisp, to the point and has a clear CTA.

Best time to post on social media in 2020– Instagram

  • The safest times to post are every day from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
  • The best time to post on Instagram for online retailers is Saturdays and particularly at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.
  • Wednesday has been seen as the day with the most engagement.
  • Monday is the least engaged day for consumer goods, maybe because people are more likely to catch up on work, and everyone, in general, is more focused on getting ready for the week ahead.

What to post on social media for your business: A Guide for InstagramPrimarily a photo sharing app, Instagram is highly impacted by product images and is a key driver of brand awareness for eCommerce. New product launches, lifestyle posts, and user-generated content teamed up with effective hashtags have been seen to be doing really well on Instagram. You could also post short videos.

Best time to post on social media in 2020 – Twitter

  • The safe time to post on Twitter is between 1 to 3 p.m. every day.
  • The best day and time to post on Twitter for eCommerce brands is on Saturdays at 1 p.m.
  • Sunday has been reported to be the lowest in terms of engagement but has seen some engagement at 11 a.m. and between 1 to 4 p.m. on this day.

Some other types of content to post on social media sites

  1. Posts of your company
  2. Industry news
  3. Curated content
  4. Questions
  5. Videos
  6. Advice
  7. Memes 
  8. Contests
  9. Holiday Posts
  10. Links to freebies

How to post on Social Media? – Apps that post on social media for you

Very often you might be required to post to multiple social media accounts at once, and it can be very daunting for those who don’t know how to post on social media. Here are some tools that will help you with this:

  1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a great tool which enables you to schedule your posts across all major social media pages at specific times. Available both as a free and paid version, this is an excellent tool to publish and monitor your posts on multiple platforms from one single screen. It also has an “auto-schedule” option which is based on the company’s own knowledge on the best time to post on Instagram or on Facebook. 

  1. Hubspot

Apart from publishing and monitoring, if you are also looking for an app that will also do the reporting for you, Hubspot is the app to go to. It provides a closed-loop reporting data, which means that you’re not just seeing which channels are giving you the most engagement, you can also track the funnel down further to see which posts are driving actual leads and sales.

  1. TweetDeck

If you are focusing on just Twitter, you should not look any farther than TweetDeck. Apart from being one of the oldest to be around, it is one of the best too. You can follow several conversations at once with this tool, and it is actually quite fun at times.

  1. IFTTT (or Zapier)

This is a Trigger-and-action tool. Acronym for ‘If This Then That’, IFTTT is an automation tool that can save you a lot of time while it manages your social platforms effectively. The tool links your website, social media pages, and apps based on a trigger and an action. Based on a particular trigger you create, it starts an action. For example, if you publish a blog (the trigger), then IFTTT will automate and create a tweet (the action) about it.


  1. Raven

Apart from allowing you to access data and schedule posts from a variety of social media platforms, Raven provides reports from information gathered about pay-per-click (PPC), search engine optimization (SEO), and social media channels. Thus, you get insights on topics like what the best time to post on Instagram is or if SEO is a better channel than PPC campaigns.

  1. Buffer (DLVR.it)

Buffer or Dlvr.it are advanced applications that provide Automated scheduling and engagement analysis.

Conclusion There is really no magic rule to engage with users. Every brand is different and so are their respective audiences.

 

Since the birth of e-commerce, marketing experts have disagreed about the future

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Since the birth of e-commerce, marketing experts have disagreed about the future role of brands.
  • Some have predicted that digital technologies will hasten the demise of brands because customers will have ready access to information they need to make purchase decisions, and “brand” will, therefore, become less relevant.
  • Others have prophesied an increasing importance of brand as a simple way to evaluate choices in an era of information overkill.
To find out which school of thought is more accurate, we looked at the value of brands and customer relationships as revealed by M&A data covering over 6,000 mergers and acquisitions worldwide between 2003 and 2013. The beauty of M&A for examining valuation trends is that M&As reveal the dollar valuations of all assets at the time of the acquisition. Upon acquiring a business, companies have to value the different assets they acquired for their accounts and balance sheet in accordance with accounting and reporting standards. These valuations include – among other assets – brands (trademarks) and customer relationships.
 
This graph, based on data from the MARKABLES database, represents brand and customer relationship valuations as a percent of total enterprise value. The percentages come from fair value assessments done by purchase price allocation experts according to established accounting standards.
 
 
As the graph bracingly shows, brand valuations declined by nearly half (falling from 18% to 10%) while customer relationship values doubled (climbing from 9% to 18%) over a decade. All other categories of intangibles remained stable. These numbers reveal a dramatic shift in the strategic approach to marketing over the last 10 years. Acquirers have decisively moved from investing into businesses with strong brands to businesses with strong customer relationships.
M&A strategies often concentrated on brands and on growing brands through better brand management and internationalization.
  • Today, such brand growth strategies appear to be either limited or too expensive.
  • Instead, M&A strategies now concentrate more on acquiring firms with strong customer relationships – with all the loyalty and cross-selling benefits that confers.
This trend is powerfully reinforced by digital technologies. These allow more direct interactions with customers, bypassing expensive middlemen and reducing the cost of sales and marketing; they allow firms to optimize customer lifecycle management based on detailed data and analysis of customers’ needs; they improve efficiency and quality across the value chain as a result of continuous customer feedback; and, finally, they facilitate the realization of merging two brands into one, or rebranding. As a result, the price of direct engagement with customers relative to traditional branding and media campaigns has dropped while the effectiveness of such marketing efforts has grown.
There is a parallel development on the demand (customer) side. Digitalization makes information, including information about brands, easily accessible. For example, a customer shopping for a new car can now instantly examine and compare the specifications and performance of different car models.
Thus, purchasing decisions have become more fact based, and less brand-image based. Customers still value strong brands, but what constitutes a strong brand is now more dependent on customers’ direct experience with an offering, and with their relationship with the firm that produces it.
 
Marketing resources now directed at brand building should be more fully integrated with those designed to reinforce relationships. Strong brand communications are and will remain important especially in attracting new customers and in enhancing desirability for higher price premiums.
 
As Peter Drucker said, well before the advent of the information age, the sole purpose of a business is to create a customer.
source hbr.org/2015/04/why-strong-customer-relationships-trump-powerful-brands
 

The Death of Microsoft’s LinkedIn’s SlideShare

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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.”

 
 
Power users have been dropping the SlideShare channel.
 
  • Top content creator and SlideShare investor Dave McLure hasn’t posted to the channel in over 11 months.
  • 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.
  • 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.
 
Despite SlideShare’s massive fan base, loyal users, and billions of impressions, a once-powerful channel is all but dead, and here’s why.
 
The Loss of Human Touch
The rapid growth of SlideShare from a small startup to a top website began in 2009, in a tiny room in India, when Amit Rajan, Rashmi Sinha, and Jonathan Boutelle saw the need for a “YouTube for presentations.” Within a few years, they had built a network of 38 million registered users by providing a desperately needed tool—and a new social channel for presentations.  But the key to their success wasn’t the tool, it was the human touch it added to the presentations.
 
SlideShare didn’t have a marketing team fueling its rapid growth. It relied on loyal fans. Its fans were the content creators, and to ensure the best content was featured, the team at SlideShare would manually curate the site each day, ensuring that the best presentations were prominently featured.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
 
Some alternatives to SlideShare:
  1. 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. 
  2. 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. 
  3. 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.
  4. Use Google or Dropbox or ISSUU document sharing with their built-in presentation handling.
As we are continually bombarded with new marketing channels, tactics, and tools, one thing is clear: Slides are not going away. Events seem to give brands the personal touch the digital world just can’t, and slides are usually the No.1 content type at events.
 
The “YouTube of presentations” was at one point the number one destination for business owners and managers. It sported better demographics and site visitor loyalty than even LinkedIn. It was one of the top 100 most visited websites on the planet. Maybe that’s why LinkedIn bought it for $119 million in 2012, padding the nest eggs of serial investors and Slideshare backers Mark Cuban and Dave McClure, among others.
 
The 3 Biggest Slideshare Problems Today
 
  1. 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. 
  2. 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.
  3. Third, Slideshare now appears to be making puzzlingly awful customer experience decisions. I have no idea if this is correlation or causation.
 
Slideshare’s coming passing comes on the heels of the death of Squidoo and Scribd, among others.
 
 
 

Audience First then You’ll Know What Products to Sell

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When You’ve Built an Audience You’ll Know What Product to Sell

Don’t know what product or service you should be selling? That’s actually fine, says Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute and author of the new book Content Inc.: How Entrepreneurs Use Content to Build Massive Audiences and Create Radically Successful Businesses.




“In most cases [early on], you don’t have the product or service right, anyway,” he says.

Instead, he recommends that entrepreneurs “flip the model on its head” and build an audience first, and only then figure out what to sell them. “What if you spent the time and understood the audience better than anyone else? It’s basically a future list of your customers,” he told me during a recent interview in New York City. “That audience knows, likes and trusts you more. And they’ll actually tell you what to sell [to them].” That means when you do start to sell, it’s a faster, easier and more lucrative process.

He recognizes that building an audience without a clear path to monetization may feel frightening to entrepreneurs watching the bottom line. “Is it a leap of faith? Sure. But I actually think it’s a less risky model as long as you’re patient and as long as you have the time.”

So how can you build an audience successfully? Pulizzi, not surprisingly, is a strong believer in the power of content creation. First, you have to specialize.

“Just take content marketing, for example. Now it’s such a crowded space. There’s no way you can cut to the clutter. You’ve got to find your content tilt,” which he defines as your unique niche and spin on a subject. “What is that area of little to no competition out there, where you actually have a fighting chance to break through?”

As an example, he cites a pet supplies company that originally considered blogging about pet supplies, which was way too broad. Instead, he urged them to drill down — first to the subject of “traveling with your pet,” and then “pet owners in Southwest Florida” who travel with their pets. Says Pulizzi, “Now you’ve got a chance. Now you can be the leading expert in the world on that.”

Next, you want to think carefully about the channel you use. “A blog, a podcast, and a video series are the first three options I’m going to be looking at when building my base,” says Pulizzi. You want to ask yourself, How would this story best be told to my audience? You should think about where your skills lie (perhaps you have a particular knack for writing), where your audience is already congregating, and whether your content is especially compelling in one format or another (if you’re frequently doing demonstrations, video may be optimal).

Finally, you need to produce consistent, high quality content. “It’s quality over quantity,” says Pulizzi. “That didn’t always used to be the case,” but Google has been steadily improving their algorithms to prioritize excellent work. You don’t necessarily need to post every day, but he argues that the minimum effective dose is “one fantastic piece per week.” You should also evaluate when you reach the point of diminishing returns; the Content Marketing Institute started with posts three times per week, and eventually increased their rate to posting three times per day. But their audience didn’t want much that frequency, and they ultimately settled on daily posts, instead.

Pulizzi believes that entrepreneurs are particularly well positioned to leverage content marketing. “I think small businesses and entrepreneurs are better suited for it because they are more patient [than large, established corporations],” he says. “When you’re going to the big companies it’s like, We need it right now. But a small company can say, This is a three-year tour and I’m going to make this work. It’s about putting in enough time, knowing that the benefits on the back side are going to be amazing.”

Building an audience requires patience and faith. But the trust and loyalty engendered are well worth the effort.

Source: entrepreneur.com/article/272585

How Content Marketing Can Fuel Your Thought Leadership Program

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When brands practice thought leadership, the natural result is trust. When an audience trusts a brand or its representatives, they are more likely to convert. Research supports that there is a strong, positive relationship between consumer trust, brand loyalty and increased customer referrals. In fact, 84 percent of B2B decision makers start the buying process with a referral, and customer disloyalty can stunt growth by 25-50 percent.

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