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Attracting Audience Attention

Curated January 10, 2019 by Staff Editor

How to Attract an Audience with Creating Captivating Content

To be successful, every business has to tell its stories.

These days, such stories are usually told through posting content online in blogs, articles and social media.

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.
how do you ensure you’re creating compelling content that generates views?
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

As a printing company, our target companies are other businesses that need printed collateral, as well as individuals that have a specific need. Content about our latest printer is not effective. However, design tips or examples for wedding invitations, how-tos, or graphic design tips for other businesses will create value that organically leads to sales. Your content does not have to revolve specifically around your goods or services. Rather, cross-pollenating your content into the desired industries you would like to sell to is an effective way to create value and sales. – Brandon Stapper, Nonstop Signs

2. Choose The Best Platform For Each Message

Different channels accomplish different types of engagement. Facebook is great for showing company culture. We find images and behind-the-scenes videos get the most likes and shares. For Twitter, we’re testing tweets that are story driven; you create a thread, and each tweet links to different content that threads up around a point. This is a great way to repurpose multiple pieces of content, and it drives conversation with people commenting on tweets. Instagram is obviously image and video driven. The trick with Instagram is choosing the right hashtag to get the right visibility. If you’re looking for leads, you’ll need users to download an asset that’s useful. We’ve been doing checklists on how to do something accompanied by a case study that proves it works. – Kerry Guard, MKG Marketing

3. Write Step-By-Step Guides

I’ve noticed that some of our best content is how-to guides that show users a step-by-step process on how to implement something on their own website. This has helped gear us to becoming more of a resource-based blog where customers can find information on how to make their own sites better. Find out what guides your customers want and write a detailed, step-by-step process that will help them. You can even turn some of your most popular ones into content upgrades in exchange for email addresses. – Jared Atchison, WPForms

4. Round Up The Experts

When producing content, a helpful strategy is to include experts with relevant experience on the particular topic you are producing content around. By including these experts and their take on a specific issue, you’re providing them with a platform to share their thoughts and ideas and increasing your chances of them sharing your content with their audience — “seeding” the content with additional readers. If the content is well-received, the results will compound from there. – Brandon Pindulic, OpGen Media

5. Answer The Questions You’re Always Asked

Answering tough questions about our industry has been a boon for traffic to our site. Some of our top-performing pieces are articles on how much an app costs to build and on how much money an app can make. Think about the questions clients or potential clients ask you all the time, and then go and create blog posts to answer those questions. – Ryan D Matzner, Fueled

6. Take On Trending Topics In Your Industry

I’ve noticed that the content that tends to get the most engagement on my company’s blog and my social media channels is around topics that are disruptive to the industry. For example, in the digital marketing industry, some of my most shared and engaging content dealt with new trends, such as voice search and mobile AMP (accelerated mobile pages). The keys for greater engagement and cultivating thought leadership are to provide helpful context and actionable information that empowers your readers. Don’t be a journalist, be a thought leader instead! – Kristopher Brian Jones, LSEO.com

7. Pitch Solutions, Not Products

No one wants to hear your sales pitch. No one is as excited about your product as you are. What they want to see is someone like them who’s struggling with the same issues. Then they want to see you fix those issues. Case study marketing is the way to go. It’s organic, it’s not just about you and others want to share it. At Enlighten we spend a remarkable amount of time working with clients after the sale to follow up and document the successes. These successes become inspiration for others that see them. Case studies have people asking you for help rather than you asking them for business. – Jeremy Jacobs, Enlighten

8. Integrate Insightful Interviews

Interviews are a great way to generate traffic to your site. Find people in your industry to interview and send them a few questions. You can then post your article in a question-answer format and optimize it for SEO. The trick is to find people that your audience is interested in learning from and asking them questions the audience would like to know. You can create a poll on your site to find out who your audience would like featured on your site. – Chris Christoff, MonsterInsights

9. Livestream For Authenticity

Content that receives the most engagement for us is livestreaming on Instagram. For instance, after I released my most recent book, I did a handful of Instagram livestreams with other entrepreneurs, and each segment received more engagement than any other type of content marketing we produced. Livestreaming is the most transparent way to showcase your knowledge and expertise without sounding scripted or rehearsed. – Kristin Kimberly Marquet, Creative Development Agency, LLC

10. Tap Into Holiday Spirit

Is there an important date or popular holiday coming up? Injecting your brand (in an authentic way) allows you to take advantage of its popularity. Posting content that taps into the interest of a given date almost always guarantees fantastic engagement. Holidays such as Christmas or Valentine’s Day are obviously days you want to take advantage of. You can also time your content to coincide with the release of a popular movie or more niche holidays, such as “National French Fry Day” or “Star Wars Day.” Timing your content to highlight special days allows for predictability. It’s simple, and you can easily track results. It also allows you to tap into niche or international audiences that you may not otherwise reach. – Shu Saito, Fact Retriever

mike stuart, 1stonline.us

The Death of Microsoft’s LinkedIn’s SlideShare

Curated December 17, 2018 by Staff Editor

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:

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.
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.
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.
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

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.

Slideshare’s coming passing comes on the heels of the death of Squidoo and Scribd, among others.

Tips from the Top Ten Inspirational Books

Curated December 15, 2018 by Staff Editor

Tips from Ten Inspirational Books

Find Your Element by Ken Robinson
Start With Why by Simon Sinek
Purple Cow by Seth Godin
Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
Getting Things Done by David Allen
The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
Zero to One by Peter Thiel

Get your tips on from each book below:

Find Your Element

by Ken Robinson

· Expose yourself to as many new opportunities as possible to discover your unrealized aptitudes.

· Strive to have a growth mindset. It will allow you to develop and improve your abilities.

· Find your passions, things you do without noticing the passage of time.

· Forge your own path, along with an understanding of your happiness, instead of blindly seeking wealth, immediate gratification, or other people’s definitions of happiness.

· Don’t plan your life when you’re young because life is unpredictable.

· Don’t assume you are bad at something because you performed poorly in that subject in school. Standardized tests only measure one kind of human intelligence and schools only cater to a few learning styles.

· Every person is special and different because of their genetic makeup (every human who ever existed in history has their own genes) and their environment (everyone has their unique mix of family, friends, and location).

· If you accept you can’t predict or control the future, you will discover many new opportunities.

· Experiencing positive emotions from your passion reduces stress, chronic pain, and addictions. It also improves sleep and concentration.

· Finding a group of people who share your passion can be very beneficial, or even necessary, for both you and other members of the group to realize personal goals.

Start With Why

by Simon Sinek

· Think inside out (starting with why), not outside in (starting with what). Communicate the why as it fosters a sense of belonging.

· The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe.

· People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. What you do simply proves what you believe.

· Excited employees and customers who believe in your cause are the most powerful resources an organization can have.

· Financial incentives or punishments do not motivate people on a deep and emotional level.

· Customer manipulation may work in the short term, but it doesn’t foster trust and is ultimately counterproductive.

· The Golden Circle consists of three concentric circles. The what is the outer layer, the how is middle layer, and the why is the core.

· Making profit is a result of the what and the how, not the why.

· The Law of Diffusion on innovation breaks down to 2.5% innovators, 13.5% early adapters, 34% early majority, 34% late majority and 16% laggards. If you want mass-market success, you have to achieve a 15–18% tipping point.

· The early majority won’t accept something until early adapters have tried it and accepted it, and you won’t get early adapters until they believe in what you have.

Purple Cow

by Seth Godin

· Take risks at being remarkable, and don’t worry about criticism.

· Target the people who are both willing to try new things and very vocal at spreading the word to others.

· Invent the product with marketing.

· Target and measure your marketing effectively.

· Don’t emulate the leader, because you’ll never learn the process of turning risks into success.

· The traditional form of advertising is no longer effective because in today’s overwhelmingly advertised world capturing the consumer’s attention is almost impossible.

· In today’s crowded marketplace, there is no room for “ordinary.”

· Being ridiculed can be a good thing, as it spreads word about you and your product.

Tipping Point

by Malcolm Gladwell

· To spread an idea, you must make sure it sticks first. It has to be something special, catchy, unique, and remarkable to cut through the market noise.

· Keep the group smaller than 150 if the goal is to effectively spread a message.

· The spread of ideas is similar in behavior to the spread of epidemics.

· The tipping point is when ideas spread from an initial niche user base into the mass majority.

· A select few types of people are generally responsible for ideas to spread: connectors, salesmen, and mavens.

· External elements influence our behavior. Such influence is generally greater than what we perceive it to be.

· Small changes in context caused by external elements can have a big ripple effect.

Getting Things Done

by David Allen

· Focus. When other thoughts enter the mind, record them on an external nearby Thought Bucket.

· Empty the Thought Bucket weekly and organize it.

· Remove unimportant items, finish 2-minute tasks, and enter deadlines, or appointments in your calendar.

· Practice outcome thinking by having a project list that tracks steps leading to desired goals. The most urgent step on the project list goes to the Next Action list.

· The Next Action list should stay with you at all times so you can choose to act on them when time frees up.

· The Waiting For list can help expedite things.

· The Tickler File consists of 31 days and 12 months into the future, and is for time sensitive reminders.

· The Someday/Maybe list is for ideas in the future that are not concrete projects yet.

· Set up a functional workplace to create a cockpit of control that eases your mind.

· Review and update all of your lists weekly.

· Natural planning turns ambiguous ideas into brainstorming sessions that reduce the fog and provide clarity into actionable steps.

· Don’t multi-task. Focus 100% of your mental capacity on the task at hand.

· Our brain’s nature is to think. Thus, thoughts might enter our mind that distract us from the current tasks.

· Daily to-do lists are inefficient because of their warped view of time.

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

by Stephen Covey

· Effectively integrating into the world means aligning personal paradigms with universal principles.

· “Sharpen the Saw” to stay effective. Stay physically fit by exercising. Stay mentally healthy by learning new things. Stay socially and emotionally engaged by developing positive relationships. Maintain spiritual health by confronting and reflecting on your own values.

· Be proactive and take control of your own fate.

· Begin with the end in mind and set long term goals with an understanding of your personal mission statement.

· Visualize the outcome of every step toward your goal so it will be easier to translate into concrete actions.

· “Put First Things First” by prioritizing things that bring you toward your goals and are consistent with your values or norms.

· Practice the Win-Win mentality. It will create good relationships, mutual trust, and long term benefits.

· Forming stable relationships means listening empathetically to others and understanding their personal paradigms so you can contribute and invest in their goals.

· Engage in active listening by repeating back people’s own words, mirroring their emotions, and helping structure their thought processes.

· Synergize with others by cooperating openly and respectfully. Collectives can achieve a result that is impossible for an individual.

· Don’t say yes to everything.

· Don’t view the world from a Win-Lose, competitive perspective.

· To change, you have to address your character, not your behavior.

· Our paradigms are our subjective perception of the world that shapes our habits.

· If you want to be able to influence others, first seek to understand. Only then can you be understood.

The 4-Hour Workweek

by Tim Ferriss

· Aim high so you can create your own reality and write your own rules.

· Step outside of your comfort zone and take action now.

· Try to gain the freedom of remote working within your current job.

· Be effective on the job by working on things with the goal of gaining remote work.

· The 80/20 rule applies with work: 20% of work will bring 80% of results. So, focus on being productive instead of busy.

· Time is money. Remove things that reduce your effectiveness at the job.

· Rate the importance of a task by asking yourself, “If this is the only thing I do today, would I be happy with today?”

· Finish your high priority items before noon.

· Address email and voicemail messages after completing the high priority tasks are done. Then bundle tasks to finish them.

· Have others play by your communication rules.

· Set up an automatic source of income by outsourcing everything. The key is to use as little of your time as possible.

· Have open communication and do not let your input be a requirement in the business process.

· Delegate as much responsibility as possible.

· Validate and test your products before selling. Set up an online store with out-of-stock items and an A/B testing ad campaign.

· Establish credibility in your product category.

· Appear bigger; because people trust larger companies.

· Be picky about your customers. The 20/80 rule applies. Top 20% of your customers will be responsible for 80% of revenue, so attend to them.

· Go premium with your product because premium quality brings higher profit and customer quality.

· Don’t lie to yourself and think that when staying within your comfort zone, things will magically be okay.

· Don’t start your day by checking emails.

· A fulfilling life can be achieved by being mobile and flexible. This means that you can do whatever you like, whenever you like.

· Moderate, automatic income you can manage anywhere around the world allows for the mobility required for the lifestyle you truly want.

· The worst-case scenario from making a decision is usually not as bad as you think.

· Five steps to independence: 1) start with a full time 9–5 job; 2) move to a full time remote 9–5 job; 3) gain efficiency to reduce 9–5 tasks to 9–1; 4) use other time to automate alternative income; 5) quit old job and live on alternative income.

The Innovator’s Dilemma

by Clayton Christensen

· Have two innovation incubation models for an established firm.

· Observe how customers are actually using the product.

· Have discovery-driven planning that is adaptable to various factors of change.

· Be creative at finding the right customers who can directly benefit from your innovation, rather than a large, less targeted market.

· Expect trial and error so that a new organization can fail early and without great expense.

· Don’t develop products and services based on what customers say they would like.

· Don’t innovate in a singular quality such as performance oversupply. What does innovation look like in functionality, reliability, convenience, and price?

· Established and entrant firms bring different types of innovations to market.

· Established firms bring sustaining innovations to maintain market positions and profit margins. However, they still lose market dominance because of their focus on sustaining profits while ignoring new markets brought by disruptive technologies.

· Knowing what customers want through surveys, focus groups, and interviews is good at incremental improvement, but not effective at creating the next thing.

· A tunnel-vision chasing of profit margin should be moderated with long term expectations.

· The difficulty of predicting emerging markets means an established company can’t justify the investment. Consequently, they usually miss out on disruptive technologies and the emerging market that comes with it.

· Sometimes firms are too inflexible with its Resources/Processes/Values (RPV) framework to adapt to changing conditions.

· Theoretical models for innovation rarely work in the real world.

· Disruptive innovations are usually variations on existing technologies that open up a new customer base.

· The best way for an established company to take advantage of a disruptive technology is to create or acquire an organization that is small but utilizes flexible processes.

The Lean Startup

by Eric Ries

· Focus the whole team on finding a sustainable business model. The faster the model is found, the likelier the start-up is to succeed.

· Learn through a scientific approach, constantly validating your findings.

· Validate your hypotheses by speaking with real customers.

· Move from believing to knowing by testing the value and growth hypotheses of your product.

· Test the demand of your product by building a minimal viable product.

· Establishing the build-measure-learn cycle as fast as possible will get you to your sustainable business model quickly.

· Split-test all your features to distinguish what would be valuable to your customers and what would be a waste of time.

· Pick an engine of growth (sticky, viral, or paid) and focus.

· You must examine the right metric, not superficial metrics that don’t help you towards your goal.

· Traditional strategies cannot manage start-ups because start-ups lack a history.

· Don’t be afraid of pivoting your fundamental core assumptions.

· The main goal for a start-up is to find and build a sustainable business model.

· Value hypothesis assumes early adopters will accept a product.

· Growth hypothesis assumes a product will appeal to a larger group of people later.

Zero to One

by Peter Thiel

· Think about the future as a definitive vision. This is a vision you want to focus on and attain.

· When thinking about the future, think about the progress which stands between now and the future.

· Finding ideas most people don’t know about, or agree with, is key to being successful.

· First aim to be a profitable monopoly at a specific and narrowly defined target market, then expand to other markets.

· The initial team members are critical. You must find the right mix of skills, vision, and personal connections with each other. This makes it easier to foster a strong company culture.

· Have balanced owner interests to avoid future misalignments that may cause the company to suffer.

· Two types of progress bridge the now and the future: horizontal progress (one to n) and vertical progress (zero to one).

· Vertical progress is hard because it does not exist yet. It requires you to see the present differently. It also requires you to find a truth most people don’t see or agree with.

· A startup has only one specific future vision leading to success. One must parse decisions relevant to specific conditions.

· Perfect competition is good for consumers, but it does not drive progress.

· Real progress, the zero to one type of vertical progress, usually results in monopolies. That means you’re producing something much better than everyone else is.

· Sales and distribution is vital because your products will never sell themselves. Optimize your sales effort per distribution point to include various sales strategies.

· Founders tend to be strange people. However, the vision they have is indispensable because the decisions are made to realize that original vision.

Source medium.com/the-mission

Best Social Media Automation Tools to Boost Traffic

Curated December 13, 2018 by Staff Editor

What are the Best Social Media Automation Tools to Better Reach My Audience?

The internet is chalk full of tools that are useful in this arena. Many sites exist to make your life easier by taking some of the burdensome work off of your shoulders. We’ve compiled a list of the nine best social media automation tools (in no particular order) to help you make a decision as to which tool is ideal for your needs. We asked the following two questions:

What makes this one of the best social media automation tools?
What should I be concerned about?

Here are the nine best social media automation tools:

1 – dlvr.it

dlvr.it offers many options to automate posting to social media. From automating your blog within minutes of publishing – to scheduling posting – to repeating posts automatically, dlvr.it has a full arsenal of tools to make your life easier.

What makes this one of the best social media automation tools?

dlvr.it offers the ability to post multiple posts per day from an RSS Feed to Socials. On the basic plan, users have the option to post to three different socials from different platforms. Free users can also use content filters to exclude any posts that do not meet criteria automatically. dlvr.it also offers Instagram integration as an input, as well as Twitter and Pinterest. This platform integrates into many different social media platforms. dlvr.it also offers the ability to either schedule posts, or post automatically.

The Pro plan is reasonably priced for most users. At $9.99 per month, users can expect to be able to use up to 10 social media accounts and up to 50 sources of input. The price tag of the Pro plan also provides access to the Echo feature. This power packed feature allows automated reposting of content from your input source up to two additional times without you having to do any further scheduling. dlvr.it also offers a free trial, which does not require additional credit card information.

What should I be concerned about?

Analytics for dlvr.it offer just click stats and follower stats. However, you can add Google analytics tags with additional parameters attached to your social media accounts. dlvr.it also does not provide in-depth demographics of followers.

2 – Hootsuite

Hootsuite has built a platform that is attractive to marketers because of its built-in analytics.

best social media automation tools hootsuite

What makes this one of the best social media automation tools?

Hootsuite’s software packs a punch using Analytics. Hootsuite provides in-depth, detailed analytics that can help you to determine your audience engagement, metric performance, and real-time feedback. Hootsuite offers basic analytics for their free users, as well as enhanced analytics for its Pro users. For its free users, RSS integrations are free and unlimited. Upgrade to their Pro plan, and you can schedule bulk messages. Hootsuite also offers its users support through free social media classes.

What should I be concerned about?

Hootsuite does offer all of these features but prevents its free users from using more than three profiles. Hootsuite also does not allow image posting for its free users. Their analytics provide a lot of power, but for the novice user, this can be very confusing and difficult to understand. The front dashboard can be a bit confusing if you are not used to looking at so much information.

3 – Buffer

Buffer is a tool that works with input sources and social media accounts to publish your content quickly and easily.

What makes this one of the best social media automation tools?

Buffer has a wealth of tools that help their users stay connected to social media wherever they are. They employ the use of a mobile app to make it quick and easy to schedule a post from anywhere. Buffer has also created a system that will work to find the best times to post your content. Possibly the most attractive feature that Buffer offers is the option to create infographics inside the tool. Buffer offers a tool called “Pablo” that allows you to create graphics within the app and will allow scheduling of this post also within the app. With access to the Pro plan, you will gain access to use RSS feeds as inputs as well as the Calendar feature.

What should I be concerned about?

Buffer offers some Instagram integration, but this integration is a tad misleading. Buffer reminds users to log into Instagram to post content. Essentially, the only automated function of these reminders is the reminder itself. Also, if you are a basic plan user, Buffer significantly limits the functionality of their app. For their basic users, they will only allow one social media account per platform, and will only allow you to schedule ten posts at a time. There is also a significant limit for their next step plan. This plan allows you to schedule 100 posts for ten profiles.

4 – Social Oomph

Social Oomph offers management of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

What makes this one of the best social media automation tools?

Social Oomph integrates with a few different platforms including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. The most powerful feature that Social Oomph provides is to track Twitter followers and keywords. These platform analytics provide quite a bit of information about your audience so that you can tailor your content to your audience. Social Oomph also allows your employees to submit content via email, which will allow you to avoid needing to add team members to your account. You will instead be able to review and approve content from your own login information.

What should I be concerned about?

Social Oomph severely limits its free users, only allowing connection with Twitter at the basic level. Complete automation only occurs at the professional plan level, which is a higher price point than many on this list. The professional plan runs $17.97 every two weeks.

5 – IFTTT

IFTTT is a platform that allows you to set up a number of triggers. The acronym stands for If This Then That. This means if a certain condition is met, then an action is performed.

best social media automation tools ifttt

Why is it one of the best social media automation tools?

IFTTT works on the formula of recipes. You set a trigger, whether it be a YouTube video published, a Tweet sent, or a new blog post on WordPress, and then set a result. The result indicates where this content moves. IFTTT has a huge variety of triggers and resulting actions. Recipes on IFTTT are extremely varied, and possibilities are endless with the trigger options.

What should I be concerned about?

Costs can start to get steep with this platform. There are only two levels of the plan, which start at about $1,200/year and do include unlimited triggers and actions. The only other option is to pay around $6,000 per year to customize your plan.

6 – Sprout Social

Sprout Social helps business users manage and analyze social media impacts across platforms.

best social media automation tools sprout social

Why is this one of the best social media automation tools?

Sprout Social follows the analytics protocol, providing its users with many different types of analytics and interactions. Google Analytics are an essential feature of what Sprout provides. They integrate this into their dashboard so that you don’t have to run to Google to find out why your traffic may have dropped. Team members may also be added to all plan levels. They also have options to automate your social media content via a Social Content Calendar. Sprout also can decide the optimal times to deliver your content if you have trouble deciding when to publish.

What should I be concerned about?

Sprout is one of those platforms that is on the more expensive side. While they do offer a 30-day free trial, they also start their pricing at $99 per user per month for their most basic plan without adding additional users. Sprout also lacks Pinterest, Instagram, and multiple Google+ page interfaces. These features may be available on one of the other tools mentioned previously.

7 – CoSchedule

CoSchedule is a more robust platform that allows for posting and scheduling in a drag and drop calendar format.

best social media marketing tools coschedule

Why is this one of the best tools for social media automation?

CoSchedule offers a drag and drop format calendar that allows you to categorize your posting. This tool also allows you to select evergreen content, which can be posted indefinitely. The tool will also select the most popular posts in your history and repost them for you. CoSchedule also has integration options with Buffer.

Why should I be concerned?

CoSchedule is similar to Sprout Social in that there is no option for a Free plan. The lowest cost plan offered by CoSchedule is $30 per month for 10 Social Profiles and one user account. In our experience, CoSchedule does require a lot of initial setup. There is a significant time investment up front in setting up the account and calendar. However, once set up, only minor alterations are required.

Should I be using Third Party content?

First, third party content is not content that you have to write yourself. You may be pressed for time in coming up with original content, but want to make sure that you are maintaining a consistent social media presence. That’s where third- party content comes in. Well curated third party content can reinforce your messages in your original content. B2B Marketing Solutions suggests that you make this a part of your marketing strategy because you want to be a trusted source of valuable information. Not all of this information has to come from content that you generate.
Second, third party content can add valuable information to your social media walls without you needing to write it. Social-tribe suggests that third party content can add value as long as it holds relevance to your target audience. Sharing someone else’s article can help you publish this valuable information for your readers, increase your credibility and also increase your followers.
Third, this falls into the category of making sure that your content isn’t just bombarding your followers with sales pitches. Neil Patel recommends that when sharing content to your social media accounts, 80% should be social, rather than sales.
The social content draws in your audience and makes sure that they’re not exhausted by a constant sales pitch, leading you to see more audience attrition.

Source: blog.dlvrit.com

Top Technology firms erect shrines to themselves

Curated December 12, 2018 by Staff Editor

Many of the nation’s leading technology firms are erecting billion dollar shrines to themselves, while hoarding cash and using the American public to pay the bill.

Is big tech robbing the country’s revenues by declaring their intellectual property resides in offshore tax havens ?
Are they devaluing the country’s technical labor force by using lower-wage offshore nationals ?
Is the Governmental without objection because they are so far behind ?
Is big tech the reason so many qualified workers are out of work ?

Big tech companies claim they won’t be competitive if they rely on US tech labor, yet all but admit they primarily use offshore labor to reduce cost and risk. They also claim that they aren’t replacing US jobs, and that’s non-sense. There is a plethora of technical talent in the US that’s out-of-work from age discrimination and the available supply of foreign workers willing to take their place at half the cost.

Salesforce Software’s new tower makes San Francisco’s old monuments look small. And It is not the only technology company erecting a shrine to itself, Apple’s employees have just begun moving into their new headquarters in Cupertino conceived by the firm’s late founder, Steve Jobs. The four-storey, circular building looks like a fat dough-nut about the same size as the Pentagon, and cost around $5 billion.

Throughout California’s Silicon Valley, cash-rich technology firms have built or are erecting bold, futuristic headquarters that convey their brands to employees and customers. Another example is Uber, a ride-hailing company, which is hoping to recast its reputation for secrecy and rugged competitiveness by designing an entirely see-through head office. It is expected to have some interior areas, as well as a park, that will be open to the public.

The exteriors of the new buildings will attract most attention, but it is their interiors that should be watched more closely. The very newest buildings, such as Apple’s, are mostly still under wraps, but they are expected to be highly innovative in their internal layout. Some of that is because of fierce competition within the tech industry for the best engineering and other talent: firms are particularly keen to come up with attractive, productive environments. But these new office spaces will also signal how work is likely to evolve. Technology companies have already changed the way people behave in offices beyond their own industry, as a result of e-mail, online search and collaboration tools such as Slack. They are doing the same for physical spaces.

The big idea championed by the industry is the concept of working in various spaces around an office rather than at a fixed workstation. Other industries have experimented with “activity-based working”, but tech is ahead. Employees may still have an assigned desk but they are not expected to be there, and they routinely go to different places to do various tasks.

There are “libraries” where they can work quietly, as well as coffee shops, cafés and outdoor spaces for meetings and phone calls. The top two floors of Salesforce Tower, for example, will be used not as corner offices for executives but as an airy lounge for employees, where they can work communally and gaze out at the views over a latté.

A fluid working environment is meant to allow for more chance encounters, which could spur new ideas and spark unexpected collaborations.

Facebook’s central building is the world’s largest open-plan office, designed to encourage employees to bump into one another in its common spaces and in a nine-acre rooftop garden. Communal areas are meant to be casual and alluring. John Schoettler, head of real estate at Amazon, says he aims to make them into “living-room-like spaces”.

The new “working at home”

The lack of fixed workstations shrinks the amount of expensive real estate given to employees without leaving them feeling too squeezed. Tech firms devote around 14 square metres to each employee, around a quarter less than other industries, according to Randy Howder at Gensler, a design firm.

Young workers are thought to be more productive in these varied environments, which are reminiscent of the way people study and live at university. One drawback, however, is that finding colleagues can be difficult. Employees need to locate each other through text messages and messaging apps.

Collaborative spaces can also expose generational tensions, says Louise Mozingo, an architecture professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Tech firms’ elderly employees (otherwise known as the over-40s) can struggle to adjust to moving around during the day and to the frequent disruptions that come from large, open-plan offices.

Many of Facebook’s employees do not like their office because it is noisy, and some Apple employees are hesitant to move into their new building for the same reason. Plenty also balk at the massive distances they will need to walk.

That may not be the only thing to cause employees concern.

Tech firms are increasingly keen to use their own products in their headquarters. Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, a chipmaking firm whose graphics processing units are widely used in artificial-intelligence programmes, says his firm plans to introduce facial recognition for entry into its new headquarters, due to open later this year.

Nvidia will also install cameras to recognise what food people are taking from the cafeteria and charge them accordingly, eliminating the need for a queue and cashier. A self-driving shuttle will eventually zip between its various buildings. And Nvidia’s own AI will monitor when employees arrive and leave, with the ostensible aim of adjusting the building’s heating and cooling systems.
The data that firms can collect on their employees’ whereabouts and activities are bound to become ever more detailed. Another way of keeping tabs on people is through company-issued mobile phones. “Every employee has their own tracking device,” observes Mr Howder at Gensler. “Technology firms will sooner or later take advantage of that.”
Few of them are willing to share details of their future plans because of concerns about employees’ privacy. However, some of their contractors signal what sort of innovations may be in the pipeline. Office-furniture makers, for example, are experimenting with putting sensors in desks and chairs, so that firms will be better able to monitor when workers are there.

Iit is not hard to imagine how such data could create a culture of surveillance, where employees feel constantly monitored. “Technology firms could be an indicator of what will happen with privacy in offices more generally,” says David Benjamin of Autodesk, a company that sells software to architects, among other clients.

A less controversial trend is for unusual office interiors. These can distinguish companies in the minds of their employees, act as a recruiting tool and also give staff a reason to come into the office rather than work from home. For companies that do not ship a physical product, such offices can serve as important daily reminders of culture and purpose.

Last year LinkedIn, a professional social network, for example, opened a new building in San Francisco that is full of space set aside for networking, and that includes a “silent disco”, where people can dance to music with headphones on. Instead of offering generic meeting rooms with portentous names, Airbnb, a tech firm that lets people rent out their homes, has designed each of its meeting spaces after one of its rental listings, such as a Bedouin tent from Morocco. It also has a meeting room (pictured above) that is an exact replica of the rental apartment where the founders lived when they came up with the idea for Airbnb. Every detail, including the statue of Jesus in red velvet on top of the fireplace, is accurate, says Joe Gebbia, one of the company’s founders.

Nvidia is obsessed with triangles, the basic element of computer graphics used to create lifelike scenes in video games and movies. Its new headquarters, which cost $370m, is shaped like one (see picture), and its interior is full of them. Everything, from the skylights to the benches in the lobby, is triangular. “At this point I’m kind of over the triangle shape, because we took that theme and beat it to death,” admits John O’Brien, the company’s head of real estate, who pointedly vetoed a colleague’s recent suggestion to offer triangle-shaped water bottles in the cafeteria.

Such workspaces remind staff that they are choosing not just an employer but a way of life. In the tech bubble of the late 1990s companies disrupted the workplace by offering foosball tables, nap pods, blow-up castles and free lunches. Now the emphasis is on amenities that help employees save time. Larger firms, including Facebook, Alphabet and LinkedIn, offer their staff something akin to the services used by the extremely wealthy, helping employees to find places to live, adopt pets and the like. Some large tech groups offer on-site health care.

The effect of all this is that the typical office at a technology firm is becoming a prosperous, self-contained village. Employees have fewer reasons than ever to leave. With the spare cash they can throw at their employees, tech giants have vastly raised the bar for other kinds of company, which also want to recruit clever engineers and techies for their projects.

Other industries would be wise to take time to watch how tech firms are structuring their work environments. There is certainly a chance of a backlash against those that use their products to watch employees too closely. Workers may like free lunches and other perks associated with the tech business, but probably not enough to surrender their privacy entirely.

Source: Economist.com