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Amplified Content Marketing

by Michael Stuart

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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:
  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.
 
 
 

Filed Under: News Tagged With: ads, API, blog, brand, business, content, content curation, content marketing, creation, curation, Digital Marketing, Email, events, Facebook, google, influencers, linkedin, loyalty, marketing, mobile, people, pr, price, publishing, Social Media, story, success, top, website, Websites

Master influencer marketing and grow your brand

Curated December 14, 2018 by Staff Editor


Influencer Marketing in 2017 results from a survey of top marketers across industries  how 86% of marketers use the channel, with content being the top driver, illustrating that influencer marketing and content marketing are often done together.

Top reasons marketers use influencer marketing:

  • 89% to create brand content
  • 77% to drive engagement
  • 56% to drive traffic to websites or landing pages.

The best influencer content tends to be organic.

While you want to give influencers some brand guidelines and talk about business goals, you’ll get the best results when you select the right influencers and trust them to engage in whatever way they feel resonates with your audience.

 


You chose them for influence; give them the freedom to use it.

Invite your influencers to use their voices to amplify what they’re seeing and trust that what they say will elevate your brand’s thought leadership.

Influencers don’t want to merely repeat brand messages, they want to share their insights and voice, often on partner networks.

Influencer marketing’s real value with the greatest impact comes from influencers building relationships with potential customers and repeat interactions with the audience.

Reference ibm.com

Michael Stuart
1stonlinetech

Filed Under: News Tagged With: brand, business, content, content marketing, influencer marketing, influencers, landing page, Landing Pages, marketing, Michael Stuart, top, website, Websites

Link Engagement Declines On Facebook

Curated December 8, 2018 by Staff Editor

Last 12 months of Facebook data for leading websites shows a noticeable decline in engagement (Less Likes, Comments, and Shares on Links)

Facebook Engagements

The top ten sites include (the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed) and major news brands (the New York Times, Fox News, BBC, the Guardian).

With the decline in Facebook engagements for web content, native videos are on the rise.
  • Videos are more of the overall total of post types on Facebook pages.
  • Everyone has heard about the massive potential Facebook video has for engagement.
  • Some publishers have shifted strategy entirely to focus on the video.

If users are spending more time watching videos from publishers, there’s less chance of them coming across a link to a story that their friend has liked.


Recent Facebook Algorithm Updates of note:

  • June 12 2015 – Taking into account time spent on stories
  • July 9 2015 – Updated controls for news feed
  • February 1 2016 – Using qualitative feedback to show relevant stories
  • April 21 2016 – More articles you spend time viewing
  • Announcements around the promotion of video.

A new Pew Research report finds that 44% of the US population now gets news on Facebook .


As consumer habits change, publishers need to be aware of how their audience is finding their news.


Source: www.newswhip.com/category/digital-journalism/




Filed Under: News Tagged With: brand, content, Facebook, pr, stories, story, strategy, top, website, Websites

Referral spam is compromising the accuracy of most Google Analytics reports!

Curated December 7, 2018 by Staff Editor

What Google referral spam is, how to identify it in your reports, methods to clean up historical reports and prevent referral spam from effecting reports in the future.

Starting in 2014, there was a full-frontal assault of fake referral spam masquerading as legitimate website visitors compromising the accuracy of our Google Analytics reports!
While we thought Google would fix it, a solution still has not arrived, and so we are on our own.

The problem was, and still is, most marketers don’t know what referral spam is, how to spot it, or how to remove it.

  • This presents a major problem when businesses and marketers begin using these inaccurate Google Analytics reports to make conversion rate optimization decisions on A/B tests, landing page optimization, and more.
  • Worse yet, many marketers are unknowingly presenting traffic numbers to bosses and stakeholders that could be off by up to 60%!
  • There are a few proven strategies to eliminate Google Analytics referral spam.

What Is Referral Spam?

  • The majority of referral spam never actually visits your website which is why some marketers refer to it as “Ghost” spam. Even though this traffic never visits your website it still appears in your reports as legitimate traffic affecting total sessions, bounce rate, time on site, conversion rates and more.
  • On small business websites, this traffic can account for over 60% of daily sessions which causes major problems in month-to-month reporting, A/B testing, or other conversion rate optimization tests.
  • If this traffic never visits your website, why does it show up in Google Analytics?
  • The spammers use a Google developer tool called the Measurement Protocol.
    Among other legitimate uses, this allows developers and businesses to track behavior of their customers from a wide variety of different offline data sources and send that raw data to their Google Analytics account. Unfortunately, this also opens the door for crafty spammers to force raw data into Analytics accounts by randomly attacking UA tracking codes, completely bypassing the website.

referral-spam

How to Identify Referral Spam

  • There are a lot of ways to identify referral spam but the quickest is to review your traffic reports by clicking Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium.
  • If the referring domain URL isn’t a big enough giveaway of the traffic source being spam, simply visiting the URL should remove all doubt.

How to remove Fake Traffic From Google Analytics?


Three filters will block most future traffic from domains which are currently known to send referral spam.

First filter click the Admin tab, select your Filtered View, click Filters, and enter a name for your filter keeping in mind there will be several.
In the Filter Pattern field, copy and paste the string below:

  • dailyrank|100dollars-seo|semalt|anticrawler|sitevaluation|buttons-for-website|buttons-for-your-website|-musicas*-gratis|best-seo-offer|best-seo-solution|savetubevideo|ranksonic|offers.bycontext|7makemoneyonline|kambasoft|medispainstitute
  • Since there is a character limit to the Filter Pattern field create a second filter: 127.0.0.1|justprofit.xyz|nexus.search-helper.ru|rankings-analytics.com|videos-for-your-business|adviceforum.info|video—production|success-seo|sharemyfile.ru|seo-platform|dbutton.net|wordpress-crew.net|rankscanner|doktoronline.no|o00.in
  • Third Filter: top1-seo-service.com|fast-wordpress-start.com|rankings-analytics.com|uptimebot.net|^scripted.com|uptimechecker.com

The fourth is a Hostname Filter.
  • This can be seen in your Network report by clicking Audience > Technology > Network and selecting the Hostname tab.
  • The Hostname Filter eliminates this spam from your reports by including only the traffic that reaches your website by requesting your actual domain name.
  • The difference here is you must select Include, choose Hostname for the Filter Field and enter your hostname in the Filter Pattern.

How Do I Clean Old Google Analytics Reports?

  • While the above mentioned filters will only fight future referral spam, you can still remove spam from historical reports using a single Custom Segment.
  • Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium. Once there, click + Add Segment > + New Segment and recreate the four filters above as a single Custom Segment.
  • Click Conditions, and on the first filter select Hostname > Matches Regex and enter the hostname(s) you used in your fourth filter above.

Click the + Add Filter button.

  • Source > Matches Regex and paste the same list of spam domains from the first filter you created.
  • Click the OR button and repeat this filter two more times with the respective list of spam domains.

Notice the circular graph to the right reflect a smaller amount of traffic. This is the amount of site traffic that remains after all referral spam has been removed. Once you save this filter, you can apply it to any report and any time frame.




THE EASIER ALTERNATE METHOD

Google Analytics spam shows up with bogus referrers, events, and other junk data. Referral spam in web analytics reports has been around for a long time, but it started showing up in Google around the end of 2014. Google is working on the issue and seems to be blocking some of it, but new spam continues to crop up. This method will stop current spammers, and can be re-run again in the future as new spammers arise.

This tool will automatically insert filters to block new referral spam: https://www.quantable.com/ga-filter/spam-filter.php

It uses two different methods in combination:
  • Blocking analytics calls from sites other than your own (or other hosts you select, the tool will walk you through the sites calling your GA). This eliminates most of the so-called “ghost” referrals where your site was never involved in the measurement calls.
  • Explicitly blocking other spammers that get around the hostname-limitation method. Usually these are bots that actually are hitting your site and firing the GA sensor as normal but are still junk traffic that we’d all like to filter out. If you already have existing spam filters these new filters should not conflict with them.



ANOTHER ALTERNATE METHOD WITH MORE OPTIONS

  • This tool lets you automatically create and link referral spam filters to your Google Analytics profiles.
  • The list of spam sources is derived from friends at Lone Goat and Analytics Canvas.
  • To create and link these filters, you will need EDIT access in the Google Analytics accounts you want to modify.
  • This tool will only allow you to access privileged accounts.
  • Note that any existing filters with the names sa_Spam_filter_#N will be updated if there is a mismatch.

The tool: http://www.simoahava.com/spamfilter/




Sources:
www.simoahava.com/analytics/spam-filter-insertion-tool
blog.kissmetrics.com/removing-google-analytics-referral-spam
www.quantable.com/analytics/google-analytics-referral-spam-filter-wizard

Filed Under: News Tagged With: blog, business, Conversion, events, google, landing page, pr, SEM, SEO, spam, success, top, website, Websites

News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2016

Curated December 7, 2018 by Staff Editor

How people are using News Articles on Social Media Platforms
  • An ongoing study by Pew Research Center from 2013 to 2016
  • A majority of adults (62%) get news on social media, and 18% do so often
A majority of U.S. adults – 62% – get news on social media, and 18% do so often, according to a new survey by Pew Research Center, But which social media sites have the largest portion of users getting news there? How many get news on multiple social media sites? And to what degree are these news consumers seeking online news out versus happening upon it while doing other things?
Reddit, Facebook and Twitter users most likely to get news on each site
News plays a varying role across the social networking sites studied.2 Two-thirds of Facebook users (66%) get news on the site, nearly six-in-ten Twitter users (59%) get news on Twitter, and seven-in-ten Reddit users get news on that platform. On Tumblr, the figure sits at 31%, while for the other five social networking sites it is true of only about one-fifth or less of their user bases.
  • Facebook is by far the largest social networking site, reaching 67% of U.S. adults. The two-thirds of Facebook users who get news there, then, amount to 44% of the general population.
  • YouTube has the next greatest reach in terms of general usage, at 48% of U.S. adults. But only about a fifth of its users get news there, which amounts to 10% of the adult population. That puts it on par with Twitter, which has a smaller user base (16% of U.S. adults) but a larger portion getting news there.
Social media news use: Facebook leads the pack
The audience overlap
To what extent do the various news audiences on social media overlap? Of those who get news on at least one of the sites, a majority (64%) get news on just one – most commonly Facebook. About a quarter (26%) get news on two of those sites. Just one-in-ten get news on three or more.
Most social media news consumers only get news on one site
Seeking out news online
  • Differences also emerge in how active or passive each group of news users is in their online news habits more generally. YouTube, Facebook and Instagram news users are more likely to get their news online mostly by chance, when they are online doing other things.
  • The portion of Reddit, Twitter and LinkedIn news users who seek out news online is roughly similar to the portion that happen upon it.
Instagram, Facebook and YouTube news users most likely to happen upon news online, but LinkedIn, Twitter and Reddit news users are more evenly divided between news seekers and non-seekers
The demographics of social media news consumers
A look at the demographic characteristics of news consumers on the five social networking sites with the biggest news audiences shows that, while there is some crossover, each site appeals to a somewhat different group. Instagram news consumers stand out from other groups as more likely to be non-white, young and, for all but Facebook, female. LinkedIn news consumers are more likely to have a college degree than news users of the other four platforms; Twitter news users are the second most likely. The demographics of other sites can be found in the Appendix.
Demographic profile of social networking site news users
Social news consumers and other news platforms
Social media news consumers still get news from a variety of other sources and to a fairly consistent degree across sites. For example, across the five sites with the biggest news audiences, roughly two-in-ten news users of each also get news from nightly network television news; about three-in-ten turn to local TV. One area that saw greater variation was news websites and apps. Roughly half of Twitter and LinkedIn news consumers also get news from news websites and apps, while that is true of one-third of Facebook and YouTube news users.
Social media news consumers access news on a number of other platforms
Changes over time
Digital readership data and what it can tell us
One of the less high-profile benefits of the news media’s move to online content is the fact that it has provided media researchers with an important tool: Readers now leave a digital footprint, meaning that researchers no longer need to rely only on a reader’s self-reports of what they saw, heard or read that day.
  • A typical news website, for example, can tell you how many people read any specific article, at what times of day, how long they spent there and from where in the digital world they arrived.
  • Amid this avalanche of news data, audience metric companies arrived on the scene to help individual organizations make sense of their own data and to provide a consistent way of measuring and interpreting behavior across numerous websites.
  • One of these companies is Parse.ly, which agreed to share anonymized September 2015 data from 30 of their diverse news media clients.
These data include measures for unique visitors, sessions with an article and complete interactions with a given article.
  • The unique visitor metric (also referred to simply as visitor) reflects the total number of individuals that visited a particular website, as identified by first-party cookies, on a particular device during the month studied.
  • Another central metric in this analysis is engaged time. This captures how much time a user spends with content by tracking cursor movement, clicking and scrolling.
Sources Jeffrey Gottfried and Elisa Shearer

Filed Under: News Tagged With: content, Facebook, linkedin, local, people, pr, Social Media, website, Websites

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Michael Stuart

Mike’s experience in the technology industry is quite extensive. During his career, he has had the good fortune of serving both as a designer of complex enterprise applications and as a corporate executive. Read More…

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