Attracting potential customers to your small business via content marketing is essential in today’s noisy social media landscape. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram make it easy to connect with consumers, but your brand’s outreach efforts on those platforms can be decimated by algorithm shifts or changing business strategies. Building the future of your small business strictly on social media marketing is a strategy that is dangerous at best, and potentially fool-hardy if you’re hoping for long-term growth. Opting to attract customers to your small business via content marketing is not only fabulous for SEO (search engine optimization), it helps you prove your industry knowledge to business partners and customers at the same time.
If you’re a small business owner wanting to increase the effectiveness of your content marketing, following are a few essential tips you ought to bear in mind for maximum ROI (return on investment).
1. DISTRIBUTION
The single most effective way you can increase the potential of your content marketing is to develop a diverse content distribution strategy. It’s not enough to add fresh content marketing posts to your small business’ blog; you must have a plan in place to connect your content with consumers. Develop a strategic plan of action to distribute your small business’ blog posts via a variety of channels, including content syndication, RSS feeds, automated social sharing, and referral networks. The more effort you put into honing your content marketing distribution strategy, the faster you will see engagement rates with your content soar.
2. AUDIENCE ANALYSIS
If you want content marketing to work for your small business, it is imperative you develop a deep understanding of your audience. Failing to understand the content preferences of your target customers can be disastrous — not only for engagement, but potentially pushing customers away at the same time. You need to understand the topics your target customers want to read about as well as the content formats they prefer. Just as developing a detailed distribution strategy is vital for content marketing success so too is a diverse audience analysis strategy.
3. ENGAGEMENT ANALYTICS
For content marketing to be effective for your small business, you must measure engagement on a frequent basis. Track everything from time-on-page rates via Google Analytics to the shares your content receives on social networking sites. When you dig deep into your engagement analytics, not only will you uncover the topics your audience enjoys the most, you’ll also uncover subtopics and keywords you might have overlooked.
Bear in mind these tips for effective content marketing and there’s a good chance you can increase your small business’ ROI from your content outreach efforts. Growing your company via content marketing takes time and dedication, but the long-term rewards for your small business can be substantial.
As the gaming industry prepares to descend on Los Angeles for the annual E3 Expo, Facebook is launching some updates to its own gaming infrastructure. Most notably, the social platform has announced fb.gg — a destination filled with streams and on-demand videos from Facebook’s top gamers.
Facebook has been courting the gaming industry since January, when it launched the Gaming Creator Pilot Program to offer financial support to streamers. Now, those creators will get more support thanks to the launch of the Level Up program, which will provide access to a feature that looks a lot like Twitch’s subscriptions: By purchasing virtual goods during streams, fans can support their favorite Facebook gamers. Level Up partners will also be granted access to new Facebook live streaming features as those updates roll out.
In addition to meeting its gaming community’s monetization needs, Facebook is also fostering the growth of their respective audiences. The fb.gg platform, which Facebook says it has been testing of late, is still in an “experimental phase,” but it already lets visitors discover top gamers (and the games they play) on Facebook. Some of those creators, such as Darkness429, have accrued six-digit follower counts in the early days of the Gaming Creator Pilot Program.
Facebook said Level Up will open up globally “in the next few months.” In the meantime, the platform is still soliciting partners for its Pilot Program. “We’re continuing to expand our gaming creator program — creators who are interested in joining can sign up here,” reads a blog post introducing the new features. “Several partnered creators are participating in our test of fan support via monthly payments, and in the coming weeks, we’ll add more partnered creators to that test group.”
To promote its new tools for gamers, Facebook plans to have a significant presence at E3, where it will set up its own booth. Details about the social platform’s E3 plans can be found here.
After reports surfaced earlier last week that Instagram was eyeing a push into long-form vertical video by expanding its maximum video length from one minute to one hour, new details have emerged about the platform’s bigger video visions.
While initial reports suggested that long-form video could serve as an extension of Instagram Stories, Techcrunch reports that Instagram is actually poised to launch a brand new hub for long-form content tentatively slated for June 20 — coinciding with VidCon. That hub, which Techcrunch likens to Snapchat Discover, will house vertically-oriented scripted series, music videos, and YouTube-style clips in fullscreen and with 4K resolution. Instagram is currently meeting with social influencers and digital publishers about potential programming for the venture.
If such a hub would bring Instagram more squarely into competition with YouTube, it is still honing a monetization model to rival that platform. While no ad revenue splits or upfront payments (as was the case with Facebook Watch) are reportedly being offered to potential partners at launch, according to Techcrunch, the videos will have a ‘Swipe-Up’ option that creators can use to drive traffic to other monetizable destinations.
In addition to popular creators and bold-faced publishers, Instagram will enable all users to share videos that are longer than its current one-minute limit, per Techcrunch — though it still remains to be seen how these videos will relate to the main Instagram feed, and how users will be alerted about new posts.
Techcrunch has uncovered several other details about the forthcoming video hub, which it says may live within the ‘Explore’ tab, receive its own tab, or even be spun out into a standalone app. Additionally, a ‘Continue Watching’ option will enable users to consume clips over several sessions; long-form clips will also be able to be accessed via bubbles on creators’ profiles near Stories Highlights; and long-form videos cannot be shot and instantly posted — they must be pre-filmed and uploaded.
Facebook launched a new feature on Monday called Memories, where users can look back at all their old posts and photos in a single location.
According to Oren Hod, a product manager at the company who announced the new feature on Facebook’s blog, over 90 million people a day use the social network’s “On This Day” feature, which shows users what they were doing on that same date, say, a year ago. This inspired the company to put further emphasis on aggregating “memories” on the platform.
Users’ Memories pages include On This Day posts, Friends Made On This Day posts (which, in addition to showing friends users connected with on that day, may also show video collages featuring those friends), and Memories You May Have Missed (a log of the past week’s “memories”). Recaps of Memories consist of “seasonal or monthly recaps” in the form of messages and short videos.
Of course, there are certain posts users may not want to be reminded of, like those featuring past romantic partners. Currently, Facebook lets users set filters for the On This Day feature, one of which allows them to list the names of people they don’t want to see pop back up from old posts. Presumably, those same filters could extend to Memories’ other features.
As of now, Hod didn’t provide specific information on how users could help tailor their personal Memories pages. “We try to listen to feedback and design these features so that they’re thoughtful and offer people the right controls that are easy to access,” he wrote. “We work hard to ensure that we treat the content as part of each individual’s personal experience, and are thankful for the input people have shared with us over the past three years.”
Hod also cited research conducted by a Facebook user experience researcher, Artie Konrad. In a Medium post from August 2017, Konrad described how he and his team developed On This Day, which involved polling a group of Facebook users about their “fun, interesting, and important life moments” and determining how to avoid showing users’ “negative memories.” Perhaps more focus groups are convening as we speak.
So far, my Memories page consists solely of an On This Day post from seven years ago in which a friend apologizes for not calling me back. Users can find their Memories pages at facebook.com/memories or through notifications and News Feed messages on the social platform.
After rolling out the ability for users to share shoppable links within their Instagram feed posts in 2016, the social platform is adding the feature to its popular ‘Stories‘ product — which is used by 300 million people every day.
“On Instagram Stories, when you see a sticker with a shopping bag icon, tap on it to see more details about that product,” the company shared in a blog post,” noting that brands like Adidas, Aritzia, and Louis Vuitton are piloting the feature. Instagram added that a recent survey found that users frequently watch Stories to keep up with and glimpse an insider view of their favorite brands, as well as to discover relevant products.
While Instagram is rolling out the feature with only a handful of retail partners, it could eventually be a particularly grabby tool for influencers to guide followers toward items they’re selling.
To this end, competitor Snapchat has also ramped up its ecommerce capabilities in recent weeks. The company is now testing shoppable ads that can run in both its premium Discover section and between user-generated Stories, AdWeek reports. Snapchat will also also provides marketers with performance metrics for these ads. Additionally, ticket seller SeatGeek has been partnering with Snapchat for the past several months to vend tickets to events within the Stories of companies like Major League Soccer (MLS).