Social media is one of the best outreach tools available to help spread the word about your eBook. Here, you will find out some actionable tips and tricks for promoting your eBooks on social media sites.

Create a Social Media Outreach Strategy

When preparing to promote your new eBook, setting an easy-to-follow plan is the best way to go about it.  The plan creation should start with market research, include when you will use which means to promote your eBook on what platforms, and end with a section for follow-up analysis and adjustments.

Use a calendar to schedule your posts based on the best times and platforms for your target audience. Brief everyone who is helping with promotions on the details of your initial strategy, and each time a change is set.

Share Viral-Ready Images with Quotes From the Book

One of the best ways to promote an eBook on social media is to use quote images. Take the best quotes from the book, set them to a nice background, one at a time, and share. Here’s an example of a quote that was used to promote Steven Aitchison’s eBook, “Release the Magic.” This particular image got nearly 600,000 shares on Facebook in just over a month.

When sharing posts like this, be sure to include a link that, when clicked, will take viewers to the page where they can access the download. This can be a website homepage where they subscribe to a newsletter in order to be taken to the download page, an Amazon product page, or any other landing page that helps you reach your promotional goals.

Link to Articles and Directories That Mention the eBook

If the website where the eBook is listed has a blog with a link to the book in the sidebar, include those blog posts in your promotional strategy. If your book is listed in an eBook directory, come up with creative ways to share that directory. On Pinterest, there are many popular pins with titles like, “Where to Find Thousands of eBooks,” and, “Where to Find Free eBooks.” These are examples of linking to directories, and are very important to a social media promotion strategy for eBooks.

Link to the eBook From Your Profiles

During your campaign, you want to include links to your eBook and landing pages on the social media profiles. If your eBook is available from the homepage of your website, that will suffice. Just make sure that anyone who finds you or your company on social media platforms can find the book whether or not they see any ads prior, and think to search for it. Linking to it from your profiles contributes to optimal visibility.

Keep Your Social Media Profiles Public

Any of the social media profiles being used in your plan should be set to public. This way, you ensure that anyone can share your posts and they will be seen. It is an easily overlooked detail that can stifle the project if not done.

Use Different Promotion Messages on Personal and Professional Profiles

Use both personal and professional profiles to share and promote your eBook. When doing so, craft each message directly toward your target audience. Your friends and family will want a different type of personal message accompanying your ads.

Join Group Discussions in All Relevant Niches

LinkedIn has over 2,500 groups related to eBooks. There are unlimited forums here in all professional niches. All you have to do is join the discussions, and get people interested in finding out more about you. When group members decide to click through to your profile, you will have a link to the eBook in one way or another. If you are the author, you can place the eBook link in a very prominent area of your profile, including your headline. If you are only contributing to the promotional phase, you can list it as a project you’re currently working on.

Use Facebook groups in a similar way. When group members click through to your profile, have a link ready for them to find. All you need do is join in on conversations with your target market. There is no need to even mention the eBook. If you do, you may come across as spammy, so be very careful in doing so.

Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to create a strong internet presence as a brand. Through blogs, social media forums, and web content, you can inform your audience more about your brand, encourage them to use the brand and get feedback from customers as well. Content marketing cuts across all internet platforms such as social media sites, websites, and search engines. One important thing to remember when it comes to content marketing is wording is very important. Most content marketers know all about using keywords, links and other inserts to content that will redirect traffic, but when it comes to catchy titles and quality content, they can learn a thing or two from journalists.

Many principles of journalism already influence online marketing strategies. Factors such as style, grammar, and vocabulary all influence the target audience to make a decision regarding the brand whether positive or negative. Many content marketers often think of the quantity of content they can generate to meet the eager and ever growing internet audience, but do not pay much mind to the quality of this content.

Give Context to Links

Using links is a major way of redirecting user traffic back to the brand website. These links are often embedded in articles and blogs that internet users can read either to know more about the brand or information related to the brand. One of the biggest mistakes that content marketers make is inserting links without giving context to it. You should not make readers click away from a page just to get information. It is advisable to be generous with words, give the right facts in the right place and then insert the link for the audience to click on.

Get the Facts Right

The content should not simply be a tool to get your audience to click on the link and buy into the brand. When content writers only think of the content as a marketing tool, they fail to meet the right standards in content quality. This includes guessing or falsifying information, misinterpreting the results of studies conducted in relation to that brand and other grave discrepancies. Remember there are some internet users who are widely read and making such errors can reflect negatively on the brand you are so desperately trying to promote. Recycling content from one blog to another is a common practice among content marketing. In this process, crucial pieces of information are lost or misinterpreted. Fact checking is crucial when writing content.

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Reporting

Reporting creates a much more insightful and challenging thought process with audiences rather than simply recycling content that has been trapped in the industry cycle for years with little or no additional information. Rather than pulling snippets of information from one blog and blending it into another, content marketers can create more of a buzz by actually interviewing industry experts and spark meaningful conversions to report to audiences. This will elicit more interest and attract serious traffic to your website with great conversion rates.

Know What the Audience is Looking For

You can do great with half a page of content that directly addresses the audience’s interest needs than two pages worth of irrelevant information. Merging creative ideas with market analytics can have a great impact on the audience decisions when it comes to content marketing. Every content marketer should have a deep understanding of what the content is all about and meeting the audience’s expectations. Content writers should engage in brainstorming meetings to come up with useful ideas for the blog. Combining the creativity and knowledge of many minds can lead to creating effective content. You do not want the ready to simply open the article but also click through to access the information or product in question.

Transparency

The audience should be aware of the purpose of the information given in the content. The point of content marketing is purely to create brand exposure, which results in revenue. Therefore your only challenge should be making the content as relevant and as delightful as possible to the target audience so that they can use the brand.

Attribution

Attribution is an essential skill in content writing that many content marketers fail to use. Human is to error, sometimes errors are passed from one article to another to the point that the lie becomes the new truth. This is often a problem with brand marketing in small industries. Attribution of hard facts and figures given in articles helps to prevent the muddling of facts along the chain of blogs that they are used in. With attribution, it is easy to pinpoint the exact moment where facts got twisted and equally, easy to set the record straight.

Conclusion

Writing content for content marketing requires a multidisciplinary approach in order to have the desired effect on the target audience. The input of journalists to marketing content is about as important as that of content marketers.

With so many search engine ranking factors, it can be a challenge to decide where to spend your time, money, and resources.

While every factor deserves your attention, one remains more important than the rest: inbound links.

The strategy you employ today ain’t the same one you used a few years back. Travel back in time three to five years and your inbound linking strategy was likely driven by the following:

• Quantity of links, NOT quality.
• Massive keyword anchor text.

Those days are long gone, as link quality and relevance is more important. If you get caught up in quantity and anchor text, there is a good chance this will work against you in the form of a Google penalty. Is that a risk you are willing to take?

What Should You Do?

You already understand the importance of securing quality inbound links, and no one wants to spend huge piles of cash on unnecessary advertising. Even so, you may not know everything you need to about improving your link profile. While you can create great content and hope for the best, this isn’t typically enough. You need to do more.

My first suggestion is to get a handle on what keywords you rank for,and more importantly what your competitors rank for. SEMRush is a great tool to get a quick idea and you get a limited version out of the gate.

Before we launched our business dashboard startup Dasheroo, we blogged every day, publishing content more generally focused on data visualization. We wanted to drive traffic prior to launch and begin to get known for being a dashboard solution. Did we do that? You bet and I highly recommend it. But, we were astonished by what terms we were ranking for, and it wasn’t the direction we wanted to go.

We took a good look at a long list of keywords and phrases our competitors were ranking for using SEMRush; what the average monthly search volume those keywords were getting using the Google Keyword Planner tool; and compared where we ranked for those same keywords. Then we set out to develop our SEO strategy for ranking for those same (and additional!) keywords.

Using powerful tools Dasheroo can track where we stand versus our competition for number of keywords, amount of traffic and how many common keywords we have.

Now we provide valuable content around the keywords we want to be known for. We’re actively climbing the ranking ladder for those keywords (it doesn’t happen overnight so be patient) and organic traffic has doubled in the past two quarters.

There are many strategies to consider, with these three among the most effective:

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1. Use Social Media to Your Advantage

With the right social media marketing strategy, it won’t be long before you find others linking to your website and blog on a more regular basis.

Your goal is to form relationships with people who are interested in your company and what you have to say.

Maybe you have a product or service geared towards college career departments. Use Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to connect with people in this space, such as career advisors. You don’t have to “hard sell” them. All you’re trying to do is forge a relationship. So follow them on Twitter, Like their Facebook page, connect with them on LinkedIn.Over time, as you become more comfortable with one another, they may become more willing to hear you out and share your valuable content and views, often via a link to your website.

Use tools like Hootsuite and Buffer to make managing all of this easy.

Yes, relationship marketing with an eye towards link building takes time. However, the results can be astonishing.

2. The Power of Blogging

If you don’t have a blog, stop now and create one. With the help of WordPress, for example, you can have a visually appealing blog up and running in no time, and for free.

Once your blog is populated with high quality posts, those that prove your expertise, you can do a bevvy of things, and we’ve had great luck with all of these tactics to drive inbound links:

• Link out to companies that you want to receive a link from.
• Make it known to others that you are linking to them from your blog (a simple email will do).
• Conduct interviews with industry professionals, knowing that they are likely to link to it from their website or blog.
• Create an infographic from a survey you do or from outside surveys to illustrate a point.
• Write case studies that detail the success of your clients.
• Write an in-depth book review.
• Host a webinar.
• Offer a white paper.
• Offer free tools and guides.
• Quote industry leaders in articles and link back to them.
• Create a “16 Online Tools Your Company Can’t Be Without” type of list.

When you publish a flattering case study of a client, they’re likely to link back to it. When you include an industry influencer’s quote in an article they could link to it and/or even post it to their enormous social media following. This is good publicity for them. When you announce a webinar, others may link to it as a means of sharing with their audience. When you publish a list and link to each entity there is a list of sites who could link back to you.

Your goal with each type of content is to provide so much value that others want to link back. You get the point - content is a very much needed marketing tool.

3. Publish Content Outside of Your Blog

Most of your time may go into creating content for your blog, but you don’t want to stop there.

Ask to get an article published on another site that has a killer domain authority rank. Sites that publish content often have a program for contributed authors since they don’t typically have the staff to keep up with what they have to publish. And who better than you has the expertise in your industry?

At Dasheroo, over 6% of our traffic comes directly from contributed articles, however that also has a direct effect on our Google Search ranking growth. A win-win all around!

Bottom line, make sure you write quality content, link back to your site from your company name in your bio and you link to your site from keywords you want to be known for. Inbound links from quality sites gives you a better your chances in the search results.

Final Thoughts

With so many ways to secure quality inbound links, it can be a challenge to settle on only a few techniques. But rather than spread yourself too thin, experiment with the three ideas above.

What other strategies have you used to achieve success in getting links?

Over the last year, some brands have started seeing a reduction in their website traffic from social media. As Chad Pollitt, Co-Founder and VP of Audience for Relevance explains in a Social Business Engine podcast episode, that reduction is going to continue in 2016.

Exactly why this is happening and what to do about it is confounding to marketers. Do they need a new social media strategy? A new team? The likely answers to why the reduction is occurring suggest that a shift in thinking maybe in order.

Many Social Media Apps Remove Referral Data

Yes, you read that correctly. Many social media mobile apps – including Facebook -- strip out the referral data your analytics software seeks. Without the referral data, those referrals appear on your analytics dashboard as direct visitors, not referrals.

This situation came into view for Relevance when they realized that in spite of adding 50,000 subscribers in only 6 months, their social media referrals had dropped by 17%. Several major blogs are reporting similar results. For Moz, Copyblogger, and Buffer, the decline in social media referrals was as high as 50%.

When Chad looked at all the data, he found that the number by which social media referrals had declined was very close to the number by which direct website traffic had increased. Clearly, this looked to be an attribution error.

At first glance, it may seem counterintuitive for a social media platform to block that data, but is it working? Much as reducing the organic reach of brand posts has helped Facebook enjoy tremendous growth in ad sales, limiting the available data makes Facebook the only reliable source for quantifying referrals from Facebook. Check out Facebook’s stock price. The more they limit organic reach, and the less data they provide, the higher the stock climbs.

And that explains why other social media platforms are getting into the act. Twitter has said they are going to ratchet down the organic reach of tweets, and there are signs that Pinterest is doing it as well.

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Content Shock

BuzzSumo investigated and determined that what Mark Schaeffer calls “Content Shock” may be at least partially responsible. The idea behind the content shock is that brands now produce more content than humans have the capacity to handle. Perhaps that’s why BuzzSumo found that social shares had dropped for major brands, even as the amount of content they published increased by 78% in the same timeframe.

A Proposed Solution

As Chad explains, the solution is not to produce more content. Rather, it is to spend more time promoting content and less time creating it. Many brands today spend as much as 90% of their effort creating content, which leaves only 10% to promote it. Chad recommends spending at least 40 - 60% of your time, energy, and effort promoting your content.

Chad’s comments on the decline of social media referrals were just one part of a podcast in which he presented 6 Audacious Digital Marketing Predictions for 2016. Tune in to learn about all 6 predictions and get a head start on what’s coming in 2016.

“Content marketing is just solving the same problems that your product solves through media you create and promote.”

This quote by Jay Acunzo of NextView ventures in his post Should Startups Blog? stopped me cold and made me re-think content marketing forever.

Why did it have such an effect on me? Because it stated an obvious point I had directly experienced for the last eight years with content marketing: the most successful content marketers treated content like a product offering, not like a marketing tactic.

Let me tell you the story of how I became acquainted with modern content marketing.

I was laid off from a software sales job during the first week of January 2009. It was just after all hell broke loose in the stock market – the beginning of the ‘Great Recession.’

So there I was in January 2009, out of a job and with no prospects. What to do? I already had enough of the corporate world, so I decided to launch my own consulting career. But with no money for marketing, I concluded the only thing I could do was a blog.

But I didn’t know the first thing about how to blog to generate business for myself. I did what anybody in my situation would do: I went to Google.

I stumbled upon Copyblogger. It was only a few years old at that time. I couldn’t believe my luck, because what I found was a treasure trove of free content – content so valuable that I felt guilty consuming it.

The first series of blog posts that grabbed me was their initial “Copywriting 101” series written by Sonia Simone and Brian Clark.

This was truly valuable content. It was chock full of valuable advice, the kind that normally costs hundreds of dollars to get from an online course - yet here were Simone and Clark giving it away for free.

In fact, that’s how Copyblogger built its business: by giving away tons of really valuable content.

Of course, now they are one of the most successful Software-as-a-Service companies with their Rainmaker Platform.

But to me, and to thousands of writers and freelancers out there, their main product is their content. That software stuff is just how they make money.

Treat Your Leads Not Like Leads But Like Customers

Copyblogger treated me like a customer. I never felt like they were trying to butter me up to sell me something. However, they did sell me stuff: teaching sales, premium WordPress templates from StudioPress, and membership in their Authority membership site. I estimate that I have spent over $1,000 on various “paid for” products they have.

But I became a customer the minute I consumed their free content and subscribed to their newsletter.

Brian Massey, “The Conversion Scientist,” explains it this way in his book The Customer Creation Equation:

“The term ‘customer’ works because we should treat our leads with the same respect that we treat customers who have paid with cash.”

Massey doesn’t like the term “lead,” nor do I. He calls it “sales speak” because it seems to dehumanize the very people we are striving to help.

But why asks Massey, should we call them customers when they haven’t bought anything? Because on the Internet, no one is going to give you their contact information unless you offer them something in return.

“They’ll fill out a ‘lead’ form if you promise a great report, webinar, or some consulting time on the phone,” continues Massey in his book.

They have bought something with their attention, and with their email address – two very important resources we hold dear in this day and age.

And how do you treat your customers? You strive to make their experience with your product or service as wonderful as possible. You want them to become loyal customers, you want to eventually upsell them to your higher value products and services. And in the case of “content as a product,” you want to upsell them to a paid product.

But first, treat them as a welcome member of your customer family, that exclusive club of preferred customers who have given you their valuable time and attention, and deserve your best.

Develop a Product Development Mindset

In his revolutionary book Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing, Robert Rose of the Content Marketing Institute said you should treat your content not as a campaign, but with a product development mindset.

I wanted to include the following excerpt in its entirety because I think it’s so important:

In a traditional marketing or advertising campaign, we want to understand the campaign goals and tracking, the target audience, the key campaign messages, the offers, the media strategies, and the schedule and campaign integration. Many of these are similar to the construction of a content marketing approach. But there is one critical— and often overlooked— difference. This experience really has no end. It’s not a campaign. It’s a content product. In this regard, the mapping, building, and ultimate management of the content-driven experience looks much more like product development than it does a traditional marketing campaign.

Rose says it’s like planning and building a permanent space station, not a mission to orbit the earth and come home.

The best product development model to follow for the ongoing ideation, creation, production, and publication of content is the media company model – for who the content is THE product.

But obviously, this looks a little different when you’re a product or service company and living on the 24/7 always-on Internet.

Contently produced a very interesting graphic that represents the prerogative of content marketing departments today:

SOURCE: CONTENTLY, "STATE OF CONTENT MARKETING 2016: THE TIPPING POINT"

At the center of this chaotic spaghetti of content that is produced for many channels is the Brand Newsroom – a permanent, well-defined department that serves as the machine that produces, like clockwork, the ongoing content needs of the organization.

If the content is one of your products, then you need to approach it with a product development mindset and put into place procedures for ongoing product ideation, creation, production, and publication.

Put Your Customer-Oriented Mission Before Your Profit Motive

And talking about Contently, Shane Snow, Contently’s founder, wrote SmartCuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success, a fascinating book that interestingly has nothing to do with content marketing. But Snow inadvertently provided one of the most valuable lessons for content-driven organizations: Your mission, especially if it’s a mission to start a movement or change the world, is highly important.

In the book, Snow describes research conducted in the 2000s by executive Jim Stengel, formerly global marketing head of Procter & Gamble and research firm Millward Brown to collect a decade’s worth of data on the market performance of major brands that orient themselves around a noble purpose or ideal.

Snow said the findings were more dramatic than he expected.

“Brands with lofty purposes beyond making profits wildly outperformed the S& P 500. From 2001 to 2011, an investment in the 50 most idealistic brands— the ones opting for the high-hanging purpose and not just low-hanging profits— would have been 400 percent more profitable than shares of an S& P index fund.”

Snow cites content marketing poster child Red Bull, and Whole Foods, as iconoclastic examples of brands who have put their mission apparently above their profit motive – although, of course, these brands are very very profitable.

In order for your content to be successful, your mission should be to change people's lives, to lead a movement, to champion a cause – whether your “customers” pay you for the privilege or not.

Copyblogger honestly doesn’t care whether most of their subscribers buy any of their stuff – their mission is to improve the writing skills and marketing savvy of freelancers and creatives everywhere – while making an insane profit in the process.

And that’s the ironic thing about your content as a product: you’re giving away deep value in the form of free and paid products to fulfill your mission to improve lives – and you get paid handsomely for it.

Conclusion

Success in content marketing starts with your mindset for approaching content. If you treat content as a campaign or as a marketing tactic (and I know this is going to sound weird and woo-woo), karmically it comes through. People can smell a marketing pitch a mile away, even though you’re taking a content marketing approach.

As Jay Baer says in Youtility, be useful, be valuable, but not in a “…Trojan-horse, ‘infomercial that pretends to be useful but is actually a sales pitch’ way.”

Approach your content with the mindset that it is a product that represents and fulfills your customer-driven mission. Treat your leads as customers to whom you’re delivering value, and turn them into loyal customers who eventually buy your “paid for” products. Implement a product development process to your content, because content must be an ongoing process, not a campaign. Approach it the way media companies do.

And finally, make it your mission to change your customers’ lives and lead a movement they’d love to belong to. Your mission is expressed by your free products (your content), and your “paid for” products. Your mission transcends your profit motive, but of course, you’ll make a mint.

As a result of this change in perspective, I’m changing the way I approach my content marketing. I’m approaching it as my initial product offering to my clients, sincerely and without reservation. Not in a cynical quest to implement the power of reciprocity, but because it’s the right thing to do – and it works!

Some marketers still follow a “one-size fits all” approach, meaning that all individuals within a target audience receive the same message. Others may succeed in delivering varied communication, but struggle to find the appropriate forms of content messaging.

Today, it’s important to recognize how vital personalization and customization are when interacting or communicating with different customers. The problem is, while one person is ready to purchase your product, another may need education regarding your company, or on the extensiveness of your product line.

Other content distribution issues marketers face may include: being too promotional or “salesy,” insufficient content variety types, failure to reach a desired audience, and lack of audience interest in content.

Give Your Customers the Content They Want & Need at the Right Time

Before you determine the information your customers ultimately desire, you must identify where they reside in their buying process. Enter: Customer Lifecycle Marketing.

With Customer Lifecycle Marketing one can graphically see where a prospect or customer is in their relationship with your brand. This insight allows you to segment your audience to ensure you provide them with maximum relevance. It’s a continuous process of winning new customers while retaining the clients you already have through engaged relationships.

Combining Customer Lifecycle Marketing with Content Marketing

Once you know which buying stage a prospect or customer falls within, you can determine how the contact or company is communicated to, by whom, and how often. This calls for the use of an array of different content formats including emails, infographics, ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, and more. Pairing the appropriate content with a customer’s specific buying stage is known as lifecycle content marketing.

The process begins when a person hears a brand’s name or visits the brand’s website as a result of a search for information, which is when they enter the brand’s marketing lifecycle.

While they are uninformed at first, they are still captured and placed into the first customer lifecycle stage. It’s now up to the brand’s content to maintain and grow the relationship. From that moment forward, the content offered should motivate prospects to learn more about the brand, appreciate the brand, and most importantly, purchase products or services from the brand.

This infographic highlights a typical B2B customer lifecycle stage map as well as the suggested content forms that supplement each stage.

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Sometimes it can feel as though social media is a rabbit hole. You peek your head in and end up falling right down it, getting lost for hours. When you have to use social media for professional or branding purposes - as so many of us do these days - that can be an especially problematic fact. How are you supposed to use the tool and remain on task?

However, you may feel otherwise—that social media and productivity are, in fact, compatible. They can co-exist, as long as you do everything possible to allow efficiency to thrive. That means stacking the deck in your favor, and not letting your desire to waste time have even an inch of ground.

Here are some simple tips to keep your time on social media productive:

Create a Social Posting Calendar

You likely know all about editorial calendars and how they can help organize a publication schedule. But did you know you could create one for posting on social media? One simple tool can completely change the way you interact on social networks and maximize your time and results.

At the beginning of every week, create a posting schedule that allows multiple posts to go out per day without you monitoring them. A tool like Buffer can really help with this. Fill up your queue and then schedule a time every day for you to get directly onto the platforms and interact with the community. Don't go over this time limit; think ten to fifteen-minute blocks daily.

Further reading: How to Productively Promote a Blog Post on Social Media

Even further reading: this comprehensive guide on promoting your content that outlines major social media networks and their key differences.

Aim for Engagement, Not Feed-Flooding

Some social media profiles post continuously (even several times an hour) throughout the day. If you own an account dedicated to something like breaking news, it makes sense. But if you are branding yourself, a company or a product, this is a bad idea. You aren't engaging with anyone; you are just flooding their news feed with constant noise.

Proof of that comes from those profiles on Twitter that post constant links. Yes, they have plenty of followers. But how many of those followers are retweeting, or commenting, or even liking? Next to none, and that is because the profile becomes white noise whose updates they ignore.

Try to spark interaction. It is about quality, not quantity.

Start Using More Visuals

Visuals are far more effective on all social platforms than text. Humans have evolved to respond to visual stimuli above all else, so you should work to catch their eye. Photos are one way, though even better are infographics, GIFs or comics—items that require your followers to settle down and take in information. Otherwise, they may just skim it partially, focusing more than they might otherwise have, but not enough to leave an impact.

Greater results on fewer posts means less work. So resolve to use visuals as often as possible. I would go so far as to suggest using visual posts at least once a day, even if it is as simple as using a GIF to illustrate a point.

Sitegeek is doing a fabulous job turning their analysis into infographics and marketing them through social media.

Know How Often to Post, and When

You don't want to waste a lot of time posting to social media during blocks of the day where you are less likely to be seen. But time zones alone aren't enough to determine the activity of your audience. After all, if you have a lot of people who are posting at midnight it might seem like that is an active time, but they might have merely scheduled posts for that hour. You want high times for engagement.

There are tools on social dashboards where you can do this (Hootsuite, for example). But this is also where social media scheduling comes in handy. You can look back over your past activity and see who engaged on what posts, and when those were originally posted. A couple months of data will quickly show a pattern to work from across each social network.

Understand the Different Networks & How to Optimize Them

Each social network is unique, and the audience that uses them will have different expectations and needs. For instance, you won't post more than one or two times a day on Facebook if you want to gain a lot of attention. But on Twitter frequent posting is mandatory. On Instagram, you don't want to flood your follower's feeds, but on Pinterest you do.

Understand the etiquette of each social network and how it applies to your needs. Find the platform that can best be utilized in your favor, and take advantage of its unique qualities.

Limit Your Time on Social Platforms, Even Professionally

Finally, the biggest tip of all is to limit your time spent on social media. It has been mentioned before, but you should have a block of time carved out where you are allowed to be surfing and engaging, even professionally. Remain strict on this point, and you will save many hours.

Here are my two favorite tools to keep social media productive and clutter free:

• Facebook Filter: Filter all time-wasting words to never see updates about politics, celebrities, etc and focus on what matters
• StayFocused: Set how much time you can allow yourself to stay on social media sites. This one is especially great for Facebook, which is highly addictive.

When a company such as Facebook introduces a new feature, marketers have two simultaneous reactions: excitement and skepticism, like a child discovering fire for the first time.

When Facebook unveiled its Instant Articles, the appeal was instant, but so was the potential drawback. Do we really want another place to share our content? How much do we want to fragment our audience? Aren’t our owned media enough? How much more ad revenue can we give to Facebook?

These are all relevant questions we have to ask when approaching a new, shiny feature full of promises. The good thing is this feature explicitly targets media outlets, hoping to draw them in with minimal loading time and nearly complete control over ad revenue. But is it worth your resources, and how can you benefit from it?

What are Instant Articles?

According to Facebook, Instant Articles are “a new way for publishers to create, fast interactive articles on Facebook.” Leveraging the same technology used to display photos and videos in the Facebook iPhone app, Facebook wants your content to live on its native app, versus linking to your website.

When you break it down, Facebook Instant Articles bring its established user experience to long-form content, with high-resolution photos, interactive maps, and embedded audio captions. With Instant Articles, your audience is immersed in every element of the story. Imagine holding a photograph in your hand, while being able to tilt it back and forth. Now imagine experiencing that with an image in a Facebook Instant Article.

But What About My Ads Revenue?

When you post a link to your website on Facebook, it’s a simple way to track conversion through click-through rates and ad impressions. At a first glance, Instant Articles come across as another way for Facebook to gain revenue from content you’ve created. However, according to the model they’ve set up, there are two ways to earn revenue from Instant Articles published on Facebook:

• Content creators can fill display ad inventory themselves and keep all of the revenue; or
• Let Facebook handle placement at the expense of 30 percent of your ad revenue.

Publishers who choose the first option of selling their own ads are free to insert those ads into the Facebook pages using any “ad serving” tool they wish. Of course, Facebook being Facebook, there are some guidelines in place for your self-serving advertisements:

• One large banner ad—or two small banners—for every 500 words of content.
• A maximum of four ads per article, and a maximum of two small banners per article.
• All articles are allowed to have at least one ad, regardless of the length.
• Publishers may include no more than one house ad per article.
• No ads may be placed “above the fold” on the first view of the article.
• Publishers may not include ads in autoplay videos embedded in their articles, although ads in third-party video players are allowed.

Jon Handschin, co-founder and chief creative officer of Moviepilot, says Facebook gives “publishers room to put in other types of advertisements because it’s the profit model for us. Native advertising is a play in that market as well, and Facebook understands it."

Whether you choose the self-serve option, or let Facebook handle your placement for a small price, Facebook is trying to make one thing obvious: They want to support your business models by encouraging you to use their platform without taking away your ad revenue.

Well...at least not by much.

Technical Brass Tacks

Will your content team have to learn yet another content management system to use Instant Articles? Yet another dashboard to add to their bookmarks list?

The short answer: No.

One of the biggest appeals of Facebook Instant Articles is its ability to publish directly from your existing system. You want a single tool to publish articles to the web, and Facebook heard you. All you need is a simple RSS feed of your articles.

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According to the Facebook Developers’ blog post, once you’ve set up your RSS feed, Instant Articles “automatically loads new stories as soon as they are published to the publisher's website and apps. Updates and corrections are also automatically captured via the RSS feed so that breaking news remains up to date.”

And for the interactive images and videos? Well, lucky for developers everywhere, Instant Articles are created with HTML5, and it allows publishers to reuse the code from their website. So once the code is written, you’re set to go.

Is it Worth Your Time?

Currently, the early adopters of Instant Articles include publications such as The New York Times, Buzzfeed, National Geographic, MTV and Vox Media—all of whom include extensive creative elements in their content, including videos, voice recordings and interactive maps.

But will it benefit you as a content creator? The short answer is “yes.”

Is it worth your time? That depends on how you want your audience to interact with your content.

If your goal is to share the information with as many people as possible, Facebook Instant Articles provide an easy to way to help you reach more eyes via a simple syndication model. With comScore integration, Instant Article views count as traffic to your original content.

If your goal is ad revenue, you need to evaluate the time to takes to set up the revenue stream on Facebook in addition to what’s already created on your website.

Bottom Line

As you plan your content strategy this year, Facebook Instant Articles could be an easy win for content publishers who are hoping to get more traction with mobile users because they’re currently only available to iPhone app users.

This is just one more step for Facebook to retain its users on the platform for as long as possible, creating a fully immersive experience from the way we connect with friends to the way we get our news.

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In years past, there used to be just two schools of thought in SEO: whitehats and blackhats. The sad fact is (even if you were part of the “good guys”) your actions—whether content-related or technical—were often driven and dictated by Google’s algorithm.

It’s job security, right? I’ve even been guilty of glibly saying that Google’s 400 algorithm changes per year would ensure that I had a job for years to come. Any resistance I had to my budget and resource requests merely lengthened the time for which my services would be required. It has been very easy for SEOs to be arrogant about their roles in the past.

Today, however, with the advent of machine learning, the decentralization of Google’s search algorithm, the ever-increasing presence of personal assistants (Google Now, Siri, Cortana) and the imposition of personalized results where the query is about as generic as it could be, we’re seeing a future in which the two schools of thought in SEO will be:

• Algorithm Chasers
• Audience Pleasers

Algorithm Chasers

If you fall into the Algorithm Chasers group, you will continue trying to reverse-engineer each of the variations you see in your ranking reports, each rise and fall of your traffic, each major algorithm update from Google and so on. Rather than opportunities, you will focus on obstacles. At best, you’ll be a fast-follower for content trends in your industry.

Links will continue to be a focus area to compensate for poor rankings. Content strategies will appear fragmented, disjointed and random. Technical SEO efforts will have the primary focus of trying to maximize internal link equity amidst an ever-decreasing domain value.

Audience Pleasers

If you fall into this group, your focus will be creating engaging and effective content, keeping your technical infrastructure nimble and compatible with the latest interfaces, and setting the trends rather than following them.

Links and social engagement will come naturally, thanks to shifting your focus away from manipulation to conversation. Content on an Audience Pleaser’s site is not just informative and engaging; it leaves audiences wanting more, even after the purchase is made. Audience Pleasers build their brand outside of their owned media. They’re unafraid of social networks, video platforms, forums and new & evolving personal mediums.

And frankly, this shift perfectly aligns with Google’s evolution.

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Google as a Personal Assistant

Many years ago, one of my first jobs out of college was a cold-call computer salesman. I did so poorly at that job that I don’t even list it on my resume. But I learned something very valuable while calling potential customers every day: executive assistants (still called “secretaries” at the time … yes, I’m old-school) are the gate-keepers for their bosses. And if you don’t get on their good side, you’ll never reach the decision-maker.

This is precisely the direction in which we see Google going. Google will be the personal assistant that will act as the gatekeeper, basing its decision on whether or not to direct its users to your site on the users’ personal habits, preferences and quirks.

Additionally, it will determine if you’re worthy based on your site’s history of either pleasing users or turning them off. Rather than one single algorithm that fits the needs of most users, there will be 7 billion separate algorithms acting with autonomy to bring their specific user the best possible information, entertainment, educational material, goods and services. Think “Samantha” from the movie “Her.”

So, how you think about search and SEO going forward matters. If you think you’ll be able to manipulate your way into the top rankings in Google moving forward, you’ll most likely just wind up frustrated. However, if you focus on your users’ needs, their wants, their desires and the way they want to interact with sites, media, and each other—you’ll know how to navigate the ever-changing landscape of SEO.

How to Prepare for a Personalized Search World

At seoClarity, we have the privilege of working with some of the most advanced SEO teams in the industry, and we’ve been able to see what successful companies do in order to be successful.

1. They’re technically nimble, allowing them to embrace change and adapt to new channels quickly.
2. They democratize SEO throughout their organizations, which allows their SEO to focus on analysis and personal education, while their writers, developers, promoters, executives and marketers use the best web practices in their particular disciplines.
3. They build their content strategy specifically for their users, addressing their needs, speaking their language and meeting them wherever they are.
4. They re-align their metrics to focus on how engaging and sticky their sites are, rather than just chasing ranking and traffic.

As you start planning for the next fiscal year, think about the intent behind your content strategies and technical requirements for the New Year. Are you trying to game the system? Are you trying to attract users with blasé content produced with no particular passion? In other words, do you still see SEO as “search engine optimization?” Or have you evolved your approach to SEO to see it as “search experience optimization?”

How you answer that question will determine your success going forward.

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If you are a content marketer, blogger, startup or small business with a name that doesn’t carry as much weight as the heavy hitters, you’re faced with the challenge of finding online marketing channels that are less traditional.

Why?

There is a content overload on the traditional channels. If you don’t already have an established following, you don’t stand a great chance of getting noticed.

You need a content marketing platform that gives precedence to the content, not necessarily just the author and his or her authority. This is where Medium comes in.

What is Medium?

Medium is a content platform that is dedicated to quality content. Unlike some other platforms, it does not have landing pages, ads, and pop-ups. People come to Medium to create and read content, as well as for content distribution. Medium is not a social media site.

The Medium Advantage

Medium can amplify quality content, generate a lot of website traffic and even email subscribers, depending on your objective and approach. Any content platform that is easy to use and has a built-in audience that is engaged and growing rapidly is surely worth your consideration.

Medium offers authors the ability to collaborate on content before publishing it. You could collaborate with anyone on Medium who is willing to give you feedback. Moreover, Medium allows readers to highlight text and comment anywhere, making published content interactive.

The good news is that anyone can post in Medium and it is free to use. Anyone can also search and approach a “Publication” (a collection of stories or posts on a particular topic) to submit content. If the content is appealing and fits the publication’s bill, it will get published. This, in turn, increases your visibility and following, and maybe even create new connections.

As an example, Business Daily is a Medium publication that publishes stories about start-ups, business development, and management. The publication gathers stories from Medium users and also allows users to submit content.

If you look at the Top 100 posts on Medium for any given month you will notice the headings are quite bold. List posts and posts with actionable advice do well. The more recommends you get from readers, the better for the content’s visibility.

What to Watch Out For

Medium is not a paradise, at least not for everyone. Content that is detailed and actionable is paramount. So is finding a Medium publication with a decent following. It also helps if your content is backed by research data and relatable lessons learned.

A few words of caution: don’t rely solely on Medium for your content distribution and amplification. It should be one of the many avenues in your marketing checklist. If you are a new blogger, don’t start your blogging journey in Medium. After all, it’s a platform that you don’t own, and it’s limited in look, feel and monetization options.

Medium is a great platform to elevate awesome, bold content. Include it as part of your online marketing for additional exposure. Check out this infographic from YourEscapeFrom9to5.com for more tips on how to get the best out of Medium.