See A Need, Fill A Need – The Simplicity Of Social Media Marketing

This weekend I was watching the movie Robots, with my four year old. If you have kids, you have no doubt seen this comedy filled movie with a great story about overcoming social status, wanting to do something great and believing in yourself. Beside the film being quite entertaining and a lot of fun, there is a great thread of business and social media wisdom throughout the movie, in the form of a quote.

“See A Need Fill A Need” is something Bigweld says that inspires the main character “Rodney” to invent new technology as well as help fellow robots that can no longer obtain spare parts.

Here is a quick trailer for the movie.

If you don’t have kids or have never seen this classic animated film, you’re probably asking yourself , so how does all this kids stuff connect to social media? What’s worse you’re may even be ready to close the post and move on, but I challenge you to stay with me on this one.

Social media marketing must have a strategy for delivering value to your audience to be effective. The strategy should be designed around the topics and interests of that audience that may have nothing to do with what your company actually does. So it is your job in social media to determine the needs of your target audience (their interests) and fill that need with content.

For example: If your target audience is stay at home mom’s and you are sharing posts about your cleaning products without also sharing content about parenting, kid friendly events and funny kid stuff, you aren’t effectively seeing the needs of your audience, nor are you filling the needs they have.

Here are some tips for identifying your target audiences social media content needs:

1) Clearly define your social media audience. 

Be very specific here. Knowing what your target audience really looks like demographically and even geographically is important. Everyone is NOT your target market.

2) Investigate the websites and social media accounts they frequent.

Knowing the brands and social media accounts that likely have communities of your target audience will provide you details about your audience very easily.

3) Observe what content topics they tend to share, comment and like the most. (usually it’s 3-5 topics)

Put yourself in your target audiences shoes. If you were them, what would drive your interests when you logged into social media everyday? Watch your customers and prospects on other social media sites and with other brands to determine the topical drivers.

4) Stay clear of the larger brands for social media marketing and content topics.

Most major brands don’t do social media correctly, and they don’t really care to. They simply leverage the billions in branding and marketing they have already done over the years into the social space as an additional channel to pitch themselves. Everyone else has to do social media properly if they intend on getting any real results.

So, properly seeing and then filling the interest needs of your social media audience is the best and proven way to increase conversations and build relationships with them. The value derived from doing this effectively is that the relationships that result will be your best opportunities to realize increased revenue and ROI through social media marketing.

By Robert Caruso
@fondalo
http://fondalo.com
Founder/CEO – Bundle Post

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Social Media Purpose and Tactics – The Truth About Content and Engagement

Recently eMarketer released a new report that purported to cover Social Media Tactics and which work best. Though the report has a lot of valuable information, most is based on a highly misguided view of social media to begin with. In this post I am going to outline two of the points in the report and attempt to give you some straight talk about them that is intended to help you adjust strategy and be more effective.

Engagement:

Early in the report there was a statement that stood out to me as a huge red flag:

“the greatest percentage of respondents from both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) companies considered customer engagement to be the primary purpose of their social media marketing.”

With so many marketers seeing engagement as the primary purpose for their social media marketing, it is no wonder why the respondents answered the way they did on other segments in the report. Engagement should simply be a part of the process within social media marketing, not the goal or purpose for it. The goal or purpose should be a clearly defined objective that is different for every business, but that should include things like increased sales, revenue, customers, traffic, etc. Real results and measurable metrics that make the time-consuming activities in social media worth while.

Content Creation:

A huge misnomer in the report is the repeated theme of the content creation requirement. Yes creating content is required. Photo’s, graphics, articles, blog posts, etc are optimum drivers when focused on the interests of your audience and delivers real value to them. However, there are two issues that need need to be dissected about this segment:

1) Average Small/Medium Businesses – Content creation can be an effective tool for driving social media marketing results, but the hard facts are that most SMB’s do not have the staff, resources or budget required to constantly create fresh creative content. In fact in most cases establishing a budget for this purpose for most SMB’s would not result in anything close to a return on investment. Larger companies and bigger brands are able to leverage their previous branding, resources and huge budgets without the need for real measured results and this is highly skewed in this report.

Most Difficult Social Media Marketing Tactics

2) Content Sharing – Since the overwhelming majority of marketing professionals that responded, reported that the top tactics of “content creation” were also the most difficult to execute, this leaves many scratching their head for what to do in their social media marketing. Not once in this report was a reference to content curation, aggregation or sharing, let alone a strategy around sharing. The average business must have a content strategy that involves posting content that others have written; content that is interesting and relevant to their target audience, provides value to that audience and starts conversations.

Reports like these can be incredibly insightful for the largest brands out there, or those that work with large brands, the fact is that small and medium businesses just don’t have the resources to execute social media this way. Furthermore, many of the larger brands do social media marketing in direct contrast to how it should be done, therefore spending most of their efforts pitching their products, not responding to their audience and producing content that are more liken to commercials than content that adds value to their audience.

If you are not a large brand, don’t let this report discourage you. Use the information to establish an effective strategy of content sharing and do what level of content creation you are able to, focusing on delivering value to your audience and building real relationships. THESE are the tactics that actually get real results.

By Robert Caruso
@fondalo
http://fondalo.com
Founder/CEO – Bundle Post

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Multi-Select Content Options And Content Date Tagging Goes Live

As we finalize the next big Bundle Post Pro user feature this week, we decided to go ahead with another feature set enhancement release for all user levels. This new feature set delivers additional efficiencies to our overall social content management system, making content selection from feed channels faster and more accurate.

There are two main features in this system enhancement that we think you will really like.

1) Multi-Select Groups – Starting today, all Bundle Post user levels are able to select the most recent content in a feed channel in groups of 5, 10, 15 or 25 in a single click. When a group option is selected, the system automatically selects the corresponding number of most recent content from that feed channel and readies it to be moved to your export table. Users will still have the option to manually select the content they wish to share through their social media channels, as well as deselect any posts that are checked via the group selection option.

Our team has been begging for Multi-Select for some time and have been really excited about it during testing. Our testing realized an additional 10% time savings while managing content posts, but we think it may end up being even more than that.

2) Content Date Tagging – Included in this feature set release are content date tags which denote the date that each piece of content was aggregated into that feed channel by the Bundle Post system. The date stamp function on the feed channel content select window will be exceptionally helpful for niche feed channels that don’t have regular new content added.

For example, if a user has an RSS feed from a blog that only puts out new content once or twice a week, the date tag will make it easy to identify what content in that feed channel is new. Additionally, very niche Google Alert feed channels also presented a challenge to identify when there was new content. The new Content Date Tagging in Bundle Post makes this a breeze.

Both of the new features are now live in the Bundle Post System and we have activated them for all user levels. Though this is not the big Pro User feature release everyone is waiting to hear about, we think the efficiency advantages warranted an early activation. Pro users can expect the next major system upgrade anytime within the next two weeks as we take a big leap forward in social media management for our users.

By Robert Caruso
@fondalo
http://fondalo.com
Founder/CEO – Bundle Post

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Pro Users Get Content Sorting Randomization

As the Bundle Post user base and community has continued to grow, we have been fortunate to get an incredible amount of feedback from our very loyal users. Being Pro users of our Social Media Content Management platform ourselves, we also have a huge list of must have’s and wants that we require as the technology continues to grow and expand. The great thing about social media and software, is that they are continually changing and growing. Bundle Post is no exception.

Today Bundle Post, The Social Content Management System, is announcing a significant feature upgrade for our Pro users. We call it the Auto Sort function for the export table. This new function removes the time consuming task of mixing up feed channel and topical content sets manually via drag and drop. Now Pro users of the Bundle Post app can click the “Auto Sort” button at the top of the export table and randomize the scheduled posts on the screen to mix up content of various topics and from various feed channel sources. A huge jump forward for efficient social media management and content scheduling.

How the new Sort feature works:

When clicking the Auto Sort button on the export table in Bundle Post, the system will automatically mix the content you have merged with a schedule on the screen. The function uses an algorithm to quickly and randomly mix the posts via feed channel sources and reschedule the content automatically. Users are able to click the Auto Sort button as many times as they wish to achieve a desired mix of content from various feed channels, then fine tune by dragging and dropping posts further to move specific scheduled posts to a different date and time slot.

The new auto sort feature is one of the most requested features from Pro users and staff alike and we are thrilled to finally be able to deploy it system-wide. During testing internally, our team realized massive additional time savings over the drag and drop manual mixing previous required. The time we spent managing a 100 post export from Bundle Post was cut in half, which is no small benefit! We also found that multiple clicks of the sort button gets the best initial mix of content for smaller quantity exports, while larger exports with more feed channels used typically requires a single auto sort, followed by additional dragging and dropping for complete control.

Since Pro accounts are able to manage and export 100 posts at a time, instead of the 50 posts of Free and Expanded account types, the Auto Sort feature is exclusively being added to Pro user accounts. Free and Expanded users may upgrade to Pro for the additional volumes and feature enhancements announced today and in the near future!

Let us know if we can help you get started with the Bundle Post Social Content Management System to be more effective, efficient and profitable with your social media and content marketing efforts.

By Robert Caruso
@fondalo
http://fondalo.com
Founder/CEO – Bundle Post

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Social Media Requires Some Comedy

Do yourself a favor. Take a look at your social media marketing and ask yourself a few questions…

1) Am I funny/fun?

2) Am I able to laugh and make fun of myself/your brand?

3) Do I actually do it?

4) Do I occasionally share funny/fun content?

5) Do others get a laugh from my content strategy from time to time?

Some of the most effective content in the social graph is funny. Think about the content that is most shared on Facebook. It’s funny videos and graphics that connects with the audience. It makes the day better and becomes memorable and is shared.

This blog post (and video) is a result of a back injury Sunday and over exhausted from working 24/7 for 2 straight years.  This forced me to realize that I am not invincible and put me on my back for nearly the entire day. The good news is that the following video is the ultimate result. I hope you laugh as hard as we did… ;-)  

If your social media marketing isn’t incorporating fun, funny and tasteful hilarity every week, you are missing opportunity to connect in a great way with your audience and extend your reach through the shares that result. Be a bit silly, laugh a bit and invite your target audience to laugh with, or even at you too!

Remember to keep the content audience appropriate and refrain from obscenities and other content that may be considered offensive to anyone in your target audience.

Have some fun with it!

By Robert Caruso
@fondalo
http://fondalo.com
Founder/CEO – Bundle Post

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Reality Check: Daily Required Social Media Marketing Activity

I am frequently seeing articles explaining how to do social media marketing in 30 minutes or an hour each day and decided it was time to deliver a reality check. Unless you are a social media “guru”, “author”, “celebrity” or #fauxpert that has never done social media marketing outside of self promotion and has a huge social following, it’s time for a reality check. Any expectation that real results, revenue and return on investment for any SMB or marketer will be achieved by following such advice is foolish thinking.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but effective social media marketing is a detailed combination of technology integration, creativity and a whole lot of activity 24/7. It’s not working when you want, getting weekends off and forgetting to check your feeds, mentions and conversations for days at a time. We call that kind of activity and dedication social networking, not social media.

That’s great if you are an enthusiast that is not using social media channels for marketing, but then again I don’t write for enthusiasts. My articles are always focused on the average brand, SMB, individual marketer and social media agencies. It’s what I know and do, not a hobby or a subject matter I have become known for and use to generate book sales, speaking gigs or ad revenue from blog traffic.

Our goal is to change the message of the industry that is dominated by the folks outlined in the above paragraph into that of real effective use of social media by people who have and actually do it. It’s one thing to consult Starbucks or most other major brands on social media because you sold a ton of books about the subject. It’s another thing to actually create and execute a strategy for the majority that make up social media marketers like small and medium brands or individual marketers and get results. Heck, my 14-year-old daughter could consult Starbucks or most other major brands on their social media marketing. They do it wrong and don’t have to do it right. They have billions in media and marketing dollars that drive their brand on and offline.

While articles that tell you that you can get results with minimal time and effort in social media are incredibly appealing to the masses, I am hear to tell you that it takes work.

*Note – Social media agencies, consultants and coaches – keep reading. There are some reality checks for you as well. :-)

In an effort to both deliver a reality check as well as a real guide of activity, following is a list of SOME daily activities that are required to get results with any social media marketing program.

1) Content Posting: Every day you need to have relevant valuable content for your audience in your stream. Content that gets them to engage, like, comment and share. Not just posts about you or what you do, but information, news and articles your audience will find relevant.

How much content? Here is a basic list of posts per day on a few of the networks you are likely working with:

Twitter – 15-20
Facebook Personal – 4-8
Facebook Page – 3-6
LinkedIn Personal – 5-10
Groups – 1-4
G+ Personal – 10-15
G+ Brand Page – 2-5

Every industry, audience and brand is different, but this will give you a sense of some minimum levels that are required.

2) Content Creation: Like it or not, you have to not only share content relevant to your audience, you also have to create your own content. Blog posts, videos, images, infographics, etc. You can’t lead in an industry where you are not contributing to its message in new ways. This is not an occasional required activity, it’s every single week.

3) YOUR Content Posting: Once you have created content, you need to post it. The good news is that the more content you have created the more content you have available to post daily. I believe content you have created and posts that are about you and what you do should make up about 20% of what you post every day.

4) Content Sharing: Part of social media marketing is sharing other people’s social posts that you and your audience may find interesting and valuable. This serves two purposes;

1. It delivers additional value to your audience beyond what you found and posted.
2. It lets others know that you appreciate what they post and wanted to pass it along.

5) Real and Real-Time Posting: These posts are above posting and sharing content and are just about being real, human and approachable. These are often just text and consist of what you are thinking, the weather, where you are and what you are doing. Don’t forget that people connect with people in social media. Don’t be a logo or a robot. Nobody can like or build a relationship with either of those.

6) Community Growth: Every day you need to be growing your community of fans, followers and friends that are your target audience. If you build it they will come doesn’t work in social media. Though doing the above 5 activities every day will help you consistently grow your community, if you are using social media for marketing, that community size needs to increase. Therefore every day you need to be searching and finding your target audience on all of the social networks and connecting with them. Don’t wait for them to find you.

7) Community Outreach: Within your community you need to continually reach out and engage. That is no different from being at a live networking event. You start conversations and get to know them. You share their content and information with others and build a relationship. This must be done daily to be effective with social media marketing.

8) Response/Engage: The opposite of outreach is responding. When someone likes, shares, comments on your posts, acknowledge them, thank them and star a conversation. If someone mentions you in social media, respond.

I have a lot to say about this section, but in order to keep it a blog post and not an article I will say that timing matters. When someone mentions you or comments, they are there, online, right now. Waiting hours or days is missed opportunity and will never see any real results.

9) Follow Backs: When someone follows you on Twitter, Circles you on Google Plus or Friends you on Facebook or Linkedin, you need determine whether you want to reciprocate or accept. I recommend that this is done every single day. We do it twice per day ourselves.

*Tip – if you’re using social media for marketing, follow, friend and connect with those that are your target audience. If you are a restaurant in Tennessee, friending or following someone in the UK doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

10) Data/Statistics: You need to know what is working and what isn’t. Paying attention to your statistics, results, analytics and data on a daily basis is required. Knowing this information enables you to adjust the what’s and when’s of what you are doing and set realistic goals and targets. Not knowing means you are not getting anywhere.

11) Planning/Strategy: Every day you need to be planning and adjusting your strategy. Using what you learn to improve results in social media marketing is no different from anything else in business. Test, measure and adjust… DAILY.

More Reality Checks for Marketers:

So if you think that real, effective social media marketing can actually be accomplished in 30 minutes or an hour per day, I invite you to think again. This is why there are so many social media agencies out there and more popping up every single day. Not too many people have the time, knowledge and ability to execute all of these thins on a daily basis. If you can’t either or are not getting results, I suggest you speak with a qualified social media professional agency as well.

*If you are paying $99/mo for “social media” from some online company, you’re being robbed. It takes far too much time, tools and activities to really do social media marketing right that results in real business.

More Reality Checks for Social Media Agencies:

If your agency is teaching social media marketing instead of doing it, before taking some unsuspecting persons money, be sure they understand what it really takes. Stop taking money from people to teach them things they will never have the time, skill or experience to execute well. Anyway you slice it, it’s stealing…

*As a consultant or agency that teaches social media, the person you teach is rarely the CEO that paid for you. Be aware that the admin, intern or junior employee you train, will soon be in love with social media marketing just like you and will be starting their own agency when their employer pulls the plug. Stop creating competitors for yourself every six months, while making pennies for doing it. Do the hard work for clients and get them real results by delivering effective social media management that has value and recurring revenue.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more required in social media marketing like strategy, targeting, social selling, conversations and more. But true to form, I am not here to condemn or be hurtful. My only goal here is to increase the effectiveness of social media marketing in general and change the message to real results, not scores, followers, likes or speakers. Go do this!

By Robert Caruso
@fondalo
http://fondalo.com
Founder/CEO – Bundle Post

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Google Reader Shutting Down Leaving Huge Curation Gap For Marketers

Yesterday Google announced on the official Google Reader Blog that on July 1, 2013, they will retire Google Reader. Originally announced on the official Google Blog that same day, the excuse given was that usage over the years had declined and that the company is focusing its efforts on other products. As I read and researched the effects that this decision by Google has on social media content curation, I was compelled to pull a late night and write a post about it, in place of my originally scheduled blog post.

What does this mean for social media marketers that rely on Google Reader and other readers for social media content aggregation,  discovery and sharing in the social graph? It may be more of an initial inconvenience for some, as there are many other RSS readers on the market. Many other readers do use Google Reader for their syncing though and that will cause even more wide spread RSS reader issues. This change is also signaling that for social content aggregation and curation, scrolling through readers, scheduling content one by one manually or with browser plugins like Hootlet and Bufferapp, is definitely going away and frankly it must.

Efficient, reliable and effective means of content discovery, scheduling and management has to be done differently if social media marketing time spent is going to be able to realize profitable returns. Done properly, social media agencies,  marketers and brands must have enough interesting, relevant content in their streams every day and they know that. Content is where everything starts. It’s what creates conversations, develops thought leadership and influence, all of which are required for real results.

With old school content discovery and management methods going the way of the dumb cell phone, one must consider where social media content management is going. Where it has to go and what that looks like. Let me show you…

Though we rarely write about our own technology, this market changing event by Google compels us to do so this week.

Originally as an agency, we had the same issues you do. Searching, finding, editing, scheduling, hashtagging and posting enough relevant, valuable content for our clients target audience across all of the social network accounts they had. And doing that 7 days a week. Efficient? Not so much. Consistent? Near impossible. Effective? Let’s not go there. Profitable? We all know the answer to that. We knew that if we did not spend the hours every day on content management, all other social media management functions, results and metrics would fail. Something had to be done differently…

Bundle Post is the first Social Content Management system designed to solve the enormous time challenge of content management within social media. We designed it for us and had no intent on making a product. That changed quickly as the results increased on every client program, we saw huge efficiency gains and profitability climbed massively. We knew we were soon to become a social media software company.

So what is Bundle Post? The system efficiently handles 5 of the time-consuming back office functions related to social media content.

1) Aggregation and Curation – Attach Google Alert and RSS feeds where all content is ingested four times per day and saved as social media posts. You can view, edit and delete content you wish to use from every feed channel.

2) Legacy Content Management – My Social Content serves as repository folders of you and/or your clients legacy social content posts. Their website, videos, fanpage, interviews, photo’s etc. Legacy content can be merged with curated feed channel content and together be scheduled as individual posts for your newsfeeds.

3) Hashtags and Content Change – Hashtag folders for all campaigns can be created and house the keywords/phrases you want flagged for content changing in the text of all posts within Bundle Post. You designate the replacement hashtag or other text you want the system to replace. It automatically hashtags and/or changes the text of 100 social media posts in a single second.

4) Scheduling – Posting time schedules for all social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google Plus, Groups, etc can be saved in Bundle Post and merged with content from 1 and 2 above. Easily scheduling 100 posts in less than 30 minutes.

5) Follow Friday Mentions – All Follow Friday posts can be managed in Bundle Post. Each post can be customized, twitter account names added or removed as you wish. With Bundle Post Follow Friday mentions on Twitter take 45 seconds on Thursday night instead of all morning on Friday.

What Bundle Post Isn’t? We are not a social media dashboard like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck or the many others. We do not do anything current dashboards do and they can’t do what we do, due to our 19 claims in a Pending Patent filed over 24 months ago.

Bundle Post is a back-office social media content management system that currently integrates with Hootsuite. Your scheduled social media content comes out of Bundle Post and uploads directly into Hootsuite.

You use Bufferapp or Hootlet to schedule content? That’s great when you come across a single article you want to share and schedule. But why would you spend hours finding, scheduling, editing and hashtagging enough content everyday for all your social profiles?

In 30 minutes our users manage 5 days of currated content, your legacy blog posts and your own marketing content. Yes, that’s right, 30 minutes. Not auto-posted content. Content YOU select and control. Nothing leaves Bundle Post to your social media accounts without you allowing it to be sent. Now you have the time to build relationships, get ROI and even handle more clients, all more effectively with better net results.

One more thing… You can share Bundle Post export files with others in your brands community and they can upload them into their Hootsuite, making your scheduled content reach even bigger. Have we got you thinking yet?

Welcome to Bundle Post. Want a live demo? Hit the website and click to contact us or just message me @fondalo or us @BundlePost on Twitter and let’s change the effectiveness and efficiency of your social media marketing NOW!

By Robert Caruso
@fondalo
http://fondalo.com
Founder/CEO – Bundle Post

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Social Media Is NOT About Engagement

The definition of Engagement in social media marketing is sometimes a bit cloudy. I would describe social media engagement as listening, responding and communicating with your social community. It is being real, ever present and responsive to conversations taking place within your social presence. Engaging involves responding to activities that happen to you, like:

1) comments

2) mentions

3) shares

4) likes

Engagement also involves the proactive activities that solicit responses from others, like:

1) Posting relevant, interesting content

2) Liking other peoples content

3) Sharing or Retweeting other peoples content

I hear so frequently that social media is about Engaging, or Engagement. I also hear the phrase, content is king. Is it really? Is that what social media marketing is about? I disagree that social media is about content, engagement or even relationships. Effective social media marketing is not ABOUT those things, it simply USES those things to accomplish something. They are merely the methods to achieve a result.

“Content isn’t king, results are! #quote @fondalo” Social Media is about Results! Whether you are a big brand, entrepreneur or social media agency, using social media for marketing, you should be here for a specific reason or reasons. One of those reasons, and hopefully the main one, is to acheive some kind of return on the significant investment of time, money and resources that you are spending in the space.

Someone recently posted a comment in response to an article I shared. They said, “Remember… it’s not the amount of likes, but the engagement that makes a page worthwhile.”

My response was, I disagree. It’s BOTH. You can have all the awesome engagement in the world, but without a large enough, targeted community, you will never get an ROI. After all it is about results, not engagement that is important.

I challenge you to look at content, engagement and other components of your social media management in the proper perspective. I challenge you to spend less time on the methods of social media and focus more on achieving real revenue and results. I challenge you to shift your daily activity from doing social media to being effective, which is measured by real results.

Yes, you need to engage and you must always respond and build relationships. Just be sure you are engaging and building the relationships that have a chance to achieve results. These things combined is what I call social selling.

“When you EARN the relationship, you can ask for the sale. #socialselling #quote @fondalo”

For more on this topic, check out an interview   
I did recently with @Tweet4ok - Click Here

By Robert Caruso
@fondalo
http://fondalo.com
Founder/CEO – Bundle Post

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Blogging For Social Media Marketing – My Top 12 Tips

I am frequently asked about blogging and how to use it effectively for marketing within social media. I decided to put together a list of my top ten tips that is specifically designed for the individual marketer or small to medium business.

This list is not at all for the large brand, affiliate marketer, the social media author or speaker. Those specific groups are typically about numbers, driving less than targeted traffic, ego inflation and/or putting out volume over substance. Exactly what you should NOT be doing if you are serious about being effective with your blog within social media. If you want to measure REAL results that is –  You know things like sales, revenue and new customers. But I digress…

In no particular order, here are my top ten tips for using your blog effectively within your social media marketing strategy. I have broken them up into two sections – Strategy and Execution.

Blog Strategy:

1) Write for your audience – Too often brands and marketers forget who their target audience is. Write for your target audience, not for traffic. Deliver value and relevance in your content, just like a proper content strategy within your social marketing strategy. Write content that solves their biggest problems, answers their questions and/or helps them improve.

2) Stay away from time sensitive writing – New is great and often shiny, but does it attract your target audience? Writing content about something new in your industry or an event that is happening can destroy the long-term validity of the content. It’s ok to include some time/event based posts, but try to write content that has value for your audience, that can be found via search and/or shared via your social media efforts over a long period of time – i.e. relevant, Legacy content.

3) Be concise – Remember that a blog post is NOT a magazine article. People have very short attention spans and keeping your blog posts short, to the point and without all the fluff is important. Give your readers clear points to absorb along with a title that states exactly what they can expect from your piece.

4) Have personality – Be real and approachable with your posts. Don’t be afraid to put your personality into your articles or even be a little controversial at times.

5) Write yourself – For MOST marketers or SMB’s doing your own writing is going to get the best results. Having the benefit of your voice consistently across your content is extremely helpful for your readers.

For some that lack writing skills or the time and resources necessary to blog, outsourcing the function to a professional may be required. Be sure that the professional you select to write for your blog can follow your strategy  and capture your voice (tone and personality) accurately.

Blog Execution:

6) Consistency – Just as with your regular social media marketing content posting, consistency with blog posts matters. You must have a consistent flow of relevant, valuable blog posts on your blog to build and retain an audience. Occasional posts will not be effective, so be consistent every week. I try to write two new blog posts per week.

7) Comments – Also like your social media marketing, responding to comments on your blog is important. Respond always and do it quickly after a comment is posted.

8) Use drafts – Whenever I think of a new blog post idea, I start a new posts in WordPress and save it as a draft. I add notes and bullet points for what I want to do with the post and save it. This way I always have some 30 blog posts started and only need to select one to finish whenever I need to write.

9) Stay ahead – Keep ahead with completed posts in the queue

10 SEO – When writing a blog post, you want to not only follow the strategy items we have listed above, but you also want to consider the long-term search engine optimization of your posts. Including images, tags and keywords in your posts is highly important for being found on search engines.

For the average brand and marketer, there are three main points to consider here:

a) Always include a graphic that depicts the content. This is important when readers share the content on social networks, but also for SEO. Be sure the name the image file with words contained in the title and body of your post and also complete a description that does the same.

b) Always include tags of the keywords and phrases appropriate for the post.

c) Be sure the main keywords of your post are included in the title, the body of the post as well as in tags.

11) Be realistic – Be realistic about what you can really do. Don’t set editorial calendar expectations too high for yourself so that you can’t complete them. Don’t expect that you will get 20,000 hits a day when you are just starting out. Be consistent, even if that is only one or two blog posts per week. Commit to the realistic expectation and stick to it.

12) Be Social – Without integrating your blog into an effective social media marketing strategy, it is highly unlikely you will ever get much traction with your blog. You need to have a targeted social community established that is highly engaged in order to best take advantage of a blog. Here are two things to consider:

a) When you post a new blog, share it multiple times that day in the social graph.

b) Keep a list of your blog posts and share them at lest once a week/month.

A blog is an extension of your brand, your website, your overall web presence and more importantly your social media marketing. Understanding the best way to leverage and integrate it properly across all of them will help you begin see increased results.

By Robert Caruso
@fondalo
http://fondalo.com
Founder/CEO – Bundle Post

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How To Use Your Legacy Social Media Content To Get Results

Assuming that you have a content strategy that delivers a consistent stream of relevant, valuable and interesting content to your target audience that is NOT about you or what you do through curation, you may need to take a closer look at YOUR content. Your legacy social content is an important additional component to your content posting mix. I find that marketers failing to effectively use their own content is one of the biggest overlooked opportunities within social media marketing. You need to know what you have available and mix it into your streams along with your other content, past as well as new.

Simply defined, “Your Social Content” is anything found on the web about your company that you can link to and/or share in the social graph.

A Few Examples Of Your Social Content Include:

1) Your website home page.

2) All of your other pages on your website.

3) Your Facebook page.

4) Each of the specific photo’s on your Facebook fanpage.

5) Your YouTube channel.

6) Specific videos on your YouTube channel.

7) Past articles you or your brand were mentioned in.

8) Your past blog posts that are timeless and still relevant to your audience.

The Role Of “Your Social Content”:

Your community is constantly growing, with new followers and likes happening all the time. Many long-time connections may have never even seen the original content when it was new or are not aware of what you do to begin with. Therefore, making use of past, timeless content in your streams is extremely important for your overall social selling effectiveness.

Utilizing enough of your social content will help with branding, click-throughs, and more. Be careful not to over do it though. Somewhere around 20-30% should be the maximum percentage of your content in your streams. That should be made up of new and archived content about you.

Know What You Have Available To Use:

Tracking the social content you have available to you to share about your brand can be a huge challenge. We experienced this quite frequently when we were a social media agency. Couple that challenge with the time to ensure you are including it as well as simply remembering to do post legacy content and the challenge gets even bigger. Those recurring struggles are a few of the reasons that led to the development of our Bundle Post software.

A repository of your social content in a central location that can easily and quickly be inserted in with the rest of your content posts is highly important. Spreadsheets and Word documents are great, but very cumbersome to manage, especially with multiple team members as with agencies. Relying on memories to include content and tracking what you have available needs to be efficient and effective for best results.

Make content aggregation, as well as repository posting of your legacy social content a priority to see new gains in your social media marketing efforts.

By Robert Caruso
@fondalo
http://fondalo.com
Founder/CEO – Bundle Post

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