Social Media Content Curation, Marketing Messages and Results

In business, marketing and social media, time is money and results are important. With so many tools to choose from, it can be difficult to know where to spend time, effort and money in order to realize real, measurable results.

Knowing that 75% of Social Media Marketers Want Better Tools and 88% Better Results [Report] it is no surprise that many are looking to improve their efficiencies and reallocate their time management toward engagement activities. Content curation, creation, evergreen content sharing, hashtagging and status update scheduling are crucial components to this time reallocation. However, being forced to use a myriad of readers, browser plugins and other clunky tools require far too many hours and resources in an efficient work flow to realize the best results.

In fact, more time is spent managing these required tasks than is spent in conversations and relationship building, creating a significant problem for marketers. Time and content management are in constant challenge with efficiency and strategy, forcing many to invest time for required back office tasks instead of putting resources toward the things that do achieve social media results.

What If You Had 10 More Hours Per Week?

What if there was a better way to manage curated and marketing content in social media, that enabled you to be more efficient, strategic and effective? What if you could spend less time on the required activities and more time engaging, building relationships and getting results?

You Can…

It never ceases to amaze us when someone sees BundlePost in action for the first time. Our completely unique approach to social content management always gets the “Ah ha” moment and response as the new user realizes the incredible impact the technology has on their social media management.

If you’re tired of DOING social media marketing and want to finally start being strategic, effective and get real results, let us show you BundlePost in action. Tweet us to schedule a live demo today.

Hey @BundlePost I’d love to see your Social Content Management System in action!

 

Adjusting Social Media Inputs To Realize Desired Output

There are several things to be said about effective social media marketing. One of them is that social media is not static. If you’re being effective with a social media program it is often because you are doing many things right, not the least of which is continually making adjustments.

The famous quote from Albert Einstein says it best – “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” There’s not many other places that this phrase holds more true, than with social media marketing.

If you are not getting real results with your social media marketing, there is only one reason. What you are doing in one or many areas isn’t correct. Lack of results in this space isn’t because social media doesn’t work, it’s simply due to missing activity, improper strategy or most importantly improper activity that is preventing your desired results.

You need to ask yourself a simple, but extremely important question and answer it honestly. Not only do you need to do this, but you also need to be prepared for the answer you uncover.

Are you getting the results you expected from your social media marketing efforts?

If you are able to be honest with this question and accept the real answer, then you need to weigh the options.

Answer = No

If you have answered this all important question honestly as a resounding NO, then you need to make some adjustments to what you are doing. But you can’t make adjustments for adjustments sake. You need to know what you don’t know and that requires information.

There are not too many other marketing disciplines that have a bigger learning curve than social media. There are so many best practices, tools, mistakes and resources required, most professionals take years to get up to speed. What’s more? Things in social media change on a daily basis, making the learning curve even more challenging.

Ask yourself these questions:

1) Do you know what you don’t know about social media marketing?

2) Do you have the time and ability to learn what you don’t know and execute it well enough to get results?

3) Are you spending more time learning about social media, then you are executing it effectively?

4) What 4 things are you currently doing in your social media program that are alienating your audience and results?

5) Do you have a detailed strategy and is it the correct strategy?

Hard questions aren’t they? Doing social media marketing is easy, getting real results is not. You may need to make some adjustments. What are your options?

Learn – There are many books, consultants and courses out there that teach social media marketing. I suggest doing a lot of research because many are from people who have never really achieved social media success, other than promoting their celebrity, books or training.

Invest – One option is to hire a social media professional or agency to handle it for you. Find one that has the experience and expertise to execute your social media management well. Tip – If someone tells you they can do that for $500/mo or less, run. It takes far more than that to make social effective.

Refocus – Another option is to seriously consider whether your brand, product or niche can be effective using social media and/or whether you can afford to invest the time and money required to make it a success. I personally believe almost every single market can be effective with social, but that only depends on having the proper knowledge, experience and resources.

Answer = Yes

If you answered YES to getting the results you expected, you’re not even close to finished. Fine tuning and refining what you’re doing will uncover new opportunities to increase your current results. At this stage of your social media efforts, discovering which components of your strategy and tactics are the ones that are contributing most to your results need to be accurately identified and leveraged.

Ask yourself these questions:

1) Do you know the tactics, strategies, topics and content that is getting the best results?

2) Do you know which of these are not getting the best results?

3) What activities need to be adjusted upward to increase the results you are getting and how much of an increase of these activities is scalable?

4) Does removing less effective activities impact your overall results positively?

5) What missing components could be added to what is working well to increase your net results.

Now let me be very clear. When I say results, I am referring to REAL results. Things like traffic, leads, walk-ins, sales and revenue. I am not referring to soft results like engagement, likes, followers or branding. While these are also important metrics to track, they are not the measurement of whether your social media is actually getting results or not.

There are millions of marketers, brands and people spending an exorbitant amount of time attempting to execute social media marketing. At the end of the day, just like any other sales or marketing efforts, there needs to be a return that can be measured against the input of time, resources and money. Failure to understand this will doom your social media marketing to activity, low optimal output and little meaningful results.

 

100% Year Over Year Sales Growth Exclusively Through Social Media – You Can Too!

Is it possible for a small startup company with little funding to succeed exclusively through social media marketing?

Can social media really achieve ROI (return on investment) no matter how crowded their industry space is?

The question of ROI, huge sales and revenue growth for an organization built exclusively on social media marketing as its one and only marketing channel is constantly a topic of discussion online. Many are now writing articles that suggest a change of focus toward less measurable things like branding, exposure or some other old school marketing lingo that simply replaces real results with a lot of flashy terminology.

The answer is a definitive YES!  You can get ROI and more than 100% sales and revenue growth each year. How do we know? We’ve done it. We would like to make it official.

Today Bundle Post is announcing that it has achieved over 100% sales, revenue and user base growth in less than 12 months!

Do you think we are a little excited? Of course we are. shouldn’t we be? We have not even done a single social or online ad whatsoever.

You can do this too!

So the question becomes, how does a social media technology startup that is self-funded and in one of the most crowded spaces online compete with companies that have millions in venture funding?

Below you will find six keys to an effective social media program. We also include links to more detail on specific items within each section. So let’s take a peek under the hood…

1) Start Early –

You can’t wait to start your social media marketing when you have your site, product or ducks all nicely in a row. You need to have built a community well before you launch your actual product or service if you are going to be effective launching it in social media. So you have to start early and build a community that knows you BEFORE you are ready to go to market.

Already launched, now what?

If you have already launched your company or service, you’ve GOT to work over time. Growing your community size is every bit important as anything else in social media. This has to be a constant and active part of what you are doing.

WHY?

You have to have a large enough audience to make social media effective. Think of radio or TV advertising. Although it is mass market, direct advertising and anything but social, it’s about the numbers. Social media marketing is about the numbers too, but not only the numbers. It’s also social. You must find your target audience and connect with them. In essence you need to take an active role in growing your audience on a daily basis and not just building your profiles and hoping they will come.

But this alone doesn’t make social media effective. It’s just a single spoke in the wheel.

2) Stay Consistent – In social media, there is nothing more important than consistency. Just like in sports, if a team is really good at something, but not consistently, they struggle to win. You need to be consistent will all of your social media components if you expect to see results.

Here are a few things to be consistent at:

• Selfless Value – Share enough relevant, valuable content every day, all day that is interesting to your target audience.
• Be Grateful – Thank people who share your posts. Do it always and do it quickly.

3) Strategy – You need to know exactly where you are going and how you indeed on getting there. Get this wrong and you’ll be in trouble. You need to get it right and stick to it! In social, we call that strategy.

Know these 5 things:

• What is the specific and realistic objective of your social media program.
• Who exactly are you trying to reach. (no time to be general. Think geographic, psychographic and demographic)
• What are they interested in? (that’s what you need to post content about)
• What brands/people have already built a following of your intended audience? (Follow their following)
• How often do I plan to proactively engage with my intended audience DAILY?

4) Always Respond –

One of the biggest mistakes we see being made in social media is slow or no response from accounts. When you are mentioned, tagged or your posts are shared, you not only need to respond, but you need to do it rapidly. When someone engages with your brand or content you posted, they are there, right at that moment. Missing the opportunity to have a conversation is limited by the length of time you take to respond.

Ignoring connections that engage with your brand is a death sentence. Over time, they stop. Do this at your own peril.

5) Be Known For Something –

You don’t just DO social media and magically get results. Having an effective social media program involves really understanding your audience, the topics that interest them and the challenges they have that you help with. If you truly understand these things about your potential and current customers, you will know the topics you need to be known for posting about. This is called “thought leadership” in social media.

Beyond subject matters, be known for your engagement, gratitude and response. Better yet, follow our lead and also be known for your Customer Support. We are constantly and publicly acknowledged for our support response, willingness to help and hands on approach. Mimic this and make it not only a priority, but part of your company culture. You will thank me later.

6) Earn Relationships –

Before you start posting your marketing stuff in your feeds, be sure you have real, selfless value in them. A small percentage of what you post on a daily basis should be about you and what you do. The largest number of posts should be what we discussed in number 2 above. Curate content that is valuable to your audience and earn the right to pitch your wares by first doing that and responding to the conversations that result.

Building relationships is a process. Providing selfless value is the method. ~ 

Does this seem like a lot? Well, it is. There’s an enormous amount involved in running an effective social media marketing program. Your social media management, tools and workflow are the essential components that must work together effortlessly. For us and many other social media marketers, brands and agencies, Bundle Post is the glue that makes them all converge.

If you’d like a live demo of Bundle Post in action and a one on one social media marketing consultation, hit us up on Twitter @BundlePost

The Two Biggest Challenges Faced By Social Media Marketers [SURVEY REPORT]

As we continue our series from the survey we conducted on social media marketing, the question of overall challenges is the focus. We asked hundreds of social media marketers, agencies and brands what are the two biggest challenges they face with their social media marketing efforts. We were somewhat surprised by the top two answers and think you may be as well.

We asked what are: “The two biggest challenges I face with my overall social media marketing is?”

 

A total of 36.5% of respondents said that Engagement and Sales/Revenue were the two biggest challenges they face with their social media marketing. We found it very interesting that some of the very things that impact both of these key result areas the most were ranked much lower. The key areas that ranked lower were Time, Relationships, Clicks, Content Curation and General Results.

Time 13.68% : Not too surprising is ranked number three is the challenge of time. We all know that social media marketing is very time and human intensive, but where you’re spending time or where you aren’t spending it, is the important part. We have found that most social media marketers spend most of their time on back office functions, not the front office functions that actually result in the two biggest challenges of Engagement and Sales/Revenue.

If your time is spent managing, scheduling, editing and hashtagging curated and marketing posts, you have less time to have conversations, build relationships and engage. These are the things that result in sales and revenue, therefore adjusting where you spend time by using the proper tools, such as Bundle Post is imperative if you wish to impact the Engagement and Revenue of your social media management.

Clicks/Traffic 12.82% :  Now this one is often a challenge to figure out for some. There are several distinct reasons or combination of reasons for this to be a challenge for a social media marketer. Sometimes it is just one of the reasons listed below, but more often than not, it is a combination of several that result in little click-through traffic coming from marketing efforts. Here are a FEW reasons why this tends to occur and questions you should ask yourself.

1. Lack of -or- Improper Strategy – Do you truly know who your audience is and what they’re interested in?
2. Lack of Topical Thought Leadership – Are you posting topical content that drives your audiences interest or are you mainly retweeting or sharing content others are posting?
3. Lack of Consistency or Volume – Are you scheduling social media posts everyday, all day at the appropriate levels, or are you sporadic, inconsistent or not doing it at levels that are even being noticed?
4. Lack of Value – Do your posts provide selfless, relevant value to your target audience on a consistent basis?
5. Not Enough Marketing – Are you sharing 10% to 20% of your posts that market you, your company, products or services, or are you rarely even mentioning your online properties, content and landing pages?
6. Too Much Marketing – Are you posting primarily about you, your company, products or services?

These are some of the reasons that none of your friends and followers are clicking through to your website, content or offer pages. Understanding that you have to first provide value, get into conversations and build relationships in order to get traffic and clicks is extremely important. Simple conversations create interest that can get a connection to have more interest in you or your brand. Many times those conversations cause a connection to even read your bio and click to your site contained within your profile. Get into conversations with your target audience about anything THEY are interested in and see what happens to your clicks and traffic.

General Results 5.13% : We think that Engagement and Sales/Revenue would fall under this category as well, but we did not want to assume and add it to the top two challenge numbers. We also believe that Clicks/Traffic and Relationships are also under this heading, therefore we will leave this challenge as it is.

Relationships 4.7% : Relationships in social media are created through conversations, just like in the real world. Often times the reason relationships are not being forged is due to too few conversations with the proper people. If you are finding that relationships are one of your big challenges, I suggest that you take a look at these three areas:

1. Your Target Audience – One big mistake people make is that they build communities that are not their target audience. Often the like, friends and followers many marketers attract are that of their peers and competitors, not their prospective customers. Be sure you know who you are trying to reach and connect with them, not your peers.
2. Your Content Strategy – Another error made on the relationship front is content strategy, especially when you are missing on number one above. If you have not clearly defined who you are trying to reach, you are definitely going to be off on the types of content you are curating and creating for your streams.
3. Where you Spend Time – Be sure you have the proper tools and processes in place. If you’re spending time everyday curating content and not engaging with your target audience, you will be hard pressed to establish relationships easily.

Follow this formula – “Content leads to conversation, conversations build relationships and relationships result in ROI.” – Get each step down properly and you will see a massive improvement on the quantity and quality of relationships you develop within the social graph.

Content Curation 3% : The biggest shock to us was Content Curation falling to one of the lowest challenges facing the hundreds of social media agencies, brands and marketers that answered our survey. Why? Well if people truly understood this challenge and had it under control and managed properly, we would not see Engagement and Sales/Revenue as the top two challenges. Proper content curation, with the proper topics/strategy, at the appropriate volumes will spark engagement, sharing and conversations. It’s where everything starts.

Adding content creation, proper levels of marketing your products and services, along with the all important strategy work is imperative to achieving social media marketing sales, revenue and ROI. All of this must be approached at the selfless value and relationship level if you’re going to be successful.

Here are the previous Survey posts in this series:

The Top Social Media Dashboards And Tools Marketers Use [SURVEY REPORT]

The Importance And Challenges Of Social Media Content Curation [SURVEY REPORT]

Where Social Media Brands, Marketers And Agencies Spend Their Time [REPORT]

 

We Want To Share Your Blog Content, RSS and Expand Your Reach

Today Bundle Post begins an expansion from our unique social media content management, curation and scheduling roots, to the addition of content marketing, traffic building and extending reach for blogs and content creators. Today we are announcing the Bundle Post RSS Project that has already begun databasing, categorizing and indexing RSS feeds across the web.

Where’s yours?

From the beginning, the aim of Bundle Post was to make social media marketing and curation far more efficient and effective for brands, agencies and marketers. As we have continued to grow and expand our capabilities in this area, we have always realized that tackling the blog, traffic and content marketing issues were also connected digital marketing pains that bloggers, brands and marketers experience.

Starting over two years ago, we evaluated social media and content marketing challenges together and very clear and connected obstacles stood out like a sore thumb. The question of “How do I get more blog traffic?” -or- “How do I increase traffic to my content?” always comes up.

The Problems:

1) Traffic – Many struggle to get their blog and content found on search engines, that as you know prefer to display most popular content, instead of the most recent and relevant content on a topic, YOURS. Therefore you are left to hire or become expert in SEO and/or buy Search and Social Media Ads to generate traffic. Brands and content creators need a better way to have their content discovered and increase traffic to that content in new, creative and measurable ways.

2) “Tribes” – So you thought tribes might be the answer, only to realize that the mythical 6 million, trillion reach you now have with all those “celebrities” in your tribe isn’t actually resulting in anymore traffic or reach for your blog. You faithfully share the other people’s content (which may or may not be valuable to your audience or inline with your social media content strategy) only to realize that your “tribe-mates” are rarely logging in, let alone sharing your posts. You invest further time, effort and investigation reveals that the ones who actually are sharing your content aren’t really influential at all. In fact, most of their huge followings could care less about anything they share on social media and you’re left worse off then you started.

3) Monitoring – Adding to the obstacles facing bloggers and content marketers being able to effectively monitor the open web where you or your brand is being mentioned. We’ve all tried Google Alerts for this and have become painfully aware that you find more mentions from people within social media who tell you about your brand mention on a blog post, then you ever discover through Alerts. Brands and marketers need a way discover, monitor and engage with content mentions across the web that occur outside of the social graph.

We could go on and on, right?

Innovative Vision:

Bundle Post is beginning phase one of our RSS and content index project that enables site owners to add their RSS feed into our index. During this phase we will collect and database over 250,000 RSS feeds in less than 90 days, then grow that number exponentially on an ongoing basis.

From there feed owners will be allowed to validate/prove ownership of one or more RSS feeds and control the RSS description, category, keywords, tags and more in order to optimize a feed related to its content. As the project continues over the course of 2014, the Bundle Post RSS project will be releasing multiple tools for blog owners and Bundle Post users, as well as new Feed Content Optimization (FCO) and “stream” opportunities that will deliver powerful traffic, analytics and content marketing capabilities never before seen online.

Our goal with the RSS project is to improve content discovery and curation for social media marketers in killer new ways and at the same time provide bloggers and content marketers new innovative solutions for expanding their content reach both in and outside of the social graph. This is far more than a RSS directory, so jump on the train and add your RSS feed into the Bundle Post index and we’ll be in touch soon to help you validate your blog ownership in phases two and three with many more big things to come…

This is what they call BIG DATA…

4 Reasons Why You Need To Get To Revenue With Social Media Marketing

I speak to a lot of people in this business on a daily basis. Whether it is online, in the social graph, on the phone, video chat or in person, many businesses using social media have a hard time getting to revenue. You know cash, money, moolah. Making any kind of revenue from their efforts, regardless of whether it is profitable or not seems to be a missed focus that means everything for your business.

Let me clear here, whether you’re a social media agency, a start-up, an author, a small brand or anyone else using social media for marketing, you need to just get to revenue. There is no more important reason for spending the time, effort and resources in ANY medium if you don’t generate revenue. Though branding, relationships and a host of other reasons are valid for maintaining a social presence, none of them trump revenue.

If you are not yet seeing revenue from your efforts or are not focusing on revenue FROM your social media management, you are missing out on four important points:

1) Revenue tells you what’s working

If what you are doing in your social media marketing is actually working, it will generate sales, clients and revenue. If it is not working properly, you will be focusing your time on watching metrics of clicks, follower counts and engagement. All of these are important, but only when they are achieving the net results of revenue.

2) Revenue gives you resources

If you are generating revenue, you are gaining resources. When you are gaining resources you have more options to expand what is working, add valuable tools and get more support from others within the organization. Everyone wants to be involved with something getting results. Nobody wants to be associated with something that is failing or only sucking resources.

3) Revenue gives you momentum

Along with additional resources, obtaining revenue with your social media marketing builds momentum, both internally and externally. When customers start buying, they also start talking about it. This adds to the revenue momentum.

4) Revenue gives you the best measurement of real results

Nothing better than revenue will confirm real results. By getting to revenue with your social media marketing quickly, it will confirm you have the right message, target audience and strategy.

So those are just four of the reasons you really need to get to revenue with your social media marketing right now! HOW to get to revenue is a very different question that has so many variables which include industry, audience and products. Since these are totally different for every single person and company using social media for marketing, it is nearly impossible to give a company specific plan of action in a blog post.

Here are a few points and a process that may focus your efforts in the direction you need to go.

Social Media Content And The Social Selling Process [INFOGRAPHIC]

The Social Selling Process

1) Provide Selfless Value – in the content you create and curate. Earn the right to pitch your products and services by being selfless.

2) Be Consistent – with your content posting, engagement and responses.

3) Target Audience – Be sure you know your target audience and what they are interested in.

4) The Right Relationships – Focus your time, effort and conversations on your target audience, not with your peers.

Social Media – Your Time Percentage Should Equate To Result Percentage

Ask yourself a few questions:

Where are you spending your time in the social graph?

What social networks get what percentage of your time and effort?

What network do your target audience spend most of their time on?

Which social network has the highest quantity and concentration of your target audience?

If you can’t answer these questions, you’re probably not being as effective with your social media marketing as you could or should be.

When a marketer or agency that is newer to social media asks me questions like, should we be on Pinterest, or should we have a brand page on Google Plus, I know right away they have a problem. You need to know where your audience spends most of their time when on social media and more importantly which social network gets the best results for your effort and time spent.

Once you know these answers, be sure your time and effort reflects the numbers. In other words, spend time on the social networks that get you the best and most results. Spend less time on the social networks that get the least or slowest results.

You’d think this would be common sense, right? Unfortunately it isn’t. I can’t tell you how many times a social media professional or marketer tells me about one of the newer or really niche social networks they love and that they spend most of their time on. My only question to them is this. How much revenue have you driven on that social network, rather than the main networks that have the highest concentration of your target market?  Sadly, one of two things usually happens:

1) They disappear and end the conversation. (BTW – this happened yesterday with someone I know personally when discussing their blog and the traffic they drive because they write about the newest shiny things and how traffic is so important. Once I asked them about revenue, poof!) Is it really that hard to understand? If you’re spending a ton of time doing something for your business it needs to get returns. Ignorance is only bliss if you won the lottery. In business you can’t ignore the obvious.

2) They justify and make excuses. Ya, but I really like it. Well, I am here to have fun too. It’s not about making money for me. These are the other responses I hear. Really?  You’re a social media marketing consultant, agency, marketer or ninja and it’s not about making money? Please stop consulting or teaching social media to anyone else!!!

Example?

Our revenues and new Bundle Post users come as a result of the following:

50% Twitter – 40% Facebook – 10% Linkedin/G+/Etc.

We spend our time and efforts in exactly these percentages, on these platforms.

For those of you that have read my stuff for a while, you know that my only goal is to help you get real results from your social media marketing. I write only about what I do that gets results, not theory or hype about the industry, new shiny distractions, etc. Don’t take any of this personally, just use it to be better.

I leave you with a mission:

Know the numbers, where your audience is and start getting real about what you are doing and where. Putting your head in the sand isn’t going to help get you results and ROI.