Here is a list of the best social media marketing articles of this week!

#1 Outsourcing Social Media – Should You Do It? The Pros & Cons by Amanda Day

In our recent social media survey, we found that 43% of small businesses spend 6 hours per week or more on social media. That’s precious time for a small marketing team (or army of one)! Given the investment of time required, and the need for someone with expertise, many companies opt to outsource their social media marketing to a consulting agency or individual. In this post, we examine the pros and cons to hiring a consultant vs. keeping your social media marketing in-house, and provide tips for making the right choice for your business.

#2 8 Businesses That Nail Social Media Brand Consistency by Desmond Wong

With all of the social media platforms available to us, however, it also becomes more and more difficult to present a cohesive message across all the channels. One thing that we’ve noticed — and struggled with ourselves — is that the experience from one social network to another can feel really disjointed. And I’m sure that’s not the brand experience most marketers hope and dream for their fans and followers.

#3  When Small Businesses Shouldn’t Do Social Media by Stephanie Schwab

As someone who is deeply entrenched in, and very much in love with, social media, it’s very hard to say “Don’t do social media.” But honestly – more and more, I find myself telling some of these entrepreneurs and business owners that social media may not be the most important thing for them to do (at the moment they’re asking me).  So how can a small business know when to not do social media, or which types of social media to use if they’re a very small or very new business?  For most, it comes down to a matter of time, money and priorities.

#4 10 Women That Rock Our Social Media World! by Frederic Gonzalo

These ladies share a common trait: they are passionate, experts in their respective field and share generously their knowledge through blogs, tweets, webinars and/or other social media outlets. I learn a great deal hearing or reading them, so if you don’t know them or don’t follow them, get your notepad ready! Here they are:

#5 16 Ways Businesses Are Using Twitter Vine by Kristi Hines

Vine is a new mobile app that allows you to capture life from your mobile device in short, six-second looping videos.  You can share these short videos with your Twitter followers and Facebook friends.  Think of it as Instagram, except with videos instead of pictures. In today’s post, I’ll show you some creative uses of Vine for business.

#6 Addressing the Addiction and Cost of Social Media by Sam Fiorella

Have you ever found yourself asking, “Where did the last hour go?” when connecting with friends or colleagues in social networks? Social media is like a drug; just a little taste and we can’t help but want more. Social networks are the drug dealers; they facilitate our addiction to this gateway drug with one-click access to our social graph and a multitude of other sites and apps.

#7 If you don’t monitor social media, you might as well not use it by Catriona Pollard

Like all the major manufacturers, Ford has a “book a test drive” feature on its website and on the face of it, it’s a very clever marketing tactic. Ford is fulfilling the potential buyer’s needs without them having to even pick up the phone or walk into a dealership to get service.

#8 Facebook Is Now The Best Ad Targeting Platform Around by Ben Harper

Facebook advertising’s precise interests and social profile targeting features have always had a slight edge on Google in terms of knowing about the users targeted, but now this can officially be combined with desire to purchase and real world data I’d expect to see the balance of power in the online advertising world begin to gradually shift.

#9 5 reasons you should be in social media, even if the boss says “no” by Mark Schaefer

Boss driving you crazy? Having a hard time selling the idea that you need to be on the social web? I know first-hand that there are still many naysayers out there who don’t understand why they need to have a social media presence. Here are five reasons that should convince even the last hold-out to get on board …

#10 Survey Says: Nearly 4 in 10 Women Have Decreased or Stopped Using Social Media by Cynthia Boris

A new survey from Weber Shandwick says it could be so. They questioned 2,000 North American women and found this startling fact: Nearly four in 10 North American women (38 percent) have decreased or stopped their usage of one or more social networks during the past six months.

I hope you like this week’s top social media marketing articles. Stay tuned for next week’s articles!

Here are the most popular content marketing articles of this week in case you missed them!

#1 Content Marketing Nirvana by Andrew Delamarter

Content marketing efforts are typically held to ROI metrics – this is “weaponized content” that is supposed to generate traffic, sales, or engagement – so let’s begin with the ends in mind and map out the best possible content marketing framework. It may not be reachable, you may not be able execute every element, but at least you know what to shoot for. So let’s get started on defining our own personal content marketing perfect state.

#2 How to Develop a Content Marketing Strategy with Joe Pulizzi by Trent Dyrsmid

Content marketing is all the rage these days, but have you given thought to developing a strategy for your content?  Do you know how to create content that your audience will find valuable enough to share?  Do you know how to measure what is working with your content marketing?

#3 Seven Content Marketing Tips From Top Chefs [Infodoodle] by Veronica Maria Jarski

After watching a marathon of Food Network programs, I realized that much of the advice from top chefs regarding fab cooking is the same type of advice for content creators.

Inspired by the chefs who want to serve fresh, attractive food, I drew an infodoodle for marketers wanting to serve refreshing, flavorful content to their customers.

#4 How to Approach the Creation of Viral Marketing Content by Hartley Brody

I have a secret for you. Viral videos don’t always spread like you might think. When people imagine creating a viral video, they expect that everyone who watches it will pass it on to at least one other friend, who will then pass it on to at least one more friend, etc.

#5 Hunting Hippos: Winning Approval from the C-Level for Content Marketing by Jonathan Crossfield

Unless a new activity is directly related to a particular business challenge, it is viewed as a diversion. If the current climate is to reduce costs, outline how you’ll support your social media strategy. If customer acquisition numbers are causing boardroom stress, introduce plans for an email program to prospective clients.

#6 Dramatically Raise the Value of Any Piece of Content with These 27 Tactics by Ken Lyons

If you really want to dominate your niche and distance yourself from your competitors, you have to take the wheel of the “awesome content” bus, be a leader and set precedent for your industry. And by implementing the following 27 tactics (which range from keyword targeting to link analysis to content usability tips), you will dramatically improve the value of your content for readers, users, customers and engines as well and absolutely own your vertical.

#7 The Nine Ingredients That Make Great Content by Zach Bulygo

If you write original content, search engines will help your site get more exposure. For instance, Google has made it plain that they do not like and will penalize sites with duplicate content. Put another way, Google wants to reward high quality sites that contain original content.

#8 Technical Hacks for Content Marketing by Justin Briggs

Creating the kind of content we all strive for requires copywriters,  photographers, creative directors, graphic designers, videographers, statisticians, marketer researchers, back-end programmers or front-end programers. Creating great content these days requires at least 2 or 3 of these skills to create the content in isolation. Otherwise, content needs to leverage external resources or other team members.

#9 What to Tweet About – 37 Ideas for Better Content Marketing by Mike Brown

What to blog about is a frequent content marketing topic on the Brainzooming blog. People are always looking for new blogging ideas. Responding to a tweet on what to blog about, @InnervateTF requested a comparable piece on “what to tweet about.” Since responding to audience questions is a great source of ideas for blogging topics, we’re covering their Twitter content marketing question – which amazingly, we haven’t done previously.

#10 4 Powerful Local SEO and Content Marketing Strategies No One is Talking About by Marcus Sheridan

Ever since Panda and Penguin, local SEO has become more and more of a challenge for businesses. Not only do they need to target what is in some cases many location-based keywords, but they need to do it without sounding like they’re schlepping Google with an abundance of out-of-place local search phrases. Truth be told, the information that I’ve seen around the web on this subject of how to combine SEO with Content Marketing (Search Content Marketing) on the local level is seriously lacking.

I hope you like this week’s top 10 list. Stay tuned for next week’s articles!

SEOMoz has published a fresh addition of “The Content Curation Guide” originally posted last year by Gianluca Fiorelli. It’s based on his “Mozinar” (slides posted below) and includes audience Q&A. → Read more

“Essentially, you find where your audience is and go there. Common sense, but not so easy to do it if you listen to the buzz instead of your customer.”

Source: 19 Things Successful People Do On Social Media via www.forbes.com

This article presents some great points, but I want to spend a minute on point #3, about finding where your audience is.

First, before you can find where your audience is, you need to know who your audience is.

Identifying a focused target audience (e.g., your customer) is the first step in positioning your social media sharing. The next step in positioning your social media sharing is identifying your audience’s problem, desire, or as Clayton Christen likes to say, their “jobs to be done.”

Then you need to provide your audience with a solution. That is, solve a problem, share some useful insight, answer a question, or simply relieve them of boredom (e.g., entertain them through conversation).

When you identify a target customer and a problem, and provide a solution, you’re delivering value. It’s this value that helps you connect with your audience and build your brand.

Successful people position their social media sharing, and so should you!

This great guide contains a comprehensive list of activities that help you acquire customers: From planning, set up, and execution all the way to analytics and optimization. Building your audience on social media, and driving traffic to your website through content marketing are on the list as well. Intigi is the ultimate tool for any content marketer who is committed to posting targeted content on a regular basis to social media and their blog.

Read more →

Have you missed the most popular content marketing articles of this week? No problem! We’ve got you covered.

#1 Goodbye SEO, Hello SCM: The Rise of Search Content Marketing by Marcus Sheridan

Recently, while speaking at a conference in Dallas, a WordPress developer who was in the audience gave me one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received. After my 1-hour talk, the gentleman came up to me and made a very simple statement:

 

“That was the best presentation on SEO I’ve ever seen.”

 

I don’t mention this compliment from the gentleman to brag, but rather to make a point—during my entire time speaking to this group of people, I never mentioned the phrase “SEO”  or “search engine optimization” one single time. Rather, I simply discussed the power of thinking like a consumer, being willing to address every single question they have on our website, and then using those questions to create a long tail keyword campaign that generates traffic, leads, and sales.

#2 Is corporate America ready for content marketing? by Justin Goldsborough

My question. And I got the answer I was expecting. Very. Very important. Content marketing is not creating an ad. It’s creating content that doesn’t sell overtly,  but does provide relevant information to consumers. And according to Brent, that content takes time to concept and produce effectively. He told a story of a Pinterest infographic his agency created and shared online that led to speaking engagements and a new business opportunity. An infographic his team spent several hours of several days building.

#3 The Story of Content Marketing by Kay Ross

Once upon a time, business owners and marketers thought the only way to attract customers was by broadcasting pushy, one-way, disruptive, hard-sell marketing messages.

#4 Content Marketing Personas: An Introduction by J-P De Clerck

Personas, whether buyer personas or not, represent how different segments will interact with you. As said, in each step and across each touchpoint they take decisions and by giving them a name, face and personal story as representatives of your typical buyer segments, etc. you take that narrative when looking at every decision. It’s clear that content is essential in taking decisions and persuading people to make them. From a content marketing personas perspective we add this additional mapping layer of auditing content needs.

#5 4 Ways to Fall in Love with Content Marketing (NOW) by Craig McBreen

Part of branding done right is a solid content strategy. Say you’re a firm that specializes in disaster preparedness and recovery (why not pick the most obscure industry ever, right?).

 

Write a whitepaper on 10 steps to prepare your company for the worst. This pdf could be offered if someone signs up for your list. Then write 10 posts, one for each step. And while you’re at it, do your best to make it less than boring – that’s where the love comes in. Just make it sing a little and you’ll be miles ahead of the competition.

#6 Qualifying Leads Via Content Marketing: 4 Top Qualifiers by John McTigue

I know what you’re thinking. What happened to BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing)? According to Ken Rogue of InsideSales.com, “BANT went out of style about three years ago when a research study done by DemandGen found that only 20 percent of companies have an annual budget that they make purchase decisions from.” So authority is crucial as a first step now, and money will work itself out of need and timing. But how do we get the answers to these questions from content alone?

#7 What comes after content marketing? Here are four ideas by Mark Schaefer

Here’s a dirty secret of content marketing. Today it is possible to win the inbound lead battle simply by being first and overwhelming, a trend I characterized last year as the content arms race. You don’t have to be great. You don’t even have to be good. And to some extent it is even possible to fake your way to the top.  But that can’t last.  The market will adjust. Something has to emerge that will trump strategies based on sponsored posts, social proof, and commodity content.

#8 Why Our Content SUCKS by Jonathon Colman

But what is content anyway? It’s not a feature. And it’s more than the sum of its parts: words, design, production, UX/IxD, advertising. When we regard content as a feature or as simply being a set of components that can be “bolted-on” to a design, then our content is bound to fail.

 

That’s because content is the experience — it’s the whole thing. And you can often tell good content from bad by focusing on the experience it creates. It’s pretty easy to figure out when a brand is just targeting some niche set of keywords with their content… instead of, you know, targeting the needs of their users.

#9 Effective Content Strategy Guided by The SAVE Framework by Nenad Senić

The SAVE framework fits like a glove to your publishing strategy. To attract your prospects/customers, to retain them, to make your content valuable and sharable, you should follow the SAVE framework. Many of you already do it, though not calling it as such.

 

Many others are still looking for the model that would work best for you, for the model that would help you draw a successful, effective and long-term content strategy. I believe that the SAVE framework can help you tremendously.

#10 Personalized Content Marketing: Segmenting Leads to Win Customers by Brianne Carlon

Over the past few years, marketers have realized that relevancy is one of the most important elements to their success. That is why we spend numerous hours and copious amounts of energy depicting buyer personas. So now that these personas are determined, why would we send them all to the same place to receive the same content? Ideally, you wouldn’t, and soon you won’t have to.

 

We already know leads who are nurtured with relevant information produce a 20 percent increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads. Why not start the process off with a bang—or better yet, Personalized Content from the visitors’ very first interactions with your site? You know what this means: Personalized Content helps you get the right content to the right person at the right time from the beginning.

I hope you enjoy these fantastic articles on content marketing…please stay tuned for next week’s top ten articles!

Are you looking to keep up to date with the best articles on the topic of social media marketing?

Here the ten most popular articles from last week (February 11-18). Enjoy!

#1 Twitter Will Decide the Value of Your Tweets - 3,072 Tweets

Twitter is about to start attaching value ratings to users’ tweets. The value judgements will be assigned to the public metadata of tweeters’ posts, and used by Twitter’s streaming API to help developers more selectively curate massive amounts of status updates.

#2 How Social Media Is Making Over the Fashion Industry (Infographic) - 2,196 Tweets

Technology made its mark at New York Fashion Week this year with the rise of social media on the runway.

#3 3 Tools to Better Manage Your Social Media Presence - 1,959 Tweets

Are you looking for tools that will help you manage your social media efforts? In this article you’ll discover 3 tools to enable you to become more efficient and effective with social media.

#4 30 Terrible Pieces of Social Media Advice You Should Ignore - 1,816 Tweets

We’re here to share some of the worst pieces of social media advice we’ve seen to debunk all those misguided “best practices” and steer you in the right direction toward social media marketing truth and justice.

#5 Facebook Graph Search Review: How it Works - 1,628 Tweets

In this article I’ll share what Facebook’s Graph Search is, how it works and how it fits your marketing strategy.

#6 11 Rules of Twitter Etiquette You Need to Know - 1,583 Tweets

When on a date, one should have proper etiquette! Just like being on a date, when you are tweeting away on twitter, one should also have proper etiquette. TWITIQUETTE if you prefer!

#7 How to Build Powerful In-Person Networks From Your Social Contacts - 1,574 Tweets

In this post, I’ll explore steps you can take to turn those online contacts to offline business relationships.

#8 Our Measure of Twitter Influence - 1,361 Tweets

Today, we’re excited to announce the release of Social Authority, our metric of Twitter users’ influence. There are plenty of vanity metrics out there, but Social Authority offers something compellingly different.

#9 5 Dead Simple Ways to Track Social Media ROI - 1,249 Tweets

…there are a few dead simple ways to track [social media] ROI that don’t require a mixed media modeling program or a staff of math nerds.

#10 Why Blogs that Allow Guest Posts Will Be Penalized in 2013 – 815 Tweets

Just as low-level article directories (ezinearticles, articlesbase, and others) got hurt by Google’s Panda Update in 2013, I predict that Google will hurt sites abusing guest blogging in 2013.

Online marketing can go a long way to help small businesses stand out in a crowd and direct traffic to their door. This is done by generating a cycle of targeted marketing, brand awareness, and word of mouth marketing – each element working together to help guide people through the purchasing process. Small business owners can use social media to reach more people; use blogs to share their stories and build trust; use other content marketing (e.g., video) to be recognized as a valuable resource; and, use local search engine optimization to ensure that their customers can find them. → Read more