Author: Damien Mulley

Your Digital Content Strategy – Today it’s SEO and Social not one OR the other

Well it’s even more than those two but for this post, we’ll look at both.

More work but more rewards for digital marketing these days. 50% of the visitors to this website are now coming here because of Twitter. 50%. So each month a few hundred visitors are coming here just from Tweets about our various courses. Twitter indirectly sells most of the training courses Mulley Comms does and Google searches do the rest.

Information consumes attention
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

Your future digital/social content strategy – What you need to do

1. Build pages that are search friendly:
You need good titles, good descriptions, well structured pages, fantastic and inspiring content. Yeah, just that. totally easy right? But at least you have a plan. So this blog post has “digital, content, strategy” as keywords in the title and the description will mention digital marketing and social too. Here’s a preview of them:

MulleyPostDescription

The post should tell people what needs to be done and so gives readers content that they feel is valuable and they might share that value on Twitter or Facebook. Use Google Keyword planner or other keyword research tools so see what people are searching for and use some of those keywords in your post/page. Unless you are a website that updates non-stop and Google visits you non-stop too, then it will be days but more likely weeks before this page starts performing well in Google. Weeks is a generation in digital. So social is going to help.

2. Create Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook headlines that are must-click in nature.
Social Media traffic is the quick hit. It is surge in nature. Lots of clicks in a very short time and then traffic falls off a cliff until you Tweet/Facebook about it again. This is the traffic surge from a link that was Tweeted the other day.

BitlyClicksDrop

Social Media is the first line of attack nowadays with SEO the rear guard that comes in and finishes the job. For what’s on your website, you need to be strategic with the keywords so that over long periods of time, Google will bring you traffic. To get people in social media to click on links to this content though, you need to think like a PR person or a headline maker for a tabloid. The title of this post is useful to a degree, very findable in Google but what about social? What gets the clicks? Well what makes you click on things on Twitter or Facebook? What works for me are amazing stats and then a promise to reveal more. This post could be marketed/PR’d on Twitter as:

  • Well written Tweets are generating thousands in revenue for me yearly. Here’s how:
  • A single Facebook status update or Tweet can send 100s of visitors to my site. Some become clients. A guide for you:
  • Cheatsheet: Writing good website content and creating great social media headlines = How to get business in digital.

Here is a great guide form Upworthy on how to cook great social media headlines. Social Media is noisy though so you also need to be strategic here. Timing is everything. Various tools like Buffer will help you to find the best times to Tweet/Facebook out during the day/evening and time updates to go out then during those “social media prime times”. Once you get a handle on that, line up the most important tweets and Facebook updates for the week/month then it becomes a good deal easier to have your content seen, shared and clicked.

And here’s the sell.

A post with good content that you spent an hour writing has to have some kind of action item! I’m doing a course on Social Media Content Creation on May 28th in Dublin. Why not book a place?

5 minutes can positively impact your business – Here’s how

Five minutes will transform your business

Your website:

Every webpage on your website has two interesting properties: One called a Title, one called a Description. If you add relevant keywords (based on what people search for) to these titles and descriptions, you can increase your website visitors easily by 20% and this only takes 5 minutes. The change takes 5 minutes, the initial impact takes 3 weeks depending on Google’s coming around.

Your Facebook:

Your Facebook Business Page has a tool called Insights that only you can access. It tells you the time of the week and time of the day that are the best to do updates in order to be seen by the most people. Look at these figures (takes 3 mins) and you can have your updates seen by more people.

Your Twitter:

Do you know when people that follow you on Twitter are most active, do you know what Tweets of yours were clicked on the most? Log on to ads.Twitter.com and Twitter will tell you. From that plan your Tweets to go out at the Prime times during the day and week

Mulley Communications does training courses and consultancy around strategy. Sign up to the courses list or our mailing list.

Digital links – Monday January 13th 2014

Why not get rid of some of your fans? Maybe a lot of the ones? Highly interesting post from John Bell on this. Real fans versus those there for a freebie debate coming back again.

Facebook can now tell of those who saw your FB ad (not just those that clicked), who purchased something in a physical store. In the store! jumping from the digital to the physical.

Facebook is also the number two ad network in the world now. Google is number 1.

Just read ALL of these.

(PDF). The Social Media Policy from the HSE is quite good and full of common sense.

Jeremy Waite’s social strategy for 2014.

P.O.S.T. People Objectives Strategy Technology.

Facebook ads, like growing crops. This guy suggests highly targeted and lots of ads. Or something.

Your Digital NCT

Mulley Communications does training courses and consultancy around strategy. Sign up to the courses list or our mailing list.

If you want to start being serious about digital in 2014 and it’s a good idea to be so, then you need to up your game. Digital is going to get harder and harder in 2014, the easy days are gone, so you need to be more efficient and strategic about what you do.

So here’s a checklist on what you ought to be aware of. Pick one area to concentrate on or all. This is not a definitive list. (That gets me out of getting into trouble)

Overall Digital:
Are you mobile first in all things digital?

Website:

  • Is your website mobile first?
  • Make your website responsive by re-designing it or adding some responsive plugins to it.
  • If you can’t make it responsive, then have elements that allow the site to perform while being viewed on a mobile e.g. your number in text on the front page, same with email. No crappy contact forms.
  • Do you have a content and search optimisation plan?
  • Do you have Google Analytics or something better installed?

Facebook:

  • Learn about Edgerank.
  • Forget Page likes, the most important thing is your reach. How many people actually see any update of yours? It is less and sometimes WAY less than the number of likes.
  • What is your post engagement rate? How many people click on your post or Like it or share it or comment on it? The more people that engage with your updates, the more signals Facebook gets to keep sending your updates to your fans on the Page. Engagements are very low? Your reach is going to go down and down over time.
  • Are you updates short to be seen on mobiles?
  • Are you images using up as much of the timeline as possible?
  • What is your content plan?
  • Are you timing updates?

Simply put: Good content = good reactions = over time you retain or grow the reach of your page. Good content timed = reaching the best possible numbers each time.

Twitter:

  • Who are the people you are following?
  • Who are the people that follow you?
  • How many RTs would you get on a Tweet that’s business related?
  • How many new follows do you get a week?
  • Are your images the right size to be displayed nicely in the timeline?
  • Do you have a growth plan for Twitter?
  • Do you have a content plan for Twitter?
  • Are you timing updates?
  • How many clicks on average do you Tweets get? Are they going to your website?

Instagram, Vine, Snapchat

  • Are your audiences on Instagram? Find out.
  • Should you be using Vine? Will quick 6 second videos get you customers? They could.
  • Are many of your demographic under 20? Yes? So why are you not on Snapchat?

And you’ll never guess who does this stuff for companies? Yeah.

Contact us if you want a full evaluation or an evaluation of on one of your channels.

Mulley Communications does training courses and consultancy around strategy. Sign up to the courses list or our mailing list.

Businesses: Time to get your Vine on

Mulley Communications does training courses and consultancy around strategy. Sign up to the courses list or our mailing list.

Main takeaways:

  1. If you are on Twitter already, get a Vine account
  2. Practice by making lots of quick videos
  3. Vine videos should be instructional not promotional and fun not boring
  4. Make your Vine titles obvious/informative
  5. Share them on Twitter
  6. Get your public URL

Vine is an app from a company Twitter bought a while back. Vine lets you make 6 second videos. Just 6 seconds. All in one go or you can make them in smaller bits and put them together. They have to be done via your Vine mobile app. Another mobile first company. You can get the app for iPhone, Android and Windows.

Back in August about 3% of people in Ireland had a Vine account and this is growing, not rapidly but steadily. The value of Vine is that the video you record can be shared into the Twitter feed of everyone that follows your Twitter account and can be played on desktop or mobile instantly. No clicking and it popping out into a browser or anything like that. As Twitter grows and it is already massive in Ireland, your Vine videos can, in a way, be seen by more people.

Now in addition, your Vine videos can be seen on a public profile page. Which means lots of Google traffic to your videos so you don’t need just Vine traffic and Twitter traffic. So if you were dithering about Vine, now is the time to decide. All the elements are there now to use it for marketing.

And they can also be embedded, like this from Pendelton:

6 seconds can add a hell of a lot of context
Images can give more context than text only. animated images even more context, video with audio way more. The issues with video have always been the production that goes in to getting them right, even if they’re just two minutes long.

Now while you don’t need 10,000 hours to get them right, you do need some practice so playing with making really short videos means you can get your experience level up quite quickly.

A nice example is Essential French in Cork sharing 6 second French lessons.

Some guides on how to use Vine. From Convert with Content. Beginners Guide from Mashable.

Mulley Communications does training courses and consultancy around strategy. Sign up to the courses list or our mailing list.

Snapchat: Why isn’t your brand on it?

Updated as of June 2014.

Every now and then someone will write a post encouraging you to bandwagon on to the latest trend in digital. This is such a post. Snapchat is now mainstream and pretty huge in Ireland. IPSOS MRBI says 21% of adults aged 15+ are on Snapchat in Ireland. 9 months ago it was 11%.

June 2014 Snapchat in Ireland stats

The data is there to show that for younger demographics, it’s not just Facebook anymore. And these younger demographics marched Bebo, Instagram, mySpace and Facebook into the mainstream. Right now, there are 500 Million photos or videos uploaded to Snapchat every day. That’s about the same as the number of photos uploaded to Facebook and 5 times as many as Instagram.

Snapchat, the sexting thing?

Get over yourself. People were sending silly pictures of themselves well before Snapchat but Snapchat is seen as one of the enablers of this. Snapchat is a great little app that allows you to send pictures or videos taken right now to your friends and they are guaranteed to expire/evaporate in ten seconds or less when clicked on. You can write a teeny amount of text on the image or video and draw on it too. The images are not on their phone, they’re not on the Snapchat servers. Lost forever like tears in the rain. Ephemermal media they’re calling it.

SnapchatPicture

If someone manages to take a screenshot, Snapchat informs you of this so you know not to trust that person again. In extreme cases, when you basically hack into the phone and connect it to a computer, you may find a picture in a temporary file on the phone but that’s it. Pretty safe really.

So your brand isn’t there, why?

Hardly any companies are using Snapchat in Europe to market, which is a shame. If one of your core audiences are Irish people ages 15-20 then Snapchat is one place they’re at. Some companies in America are using Snapchat to connect to the “right audience” and do stuff around competitions and vouchers. Still, hardly any case studies right now. 16 Handles and Taco Bell are rolled out again and again right now but that will change.

What some companies are doing to Market on Snapchat:

  • Vouchers: Discount codes, 10% off vouchers. Show at till type things.
  • Contests: Submit a picture type contests. Take a picture of a product and add a comment.
  • Interactions: Just having a fun back and forth with users e.g. Holding a sign with loads of people’s names.
  • Exclusives: Tell Snapchat first before other channels. (A great way to build numbers)

Snapchat Stories are made for brands

Now that Snapchat has serious investment and it has a huge audience, it needs to commercialise what they’re doing. Everything these days is about the timeline so Snapchat is now going to try and do something with that. First comes creating something that end users will appreciate and then they can make money off it later. Enter Snapchat Stories.

Snapchat Stories allow you to weave Snapchats you made into a piece of content that is viewable for 24 hours. You can add to this Story any time you want and it gets tacked on to the end of the story. When people log in, they can see in the timeline, any Stories from friends. This is mine:

SnapChatme

This is a Vine of a Snapchat Story I made:

And stats released this week (June 23rd 2014) show that Snapchat Stories are getting … dun dun dun, 1 billion views PER DAY. Highly successful. There still aren’t any tools for brands to use but give them time, they’ll have them.

In the week that Facebook (who?) released Slingshot (what?), Snapchat announced a new feature for a single brand (for now). People will be able to add their content to the Snapchat Story of a brand at a specific location. It’s called Our Story. Done around a music festival for now. Body and Soul was last week and various Snapchatters were keeping me in the loop via photos and videos. Perfect alignment. Expect to see big brands host these around music festivals, launches, fashion weeks etc.

Some tips:
If you bung a load of photos or videos together on to your Story, they can become quite boring, even if just a minute long. Make the shots snappy and have an actual story in place. This means pre-planning for it. Use text in your Story to accentuate or explain the content. Fail fast and fail cheap: Try things, mess about. It’s Snapchat, silly mistakes do disappear.

I await a band making a music video and sharing it as a Snapchat Story. 10 second bursts, it can be done.

Snapchat Drawbacks

Right now Snapchat is mobile only and everything needs to be done through the mobile app for iPhone or for Android. There are no official apps for businesses that can be used. You can’t “officially” upload premade material to Snapchat so you can’t have highly produced content. (There are obviously unofficial ways around this, same for Vine) I’m sure if you are a huge brand though, there probably is a tool you can use for Snapchat that does allow uploading of pre-made video. Vine definitely has this.

Law of diminishing returns

Like everything else before it, Snapchat Stories will work really well for the first while but as more people and more brands start to saturate your timeline, they’ll become less effective. Same has happened with Banner Ads, Google Ads, Facebook Ads and it will happen with Twitter promoted tweets too. Get in early, make the most of it and then analyse what is coming next and be ready for it.

Do have fun on Snapchat.

Update: June 2014

Mulley Communications does training courses and consultancy around strategy. Sign up to the courses list or our mailing list.