Here’s a really good, practical, infographic on the ideal types of social media post including timing.
I’ve seen a number of similar infographics before but this one has been well summarised and kept simple. Try the tips below and let me know if you see any improvements.
How to create the perfect social media post is an infographic that was produced by mycleveragency
There was a time when I thought that the Internet spelt the end for intermediaries, or third-party agents. Surely, I imagined, users would go and transact direct with brands – from flights to banks, from insurance to mobile phones.
Agents have comparison engines to thank for averting disaster. Comparison engines finally showed the added value that agents offer.
Until comparison engines, third parties had been purely introductory agents. Think of a recruitment consultant – they are pairing together, or introducing – a candidate with their potential future employer. Estate agents do a similar role. And the Internet looked like it would disintermediate the middle man by offering a direct service.
Along came comparison engines and aggregators (on the Internet there isn’t much of a difference). Here we could see more choice, price comparisons, and feedback from other users.
Travel agents are still having a tough time economically. In the travel sector, the real winners have been startups and companies which have completely transformed themselves into a digital company.
One of the leading startups has been TripAdvisor. This is a completely new type of intermediary. It doesn’t have any stock in a traditional sense, and doesn’t even enable customers to book directly on its site. Yet TripAdvisor is growing at 25% year on year and has current revenue of $850 million, with a healthy 25% profit margin.
We’re seeing the same story across many other industries – in retail (think of Amazon!), recruitment, real estate and finance. Finance is particularly interesting because financial services organisations could become “utilities” where customers go to a third party agency for a financial product (e.g. a loan), the cheapest one is shown and the user goes through to complete the transaction.
This is already happening with the insurance market – Compare the Market and other comparison engines have bigger brand recognition and fundamentally, loyalty, than the insurance companies it passes business through to.
Today’s question is whether insurance and financial companies want to be, or mind being, seen as utilities or value-add services. To answer this, it would be interesting to see the transactional statistics of insurance aggregators – to compare (forgive the pun) whether customers compare insurance companies and then click on the companies that they recognise.
If users are selecting the insurance companies which aren’t easily recognisable, it’s a signal that the industry has already turned into a utility model, and agents are here to stay for a while longer.
I’ve been applying a bit of Search Engine Optimisation to this blog over the last couple of weeks (successfully I should add – visits are already up over 30%) and one of the most recommended techniques is to assign authorship to articles.
What this does, is tells Google that the web site owner has trusted this particular person to add an article to the site. You might think that for this blog, the site owner and author is the same – but Google doesn’t mind this because it just wants to know there’s a human at the end of the keyboard, not another spammy robot knocking out (or copying) content. It’s the age old sign of trust of putting someone’s name at the bottom of a document adds credibility.
The way Google trusts that the person is a real human is by linking the ‘byline’ to their Google+ account. This is clever for so many reasons:
It’s the last point that is the most valuable. The Internet needs a single sign on, centralised user authentication system to prove who we are, so that businesses can trust who the buyer says they are.
A friend of mine sells furniture online. It costs him a small fortune to deliver it to customers, and with the distance selling regulations, he often gets customers who tell him after a week of delivery that they don’t want the item any longer. He reckons he can tell who is ‘trying it on’ to check whether he’ll offer a refund without bothering to collect the item again. He estimates that these “customers” go from site to site trying to take liberties from companies.
Wouldn’t it be a better system all round if a user bought an item from a website, and that site could look in a central place for delivery and payment information, and whether this user was trustworthy or not, before dispatching the item.
Another player in the market who might try to create this central authentication system is Apple. Combining Apple ID with fingerprint recognition and perhaps phone based GPS information could be a secure system.
These notes are from the adtech London exhibition in September 2013. Apologies for any brevity, grammar or spelling mistakes, I did the best I could! Here is a full list of all my presentation notes from adTech London 2013.
Dara Nasr is the Head of Agency Sales at Twitter, and had an arsenal of amusing, anecdotal case studies about brands on Twitter.
His opening slide was “Twitter: the real time pulse of the planet”
Case studies:
Successful Twitter users and brands:
Answers to questions from the audience:
Here is a full list of my presentation notes.
Almost to reconfirm how I described how the first morning at ad:tech had been full of
practical tips and advice, Hugh Jackson from MediaCo, an SEO company, gave a good, practical presentation on two of the latest Google algorithm changes and how to take advantage of them, despite all the bad press they’ve received.
The two algorithm changes are Panda and Venice.
Results are now based upon the local results of where the user is located. (My Note: Actually, they’ve always been local, so if you searched for ‘Spurs’ in the UK you’d end up with Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, and if you searched for Spurs in the US you’d see the San Antonio Spurs basketball team. Now, results are localise for everything, down to a far more granular level).
So if you type in say, tyre dealer, you’ll get very different results if you’re based in New York, London or Manchester.
This is the only way results are ranked organically (i.e. not paying for an ad in the results) for generic terms.
To take advantage of Venice, you need to create truly unique content for your user’s locations. National companies without local offices are at a disadvantage.
The SEO strategy to take advantage of Venice is to create landing pages and change the site structure to reflect localised pages. The example Hugh gave is Autotrader, which now has regions, and then local cities where car results are displayed for that local city or region.
The tried and tested SEO technique for Titles and Descriptions has been slightly updated, so you should now use:
for AutoTrader, the example given was:
‘Find used cars in Manchester – used cars | Autotrader‘
Also, inbound links should ideally include the location in the anchor text, although Hugh pointed out that Google sometimes perform U-turns on best practice for inbound links.
Other techniques to improve natural results include having local reviews, directions to the location, a local address for the business, and a local phone number. These are recommendations though, not necessities.
Finally, put your local addresses in the site schema.
![It's [almost] always about content, content, content...](https://bradbox.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/2013-09-11-15.07.27.jpg)
Use google.com/trends and adwords.google.co.uk/keywordplanner to help with your SEO terms.
You can now have a page with little text, perhaps just a couple of sentences, followed by a video, and this may perform well. The reason is that users will stay on the page (watching the video), and this gets fed back to Google, who then interpret this as a sign of a real user finding the page interesting. This is very different to previous SEO techniques where keywords were the most important SEO consideration.
To create inbound links, Hugh recommended that you create Infographics and distribute these to other websites, making sure you have credit for the work, through good quality anchor text.
It’s important to ‘announce’ new content by promoting it on social networks – Twitter, Google+ and Facebook for example. This builds authority and will help develop you as a thought leader and people will link to your page.
Another good technique, which Google has been vocal about, is to attribute content to a particular person by linking to their Google + page.
And finally, it’s a sobering thought that on some search results such as ‘Manchester United’, the 3rd result is already below the fold!
Of course, Panda and Venice are details. The main reason why natural searches are still so important is because when a user performs a search on Google (or Bing, or any other search engine) and arrives at your website, the chances are that you have a genuinely and fully qualified lead!
Keith Pape is SVP Social Engagement at Singley & Mackie and provided some practical advice for brands working in social media.
Social equalises big brands with smaller businesses. It’s a pretty even playing field
Everyone can tell a story in a different way. The top 10 most engaged brands span several industries from supermarkets to travel agents to drinks companies
Too many clients don’t understand the business, not the social, goal of a project
Their recommendation is three phases:
Grow, engage, convert. It’s vital to measure and refine at every stage.
Grow = content. Keep measuring
Engage = talk (customer service & sales/ marketing). Keep measuring
Convert = sell. Keep measuring
During the Q & A he pointed out that people don’t visit your timeline, so your content on twitter and Facebook needs to stand out from the rest of the content. Assume only 15% of your followers see each of your tweets.
Use link trackers such as bit.ly to measure click though rates.
This was the first keynote speech of ad:tech London. Here are my brief notes:
A key focus for WPP at the moment is China and the Internet
WPP has more staff in China than in the UK
Digital ad spend will grow from 95bn today to 180bn in 2018, at which point digital will exceed traditional ad spending
Digital will take revenue from print and other channels, not from TV. In fact, TV ad revenue may still grow very slightly to 2018
![WPP will be concentrating on this [shopping] list for the next 5 years](https://bradbox.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/2013-09-11-09.42.05.jpg)
In the next 5 years digital will account for around 45% of WPP revenue, it’s currently in the mid-30s.
WPP have bought ecommerce provider Salmon who produce the sites for Argos and DFS.
WPP doesn’t want to be a an ad agency. It wants to become a full marketing implementation agency in the next 5 years, competing with the likes of Accenture and Deloitte Digital.
The summary was this:
Ideas + Technology = great digital marketing
You need strength in both areas.
And I couldn’t agree more.
This is the sixth year of Evian sponsoring Wimbledon
We are social found that people we already using the live young tag line in tweets without any prompting
Out of office brainstorming session led to an idea that wasn’t received well by the client. Back to the drawing board…
Wimbledon wiggle came from how the server in a tennis game does a quick ‘wiggle’ before serving. Its obvious and recognisable.
They commissioned some music and created this video:
There was a low barrier to entry for the wiggle.
They created a Facebook app for users to upload their video. Then celebrities including Jonathan Ross joined in. Then Sharapova, who was already an Evian brand ambassador, wiggled.
The best wiggles were shown on outdoor public screens.
80,000 people interacted with Evian, with a 90 million reach
Evian achieved almost 75% share of voice for Wimbledon last year despite having a lower budget than other sponsors such as HSBC and Rolex.
I’m at ad:tech London for the next couple of days. It’s an industry exhibition in Olympia focussed on digital marketing. I’ve found this to be one of the better exhibitions – based on quality of the presentations.
There were several programme tracks to choose from this year and when I selected the ones I was interested in, there were several clashes, which demonstrates the quality of the presentations.
I found there weren’t as many client case studies as usual, which is usually a warning sign of agency sales pitches approaching, however it hasn’t been like this at all, and the agencies have been open to sharing their best practices and leaving sales pitches on their stands. I think this shows some maturity in the industry.
Here are some of the presentations I’ve been to. Apologies for brevity and any spelling/ grammatical errors. I’m trying to post these as quickly as possible. And finally, I’ll add more links as I go to more presentations.
If you’re visiting ad:tech, drop me a line or a tweet and let’s see if we can meet up.
This morning I received an email from Amazon to say “Albums you have previously purchased on CD from Amazon are now available in Cloud Player for FREE”.
It’s always a nice surprise to receive something for free, and when I logged on to the Amazon Cloud Player, yes indeed the CDs I’d bought from Amazon in the last few years were all on there.
Half of all the CDs I’d bought from Amazon were gifts for other people. This reminded me of the nightmare I’ve had in the past with registering my children’s iPod Touch devices, and setting up iTunes for them. Or our ‘family’ Spotify account. Or just buying MP3s for my kids.
All of these purchases for other people are against the terms and conditions of use. I haven’t found a legitimate method of buying music for my kids like the old physical CD method. Perversely it’s easier to download music from BitTorrent for other people than legitimate methods. However, I’m completely against music piracy and feel that it’s morally correct to buy MP3s from iTunes, Spotify or Amazon and then give access to my kids.
Amazon has just brought this debate back to life where all the CD gifts for others I’ve bought in the past are now available for me to listen to via MP3s.
The next step will be for Amazon to offer the same service for videos and DVDs. If you bought a DVD film a while ago, you should be able to watch it over the Internet.
There are systems in place such as Ultraviolet which enable users to watch a film irrespective of the original purchase media. So if you bought a DVD or Blu-ray or Internet file for a specific film, you can watch it on the other media for no additional charge.
This is exactly the type of advantages that consumers want to see from cloud services. In fact, consumers don’t want to know about cloud any more than RAID storage, they just want life made easier, and with additional value thrown in as part of the package.