When you lack the willpower to continue on your fitness journey, there are a few things that will help you stay on track. These inspiring fitness tips will keep you inspired, motivated and strong towards realising your goals. 

Share Your Daily Workout

One of the greatest challenges to achieving fitness goals is obstacles to lifestyle changes and the inability to create strategies to surmount them. 

Do you know that sharing your workout milestones and achievements as a beginner has positives effects on your wellbeing? If you are a newbie you should set a program that has challenges. Here southfloridaathleticclub.com has come up with some great resources that helps beginners to avoid mistakes and set a routine. It could be a great way to power your workouts. You may have observed that most fitness experts share their lifestyle changes on social media. 

A recent study suggests that self-promotion is an efficient way to create a visual board for your workout progress and enhance accountability. The best way to break boundaries is to share your milestones and achievements on social media. This helps you to focus on achieving the goals.

Post a sweaty Selfie

Posting your sweaty selfie provides remarkable positive effects. It also provides the opportunity to archive your progress, enabling you to set a fitting timeline for your fitness journey. Documenting your fitness journey by posting your improvements on social media helps you to maintain laser focus on the goals. This could help to push you to the next level. 

Studies show that taking and sharing selfie can help your weight loss goals, and by extension fitness goals. Sharing before and after photos could provide powerful inspiration to help you maintain healthy habits. You can also enjoy wider acceptance, praise and applause from followers. Sharing evidence of your workout achievements will provide the strongest motivation you need to push beyond the next fitness boundary. 

Join a community

Sometimes you feel left out in the journey for an active and healthy lifestyle. You may agree that meeting your fitness goals could be tricky, especially if you feel you have no partner to share your struggles and successes.

Do you know that one of your best strategies to get rid of emotional eating is to join a support group? Circle of like-minded enthusiasts can go a long way to keep you on track as you struggle towards achieving your fitness goals. 

There are several places you can access a community of like-minded fitness enthusiasts. A quick visit to Facebook could provide you with an opportunity to interact with people who share the same struggles and success stories. 

It begins with creating an amazing profile that speaks volume about your fitness journey. Then connect and engage. Connecting and getting encouragement from other fitness folks could provide you with the greatest strength. Why? A research published on Sciencedirect.com revealed that sharing difficulties with the online community could be a key to drop pounds.

Do A Challenge

Sometimes living up to your fitness goals could be a challenge. You might get bored after some weeks of serious workouts. To ensure you remain on track, you need workout ideas and fitness challenges to push you to the next levels. 

You can start with entertaining fitness challenges and contests with colleagues and friends. It has the benefit of keeping you focused on the fitness routine for longer and stronger workouts. It could serve as a great opportunity to boost your fitness activity and a healthy lifestyle.  

You can use fitness trackers to keep a log of your performance, but social fitness goes beyond that. You can start with a 5-day fitness challenge. If you can join a fitness community, a good number of them may have already been engaged in a 30-day fitness challenge which can benefit you as you share your struggles and successes with them. A challenge with a community of enthusiasts will provide you with the strength you won’t find elsewhere.

Strength is the foundation of workouts and physical ability. It’s all about getting stronger and stronger. Strength training such as Powerlifting, for instance, has lots of benefits. It can help slow down the ageing process and help you live a strong and healthy life. But efficient strength training won’t be effective without the right equipment. 

Stay positive

One benefit of social media is strengthening your mental muscles as you engage with fitness enthusiasts. Positive motivations are everywhere on the social media. This also means that you will have to get the right handle or channel that serves your purpose. 

If you cannot access a wonderful treasure-trove of positive messages, you can begin with creating positive self-affirmations. Positive self-affirmations is one of the easiest ways to retrain your brain to remain positive.

Any time you feel unmotivated to work out, you can break such mental clog with positive self motivations. Repeatedly assure yourself that you can do it and remind yourself of the benefits of your workout.

Positive self motivations will help you get rid of poor attitudes that promote common fitness mistakes. Positive thinking and affirmations can make you feel better and your exercise harder for longer periods.

Set limits

Social media is one of your great fitness arsenals because it will provide you with countless ideas/guides to power your workout. While social media could fill your gut with the juice of competitiveness, you mustn’t push beyond your limits. The temptation to chase what you see others do is high, but it can hurt your fitness journey.

To achieve your goals, you need to set your limits. Whether you’re a beginner or fitness guru, everyone has his limits. You may often hear that you are not training enough. We believe that under-training is as bad as over-training. We do not encourage any of the extremes. An exceptional coach understands how best to urge you along making the additional sets and reps. You must understand your limits to prevent sores, burnout or push too far, especially with cardio work.

Setting your limits means that you understand the workout you want to do and ensure you do not workout to fatigue or break your muscle fibres. It also means that you make out time to rest and recover.

Share Recipes for Healthy Eating 

To find healthy recipes that are both tasty, healthy and serves your workout purpose is challenging. This could also overwhelm as you try to figure it out. You can keep things simple.

Workout especially strength training boosts immunity. It promotes the pumping of blood throughout your body, releases happy hormones and relieves stress.

Having an effective workout begins and ends with a healthy and balanced diet, which promotes recovery of muscle tissues. Proper diets will also reduce recovery time while boosting your strength. For better ideas and guides on workout diets, get a perfect powerlifting diet chat which will help you to boost the energy.

Whatever becomes your healthy eating recipes, share with your social media followers. 

To ensure the effective realisation of your fitness goals, here are seven ways you can power your workouts with social media. You need to share your daily workout, post a sweaty selfie, join a community, do a challenge, stay positive, set your limits and share your recipes for healthy eating. 

The post 7 Ways to Power Your Workouts With Social Media appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

So, if you have 1,000 visitors to a web page and 200 of them fill out a form, then 20 of them actually purchase the product in question, you have a 20 percent action rate (200 of the 1,000 filled out the form … they took the action) and a two percent conversion rate (20 of the 1,000 actually “converted” to a customer.)

Search engine optimization and e-commerce experts like this motor vehicle lawyer live in this math. They know how many visitors to a given site or page it takes to produce one action. They then know how many of those actions they need to produce one conversion. They focus their energies then on two areas:

• Drive the requisite numbers to the page to result in the projected conversions for their business’s success
• Optimize the site or page so it takes fewer visitors and/or actions to achieve the same outcome

The more efficient the action and conversion rates on the back side of the site or page, the less work there is on the front side to get people there. So, in essence, this math is a microcosm of an effective business: Reduce costs and maximize revenue.

Your challenge this week is to determine what your action rate and conversion rate for your website, landing page or even social sites are. Then you can start reducing costs and maximizing revenue to optimize what you’re doing.

The post Good Digital Marketing = Good Math appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Not every business owner is a social media master though, and to someone that isn’t active on the platforms daily, it can be a very overwhelming situation. Social media doesn’t have to be intimidating nor difficult, as long as you have a grasp on the basics. To help, here are five essential tips to help you succeed on social media.

1. Map out a social media marketing plan in advance.

The biggest mistake a lot of business owners make is not having a plan and just blindly posting content across social media. Without a strategy mapped out you lack specific campaign goals and a way to track your performance.

“Using a scheduling tool like Hootsuite is the easiest way to plan in advance,” suggests Jim Rafferty, CEO of Wabash Power. “If you carve out a few hours you can import an entire campaign that will take you through the next month. This allows you to think of a solid plan and not just fly by the seat of your pants daily.” You should also make sure each campaign has a clearly identified goal, whether it’s gaining email subscribers or generating direct purchases.

2. Focus on engagement and brand building rather than selling.

Social media gives you direct access to a massive audience, but that doesn’t mean you should jam offers down their throat. “Social media gives you access to so much quality attention, and it’s a great environment for building brand awareness,” advises David Sessford, Managing Director at Ready Steady Sell.

Use social media as a platform to inform and educate, and when you do that correctly you will build trust and relationships that translate into sales, brand supporters, and repeat customers. Consumers are constantly flooded with direct offers, so stand out by making a solid connection without a hard-sell at first.

3. Be consistent and understand it’s a long-term strategy.

A lot of people post on social media for a couple weeks and then declare that it doesn’t work for their particular business. They fail because they give up much too soon. You can’t expect to experience results from social media right away. It takes being consistent over a long period of time before you will see social media pay off.

You can experience huge gains if just a single social media post receives the right attention and goes viral, but that may take months before you are able to experience what that type of traction can provide. You will need to consistently post content and learn what your target audience engages with in order to plan and adjust.

4. Create an authentic brand voice on social media.

If you look at the companies that perform very well on social media you will see that they let their personality shine. “Look at Wendy’s Twitter for example. They are the perfect example of how a brand can use its voice on social media to create raving supporters and generate interest in what they offer without just posting blatant advertisements throughout their feed,” says Chris Dziak, CEO of Pure Nootropics.

Now, you don’t have to turn your social media feed into jokes and comedy, but it is important to let your personality show, whether it’s sarcastic or serious. When you do this correctly and engage with your followers in an authentic manner it constantly strengthens your brand’s voice.

5. Always analyze the analytical data available to you.

There is so much free data available within each social media’s network for business profiles. “From Twitter analytics to Facebook reach stats and Instagram’s insights that are available for business profiles, you can easily see what is working, what isn’t, and then adjust in order to drastically improve your results,” suggests Michael Plaza, CEO of Compare the Financial Markets.

Commit to spending 10 to 15 minutes looking at your social media analytics every couple of days and you will quickly learn how to navigate through the data and understand it. It will take some time, but the self-education is worth it once you learn how to optimize and pivot in order to experience improved results.

The post 5 Essential Social Media Tips Every Small Business Must Follow appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Listen to any digital marketing consultant type these days and they’ll tell you that you won’t be able to get a job in 3-5 years if you don’t build your personal brand. Mark Schaefer’s new book Known is a step-by-step guide to doing so. (It’s worth the read. Great ideas in there.)

But just how many personal brands can the world take? And with all the social media talking heads promoting the concept, how much credibility do personal brands really have anyway?

Why I’m Asking

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think it’s a bad idea to have your own website, masterful control of your social networks, rank well for keywords around the type of work you do (or want to do) and the like. It’s not hurtful to have a consistent reputation and image when people go looking for you online.

But at what point to employers say, “They’re too focused on them and not the work. I’ll pass?”

In my experience in the digital marketing world, there are two kinds of people: Personal brands and people who get shit done. The personal brand types write and speak and seem to know a lot. But few have case studies and projects to share to show their knowledge translates to business value.

What good is making a name for yourself if you can’t show that the name is more than a hood ornament? You can sell me something that looks like a Porsche, but if it runs like a Yugo, I’m going to be pissed.

It Goes For Me Too

Part of the reason I ask these questions is I’ve encountered them in my own experience. I’ve always toed a weird line between the talking head, influencer type and the practitioner who does good work. I’ve been accused of both – good or bad – and have both gained and lost as a result.

Recently, I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that no matter what my outputs, some clients and even colleagues will never see me as more than a speaker/writer/talking head – The Personal Brand. Never mind my case studies, happy clients, awards or output they demanded and received.

At the end of the day, the Personal Brand only goes so far. I can land a client or two, score a contract or two, but none of them last and provide for my family if I can’t back up the hype with the production. And sometimes, even the hype itself means people expect more than you’re able to produce. It makes me pause to wonder if the hype is actually worth it at all.

Might one be better off just selling themselves on their ability to get shit done and steer clear of the Personal Brand? In many instances, I’d say so.

What Does It Mean For You?

The good news is that personal branding isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. You don’t have to be a speaking/writing/pied-piper-of-your-industry to have a strong personal brand. Share your professional wisdom and perspective frequently on a social network or two. Guest post on a blog now and then. Be a podcast guest and share your insights from time to time.

You don’t have to have a website and a color scheme and a wardrobe and speak at all the big conferences. You don’t need a podcast or a vlog or a book.

At the end of the day you just need proof points out there that show your next client or employer than you’re really good at what you do. And that doesn’t require the Personal Brand all these talking heads try to sell you.

The post The Dilemma of the Personal Brand appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Take a look at any social listening scan for the sources of the data and Twitter can account for half, two-thirds, three-fourths or more of the social media conversations.

Things Are Changing…

But the social listening platforms have conveniently forgotten to stress that they do not index the vast majority of Facebook, which is hidden behind privacy firewalls. At the Conversation Research Institute, our testing shows that anywhere from 45% to 90% of all conversations about a given topic online happen on Facebook.

We’re missing that understanding. And we don’t have much time before our only look into it will be gone.

Facebook has told social listening partners it will sunset its search access, broadly known as Facebook Topic Data, in September of this year. I, for one, am disheartened by the news since I spend most of my days deciphering online conversations for brands. Facebook Topic Data is the only way to see what conversations look like on the world’s largest social network

But there is a glimmer of hope and it comes in the form of Facebook Advertising. More specifically, Facebook Ad Manager.

A Brave New Facebook Targeting Option

When Facebook Topic Data is sunset in September, there will likely be an entirely new suite of products offered by a handful of Facebook’s partners that add more depth and breadth to its advertising targeting features.

I’m told by multiple people at a half dozen companies that the indications are that the added feature sets will likely bring targeting based on conversation dynamics to the table.

If you read the tea leaves a bit, this means Facebook Topic Data wasn’t really driving the kind of revenue Facebook hoped for and is thus turning conversation data into targeting data. It will perhaps allow you to target your advertising to anyone talking about Topic A in a negative (or positive) sentiment and/or using the qualifying behavior indicators (like want, buy, hate, love, etc.).

Moving Forward

This is all conjecture on my part. But it is also hopefulness. Since Facebook’s walled garden is the most plentiful in the conversation research set, I want at it. If these advertising features are what Facebook’s partners have been challenged to create (which I think they are), then researching conversation on Facebook may not be dead.

And advertising targeting is going to get a whole lot more sophisticated by year’s end.

Whether you’re a researcher or an advertiser, the prospect is exciting. Here’s to 2017!

The post Why 2017 Will Be The Year of Targeting appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

There were over 800,000 posts on various social networks in the last year about planning a trip to some part of Asia. I was doing the conversation research for the Travel Blog Expo (TBEX) Asia-Pacific with the intent of telling travel brands and writers what North American consumers talked about online when they indicated they were planning vacations to Asia.

As we dove into the conversations, the phrase “won’t recommended” kept popping up, so we dove in to analyze why this negative term would be so prominent in posts about traveling to that part of the world. Granted, from a high level, it looked like a good portion of the people who talked about traveling to Asia were mentioning that it wasn’t recommended. When you drilled down to just the negative conversations, it was by far the most prominent sub-category.

For those selling travel to Asia, or for Asian destination marketers, this was a very bad thing. But that’s why you should always validate your social listening tools, charts and graphs with good, old-fashioned, human analysis.

Things Are Not Always What They Seem…

We furthered the research to categorize and organize any mention of the phrase “not recommended” and discovered some interesting commonalities. Paralleling the frequency of this phrase in negative conversations were the phrases “#GreatWall” and “#Terracotta warriors.” But those phrases were positive in sentiment.

Our experience tells us this means a single post was driving these results. It was one that was likely repeated over and over again – perhaps re-blogged or re-tweeted. And sure enough, we found it:

One influential blogger’s tweet was the culprit. Morgan Magazine has over 100,000 very engaged followers on Twitter. The post garnered hundreds of likes, shares and re-tweets. It was also echoed on other platforms beyond Twitter.

How Did This Change Our Insight Reporting?

First of all, any high volume negative topic is something to be concerned about in online conversations. It’s high volume for a reason, but you need to know a lot more before you actually know the reason.

In this case, one popular influencer made a flat statement about China. His network of fans and followers amplified it to the point of making its finer points emerge in a year-long look at the topic. So if you sell vacation packages to China, perhaps this is someone you want to reach out to, get to know and perhaps partner with to expose the good about traveling to China.

But this insight in and of itself doesn’t mean you have an image problem. It means you have one person who doesn’t think the world of you as a destination. The insight would be different if 1,500 different people said the same thing. But they didn’t. They simply echoed what one person said.

Validation Is As Crucial As Collection

Too often, brands who subscribe to social listening platforms forget that validating the data is just as important as finding them in the first place. But in order to do this, you have to have the time and analysis expertise to put your data through the rigors of proofing, testing, and validation.

This is why human analysis is required before you can act on a given insight that emerges from social listening platforms. It’s not enough to assume the software is right. You have to validate it is, then move forward with actions as a result.

To better understand your social listening data or see how conversation research can help your brand, drop me a line!

The post Are Your Social Listening Insights Actually Valid? appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

The gap between the day-to-day social media staff members and the brand management team reminded me how important it is to have internal feedback loops built into your marketing effort so that no stone is left unturned in analyzing and optimizing your marketing.

A brand manager, VP for marketing and event a C-level executive should know how a brand’s audiences vary from network to network. Better yet, when there is a vast difference between who your audience is online and what audience you’re targeting, some deeper internal discussions need to happen.

I’ve encountered brand managers in the past who were insistent that they know their target audience. They refuse to acknowledge any data that refutes their understanding of who buys, who uses or who talks about their brand. Sometimes they’re right. I’ve met a few, however, who were wrong. They weren’t managing their respective brand much longer.

Your Targeting May Not Be Off

But when a demographic profile of one’s Twitter or Facebook audience doesn’t match step-for-step with your primary target, it doesn’t necessarily mean your targeting is off. Here’s why:

The people talking about your brand may not be the people who buy your brand. Or, the people who talk about your brand online may not be the audience of influencers who persuade others to buy your brand offline.

This is why social analytics alone cannot fuel major swings in brand strategy. These assertions need to be confirmed with other, more traditional research. Focus groups, buying data, trends among your target consumers, influencer analysis (on- and off-line), all add up to the pool of knowledge you need to make these types of decisions.

“social analytics alone cannot fuel
major swings in brand strategy”

But social conversations are a great place to start. If you’re performing conversational research on your brand, you have the opportunity to gut-check who you’re communicating with, whether or not you’re successful in that communication and understand what other audiences or influencers are also paying attention.

The brand in my earlier analysis had about a 50-50 gender split on Twitter, but two-thirds of its Facebook audience were women. It happens that this brand’s core target is male. While the Facebook data on who’s talking about them isn’t alone enough to force a switch in brand targeting, it certainly is enough to warrant further investigation, validation and analysis.

Maybe – just maybe – the brand is focused on the wrong target audience. But maybe they’re just fine because the men they target fuel conversations from and with the women who happen to talk more about brands and products in that category.

My recommendation is to use conversation research as a starting point for your curiosity, then let the data guide you. Confirm, validate, refute or adjust based on more analysis of online conversations, adding in some focus groups or survey instruments and perhaps reviewing industry data for the product category.

Social media conversations may be the only place your targeting seems awry. But if they are, it’s at least worth considering perhaps there’s more to it than what you might think.

The post What Happens When Your Audience Isn’t Your Target appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

With your digital marketing, it’s imperative to extend that consistency to your audience. BMW can’t deliver luxury or prestige over the Internet, but its content certainly can build on or around those concepts. Your messaging, campaigns and programming through your website, app, social channels and more should feel like your brand.

It’s about understanding your brand’s DNA. This is the core experience your brand delivers to consumers. And it’s hard to pinpoint sometimes because it might be an idea or a feeling, not a tangible thing. Apple fans might say the brand delivers innovation in technology, innovation in design or even a supreme user experience. But for many Apple fans, the brand delivers a feeling of sophistication, of elegance, of style. They feel like a more refined person because they own a Mac.

Social Media Explorer started as an outlet for me to share ideas on the emerging world of social media marketing. Because of my personality and an ill-fated conference I attended in the fall of 2007, it quickly became a flag bearer to stir up the conversation. That attitude led to me co-authoring No Bullshit Social Media.

The DNA of this blog is that of the instigator. The disruptor. We call it like we see it and call those out who aren’t doing it right. That has been the unwritten promise of Social Media Explorer.

Deviating from that Brand DNA would be a mistake.

That’s why I was tickled the first time I chatted with Drew Neisser about taking over control of the site. Not only did he want to know the backstory of SME, but he wanted to build the direction of it around that. Drew gets it. And he gets you. He knows why you’re here. And he plans on delivering on that promise.

And yeah … I’ll be around, too.

So let that serve as an all points bulletin to the snake oil salesmen, self-promotional blowhards and social media douchebags out there. The naysayers and social media skeptics should pay attention, too. Social Media Explorer won’t let you over-promise and under-deliver. It also won’t let you write off a good thing.

SME explores the new with a mindful eye on driving your business. SME analyzes the world with the intent of sharing learning to improve your business. SME holds accountable those who influence businesses about social marketing to protect your business.

It’s in our DNA and our audience demands it.

The post Do You Understand Your Brand DNA? appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

If digital marketing and social media talking heads really want to be honest about what they know, they’ll tell you they’ve learned a lot from advertising through the years. It has been the primary way companies communicate messages to consumers for decades. The Super Bowl has become the annual celebration of the best advertising out there and as many people watch it for the spots as the ballgame. We even idolize the golden age of advertising represented in a dandy television show.

For four years, I had the honor of working at Doe-Anderson, a fine advertising agency in my hometown of Louisville, Ky. Through brand partners, I’ve been in strategy and working session and worked with people from BBDO, J Walter Thompson, Saachi & Saachi and more. And the ad-side folks I’ve worked with through the years have certainly contributed to my knowledge and understanding of marketing and communications — even the principles I evangelize in the digital marketing and social media worlds.

A few of them:

We Are In The Holy Smokes Business

How do you judge a good advertisement? One that makes you laugh? One that makes you cry? One that leaves you with the notion you have to buy that item or at least feel good about it? The common thread is that a good advertisement pushes an emotional trigger. It makes you say, “Holy Smokes! That’s ________ (insert adjective here).”

This is the exact payoff good content has — content that you might use on your blog, Facebook feed, Instagram and more. The content (ad) must be memorable (elicit a response) for it to be successful.

Repetition Is Key

There are a handful of last night’s Super Bowl advertisements you will never see again. They put all their marketing eggs into a moment in time and blew their budget on the big game. They will see some pick up (hopefully) for the trouble today and throughout the week. But then they’ll disappear into irrelevance.

Why? Because repetition is the key to delivering a message. You cannot trust that people will hear or see a marketing message once and get it. You have to drill it into their heads.

My friends in Louisville hate this guy:

In social channels, this translates to consistency of message. If you’re trying to be the fun and witty “friend” then you have to be that all the time, not just during the Super Bowl or Oscars or whatever live tweeting moment you wish to get snarky with. That content strategy needs to emit the same light all the time. The more consistent you are with voice and tone, the more people will remember you as being that “friend” indeed.

You Don’t Have To Sell To Do Well

The Dove commercial from last night’s game paid tribute to Dads. It was a tear-jerker of a spot for anyone who loves being a father. It drove people to submit their own idea of how, “care makes you stronger with #RealStrength.” The touching tribute to dads had a brief moment of product shot, but it never tried to sell their care products for men.

Like Budweiser and other commercials, Dove was not trying to sell us soap. They were trying to sell us an idea. They hope that the idea they sell — in this case appreciation for fathers — is a powerful idea you’ll associate them with the next time you need to purchase body wash or skin care items for your husband, father, or self. Budweiser’s puppy spots don’t sell beer. They sell values the brewer wishes consumers to identify as part of their brand.

And these spots work to associate brands with those values. Ford is about Quality. Never mind that as of 2011, Ford had more vehicle recalls than all but two car makers.

In the digital and social space, who does well? Companies that provide usefulness, are helpful, or are entertaining. Not ones that push product and deals down our throats.

Lessons Learned

Instead of acting like social media or digital marketing are different than advertising, or that advertising is a dying industry, what do you say we call it like it is? Advertising teaches us a lot about how to communicate effectively as a brand in any medium. Yes, there are differences. No, they aren’t vast.

Maybe that understanding can help us build smarter brands that serve our customers well while driving the bottom line numbers, too.

The post Three Lessons This Digital Marketer Learned from the Ad-Side appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

The study focuses on the digital space, so there’s no real comparison to off-line tactics or execution, but with that in mind, here’s my quick read of the report which surfaced a few interesting nuggets:

• Blogging is the one area that seems to be in decline. While 59 percent of respondents say it’s effective, that’s the lowest number reported among a couple dozen tactical areas. Blogging also has the highest degree of people saying it’s not very effective. This is disappointing to me. If positioned properly and with the target audience, not company, in mind, a blog can be a powerful search engine and customer magnet. Plus, you own it. You don’t own Facebook or Twitter.
• Social advertising is among the chief areas marketers say they’ll increase budgets for this year. That’s right in line with what should happen as Facebook and other channels ratchet down organic post reach. We’re going to have to think about paid media in our social planning from now on. It’s not fair, in my opinion — your social audience has opted in to see your content — but it’s the way of the world in Zuckerbergland.
• Quality of leads, new business development and customer acquisition are three of the top four problem areas marketers identified in relation to digital channels. Since social media is a major focus of digital marketing these days, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Social is a much more natural fit for customer retention rather than acquisition. Though I think the push toward social advertising is going to correct that frustration a bit.

Perhaps the most interesting chart in the report, at least to me, was the effectiveness rating of various social networks:

As expected, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn dominate the channel usage. Google+ and YouTube are hanging in there, but then there’s a huge drop-off in usage of blogging. Instagram, Pinterest and even podcasts are used by less than 34 percent of the total.

Pinterest, surprisingly, is only used by 24 percent and 15 percent of those say it’s not very or not at all effective.

More broadly, though, this chart seems to say that most marketers are mostly satisfied with the channels they are using. And that’s where I call bullshit. Finding a marketing manager or CMO to say, out loud, “We’re very happy with what we’re getting out of this social channel,” is like finding a fully inflated football at Gillette Stadium. They’re few and far between.

So while the data was gathered from 5,000 marketers, we have to question whether or not the bias of being asked by social companies (Salesforce Marketing Cloud and LinkedIn) had an effect. Sure, you can argue that if a CMO isn’t happy with what they’re getting out of a network, they’d stop using it, so the answers would be holistically biased to the positive.

Yes, if pressed, we could all find an effective use of any given channel. But the truth is — at least from talking to brands and agencies and business owners around the country — we aren’t typically doing that.

Are you or your clients satisfied with what you’re getting out of social channels? Do your experiences line up with this data? I’d be curious to know. It seems like reality and this report are a bit dissimilar.

The comments are yours.

The post Report Shows Social Channel Effectiveness … Maybe appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Every marketing hack and their brother has a podcast now. Most of them are video podcasts repurposed as audio as a supplement. Some people have both audio podcasts and short videos to drive their activity. And, if you’re paying attention, you’ve also noticed that the smart ones are using more and more images – specifically text on photo – to capture they eye as people scroll through their feeds.

Could it be that 2015 could finally be the year of multimedia in digital marketing? We’ve heard the talking head set say “this year will be the year of video” every year for about eight years now. Maybe all this earned media roadblocking is going to be blown up by those with better media to be social with.

The Case For Video

Video gives your brand a personality, a face and a voice. While there is still something to be said for production value, good videos don’t have to be complex. A smart person looking into a web cam and saying something smart is often good enough.

Maybe you can offer up a short customer tip of the day, commentary on a relevant industry news development or even current event or even a deeper effort with a webisode series focused on humor or even drama that is somehow relevant to your audience and brand. Having video in your content arsenal can make a lot of sense as you can distribute it as your content of the day on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, your blog, email, YouTube and more.

The Case For Podcasting

Not only is podcasting on the rise in terms of content being created, but also in terms of listeners consuming that content. Keep in mind, it may not be that everyone is plugging into iTunes, subscribing to a podcast feed and listening to them on the commute in. Embedding the podcast playback stream in a blog post is just as effective at delivering the content and is one-click service for the audience.

The on-demand iteration of radio continues to catch on and give people something different to consume and in a different way. Like video, your creativity and ability to come up with continual streams of information to engage your audience will be tested. But if you can find the right person to sit and talk about the major issues your customer face, the challenges of your business or industry or even lightly related events and news items for 20-minutes a week or so, you can take a piece of that ear-share.

And keep in mind, too, that with the right tagging and broad distribution, podcasts can open entirely new audience segments and channels you’ve not used before.

The Case For Imagery

Meme-like images – text on photo – are becoming more and more popular with consumers and brands. Someecards may have started the trend, but now many companies and even people are jumping on the meme bandwagon to deliver relevant messages in compelling, visual ways that stop customers in their newsfeed tracks.

Memes if done well are essentially miniature outdoor boards for your messaging. An attractive product shot or friendly face along with a compelling message, which links people back to a blog post or call to action on your website can be incredibly effective if done well.

I’ve even been experimenting with promoting my blog posts through Instagram by adding some teaser text to smartly posed selfies. At worst it reminds my network there I have some new content for them. At best, I’m driving an additional set of traffic to my posts on JasonFalls.com they aren’t aware of.

Do What Fits Your Capability

Not everyone can do video. Not everyone can do podcasting. Within each one of those, there can be a complex web of to-dos to plan, record, produce and publish. Sure, they can be done simply, but the more you put into them – as a general rule – the more you’ll get out of them.

Text on photo is super easy. My old business partner Aaron Marshall has made that possible with his app Over. You can do it on your phone or tablet, shoot it to yourself or one of your social networks and embed or distribute from there. The only thing preventing you from creating memes is your ability to work a camera phone. If you can’t do that you should probably consider out-sourcing your media creation. Heh.

The bottom line is that multimedia can be done by just about anyone and without a whole lot of time or complexity. So think it through: What content theme can you bring to life with more than just the written word in 2015? Now go do it.

The post Video, Audio and Imagery May Set Your Brand Apart in 2015 appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Today, G2 Crowd issued its first real rankings, this one on the best social collaboration tools. Salesforce Chatter, Lync, VMWare Socialcast and Podio each qualified as a “Leader,” meaning ti has a high customer satisfaction score and a substantial market presence. “High Performers” with good customer satisfaction ratings but smaller market presences included Wrike, Slack, Flowdock, Central Desktop and Confluence. Looking at the plotted chart, it’s clear that Salesforce’s Chatter stands out among this set.

Yammer, Jabber, Jive and IBM Connections were in the “Contender” category, meaning they had a strong market presence, but lacked in customer satisfaction scores. Bitrix24 was the only tool measured that was low in both customer satisfaction and market presence, according to the ratings and reviews on G2 Crowd.

So is this useful information? Certainly. But keep in mind that there are many other social collaboration tools not even rated. G2 Crowd only uses companies than have a minimum number of reviews (10, I think). So if your favorite tool isn’t there, perhaps you should go submit a review and encourage others to do so.

For instance, I have a client — Red e App — that is an outstanding internal collaboration tool, but is intended to be mobile-first and address a very specific market need. So comparing it to Chatter, for instance, is unfair since they address two very different problems. But it should be on the list, even if it’s not ideally labeled as an internal collaboration platform. (Yes, I’ve pointed out to the client we need to get some reviewers to head G2 Crowd’s way.)

And, as a bit of forthcoming to add to the disclosure, I’d guess Red e App would rank well in the customer service rankings but not as well in the market presence factors. I’d probably guess it would be around the same plot as Slack in the High Performers category. At least for now.

The point is that G2 Crowd is only as useful as the volume of its reviews. So the more we all add, the more useful this site becomes.

The premium content you can subscribe to on G2 Crowd features more than just the Social Collaboration Grid. If you’re in the market for a toolset — in social or beyond — it’s probably wise to give G2 Crowd a look see.

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