Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Too many businesses produce content on so many topics that it’s clear they haven’t taken the time to learn what their audience really wants to read.

In other words, these content marketers don’t know for whom they’re writing. There are two ways to solve this problem along with some helpful tools:

Identify your target audiences, find out where they reside, and the topics they discuss.
Find out what your competitors write.
What does your target audience want from you?

Finding where your target audience hangs out online and what they share should inform your content development....

With so many advances in smart technology these days, marketing professionals, content creators, and their teams need to keep up with the availability of tools that help reduce their workload and maximize their output.


Yet, many don’t have the time to investigate which tools will help them the most. To help you thrive in this era of smart content, we share information about seven useful tools that can help you create more effective content and cut down on the time it takes to create it....

The key factor is not keyword density, back-links, tags or optimisation, it is sharing performance on social networks.

Now brands looking to benefit from content are faced with a tougher question: How to create content that people enjoy enough to share?

Adding value gets better long-term results than extracting it.

Understanding this statement as your top-level motivation is the key to the success of content strategy today....

Content marketing was big in 2014. Last year, more businesses began regularly investing time and money into content marketing than ever before. That’s not much of a surprise when you consider the following facts found in a recent writtent.com blog post:

Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about three times as many leads. (Source)
78% of CMOs believe custom content is the future of marketing. (Source)
Website conversion rate is nearly 6 times higher for content marketing adopters than non-adopters (2.9% vs 0.5%). (Source)
If you haven’t yet taken the time to invest in developing and implementing content marketing strategies for your business, now is the time....

To actually attract and entertain your social media following, small businesses should definitely be posting several times a day from their business’ Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The social posts should be high quality and interesting, or you'll never be successful in growing your following. It's also crucial to make sure that small businesses are effectively using their social profiles and followers to promote their business and increase sales. All these things are easier said than done though right?

Well, here’s a handy guide full of great (and easy!) ideas to populate your social feeds with....

In addition to the Discover, Create and Engage modules, we have included a guide for journalists that will explain how to get started on Facebook or simply grow your presence. We’ve heard from journalists that they need more information when deciding between setting up a Page or a profile and about how to manage privacy settings. The “Getting Started” course seeks to answer all of those questions and covers key steps for building out a professional journalistic voice on the platform, including how to apply for the Facebook blue badge that indicates verification.

In the coming weeks, we will also commence a series of webinars on the site which will be tailored to journalists who are both new and old to Facebook. These webinars will be organized according to new products and features, a person’s level of experience using Facebook as a journalist, and their role (newsgatherer, content creator, or audience engagement specialist)....

Do you create your own images for social media?

Are you happy with their performance?

With a few simple tweaks, you can optimize images for greater visibility on social media and in search engine results.

In this article you’ll find three tips to optimize your social media images for better online performance.

Are you always running out of ideas for new blog posts? Need some help generating new and useful content for your readers?

It’s well known that a blog with regular, fresh content that people like to read is great for generating targeted web traffic and improving your SEO. So don’t fall victim to the dreaded writers block, keep yourself stocked up with a mammoth list of things to blog about.

The guys at Digital Marketer have put together a comprehensive list of post ideas in the infographic below....

When you're first starting to create visual content, one of the easiest things to overlook is the image file type. It's easy to get caught up in picking the right fonts, colors, and graphics to support your final project, so when you get to that final stage to pick a file type ... you just breeze on past it. 

But picking the wrong file type can be more disastrous than you'd think. Certain types could make your final design look distorted and unattractive, thereby undoing all the meticulous work you put into creating the image. 

Beyond the aesthetics, some file types take up more memory than others. If you put those file types on your website, you could end up unknowingly slowing down your site's speed (and we all know that that could have an impact on your SEO).

To make sure you're avoiding those mistakes, this infographic from WhoIsHostingThis.com will walk you through the best practices of choosing the right file types for your visual content. Read up on the whole process below. ...

There is no fun in “it depends” when it comes to content length so here are a few guidelines, from tweets to blogs.

How long should everything be?

When Twitter was born, suddenly we learned to converse more efficiently, directly, and creatively. Once in a while, we still complain regarding Twitter’s 140-rule but according to a research by Buddy Media, you won’t be needing all 140 characters when you want to get your message across. The research found that tweets shorter than 100 characters get a 17% higher engagement rate. A similar research by Track Social in a study of 100 well-known brands garnered the same result.

Why less than 100? The research said that these “medium” length tweets get more re-tweets because they are long enough for the original poster to say something of value and short enough for a re-tweeter to add his or her comment....

So what are social media’s biggest questions?

To find out, we asked.

We solicited feedback and questions from our list of 40,000 email subscribers, asking each of you to ask us anything. And you did! We received hundreds of questions in response, each of which we’re eager to research and reply to. For starters, we grabbed 17 frequent asked questions about social media marketing. Come see how we might answer them....