Love and Death

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6 Outdated Social Media Tactics That Need to Die

What’s your social media marketing plan consist of? Seriously, is it just blasting out links on Facebook and Twitter and waiting for traffic to come to you? If that’s all you’re doing on the socials, then you’re doing it wrong. You might be doing some other things wrong too.

So take a deep breath ’cause today we’re looking at 6 outdated social media tactics that you should stop doing right now, if you’re still doing them. ::crosses fingers that we’re not doing any of them::

• Only Posting Links. Social media is about being social. If you’re just posting links, you’re f*****g up.
• What to do instead: you can share links, but balance it with posts that don’t link anywhere, images that don’t link, conversation starters, etc.

• Jumping from Follow to Pitch. If you’re hitting your followers with an automated pitch for your product/services, you’re doing it wrong.
• What to do instead: you can still pitch to followers, but let them warm up first. Engage with them, add meaningful comments to their posts, and tag them in posts when relevant.

• Mass Following to Gain Followers. Following and unfollowing accounts might “work” but it really only works with other accounts that automatically follow anyone who follows them. This isn’t helpful. Stop it.
• What to do instead: Read this – 9 Tips to Get More Followers.

• Obeying “Best Times to Post” Studies. If you’re blindly following “best practices,” you’re screwing up. Your followers are a unique audience. Don’t treat them like an average of someone else’s research.
• What to do instead: Use Facebook Insights for Facebook, and simply test the other platforms! Start with a benchmark, and test based off of that.

• Not Optimizing Your Content for Sharing. Research shows that social sharing is declining. If you’re giving readers every available sharing option, you’re doing it wrong.
• What to do instead: Limit readers’ choices. Find the two or three most popular platforms for your audience, and put only those share icons on your web page. Also, use click-to-tweet pullouts that have pre-populated content.

Skipped over a few good suggestions…

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4 Case Studies Show How to Crush It With Out-of-the-Box Content Marketing

Content marketing, content marketing, content marketing!

Once brands caught wind that content marketing was the future, it didn’t take long for the storm to come a-blowin’. (Weather metaphors!) There’s a lot of content out of there. This means there is a lot of…really bad content out there. It also means there are some straight-up killer content marketing examples.

This article from Content Marketing Institute highlights four case studies that show how content marketing can be used to create true value. The post serves up the results, why it worked so well, and how to make the strategies work for your own business. Tight.

Shutterstock’s Annual Creative Trends Infographic

For its annual Creative Trends report, Shutterstock analyzes its customers’ search and download data to predict trends that will dominate the coming year. Then they distribute the results in an infographic.

Its 2017 Creative Trends infographic earned:

• Mentions in more than 100 articles
• 6 billion unique site visits
• 5,300 social media shares, 11,000 social media engagements

How to make this strategy work:

• Focus on the value of your content to your audience – content can only serve multiple audiences if it’s genuinely useful to multiple audiences
• Consider using data you have rather than spending time and money building and promoting a survey
• Don’t be afraid to share proprietary data if it could provide insights your audience can’t get anywhere else

SEMrush’s Easter Egg Hunt

SEMrush has more than 20 research tools for SEO, PPC, and content marketing, and an expanding list of features. With so much to offer, SEMrush has found it difficult to tell its users about new features and tools.

So, they gamified its educational process with a virtual Easter egg hunt, challenging users to find 15 “Easter eggs” by completing desired actions within various SEMrush tools.

Its Easter egg hunt, launched in April 2017, earned:

• More than 9,300 participants
• 8 million Twitter impressions (16% of those who tweeted had 1,000-plus followers)

How to make this strategy work

• Use content marketing outside of customer acquisition
• Invest time and resources improving your products and developing new features
• Spend time and resources developing a campaign to drive new feature adoption
• The best performing content is interesting, informative, and interactive

Way more content marketing goodness inside →

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Electric Love

You didn’t think we were gonna completely ignore Valentine’s Day, did ya?

Renault, a car company in France, dropped an animated, Pixar-style Valentine’s Day ad (didn’t know those were a thing, but here we are).

In the ad, a mailman delivers a package to a woman and immediately falls in love with her. In the following days, he makes attempts to get to know her while doing his daily deliveries. But, each time he gets close to her house, her dog hears his noisy truck and chases him off.

Until one day, when he’s given a new all-electric mail truck. Can’t ruin the ending of this one, you’ll just have to watch it.

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