Listen
New Strategies for Today’s Social Media Landscape
The social pros at Convince & Convert are doing what they do best—making some solid predictions and serving up super insightful tips on social media marketing. In today’s Listen they cover a range of hot-button topics, from the overwhelm of ephemeral content (disappearing “stories”) to how social media platforms are no longer “leveling the playing field.”
There’s a lot to take away from this, so we’re getting right to it. The meat of the matter doesn’t begin until 11:00—start there.
- (11:15) How ephemeral content has developed and changed the social landscape over the past year
- (11:55) How ephemeral/perishable content has “jumped the shark”
- (13:10) Why there is no real long-term benefit of ephemeral content
- (13:40) Does the attention yield true benefits? “It’s not like a TV commercial, which creates attention, and then, presumably causes demand”
- (14:05) The questions Adam gets from clients at Salesforce regarding confusion about ephemeral content
- (15:40) How simplifying the user interface can create a drastic shift in demographics for a social media platform
- (16:45) The crucial shift marketers must make to focus Gen Z in 2018
- (17:15) After zero acquisitions in 2017, will we see any platforms sunset in 2018?
- (18:20) If a new platform wants to emerge, it’s going to have to “fundamentally reexamine what connectivity means”
- (18:30) Why the next platform is going to have to do something dramatically different that it’s clearly a differentiated experience… What would that look like? Augmented reality + social media interactivity?
- (21:00) How the world of social media could shift in the coming year
- (21:40) Why it’s so critical to have a social strategy that’s only 90 days. Anything beyond that, “you’re just making things up”
- (24:00) The power of live video and why video has become one of the essential tools for social media marketing
- (32:00) “Is social becoming a circumstance where the rich get richer?”
- (32:45) Why it’s better to go more in-depth on a couple of social channels rather than trying to build a presence on all channels
- (33:50) What it means to be a “social sommelier”
Read
The 15 Best Editing Tips to Craft Clear Content
In today’s world of content, it’s not the longest content that wins, it’s not the company who publishes the most content, and it’s not even the most timely content that wins. You know what wins? The best content.
Having the best content means that it’s well-written and well-edited. Don’t have both? It’s not the best. To have both, you have to be a seriously good self-editor or have a seriously good editor on hand.
Basically, what we’re saying is…if you suck at editing, your content will suffer. Good news, though. Today’s Read has 15 tips to help you become a self-editing pro. Your content will thank you for it and your audience will thank you for it. Here’s 8 tips to get you started:
- Read your writing out loud. This technique will help you notice clunky sounding sentences, unclear phrases, and spots where you stopped being authentic.
- Cut it down. Bad news: 15% of what you just wrote needs to be cut out. Go through your shiny new blog draft and try to identify sections that don’t further the narrative. The Carnage writers love the Hemingway Editor to help with this.
- Make paragraphs smaller and sentences shorter. This is especially true for web content.
- Vary sentence length and structure. Yeah, this kinda contradicts the point above, but if all of your sentences are short, your content flow will be clunky.
- Avoid adverbs. These are words like “very,” “totally,” “really,” “definitely,” etc. Hey, but sometimes you just reallllly need an adverb so use your own judgment here.
- Drop the jargon. Stop using fancy words like “utilizing” and “leveraging” when you can just use “use.”
- Take your time. Editing is time-consuming and that’s a good thing. Don’t view it as an afterthought.
- Throw weak verbs and adjectives out the window. Today’s Read has a massive list of stronger verbs you can use in place of those weak ones.
Still 7 more to go…
Oh, and as a bonus, CoSchedule threw together this handy self-editing checklist.
Watch
Whopper Neutrality
Net Neutrality has been repealed, which is bad news for marketers, but there is still some hope that it can be saved. And Burger King is leading the charge.
What? Burger…King? Like, the restaurant that makes Whoppers? YUP! The crowned hamburger is doing what it can to save Net Neutrality by repealing Whopper Neutrality. Their repeal means that customers either have to pay more to get their Whoppers now, or pay less and wait up to 15-minutes for it.
BK recorded their customers’ reactions, and as expected, no one was happy about having to pay $26 to get a Whopper now. Get ready to watch some fast-food freakouts.
All in all, this Whopper Neutrality ad is a deliciously simple explanation of how the Net Neutrality repeal will affect the average American.
“We need to have social sommeliers. Just like a wine sommelier pairs the right food with the right wine, we need to make sure we’re using fewer social platforms and pick one or two that are really most important for our brand.”
Adam Brown
