Incredible data dump regarding social media sites and other websites, although some are saying that all sites are social these days.
Hot content or tribal? Who has the biggest content marketing drums?
Lets be honest, let us open the window and let the fresh air in.
Below are the top articles that Buzzsumo has ranked for the keyword, “content marketing”, for the last 7 days. They use a system based on social media signals.
My question is this.
Do you think these are the best articles on the subject, for the past 7 days?
Is the information essential reading and do they deserve all those social media votes?
Or is something else going on?
Has blogging become tribal?
More about the tribe, the bloggers you love, than about the information they share.
And then, turn it around to your blog, to the tribe you have, the niche you operate in. Is there something to be learned from the people in this list about how they do it, rather than what they tell use to do?
Sometimes it’s useful to question the direction we are going in.
1. Everything the tech world says about marketing is wrong
Techcrunch
2. Great Content ? Long-Form Content
Moz
3. The Buzzfeed Approach to Social Media Strategy
Moz
4. Our software must get better
sethgodin.typepad
5. Learn to Code: 16 Handy Resources to Get Started
Hubspot
6. 3 Tactics That’ll Make Writing Tighter as Easy as 1-2-3
Moz
7. Why You Should Forget About Linkedin
jeffbullas.com
8. Seth’s Blog: Awareness, trust and action
sethgodin.typepad
9. What Is Creativity? 21 Authentic Definitions You’ll Love [Free Poster] copyblogger
10. 23 Things to Consider When Creating Video Content
contentmarketinginstitute.com
My Top Three Tweets in the past 28 Days
How To Spruce Up Your Content Marketing Strategy In 2016
Why you are really competing with Kim Kardashian’s Ass
I thought these Twitter stats may be useful to you.
Why I no longer follow you or anyone on Twitter
Today is the start of Advent, it is the tradition of giving something up in advance of the festivities of Christmas. Although it is supposed to be the nearest Sunday to St. Andrews Day (Scotland FTW) I like to think it starts when the kids start opening the advent calendars which is the 1st of December.
Quasi Christian/pagan festivities aside (lets not go there right now) I thought it would be a good idea to give up social media for advent, well not entirely, but enough that it would be meaningful.
I have decided to defollow everyone on my Twitter account, it being my most used social media entity.
Will it hurt? Probably, but there are so many other outlets where I can get the skinny on what the people I follow are up to and of course I have quite a number of Twitter lists to keep me busy.
Am I afraid of people will no longer follow me because I no longer follow them? I hope not, but if they do were they worth following in the first place? And as this is a temporary experiment I can always follow back people again.
There is the issue of being able to message the people I follow back, but these days there are many paths to the door.
However, I thought it a waste to have a zero denoting the people I follow and quite powerful to have only one.
There are also people I have been following for over 7 years, I pretty much started using Twitter at the beginning. But Twitter is a tool, it is not the actual person who even the relationship, it is a conduit to connecting and communicating with people and pressing the reset button once in a while is a good thing, lets hope anyway.
So I have decided for advent to only follow one Twitter account, my favourite charity The National Autistic Society.
I shall now go and press the delete button, but first will get a cup of tea.
Will let you know letter if anything of note comes of this.
Update: I am now following Shelter Box, which is based in Cornwall and is an excellent charity. It also appeared with the Rock in San Andreas, so it has to be cool.
Why I am spending more time on LinkedIn
The more I use LinkedIn, the more I like it.
Yes, there are the people who still use it to dump content mentions and run. But I have found if you engage with people in a real, conversational manner time spent there can really pay dividends.
It helps I do this kind of thing for a job, although if your job is to sell “wholesale spices”, or “raw chocolate”, there are ways in which it would help out your business.
Dusting off my profile I noted my endorsements were a fantastic collection of amazing people in the field of Internet Marketing.
Not that I am fishing for more, but using this as a great example of social validation, and this is what LinkedIn is really good for.
I always check for the LinkedIn page of any new contact and will use any information I find to form an opinion, and if you don’t have a LinkedIn page I assume you don’t really want anyone to talk to you, or you are not doing much of any interest online.
It’s also a great place to publish content, as I did here with talking about my headline writing book.
There are plenty of guides out there to get to grips with it and any time invested will deliver a good ROI.
Most Socially Shared Pages for the Office of National Statistics
This screenshot is from the cognitiveSEO, Social Visibility analysis page of the website, ons.gov.uk, the Office of National Statistics.
If you are an infographics creator or heavily into stats to create content with, you will be well familiar with it. And if you have never heard of it then you probably have a life and should just head back to instagram.
What I want to do here is simply present something that most will never see. I doubt anyone has used their analysis credits and time to look at such a site as it’s hardly commercial. But what is interesting is the fact that journalists are heavy users of the site, which means that it may possibly reveal what journalists are interested in.
And we like journalists because they may write about our clients and give them a bit of publicity.
What’s interesting is you could go deeper and see which people Tweeted each page and see what else they are focused on. As the data reveals a lot about the motivation and goals of the people who bother to share this. As this is not a commercial site we assume that people are not doing this because they are paid to, but because it is useful to them.
I could spend a few hours giving my take on what this data can tell you, but I will just let you enjoy it and see if you can spot the obvious possibilities.
If you enjoy this kind of short, off the wall, data reveal. Let me know and I could do more. I like to dig into the areas that we never usually see as these can be the most revealing.
Never be a fan of the Platform
Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, are all platforms.
Social media is the mechanical part of reaching people, everything else is fluff.
Being a fan of a platform makes you irrational, the word fan being derived from “fanatical”.
You need to use the platform and not the other way round.
They are tools, and should be used only to fit into your strategy of Empire Building
Love shooting the breeze on Facebook?
Describe yourself as a “social media evangelist”? This is not for you, please leave now and never return.
Social media is a means to an end and not a destination.
We have been given social media to allow us to ruthlessly use it for our own gain. Never forget that a social media platform has been created to ruthlessly scrape cash into the alligator leather wallets of the venture capitalists. They don’t do it to be your friend.
Social Media is not about the Conversation
I Tweeted this week that social media is not about the conversation?
It had a few retweets and I thought I would post them here.
‘The C-Word’ RT @lyndoman: If anyone says “it’s about the conversation” at a social media conference, throw a sticky bun at them.
RT @lyndoman: If anyone says “it’s about the conversation” at a social media conference, throw a sticky bun at them.
RT @SceptreSocial: RT @lyndoman: If anyone says “it’s about the conversation” at a social media conference, throw a sticky bun at them.
RT @SceptreSocial: RT @lyndoman: If anyone says “it’s about the conversation” at a social media conference, throw a sticky bun at them.
RT @AutomotivePR: RT @SceptreSocial: RT @lyndoman: If anyone says “it’s about the conversation” at a social media conference, throw a sticky bun at them.
But am I not having a conversation right now and isn’t that a good thing?
Yes it is, but that is not what social media is about.
The “conversation” is a stepping stone, a communication tool that we use to get to our real objective.
I hear you say, “but the social media gurus say it’s all about the conversation.” Some do, but you will find that their real objective, the stuff that gets them out of bed an put on their Star Trek boxer shorts is selling their books, conference talks, advertising on their sites.
The conversation is simply the tool they power up to fund their collection of Sci Fi boxer shorts.
What social media is really about is persuasion, it’s about communicating a message that gets you to do stuff. The social media gurus are experts at getting you to do stuff and using the tool of conversation to promote that.
Nothing wrong with that, we all use various communication tools to persuade people to do what we want. You could say that a pair of very tight jeans is a communication tool design to persuade people to look at the wearer in a particular way.
Yes this is pushing the envelope a little. But communication is all around us, most of it designed to persuade. Even if it is to get you to press a button on a microwave when your Chunky Chile Chicken is done, just with a ping.
The ping on a microwave as a tool of persuasive communication?
Is that taking it too far?
Most Common Mistake of Businesses using Facebook Pages
It’s much more useful if a companies Facebook page is about the benefits of customers using the service, than about what is happening at the company, for example, “We have just had the walls painted a very interesting magnolia colour here at Donotgetit Design ltd…..”
It may be very important for you to give out this information, but it’s incredibly boring for any reader or follower. This is the biggest mistake I see when a business is updating their Facebook page.
It’s as if the boss has decided that the Facebook Page should be used as some kind of corporate newsletter, detailing the minutiae of everything the company does.
People don’t care about you or your business, they only care about what you can do for them.
Pinterest, C'mon Guys Get a Grip
Look, before you start running around the place with your knickers on your head screaming about how Pinterest is going to solve all online marketing problems known to mankind, I suggest you take a deep breath and consider a few things.
Maybe it’s the young, cool and froody crowd over at Mashmumble who are whipping up the frenzy over what is a generic system like Pinterest.
Pinterest is fantastic if your niche is visually stimulating, such as cat calenders, kitchen taps, motorbike paintwork, bathroom tiles etc. And I have a few friends who are really working Pinterest to their own advantage who happen to be in these niches. I myself have, ahem, a few accounts that focus on certain niches.
As far as I can see, it has the same flavour as Stumbleupon, Flickr etc. of course it’s not exactly the same. But if you found that these types of systems did not work for you in the past, I doubt it’s worth a look in.
There is no social media system which everyone should be a member of. I am a member of all I can be, but then this is my job. I can’t advise clients if I don’t join and try to game these systems to my own advantage.
6 months ago, G+ was the next big thing, as far as I can tell it’s definitely not. It shows some interesting aspects, but it’s not captured enough critical mass for it to be a Facebook killer.
If there are two social media systems to use it’s Twitter and Facebook. But they are no longer new and exciting and so maybe not worth the Maserati raving about them. Twitter and Facebook are established enough to easily work out if they are for you. With Pinterest, unless you are a social media professional or a middle aged women making cupcakes, I would look at all the social media systems that are on offer and chose the one that benefits you the most.
+1 Button
I have not yet put the +1 Google goodness button on my site. But, I think it’s definitely worth it. Although there have been rumblings that a + 1 is going to influence SERPS, I wouldn’t get too excited as I haven’t seen anywhere that says it happens when you are logged out.
My advice, let the first movers expend time and resources on figuring out if G + is worth it, then simply modify accordingly. If you are a business you really do not have to worry about G+ or G+1 or whatever it’s called.
Some commentators are hooked on change, rather than efficiency or adapting to the environment. This is the nature of the new social media landscape. Every few months a new network/website comes out and has people running around as if robotic cockroaches are in their pants nibbling at their bits screaming, “we must change now or we get left behind”.
I think I understand where this thinking comes from when looking at places like Myspace and others and noting how they were not developed. Facebook and Twitter (old web 2.0 media) continue to innovate and develop, therefore it’s a different landscape.
I don’t use FB much, but have found Twitter extremely useful following #hackgate #notw, as all journalists and most politicians Tweet. As far as I can tell they will continue to do so. Their thinking seems to be along the lines of, “Twitter does what we need it to do, why change?”
I look at the feed in G+ and it’s mostly a river of garbage. LOLcats, music videos, the odd politico rant against socialism. You may like such stuff, but my focus is elsewhere on more serious stuff.
Sure I can spend time organising my feed into different circles and stuff, and make sure I only get stuff from people I want. The thing is, in real life when you organise something you don’t expect to have to reorganise a few months later and this is exactly what will happen.
But, some people love to organise and move avatars of friends into and out of boxes and good luck to them. These types of people probably find comfort from the harsh world in doing such inefficient tasks.
And anyway, you can just hire these people for very little money to go build a +1 empire. For what little good it’s going to do.
You can’t automate the social process, it has to be organic.
It’s not a better system you need. It’s better implementation.
Feeling like crap from a bad cold, which may make this post more rambly than usual.
What will +1 result in for small business
Best Lisa Barone Article on G+ Today
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Making money with Google
Not Really a Top Ten Tips on How to Make Money Online with G+
I remember when Twitter started and I was following/being followed by about 200-300. The signal to noise ratio was very high. Because you couldn’t add pictures/video/music into the stream there was little distraction.
Things were focussed on the the business of SEO and Social Media Manipulation. All good stuff. Of course the “drinking coffee” Tweets started to seep in and things increasingly got tedious and banal.
But then an interesting thing happened to Twitter, normal people started to join it. The BBC and other mainstream media organisations came to the party. And it became a powerful tool for a marketer.
Looking at my G+ stream right now, there are pictures of cars, funny videos, reviews on TV shows and so forth. Very little of what I really want, which is SEO and social media and other media stuff. Now, you could say just create a circle and blah blah blah. Problem is, it’s not the people I need to separate, it’s the topics of the posts.
I am sure there are people have a lot of time on their hands to be able to tweak and learn a new social media system. I’m trying to be polite about this, but there seems to be a lot of “look at me I’m a first mover” kinda business going on.
If your business is built around telling me what social media tool to use in exchange for piles of cash, then it makes a lot of sense to be here.
But, I look at my stream in G+ and just see a bunch of distraction and just like Twitter can be, it’s a bit banal, a bit childish and a bit crap. Sorry if this offends, but my job is to write what I think, not to give borderline personality types the warm fuzzies.
I have my Google Reader, I have Twitter, I have Facebook, I have Google Alerts, I have Linked in, I have email. I very much doubt I will miss something if I don’t squat on G+ as client work ends up being late (as it mostly does, but that’s another story).
There is a big bag of reason to be on G+ and check it out. But if it does not fit my strategy it ends up being a big bag of wank. I think there are reasons to keep tabs on the system as these things tend to morph into something that wasn’t initially expected. But the idea of sitting here, eating carrot cake and ingesting the stream of G+ leaves me a bit queasy. Much better to go and read my copy of the Guardian which I bought in a pique of righteous indignation whilst tutting at the piles of unsold copies of the Sun.
More like this:
+ 1 button marketing
Will Google +1 Result in the End of Small Business Online?
It’s very simple.
Either Google +1 will affect the search engine results or it will not.
What if it does?
Will the frenetic dash that Digital Media Agencies mean that they then resell their networks to Corporate big gits to help crush the small independent, just as they have on the high street?
A little emotive perhaps.
But what does Google say?
When your ad is shared, Google notes its final landing page URL. When the same URL appears in an organic search listing, the organic listing will include the same personal annotations as would an ad.
Similarly, if a user +1’s one of your organic listings, ads with the same final landing page URL will include the same personal annotations, increasing the chance of your ads getting noticed.
+1’s (whatever their source — organic search, ads, or +1 buttons on publisher sites) is a signal that affects organic search ranking, but +1’s do not change quality scores for ads and ad ranking
How will the +1 button affect my organic search listings?
I had to read it a few times before it sunk in.
Rankings are not going to be affected. It’s just that some hairy seo/social-media-manipulator is going to have their mug next to the search results. As long as you are logged into Google and you circle/follow/adore the hairy seo/social-media-manipulator who has taken the valuable seconds of his existence to +1 it.
My point is this. Is the potential buyer of a cordless power drill, when searching for a Makita 18v going to see and then be influenced by the hairy seo/social-media-manipulator? Or is it going to only other hairy seo/social-media-manipulators who see the results.
I think the latter.
As a commercial persuasion proposition, the Google +1 button will be mostly worthless. The majority of the human effort going into the +1 will stay in the goldfish bowl which the hairy seo/social-media-manipulator lives.
Sometimes the hairy seo/social-media-manipulator does stuff not because it’s going to be of great benefit to the client, but because they have something to sell and the I-don’t-want-to-be-left-behind part of the brain gets excited.
People mistake influence in the hairy seo/social-media-manipulator bubble with an increase in wealth.
I’m not anti social media/social signals/crowd sourcing etc. far from it. But, most of what you hear about it these days is garbage, people need to sell books, fill conferences and get endorsed by the latest over invested fad and so desire has to be created.
It’s as if a food is being sold to hungry people which only increases their hunger.
Stop eating the empty calories.
More like this:
+ 1 button marketing
The Best Blog Post on Google +1 you will ever read
I hate to say this, I really do. But Google +1 will fail.
I don’t think this because I have done an in depth analysis of it’s features and tested it for the last 6 months it’s more instinctive, so take that for what it’s worth. My thinking is based on the following.
- Google does search very well, social is a different thing entirely
- Google isn’t hungry, failure will not move the share price or cause a significant bump in revenues
- Google can buy Twitter whenever it realises it can’t do social, so why try too hard
- Sheds of sock puppets are on standby to manipulate the system
- There is no void for Google + 1 to fill, we can already do what it offers and are embedded in other networks
- Social networks are powered by fundamental forces like sex, money, social approbation etc. I don’t see any of these primal forces being sated in the current features
There are a few more reasons I will save for the email list.
I hate saying all this because Google could have done it, they left it too late. I remember saying back in 2007 they should do something like this.
They have spent too much of the evening working on their PhD papers and turned up at the party with a bottle of Peach Schnapps wondering why the hot chicks have already left the party.
The other reason of course is that Google search is very, very good and it would be hard to improve it. Google Search and it’s commercial cousin Adwords are truly the works of genius. Which is why it feels awkward watching people get excited over this.
Ah well, gives SEO bloggers something to write about.
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