When you log in to your brand’s social account, you encounter an environment of virtual noise and chatter. If you are on social, ‘hearing’ happens by default – where you see and hear everything around you to an extent that you have awareness about the most important topics and conversations. Listening, on the other hand, is an activity that requires your attention and concentration. It means you understand the sentiments behind the statements and get into a position where you are responding and not reacting. Social listening is done for multiple purposes. It is to identify brand advocates and dissuader. It is to get feedback that you didn’t actively ask for. It is to know the questions that prospects have in mind about your product or services. But one of the most important reasons to do it is from an Online Reputation Management and SEO perspective. It is important to listen to your fans and haters and respond to both and turn the brand around for the better. Here are some reasons how social listening is good for your SEO game with Google 1. Social conversations feature in search results Search isn’t what it used to be ten years back. Earlier you could search for ‘Mumbai hotel’ and get a list of hotels in Mumbai in your search result. Today you are more likely to type “Reviews for top hotels in Mumbai” and get answers from social chatter, Tripadvisor, Mouthshut and video walk-through and reviews on YouTube. Other conversations about your brand could be happening on blogs and social forums. While you don’t have control over what’s being posted, listening to these are important as you need to ensure that the sentiment is largely positive. If needed, you’ll need to nudge the conversations to get desired results. 2. Being responsive to social queries shows Google you are active and that you care Google loves fresh content, and so do we. You might have an answer on Quora which is a year old but if it still getting upvoted, Google thinks of it as fresh content. This is one of the main reasons, negative content takes ages to subside. The only way to tackle this is to have a constant onslaught of fresh, original content and upvotes which can pump up the positivity in the search results. 3. You can use social chatter to create your own FAQs and rank well A lot of social chatter is around queries people have about your product or services. They could also be about the pain points around your product and how you can improve. It is great to get some impromptu feedback too. Once you identify a pattern based on your customer’s user journey, you can pin down their frequently asked questions and give them answers straight on your website. After optimization, your own page is likely to rank for your customer’s FAQ and it can help tremendously to mould their opinion about you. 4. It allows discovery of new keywords to optimize People often don’t talk in the same language that brands envision them to. Your customers may be using short forms, similar words and even hashtags to describe your product and their thoughts around it. Once you identify these words, you can add them to your SEO keyword list. Plug them into a tool like Ubersuggest and it’ll be a sure fire way find out if these are isolated cases or a part of the frequent chatter around your products. 5. It’s a great source to identify potential link websites As you track and monitor your brand on third party websites, it can help you identify influencers and content creators who could be potential sources for links. You can identify the people in the conversation and approach them as potential link building partners. They are already vested in your product. Asking them for their opinion via reviews, guest blogs or focus groups can make them feel that the brand is willing to listen to their opinion. This empowerment automatically nudges them to become brand advocates. In fact, even linkless brand mentions are also potential SEO gold. 6. Get a forecast on topic trends Listening allows you to focus on your customer’s or prospects’ current area of interest. As the conversation changes, you’ll need to make slight adjustments to your product’s brand strategy. For example, until a few years back, people thought of vacations as a list of places to visit and things to do. Today, the conversation is increasingly about ‘travel’ instead of tourism and ‘experiences to consume’ instead of ‘sights to see’. Identifying this trend has now made many destination management companies to re-word their offering according to what their potential customers are looking for. Airbnb’s experiences is a great example of how a brand in the travel industry has created a whole new economy based on this emerging trend. 7. It helps to identify your competitors SEO strategy Your competitors could be eavesdropping on your conversations online, just like you are spying on them. Some could even potentially hijack conversations. Take this instance where users are asking about products on Craftsvilla but Go4Ethnic, their competitor is trying to grab user attention hitching a ride on the question. Social listening is also about monitoring the chatter about your competitors, identify their influencer, and track and understand their strategy. It’ll ensure you can maintain the lead in your customer’s social visibility. While we’ve given a lot of pointers on the positive effects of social on SEO, not doing it right can result in lost SEO visibility and traffic. Here are some of the potential downfalls you should avoid in your social strategy so that your SEO isn’t affected. a. Not posting enough engaging content New content indicates freshness. Content that is engaged with (liked, commented on and shared) shows that you are resonating with your audience. Both of these are SEO signals that overall contribute to your content ranking higher. b. Not posting on G+ We know that G+ isn’t
Month: July 2018
Social Media Tools: The 5 types to help you become a better marketer
Having a presence on social media is no longer a choice for businesses. It is a way to make sure you connect and engage with your customers, up the game on your competitors and continue to attract prospects. While it is one of the most exciting jobs out there, with great power comes great responsibilities. Social marketers need to be cued in on the hundreds of little changes that popular platforms keep throwing at us every day. From changing interfaces to new algorithms to new formats, we have to be quick on the uptake of what’s in trend and how to leverage it for the brands we manage. We also don’t have a real opportunity to stay away from the job – in daylight and dark, in sickness and health, at work and during vacations… Thankfully, there are a few kind souls out there who double up as brilliant marketers, tech specialists and designers who build tools to make our lives easy. Many of these tools are nothing short of a lifeline for us who have to manage multiple accounts and busy schedules. Here are the 5 types of tools you should be having in your arsenal. 1. Tools that help curate / discover content While a big part of social involves sharing brand content, it also involves sharing content in general that your audience enjoys. Hunting for shareable content is rabbit hole that most social marketers fear, unless you set the clock and focus. Here are some tools that help you find what you are looking for, quickly and efficiently. a. Hootsuite Hootsuite has been around in the market long enough to adapt through iterations of content discovery for today’s users. From tracking mentions to competitors to the industry in general, Hootsuite gives a sensible dashboard to curate and track simultaneously. b. Buzzsumo Buzzsumo is one of the perfect curation tools out there. You not only get to see the most shared and trending content, but also the medium where it is shared and who is sharing it. And the info about backlinks is invaluable. It is, by far, the one content dashboard we can’t do without. c. Pocket Keep bumping into great content as you surf the web. Put them in your ‘pocket’ app and it’ll be available on your phone or computer even if you don’t have a connection. Pocket integrates with over 1500 apps and is available of most major platforms. d. Feedly We can’t end our list without Feedly. It is the most popular RSS and blog reader in the world. Save content from websites, blogs and Youtube channels in one place for distraction-free reading. A lot of Feedly is free but the paid version is worth a try if you do this full time for a living. 2. Tools that help with scheduling While social media marketers are generally a sleep-deprived lot, some tools have made the journey of being one slightly easy. Scheduling posts for the future allows you to get the basic tasks out of the way and be more prepared for daily firefighting exercises. Here are the tools you can try. Buffer Buffer is our in-house go-to tool when it comes to scheduling. Ease of use, multi-platform support and analytics makes this an indispensable tool for social media marketers. Sprout Social Sprout social is a sort of an all-round social tool that does many things like monitoring, engagement, reporting and scheduling. Nonetheless, it is a tool worth considering Later: Later is one of those tools that can especially work well with Instagram. It is great for visual content as it has real-time post previews, hashtag curation and analytics that help track and optimize. CoSchedule The one additional value that CoSchedule brings to the table is that it integrates with your company blog and allows you to publish content and push it on social simultaneously. 3. Tools that help with listening/monitoring Listening to social, putting out fires and keeping the positivity around the brand going is a full-time job – that of an online reputation manager. ORM is often a specialty within social whose main job is to keep their ears to the ground and more importantly respond and not react. Here are the tools that help you do it a. Talkwalker Talkwalker is a conversation monitoring tool that works very well with Hootsuite. Install these two tools to instantly tag, assign and monitor mentions. It does all this and more. b. Reputology If your customers are all over the web talking about you, chances are that you’ll have to be where they are. Reputology checks major review sites like Yelp, Google, and Facebook and responds to reviews in a timely manner. c. Streamview for Instagram Being one of the fastest growing media on social, it is important to keep track of your customers and prospects on Instagram. Streamview can monitor posts by location, hashtag or username. d. Crowd analyzer If audiences are global, you need a tool that can work on the global level too. Crowd analyzer is useful if you have audiences in the middle east. The arabic-focused social monitoring platform monitors social networks, blogs and forums for relevancy, dialect and sentiment. 4. Tools that give stats With so much everyday juggling, it is important for us to not lose our focus on the end goal of our social efforts. As such, brands measure the ROI of social with metrics like reach, engagement, traffic, leads and even conversions. Without the right analytics tools, you won’t have an informed way to analyse the past, make future plans and show what your efforts are worth. a. Followerwonk FollowerWonk is a must-have tool for Twitter. Add your handle and you’ll know who’s following you, how much authority do they have and help you nurture your influencers. b. Google Analytics Good ol’ GA is still very much in the game when it comes to social. GA is perfect to track the traffic you get from different social channels of the same platform (paid
It isn’t a great content if it can’t deliver
Content marketing is the one thing that everyone is doing these days – agencies, clients, brand owners, influencers and even people in general. That’s because we have collectively woken up to the power of content that is created well. What exactly are we talking about here? Is good content the one that sells or is it the one that seeds an idea, a possibility, or an exploratory journey or pulls the user into a story? Does the final outcome of the content matter in terms of driving the brand’s business goals? In the grand old days of content (which was half a decade back), content got written to please search engines. People believed in quantity more than quality. Today the ROI from content is actively sought by clients. As an agency, it would be outrageous to give a plan that will only talk about how the content will be written and marketed. Instead, the premise of the actions is now actively based on achieving outcomes from the content. Whether it is a landing page optimization or social media content or content created for third-party websites, our aim as an agency is to strictly align with the client’s marketing and business goals and drive it actively through our content strategy and execution. Looking for a partner to help with content marketing? Find us at www.justwords.in
What makes us share content?
Did you hear Despacito or Shape of You in a loop last year? You must have shared and had many of your friends hear it too. That made these videos the most shared ones on Facebook in 2017! When was the last time you wrote a blog that received an abysmal number of likes? And how did that make you feel? Not very good, we presume. It means that the people who did see the content did not find it ‘interesting’ enough to engage with it by liking, commenting or sharing. This, in turn, made it even less likely that others would see the content at all. See where this is going? If you’ve spent hours and hours in great long-form blog content writing but not seeing the ‘share’ numbers you want, there could be a few reasons around it. Let’s deep dive into what intrinsically makes people share content and how you can take advantage of this as a marketer. In 2015, Moz and Buzzsumo got together to do the heavy lifting on behalf of the teeming millions and find out insights behind what makes content linkable and shareable. Together, they analysed over 1M articles which gave interesting insights. 1. Shares and links aren’t directly proportional In fact, in most cases, they don’t even co-relate. Articles that had a lot of shares did not have any external links. This fact gave an insight that the driver behind shares and linking are different. Sharing is generally done as an emotional response to an article. Linking is done from a strategic alignment of the article with the content on one’s own website. There is a small sweet spot where some content is equally shared and linked to. This is generally true for articles that have high utilitarian value like in-depth research or how-tos. While we all would love to make our piece for the sweet spot, it is best to choose what is more valuable to you as a marketer – sharing (reach, visibility, branding) or linking (gaining authority). 2. Type of shareable content varies by industry An interesting insight that came from Clear Voice’s study of 640,000 articles across 14 industries found that the type of content marketing that works in different industries varies considerably. For example, infographics work well for only one-third of the industries studied. Tech, beauty, home, and garden have an affinity for long-form content. How-to content works great with arts and hospitality. You can see the complete list here The other side of the coin is that industry and type of content also dictate the media that will be used to share. While 61% of business content gets shared via LinkedIn, 73% of shares in the career industry are done on Facebook and beauty and wellness is seeing an uptake on Instagram and Pinterest. Once you connect the dots on the type of content, the industry and its social uptake value, your chances of making it shareable can increase exponentially. 3. The ‘entertainment’ value of shareable content Going back to the first example of Despacito, this reason seems to fit well. Think of other things you’ve shared recently on a social site and you can identify a pattern. Most shareable content has great entertainment value. An AMA research found that content with positive news which caused excitement, awe and delight were likely to be shared a lot. The study also showed that people who experienced the other extreme of anger or frustration after reading a piece of content were likely to share it. This, in a nutshell, means that content that gets people to ‘react’ and extract an emotion is highly likely to be shared. 4. The social validation factor of shareable content Remember, sharing Despacito not only meant that you were entertaining your friends. It meant you were the ‘cool’ one in your group who shared it with others. The ‘like’ button on Facebook wields more power than you think. If a bunch of your friends has liked a comment, you are put in a tight corner to also like the comment. In fact, it won’t be wrong to say that you can accept something to be ‘popular’ or ‘cool’ if a bunch of other people makes it sound so. As a marketer, social validation for your content can be a governing factor determining whether friends of friends will continue to like and share it. To do this, make sure you display the number of likes and shares the article has received. 5. The drive to do ‘good’ It is an open question if people are intrinsically wired to help those who are less fortunate. Even if they aren’t keen candidates, everyone wants to look the part. Beliefs and causes related content help people define themselves and what they stand for. 84% of people share content to show what they care about. What this means for marketers is that we need to constantly look for opportunities to harness the power of stories. The idea is to show the human connect aspect of a brand. It can be about how your brand has a ‘giving back day/week’ where employees and stakeholders work together to uplift the community around them. It can be about how your equal employment policy or even the lives of the people you touch by powering local economies. 6. Interesting content gets shared What was the last story you shared with your school/college Whatsapp / Facebook group? It is most likely something that you as a group would find interesting. While we as marketers already know that we need to create ‘interesting’ content, the term is as ambiguous as saying someone likes ‘good’ music. So let’s dive a bit more about what can make content interesting. According to an NYT insight group, 73% of people share content to nourish and grow relationships. Going back to the content you shared on your school Whatsapp groups, it is most likely content that gets a