9 easy steps to create engaging content

Follow these 9 easy steps to create engaging content for your brand:

1. Think about what you know

Think about what interests you. Make a list of things you know about you brand and products, what other people want to hear about them, and the topics about your industry that get you excited. Update the list regularly.

2. Find good sources of content

Collect the websites, blogs, books, and other resources that do the best job of producing content about your niche. Track them and add new ones as you find them, and get rid of those that are less valuable over time.

3. Read, read, read

Set some time aside every day to read content about your topics from thought leaders, and analyze what works for them and why. It’s also important to read content that’s bad — that way you can determine what’s wrong with it and why it doesn’t work.

4. Save content that could help you later

Save pieces that resonate with you. When you read an article or blog post that sparks an idea or that you believe can be improved upon, it’s important to save the link and write some accompanying notes so you can revisit it as part of your content creation process. Doing this can ignite ideas later on.

5. Hold regular editorial meetings and refine ideas with your team

Meet weekly with your colleagues so they can share the great content they’ve found, the topics they believe are most important, and customer questions they’ve encountered. Next, come up with catchy headlines that are interesting to all of you and will attract readers. Assign one to everyone each week.

6. Set deadlines

Deadlines provide focus and motivation, but they must be shared. Put them on an editorial calendar and make sure that everyone sticks to them.

7. Write

A natural extension of reading, keeping notes, and perfecting ideas with your colleagues, this is where the rubber meets the road. Share an anecdote with your readers to illustrate a point, write a brief case study about how one of your customers used your product to solve a problem, etc. Be meticulous about the language you use and how it will be received.

8. Get edited

Good content comes in part from good editing, so you need an editor to ensure that what you’ve written is clear and to the point. Discuss the changes your editor makes, and why, so you’re better prepared the next time you set out to write an article.

9. Repeat

Follow these steps over and over again as part of your content creation process. The more you do it, the easier it will be.

source: http://socialmediatoday.com/pamdyer/1861831/9-steps-creating-good-content-your-brand

Twitter Statistics: Italy top ten

As everyone espected Valentino Rossi' s still on top :)

Twitter Best Practices for Brands

Twitter and brands should go together like bread and butter or hands and gloves. Twitter could be the best way ever for a brand listen to and react to its customers. But sadly some brands and their social media strategy approach are missing opportunities.

A report from 2012 is worth revisiting if brands (and those who operate Twitter accounts for them) have not seen it.

Between December 11, 2011 and February 23, 2012, Buddy Media analyzed user engagement from more than 320 Twitter handles of the world's biggest brands.

The company measured success by quantifying:

• Reply Rate: number of replies as a percentage of followers.
• Retweet Rate: number of retweets as a percentage of followers (includes manual retweets).
• Engagement Rate: a combination of the replies and retweets in the number of followers.

The result of the data analysis was the mid-2012 report "Strategies for Effective Tweeting: A Statistical Review" (the link also takes you to key findings and a "Tweet Cheat Sheet" for brands).

Some of the key findings:

• Tweet during the day: Tweets during "busy hours" (8 a.m.-7 p.m.) receive 30 percent higher engagement than Tweets posted at other times.
• Don’t overdo the hashtags: Tweets with hashtags receive two times more engagement, but those using more than two hashtags actually had 17 percent less engagement.
• Keep it short: Tweets containing less than 100 characters receive 17 percent more engagement than longer tweets.

To see the data boiled down into an infographic see "Maximize Your Tweets" from Fusework Studios:

 

source: SOCIALMEDIATODAY

Twitter Statistics From 2012

1. There were 175 million tweets sent from Twitter every day throughout 2012. (source: Infographics Labs)
2. The average Twitter user has tweeted 307 times. (source: Diego Basch’s Blog)
3. Since the dawn of Twitter, there’s been a total of 163 billion tweets. (source: Diego Basch’s Blog)
4. 56% of customer tweets to companies are being ignored. (sources: AllTwitter)
5. Barack Obama’s victory tweet was the most retweeted tweet ever with over 800K retweets. (source: The Guardian)
6. Top 3 countries on Twitter are the USA at 107 million, Brazil 33 million and Japan at nearly 30 million. (source: Jeff Bullas)
7. The average user follows (or is followed by) 51 people. (source: Diego Basch’s Blog)
8. The 2012 election broke records with 31.7 million political tweets. Election Day was by far the most tweeted about event in US political history. (source: Marketing Land)
9. 32% of all Internet users are using Twitter. (source: Marketing Land)
10. Twitter is projected to make a total of $540 million in advertising revenue by 2014. (source: Web Analytics World)
11. 69% of follows on Twitter are suggested by friends. (source: Web Analytics World)
12. In 2012, 1 million accounts have been added to Twitter everyday. (source: Infographics Labs)
13. Lady Gaga has 31 million followers, which is the most followed account on Twitter. (source:Socialbakers)
14. The most followed brand on Twitter is YouTube with 19 million followers. (source: All Twitter)
15. The USA’s 141.8 million accounts represents 27.4% of all Twitter users. (source: All Twitter)
16. The “Castle in the Sky” TV screening was the busiest time on Twitter ever with 25,088 tweets per second. (source: Sys-Con)
17. 11 accounts are created every second on Twitter. (source: Infographics Labs)
18. 50% of Twitter users are using the social network via mobile. (source: Microsoft tag)
19. 34% of marketers have generated leads using Twitter. (source: Digital Buzz Blog)
20. 26% of retweets are incited by a request to retweet. (source: Web Analytics World)
A few takeaways from these facts and figures: it’s especially critical for companies on Twitter to monitor mentions – what could be more frustrating than unanswered frustration about a product or service?; if you’re looking for more followers, tap into digital worth-of-mouth marketing tactics rather than randomly blasting out content; keep mobile optimization in mind with your tweets; and remember the simplest way to engage with your followers is to just ask!
No matter your level of social media expertise, it’s important to understand the data behind each major platform in order to make the most of it.
Check out the full article here.

INSPIRE MANY LIGHTWEIGHT INTERACTIONS OVER TIME

Paul Adams, the Global Head of Brand Design for Facebook, has articulated his insights about his process into a phrase: “many lightweight interactions over time.” Witnessing the best (and worst) practices on Facebook, Adams has discovered that the companies who invest in deepening relationships with fans one interaction at a time are far more effective than overwhelming fans with overly-promotional asks that require deep commitment and investment from the outset.

Brands have 50 chances to make an impression with each fan each year.

A little math tells us why. On average, fans will see 50 posts and 50 tweets per year from a brand (based on 1-2 Facebook posts per day with a 8-10% attention rate on Facebook and 4-5 tweets per day with a 3% attention rate). In other words, brands have 50 chances to make an impression with each fan each year. 

If the first five times you talk to a fan, you ask them to BUY, BUY, BUY or DOWNLOAD, INSTALL, MARRY ME, fans will be turned off and turned away. You need to earn their trust over time, by mixing lightweight content about the issues they care about with brand and product-specific information. That way, when you go for the big ask, they are ready to say YES! 

As engagement with the brand increases over time and attention, the depth of the emotional engagement increases as well. As you take fans through the social sales funnel, from awareness through mass media to engagement in social media, through consideration and to purchase, this approach will help to ensure that more people stay engaged, becoming not just customers, but advocates for the brand.

FOSTER ONE-TO-ONE SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT

But the most important part of the Big Data story isn’t about data, it’s about people.
By combining databases and overlaying social profiles against such data, brands (and campaigns) are able to connect with people as people, not unique identifiers.
Knowing who they really are enables brands to turn the data into prescriptive actions, syncing online with people in the real world. Brands are moving beyond simple demographic and psychographic data to ever-more sophisticated ways to understand, target and engage customers.

 SOURCE: http://www.edelmandigital.com/