Last week I attended the PR News Digital Media Summit in San Francisco. There were many influential members of the national interactive marketing media including community managers, social media strategists, editors and other smarty pants thought leaders. While it would be difficult to condense all their tasty morsels of knowledge into one, reasonably sized blog post, I’ll limit it to my most important key takeaways I think are beneficial, and maybe you will too.
- Visual Storytelling – This is no shocker, but visual content receives up to 9.7 times more views than text only content. Fully visually optimized content should include a photo, video and something to download, like an audio track or PDF. Also, if you haven’t noticed, Infographics are hot right now. Piktochart is a free infographic creator for spicing up your visual content. Freevisualtools is another great resource for creating maps, charts, collages and other graphics.
- Social Proof – Another common sense concept: people tend to flock towards brands or products with a positive public response. Just like a restaurant with rave reviews is popular, so is a brand with satisfied customers that’s been recognized in social and news media. If your brand or client is getting a lot of positive attention online, there are a lot of Facebook social plugins that can be added to a website to stream likes and shares. You can also embed impactful tweets or create a newsroom section on your website if there isn’t one already to showcase positive press.
- News Audiences – The top online news sources are Yahoo! News ranked at #1 and Google News ranked at #2. When optimizing your online press releases or content, be sure to use Google Trends as a resource. Yahoo! News and not surprisingly, Google News pays attention to the rising searches and keywords provided by Google Trends. In Google Trends, you can compare rising searches over time to help form editorial calendars according to peak search periods. In addition to having well optimized content that will show up in SERPs, you can submit your site to Google News or Yahoo News to be considered as a news source for those aggregators.
- YouTube – YouTube is the second most popular search engine and presents a huge opportunity to market your brand’s content and for social referral traffic to your website. Add original, engaging short videos to your channel (about 1-2 minutes). These don’t have to be professional – smart phones work for short videos to promote your brand. Add optimized titles, descriptions and tags to all videos. Get ideas for tags by typing in topics into the search field to see what popular searches come up. Reach out to other channels relevant to your brand for potential cross promotion partnerships. Create playlists of other channels’ videos and hopefully they will return the favor.
- Leverage Engaged Fans – In 2010, Cisco started a Superfan Spotlight Facebook social marketing campaign to provide community recognition and it resulted in a 20% increase in average engagement and a 200% increase in likes. Their Facebook community grew from 100,000 fans to 400,000 fans. If your brand has some particularly consistent engaged users, recognize and reward them in a blog post, photo album, fan of the week, etc.
- Content Marketing – Treat each piece of content as a mini campaign. Besides optimizing it and posting it to your primary social channels, think of additional ways to distribute it, like creating Pinterest boards for recurring features, or blog outreach. Blog outreach can be tricky, and one way to effectively get the attention of journalists is to reach out to them, when appropriate, on LinkedIn if it is an especially important or captivating piece of content. A great way to boost your blog’s organic search is to take advantage of Google Author Tags. Make sure all the authors of your blog have complete Google+ profiles and they post a link to their blog posts on their Google+ page. These profiles will come up in Google search for additional rankings.
- Crisis Management – If there is ever an emergency that you have to monitor online, there are a couple of precautions you can take to make sure the process goes as smooth as possible. Build media lists before a crisis occurs to use as both a resource for what’s going on and to refer followers and fans to. Also, before an emergency happens, anticipate the needs of the public and keep a list of questions with prepared answers to expedite community conversations.