5 of the Best Content Marketing Articles You May Have Missed [Week of March 13 , 2016]
Looking for a resource, you can trust to keep you up to date on important content marketing news? We’ve got you covered. Our weekly roundup is here to help you stay on top of all the latest in social media and other interesting facts, trends, tips and questions.
This week:
- Featuring: Facebook Is Eating The World
- Social Media Growth Hacks:
1 – 5 Websites That Offer GIFs to Enhance Your Social Media Marketing
2 – How Adidas is using newsrooms to create five great pieces of content a week, not just five great ads a year
3 – Is Your Social Media Content as Popular as You Think?
- Just for Fun: Fill Our Stapler Day – March 14
- Productivity Tip: Actually, You Should Check Email First Thing in the Morning
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Featuring
Taken from a lightly edited speech Emily Bell gave at Cambridge last week titled “The End of the News as We Know It: How Facebook Swallowed Journalism”:
Facebook is Eating the World
SOMETHING REALLY DRAMATIC is happening to our media landscape, the public sphere, and our journalism industry, almost without us noticing and certainly without the level of public examination and debate it deserves.
Social media hasn’t just swallowed journalism, it has swallowed everything. It has swallowed political campaigns, banking systems, personal histories, the leisure industry, retail, even government and security. The phone in our pocket is our portal to the world.
Let’s recap:
- People are increasingly using their smartphones for everything.
- They do it mostly through apps, and in particular, social and messaging apps, such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Twitter.
- The competition to become such an app is intense. Competitive advantage for platforms relies on being able to keep your users within an app. The more your users are within your app, the more you know about them, the more that information can then be used to sell advertising, the higher your revenues.
Social Media Growth Hacks
1 – 5 Websites That Offer GIFs to Enhance Your Social Media Marketing
GIF, noun. Alternate: “Graphics Interchange Format” — picture format
1. a set of standards and file format for storage of digital color images and short animations
GIFs are increasingly popular on social media. Not only are they fun, but they allow users to complement their messages with animated images. Last year, on Twitter alone, users shared more than 100 million GIFs, prompting the social network to allow users to search for GIFs directly from the platform.
To help you quickly find the right GIF, here is a list of five websites that have every type of GIF under the sun.
1 – Reaction GIFs allows users to search for GIFs by popular tags and specific feelings.
2 – GIFs From Last Night is a great source for funny GIFs related to TV, movies, news and pop culture.
3 – GIPHY originally started out as a search engine for GIFs, later evolving into the top go-to source for GIF needs.
4 – GIF Bin is a great resource to uncover GIFs that aren’t as mainstream.
5 – Reddit has multiple subreddits dedicated to GIFs, most notably: /r/gifs/ and /r/reactiongifs
2 – How Adidas is using newsrooms to create five GREAT pieces of content a week, not just five great ads a year
Understanding the need to produce weekly content rather than just a few ad campaigns a year, ‘tactical content innovation’ is becoming Adidas’ marketing super power as it moves to measure the impact of its ‘newsrooms’ around the globe.
3 – Just published: Is Your Social Media Content as Popular as You Think?
Numbers don’t lie; they just don’t tell the truth
Marketers use a variety of metrics to collate, crunch and calculate how their content performs in social media. Metrics such as shares, retweets, and views are often the easiest and most obvious to gather, but they may be the most deceptive and unreliable when evaluating whether your content is genuinely making a difference.
- Engagement metrics don’t prove a business outcome
- “Likes” don’t necessarily correlate to a sale
- Thousands of views don’t automatically equal a positive ROI
But these metrics still provide valuable feedback about our content, helping us improve and optimize … right?
Well, only if those numbers can be trusted.
Just For Fun
Monday, 14th March, 2016 will be…Fill Our Staplers Day
Is there anything more annoying in this world than going to use a stapler, only to find it has run out of staples?
Created by the Dull Men’s Club (where dull men – and women who appreciate dull men – share thoughts and experiences about ordinary things), Fill Our Staplers Day attempts to solve this super-serious problem. Occurring twice a year, on the day after the Sunday when the clocks change, the day encourages people, especially office workers, to refill their stapler, to (or “intending to”) minimizing the chances of a workplace crisis.
So, for the good of all humanity, fill that stapler today!
Productivity Tip
Actually, You Should Check Email First Thing in the Morning
Despite studies showing that the average worker checks email 74 times a day — and, in many cases, is lightning-fast at processing it (another study showed that 70% of work-related email is handled within six seconds) — many of us still feel we can’t keep up. Partly, that’s simple math: we’re emailing more than ever.
- By 2018, the average employee will send and receive 140 messages per day.
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Have any social media trends, tips or tricks to share?
Read any interesting social media facts recently?
Run across any fascinating infographics?
We’d love to hear from you!
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