Marketing Pilgrim Published: "Pilgrim's Picks for October 21, 2011: A Little Bird Told Me Edition" plus 3 more |
| Pilgrim's Picks for October 21, 2011: A Little Bird Told Me Edition Posted: 21 Oct 2011 07:14 AM PDT
So here is a recap of some of the stuff we have seen out there that we haven't had the opportunity to discuss in a post here at Marketing Pilgrim. Doesn't mean it's not news though right? Pilgrim's Picks October 21, 2011: Steve Jobs biography tidbits abound: Google Updates: Microsoft's Online Drain on Earnings Yahoo! Yup, they are still around Of course there is more but you have a weekend to think about so go have some fun! A little bird told me to tell you it's time to relax.
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| Weekly Roundups for Tweets & Links in Under an Hour a Week Posted: 20 Oct 2011 09:15 PM PDT
Content marketing occurs in one of two ways: Creation & Curation. Creation is where you're creating new content, curation is where you're aggregating and/or organizing information that already exists. One of the most effective ways curate content in a way that builds relationships and links is to create a weekly roundup of all of the great content that's been produced in your industry. The problem? It can take a lot of time. The solution? Read on. We've designed a process that, once setup, takes less than an hour a week to quickly discover, prioritize, tweet and curate your industry's best news into a single, weekly roundup post. The key here is putting the right tools and processes in place and letting those do the work for you, while you're making your own marketing judgement calls at all of the right times and places. (Some credit where credit is due: I originally discovered part of this idea here. We take it a couple steps further, leading into a content creation and link building process. Here's an overview of the setup process: § Aggregate industry RSS feeds into Google Reader. § Setup Twitterfeedto push your starred items to Twitter. § Setup your blog to allow for scheduled publishing. § Setup a tweet-scheduling service. (We use HootSuite) Once you're all setup, simply: § Go into Google Reader once or twice a day. § Perform a search on your folder for your industry's top keyword(s). § Star the best posts. § Mark the rest as "read." § Once a week, review your starred items. § Pull quality excerpts from each of the starred posts. § Gather author names and Twitter accounts. § Compile a quick blog post. § Schedule your post and tweets to publish the next morning. Pretty neat, huh? Plus, it takes only an hour a week. Let's jump into the how-to. 1. Research and Collect Industry RSS Feeds First, collect a bunch of RSS feeds for your industry and create an OMPL file to import into Google Reader. Don't add them to Google Reader one at a time. That's a lot of clicking and time wasted. I also recommend doing what we do and setup a Trackur account to make sure you're getting everything out there. (And, yes, if you're curious, we do pay for our own Trackur account at Ontolo.)
Instead: § Go to the Ontolo Labs OPML Generator OPML Builder. § Select a name for this feed. (It will later become your folder name in Google Reader, so use something descriptive. We call ours "Industry Blogs.") § Copy and paste your RSS feed URLs list. § Click "Generate OPML." § Save the file to your computer. (* Note: If enough people comment below about not knowing how to find top blogs in your industry, I'll do a post about that, too.) 2. Import RSS Feeds into Google Reader
§ Go to your Google Reader Settings. § Click the "Import/Export" tab. § Click the "Choose File" button. § Find the OMPL file generated previously. § Click "Upload." 3. Publish Starred Items to an RSS Feed Here are the steps and screenshots:
§ Go to your Google Reader Settings. § Click on "Folders and Tags." § Check "Your Starred Items." § Click "Change Sharing," and change to "Public." § Click on "View Public Page." § In the right-hand navigation on the new page, click "Atom Feed." § On the Atom feed page, copy the URL. 4. Publish Your Starred Items to Twitter with Twitterfeed Setup a Twitterfeed account or login to your existing account.
§ Setup a new feed. § Enter a name for your feed. § Paste the Atom feed URL from the previous steps. § Click "Continue to Step 2. § Authorize the services you wish to publish to. (Including Twitter and Facebook) Now, any time you star an item in Google Reader, it will publish to the accounts you authorized above. 5. The Daily "Reviewing & Starring" Routine At Ontolo, we've added 50+ RSS feeds to this particular Google Reader account. Our business, link building, could be considered a "niche" within SEO. Therefore, a lot of the blogs we have in our reader are about SEO, but we need to get quickly to the link building content. Here's how we quickly filter out 90%+ of the SEO noise.
§ Put in a targeted search query into the search box. We've found phrases work particularly well at narrowing in on relevant content. § Click the "All items" select box. § Choose the folder name you chose in Step 1. § Click "Search."
Next, review what's there. As you find something that you think your readers would benefit from, simply star the item. Soon (usually within a half hour or hour), Twitterfeed will find it and publish it to your Twitter account. 6. The Weekly Roundup & Promotion Routine All you have left to do here is to write and schedule your weekly roundup for publishing, then setup some tweets to go out promoting the roundup post. Since, based on formats, styles, publishing platforms and Twitter tools, here are some final tips for that process: § We segment our roundups into two parts: Must Reads and Notable Posts. This allows for us to do two things: 1, give readers the best stuff first and, 2, give an extra thanks to the exception content that week. § Link to the post, then also give credit to the author and, at least, a link to their twitter account. Also consider linking to their blog or home page. § We write these posts on Thursday nights, then schedule them to publish on Friday mornings. § This also lets us schedule tweets to go out the next morning without us needing to worry about it. Being on the West coast, I don't have to wake up at 6:30 to publish to Twitter for the East coast. You can use any number of tools. We use HootSuite. § We schedule at least two tweets: 9:35am EST and 9:35am PST. Being a roundup post, it makes better for morning reading. Consider where your content fits into your audience's day. § Contact the people you've linked to and let them know you appreciate their work that week. Chances are, they'll appreciate it and may even tweet it out to their own followers as well. Here's an example of one of a roundup we've done. That's about it! Any questions you have, comment below and I'll respond with any help I can offer.
Editor's Note: Ben has been a friend of Marketing Pilgrim before it was even Marketing Pilgrim.
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| Majority of Mobile Social Networkers Do it Every Day Posted: 20 Oct 2011 12:46 PM PDT
Review email? Check. Twitter on mobile phone? Check and reply. Check. comScore says that in August 2011, more than 72.2 million people used their mobile device to access a social networking site or blog. That's up 37% from the previous year. More than half of the mobile social networkers tapped those sites daily and 38.5 million people used a social network app to do it. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, all showed a marked increase in mobile access over the last year. Facebook still rules for pure numbers of people, but Twitter showed the largest growth. And look at little LinkedIn jumping up 69%.
Since LinkedIn is all about business, it's easy to see how mobile would be a huge factor in raising their numbers. As for Twitter, I never understood why people Tweeted so often until I got my iPhone. It's just too easy. Then there's Facebook, which, in my opinion, isn't that easy to navigate on a mobile device. Obviously, that's not stopping the masses. And social media mavens aren't just reading posts, nearly 70% of them also update their status via their mobile device. Even better, 52.9% reported reading updates from organizations/brands/events, one in three used mocial to get a coupon or deal, and one in four clicked on an ad inside a social network site. Let me repeat that last number. 27.7% of mobile social network users clicked on an ad. Maybe it's not time to count out the clicks after all. Mark Donovan, comScore senior vice president for mobile says,
This holiday shopping season, mobile social will be more important than ever, so make sure you're stocked up on gift idea tweets, Facebook coupon codes and lots of shareable holiday cheer.
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| Two-Thirds of All Online Moms are on Facebook Posted: 20 Oct 2011 11:51 AM PDT
Then again, you know how statistics are, because even though 23 million sounds like a lot, it only represents 17.4% of Facebook users and that number is going down. eMarketer also notes that in the next few years, the current heavy penetration will work against the mom brigade and growth will be slow. By 2013, they say moms will only account for 16.1% of the total Facebook population. Does that mean that moms are maxed out? Or are we all maxed out? The truth is, Facebook isn't all that new and hip anymore. Talk to anyone about their Facebook usage and they'll generally reply in a way that makes it sound like a necessary evil. "All my friends were on there, so I had to join, too." "There are good coupons on Facebook but you have to have an account to get them." "I wanted to play this game, but I had to connect through Facebook."
Honestly, when was the last time you talked to someone who was excited about being on Facebook? And yet, eMarketer says 57.1% of internet users use Facebook monthly. That's a lot of people spending time on a site no one claims to like. Explain that.
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