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ou will be able to follow more than 300 “topics” across sports, entertainment, and gaming, just as you are currently able to follow individual accounts. In return, you’ll see tweets from accounts that you don’t follow that have credibility on these subjects. Twitter executives hope that Topics will make the platform more approachable for new and intermittent users and make it easier for heavier users to discover new accounts and conversations. The feature, which began testing on Android in August, is set to roll out globally on November 13th.

A solid lead generation strategy does both, Craig Rosenberg, author of the blog Funnelholic, told me. The appetite for content online is insatiable so marketers would be wise to indulge the public with registration-free content, Craig says. “I do believe that if people are addicted to content without the reg-path and you path stuff, it better be remarkable.” Rosenberg says the “vast majority” of your marketing funnel should be free without asking potential clients for personal info. Save the registration forms for further down the funnel where more research-heavy content like whitepapers resides.

Chris Jablonski, author Emerging Tech blog on ZDNet, who provided the following formula: 10% to 20% fully gated content, 20% to 30% name and email only, and 50% to 70% completely free.

Last April, Gamestop Corp. (GME) opened a store on Facebook to generate sales among the 3.5 million-plus customers who’d declared themselves “fans” of the video game retailer. Six months later, the store was quietly shuttered. Gamestop has company. Over the past year, Gap Inc., J.C. Penney (JCP) Co. and Nordstrom (JWN) Inc. have all opened and closed storefronts on Facebook Inc.’s (FB) social networking site.

“We just didn’t get the return on investment we needed from the Facebook market, so we shut it down pretty quickly,” Sheetz said in a telephone interview. “For us, it’s been a way we communicate with customers on deals, not a place to sell.”

“It was basically just another place to shop for all the stuff already available on the retailer websites,” Gerten said. “I give so-called F-commerce an ‘F.’”

using marketing analytics remains a distinct challenge for companies—beyond the production of these sophisticated data."

Mobile advertising currently takes up 3.2 percent of marketing budgets but will almost triple to 9 percent in the next three years.

Social media now accounts for 9.9 percent of spending, though it should grow to 22.4 percent of budgets in the next five years.

When you’re ready to write PR content, these free tools and resources can help you with the process. SEOToolSet: provides information on search activity (e.g., how popular search terms are) and the demographics of people doing the query Ubersuggest: gives suggestions of keywords you might want to add to your keyword list or article content Google Trends: shows topics trending on Google, which can help you as you brainstorm topics to write about Scribe: shares the content marketing process with an integrated, holistic approach that maximizes your return on investment.

On original reporting, Facebook says that it will now seek to identify and boost outlets that are the first to break a developing story or topic. "We do this by looking at groups of articles on a particular story topic and identifying the ones most often cited as the original source. We’ll start by identifying original reporting in English language news and will do the same for news in other languages in the future."

Google’s controversial encrypted-search feature has had a chilling effect on B2B publishers’ ability to track organic search referral terms,

Encrypted search queries, which are enabled when a user signs into a Google account, now account for almost 40% of referring traffic data to B2B sites

“Eventually you’re not going to be able to measure SEO performance by keyword or understand the impact of organic search on your website traffic, engagement or conversions.”

The labor board’s rulings, which apply to virtually all private sector employers, generally tell companies that it is illegal to adopt broad social media policies — like bans on “disrespectful” comments or posts that criticize the employer — if those policies discourage workers from exercising their right to communicate with one another with the aim of improving wages, benefits or working conditions.

Employers often seek to discourage comments that paint them in a negative light. Don’t discuss company matters publicly, a typical social media policy will say, and don’t disparage managers, co-workers or the company itself. Violations can be a firing offense. But in a series of recent rulings and advisories, labor regulators have declared many such blanket restrictions illegal.

The National Labor Relations Board says workers have a right to discuss work conditions freely and without fear of retribution, whether the discussion takes place at the office or on Facebook.

Google +1s are more highly correlated with search rankings than any other social factor, including Facebook likes/shares and Tweets.

“We have a lot of our clients whose titles are actually changing from SEO Manager to Content Strategist,” Dotterer said. “Search engine optimization sounds like you’re doing something to the engines themselves, but what you’re really doing is optimizing online content. You optimize it by changing the content you’ve already created to better fit the voice of the consumer. You also optimize by finding the gaps in the content so we can create more.”

The importance of content creation has encouraged more companies to get their SEO, social and creative teams more involved in content strategy,

acebook has known for a while that the things its users talk about are supremely interesting and relevant for advertisers. Twitter proved that basing an advertising model around brand mentions really works; Facebook is bound to follow suit. Already, we are seeing Facebook taking steps into Twitter’s territory by showcasing which topics and brands are trending in users’ News Feeds, and by aggregating hashtagged terms

Offline conversion for retailers. Speaking of consumers’ path-to-purchase on Facebook, the ability for retailers to track offline sales conversions from ads viewed on Facebook is another critical step Facebook is taking to give advertisers deeper insight into how their ads actually drive some type of consumer action.

Percolate first identifies which social topics matter to brands’ audiences, then finds matching assets in those brands’ databases. SocialFlow tracks how many of a brand’s social followers are active throughout the day, then automatically posts the brand’s content at the best possible moment. Brand Networks taps historical sales and weather databases to tell retailers which products will generate the most social interest, based on local forecasts. SimpleFeed helps brands’ affiliates automate content selection — dynamically publishing social posts that have worked for other affiliates in the past.

Google is now showing tweets in a new and more graphical way on mobile devices, with desktop promised soon.

Tweets don’t always appear at the top of the page. Sometimes they might be elsewhere, such as the middle of the page

presumably, you’re more likely to see tweets in Google when a hashtag, topic, person or organization appears to be trending or is newsworthy.

the need for “an algorithm that delivers the depth and breadth of the content we have on a specific topic and then eventually as it relates to people,” he added.

This is related to Twitter’s larger aim to better organize its content—to separate the interesting and timely tweets from the noise. Twitter has already begun tweaking the timeline where tweets appear—most notably (and controversially), by introducing tweets from accounts users haven’t chosen to follow.

Costolo said that the favorited tweets by other users show up when the user pulls to refresh their timelines twice and Twitter has no new content to show both times.

Research from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs indicates content marketers with a documented strategy are: Much more likely to consider themselves effective at content marketing Far less challenged with the many aspects of content marketing Able to justify why a higher percentage of the marketing budget should be spent on content marketin

Consider documenting one or more of the following goals as a starting point for your strategy: Improve brand awareness Increase engagement Generate more website traffic Expand the email list Increase marketing ROI Achieve higher customer retention, loyalty and referrals

A buyer persona reveals what prospective customers are thinking and doing as they weigh their options to solve a problem.

Try Mute, a way to quickly mute 100 words from Twitter as chosen by the wisdom of people on the internet — aka crowdsourced.

Twitter has long supported muting words, but Mute makes it easy to really get into the feature. Its Mute.life website lists 100 keywords that have been added and then voted on by visitors to form a ranked list. By installing a bookmark in your (Google Chrome) browser, Mute can be used to automatically add those top 100 words into your muted word list for Twitter.

Optimization is a standard practice for most marketing channels. Not so much in influencer marketing, according the influencers surveyed. Influencers indicated that it is rare for marketers to ask for active campaign data and even more unusual that adjustments are made midstream.

One topic that the influencers strongly agreed upon is that longer engagements would produce better results. They believe their followers will see brand partnerships as more authentic and will become more familiar with the brand as they see it more. They also feel that micro-relationships, like one-post campaigns, are ad-like, which can discredit both the brand and influencer.

Many influencers provided anecdotes of high-performing content, especially on blogs, that lived long after the influencer marketing campaign ended. Examples of continued performance include content interaction, traffic generated to a website and appearance in search results. As an opportunity, marketers could engage with the influencer to amplify that content where it lives or extend it through paid support. At the very least, reengaging past successful partners or content should be top of mind.