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what are some of the things you can A/B test with your influencer marketing campaigns? All the same things you test in your other channels…

xperiment with different types of content and track which resonates best with their audience for your goal. For example, images may drive better social engagement, while videos are better for leads and signups. Alternately, you may find certain content performs better on some channels over others.

Don’t forget all the types of content you have at your disposal – podcasts, live stream videos, tweets, Instagram Stories, webinars, long-form blog posts, short-form blog posts, and much, much more.

It’s passive zombie-feed scrolling, not active communication with friends, that hurts our health, according to studies Facebook has been pointing to for the last seven months. Yet it’s treating all our social networking the same with today’s launch of its digital well-being screen-time management dashboards for Facebook and Instagram in the U.S. before rolling them out to everyone in the coming weeks.

Unfortunately, you’ll only see info about your usage on the mobile app on that device. It won’t include your minutes spent on desktop, where these features don’t appear, what you do on your tablet or info about your usage across the Facebook family of apps. There are no benchmarks about how long other people your age or in your country spend in the apps. All of these would make nice improvements to the dashboards.

One of the many ways that ads get in front of your eyeballs on Facebook and Instagram is that the social networking giant lets an advertiser upload a list of phone numbers or email addresses it has on file; it will then put an ad in front of accounts associated with that contact information. A clothing retailer can put an ad for a dress in the Instagram feeds of women who have purchased from them before, a politician can place Facebook ads in front of anyone on his mailing list, or a casino can offer deals to the email addresses of people suspected of having a gambling addiction. Facebook calls this a “custom audience.”

You might assume that you could go to your Facebook profile and look at your “contact and basic info” page to see what email addresses and phone numbers are associated with your account, and thus what advertisers can use to target you. But as is so often the case with this highly efficient data-miner posing as a way to keep in contact with your friends, it’s going about it in a less transparent and more invasive way.

Facebook is not content to use the contact information you willingly put into your Facebook profile for advertising. It is also using contact information you handed over for security purposes and contact information you didn’t hand over at all, but that was collected from other people’s contact books, a hidden layer of details Facebook has about you that I’ve come to call “shadow contact information.”

as Page reach and engagement continues to dip for brands, Facebook has made some updates to help deliver value to businesses through Pages beyond just News Feed distribution.

Facebook Page is becoming more like a website for your business — a destination people will come to when they want information, or even make a purchase or booking, as well as a place to engage with great content.

Facebook has made it easier for people to recommend your business by bringing Recommendations to your Page. As shared by Facebook: People will now be able to post a Recommendation for your business including text, photos and tags directly on your Page. And Recommendations will also help you reach people while they’re searching for or talking about your business.

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.

snag your free template to put together a complete crisis communication strategy. Use this post as a guide to complete it.

Create a Social Media Crisis Scale Convince and Convert devised a great solution to this problem. They built a customer response flowchart that matches the severity of an issue, to the right course of action.

Crisis Level 1: Isolated customer complaints and questions. Crisis Level 2: Angry customers, broken links, posts directing to the wrong page, factual inaccuracies, major misspellings on social posts. Crisis Level 3: High volume of angry customers, service outages, lack of product availability. Crisis Level 4: Product recalls, defective services or products, widespread negative press coverage, layoffs. Crisis Level 5: Lawsuits, serious accidents resulting in injury, illegal employee conduct.

it can be tough to predict what headlines will work best for your audience—that’s where Coschedule’s Headline Analyzer comes in handy.

LikeAlyzer, powered by the folks at Meltwater, provides an in-depth assessment of your Facebook page performance, coupled with super-actionable recommendations on how you can boost engagement with your brand. Unlike many other free tools, you don’t have to turn over any personal information to attain the assessment. Simply plug in your page URL and it will be automatically generated within seconds.

Now you can outsource the scavenging to DrumUp and cross this task right off your to-do list! This free tool identifies engaging stories that are fit for your audience, ranks them and then queues them up to be shared on your social media accounts.

"The thing I've tried to do with any client opening up its customer service channels -- you have to have a crisis communications plan mixed with a customer service plan," he said.  "You have to anticipate what will happen. ... Companies that dive in without a plan of attack for those situations are finding it difficult."

"You have to have a lawyer on staff who can be on call and help your social media team craft communications in crisis situations," he said. "When you have a big publicity problem, you have your legal team working hand-in-hand with PR. Why wouldn't you do the same thing in the social media world?"

"Any industry that's heavily regulated will always have a layer of legal and compliance teams that have to be trained, and have to buy in," he said. "It can be done with the right legal team. But if you have a team that constantly says ‘no,’ it'll never work."

PTAT brings everything together by measuring all of the individual Facebook users who have engaged with a page’s content and created a “story” in their News Feed and their friends News Feeds in the past seven days.

Prior to the introduction of PTAT in the Fall 2011, most marketers relied on a mashup of metrics – including the number of Likes, active users, comments and other performance indicators – to measure the health of their page.

According to Facebook the different types of stories measured in your PTAT score include: Liking your page Liking, commenting on, or sharing your page post Answering a Question you’ve asked Responding to your event Mentioning your page Tagging your page in a photo Checking in or recommending your place

Another way to get shared by influencers in your field is to research which sites they visit frequently. Then either guest post for one of the sites or pitch an article about your company to people who already write for it.

Involve influencers in the creation of a piece of content, and they have a vested interest to help promote it. Do an interview with a targeted expert, request a guest post for your blog or get a quote for an article you’re already writing.

Take time to research, write, edit and fact-check articles. Shift your thinking away from quick fixes and ideas that have probably already been done. Instead, come up with unique concepts and strive for more ambitious projects.

The primary reason we’ve seen our best open rate climb ever upwards has been an ever-increasing focus on list hygiene.

It’s natural that curiosity-based subject lines would become more powerful as the inbox gets more crowded.

Scarcity, on the other hand, is a powerful tool but is best used conservatively as its impact diminishes the more it’s put into play. And while scarcity is a great driver of sales, it is often less effective at driving your overall open rate up.

When Should You Use Facebook Canvas Ads? There are lots of applications for Canvas ads. Whether you want to implement a conversion campaign, grow brand awareness, or generate more clicks to your site, these are a great idea. If you want to elicit a direct response, consider using a format that displays your products with a CTA button. If brand awareness is your goal, focus your efforts on creating engaging visuals and copy to attract as many views as possible. In this case, also consider paying based on CPM (impressions) rather than CPC (clicks). This will help you optimize your views.

Most of your content is getting lost in the shuffle. Recycle it! Let the customer’s social activity tell you what they prefer. Engagement in social is good, but not if that’s all you get. Some top brands have made the transition to acting like publishers with dedicated internal and external teams cranking out content.

Top tactics used by savvy publishing brands are: Storytelling – high quality engaging content on an going basis Infographic Creation – relevant lists and how to’s Visual Content Marketing – compelling visuals eBook Creation – great for lead generation eMailer Personalization – targeting with relevance and being the information / education source Content Curation within an Industry – keep people coming to you because you find what’s hot and important to your customers, making it easy for them to keep current Webinars / Pod Casts / Google Hangouts – establishes authority Slide Share Presos – extends your corporate social graph and thought leadership Case Studies – SEO value and high share currency Videos to Motion Infographics – video is growing

Brands have a need for smart content routing and unique displays which enable them to maximize customer engagement and experience at every touch point, increasing site participation, and garnering higher social share just begs to get fracked.

Katie Hooper, managing director and vice president of strategy at HZDG, agreed: "As soon as you say you're changing your loyalty program, an instant skepticism emerges. When you make the reward harder to realize, it feels like something that's just helping the companies improve their revenue streams. We recommend telling customers how this is going to improve their daily life. Before, Starbucks was doing it really well by rewarding them based on frequency. It said they valued the customer no matter what."

Changes such as these actually could make your loyal customers less loyal, said Susan Cantor, president of Red Peak Branding: "It erodes good will. If you make a change, it needs to be more in line with previous customer expectations."

Instead of complaining that you are being “forced” into “pay for play” on networks like Facebook, embrace the fact that social paid promotion is probably the most sophisticated marketing tool ever created.

There is a steep learning curve to doing it right, and the need for a regular investment of time to properly manage campaigns. Additionally, even for paid campaigns, you still need to have content that doesn’t trigger ad blindness. But the ability to target your messages to exactly the right people, and to creatively remarket to those who have already shown interest, is unparalleled.

There is a major side benefit to moving toward that kind of content, beyond just keeping you in the news feed: Truly engaging content is better for your business. It helps make your brand more respected and remembered. It develops positive feelings toward your business that help influence people when it’s time to make a buying decision.

Personalization is shown to increase open rates for most users, and may work well when combined with targeted automations such as birthday deals and post-purchase follow-ups.

try to communicate the benefits of your promotions, or call attention to specific deals.

Subject line researcher shows you the effectiveness of different keywords. Search for a word or phrase, and we'll compare your terms to all subject lines ever sent through MailChimp. Then we'll list related terms and phrases, and use a 5-star rating system to show you how each one performed.

Preparing for a crisis takes place long before a crisis actually occurs. “Act like a post-crisis company pre-crisis,”

“Build a solid brand narrative so that when people are googling your company it’s not just your crises news that comes up.”

"Build relationships before pitching, especially in a crisis. Have the foundation laid so that when the time comes you can have resources to utilize in the media," she says.

99% of journalists say it’s somewhat important (9%), important (34%), or very important (56%) for a company to provide access to news releases within their online newsroom.93% of journalists say that it is important to have news releases organized by type of news category.94% of journalists say it’s somewhat important (14%), important (28%), or very important (52%) to have access to photographs within an online newsroom.90% of journalists indicated the availability of digital product press kits would be somewhat important (25%), important (34%) or very important (30%) for their work.75% of journalists say video files are an important component of an online newsroom.

Archived press releases are a fantastic source of inspiration for journalists, they provide historical insight into your company, can provide industry metrics (which journalists are always seeking) and ultimately give your media contacts some ideas for stories to run with.

Highlighting ContactsDepending on the size of your business, locations, industries and a whole host of other factors you may have several key media spokespeople on your list who can engage with the media.

Quuu is a simple platform to help put your content curation on autopilot, working seamlessly with Buffer to bring you the most relevant content.

use Narrow to build a targeted Twitter following. Just enter your keywords and targeted hashtags, and Narrow will identify a relevant audience for you to start building your following.

Cyfe is an all-in-one marketing dashboard of sorts that helps you zero in on what’s working and what isn’t. It’s a great analytical tool for social media management that lets you pulled detailed reports on Google Analytics, AdWords campaigns, SEO, competitive searches and even brand mentions on the web. It’s a real-time tracking tool to help you monitor and manage your KPIs.

from the user’s perspective, one of the best parts about Actions is that you can use them without incessantly oversharing to your friends.

When you share a post or update your status on Facebook, it will appear in your friends’ news feeds. But when you have an Action coming from the Open Graph (i.e., from a site that exists outside Facebook but that uses Facebook Connect in some way), that activity will only appear in the Ticker and on your own Timeline.

Many Actions partners will offer granular settings to give you control over what you share. For example, design-centric flash-sale site Fab.com’s “Bought” actions are opt-in. Like the Actions turned on but don’t want to share a particular purchase with your friends? Mark it as a gift to hide it. Don’t worry about embarrassing buys; all Fab.com “adult” items are hidden by default.