Social Media Training for Marketers

In 2016, BuzzSumo analyzed more than 800 million Facebook posts. Based on their findings, posts with less than 50 characters “were more engaging than long posts.” According to another, more precise study by Jeff Bullas, posts with 80 characters or less receive 66 percent higher engagement:

Paid posts: 5 to 18 words Every Facebook ad needs three types of content: a Headline, Main Text, and a Description. After analyzing 37,259 Facebook ads, AdEspresso found that ads did best when the copy in each element was clear and concise. According to the data, the ideal length for a: Headline, the first text people read, is 5 words. Main Text, the snippet above your image or video, is 14 words. Description, the text that lives directly below your headline, is 18 words.

Videos: 30 to 60 seconds With video, one of the primary measures of success is how long people watch, also known as your video retention rate. In 2016, Kinetic Social tracked 2 billion social ad impressions and found that 44 percent of 30- to 60-second videos on Facebook were viewed to completion. Meanwhile, videos that ran under 30 seconds or over two minutes saw completion rates of 26 and 31 percent, respectively. A more recent poll, from 2018, showed that 33 percent of Facebook users preferred to watch shorter videos, from 30 to 50 seconds long.

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.

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.

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.

19 Marketing Research Websites to Bookmark

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.

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.”

Hundreds of thousands of Twitter accounts that amplified fake news and disinformation in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election are still active on the site, tweeting about other fake news and conspiracies more than a million times every day, according to a report released Thursday by the Knight Foundation.

Twitter hasn’t cracked down on many of its fake news amplifiers. Eighty percent of Twitter accounts that were spreading false information during the campaign were still active on the platform, researchers found.

The study found that most of the fake and conspiracy tweets on Twitter linked to only about 1o websites, including The Gateway Pundit and Truthfeed. That trend was largely unchanged from 2016. Additionally, about 60 percent of the accounts that shared and amplified fake news were estimated by researchers to have been automated accounts. Those accounts were densely connected, following each other at high rates and retweeting each other frequently, intensifying the impact and reach of each post.

Today, we’re releasing a new free tool to help anyone discover what percent of an any Twitter account’s followers are fake vs. real: The Fake Followers Audit.

The tool is designed to estimate the percentage of a given account’s followers that fit one or more of the following buckets: Spam accounts (those that purely send spam tweets) Bot accounts (those that have no real human actively operating them) Propaganda accounts (those designed to propagate dis/misinformation) Inactive accounts (those that no longer use Twitter or see tweets)

News publishers’ “pivot to video” was driven largely by a belief that if Facebook was seeing users, in massive numbers, shift to video from text, the trend must be real for news video too — even if people within those publishers doubted the trend based on their own experiences, and even as research conducted by outside organizations continued to suggest that the video trend was overblown and that news readers preferred text. (Heidi N. Moore put many of these trends together in 2017, and her accounting is only strengthened by the new information that we’re seeing this week.)

The court case was unsealed this week, following efforts by organizations like the online publishers’ trade organization Digital Content Next to make previously redacted parts available to the public. I read the filing and pulled out some of the most interesting and relevant parts for news publishers below. I wanted to try to see whether Facebook’s active promotion of its video offerings might have influenced news publishers’ allocations of resources, and whether it is reasonable to allege that Facebook knew, as publisher after publisher laid off editorial staff and pushed into video, that that was misguided. I wanted to know whether people working in news organizations were fired based on faulty data provided by a giant platform that publishers believed they could trust.