Content Strategy: Takeaways from Social Media Marketing World 2016

April 25, 2016 by

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Content Strategy: Takeaways From Social Media Marketing World 2016

Content Strategy is Episode 70 of This Old New Business weekly business podcast with Jeff Korhan.

Frank Kenny has twice been a guest on the show. This week he graciously interviews me to discover and share the top takeaways from Social Media Marketing World 2016 hosted in San Diego, CA last week.

The key was having a strategy and following it, and that is also my top takeaway from the event.

Content strategy isn’t sexy, but it is indeed what everyone was talking about.

Here are a couple of examples from sessions presenters.

Stephanie Sammons talked about tilting your LinkedIn profile to the audience you are trying to reach today. In her own profile, she uses phrases like Texas gal and yogi to show some personality that makes her stand out on what many consider the least interesting social media channel.

And she gave examples of business she has landed with this strategy to back it up. So, don’t be afraid to test new profile strategies.

Shaun McBride (Shonduras on SnapChat) is exactly what you would expect from a SnapChat expert. He’s a snowboarding, surfer dude kind of guy that knows how to tell stories with short videos that will make you laugh out loud. His simple video strategy follows a theme: Will This Work?

He has built a massive SnapChat audience that wants to find out if his next crazy project will work.

If you are curious, the hot social channels nowadays are SnapChat, LinkedIn, Facebook, email, podcasting, and live video such as Blab and Facebook Live. A valid strategy with any of these channels should ideally provide a shift (or tilt) that gets you noticed when others are playing it safe.

And that brings us to a proven strategy that anyone can use.

Take The 3% Challenge

Mark Schaefer, the author of The Tao of Twitter and The Content Code, gave the closing keynote at Social Media Marketing World. He delivered an entertaining and informative presentation that challenged the audience to take the 3% content strategy challenge.

Most of us have a core group that loves us. They are the ones that engage with and share our content because we’ve earned their trust. Our challenge is to focus on this segment that is probably 2% of our subscribers and followers and grow it to 3%.

If you get there, refocus and go for 4%. That’s been my commitment with my weekly newsletter from day one, and it’s why I consider it my primary channel. Feel free to steal my strategy. Here it is.

Choose one channel to be your proving ground, the place where you push the limits to make new discoveries for that small segment of your audience that truly loves and appreciates your work.

In addition to being a source of valuable content, this is the channel that always gets 100% of your heart and soul, regardless of other commitments, and fuels the larger body of work that defines your brand.

Good luck with yours.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on content strategy. Meet me over on Twitter to take the conversation further.

Key Take-Aways

  • Thanks to Frank Kenny for helping to put this podcast together. You can learn more about his work with local Chambers of Commerce at FrankJKenny.com
  • While SnapChat was the darling of the event, you may be surprised to learn that all four of the LinkedIn sessions I attended with Stephanie Sammons, Viveka von Rosen, Melonie Dodaro, Jason Miller and Alex Rynne were completely full. This is a reminder that for many businesses LinkedIn is considered an essential social media channel.
  • Peg Fitzpatrick offered a couple of resources for upgrading your images. They are DesignFeed.io for resizing images for the social media channels and RelayThat.com for quickly and easily creating cool graphics.
  • Syed Balkhi shared AnswerThePublic.com for learning what people want to learn more about so that you can create content that addresses relevant issues. Note: When using it you’ll want to change the country from UK to US, or whatever is most relevant for your search.
  • You can still buy a virtual pass to access to 140+ Social Media Marketing World session recordings and slides by going here.

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About the Author:  Jeff Korhan, MBA, is the author of Built-In Social: Essential Social Marketing Practices for Every Small Business and host of This Old New Business podcast.

He helps organizations use media to create exceptional customer experiences that drive business growth in a digital, social and global world. Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+

The Value of Social Media Sharing

June 26, 2013 by
Technorati Top Small Business Blogs


Technorati Top Small Business Blogs

 

The Jeff Korhan New Media and Small Business Marketing blog enjoyed a great week, leaping back into the Technorati Small Business Top 100 Rankings.

How does this happen?

While producing great content helps, it is not enough – not nearly enough. Your content has to get shared, again and again.

Original content is fuel for helping your customers – and social media sharing is the flame that ignites it.

Getting Your Content Shared

To start, you have to earn the right to be shared, and that does require having a base of solid content that is the result of understanding your business and its customers – and then showing up to do the work of creating it.

Your content is a body of work that earns the attention of your community. If you consistently provide value, the community will engage with your business blog, with a few even taking a moment to leave a comment.

This is precisely how I first met Jon Loomer. Since then, we have crossed paths as guest bloggers at Social Media Examiner, something that would not have been possible without our respectively building a base of content worthy of the standards of Social Media Examiner.

Links from prominent sites like Social Media Examiner significantly contribute to the ranking of your blog. Now fast forward a few years to just last week, when I did an interview with Jon Loomer on his Social Media Pubcast.

Jon’s podcast is so popular that we scheduled that conversation months into the future. So, in addition to the time investment for doing your own work, you have to be patient about your content sharing.

This is a marathon – not a sprint.

Get in The Game and Let Serendipity Happen

Jon Loomer is influential as a Facebook expert, and we had a good time chatting about the new Facebook hashtags. The article I recently wrote on that topic earned quite a few shares, something that occasionally happens when you continue showing up to do the work of helping your community.

Serendipity played a role in helping that article reach a larger audience, because my content is syndicated by Business 2 Community and Social Media Informer, which both significantly helped to earn it even more shares.

These partner relationships would not be possible without first creating content worthy of sharing.

So, the lesson is simple.

Create content to the best of your ability, keep showing up to do it again, and reach out every now and then to expand your audience by joining the communities of other blogs.

Oh yeah, and don’t forget to share and share alike.

When you share, you create opportunities for new relationships. That’s how I met Jon Loomer, Mike Stelzner at Social Media Examiner, and lots of other cool people.

The web is designed for sharing.

You simply cannot do this alone. You need friends and allies.

The aforementioned Technorati ranking may have my name on it, but it was a team effort that was years in the making.

Are you ready to get started building yours?

About the Author:  Jeff Korhan, MBA, helps mainstream small businesses create exceptional customer experiences that accelerate business growth. Get more from Jeff on LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+.

Jeff is also the author of Built-In Social: Essential Social Marketing Practices for Every Small Business – (Wiley 2013)

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The art of marketing has always been about making meaningful connections with ideal buyers. Modern marketing is a practice that is new to most small businesses. Prior to that small businesses made meaningful connections through selling, not marketing. One of the reasons for this is that most of the media available in recent decades, including magazines, […]

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How to Successfully Launch and Propel Your Business Upward

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Do you have a great business idea but don’t know where to start?  Is your small business stuck? Michael Stelzner is someone who has successfully met both challenges – and he describes how you can do the same in his newly released book. In Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition, Mike shares […]

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