Facebook Timeline case study: The Hunger Games
Over the past few weeks I’ve been spending even more time than usual on Facebook, putting together a new update to our report: Facebook Pages for Business: A Best Practice Guide.
It’s been a mammoth task, with Facebook in an almost constant state of flux over the past 12 months.
The Facebook Pages for Business guide contains over 80 new examples, and includes details on optimising the Timeline, guides to daily admin and tracking success, advice on creating and communicating with audiences, optimising your page to help with search and brand positioning, usage and demographic stats, and case studies of a variety of businesses, from niche B2Bs to global FMCGs.
The report has been designed to take you through every aspect of Facebook, from clicking 'create a page' to advanced f-commerce and beyond.
It reflects the sheer scale of Facebook, and should help to counter all of the outdated information that's available, something I know from first hand experience to be incredibly frustrating.
Why aren’t you using animation yet?
Animation is often overlooked when planning a marketing campaign, meaning that many organisations can miss out on using this powerful tool.
Seven ways to be a blog content king
I’m sure you’ve already read a lot of articles advising you about the power of blogs. They provide fresh, content that search engines love, that you can farm out through social channels and use to engage and amuse your audience, share links, grow your network… the list goes on.
The problem is, you really aren’t sure how to go about it. First and foremost, running a successful blog requires a lot of hard work on your part, and maybe you just don’t feel you have enough interesting content to fill page after page.
The biggest mistake made is often the assumption that a blog is simply another promotional channel for your business.
Five press release mistakes and how to avoid them
As I was going through my RSS reader earlier today, I came across an post on paidContent detailing the launch of Sharecare, a new online health and wellness website that is set to launch in 2010.
I was intrigued because of the number, and identity, of the co-founders: celebrity doctor Dr. Mehmet Oz, WebMD founder Jeff Arnold, Discovery Communications, Harpo Productions (Oprah!), Sony Pictures Television and HSW International. Wow, I thought, this must be good.
15 kick-ass retweet tips for writers
Twitter is a publisher’s dream. It is a huge echo chamber that can drive a lot of quality traffic to articles, especially if the retweets take off.
Retweets are referrals. The 'RT' abbreviation is a strong call to action. People trust their virtual friends to steer them in interesting directions, otherwise they wouldn’t be following them in the first place. As such retweets can generate lots of clicks, and they can quickly go viral.
In addition, there are a range of websites orientated around retweets. Think Digg, but instead of ‘diggs’ you have ‘retweets’, and usually these links are displayed in order of popularity (and not buried / subject to a complex algorithm to determine front-page status). These sites can be traffic drivers too. One of my favourites is the excellent TweetMeme.
So, considering the opportunity here, how can publishers make the most out of Twitter, and optimise the retweet factor?
130+ essential tips for Twitter fiends
Over the past couple of years we’ve written lots of articles on how to use Twitter both effectively and ethically, to help grow your audience and boost engagement.
I have aggregated a bunch of these posts together to share some insights on how we – and others – use Twitter as a tool to improve our business, and some pointers towards best (and worst) practice.
I hope you’ll find these tips and how-to articles to be useful, whether you’re just starting out with Twitter, or have lapsed into inactivity, or are a frequent tweeter who is looking out for a few more optimisation clues.
A 20-step starter’s guide to using Twitter efficiently
While you might imagine that everybody in the world now uses Twitter, the reality is somewhat different.
Even in the internet industry there remains something of a Twitter vacuum. I have spoken to at least half a dozen people in the past few days who haven’t yet set up an account, for one reason or another.
I’m not saying Twitter is for everybody, or is right for all brands, but we find it useful and many of the people I’ve been talking to would benefit from using it.
So for the purposes of any further ‘how do you do it?’ discussions I thought it would be a good idea to explain how I (currently) use Twitter. There are of course a hundred ways of skinning a cat, and I’m quite sure that there are lots of far more advanced Twitterers out there, but this works for me...
Copywriting for Twitter: 10 ways to make every tweet count
No one can deny the phenomenal rise of Twitter over the past few months. But with a massive 750% growth rate within 12 months and hundreds of tweets every second, it means there is an awful lot of ‘noise’ being channelled through the medium.
So how can you make yourself heard through all this activity? What will make you stand out from everyone else? Although there’s no definitive rule, we’ve come up with ten tips to guide you in the right direction.
How many Diggs does it take to hit the homepage?
Social media A-lister Digg.com is a wondrous diversion for those times when you have 15 minutes to kill. It’s better still for media owners that happen to be on the receiving end of Digg love.
Digg can deliver a serious traffic spike, should one of your stories make it to the homepage. I’ve watched in awe as Digg directed more than 1,500 visitors in a minute to an entertainment blog that I run. It’s like turning on a tap.
One of the questions I’m frequently asked is ‘how many Diggs do I need to get my story onto the front page?'. The answer, it turns out, is about 100, but there’s way more to it than that.
Let’s look at the fundamentals for success, and then some facts and figures relating to Digg.
