Social Media

Why You Should Add Live Video to Your Content Strategy

Why You Should Add Live Video to Your Content Strategy

Adding live video to your marketing strategy will help with building your brand, engaging prospective customers, and improving your site’s SEO, among many other benefits. 

Storytelling, The Key to Social Media Success

Storytelling_ContentMarketing
"Storytelling has never been so powerful than today. The principles and success factors are closely related with word-of-mouth, social sharing, social media in general, brand perception and the very core of content marketing."

Working with clients and talking to founders we realized that some of them are missing the essential element for their social media marketing success: They need to be willing to create content and tell stories – the whole time.

Many of the people we talk to believe that social media marketing is all about posting updates and being constantly active in the chosen networks. It is. But that is simply only half the truth. Without a steady stream of content and stories all the activity in social media marketing can only get them so far.

A large part of social media success is not created directly on the various different social networks. It is created on your own site, on your own blog. It is the content, which you need to play the social networks to your advantage. It is the stories, which you tell, that attract an audience. And while there is a lot of content out there free for you to use, your own content on your own site is essential.

Of course there are many mechanisms and tweaks to social media activity that you should know about. Not knowing them will make your social media marketing a lukewarm effort. But at the core of real social media success is the content that you share and the stories that you tell. It is not enough to copy other peoples’ content or retweet and share what others post.

We sometimes have a hard time convincing these people that their biggest problem is not what they are or are not doing on social media. It is the utter lack of good and sharable content that often makes them fail with generating traffic. But fixing this lack of content is not as easy as setting up a new tweet or sharing some links on Facebook. It is going to be hard work.

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Vacation Time...Turn Off Your Social Media And Cell Phone Addiction

Technology is a filter that removes you from present experiences. We see it all the time at dinner, when friends have to remember to put their phones down and actually talk to each other. We see it on trains and buses, when people miss their stops because they’re absorbed in their devices, or fail to connect to their surroundings because they’ve got their earbuds in. They may as well be somewhere else.

I’m be the first to admit a social media and cell phone addiction. In part, I blame my job. As a blogger and a writer, I tweet articles and blog posts. I Instagram almost daily, making sure my photos have a certain aesthetic and that they’re on brand. It’s all stupid of course, but it’s unfortunately necessary. And I’m grateful for this five-inch rectangle of magic, because it gave me a career. Simple as that.

But when I go on vacation, I hate the stupid thing. I recently came back from a trip to San Francisco with my cousin. In a new city for the first time, our devices were absolutely essential. We needed bus schedules and stop information, we needed a way to contact friends, get Ubers, split the check after dinner, call our families back home. Cell phones make everything effortless. I love them for that.

We created a hashtag before we left so we could post our pictures and show the world what we were doing, and then have a little cyberpage where our photos would be organized. Whenever we saw something beautiful, breathtaking, or new, we took photos of each other posed in front of the thing, and then sent them to each other. I Instagrammed mine, she hers. I spent time choosing filters. She asked me, “What should the caption be?” We let our food grow cold while we got the perfect angle for the #innout hashtag.

And then for the tacos. And the Golden Gate Bridge. Don’t get me wrong: photos are the absolute best way to remember a vacation and I carry along a DSLR wherever I travel. But social media is different.

There’s a feeling that we’re enjoying ourselves for others: that we need the appreciation, acceptance and even jealousy of other people to fully round out our vacation experience. The phrase “pics or it didn’t happen” seems to apply here! So we take photos of stuff—everything we see—and then spend more minutes editing and filtering and ‘gramming the photo than looking at the actual thing in real life.

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