Content marketing and social media sharing are trends that have become cemented in the day-to-day lives of brand managers. But does this mean they are cemented and don’t evolve? Not in the slightest.
Two recent announcements illustrate the pace at which these processes are evolving and what this means for industry experts. These new tools seek to make the processes more effective for the growing number of PR, marketing and social media pros moving to online campaigns.
Online news and media giant Buzzfeed recently introduced Pound. This game changing technology tracks a piece of content’s spread across various social media platforms. In other news, Pound tracks how you got on an article about cats pulling funny faces.
Though there already are technologies which track social media shares, most of these group data in buckets. This means public relations professionals miss out on information golden nuggets, such as how an individual social media site affects the spread of an article, picture or video.
Buzzfeed publisher Dao Nguyen published this infographic to demonstrate the differences between Pound and other tracking technologies:
Dao Nguyen claims, “… traditional web analytics are fundamentally unable to capture what actually happens on the social web today; they obliterate its inherent tree structure.” Pound enables brand managers to see what happens when a tweet is then shared on Facebook, prompting another follower to share it in a blog post, and so on.
One of the keys to effective website design is to not make assumptions about your audiences. Don’t assume you know exactly how all your audiences are reached and the long path they took before. Same goes for this content sharing technology.
Content can be shared by hundreds of thousands of people. How can you affect these hundreds of thousands without some idea about how they got to where they are. You can’t!
Though Pound’s offerings are currently only available to Buzzfeed, expect to see copycats taking a me too approach.
Social media platforms are also eager to improve their analytics. They want to help not only brand managers promote more content, but also to make sponsored content at least seem more organic.
PR Daily says Twitter is taking a cue from social platforms including Pinterest and Facebook by taking the yellow badge off promoted tweets—Twitter’s main advertising unit for brands. The change began in May and will eventually affect all mobile and Web versions of the social media site.
In short this means it is more difficult for users to distinguish between paid and organic content. The down side of this is it can easily be considered as unethical. Users tend to distrust sponsored content – taking away their knowledge takes away their right to transparency.
However a Twitter represents there is still some degree of transparency. They told Marketing Land the move is intended to make promoted tweets “blend more seamlessly” with other tweets while “still being clearly labeled as advertising.”
A surprising study revealed that 93 percent of B2B technology marketers employ content to find and retain customers, but only 34 percent think they’re effective at it. Which percentage group do you fit into?