Our Latest Experiments With Medium, Instagram, and More: Buffer’s Social Media Report for May

It’s been an amazing month at Buffer working on some fun social media strategies and thinking ahead to some big new ideas.

What’s a good Medium strategy?

How can we gain more followers on Instagram?

What might a Buffer podcast look like?

I’d love to share with you what’s been on our plates recently, along with all the social media stats from our Buffer accounts. It’d be great to hear your thoughts also on the content we can write that would be most helpful for you!

Inside Buffer’s social media marketing stats

Here’re our complete stats from May for each of Buffer’s five major social media profiles. We’re hopeful that the context and background is helpful as you build and analyze your social media strategies. Feel free to shout with any questions!

(All stats cover a 28-day period from last month, and comparisons are made to the 28 days prior.)

Twitter

We gained 9,424 new followers for a total of 323,715 followers. (Last month, we gained 11,532 new followers.)

We shared 292 tweets (not including #bufferchat and customer happiness) that earned a total of 70,369 total interactions. This was an increase of about 35 interactions per tweet compared to last month.

Out of everyone who saw a tweet, 1.6 percent of users engaged with the tweet by clicking, retweeting, replying, favoriting, or following the Buffer account.

• Engagement rate – 1.6% (1.4% last month)
• Average impressions per tweet – 15,963 (16,046 last month)
• Average total engagement per tweet – 263 (clicks, retweets, replies, follows, and favorites) (239 last month)
• Average clicks per tweet – 182 (148 last month)
• Average retweets per tweet – 21 (23 last month)

If you’re interested in digging deeper into any of these stats, I’m happy to share our .csv of exported Twitter analytics.

Top tweet from May

Facebook

We gained 802 new page Likes for a total of 36,779 Likes. (We gained 835 new page Likes last month.)

We shared 69 posts that earned 4,304 interactions. This was an decrease of 7 interactions per post compared to last month.

An average Facebook post reached 1,256 (1,549 last month). Of these, 819 people were fans of our page (1,030 last month), so each post reached an average of 2.2 percent of our total number of fans (was 2.8 percent last month).

• Average clicks per post – 52 (-10 from last month)
• Average likes per post – 7 (-3 from last month)
• Average comments per post – 1 (no change from last month)

If you’re interested in digging deeper into any of these stats, I’m happy to share our .csv of exported Facebook analytics. 

Top Facebook post from May

LinkedIn

We gained 355 new followers for a total of 4,742 followers. (We gained 283 new followers last month.)

We shared 20 posts that earned a total of 313 interactions.

• Engagement rate – 1.7%
• Interactions per post – 15 (+8 from last month)

Google+

We gained 32,722 new followers for a total of 817,052 followers. (We gained 34,644 new followers last month.)

We shared 40 posts that earned a total of 1,032 interactions.

• Interactions per post – 25 (25 last month)
• Clicks per post – 3 (3 last month)
• Reshares per post – 4 (same)
• Plus Ones per post – 16 (17 last month)

Pinterest

We gained 212 new followers for a total of 4,756 followers.

We shared 179 posts that earned a total of 440 interactions.

• Interactions per post – 2.5
• Repins per post – 2
• Likes per post – 1
• Comments per post – 0

Referral traffic to the Buffer blog

The above chart shows the top five social referrers to the Buffer Social blog. Numbers six through ten were StumbleUpon, Scoop.it, Pocket, Reddit, and Tumblr.

Referral traffic to the Buffer app

The above chart shows the top five social referrers to the Buffer app itself. Numbers six through ten were Blogger, Quora, Google+, Scoop.it, and WordPress.

Inside Buffer’s social media strategies

Along with the stats, I’d love to share a bit about the strategies we’re testing on different social networks. It’d be awesome if you find this helpful or if this sparks any ideas for you. And it’d be great to get your thoughts in the comments on ways we could improve or grow, too!

1. Exploring a new strategy on Medium

We’ve been inspired by the great work of the team at Medium and excited to try out some new strategies for connecting with the audience there. A couple of ideas (I’d love to know your thoughts!):

1. Short-form content
2. Buffer publications

For short-form content, we were thinking it might be a great opportunity to provide a unique type of article compared to the longform content we publish here on the blog.

On Medium, our thought is to republish a popular Buffer blog article by turning it into three or four Medium articles.

Is Your Audience on Snapchat, Ello, or Vine?

Or to simply share a tip or strategy that’s been on our minds.

So You Want to Write a Catchy Twitter Bio …

Or we’ve also thought to go the route of writing responses to popular Medium articles on social media, business culture, and transparency, or to pull these types of stories from others into our Medium publication itself.

In terms of the Buffer publications, we’ve currently started one for all of our social media content, and we’re considering starting new ones perhaps for transparency, remote work, or culture as well.

(If you have any ideas for Buffer collections you’d like to see, I’d love to hear your thoughts!)

We’re quite early with things, though I’m happy to share some stats from the experiment so far. Here’s a look at all the views, recommends, and read ratios of our Medium content.

The one thing we noticed with our most successful Medium article so far (the Don Draper one, which went live on a Saturday) is that there could be quite an opportunity to publish and share this content on the weekends when Medium’s volume is a bit lower and there’s more opportunity to stand out in the Medium feed.

2. Building a presence on Instagram

We’ve also been ramping up our presence on Buffer’s Instagram account, sharing more often and working on some new Instagram strategies and tips to grow our following. We’re excited to share what has worked best for us so far!

A couple of things we’re trying so far:

1. Consistent posting schedule – We’ve been averaging one post per day on Instagram recently
2. Reposting photos from teammates – It’s been fun to share a bit behind-the-scenes from the lives of those we work with
3. Announcing #bufferchat topics
4. Sharing quotes and created images

As for the tools we’re using, a couple of helpful ones so far have been:

1. Repost – Super useful for reposting photos from teammates
2. Iconosquare – Helpful for getting benchmarks and stats on how our content is performing

3. The 1-pixel Pinterest tip

A few weeks back, we shared a post on the Buffer blog about creating Pinterest content no matter how visually inclined your brand is. One of the questions we had while writing the post:

How do you insert a tall, vertical Pinterest image into a blog post without taking up a whole lot of room?

Hugh Briss replied to the post with a super interesting tip that lets you include a Pinterest-optimized image without using up much real estate in the post itself.

Here’s the video from Hugh:

Recap:

1. Upload your tall Pinterest image to the post
2. Change the height and width to 1-pixel each
3. Done!

We tried this on our social media templates post, adding a 1-pixel image above the first picture of the post. Now, when you click the Pinterest “Pin It” button or use the Buffer extension to schedule a Pin, our secret, optimized Pinterest image comes up automatically.

And if you’re curious what the 1-pixel image looks like within a post, here’s a sample. (It’s on the line right below this. Pretty hard to see, right?)

New visions and ideas for social media marketing

We feel grateful for the chance to work on so many amazing and fun social media strategies, and we’ve got even more that we’d love to try out. Here are a few that we’re thinking over.

1. What might a Buffer podcast look like?

We’re very grateful for the encouragement and interest from the community for a possible Buffer podcast. It’s something we’re thinking about here on the team (we’re also looking for new teammates to join us, if you might be interested!), and I’d love to learn from you:

What would be most valuable for you with a Buffer podcast?

A few ideas:

Topic

• A podcast A podcast about Buffer’s values and culture
• A podcast about remote work
• A podcast about startups and entrepreneurism
• A podcast about Buffer culture

Format

• Buffer folks (me, Courtney, Nicole, Leo, others) talking with each other about a given topic
• Interviews with Buffer users on how they get the most from Buffer
• Interviews with social media marketers on what they’re testing and trying
• Interviews with influencers in the industry
• 1:1 chats with Buffer teammates

If any of these catch your eye (or if you have any other ideas to share), please do let us know in the comments! We’d love to make any future podcast as helpful and useful to you as possible.

2. Hangout on Air – Office Hours

Another idea we’ve been toying with is making time to share with you all in an office hours format, kind of an open Q-and-A where we can chat with one another and learn from each other.

The thought is that Google’s Hangouts on Air could be quite great for this. Hangouts on Air offer live video streaming that you can watch on YouTube or replay later on, complete with chat functionality during the broadcast. It’s one of the smoothest ways to record a Hangout, and we’d love for the content to be accessible to anyone, any time whether you’re able to hang out live with us or not.

Social media content we’d love to write about (any thoughts?)

And finally, I’d love to share a few of the social media blog post ideas we’re considering for the next few weeks. If any of these topics jump out at you, I’d love to hear your votes!

1. Social Media for Non-Profits
2. How to Choose the Right Stock Photo for Any Project
3. The Top 10 Social Media Research Studies (and What You Can Learn From Them)
4. 35 Unique Social Media Conversations That Every Small Business Should Be Prepared For
5. The Secret Psychology of Instagram
6. The 7 Hidden Factors of the Most Effective Social Media Ads

Over to you

What’s been working for you these past few weeks with your social media marketing?

Do you have any advice for us on the topics we’ve listed above?

It’d be really great to hear your input. Feel free to leave us a note here in the comments or catch us on social media. Thanks!

Image sources: Pablo, Unsplash

The post Our Latest Experiments With Medium, Instagram, and More: Buffer’s Social Media Report for May appeared first on Social.

Your Daily SEO Fix: Week 4

Posted by Trevor-Klein

This week, we've got the fourth (and second-to-last) installment of our short (< 2-minute) video tutorials that help you all get the most out of Moz's tools. They're each designed to solve a use case that we regularly hear about from Moz community members.

Here's a quick recap of the previous round-ups in case you missed them:

• Week 1: Reclaim links using Open Site Explorer, build links using Fresh Web Explorer, and find the best time to tweet using Followerwonk.
• Week 2: Analyze SERPs using new MozBar features, boost your rankings through on-page optimization, check your anchor text using Open Site Explorer, do keyword research with OSE and the keyword difficulty tool, and discover keyword opportunities in Moz Analytics.
• Week 3: Compare link metrics in Open Site Explorer, find tweet topics with Followerwonk, create custom reports in Moz Analytics, use Spam Score to identify high-risk links, and get link building opportunities delivered to your inbox.

In this installment, we've got five brand new tutorials:

• How to Use Fresh Web Explorer to Build Links
• How to Analyze Rank Progress for a Given Keyword
• How to Use the MozBar to Analyze Your Competitors' Site Markup
• How to Use the Top Pages Report to Find Content Ideas
• How to Find On-Site Errors with Crawl Test

Hope you enjoy them!

Fix 1: How to Use Fresh Web Explorer to Build Links

If you have unique data or a particularly excellent resource on your site, that content can be a great link magnet. In this Daily SEO Fix, Felicia shows you how to set up alerts in Fresh Web Explorer to track mentions of relevant keyword phrases, find link opportunities, and build links to your content.

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Fix 2: How to Analyze Rank Progress for a Given Keyword

Moz's Rank Tracker tool retrieves search engine rankings for pages and keywords, storing them for easy comparison later. In this fix, James shows you how to use this helpful tool to track keywords, save time, and improve your rankings.

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Fix 3: How to Use the MozBar to Analyze Your Competitors' Site Markup

Schema markup helps search engines better identify what your (and your competitors') website pages are all about and as a result can lead to a boost to rankings. In this Daily SEO Fix, Jordan shows you how to use the MozBar to analyze the schema markup of the competition and optimize your own site and pages for rich snippets.

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Fix 4: How to Use the Top Pages Report to Find Content Ideas

With Moz's Top Pages report in Open Site Explorer, you can see the pages on your site (and the competitions' sites!) that are top performers. In this fix, Nick shows you how to use the report to analyze your competitors' content marketing efforts and to inform your own.

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Fix 5: How to Find On-Site Errors with Crawl Test

Identifying and understanding any potential errors on your site is crucial to the life of any SEO. In this Daily SEO Fix Sean shows you how to use the Crawl Test tool in Moz Analytics to pull reports and identify any errors on your site.

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Looking for more?

We've got more videos in the previous three weeks' round-ups!

Your Daily SEO Fix: Week 1

Your Daily SEO Fix: Week 2

Your Daily SEO Fix: Week 3

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Don't have a Pro subscription? No problem. Everything we cover in these Daily SEO Fix videos is available with a free 30-day trial.

Sounds good. Sign me up!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

The 5 Most Meaningful Google Analytics Reports for Social Media Marketers

We have Google Analytics installed on all the Buffer blogs (Social, Open, Overflow, and certainly also Happiness in the future). I imagine you might have it installed, too.

And though I could be in a much better habit of checking GA often, I am grateful to know that all the stats are there for me, whenever I choose to look.

The next question, then: Where should I be looking for helpful social media stats in GA?

There’s just so much to look at, with so many new and unusual titles. I’ve done my best to research and ask around about the best advice for social media marketers using Google Analytics. Here’s what I found to be the five most useful reports that you can set up quickly and let run forever.

Exclusive Bonus: Get free access to a complete social media dashboard for Google Analytics! Install in one click!

1. Traffic by social channel

See your most valuable networks, plus the up-and-comers

Where to find this report:

Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals

What this report tells you:

At-a-glance, you can see which social network sends you the most visits to your website. For instance, Twitter sent the Buffer blog 79,096 visitors last month.

You can view the data in a pie chart to see how the networks break down as an overall percentage of social traffic to your site. For instance, Twitter accounted for 56 percent of social traffic to the Buffer blog. Twitter and Facebook combined accounted for 81 percent.

You can expand the results to show 25 or 50 channels, then change the date range to include a comparison to last period. Voila! Now you can identify networks beyond your main ones that are beginning to send you more and more traffic. For the Buffer blog, we’ve noticed StumbleUpon and Hacker News seem to be on the rise.

Advanced:

If you click on the individual network name in this report, you can see a breakdown of all the links of yours that have been shared on that network.

2. Social media traffic

See how much social media contributes to your overall visits

Where to find this report:

Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels

What this report tells you:

You can see your traffic sources at a high-level:

1. Organic search (people clicking through from Google)
2. Social (Twitter, Facebook, social visits)
3. Direct (people typing your site in their browser or bookmarks)
4. Referral (people clicking links from other sites to get to you)
5. Email
6. Paid search
7. Other

With this info, you get a great sense of the importance of social media for bringing people to your site. If you ever need justification for focusing on social media, this report is it!

For the Buffer blog, we see 15 percent of our traffic from social, which accounts for nearly 150,000 visits each month.

Advanced:

Under the Acquisition > All Traffic category, you can click to view the Source/Medium, which will show you a granular break down of the search, social, and referral traffic. For a quick hack into your mobile vs. desktop traffic, look at how each social network URL is abbreviated. Twitter on mobile is represented by t.co, and desktop is twitter.com. Facebook on mobile is represented by m.facebook.com, and desktop is facebook.com.

In addition, to see the mobile vs. desktop traffic breakdown, you can add a Secondary Dimension to any view (by clicking the Secondary Dimension button at the top of any table). Type in “Mobile” and select “Mobile (Including Tablet).”

3. Landing pages

Where to find this report:

Acquisition > Social > Landing Pages

What this report tells you:

Use this report to see your website pages that get shared most often on social media. For the Buffer blog in the past 30 days, our most-shared story is Andrianes Pinantoan’s guest post about Canva’s growth strategy.

Advanced:

You can click any link in this report to see the specific breakdown of networks where this content was shared.

4. Multi-channel reports

Where to find this report:

Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Overview

This report will work if you’ve got Goals set up for your website. (See below.)

What this report tells you:

The Venn diagram you’ll get on this report page shows the various paths that people take to convert through your website or blog. For example, on the Buffer blog, a good majority of people convert after coming to the site from organic search. A smaller—but still significant—portion convert after coming directly or clicking on a link from social media.

The overlap in the Venn diagrams represent visitors who might, for instance, click a link in a tweet first, then come back to the site directly later on to go through the conversion flow. And Google Analytics tracks all this, all the way through!

Advanced: 

Further down into the Multi-Channel Funnels, there are some neat reports:

1. Top Conversion Paths
2. Time Lag
3. Page Length

For Top Conversion Paths, you can see the frequency with which visitors take certain routes to conversion. For instance, I can see in my report that the most common path is a person visiting my site directly two times before converting. The top social path is a visit or two from social first, then a direct visit.

You can change the view here also by clicking on “Source/Medium Path” at the top of the chart to see the specific social networks involved in the conversion flow.

For Time Lag, you can see how many days come between first visit and conversion.

For Path Length, you can see a breakdown of how many paths are involved in each conversion typically. For my blog, the vast majority (75%) convert after one visit.

5. UTM campaign results

Where to find this report:

Acquisition > Campaigns

What this report tells you:

If you’re running a social media campaign, you can append the URLs you’re sharing with a UTM parameter, a bit of text that goes at the end of your link. Google’s free URL Builder is perhaps the simplest way to set these up.

If we were running a campaign for a bufferchat, we could change this link:

https://blog.bufferapp.com/free-marketing-tools

to this:

https://blog.bufferapp.com/free-marketing-tools?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=tweet&utm_campaign=bufferchat

When setting up the new URL in Google’s URL Builder, just make note of what you’re calling the “Campaign Name,” as this is how you’ll find the results in your Google Analytics reports.

The value here is that you’ll then be able to track how many visits this campaign sent back to your website as well as what happened to these visitors once they landed. How long did they stay? Did they convert? Etc.

Advanced:

Within the Campaigns report, you might notice the term “buffer” popping up. When you share a link from Buffer, we automatically add a UTM parameter to the shortened URL so you can easily track the impact of your social sharing via Buffer. You can override these campaign settings by creating custom UTMs in your Buffer dashboard.

How to Set up Goals and Advanced Segments

The above five reports are excellent and great and wonderful, and to make things really powerful you can go through a few quick steps to add Goals and Advanced Segments to your traffic stats to make things even more targeted and useful.

For Goals, you can tell Google Analytics which actions on your website you value most, whether those are conversions or Time on Page or any number of other metrics.

How to set up Goals:

1. At the very top of any Google Analytics page, click Admin.
2. In the far right column, click on Goals.
3. Choose a goal template.

Google Analytics breaks these down into four different categories:

1. Revenue
2. Acquisition
3. Inquiry
4. Engagement

(I’ve personally used the Revenue category to track sales and the Engagement category to track newsletter signups.)

The next steps here will vary based on the category you choose. If you’ve got any specific questions on the details here, drop a comment on this post and I’ll see if I can dig up an answer!

For a quick overview, I love this advice from Kristi Hines:

The easiest goals set up type is URL destination – this is where you tell Google Analytics that a goal has been completed when a visitor lands on a particular page on your website. For example, you would set up the thank you page for a form submission or the final order confirmation page for a product purchase as a URL destination. For ecommerce websites, you can set up goal funnels that track all of the steps visitors take in your shopping cart process for more detailed reports.

At the end of the setup, you have a chance to verify the goal to see if all is in working order. If all’s good, then you’ll be able to start seeing your traffic in relation to the goals you’ve set up, which can be hugely helpful in identifying which channels and paths are most valuable for what you’re hoping to achieve with your site.

How to set up Advanced Segments:

1. From your main overview page in Google Analytics, click the “+Add Segment” button above your main traffic graph.
2. Click the red button to “+New Segment.”

You can name your segment and choose the factors that you want to segment by.

The value here is in singling out a portion of your traffic based on particular options—only traffic from Twitter, say, or only Facebook mobile traffic. You can create these social media segments by adding the URLs for these networks to the Traffic Sources > Source in the segment settings.

For more on Advanced Segments, Convince and Convert has a useful overview on the topic.

Bonus: Free Social Media Dashboard

I’ve found that knowing about Google Analytics reports and using them can be two very different things, so I’d love to make it as easy as possible to get these reports into your social media marketing workflow.

Click here to receive a free social media dashboard.

It’s a free dashboard that adds straight into your Google Analytics once you click. From then on, you can access it quickly by clicking on Dashboards in the left column from any GA page.

What the dashboard includes:

1. Real-time visitors to your website from social channels
2. Which social networks are sending you the most traffic overall
3. Your top landing pages for social traffic
4. How your social traffic fits with traffic from search, direct, and referral
5. Your most shared pages on Twitter and Facebook
6. Your social media campaign results

Over to you

What have you found most useful with Google Analytics for your social media marketing?

Which reports do you find yourself checking often?

I’d love to learn from you on this! I feel I’m still quite green when it comes to Google Analytics and that there’s tons of untapped potential there. If you have any tips you’d be willing to share, it’d be an honor to learn from you!

Image sources: Pablo, IconFinder, UnSplash

The post The 5 Most Meaningful Google Analytics Reports for Social Media Marketers appeared first on Social.

The Quick-and-Simple Guide to Getting Started With Video Content

If you find yourself intimidated by the concept of creating video content, you’re not alone.

Every minute of the day, YouTube users alone upload 72 hours of new video content, not to mention uploads to Facebook, Vimeo, Daily Motion or Wistia.

With all that noise, making your video stand out, increasing engagement and finding ways to add value is a mammoth task; which makes doing it right even sweeter.

Fortunately, there are tons of great blueprints for creating valuable, meaningful video content.

I’ve taken a closer look at some of these strategies and have condensed the advice here, in a “delightfully short” guide to adding value with your video content. I’ve included the latest research on video content, the best expert tips, and some great examples of video content done right. If you’ve got any more tips or examples of great brand videos, I’d love to hear them in the comments.

The Stats Behind Valuable Video Content

At first glance, taking on the challenge of adding video to your content marketing mix might seem enormous to say the least.

So why would you want to take on such a mammoth task?

1. Video generates 3x as many monthly visitors to a website as other content
2. Visitors spend 88% more time on a website that includes video
3. Organic traffic from search engines increases by 157%
4. Consumers are 46% more likely to seek information about a product or service after seeing in an online video
5. Consumers are 85% more likely to buy after watching a product video
6. 52% more confidence in their online purchase

Online video presents a huge opportunity for you to add tremendous value to your brand, whether you overall goal is increasing conversions, improving brand confidence or simply to show you care.

With the advent of social streaming platforms such as Meerkat and Periscope, and in a world where the majority of marketers already have some way of recording HD video and access to easy-to-use editing software, it’s clear that no matter your budget or ability, you can create valuable video content.

The 5-Step Process to Creating Video Content

I’ve gone through some of the best user guides to making engaging video, and I’ve highlighted a few of the key steps that experts are suggesting you consider when creating video content.

Here is a quick rundown of my five steps toward more valuable video:

1. Listen and understand your audience
2. Align with your brand goals
3. Create the content and make it resonate
4. Share. Share. Share again!
5. Measure. Analyse. Understand.

1. Listen and understand your audience

First things first, before brainstorming video ideas or choosing the right video tools or thinking about which cameras to buy, you’ll need to find out:

What does your audience want to see?

Making the effort to understand what your audience wants can add a huge amount of value to your video.

Before settling on an idea for your video, spend some time getting to know your audience, looking at what they want to know about your brand and what they are talking about in the industry.

Earlier in the year, Kevan’s post covered some really useful tools that can help you understand and get to know your audience. With that list in mind, here are a few ideas of where to begin with listening:

1. Social media conversations, questions, and replies
2. Surveys sent to your users, subscribers or followers
3. Frequently asked questions from your support inbox
4. A Twitter hashtag search of something meaningful to your brand
5. Popular question headlines in a BuzzSumo search of your brand’s keywords

2. Align with your brand goals

Once you’ve identified a topic for video content that you think your audience would enjoy, the next consideration is you and your brand.

Does your video idea fit with your brand’s goals? 

After you’ve taken time to understand your audience, Katherine Hipwell of Red Bee Media suggests looking toward your brand goals and seeing how these align with the needs of the audience.

What is a brand’s objective? What is the audience interested in? And how can this be done in real time?

Here’s a neat Venn diagram that touches on the intersection of these three key questions. Aim for video content that can answer “Yes” to all three questions.

If it becomes a struggle to align brand objectives with audience wants and needs, consider shelving the idea for the time being.

It is a tough thing to do, but will help you focus on the most valuable ideas for both the brand and audience.

3. Create the content, and make it resonate

Once you’ve figured out what your audience wants and how that fits with your brand’s goals, you can move ahead on creating the video content. The Buffer blog has covered some ways to easily get started here.

I’d love to focus on the end result of your video:

What change in thinking, motivation or behaviour do you want your video to affect?

To make your video more interesting and shareable, there is some really intriguing advice in terms of the psychology and emotions behind video content.

One of my favorite stories on the topic was shared by Christina Desmarais at Inc. Christina wrote about the strategies at Unruly, a marketing company that specializes in viral video.

Unruly determined 18 psychological responses that your video should aim for.

1. Happiness
2. Exhilaration
3. Amazement
4. Inspiration
5. Hilarity
6. Contempt
7. Disgust
8. Sadness
9. Warmth
10. Pride
11. Nostalgia
12. Surprise
13. Knowledge
14. Shock
15. Confusion
16. Arousal
17. Fear
18. Anger

Among these, the positive emotions are the ones that are most effective at driving social shares. Emotions like happiness, exhilaration, and amazement (the first five listed above, in particular) are great indicators of a successful video on social media.

Christina’s post goes on to share 10 main reasons why people share videos with others, a list drawn from Unruly’s experience in viral video. Among the 10 reasons, here are two that stood out to me:

• The sharer believes the product or service could be useful to friends.
• It demonstrates the sharer’s knowledge or authority on a subject.

So when creating a video, keep in mind the emotions you’re creating with your video and the reasons why someone might share it. And in case these ideas seem a bit vague (I know I can sometimes struggle in this area!), here are some helpful resources from Wistia on the topic of emotions and video.

1. How to Balance Logic and Emotion in Your Videos
2. When Is It Best to Use an Emotional Video?
3. How to Choose the Right Music for Your Video

tl;dr – Write a script that captures the emotional voice and tone of your brand, choose music that elicits the right emotion. 

4. Share. Share. Share again!

Once you’ve made your awesome and engaging video, you’ll be set to upload and share it, ready to watch the views roll in.

To get the most effective results, approach sharing your video in the same way as any other content and spread your social posts out over a long period of time.

You could be sharing your video and adding value consistently for days!

Think about how often you should post to different networks, and if you’re on the forever free plan at Buffer, you can connect a profile from each network (one from Facebook, one from Twitter, etc.) and schedule ahead 10 posts for each network.

5. Measure and attribute success

One of the most frustrating and confusing parts of making video content is knowing what success is and how to measure ROI.

After you’ve spent hours successfully creating this amazing content that is tailored toward your audience while aligned with your brand objectives, how do you even know if it worked? You might already know you need to set some KPIs, but which metrics even matter?

Carla Marshall of ReelSEO suggests focusing on three key areas:

1. Audience
2. Expression
3. Participation

Audience: Look at the # of views from your target demographic or a video’s % of views from that demographic.

Expression: Look at how much watch time the video has accumulated, both the total amount and the average time each viewer is watching. Look at the # of subscribers your videos are earning, or the % of new subscribers you’re picking up compared to the number of views your videos are getting. You can also measure how many clicks you’re getting through to your website.

Participation: # of shares or the % of shares to views

When it comes to metrics, it’s always seemed that there was a lot of pressure to get ‘views’. In fact experts are now considering ‘view count’ as a secondary metric, with the majority suggesting shares and view time to be more important than views themselves.

My favorite tip for measuring the value and success of your video comes from TheMediaOctopus (from their really interesting infographic):

Key tip: Contrary to popular belief, you should focus on how many times the video has been shared, NOT viewed. The action of sharing is the gold standard in social, a metric in itself which offers a big opportunity to influence brand metrics and performance.

3 Great Examples of Memorable Video Content

There are some excellent examples of brand videos scattered across landing pages, blogs and social channels. You don’t have to look far on YouTube or Facebook to find something valuable and engaging that ticks all the right boxes.

I’ve handpicked three of my favorites. Each one provides great value for their audience and illustrates different ways you might use video, add value and connect with your audience.

The 3 E’s of Valuable Video Content

1. Educate

Video hosting platform Wistia offer an incredible series of videos that aims to educate their audience and inspire them to make better video content.

The brand goal is simple; highlight Wistia’s expertise while educating existing and potential customers, helping improve the video content their audience produce.

2. Entertain

Although uploaded in 2012, so in no way new to the video content market, Dollar Shave Club’s viral commercial continues to set a high standard for entertaining and amusing content.

With tongue planted firmly in cheek, the goal of the video was to drive awareness of the Dollar Shave Club brand, highlighting the key benefits to their audience, in a fun and entertaining way.

3. Engage

In her recent Emoji post Courtney highlighted the great use of video content from PETA, using Emojis to communicate their powerful message and engage a very specific audience.

With their sights firmly set, PETA took a brave and unconventional approach, engaging the target audience in relatable terms yet still delivering the brand’s disturbing message in a simple yet effective manner.

The three examples are a tiny drop in the ocean of incredible brand video content. Each video indicates that by simply understanding the audience they are targeting, brands can create a more rich, valuable and meaningful content.

If you’ve experienced some engaging and valuable video content, let me know in the comments.

Summary

Hopefully this helps show that creating valuable, engaging and meaningful video is well within your grasp. And by taking a step back and aligning your business goals with your audience wants and needs, you can add tremendous value to your brand.

What questions do you have about including video on your content marketing strategy? How do you measure the value of your videos? Have you experienced some great brand videos? I’d love to hear what you think in the comments.

Image sources: UnSplash, Pablo, IconFinder

The post The Quick-and-Simple Guide to Getting Started With Video Content appeared first on Social.

Should I Use Relative or Absolute URLs? - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by RuthBurrReedy

It was once commonplace for developers to code relative URLs into a site. There are a number of reasons why that might not be the best idea for SEO, and in today's Whiteboard Friday, Ruth Burr Reedy is here to tell you all about why.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard. Click on it to open a high resolution image in a new tab!

Let's discuss some non-philosophical absolutes and relatives

Howdy, Moz fans. My name is Ruth Burr Reedy. You may recognize me from such projects as when I used to be the Head of SEO at Moz. I'm now the Senior SEO Manager at BigWing Interactive in Oklahoma City. Today we're going to talk about relative versus absolute URLs and why they are important.

At any given time, your website can have several different configurations that might be causing duplicate content issues. You could have just a standard http://www.example.com. That's a pretty standard format for a website.

But the main sources that we see of domain level duplicate content are when the non-www.example.com does not redirect to the www or vice-versa, and when the HTTPS versions of your URLs are not forced to resolve to HTTP versions or, again, vice-versa. What this can mean is if all of these scenarios are true, if all four of these URLs resolve without being forced to resolve to a canonical version, you can, in essence, have four versions of your website out on the Internet. This may or may not be a problem.

It's not ideal for a couple of reasons. Number one, duplicate content is a problem because some people think that duplicate content is going to give you a penalty. Duplicate content is not going to get your website penalized in the same way that you might see a spammy link penalty from Penguin. There's no actual penalty involved. You won't be punished for having duplicate content.

The problem with duplicate content is that you're basically relying on Google to figure out what the real version of your website is. Google is seeing the URL from all four versions of your website. They're going to try to figure out which URL is the real URL and just rank that one. The problem with that is you're basically leaving that decision up to Google when it's something that you could take control of for yourself.

There are a couple of other reasons that we'll go into a little bit later for why duplicate content can be a problem. But in short, duplicate content is no good.

However, just having these URLs not resolve to each other may or may not be a huge problem. When it really becomes a serious issue is when that problem is combined with injudicious use of relative URLs in internal links. So let's talk a little bit about the difference between a relative URL and an absolute URL when it comes to internal linking.

With an absolute URL, you are putting the entire web address of the page that you are linking to in the link. You're putting your full domain, everything in the link, including /page. That's an absolute URL.

However, when coding a website, it's a fairly common web development practice to instead code internal links with what's called a relative URL. A relative URL is just /page. Basically what that does is it relies on your browser to understand, "Okay, this link is pointing to a page that's on the same domain that we're already on. I'm just going to assume that that is the case and go there."

There are a couple of really good reasons to code relative URLs

1) It is much easier and faster to code.

When you are a web developer and you're building a site and there thousands of pages, coding relative versus absolute URLs is a way to be more efficient. You'll see it happen a lot.

2) Staging environments

Another reason why you might see relative versus absolute URLs is some content management systems -- and SharePoint is a great example of this -- have a staging environment that's on its own domain. Instead of being example.com, it will be examplestaging.com. The entire website will basically be replicated on that staging domain. Having relative versus absolute URLs means that the same website can exist on staging and on production, or the live accessible version of your website, without having to go back in and recode all of those URLs. Again, it's more efficient for your web development team. Those are really perfectly valid reasons to do those things. So don't yell at your web dev team if they've coded relative URLS, because from their perspective it is a better solution.

Relative URLs will also cause your page to load slightly faster. However, in my experience, the SEO benefits of having absolute versus relative URLs in your website far outweigh the teeny-tiny bit longer that it will take the page to load. It's very negligible. If you have a really, really long page load time, there's going to be a whole boatload of things that you can change that will make a bigger difference than coding your URLs as relative versus absolute.

Page load time, in my opinion, not a concern here. However, it is something that your web dev team may bring up with you when you try to address with them the fact that, from an SEO perspective, coding your website with relative versus absolute URLs, especially in the nav, is not a good solution.

There are even better reasons to use absolute URLs

1) Scrapers

If you have all of your internal links as relative URLs, it would be very, very, very easy for a scraper to simply scrape your whole website and put it up on a new domain, and the whole website would just work. That sucks for you, and it's great for that scraper. But unless you are out there doing public services for scrapers, for some reason, that's probably not something that you want happening with your beautiful, hardworking, handcrafted website. That's one reason. There is a scraper risk.

2) Preventing duplicate content issues

But the other reason why it's very important to have absolute versus relative URLs is that it really mitigates the duplicate content risk that can be presented when you don't have all of these versions of your website resolving to one version. Google could potentially enter your site on any one of these four pages, which they're the same page to you. They're four different pages to Google. They're the same domain to you. They are four different domains to Google.

But they could enter your site, and if all of your URLs are relative, they can then crawl and index your entire domain using whatever format these are. Whereas if you have absolute links coded, even if Google enters your site on www. and that resolves, once they crawl to another page, that you've got coded without the www., all of that other internal link juice and all of the other pages on your website, Google is not going to assume that those live at the www. version. That really cuts down on different versions of each page of your website. If you have relative URLs throughout, you basically have four different websites if you haven't fixed this problem.

Again, it's not always a huge issue. Duplicate content, it's not ideal. However, Google has gotten pretty good at figuring out what the real version of your website is.

You do want to think about internal linking, when you're thinking about this. If you have basically four different versions of any URL that anybody could just copy and paste when they want to link to you or when they want to share something that you've built, you're diluting your internal links by four, which is not great. You basically would have to build four times as many links in order to get the same authority. So that's one reason.

3) Crawl Budget

The other reason why it's pretty important not to do is because of crawl budget. I'm going to point it out like this instead.

When we talk about crawl budget, basically what that is, is every time Google crawls your website, there is a finite depth that they will. There's a finite number of URLs that they will crawl and then they decide, "Okay, I'm done." That's based on a few different things. Your site authority is one of them. Your actual PageRank, not toolbar PageRank, but how good Google actually thinks your website is, is a big part of that. But also how complex your site is, how often it's updated, things like that are also going to contribute to how often and how deep Google is going to crawl your site.

It's important to remember when we think about crawl budget that, for Google, crawl budget cost actual dollars. One of Google's biggest expenditures as a company is the money and the bandwidth it takes to crawl and index the Web. All of that energy that's going into crawling and indexing the Web, that lives on servers. That bandwidth comes from servers, and that means that using bandwidth cost Google actual real dollars.

So Google is incentivized to crawl as efficiently as possible, because when they crawl inefficiently, it cost them money. If your site is not efficient to crawl, Google is going to save itself some money by crawling it less frequently and crawling to a fewer number of pages per crawl. That can mean that if you have a site that's updated frequently, your site may not be updating in the index as frequently as you're updating it. It may also mean that Google, while it's crawling and indexing, may be crawling and indexing a version of your website that isn't the version that you really want it to crawl and index.

So having four different versions of your website, all of which are completely crawlable to the last page, because you've got relative URLs and you haven't fixed this duplicate content problem, means that Google has to spend four times as much money in order to really crawl and understand your website. Over time they're going to do that less and less frequently, especially if you don't have a really high authority website. If you're a small website, if you're just starting out, if you've only got a medium number of inbound links, over time you're going to see your crawl rate and frequency impacted, and that's bad. We don't want that. We want Google to come back all the time, see all our pages. They're beautiful. Put them up in the index. Rank them well. That's what we want. So that's what we should do.

There are couple of ways to fix your relative versus absolute URLs problem

1) Fix what is happening on the server side of your website

You have to make sure that you are forcing all of these different versions of your domain to resolve to one version of your domain. For me, I'm pretty agnostic as to which version you pick. You should probably already have a pretty good idea of which version of your website is the real version, whether that's www, non-www, HTTPS, or HTTP. From my view, what's most important is that all four of these versions resolve to one version.

From an SEO standpoint, there is evidence to suggest and Google has certainly said that HTTPS is a little bit better than HTTP. From a URL length perspective, I like to not have the www. in there because it doesn't really do anything. It just makes your URLs four characters longer. If you don't know which one to pick, I would pick one this one HTTPS, no W's. But whichever one you pick, what's really most important is that all of them resolve to one version. You can do that on the server side, and that's usually pretty easy for your dev team to fix once you tell them that it needs to happen.

2) Fix your internal links

Great. So you fixed it on your server side. Now you need to fix your internal links, and you need to recode them for being relative to being absolute. This is something that your dev team is not going to want to do because it is time consuming and, from a web dev perspective, not that important. However, you should use resources like this Whiteboard Friday to explain to them, from an SEO perspective, both from the scraper risk and from a duplicate content standpoint, having those absolute URLs is a high priority and something that should get done.

You'll need to fix those, especially in your navigational elements. But once you've got your nav fixed, also pull out your database or run a Screaming Frog crawl or however you want to discover internal links that aren't part of your nav, and make sure you're updating those to be absolute as well.

Then you'll do some education with everybody who touches your website saying, "Hey, when you link internally, make sure you're using the absolute URL and make sure it's in our preferred format," because that's really going to give you the most bang for your buck per internal link. So do some education. Fix your internal links.

Sometimes your dev team going to say, "No, we can't do that. We're not going to recode the whole nav. It's not a good use of our time," and sometimes they are right. The dev team has more important things to do. That's okay.

3) Canonicalize it!

If you can't get your internal links fixed or if they're not going to get fixed anytime in the near future, a stopgap or a Band-Aid that you can kind of put on this problem is to canonicalize all of your pages. As you're changing your server to force all of these different versions of your domain to resolve to one, at the same time you should be implementing the canonical tag on all of the pages of your website to self-canonize. On every page, you have a canonical page tag saying, "This page right here that they were already on is the canonical version of this page. " Or if there's another page that's the canonical version, then obviously you point to that instead.

But having each page self-canonicalize will mitigate both the risk of duplicate content internally and some of the risk posed by scrappers, because when they scrape, if they are scraping your website and slapping it up somewhere else, those canonical tags will often stay in place, and that lets Google know this is not the real version of the website.

In conclusion, relative links, not as good. Absolute links, those are the way to go. Make sure that you're fixing these very common domain level duplicate content problems. If your dev team tries to tell you that they don't want to do this, just tell them I sent you. Thanks guys.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

60+ Fantastic Email Newsletters to Read and Share

It seems like there’s more great stuff to read today than ever before.

And still, finding the good stuff that’s just right for you or your brand can take a lot of time, according to this survey by Vertical Response:

When you’re sifting through the whole internet, it can help to have a guide. What if could open your inbox every day to find new, relevant, curated articles that you’d be thrilled to share to social media?

We’ve written before about the rise of high-quality niche newsletters, a format that’s flourished over the past few years.

As our choices get more plentiful, diverse experts and fans across a wide spectrum of topics are sharing the best content they discover. This includes our friends at Read This Thing, who curate one fantastic piece of journalism a day.

The Read This Thing team shared with us their giant list of 60+ must-know newsletters in areas including news, tech, arts & entertainment, self-improvement and general interestingness (my personal favorite category).

Read on to discover your next great content curation source!

General news newsletters

1. The Skimm

“theSkimm is the daily e-mail newsletter that gives you everything you need to start your day. We do the reading for you — across subject lines and party lines — and break it down with fresh editorial content.”

2. Politico Playbook

“Veteran journalist Mike Allen combs the Internet, TV and newspapers to cook up a hearty dish of whats happening in politics.”

3. The Daily Beast

All the news you could want.

4. ReadThisThing

One fantastic piece of journalism each weekday. (They’re the ones who made this list)

5. The Daily Water Cooler

“A free, quick, and splendid email newsletter chock-full of news + humor delivered every weekday morning to make sure you’re never left behind in a conversation.”

6. NY Times: What We’re Reading

Get recommendations from New York Times reporters and editors, highlighting great stories from around the web. Twice per week.

7. NextDraft

A quick, entertaining look at the day’s best stories, from the top of the news, to the very bottom.

8. Muck Rack Daily

“A digest of journalism on Twitter, written by journalists, delivered to your inbox daily”

Tech newsletters

9. Mattermark

“A hand-curated newsletter compiled daily to bring you first-person accounts of entrepreneurship, investment and other insightful reflections from the startup ecosystem.”

10. SaaS Weekly

“A weekly email of useful links for people interested in SaaS businesses.”

11. HackerNewsletter

12. Netted

A daily newsletter from the Webbies team introducing you to the best sites, apps and connected products.

13. Real Future

“Every weekday, Fusion’s Alexis Madrigal delivers five tidbits from the past and future. Wearable computers, drones, biohacking, geoengineering, rockets, digital mapping, coercive feedback loops, autonomous everything, representing the Internet in art, synthetic biology, machine logic, weapons, artificial life, the future of work, corporate surveillance, and more.”

14. StartupDigest

“The personalized insider newsletter for all things startup around the world.”

15. Product Hunt

“Get a summary of the best new products, every day.”

16. Ask Leo

“Each week I publish The Ask Leo! Newsletter where you can find more answers tips and tricks to make your technology “just work”!”

17. Charged

“The top tech news, insights, long reads and the best of the internet, delivered to your inbox every weekend.”

Marketing newsletters

18. Buffer

“Actionable social media advice. Delivered daily.”

19. Community.is

“A weekly newsletter by Loyal designed to define, educate & inspire anyone who puts people at the center of their work.”

20. Campaign Monitor

An awesome monthly newsletter with tips and tricks for email.

21. Seth Godin

Interesting thoughts from a famous entrepreneur.

Design newsletters

22. Sidebar

“Sidebar is a list of the 5 best design links of the day. But unlike a regular linkblog, it’s collaborative and manually curated by a couple great editors.”

23. UX Design Weekly

“A hand picked list of the best user experience design links every week. Curated by Kenny Chen and published every Friday.”

24. Smashing Magazine

“We love useful stuff, and we love quality writing, that’s why we send out an editorial email newsletter twice a month with useful tips, tricks and resources for designers and developers — thoroughly collected, written and edited by us exclusively for our readers.”

25. The Pastry Box Project

“Sugar For The Mind:” One thought every day, from people shaping the web.

Photography newsletters

26. Unsplash

Get 10 free, hi-res photos delivered to your inbox every 10 days.

27. Death to the Stock Photo

A fresh pack of creative photos in your inbox each month, with awesome stories to match.

28. Exposure Weekly Selects

Incredible photo essays delivered weekly.

 Sports newsletters

29. The Slurve

“We send the best baseball writing, all the essential news for each team, and a few original insights directly to your inbox each day during the season and frequently in the offseason.”

30. Casual Spectator

“Casual Spectator is a super-simple newsletter about sports. We make following sports easy and help you have better conversations with co-workers, family and friends.”

Food, beverage and events newsletters

31. Good Beer Hunting

A newsletter featuring all the best beer.

32. The Fetch

“We curate the best events, news, cool jobs and must-reads in one place.”
Mostly focused on these cities: New York — San Francisco — Los Angeles — London — Berlin — Melbourne — Sydney — Brisbane — Auckland

33. NoshOn.It

The best recipes and cooking tips delivered to your inbox.

34. Garagiste

Garagiste is a wine store that only sells wine via email newsletter. It’s weird and awesome.

35. Tasting Table

The latest trends in the categories of dining, wine, cocktails, cooking and food travel.

General interesting-ness newsletters

36. Brain Pickings

 

“The week’s most unmissable articles across creativity, psychology, art, science, design, philosophy, and other facets of our search for meaning.”

37. Lefsetz Letter

Lefsetz addresses the issues that are at the core of the music business: downloading, copy protection, pricing and the music itself.

38. Improbable Research

“Research that makes people laugh and then think.”

39. Ann Friedman Weekly

“My weekly newsletter is full of great things to read (some but not all of which were written by me) and GIFs and the occasional product endorsement. It arrives in your inbox on Fridays, just when you’ve run out of internet for the week.”

40. Wait But Why

It’s pretty hard to describe Wait But Why, but it’s awesome. Here’s how Fast Company describes it: “sometimes humorous, almost always profound, long-form explainer site”

41. This Is True

“This is True is a weekly e-mail newsletter which reports on bizarre-but-true news items from legitimate news outlets from around the world.”

42. Austin Kleon newsletter

“Every week I send out new art, writing, and interesting links. It’s free. No spam. Unsubscribe whenever you want.”

43. Today in Tabs

“Your daily digest of the worst (and occasionally best) in tabs.” This newsletter has been called as been called “the high school cafeteria of New York media”

44. The Li.st

Rachel Sklar and Glynnis MacNicol send this email a few times each week, spreading the word about awesome things being done and made by women.

45. Now I Know

Dan Lewis’s daily email with one really interesting fact per day.

46. MediaREDEF

Jason Hirschhorn’s MediaREDEF is a curated interest mix of media+tech+pop content via free daily newsletter.

47. Hardly Working

“It’s in my head. I’m sharing it with you. Read, Eat, Covet, Meet. Just one of each; randomness guaranteed.”

48. Very Short List

“VSL is a delightful e-mail that shares cultural gems from a different curator every day.”

49. Milkshake

“A free email dedicated to finding the good in everything — companies, causes, people, places and products giving back and making a difference.”

50. Brain Food

More from the popular blog Farnam Street:“Each Sunday I send out my weekly digest about new posts, books I’m reading, and interesting things I find across the web on subjects like art, history, science, philosophy, psychology, and human misjudgment. It’s basically brain food.”

51. The Ed’s Up

A weekly newsletter of writing and links from science writer Ed Yong, whose blog Not Exactly Rocket Science is hosted by National Geographic.

52. Links I would gchat you if we were friends

A daily newsletter by The Washington Post‘s Caitlin Dewey that rounds up the day’s Internet chatter (often about social media, digital and internet culture, and other fun stuff)

53. Sunday New York Times Digest

A weekly roundup of the most interesting links and quotes from the Sunday New York Times.

Self-improvement newsletters

54. Greatist

Top health tips, workout ideas, delicious recipes, and more.

55. SealFit

Get super intense life tips from a super intense Navy Seal.

56. Further

“Further is a once-a-week email newsletter that helps you maximize your purpose, performance, and potential. You’ll get the best hand-picked tips, trends, stories, and science that enhance your health, wealth, and wisdom — without the noise and fluff.”

57. Remotive

“A weekly newsletter on Remote Tips & Jobs sent to 7,000+ Remote Workers”

58. Heretic

“A daily newsletter about entrepreneurship, the art of the start and doing the work by Pascal Finette. It’s raw, unfiltered and opinionated.”

59. Think Clearly

A handwritten newsletter! “Think Clearly is a practice for hatching your visions and making them come true. It all begins with a blank page. And coffee.”

60. The Art of Non-Conformity

Chris Guillebeau has visited every country in the world. Now he shares unconventional strategies and stories on life, work, and travel.

61. Life Edited

“Design your life to include more money, health and happiness with less stuff, space and energy.”

Share your favorite newsletter!

Thanks to Read This Thing for putting Buffer on their list, and for allowing us to syndicate this handy list!

 What newsletters are missing from this resource? We’d love to hear your favorite and find even more great stuff to read and share!

The post 60+ Fantastic Email Newsletters to Read and Share appeared first on Social.