There’s a saying in online marketing that has been around for a while. “Content is king.” The truth is this – before the last year, it really wasn’t. Content has always been important, but it wasn’t until recent updates in Google and Facebook that content took a huge leap from being a portion of search and social marketing to become the actual hub through which search and social marketing flow. Today, marketing starts from content and works its way down versus recent years where content was simply a tool in the marketing strategy. Google, Facebook, Bing, and Twitter are getting smarter every day….

This is a topic that has been covered so many times that one might wonder how it keeps popping up. The reality (from a content perspective) is that Facebook posting best practices is the gift that keeps on giving. It’s frustrating to businesses and annoying to bloggers, but at the end of the day there’s one simple truth: whatever worked yesterday may not work today but may work again tomorrow. That’s Facebook. It’s social media in general from a business perspective. There are three dynamics at work and they rarely do more than lightly influence the other two: Facebook and other social media sites…

In one sentence, the advice that business owners and marketers need to hear is this: “Everything on your Facebook page should be centered around the real world.” No, I don’t mean the reality TV show that launched it all in 1992. When The Real World launched on MTV 27 seasons ago (yes, it’s still going strong in case you weren’t aware), it set in motion a genre of television that many people claim to hate but that still gets millions of viewers every day. Today, the day to day version of “the real world of marketing on Facebook” should take one concept from the original show intro: “…start getting real.”…

“Never” is a bold word. It is absolute and endless. To say that something can never happen is one of the most ignorant things that someone can say (or blog) in public. Thankfully, I tempered my statement with the word, “may”. “Impossible” is word that is similar to “never”. I’ll invoke it now: it isn’t impossible for social media to continue in one form or another indefinitely because of its nature. As long as there are humans, there’s a good chance that there will be some variation of social media. It’s a hard cat to put back in the bag. The folks over at Dashburst put together a graphic that explains five…

Do you remember the person who consulted with you about social media and told you that brands are having tremendous success on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest? That’s the type of person that you’re reaching the most according to a report by NBCUniversal Integrated Media. The report is designed to show how consumers who are part of GenX and GenY are digesting their influences. It took a split approach to the study which consisted of 2,500 people – 2,000 were average respondents age 18-49 and the other 500 were “digital trendsetters” in the same age group which represent 5% of the national…

In many ways, infographics help to fulfill one of the important promises of the internet in general and social media in particular. When done right, they present a lot of useful and interesting data in a format that is visually stunning and easy to digest. They can be used to inform the world about things in ways that no other medium besides (arguably) video can accomplish. Rather than reading a long article or a numbered list of facts, infographics visualize important, interesting, or entertaining aspects of the world in an extremely sharable format. That was the promise, at least. The reality…

One of the biggest old-school truths that is obsolete today is the idea that you should follow everyone on Twitter that follows you. It was once considered “social media polite” to follow just about everyone who took the time to follow your own updates. This never included spammers or bots, of course, but when real people and companies followed yours, many gurus recommended giving them a follow back. The interactions and ways that Twitter has evolved over the years has brought it to the point that most businesses have corrected this old notion. As a social media society, we are more willing to not…

The marketing adage “content is king” has been around for a long time. In 2013, it appears that both the search engines and social media sites are focusing on content as their driving forces, but in a different way than most understand. Things are changing in the world of internet marketing. Here’s what you need to know. Content was never really “king”. Though it made a nice talking point and allowed marketing companies an opportunity to charge for their labors, it was always a temporary fix. In search, it started off as extremely important for a little while until marketers started learning how…

One of the initial promises of the internet was realized when social media started taking hold a few years ago. Constant communication and the ability to reach out and engage with others around the globe became more than just a dream once sites like MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook opened the doors for our lives at every level to be detailed for anyone to see. The options to keep it personal are still available but so many have chosen to give access to anyone willing to take it. Lives are recorded in fine detail on social media every day. That’s nothing new. What has really been emerging in the…

“I sit down at the computer and think of things to post on social media.” This is the problem. It’s the challenge that faces many companies as they try to explore new ideas to post about on social media. They have “social media time” set aside, and while this is good to schedule and maintain, it also allows people to miss some of the best opportunities available in social media. It’s what happens in the day to day affairs of a business, the things that come to us when we least expect it, that really makes for strong social media posts. Businesses all too often try to come up with their social media posts while…