Tips and Tactics for Amplifying Your Content – Whiteboard Friday

Ben: Hey Mozzers. My name is 
Ben Lloyd. I’m a principal at Add3, which is a search marketing agency with offices in Seattle and Portland.

Brian: And I’m 
Brian Rauschenbach, President of Add3, and I work day-to-day directly with Ben on both paid and organic channels. What we’re hoping to achieve with our session today is to help you basically take the content that you’ve invested time and money into to help you amplify it and make some more noise with it. What we want to do is basically revisit some of the fundamentals and the foundation of what we’re probably all doing today and how we can make that a little better. So let’s get right into it.

The usual

Ben: Sure. So here’s kind of a typical scenario that I see when people are spending time building and launching content, is they kind of go through the same process all of the time. They’ll launch it. Great. Post is done. Ideally, they’ve done their content strategy, and they know who they’re talking to. They’ve optimized the post, done a little bit of SEO, got an original image in there or two or three or whatever. They’ll put it up. They’ll promote it, which typically means, “Hey guys, a new post is up.” Hopefully, they are even doing this. The corporate account will tweet it, and then you’ll ask team or whoever at the company to tweet it, like it on the Facebook, and whatever else, and then kind of nothing.

People sort of hope, well, maybe it will gain a life of its own. They’ll pray about it. I don’t know. Most likely they just tend to forget about it and move on to the next thing.

The results always kind of work like this. You see the life of a post kind of goes, “Hey, it’s up. It’s live.” We do a little bit of a social bump to it, and this number could be anywhere from 50 to 5,000 or whatever. But you get some visits for it, and then the tweets and whatever else die off. It kind of just dies down, and that’s really all you get out of it. So it will sort of peter out. If you do a good job with organic and some on-site optimization, maybe you’ll do okay, and then this little smiley face Rand [pointing to the whiteboard] doesn’t really smile. He just doesn’t really think it’s that great.

Brian: Yeah. We’re putting all of this time into this content, and the life cycle feels like it’s just not . . . the reward for it, it doesn’t real. I think that that’s probably the biggest challenge now in getting people to really grasp content and why we should be developing great content is you put all of this time into it, you get these results back, and this is our cycle that we’re in right now.

Ben: It bums you out. Right?

Brian: Yeah.

Social life of content

Ben: When you think about it, if this is all of the promotion that you’re doing for your content, and you see study after study talk about the life cycle or the average life span or the shelf life of a tweet or a social post, there’s a Bitly study recently that said the average shelf life of a link in three hours. Peter, here at Moz Followerwonk, he has his own, about just Twitter alone. Basically, 18 minutes is all you get out of that thing, and then you get the bulk of your results out of it.

So from a social standpoint, when you really start to think about it, if that’s all you do to promote your piece of content, this is really all that you can expect out of it, that short-term visibility. Then, again, maybe you do okay with organic or whatever, but that’s all you get.

Brian: Yeah. So if we’re getting back to basics, we’re doing all of this today it feels like, right, and we feel good. But what are some things that you’ve sort of seen in audit phases, when you’re looking at other people’s social?

Ben: Well, these results are kind of depressing, right?

Brian: Yeah.

Ben: It doesn’t impress anybody at the company when you’re like, “Hey, we got a couple of hundred visits, and that was about it.” That mileage varies depending on your following.

So there are a couple of areas that I would really like to look at that are super obvious from a blocking and tackling, real basic standpoint. Then we’ll get into some other stuff.

Social integration

But the very first thing that I like to get into, when I look at sites and content and their social strategy, I don’t even go to their social account. I don’t even look at what they’ve been doing. I just go to their page where they’re trying to share stuff. (A) Do they have buttons at all for sharing, and (B) what happens when you click on them?

So this is one area that I think is overlooked a lot, because when people at the company or whatever, the social guy goes to share content, he uses Hootsuite or something like that, or she, and they’ll post it using that tool and they never actually interact with the buttons. But your visitor doesn’t do it that way. So one thing that happens is if you aren’t tightened up there, you’ll click that “tweet this” button, and you’ll see some things like…

Brian: Random image.

Ben: Yeah, or like if they haven’t done title tags, God forbid, it’s just some generic title tag. In Facebook, maybe it’s a random image from the page. The description isn’t good, that kind of thing.

Brian: Or it’s just pulling in something generic.

Ben: Yeah, absolutely.

Brian: Which is why sort of the Open Graph thing is so big for us to be investing time in developing what the description is, making sure your images are friendly with the content you’re pushing out.

Ben: Precisely. Yeah. So when you do your Open Graph tags, make sure that description is tight. Make sure you’re pulling in a featured image, etc. Sometimes you have to get a dev involved, because you’re just taking what the plug-in gives you, depending on your site. But just take a look at what’s happening there when you do that.

Then the other thing that I think that fits in with this button idea and Open graph is just aligning your sharing to your audience. I think a lot of people…

Brian: We’re all guilty of this, right? We put up everything.

Ben: Absolutely. You go to a site and like, “Man, I can’t choose between which buttons to share.” I don’t want people to not share something on — I don’t even know — some random social network. But if you’ve done the work that you should be doing with your content strategy, you should know who you’re trying to reach, who your personas are, who is this person you want to have reading your content, and what action do you want them to take.

Brian: So this would be business content, maybe marketing-related?

Ben: So business, B2B, etc. This guy, with his little tie, he’d be somebody you’d want to see more on sharing your content on LinkedIn or Twitter. Since we’re in search and marketing or whatever, Google+ we like to see. But in a different context, maybe targeting female shoppers, you don’t really care about LinkedIn. So why do you have that button on the page? So Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, those are the places maybe that audience lives at a little bit more. So know who you are trying to reach and align that sharing to that audience.

Brian: Yeah, I like it. Then if we get into some sort of deeper, social promotional pieces here, or with Twitter cards, yeah.

Ben: Yeah, let’s jump in on Twitter cards real quick. But it totally aligns with this better social promotion. Twitter cards are like really easy to implement, and it’s been around for a while. I don’t really think a lot of people do it, except marketing guys.

Brian: Well, we all ignored it for a while, right?

Ben: Yeah, everybody ignored it.

Brian: But this is a great tool, because it feels like if you get in, even though now is not early, but if you’re adopting it now, the results that we’re seeing from our Twitter cards and our posts, this is sort of a screenshot of what we pulled out of our analytics, and what we’ve been seeing is that we’re using a summary card for most of our blog posts, and we’re getting 2.5X, may 3X in retweets just because we have the Twitter card enabled. Like Ben was saying, it’s pretty easy to implement. It feels like it’s just like setting up a Webmaster Tools account and doing some meta tag authentication and almost the same type of work you’d be doing with your OG tags.

Ben: Pretty much. The process is spelled out here, dev.twitter.com/cards. It’s really straightforward, a little bit of tag implementation, verification. It’s kind of like doing structured markup a little bit, but then you have to get it approved. But I’ve done a couple of them lately, and it comes back almost instantaneously now.

Better social promotion

Brian: That’s great. Yeah, jumping into some other social promotional things, I think Rand had a Whiteboard Friday session recently where he was talking about frequency and timing, and I think this is a piece that we’re all sort of guilty of, right? We put the blog post up, and like you said, we’re on to the next one. What’s some good advice you have on revisiting and doing this piece here?

Ben: Yeah. When you kind of consider the cycle here and the way that these normally go, and again you really take a step back and you’re like, “Three hours?” Are you really going to reach the people you’re trying to reach? Are they on Twitter for that three hours? Is that even something that they’re interested in at that point in time, etc.? So I this frequency and timing is a big deal, and there are obviously tools like Followerwonk, that is in the Moz toolset, that you can analyze your own followers, see when they’re online, or when they’re on Twitter and that kind of thing. But you can kind of do the same thing with Facebook and some of the other channels.

A lot of people put it up once and that’s it. One and done is not the way to do this. I’m not suggesting that you go and hammer away all day for 24 hours on a specific post. But if you’re a little bit judicious about it and you think about how to space that out, and is this post still relevant next week and next month, and two months from now, then why do you stop promoting it after that first day or week?

Brian: Yeah. Another thing I think we’re all guilty of is we basically pulled the post back up out of our inbox and repost it, just how it was the original time, and this is an area I think that not a lot of people are taking full advantage of, is basically testing your messaging. You have a couple of examples here that you can walk through.

Ben: Absolutely. So a couple of ways to kind of vary, and I actually struggle with this a lot, because we worked so hard on the title tag, I just want to use that as the tweet or the post or whatever. That always happens. So your title always gets out there as kind of a tweet behind that post. But some other things you should try pulling a quote out of your content, using some sort of key takeaway that’s in there. Maybe it’s a bullet that’s already in there or a headline or something. But using those takeaways, maybe including a stat, which I guess is technically a takeaway, or adding some commentary. So for example, your post might be how to do X in three steps. But then your commentary, like Miles on our team, he always does this like, “Revolutionize the way you do X. Here’s three steps how,” or whatever. Like he’ll kind of retweet stuff, and sometimes those tend to work a lot better than your static title. So I’d say trying those out and seeing what works.

Brian: Yeah, and then you could take sort of the results that you’re getting from that message testing and apply it to the next post.

Ben: Exactly. I think the last there here, and this is simple stuff, real basic, but at least in an agency setting, the pace is constant, and you don’t always have time for thinking about it, but my friend, Sarah, likes to say, “Don’t cross the streams,” when it comes to her social channels, from “Ghostbusters” there. But when you put something on Twitter, and you’ve got this great tool that like I can also post the exact same thing to Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, or whatever at the same time, don’t just copy/paste, because it doesn’t translate.

Brian: It doesn’t translate.

Ben: So you should have @ symbols and hashtags in Twitter. But on LinkedIn, you don’t want to do that kind of thing. Really optimizing for the channel, it’s kind of like a key takeaway there.

Paid social amplification

Brian: Yeah, cool. So sort of jumping into the other piece, which is basically pay to play, we’re testing in there, and we’re getting great results from it. We’ve been talking to a lot of other peers, and everyone seems to be dipping their toes in here. But it feels like this is the area where we can really do the amplification piece with our content. I think some of the stuff that we’ve been looking at recently and I think in Facebook ads, you see that boost button underneath your post, and it’s so tempting to just say boost my post. It just basically pushes it out to all of your friends, and it’s almost the same bad effect I think when I put like a post on Facebook. It’s like my family and my friends that aren’t in the industry, and they’re like, “Yeah, I’ll support Brian. Let me give him a like too.”

But that’s not who I was trying to reach with this post. So spend some time in Facebook ads and define that segment of the person that you’re trying to go after. It’s really easy in there, and once you build those segments, you can reuse them for a future post.

Promote a tweet. We’re doing a lot of good stuff here, and that I think to your frequency and timing thing, it’s where you can really go after the person that you want to see that post that you’ve spent all of this time and resources into. So you could just use their handles and target them directly or also just target by topic and category.

The StumbleUpon has been a really interesting test. It’s paid discovery, and so it’s really sort of top of funnel stuff. We see a lot of interaction in there, especially if the content that you’ve produced matches up with the topic or the categories that they have.

Ben: Yeah, one of the categories that they have available. Absolutely.

Brian: Then Outbrain, if you want to go down, I call this shock content — the 13 best cities for hippies to live in, which is actually a real article somewhere that I came across. But this is a content that lives on CNET on the bottom of the page. It’s like more from the Web, and it’s just another area where you could probably earn some links and also social shares.

Ben: Sure. I think the big thing here is, being an SEO guy and being that this is Moz and that’s this community that we’re in, to me, again, I think you’ve stated it already, but like to spend time and energy in developing your content and then to not sort of just give it that kick that it needs to kind of get it kind of spinning, Moz spends a lot of great time and energy on giving you great tips about how to participate with the community and your kind of like organic outreach that you can do behind content. But a lot of people are really just trying to get up and get going, generate that visibility for their content. I really think it’s worthwhile to consider paid social amplification.

I really don’t consider this the new “link building.” But I think if you do a lot of these things and you get your content out in front of the right people, and you spend some money putting it in front of the right eyeballs, good things happen with your organic if you’ve spent time and energy on creating good content.

Brian: Yeah. It’s also really important that we’ve been sort of advocates for content for it feels like the last 2.5 years, and it feels like a lot of our clients are embracing it and their management is embracing it. It’s like we don’t want this to happen. It’s like we finally got everyone onboard to say, “Yeah, let’s build content, great content, and push this out there.” If this is what the results that we’re reporting back to our clients and their bosses . . .

Ben: Nobody’s going to be excited about it.

Brian: . . . no one is going to keep on investing in it. So I think that if we’re having a full team of copywriters and marketers behind this, and we’re pushing this content out, we should also budget for pay channels as well.

Ben: Sure. So I think that’s really pretty much it. So thanks for having us.

Brian: Yeah, thanks for having us. We’ll be around watching the comments and for any questions that we might be able to answer. So thanks Mozzers.