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How To Get Your Content Amplified By Influencers

Do your content marketing efforts need a boost? Contributor Wojtek Mazur discusses how to identify and court influencers to help amplify your message.

Creating content can be relatively simple and straightforward, but successfully getting it out there in front of the right audience is much more difficult. To get noticed on a scale as large as the internet, you need help with the amplification of your content.

A great way to reach your target audience is through entities that already exist and matter within your sphere. To achieve this effectively, though, you need to find people and platforms that are of great influence already.

Before we delve into how to identify these key players, you should really define what value you are searching for. A large part of this is understanding what “influence” means, then finding someone who embodies these very qualities.

What Is An Influencer?

In the current world of extreme content competition on the Web, influencers are those who control the authority within a particular niche and industry. Influencers are resource persons, and thus, they command a large number of engaged followers.

Most importantly, a true influencer’s words are weighty, and therefore, they drive action. An influencer’s post is certain to inspire a conversation and engage the audience. This simply means they are able amplify your content, help you reach your targeted audience and more.

Don’t Let The Social Follower Numbers Fool You

First off all, a word for the wise: Don’t be fooled by large numbers. An account may have many Twitter followers or Facebook fans, but that can mean next to nothing. How many of those followers are active and committed users? It is better to look for someone with an engaged audience.

Compare two blogs, for instance — one with a huge number of followers with no user engagement or one with a moderate number of followers with a lot of comments and shares. The one with more comments and shares may very well be better, as their audience is not only reading the content but also having more active discussions on the matter in question. Do you want to share with 1,000 readers who might simply glance over your work or 100 who will readily share, discuss and relate to it?

Twitter is another great example. Retweets, favorites and replies are all huge indicators of an engaged following. The number of followers doesn’t matter if the content doesn’t resonate.

An account with tons of followers but few retweets, favorites or replies simply has followers who aren’t engaged. If there’s a high volume of content being re-shared, however, it shows an audience that’s paying attention and diving into the content already on offer.

Identifying Real Influencers

Simply following the trends in your niche or industry is a starter for identifying influencers who matter. A manual search also can help determine those whose opinions carry the most weight in the industry, influencing a large base of active and engaged users. However, there are also tools that have made the task of identifying and initiating contact with influencers a breeze.

Use The Right Tools To Research

The right tools will not only help you identify and create a list of influencers who matter within your niche, but they also can help you determine the behavioral pattern of each influencer based on historical data. This includes the kinds of posts they like or are most likely to share, the blogs they are most likely to visit, authors they follow and so on.

Knowing this type of information will put you at an advantage when trying to establish contact with such an influencer.

Klout

Klout grabbed a lot of attention when it launched back in 2008, as it was one of the first networks to score its users based on social influence. The service analyzes your content on multiple major social media platforms and how it resonates with users to calculate your score within a range of 1–100.

Klout is usually used for measuring your own social media impact. However, its score can be valuable if you want to get a quick overview of a given user’s social influence within your network. It also allows you to add topics of interest to your profile and to discover the top scoring experts within these particular topics.

Impactana

The Impactana app is a very complex tool that provides you with a bunch of interesting features for influencer discovery. For starters, through researching any keyword and topic, you can see top influencer profiles, along with their scores in terms of audience reach, social buzz around them and the impact of their content.

You can also view full profiles containing detailed data about each of your influencers. This information includes email addresses, a list of all existing social profiles, websites a particular influencer is associated with and a list of content he or she has authored.

Another way of benefitting from the Impactana tool is by using a keyword or platform search to discover the most influential pieces of content on the Web. Aside from the basic metrics of social buzz, such as likes and shares, the tool provides other important user engagement metrics, such as the number of views, comments and incoming links generated by a particular piece of content.

The icing on the cake is the feature that allows you to view those who shared these pieces of content. Thanks to this, you can find those who have read and actually care about the content around your area of interest.

What Can An Influencer Do For You?

Connecting with real influencers can bring you many benefits. More than just sending traffic your way thanks to amplifying social reach to your audience, a well-respected and known voice in your industry adds quality and a stamp of authority to your brand. It works like a personal recommendation, exceptionally improving your credibility.

Additionally, by linking to your platform, making mentions of your brand or referring to your posts, an influencer can help increase your rankings in organic search results. Since this signal is one of the ranking factors search engines take into consideration, you are likely to benefit from a quality backlink from an influencer in more ways than simply reaching your target audience alone.

In his presentation, “8 Things Influencers Can Do For You,” Jay Baer named eight types of influencers, along with the functions and positive actions they take on for you and your brand.

• The Megaphone: Amplifying your brand or content to their audience.
• The Reporter: Covering, reviewing and reporting your brand like a journalist would.
• The Face: Giving an identity to your brand and pieces of content.
• The Connector: Linking your brand and content with new platforms that matter.
• The Creative: Creatively setting your brand and content apart from competitors with unique strategies.
• The Designer: Giving your brand innovations in terms of ideas, contents, products and services.
• The Neighbor: Setting you up as a voice and authority within your niche through meaningful conversations.
• The Defender: Protecting your brand during the bad times.

Once you know and understand these types of influence and benefits, it helps you set your needs and determine what exactly you want to achieve. Whether your goal is content amplification alone or something else, you should adjust your research to target influencers whose qualities and behavior are the best fit for your goals.

What Can YOU Do For An Influencer?

Relationships with influencers are not a one-way partnership that benefits you alone. In fact, such partnerships work only when they benefit from you first. Asking yourself what they may need and what can you do to help out should be the first thing you do, rather than what the influencer is able to do for you right away.

Just as in everyday life, you will likely not ask for a favor from a stranger or somebody you just met a while ago. The chances you will get help are much higher when you ask someone who has benefited from your help in the past and may want to reciprocate the gesture.

As Rand Fishkin stated on an episode of Whiteboard Friday, “The interesting thing about influencers is they need new, unique content to share all the time.” Therefore, you should work to provide them with valuable content which will make them look good and help them grow their own brand and audience.

Establish And Nurture Valuable Relationships

Influencers will give preference to members of their community who engage in their conversations, follow them on social media platforms, comment on their articles, share their posts and so on. It might be worth spending some time breeding this familiarity with the influencer even before sending the first pitch.

When initiating the first contact, offer something that provides value to the influencer. For example, you might just want to appreciate his/her last article, provide constructive feedback on the post and creatively throw in an interesting angle. You might also want to mention how you shared it with your friends and colleagues and how they, too, found it very valuable.

That’s just a first step, of course. You will need to work to build genuine relationships with influencers so that in the future, should you have a piece of content you need to amplify, it will be much easier to reach out to them. This is the stage where you can explain your content or content idea to the influencer and explain why sharing such content would provide value to his/her followers and inspire a conversation.

When this works, be sure to follow up with a note of gratitude, and even maybe a shout-out on social media. This will most certainly be valuable again later down the road.

Conclusion

Real influencers have an active passion and interest for what they do, so the content you offer needs to be worth sharing.

Furthermore, it’s often better to build valuable relationships — such as by sharing their content and opening channels of communication — even before trying to get any of your own work shared. Building relationships is by far the most important aspect when aiming to employ the influencer strategy to get your content amplified.

Influencers in every niche are those who have a lot of clout, so it is imperative that you employ a strategy that grabs their attention. Remember that influencers have needs, too, and only by helping them reach their goals can you hope to benefit from them.

Source : http://mklnd.com/1hDXsnV

8 Things I Learned About Twitter

I already thought Twitter was brilliant but I am amazed after reading “140 things you don’t know about twitter.” I love that Langer chose to find 140 facts in relation to the 140-character limit for tweets. If you have 30 minutes and are a frequent tweeter, I highly suggest giving the article a read.

The elimination process was hard but here are my 9 favorite facts about Twitter that I didn’t know:

• .Twitter was created on a playground. Founding team member Dom Sagolla says the group went on the top of a slide at a playground in South Park, a small neighborhood in San Francisco, and Jack Dorsey discussed an “idea so simple that you don’t even think about it—you just write.” This moment of inspiration has turned into a multibillion-dollar company

1. The official name of Twitter’s bird is Larry. Yes, his name is Larry Bird. The iconic little fellow—seen in Twitter’s logo shown in TV commercials, print ads and practically every website—was named after Boston Celtics legend Larry Bird.
2. Twitter was almost called Twitch. Before finalizing on the name, the team looked at the Oxford English Dictionary. “We found the word Twitter,” Dorsey says. “And Twitter means a short inconsequential burst of information, chirps from birds. And we were like, that describes exactly what we’re doing here.”
3. Ending a tweet with an empty hashtag is called a hangtag, and it’s Twitter’s version of the mic drop, the team at Medium declared recently.
4. You can find your first ever tweet at First-Tweets.com.
5. Twitter’s fourth co-founder Noah Glass was kicked out of the company, according to the book “Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal,” by Nick Bilton of The New York Times. Glass is said to have made almost no money from Twitter’s IPO, according to Bilton.
6. Glass has only tweeted five times over the last five years. His bio reads, “I started this.”
7. The “unfollow” button was almost called “leave.”
8. The cost of a Promoted Trend in the United States for one day is $200,000.

Source : http://bit.ly/1OuYCk3

5 Ways to Find More Time for Content Marketing

Let’s face it. You’re busy. You have a real estate business to run. The last thing on your mind is sitting in front of a computer and writing another blog post or article for your website.

Yet at the same time, you know you need to do it. You know how important it is to produce content on a regular basis, especially if you’re putting any effort at all into social media marketing.

In face, a recent study shows that 69% of home shoppers who take action on a real estate website begin by typing a local term into a search engine. Read that again and note that these folks take action!

Essentailly, some of your best, most active leads can find out about you through a Google search. And if you want to get found on Google, you need to product content. Lots and lots of content.

That's what content marketing is all about. It's as simple as it sounds; marketing to your specific target audiance using original, relevant,a nd audthentic content. And it's all the rage right now among some of the top producers in real estate.

So, at one end of the spectrum, there’s an ever-present need to publish more, write more, engage more, comment more, share more. And at the other end of the spectrum, there’s the fact that your day is already jammed packed as it is. Something has to give in order for you to move forward with your content marketing goals.

If that situation sounds like something you can relate to, keep reading, because I just might have your solution.

The bottom line is that you get out of content marketing exactly what you put into it. If you give it the necessary time and effort, then you’re going to end up with quality content that others will truly take interest in and share. If you slack on it, well, then don’t expect much.

In the worst case scenario, if you don’t do it at all, you’re just giving the competition a shot at stealing your customers by proving value and staying relevant.

But if you're willing to give it a shot, or you already are, in this artile, I'll share some tips and tricks that can make your content marketing activites even more productive.

Essentially, here are 5 tactics that I use to produce quality content on a routine basis, without having it take away from the other parts of running my business:

1. Start by blocking out time

There are 168 hours in a week. Can you find three of those hours for blogging? It really doesn’t look like much when you lay it out in that manner, but three hours is more than enough time to keep your blog current.

If it takes you an hour to write one blog post, you can knock out three in three hours. That’s pretty much every other day of the week. Not bad at all! We’re talking about less than 2% of your week. You know you have that.

Once you’ve found the time, make it sacred. Mark it in your calendar. Make sure you won’t be interrupted. That time is yours and yours alone.

2. Share what you're passionate about

Regardless of the type of real estate business you’re in, there’s always a fun, interesting, and relevant way to share it with the world.

Do you primarily focus on waterfront properties? Don’t blog about your listings; blog about luxury living. Blog about the latest home design trends for waterfront homes.

You have to think one or two degrees out from your product or service in order to come up with content that is relevant to a wider audience.

Nobody wants to read a blog about property listings, but many people want to read a blog about home design ideas, trends, events, and more.

Once you’ve discovered what you can talk about, keep a list of ideas with you at all times. I use Evernote for this. Anytime I have an idea for a blog post, I write it down. That’s where the idea for this post came from.

After a while, the question of “what should I blog about?” becomes trivial. You’ll have ideas for weeks worth of content.

3. Choose a medium that fits your style

Blogging is not for everyone. Some people hate writing. In that case, give video a try. Maybe you love being in front of a camera, where you can let your personality shine.

On the other hand, if you’re a very visual person, you might have better luck producing infographics, or slides. Believe it or not, you can very easily produce and share PowerPoint presentations that get more attention than some blog posts.

Whatever style you choose, you need to stick with it. And if you’re really feeling brave, give them all a try to see what sticks.

You see, choosing the right medium for your content is not entirely up to you. It’s up to your audience too. For example, many fans of video games would prefer to see a video review of a new game over a written review. You need to understand what your audience wants, and always give that to them.

Hopefully, once you start thinking about these things, you can find a common ground that both fits your style and the needs of your audience.

4. Repurpose your content as often as possible

What I mean by repurposing is simply taking your original ideas and generating many different forms of media from them. For instance, I love to take quotes from my blog posts and turn them into tweets. From one blog post, I can get at least five or six unique tweets that I can use throughout the week.

I could just as easily turn a written blog post into a slide deck to publish on SlideShare. Or, if you have a great video that you’ve just created, why not transcribe it into a blog post?

There are many ways to get the most out of a single piece of content. The more variety you have in your approach, the more traction it can have, since it’ll attract different crowds of people.

Lastly, by doing this, you’re truly maximizing your time, since you’re essentially producing multiple pieces of content all from a single idea. Talk about productivity!

5. Have fun with it

If you see content marketing as a chore, you’re never going to stick with it.

I look at each blog post I write as an opportunity to learn more about a specific topic that I may not be well versed in. I also look at it as a way to practice teaching a topic to others, and in that sense, I solidify my own understanding of the topic.

So, look for ways to have fun with content marketing. Challenge yourself to speak about things that you’re not an expert in, but that you know you need to get a grasp on. In that sense, content marketing does as much for you as it does for your business or your audience.

Is it working for you?

In conclusion, these are just a few ideas to get you thinking about content marketing in a different light. At the end of the day, you know you need to be producing content, so why not make the most of it?

Source :http://bit.ly/1ZvTdwH

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Six Tips To Stay Ahead of Social Media Trends

Small business owners have enough on their plates. They have to watch expenses, create marketing pieces, go to sales meetings, follow trends in their industry and keep up with trends on social media. They might have trouble staying on top of them all, but if they fail to pay attention to social media trends, they could miss golden opportunities.

Besides new features added to Facebook, LinkedIn Twitter and Pinterest, new social media sites are launched that do different things. Being on the forefront of social media changes can be accomplished. Here are a few suggestions on ways you can do just that.

1) Create a stream on Twitter with popular hashtags

You can start your goal of staying on top of social media by using social media. Create a stream on Twitter with popular social media hashtags. You can use terms like #socialmediamarketing, #smchat or #TwitterTip. Don’t be too general because you will see an influx of tweets into your stream. This stream will help you know what you can expect for the next month.

2) Make a Twitter list of influencers in the industry

Experts in social media often hang out in the social media sites. Whenever there is a new announcement that you should know, you will be able to get advice from the industry leaders tweeting the change and discussing it. Use the hashtags that you gathered and pick out the most active or insightful people who are tweeting. Make a Twitter list based on your research and spend time each day listening to what they have to say. Ask them questions too. That’s why they are experts.

3) Use Google Alerts on terms and influencers

Now that you have a list of influencers that you can follow on social media, you can set up a Google Alert for some of them. That way you will get regular updates when they post content or are interviewed about social media. Pick your top three favorite influencers and set up Google Alerts for them. This will help you stay up to date on any breaking news in the industry. Getting the alert once a day is perfectly reasonable. All you have to do is type in your search term (the influencer's name), select the types of results you want to see (news, blogs, videos, etc.), select your frequency, and you are ready to go.

4) Join LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn discussions can get lively. Because the site is geared toward business owners, they talk about changes on Facebook, new social media sites launching or future trends. You also will meet a lot of other social media enthusiasts. You will be able to network and ask questions of these people.

5) Subscribe to social media blogs

Also, you should read blogs that post content about social media so you can be sure that you won't miss anything. If there's a new feature or trend, it will definitely be on written about in detail on these blogs. More important than subscribing to these blogs is making sure you set aside time each week to read through your content.

6) Go to a conference

Take the time to go to a social media conference. This will be a great opportunity to hear from social media experts in the industry and be able to ask the burning questions you may have. You will get the most up-to-date advice about running a social media campaign and what you should know when using social media. You don’t have to attend in person. For example, Social Media Week allows you to attend via your phone, computer or tablet.

Source : http://bit.ly/1YK0AQU

Forgotten Tips on How to Build Better Relationships with Your Customers

The number one rule in business is that the customer always comes first. If you want to build a great withstanding reputation and generate repeat customers, you should be prepared to interact with the people that determine your company’s success. Providing outstanding customer service often means putting them before your morning latte, your long-awaited lunch and your days off.

If you’re up for building better relationships and engaging in more customer conversations than simply “how’s the weather,” employ these tips and you’ll have happier customers and a great reputation for hooking prospects.

1. Treat them like a friend

Your customers are not strangers; they have invested time, money and effort into your product/service.

• Use their names. This may sound obvious, but you’ll be surprised at how many people fail to use a simple ‘Hi Sandra’ at the start of contact.
• Engage on a deeper level. Ask them about their day, what they’re doing at the weekend, what events they have coming up. Rambling about your product/service won’t win you any brownie points.
• Personalise your emails. Don’t be afraid to put a little razzmatazz in emails before hitting send. It will get them smiling, laughing and rushing to reply.

2. Know their company

Knowing your customers and what company they work for gives you more insight into why they’re using your product/service and if there’s more business opportunities.

• Do your research. Showing you have done your research is impressive — know what they do and what they stand for. They’ll instantly see you’re interested and a mutual understanding will develop.
• Ask questions. Dig deeper. Ask them questions like ‘where do you see your company in five year’s time?’ This is an opportunity for great interactions, great information and a great way of determining if there is a chance of a long-running business-to-customer relationship.

3. Don’t forget about them

Your relationship doesn’t stop when a prospect becomes a customer. They haven’t fallen off the face of the earth or gotten lost somewhere in cyberspace.

• Use email communication. Send an email to see how they’re doing and to find out how they’re getting on with your product/service. Companies better themselves when receiving feedback, good or bad, so use this as a vital tool for your personal and company development.
• Send a calendar invite. If you’d prefer to have a proper catch-up, send them an email, arrange a time convenient for both of you, and send them a calendar invite. This way, they’ll know you’re serious about finding out the effectiveness of your product/service and care for their opinion.

4. Deal with problems INSTANTLY

We’ve all been there as unsatisfied customers, so nip problems in the bud quickly for guaranteed customer satisfaction.

• Determine the go-to person. You might not be the go-to person for problems, but alert the genius that is and ask for an estimated time for when the problem will be resolved. Let your customer know instantly that you’ve contacted the relevant person and you’ll be putting the “A” in attentive.
• It’s all on you. If you can fix their problem, don’t write an email. Call, engage in conversation and instruct your customer on how to fix the problem in real-time. This ensures it’s dealt with ASAP and you’ve caught up with your customer in the process.

5. Go the extra mile

Not all companies have time to go the extra mile but this could be the difference between a customer spreading the word on your product/service or never wanting to speak of it again
.

• Interview customers for customer success stories. This gives you real insight into your product/service success and shows your prospects the positive impact it’s having on other businesses.
• Connect with them on social media. Get tweeting, Facebook-liking and pinning on Pinterest; they’ll return the favour and you both get publicity.

These tips seem obvious to those that have budding relationships with customers, but they are refreshers for others who need a reminder. As customers continue ruling the business world, give them your best efforts and get rewarded with customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Source :http://bit.ly/1FzZAbu