Top Social Media Monitoring Tools

Social Media Monitoring Tools have become a mainstay in the range of Online Marketing Tools. Due to the large number of providers, it is often difficult for companies to gain on overview of the market and find the appropriate tool for their needs. Once again, Goldbach Interactive has set itself the goal of identifying the top tools of 2013 and shedding some light on this heavily competed market.

Compared to the previous year, the growth-rate of the monitoring tool market has slowed down. The top tools have further established themselves, but competition in the market remains heavy. Tools are being bought up, retired, or completely overhauled – and new tools are constantly pushing their way into the market.

The Method

Of more than 300 identified Social Media Monitoring tools, the Top 5 tools were filtered out over the course of a several step process:

1. The most important criterion for placement on our longlist is a complete coverage of sources (monitoring online news, blogs, forums, and social networks).
2. A questionnaire with further criteria leads to the shortlist (i.e. monitoring as the primary focus of the tool, international source coverage,e-mail alerts, etc.)
3. The Top 15 are selected through a detailed tool evaluation by Goldbach Interactive based on webinars, an additional questionnaire, and live tests (simultaneous access to demo-accounts, for which every provider must perform under the same predefined queries) .
4. The tools with the best rating amongst all criteria are classified as Top 5.

The Top 5 Tools

Five tools were especially convincing. The following monitoring providers (ordered alphabetically) can hold their own in a head to head comparison, and offer impressive features in addition to wide source coverage and a range of analysis options.

Engagor: Community Management und Monitoring in one fell swoop

It’s all in the name: In the area of engagement and CRM, this tool scored the best. With a multitude of workflow functionalities, community management is an efficient task. Engagor  also convinces with its source coverage in Eastern Europe (an increasingly important market in the monitoring space, which was taken as a sample for this report’s evaluation). A clear shortcoming: navigation is a bit confusing. The trial account of the tool was very convincing in terms of speed and actually makes real time monitoring possible.

Heartbeat (Sysomos/Markedwired): Established Analytics Tool

The tool offers excellent analytics capabilities and engagement functionalities. While the source coverage in Central Europe is very strong, the results from the Eastern Europe sample could be improved. Additional advantages lie in the easy usability and comprehensive, advanced functionalities. Heartbeat is one of the few tools that simultaneously offers language and country filters. The only weakness: As an established player in the market, development of the platform has noticeably slowed.

Radarly (Linkfluence): Hot Newcomer

Radarly is THE new kid on the block: impressing through a good user interface, simple filter options, speed, and comprehensive owned media statistics, the tool is attracting a lot of positive attention. The overall impression is complemented by a wide range of engagement functionalities and good service. The only possible weakness lies in Radarly’s narrower source coverage compared to the average for Top 5 Tools.

Synthesio: Easy Navigation

The ease of use and intuitive nature of Synthesio stand out in the tool. While integration in CRM is possible, engagement functionalities are neglected. Strengths lie in source coverage of Eastern Europe, the use of new KPI’s and interesting source categorization (through predefined categories). An additional advantage: the option to have the sentiment of posts manually rated by the provider.

Talkwalker (Trendiction): Data Quality

The second positive surprise: Talkwalker shows well developed analysis functionalities and is definitely ahead in the area of service. Especially the source coverage in the Eastern European space (random sample) was especially convincing. Through a proprietary crawler, Trendiction ensures an excellent standard in terms of data quality and even serves as a data provider for many other monitoring providers. Only in the area of engagement does the tool still show room for improvement. Especially exciting are the comprehensive filter and reporting possibilities.

Top 15 Tools

In addition to the top tools, several providers shine through individual functionalities.

Brandwatch narrowly missed the Top 5 and is especially compelling with the ability to customize individual dashboard tabs. At the time of rating, the owned media analysis “Channels” which has now been integrated with their latest release, could unfortunately not yet be tested. A promising update Update, which could make Brandwatch a favorite tool.
Not easy to rate: Radian6. A high profile on the market and worldwide presences clearly justify consideration. Information was provided by Cision distribution partner for Radian6. Radian6 continues to convince users with versatile functionalities and analytical possibilities. The mature engagement console is a strong equal to the Top 5 providers in terms of interaction capabilities, but the tool is demanding in terms of usability.

UMT Delta stood out with integration possibilities for the monitoring of radio, TV and print media, while Simplify360 caught our attention with its versatile engagement and workflow functionalities. Their source coverage for Europe, however, is still lacking.

Meltwater Buzz was again also a top contender this year, with sophisticated Social CRM possibilities. Also worth mentioning are SoDash and Buzzcapture which shine through innovative ideas like automatic answers to certain types of posts and new reporting capabilities.

Full-Service-Provider

Several full-service providers were already identified in 2012. These solutions place importance on customer needs, account setup, support and data processing instead of just providing a software license. Over the course of the last months this segment has changed: several providers parked their services or were not reachable.(Ethority and Cogia, however, contacted us after publishing the German version of this report and confirmed that their service is still active.) Synthesio, on the other hand, no longer only focuses on a full service offering, but has moved into a license driven business model.

bc.lab is a provider with a compelling full-service offering. The platform is well laid out and offers precise sentiment analysis through manual screening of posts, in addition to a high standard of data quality. This makes the tool especially suited for the monitoring of difficult terms.

Also eye-catching

Additional tools, which could not be rated according to the predetermined categories, but still offer interesting solutions are: Attensity Analyze, ARGUSAvenue and Adobe Social.

Accurate Sentiment Analysis

With roots in text analysis, Attensity Analyze positions itself as Social Media intelligence and analytics tool. The provider especially focuses on the qualitative analysis of discovered posts and less on the quantitative criteria of Social Media conversations. The tool provides the possibility of comparing individual topics about products via an innovative, automatic sentiment analyses. The sentiment is determined based on sentence structure and won us over with its high success rate. The less than modern interface is a bit deterring, on the other hand.

The Swiss Market

After Swiss tool provider Netbreeze was bought up this past year by Microsoft, Argus der Presse has built out its classic media monitoring offering with a Social Media solution. ARGUSAvenue focuses on the Swiss market, monitoring a range of local sources except forums. In addition to the possibility of determining sentiment in a general sense, and also in relation to the company, Argus offers the compelling option of an editorial service. In terms of analytics capabilities, the service still has room for improvement. With its local focus, Argus could be an interesting alternative for Swiss clients.

Social Media marketing as a holistic approach

Adobe offers a marketing suite, Adobe Social, which is composed of a diverse set of components including a Social Media monitoring solution. The strengths of the monitoring tool are apparent in the area of workflow, the measurement of campaigns, and through the good integration possibilities with other Adobe software. This makes the tool especially suited to steer several online marketing activities with one tool. Areas that could use improvement include the earned media monitoring space.

Top Trends this Year

Three trends became apparent during the performance of this analysis, in addition to the continued development of the tools: the individualization of dashboards (all the way up to modular composition of entire tools), sophisticated reporting functionalities, and broader coverage of sources.

Individualization

The 2012 report already included several tools with dashboards or graphics that could be individualized. In the last 12 months, many tools have made progress in this area. Radian6 was a pioneer in 2011, with widget based data visualization. Brandwatch has also built out the possibility of customizing every tab in the dashboard with individually selected components. SM2 and Engagor modulare Dashboards an. InsbesondereSynthesio und Radarly also recently began offering modular dashboards.

Reporting Functionalities

E-mail alerts and automatic, standardized reports have been considered basic functionalities of monitoring tools since some time. Now certain providers are going one step further and offer sophisticated, individual reporting options: Buzzcapture allows users to create a report by “Drag and Drop”, which can be reached via an individual URL and is automatically updated. UMT Delta, Engagor and Synthesio also have the ability to put together individual reports. With Talkwalkerit’s even possible to export reports into a custom PowerPoint presentation template.

Broader Source Coverage

The top tools of the report already draw on a very extensive base of sources (next to the classic earned media channels, also allowing the monitoring of connected owned media profiles). Since the last report, a clear building out of the source basis is noticeable. Tools like Talkwalker, UMT Delta and ARGUSAvenue allow the integration of radio, TV, and print media. By now it is standard practice that client wishes for specific sources can be taken into account. SM2, Radian6 and Radarly go one step further and even allow users to add sources themselves. New social media platforms like Pinterest, Instagram, or Foursquare are already being searched by most monitoring crawlers. Engagoris a pioneer in this space, and has shown quick reaction in the past years integrating new platforms.

Results from the Live Test
This year’s Social Media Monitoring Tool Report is topped off through a live monitoring test. Each provider was challenged with the same search queries, to search the social web from the 13. – 19. of May. The infographic shows, which providers were set up with a demo account and took part in the live test.

The following results were observed through the test:

• Not one query resulted in two tools finding the same number of posts.
• Tool features and functions strongly vary.
• Few tools offer the possibility to set a language and country filter at the same time.
• The discovery speed for finding posts turned out varying results: the fastest tool needed 15 seconds, the slowest made «Realtime Monitoring» impossible with a 40 minute delay.
• In regards to the speed of loading graphical analyses and switching between individual tabs, performance leaves a lot to be wished for in some cases. Results ranged from real time navigation to load times of several minutes.

There are discrepancies between the indications of the provider and the results of the live test (i.e. in the source coverage), which resulted in a reclassification of the Top 5 favorites after the live test.

Summary

Testing a tool is the best way to find the appropriate solution

All of the tested platforms can be considered Social Media monitoring tools, but the results could not be more varied. Every tool offers individual functionalities and differs in focus and approach from other monitoring solutions. While the focus of some is more on engagement and workflow, others are betting on developed analytics and reporting functions. This makes the search for an appropriate tool more difficult.

Organizations must therefore first look inwards and analyze their own needs. Based on this, favorites can be selected to find out with which tool the demands are best addressed, optimally through testing.

Development of the tool market

It is interesting to observe how the tool landscape has changed within one year. Two trends can be identified here: on one hand, well known providers are establishing themselves further with their tools and developing functions and features for breadth. On the other hand, small and specialized tools are appearing which are compelling with their clear focus on specific functions.

MEDIA INSIGHT The Top 14 Video Services for Publishers and Brands

Words are cheap; and if you’re a millennial, they are also very, very boring. What youngsters want these days is video. Lots and lots of video. They want to consume content via video; create their own videos; and share videos across multiple social platforms.

Snapchat’s MyStory and Instagram’s Hyperlapse have taken off like wildfire, but they are merely the tip of the wildfire iceberg. The statistics for internet users’ hunger for video content is undeniable: YouTube gets more than 1 billion unique users per month; and now the video-hosting site can deliver stats to marketers (or any content creator) in real time, and that’s just the beginning.

Launched way back in 2005, YouTube seems like almost ancient history, or some sort of utility, like the water company of the Internet. There are all kinds of places that are serving video content to users that have nothing to do with YouTube or its family of Google-owned sites. In fact, Facebook comes in at a strong second behind Google, with a steep drop-off before getting to AOL and Yahoo. For good or bad, we are all being served more video content than ever before, just as high-quality video content is becoming easier and easier to create with mobile devices, which brings us back to Hyperlapse and MyStory.

Here’s a quick rundown on all the great new video-making toys that are trying to win the eyeballs in the new Internet video game:

http://instagram.com/p/sK2peBAaEl/embed/captioned/?v=2

Instagram Hyperlapse — So simple, yet apparently not-so-easy to have engineered: Hyperlapse allows users to take pro-quality stop-motion video to compress the time of a skateboard trick, or traffic over a bridge, or a sunset from an airplane window. Although Hyperlapse has become instantly popular, it is up for some immediate competition with a similar feature on the Apple iOS 8update.

Timehop — It’s hard to think about, but social media has been around for, like, years. Timehop takes the ephemera of your old Twitter posts (and Facebook and Instagram and…) and lets you know what you were doing this day last year, two years ago, what have you. Timehop gives historical weight to your recycled social media posts of yore.

SnapChat Story — The good folks at Snapchat decided to make a platform for stories, where you can host your snaps for 24 hours to tell your special story. Most people who want to save their Snaps save them on another social platform like Facebook or Tumblr, but if you want to string a few Snaps together for about a day, now you can with Snapchat Stories.

http://vine.co/v/h1Yz2Bad73K/embed/simple

Vine — Vine is to Twitter what Hyperlapse is to Instagram, although now that Vine isn’t the next big thing, what do we need with six seconds of looping video anymore? In the ever-evolving world of social media platforms, it’s be new or go home… but maybe with these new camera tools and editing options, Vine won’t have to go home.

Lightt — That’s Lightt with two T’s. It bills itself as a semi-pro video production app with in-app editing and music features. If you’re serious about video production, this app is worth checking out.

Vyclone — Taking mobile video production to the next level, Vyclone allows you to produce multi-camera videos with no break in the audio, as long as you can wade through a few of its non-intuitive editing features.

One Second Epic — By epic, One Second Epic means that it’s like Vine, but for 10-second videos instead of just six.

Evergram — If Timehop is the ghost of social media past, the Evergram is the ghost of social media future: it’s an app geared for leaving keepsake videos for later, even years to come.

YesVideo — Remember home movies? There was once a TV show that featured the funny ones. A new service called YesVideo allows you to easily upload and share the videos that you might have on VHS video or Super-8 film. Order DVDs and share on Facebook! Thanks, YesVideo.

Animoto — You add the photos and music, and Animoto will create seamless video slideshows with your pre-existing photo and music content.

Directr — Directr, a video production tool in the same class as Lightt and Vyclone, was the one that was acquired by Google’s YouTube, so expect Directr to be the next-generation industry standard for in-phone video editing and production.

GoPro — OK, so GoPro, as you know, is the craziest video camera ever made for the craziest people who make the craziest video with it, which is now the content that the company uses to market not just the camera, but the videos themselves and the lifestyles that support them. Just look at GoPro’s YouTube channel if you have any doubts. Then again, it can make your dog’s eye videos look pretty awesome too – like this one that has been viewed 13 million times.

Ocho — It’s 8-second videos. Ocho! Get it? Eight seconds! Of video! And it supports timelapse, filters and lots of other cool effects to make any video look special.

Storehouse — Seamlessly combine videos and photos and text into stories withStorehouse. It won an Apple Design Award for visual storytelling, so that can’t be bad.

28 Insights on Business and Marketing by Warren Buffet

I’ve been a consultant or owned a business for almost over 30 years. When you’ve been in business or worked with as many business owners/entrepreneurs as I have you start to see trends. I thought I’d try to capture some thoughts I’ve learned so far in this journey. What follows has no order or sequence it’s just general truisms I’ve discovered working with some amazing people throughout the years…

1. There are things in your business you should be doing, and you know you should be doing but you put them off last. Do these first.
2. More unproductive time is spent doing the things you should outsource. Find opportunities to outsource things you really shouldn’t be doing and if you can’t outsource then find ways to put these into a system where you are more proficient.
3. Marketing hasn’t changed all that much, only the tools and the way you communicate with your target market has. Learn the foundations of marketing, branding, and positioning.
4. Start the day with the most important thing you need to do and end the day with asking what you accomplished. If those 2 things don’t match up make a change immediately.
5. The phone is still one of the best networking tools on the planet and beats social media hands down.
6. Follow up and consistency are the cornerstone of a strong and growing business.
7. Your target market is more educated on your product, service, or idea than they have ever been. This gives you an opportunity to really solve solutions; the challenge is solving the right solutions.
8. People make decisions both emotionally and logically. If these are out of sync in your offering or process people will run for the hills. Your offers have to make emotional and logical sense.
9. People have made up their mind before they talk to you. It’s your job to help them come to the conclusion that you, your product, or idea is what they have been seeking.
10. Rely on experts. It is said that you don’t know what you don’t know. Don’t allow this to happen in your business. Find the things that are critical to know to give you a competitive advantage and work with experts to help you understand how to capitalize on these things.
11. Instill a dedication to being the best for yourself and your team. This will take you farther than any marketing strategy.
12. Test your reasoning and thoughts. Design tests in your business and marketing so that you can prove yourself right or wrong. Then iterate these.
13. All businesses need systems, what are yours and have you developed them.
14. Understand your markets buying signals and buying timeframe. In certain markets there are trigger events that cause your market to be aware of a problem or seek a solution. The birth of a child is a good trigger event that spurs a whole host of purchase decisions. What is your target market buying signals, timeframe, and trigger events?
15. Attention is becoming one of the scarcest resources. If you get someone’s attentionrespect it and give them what they want or seek.
16. If you’re just getting started or rebooting, start with your big idea, a strong website, and find unique ways to reach people who want what you have. Spend zero amount of time in social media until you have this figured out.
17. You have hidden revenue in your business; the trick is finding where it’s at with as little amount of effort as possible.
18. Act. More people fail by not acting than they do by getting their idea in motion. When you act you get feedback, when you get feedback you improve, and when you improve you ultimately get to something that works in the marketplace.
19. Trust yourself. You know deep down inside that your idea will work now prove the world wrong.
20. Quantity rarely trumps quality. This is even truer when you look at the amount of effort and time you put into your business. Make sure it’s quality and not quantity that you are measuring.
21. No clear metrics. Write down and track the key metrics that drive your sales, prospecting, and efficiency of your business.
22. Focus on what you can control and let go of the things you cannot. Or better yet find ways to flip the things you can’t control in your mind in a way that you can control them within yourself.
23. Learn to look at a situation in 3 ways, your way, their way, and as an observer looking at both.
24. Most sales can be defined by a straight line, and this straight line happens even before you talk to your prospect. The better you get at managing that line the more sales and business you will create.
25. Seek a yes or no, if it’s a maybe you should run. A yes or no is a decision, maybe will always have lingering questions.
26. Your success is your own. No one cares more about your success than you. Don’t rely on someone else to be your driver in success.
27. Find a way to banish need from your negotiations. The other side can sense this. Even if you do need that deal or that project operating from this mindset will make it harder to close.
28. Know your why.

7 deadly sins of startup social media marketing

“Yeah, I made mistakes but…life doesn’t come with instructions.”

Sure, it does not. But that’s not the case with social media – there’s certainly some good advice out there to help you avoid blunders on social media. After all, mistakes are meant for learning and not repeating, right?

So what are some of the common mistakes that companies, especially startups, make while defining and executing their social media strategy? Here is what I’ve found:

1. Incorrect platforms

Agreed– Facebook has 1.44 billion monthly active users (as of Mar 31, 2015). But you can’t have the whole universe as your target audience. In today’s time and age, when everyone is spoilt for choice, the most important marketing decision you need to make is defining the target audience. Targeted marketing is the key of the game, and targeted marketing is, by definition, exclusionary. You need to clearly define your target audience.Once that is done, you need to identify the platforms on which your target audience is active. Remember – nobody searches for a job on Facebook or looks for a hotel review on LinkedIn. Being present on the most popular platform does not make sense if your target audience is not active there. Here’s some quick help when it comes to popular platforms:

Facebook – It’s a good platform when:

• You have highly visual content
• You want to leverage the community effect
• You want to build trust in the minds of the users by leveraging their friends’ network’s
• You are ready to spend on ads asrecent changes in Facebook’s algorithm have made it very difficult to organically reach out to fans

Twitter – It is a good platform to:

• Broadcast your message
• Join the on-going conversations
• Connect with thought leaders and people that matter to you
• Build a position for yourself

LinkedIn – Consider using it when:

• You are a B2B company
• You want to connect with a professional audience and establish your thought leadership within a group of homogeneously targeted audience

Google+ – Good platform to:

• Help you with your SEO efforts
• Participate in Google communities to connect with like-minded people

Pinterest – You can use it when:

• Your primary target audience include women
• You have highly visual content to share

These of course are just guidelines. You need to do a more thorough research and brainstorming to finalise the social platforms for your brand.

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Related read: 13 ways you can make digital marketing work for you

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2. Doing Too Much or Too Little

Once you choose a social platform, you need to commit to it. Having an inactive presence on any of the platforms creates a bad impression. Having the last tweet date as two years back is worse than not having a Twitter handle. You need to show activity on the social platforms, and need to have consistency. The opposite is also true – you just can’t do too much. Don’t bombard your LinkedIn company page followers with 10 updates a day just because that will give you more number of impressions!

3. Ignoring Content Marketing

Content marketing is the gasoline of your social media efforts. You need to have good blog articles to showcase your expertise. You need interesting infographics to share with your audience. eBooks are good to share as a free giveaway. Whitepapers arean excellent way to establish your thought leadership. You need content. Period. Just don’t ignore it from your social media strategy. Not having enough bandwidth to create content cannot be an excuse today.

4. Inappropriate Content or Self Promotion

Each platform has different content needs. Don’t make the mistake of pushing the same content on all the platforms just because there are tools available that allow you to do so. Each platform requires different tone of messaging and different type of content. More importantly, you also need to mind the timing of your updates. Your audience is not going to be present on all the platforms at the same time. Social media does require some serious time and attention commitment Don’t get away with easy options of automatingyour schedule without giving it a serious thought, or having a proper plan in place. Another thing to keep an eye on is the type of content you share. Too much of self-promotion is a big turn-off. Just because you are excited about your product or services does not mean you can talk about it all day long. Have a good balance of education, industry insights, engagement and self-promotion in your content sharing.

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You’ll also like to read: How to make influencer marketing work for your startup

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5. No Personal Branding

People relate to other people – and this is especially true for startups, where people are buyingservices fromfounders more than from the company. So it is important that startups include the personal branding of their founders in their social media planning and strategy. You need a face for your company.

6. Canned Responses to Negative Comments

Lot of companies shy away from social media because of the fear of negative comments. But note that negative comments are, infact, good opportunities for you to build trust in the minds of your readers. (Read more about ithere.) One of the foremost thing you need to remember while handling negative comments on the social platform is that you should NEVER give a canned response to any negative comment. Be personal and show genuine interest in solving the problem. Acknowledge the issue, and take genuine actions to resolve it. If the there is a mistake, accept it and take all efforts to resolve it. Check this example here from Zappos – simply brilliant. Isn’t it?

7. Not aligning with the target audience in terms of tone and messaging

Try and align as much as you can with your target audience – if you are targeting the youth, introduce some quirkiness in your overall messaging. If you are targeting CXOs, maintain a professional tone. Just make sure that your marketing tone matches your company culture. After all, today, marketing is no more the job of marketing department only. It is the job of each and every person representing the company. Here’s a brilliant example of this –

Do share your experience on what worked and what did not work for you. It’s all about sharing knowledge, isn’t it?

Creative Marketing Ideas to Boost Your Business

We’ve all hit it – that wall that seems to sap away all your magical creative marketing juices. Suddenly you feel like Peter Pan without his pixie dust.

If you’ve never seen Run Fatboy Run, it’s a great movie!

All you need is a bit of help to kick your marketing strategy back on track. And guess what? We’re dishin’ out 64 creative marketing ideas and inspirational tips to help you bust through that brick wall. Let’s get started with…

• Social Media Marketing Ideas
• Urban Marketing Ideas
• Contest Marketing Ideas
• Marketing Ideas for Contest Promotion
• Content Marketing Ideas

Social Media Marketing Ideas

Push your handles – If you’re really looking to bump up those Twitter followers, you can’t be afraid to be a bit shameless. Speaking at a conference? Put your Twitter handle on the slideshow (heck, keep it in the corner the entire presentation). Ordering new business cards? Better include that adorable handle!

Very cool Twitter-themed business card from Luis Felipe Silva

Join in on weekly hashtag themes like #ThrowbackThursday – If you want to build your social media following, you need to be an active participant in the community. This means posting regularly, and also joining in on fun weekly social media traditions that already have a loyal audience. Show the kids how hip you can be!

Vines – Vines, quick 6-second video clips, are largely under-utilized. With a little work and some fun content, you could become a big fish in a small pond on Vine.

Pin your own images (and others) – Don’t underestimate the value of this image-sharing site. Post your strongest visual assets (templates, infographics, etc) on Pinterest and link them to your webpages for some serious traffic.

Keep social tabs on competitors – Facebook business pages allow you to follow other accounts via the Pages to Watch feature. Follow your competitors and see what they post, and which of their posts get the most shares and likes. See what works and follow their lead.

From Inside Facebook

Urban Marketing Ideas

Living in a concrete jungle allows for some pretty creative concepts.

Step out on the streets – In an online age, there’s something to be said for going au naturel and exercising a little IRL marketing. Go old school with flyers and poster in local cafes, do some sidewalk chalk writing. This strategy is most effective for locally oriented businesses, but it can work for anyone.

Street chalk Twitter handle by Marquette ITS

Commission a mural – Try getting permission to decorate the side of a prominent building with a large mural.

Great Di Bruno Bros mural found on Yelp

Use your surroundings – Get a little imaginative and think about how you can use your urban surroundings for potential marketing magic.

Very creative urban marketing efforts by Vijar Barbecues, found on Owni

Unusual sponsorships – Urban living results in some unique marketing opportunities you won’t find elsewhere. They secret is, you need to think creatively to capitalize on these opportunities.

Citi Bank sponsoring Citi Bike (image from Bicycling)

Contest Marketing Ideas

Photo Contests – Photo contests are great for a number for reasons – they’re relatively easy to enter (anyone with Instagram and a few spare seconds can submit), and they also provide sponsors with a great form of user-generated content that can be reused and implemented elsewhere.

Check out Harpoon Brewery – they’ve mastered the art of photo contests. (And click here for moreInstagram marketing ideas.)

Video contests – Not as many people will enter video contests, but you’re more likely to get a higher caliber of content since creating a video requires more effort on the user’s part. This kind of content can be extremely valuable for businesses down the line, especially when you have talented filmers creating video content just for you!

Submit your vote contests – Voting contests get a ton of entries because they’re so easy to participate in (just click a button, in most cases). What’s cool about voting contests is that you can use the data obtained from the votes to create a mini data study. Share what you learned in a blog post!

Caption Contests – Post a photo and ask users to submit their best caption – this kind of contest can get some pretty great laughs.

Sweepstakes – The most traditional of contests, sweepstakes/giveaways are a tried and true classic. They are quick and simple to enter – plus it’s easy to ask for email subscriptions as part of the submission form.

Marketing Ideas for Contest Promotion

Post to deal sites – People love free stuff, some more than others. The people who really love a good deal tend to frequent deal sites and forums. There’s almost always a sweepstake/contest forum section where you can add your contest into the mix.

I’ve seen contests in which 90% of traffic is driven from these types of sites – alright, they aren’t always the most qualified leads, but if you want quantity over quality, this is a sound strategy. Start of submitting to Slickdeals and go from there. This can be a great form of restaurant marketing.

Hashtag-ify your contest – Adding a relevant (and unique) hashtag to your contest helps you keep track of entries and makes them easy to scan through and organize. Besides, they’re just plain fun.

Make contests super sharable – This means adding “share this contest” buttons if you have an entry form on a website, or simply encouraging social sharing in general. The more people who know about your contest, the merrier (for you anyway)!

Offer bonus points for sharing – If you offer users bonus points for sharing news of your contest via social media, they’ll be much more likely to concede. Tools like Rafflecopter make it easy to offer users extra entries for different actions (e.g. Joining the mailing list = +5 entries. Sharing contest on Twitter = +2 entries).

(image from Website Spot)

Notify email subscribers of contest – Remember, you already know that your email subscribers like you and are interested in what you have to offer. If you’re running a contest for a free year of your software, you know your subscribers are going to want in!

Promote your contest on (all) social media – If you’re running a photo contest via Instagram, make sure you still promote the contest on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. You want all your followers, across all social media networks to know about your great giveaway!

Share buttons from WordPress plug-in

Content Marketing Ideas

Write for your audience – The best pieces of content are the ones directed at your key audiences. Understand your customer: know their pain points, what gets them psyched, and what keeps them up at night. Killer content address your audience’s needs and concerns!

Add a visual element to ALL your content pieces – People get bored with text really fast! To keep visitors reading, it’s essential to have images breaking up your text paragraphs. Don’t overlook the importance of a visual element, even in blog posts that are predominantly text-based. You can see some examples of highly visual business blogs here.

Infographics – We know readers love visual content, and infographics are a prime example of beloved, linkable visual assets.

While the idea of creating a top-notch infographic may sound daunting, it doesn’t have to be hard. You don’t need fancy software – in fact, you can make a decent infographic just using Powerpoint. There are plenty of infographic guides templates out there to get you started. Speaking of…

Useful templates – Templates are another powerful form of visual assets that visitors find extremely helpful. Templates serve as a visual framework that can help users create custom piece without completely starting from scratch. Take this landing page template as an example – it explains the basic layout and fundamentals, letting users get a grasp on great landing page essentials before making their own.

Graphs and Charts – The infographic’s less cool cousins, one-piece graphs and charts still have their place as formidable pieces of visual content. They may not be as impressive as infographics, but they require considerably less time and effort to create and are still shareable, so don’t be afraid to use them generously. For visual learners, a graph will be much easier to interpret than a chunk of text and numbers. Make sure you appeal to all kinds of learners!

That’s why you find so many dragons at the animal shelter (image from Reddit)

Videos – Video is incredible when it comes to drawing in and retaining the attention of users –retention rate for visual information can reach 65% vs. 10% for text-based info. Plus, customers who view product videos are much more likely to convert than those that don’t. Video content is a powerful tool, whether you’re trying to demonstrate how your product works IRL or educating visitors.

Statistic lists – Are you hitting a content idea wall? For an easy content marketing fix, collect interesting statistics on a subject matter related to your biz and create a blog post about what you’ve learned. Massive stat lists are easy to make and extremely sharable. Plus, some of the wilder stats may get your gears turning about other content ideas, such as…

Future predictions – Play the soothsayer by predicting future trends in your industry – just make sure you have at least some data to back up your hypothesis.

Controversy – Controversial content always earns attention, but it’s not for the faint of heart – playing with fire can get you burned! Rather than stirring up controversy yourself, the safer road may be to answer or respond to larger industry controversy with your own interpretation.

Rumors travel fast

Aggregate awesomeness from other sources – Another easy way to create killer content is to curate quality content from elsewhere. No, it’s not stealing … at least, not if done properly.

It’s completely kosher to borrow content from other sources if you’re doing something new with it. For example, take our guide to the best SEO Reddit AMAs. The content we quoted from was originally posted on various Reddit forum threads. We took what we deemed the “best” portions of the Q&As from different threads and put it all together to make a super SEO advice guide. This new post is much easier for users interested in SEO to read, rather than scouring through various Reddit threads. NOTE: Play it safe by always giving credit where it’s due.

Ask the experts – Another great content marketing idea is to interview industry thought leaders with set questions and share their responses in a blog post; for example, our interview with industry experts on the future of PageRank. This kind of content tends to do well, and it’s always interesting to see where industry gurus agree and where they don’t. One great thing about sharing expert opinions – chances are, the folks you write about will share your write-up with their own followers! (Pro tip – ask the opinions of groups with large Twitter followers!)

A very impressive panel of experts

Top 10s – People go nuts over top 10 lists – top 10 tools, top 10 blogs, you name it.

Lists – Piggy-backing on top 10s are lists in general. Starting your title with a number can make it stand out more in search listings (e.g. 3 Ways to Slice a Pineapple). Why do people love lists? Because they are super scannable and quick to read. This is probably why over a third of Buzzfeed’s posts have a number in the title. Great content strategies involve a mix of quick, snackable content pieces and more in-depth, long-form articles. Variety is the spice of life, yo.

Product comparison guide – Decisions, decisions – oh, the pitfalls of capitalism. It’s tough being a consumer with so many products to choose from. Help out users with a marketing comparison guide, especially if you have a series of product offerings for different needs. If you’re comparing your product with competitors, be objective and fair; maybe you’re a better fit for small businesses, while a competitor is better for larger corporations.

Alternatively, write up a comparison guide for a product you don’t offer, but which relates to your audience’s business. For example, a video game reseller could write a product comparison guide for different video game controllers. This is helpful content that gets relevant users familiar with your brand.

Content is an open door – Don’t just create awesome content and abandon it – feature your best stuff in other related blog posts as well. You can link to or call out other pieces of content mid-post, or list some related articles at the end of your post. Something along the lines of “Want to learn more about ________? Check out our _________ guide and our __________ infographic.”

Content, love = apples, oranges. (Image from Disney’s Frozen)

Slideshare – The slideshow is back and better than ever! Repurpose PowerPoint presentations for audience-friendly slideshares. Check out these tips from Jonathan Colman on getting more views on Slideshare.

Webinars – Host your own free webinar or partner with another business for twice the expertise (and twice the promotion power). Webinar are a great source of business leads.

Google related search – Checking out the Google related searches (found at the top and bottom of the SERP when you perform a search) for a keyword query is a great tool for generating content ideas. Just Google a term and see what related searches turn up. You may be surprised!

Pop-up opt-in – There’s a lot of debate around newsletter opt-in pop-ups. They’re annoying, they’re intrusive, but quite often, they also work! A/B test one and see how it affects your newsletter subscriptions. If newsletter subscribers have proved to be valuable leads for your business, do what you must to obtain them.

Continue your lucky streak – Not sure what to write about? Go into your analytics account and take a peek at your most popular posts to see what subjects users get excited about, then write a variation or extension of one of your most popular posts.

eBooks – Another great marketing idea is to write a comprehensive ebook on a known pain point or popular industry topic, then create a quality landing page around the offer. Better yet, don’t start from scratch; repurpose past blog posts and articles into a mega e-book collection.

101 guides – There’s always someone just starting out in the biz; beginner’s guides and Industry Knowledge 101 content pieces will always get linked to and shared around by newbs.

Even great content needs promotion – Don’t just publish your content and expect it to promote itself; share it with your email subscribers and social media followers.

Post about industry hot topics – What’s the buzz in your field? Post about topical news and trending topics related to your industry to get in on the burst of action and show that you’re in the know.

Guest Posts – While the SEO value of guest posts has been called into question, there’s nothing wrong with guest posting if done right. Just focus on the value of getting your brand in front of a new audience, rather than the links.

(Image from Flickr user matsuyuki)

White papers – Guides, e-ooks, white papers – they’re kind of all the same thing, but labeling your assets differently can help your message resonate with different audiences. Test your labels to see which works best with your prospects.

Quality content – This should go without saying, but only produce quality content that you can be proud of! Google hates thin content, and users don’t like it either.

Show some skin – I mean metaphorical skin of course – show that you are not a robot. Don’t be afraid to have some fun and show off your company’s personality. Express yourself; and if that means literally showing some skin, well then, more power to you. You’re human after all.

Online magazine – Producing your own virtual magazine is another epic form of content marketing. For a great example, check out Dark Rye, a stylish online magazine produced by Whole Foods. For a quick and easy fix, make your own online newspaper with Paper.li.

Podcasts – Podcasts are great because users can download them and then listen on the go! Possible podcast concepts include discussing hot industry news or interviewing experts, in your space.

Cover events – If you attend a conference (or even an online event), consider writing a post about what info you gathered from the event, what you found valuable, etc. Chances are others will find it valuable too! Use the hashtag from the event in your promotional efforts.

Collaboration – Collaboration can extend your reach and build your reputation. Consider all the different partnerships you could build – partner with a charity? A related business? You can co-author a blog post or guide, co-host a webinar, etc.

Memes – Memes are fun and familiar for internet-goers. Get a little cheeky with some fun memes – it’s easy to make your own with sites like meme generator.

#SummertimeSadness

Social proof – Sometimes great content marketing ideas also serve as fantastic forms of social proof. Take this inventive content project by a haunted house called Nightmares Fear Factory. They take photos of victims…er, I mean guests, and post them to their Flickr feed. The photos are absolutely hysterical and prove that Nightmares Fear Factory is as scary as they claim to be! (Thanks for the heads up from Shopify).

Divvy up your content – Don’t go content-overboard or you’ll end up overwhelming users. We live in a competitive attention economy, and if you’re creating new stuff every single day, people may tire of you, even if everything you share is excellent. Them’s the breaks, kid. Figure out what pace works for your audience.

Conduct a content audit – Is your existing content up to snuff? What is driving conversions? What isn’t – and why? Asking these questions might make you sweat, but you’ll be better off knowing the truth. Finding the answers to these questions will ensure that your marketing strategy moves forward in the right direction.

Branded tools – Create awesome, valuable tools that your audience will find useful. You can use parts of the tool to push towards your product offering, but make sure the tool itself is high-caliber – don’t just make it a glorified sales pitch. Providing free tools will make users think fondly of you and extend your brand as more people share your awesome free tool!

Mobile! – With 79% of internet users conducting online shopping via  mobile devices, you should be embarrassed if you’re not mobile-friendly. This is not optional, although many still treat it like it is.

Gameification – Gamification is a great marketing idea to get users excited about engaging with you. As on Whose Line is it Anyway, the points are meaningless, but you’d be surprised how much people really enjoy getting points. We all love instant affirmation – it’s like virtual crack!

Apps like Belly and Foursquare combine gamification with customer loyalty programs. Starbucks also has its own tame version of gamified loyalty programs in which you earn stars for Starbucks purchases. Consider if gamification could work for your biz.

Get by with some content help from your friends – There are a ton of great tools out there to help you find quality content (Storify & Buffer to name a few). Remember, you don’t want to just share your own content – sharing great pieces by others in your industry shows that you’re a team player and valuable source of unbiased knowledge.

Comics – While newspaper funnies are a dying breed, online comics are alive and thriving! Consider making your own internet comics that relate to the absurd and surreal aspects of your industry. Try free tools like Pixton or Strip Generator to get started.

Copy the masters – Watch to see who is creating great content, and follow their lead. Take a close look at clickbait sites like Upworthy and Buzzfeed that get a ton of shares; while their audience and content subjects will be different from yours, they serve as an excellent study in how to improve your marketing strategy. What are they doing right? Can you implement something similar?

Take your time with titles – While we’re on the subject, Upworthy is famous for their killer, clickable headlines. Even a superb blog post won’t get the attention it deserves without a good title. Should it be clever? Eye-catching? SEO-friendly? Think about what will appeal to your audience. It’s recommended you write as many as 5-10 titles for every article, then choose the best!

4-1-1 – The 4-1-1 concept comes from Andrew Davis, author of Brandscaping. Davis’ social media sharing strategy dictates that for every six pieces of content shared on social media:

• 4 should be content from other industry influencers that is relevant to your audience
• 1 should be your own original, educational content
• 1 should have a sales aspect (coupon, product news, press release), aka, a piece of content most people will simply ignore.

The philosophy behind the 4-1-1 concept is that when you share industry thought leadership, you’re building relationships within the industry and demonstrating a certain level of selflessness which earns serious reputation points that come in handy in the long haul.