Content strategist and freelance writer
Excuse the rather spammy title. This caught my eye today – some academic research into how companies can game Facebook Likes to beef up their social stats. It reminded me of something I discovered about Facebook Likes when putting together this piece about social share counts.
Boundaries are all-but nonexistent in the world of writing today. Brands publish more content than publishers, writers do their own PR, PRs do SEO, and SEOs basically just annoy everybody else. So it’s not surprising that in this omnishambolic world companies are pushing the boundaries of acceptable behaviour to give themselves a leg-up.
The media is packed to the gills with swooning coverage of Facebook’s tenth anniversary today, which is lovely; they’ve built a highly successful tech business and deserve all the accolades they receive. However, for small publishers out there it seems Facebook has never been more useless. More and more Facebook is artificially haemorrhaging audiences across […]
Every article online these days will sport the web-doohickey du jour, social sharing buttons. Their purpose, ostensibly, is to let readers share that piece of content easily on their social network of choice – but they’re increasingly used in Internet dick-measuring contests to boast about ‘share counts’. However not all shares are equal. Each social network […]
A little while ago the “Social Media” folder of my Feedly subscriptions was abuzz with news that a study had found that, of the various “Let’s drive engagement!”-type Facebook posts, the “fill in the blank” format out-performed others by quite some margin in terms of creating engagement. My initial reaction to this news can be […]
One increasingly important (and uncomfortably cringe-inducing) part of the content marketer’s toolbox is “targeting influencers”. In plain English this means getting your stuff in front of an influential person in the hope that they’ll spread it onwards to their followers. Influencer targeting can take many forms, and although marketers will tell you it’s the greatest mega-innovation […]
The “how to get loads of new leads from social media” blog post is a firm favourite in the small business press. I imagine this is largely because social networks are still something of a white elephant to many business owners, and those who have done it successfully like the opportunity to crow about their […]