Practical insights on digital marketing, social media strategy, content marketing, and analytics.
Here are some of the key takeaways from our content this week, along with actionable steps that you can use right away to help you build your social team's digital strategy and improve your digital ...
Here are some of the key takeaways from our content this week, along with actionable steps that you can use right away to help you build your social team's digital strategy and improve your digital ...
One of the most difficult parts of building landing pages, writing blog posts, and posting to social media is finding great photos that don’t feel like overused, clichéd stock photos. Photos are a ...
Here are some of the key takeaways from our content this week, along with actionable steps that you can use right away to help you build your social team's digital strategy and improve your digital ...
Each month, we answer your questions about a topic in digital marketing. This month, we will be dealing with common questions about marketing on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is one of the most powerful tools for B2B marketers, and it even has a place for B2C marketers as well. Whether you're looking to reach more of your audience for free, get incredibly ...
With so many social media platforms available to brands it can be hard to choose which channels are worth your time and which ones are wasting it. You may have considered using LinkedIn, or you may ...
Here are some of the key takeaways from our content this week, along with actionable steps that you can use right away to help you build and maintain your social team's digital strategy, improve your ...
We've talked about the benefits of LinkedIn Groups for your business, but how do you decide which group is the right one for you to join? Whatever your goals may be, joining and interacting with a ...
Each month, we answer your questions about a topic in digital marketing. This month, we will be dealing with common questions about Facebook Advertising.
Winter is coming up fast, but even though it's cooling down outside there's no reason that you can't be heating up your Facebook marketing efforts.
Professionals overwhelmingly prefer to use LinkedIn to learn more about trends and news in their industry. According to a MarketingProfs.com survey, 32% of people who use LinkedIn use it to read ...
Hubspot recently shared what they've learned about making successful LinkedIn ad campaigns. After almost a full year's worth of data from their LinkedIn ads integration, Hubspot has analyzed LinkedIn ...
For years LinkedIn has been one of the strongest platforms available for B2B social advertising, but a crucial component has been missing in action for just as long - the ability to know whether ads ...
Don't worry, as long as you follow these steps, you won't end up this frustrated. Now put down the giant hammer and let's get started.
Many people use LinkedIn to promote themselves, find a job, share content written by themselves or the company they work for, and to find and interact with LinkedIn Groups that are relevant to them. ...
In my last post on using LinkedIn for business, I touched on the subject of using LinkedIn Groups to promote your brand. In this post I'm going to show you three steps you should take to determine ...
There are a lot of potential missteps that you could make when using LinkedIn for business, but these are the 5 mistakes I see most often that will do the most harm to your LinkedIn strategy.
If you're just getting started with LinkedIn for business you may be a little lost. Like any social media platform it is its own beast, with unique best practices and audience expectations. Even if ...
Advertisers often think that planning their campaigns, setting goals, and wrangling budgets is a mysterious process, but the reality is that there is a lot you can do before your campaign begins to ...
Building a successful Facebook campaign is a lot of work, and with almost every step there is a risk that you could make a mistake if you aren't familiar with the Facebook Ad Manager interface, ...
If you're new to running Facebook ad campaigns, or just a veteran advertiser who still has gaps in their knowledge, you may be under the impression that once you've created your ads, your campaign is ...
Are you new to running Facebook ad campaigns, or are you an experience advertiser who is unclear on what metrics you should be measuring and how you can use your metrics to optimize your ad campaign ...
Welcome back to our Content Marketing Deep Dive series, where we analyze successful brands that consistently produce great content marketing.
Welcome back to our new series, Content Marketing Deep Dive, where we examine successful brands that consistently produce great content marketing. We'll cover what each brand does well and what you ...
Welcome back to our new series, Content Marketing Deep Dive, where we examine successful brands that consistently produce great content marketing. We'll cover what each brand does well and what you ...
Retargeting is changing in 2016. Learn what you need to know, why it's important to your brand, and how retargeting will change in 2016!
Welcome back to our new series, Content Marketing Deep Dive, where we examine successful brands that consistently produce examples of great content marketing. We'll cover what each brand does well ...
Welcome to our new series, Content Marketing Deep Dive, where we examine successful brands that consistently produce examples of great content marketing. We'll cover what each brand does well and ...
Whether you're new to content marketing or just trying to revamp and improve your content marketing efforts, this guide will give you all of the information you need to succeed at content marketing ...
A social media competitive analysis is a powerful tool that is commonly used to create a set of benchmarks against competitors within your industry, and by freelancers and agencies to help ...
Your content strategy is broken. Deep down you know it, but you don't know how to fix it. I'm going to show you how to write better content that your target personas will care about, how to position ...
Brands of all sizes around the world, from B2B to B2C have recognized by now that they not only shouldn't, but can't ignore social media. One issue many brands continue to face, even now, is which ...
A cottage industry of services has appeared over the last year with the goal of helping you optimize your Instagram photos to convert your followers into paying customers, and these offerings are ...
You have your persona all mapped out, you understand who your ideal customer is, what type of language they use what their interests, goals, and challenges are. You've learned a lot about what types ...
Your brand influencers may not be everything that you think they are... Recently Dan Sullivan, CEO at Crowdly, revealed an important truth about the state of influencer marketing. What he found is ...
A friend recently shared a video on Facebook from the Facebook page "NowThis" about President Obama's plan to help make college education more accessible to prisoners. What struck me even more than ...
While there is of course a relationship between the amount of traffic sent to an article and the number of social media interactions, you may be surprised to learn that this correlation doesn't ...
Welcome to part 4 in our series on Writing Great Facebook Posts! In our latest post we talked about the importance of targeting and how to use personas to reach the right audience with content that ...
Welcome to part 5 in our series on Writing Great Facebook Posts! In our previous post we talked about how you can build your own personas to help you write great Facebook posts, as well as tips for ...
Welcome to part three in our series on Writing Great Facebooks posts! Now that you understand the basics of how to identify great Facebook posts, it's time to add to your knowledge by learning how to ...
Welcome back to our series on writing great Facebook posts! Now that you know how to recognize a great Facebook post, you should also learn to recognize a bad post, understand why it didn't perform ...
Welcome to our series on writing great Facebook posts! In our first post, we'll be covering some of the positive post success metrics that Facebook offers you, what the value of each is, and how they ...
In previous posts we've talked about how important a quick response is when providing social customer care. However, this can be a daunting task when you're working with a small team or even a single ...
This guide will walk you through 4 steps to drive more social shares on your content. These steps are tailored to work specifically for your community!
I was recently asked to answer a question on Quora about whether a Facebook page could be banned for spamming other pages with messages to come like their page. Rather than just informing this ...
I recently answered a question on Quora asked by a community manager who is wondering why his organic Facebook likes are decreasing after running a Facebook ad campaign to increase his page likes.
Now that we've covered how to get started with a proper social media customer care program, it's time to dive deeper into using social media customer care to retain customers. Social customer care is ...
Planning to effectively provide good customer service through social media can be difficult, but you've already recognized how beneficial it will be for your business and your customers, and that's ...
In 2015 you may think it's weird to say social media is the future of customer support, after all, aren't most brands offering customer support on social media now? Well, yes and no.
This Week in Social is where we bring you snippets of the most important and interesting news in social from the previous week, along with commentary on what this means for you and your social media ...
Today on SocialMediaToday.com Digital Strategist and blogger Jacob Curtis shared a post on the impact of becoming an employee advocate by using your own network (or building one) to spread the ...
Becoming a Twitter power user has it's benefits (more on that below) and, like many things in life, it is deceptively simple, but extremely time consuming. If there's one key takeaway from this blog ...
These 3 practices are holding you back, don't waste your time on them! This post is going to explain to you exactly which social media marketing practices you need to put out to pasture, and what you ...
This blog post started its life as the answer to a question on Quora. If you enjoyed this post, please give my original answer an upvote! Quora Question: Can somebody better explain the Facebook ad ...
This is part 2 of my discussion with Kentico CEO Petr Palas, regarding the 2014 Kentico Content Marketing Survey results. You can read part one of my discussion with Peter Palas here.
As a follow up to my previous blog post about the 2014 Kentico Content Marketing Survey, MSR Communications reached out to me on behalf of Petr Palas, CEO at Kentico, to ask if I'd be interested in ...
We've been given early access to Kentico's new Content Marketing Survey! The survey addresses some very interesting questions about the state of content marketing for businesses of all sizes, and ...
Today I'm bringing my Veritasium Facebook Likes Fraud video series together with this summary!
My blog post on Derek Muller (Veritasium)'s Virtual Cat Facebook ad experiment turned out to be way too big for just one post, so I've broken it up into two posts. This is the second post, where I ...
Yesterday in part two of our series on Derek Muller (Veritasium)'s Facebook Like Fraud video, we covered Derek's own experiences with advertising through Facebook on the Veritasium Facebook page, ...
Yesterday we started our series on deconstructing the Veritasium video regarding fake likes being provided by Facebook advertising. We started by taking a closer look at Derek Muller's first example, ...
By now you've almost certainly seen the below video by Veritasium, discussing issues with Facebook's advertising platform providing branded Facebook Pages with "fake" likes, fake like being likes ...
In my last post we talked about how to prepare for your first targeting experiment. Today we're going to talk about creating the content that will go into your targeted posts. You probably have a ...
Last time we talked about how to get started with targeting your Facebook posts using insights from data that you already have. Now that you're ready to get started, let's walk through a few tips ...
In my last blog post I talked about why you should be targeting your posts on Facebook. In today's post, we're going more in depth to learn how to get started with targeting experiments that will ...
If you manage a community on Facebook, I'm sure you've noticed that advertising is only becoming more and more essential to compete with the noise other brands are making as everyone makes a land ...
I've wanted to write a post about customer service via social media for a while now, and it just so happens that last week I stumbled across a personal story from a friend, and eventually found ...
Do you have a strategy for Facebook hashtags, or are you just porting over your plans from Twitter? Instead, learn how to use Facebook hashtags to enhance your community and make your life easier! ...
In my last post, 3 Questions to Ask Before Starting an Online Community, the first question I recommended asking yourself is "Should I be using social media?" I also mentioned that you should have a ...
As I've pointed out before, with so many people urging every business and every brand to use social media channels to create their own online community, it's important to first stop and ask yourself ...
After our last few posts, you now know how to build an online community and what steps you should take to maintain a strong community. Our first recommendation for maintaining a strong community is ...
Recently we talked about what it takes to maintain great communities, and some of the roadblocks you might face while building up your community. Here at Thought Labs, we feel that advocacy is an ...
Last week I had the pleasure of attending a Google+ Hangout about online collaboration. It seems that everyone in attendance was grappling with some type of issue where they were trying to implement ...
Most brands have a Facebook presence, and most of those Facebook pages are managed by a dedicated community manager, or for smaller brands, someone who has community management duties added to their ...
Last Friday Facebook announced that it had discovered a bug in Facebook Page Insights. The bugs were likely introduced around the same time that Facebook made changes to its EdgeRank algorithm, ...
Facebook just released their new Graph Search last week, and already there has been a lot of excitement and speculation. Learn what Graph Search is, why you should care, how it works, and how you can ...
Here at Thought Labs we're looking forward to all that 2013 has in store for us, and to celebrate the start of this new year, we're bringing together 5 of the most useful blog posts we wrote in 2012!
When we talk about social media metrics we often focus on proving success or proving a return on investment. It's important to show that we are helping the business reach its goals and produce wins, ...
Just a few hours ago, a post on Harvard Business Review was brought to my attention. Dan Zarrella claims to have spent months creating a formula which accurately measures the value of a like on ...
By now most have heard about the latest high profile social media goof, this time the credit goes to American Apparel with their Hurricane Sandy Sale, just in case we get bored during the storm. Now, ...
In the past I have done analysis and recommendations/lessons from multiple brand's Facebook Pages as part of my Brand Focus series. I'm now adding a second type of analysis to my brand focus series. ...
Last Saturday my girlfriend and I were out for a drive. During our impromptu trip I happened to notice a small, rural gas station which had a sign near the road urging me to "like" them on Facebook. ...
When used properly, humor can be a powerful tool for interacting with your communities, gaining some attention, and amplifying your message. However, when used improperly, it could just as easily ...
Are you talking with your Facebook Community, or at them?
There are a number of reasons you might want to run a competition for your Facebook page, some of the most popular being to bring in new fans or to promote the launch of a new product or service. ...
Today we have the second installment in our Brand Focus series of blog posts. We will be examining the AT&T Facebook page to identify their strengths and weaknesses across four categories ...
Congratulation to our client AVG Technologies for winning Most Social Business in the Useful Social Media Awards 2012! With over 200 social media practitioners in attendance, 7 of the most ...
One of the most important benefits promised with the advent of Facebook Timeline is increased engagement for brand's pages. As it turns out though, there have been some mixed results. According to an ...
Today we're bringing you a continuation of our two-part series of excellent uses of Facebook Timeline for Brands! As promised, here's 10 more brands that are not only early adopters of Facebook's ...
Today we'd like to share a quick visual guide of how brands are already doing some pretty impressive things with the new Facebook Timeline for brands. This will be a two part series, with a follow up ...
Today we are introducing a new blog post segment, which rates Facebook brand pages in four areas: Branding, content, engagement, and advocacy. We will cover how the brand is doing in each of these ...
For many brands that blog, content is a fairly straightforward decision. Many conversations regarding blog content focus on quantity. How often are you posting? How many of your employees are ...
It's almost certain that at some point, you've been told that your brand needs an advocacy program. You're not quite certain what the benefits are, what costs are involved, or how you should approach ...
Have you recently found yourself asking “What is all this buzz about Pinterest?” We’ve been pondering over that very question here at Thought Labs! After some hefty research and critical thinking, we ...