Who is Animoto?  Does Styx sing about them?  No, that was Mr. Roboto.  Animoto helps brands make videos and they put out the Social Video Forecast, which seeks to find out how marketers and SMB owners are or aren’t adopting video.  eContent reports 60% of marketers and 55% of SMB owners think video marketing is a “must-have” to be relevant.  So it’s no surprise that 63% of both will invest more in it next year.  And that means finding the talent who can do it.  They say it’s a more priority skill in the next year than email, design, or writing.  Far from being egotistical bastards, 23% of marketers see themselves as being either “behind” or “way behind” competitors with video.  The study also shows something that won’t surprise you, Facebook is the big dog social platform for video, with YouTube second, so expect that to be where the paid promotion goes but Instagram will do fine too, especially with the marketers.

 

It’s one of your most critical, most important distribution channels, so you should care a lot about social media at your company and the fine people who handle your social media.  You should hug them if your HR department allows it, because it’s not easy.  I’ve done it.  Things are always changing, targets are always moving, bosses are rarely happy.  And Simply Measured’s State of Social Marketing Report reveals a bunch of other stressors.  Social teams are still teeny tiny.  Most, 71%, have just 2 or 3 people handling one of the most crucial communications tools in existence.  They’re still trying to show success with engagement metrics but businesses aren’t impressed enough by that to resource them properly.  42% say they don’t have enough for the software they need to publish and analyze.  And this blew me away, I even ran to see if my calendar really did say 2016.  34% surveyed have no software budget period.

 

A great deal of the content that content marketers talk about lives at the top of the funnel, but there’s another part of the funnel and I learned that at frat parties in college.  Kaleigh Moore lists 5 kinds of content that your bottom of the funnel audience needs and wants.  See if you’ve got all this covered.  Social proof.  They know you like your product, they want to hear from real, happy customers.  A discount, deal, or free trial.  Let them try it on.  Content that shows you know their specific niche.  Proof of your authority to lock up that trust.  And fast response.  InfusionSoft says after 30 minutes, your lead is 21x less likely to turn into a sale.  Automated emails at least let them know help is coming someday.

 

Having marketing challenges in China?  Join the club.  You can try to lift and spread the strategies from your other regions ‘til your blue, but China will quickly knock your one-size-fits-all dream on its global butt.  Tencent VP Steve Chang says it’s critical for marketers to understand what makes that market different.  CNNIC research shows the US has over twice the Internet users as China and a penetration rate of around 87% compared to 49% of the Chinese population.  But around 90% of Chinese users are on smartphones compared to only around 57% in the US.  US users would respond to mobile ads around 56% of the time, the Chinese 79% of the time.  59% of Americans were more likely to shop on mobile compared to 78% of Chinese.  So knowing China’s social design and usage is necessary to tailor campaigns and use the mobile content that’s in demand there to gather data on user interests and who they view as influencers, also especially important there.

 

Here comes the next full service content marketing studio, and it’s Yahoo Storytellers.  What’s its advantage?  Well they plan to make good use of Yahoo’s longtime editorial expertise, all that data it has, and Yahoo Gemini’s native advertising.  Emma Martin reports it’s about developing, distributing and measuring branded content.  Yahoo Chief Revenue Officer Lisa Utzschneider adds that there’s content consulting services, workshops, influencer activations and partnership extensions.  Speaking of partners, Endemol Shine Beyond is one of Yahoo’s partners on the production side, and President Bonnie Pan calls Yahoo one of the original digital storytellers.  Cause Shakespeare didn’t have Twitter.

 

We should probably talk about SEO a lot more than we do.  TNW News reports just shy of half of digital marketers say it’s one of their most effective tactics while 39% say it’s also one of the hardest.  Top Rank Marketing Blog’s Julia Ramos heard WordStream’s Larry Kim give these 3 tips and I’m taking them.  #1: Stop putting keywords in your meta titles.  The better performing ones tend to not have the exact keywords.  Your meta should address the intent of the search so people will click your result.  #2: Remember what actually impacts CTR.  The answer is headlines appealing to emotional triggers.  #3: Focus on engagement.  Bounce rate is the #1 indicator searchers don’t like your stuff and Google knows it.  If you have content that regularly does bad, delete it because it’ll hurt how your content looks at the domain level.

 

If you had beautiful eyes and everyone was always talking about how pretty your eyes are, would you go around with a blindfold on?  Of course not.  A) You’d fall in a hole, and B) you don’t want to hide one of your best features.  That’s why Alex Kantrowitz can’t figure out why Twitter has virtually hidden the ability to temporarily follow people when an event you’re interested in is going on.  He couldn’t even get Twitter to comment on it.  But it’s in the Moments feature.  And what it does is insert tweets right into your timeline from handles you don’t follow but that matter for a little while.  You don’t have to see these in Moments, it’s right there in your regular stream.  Then when the event ends, the follow ends.  You follow an event in the Moments tab by hitting a “Follow” button that’s there sometimes, but sometimes isn’t.  #gofigure.

 

You didn’t expect Facebook to be happy just being Facebook and staying on Facebook did you?  Heck, you knew that when Facebook put Like buttons all over other sites.  Josh Constine says those see 10B views per day.  But that’s not enough for the big F’er.  Now they’ll have a Facebook Share Chrome extension.  See something you like?  Swell.  Click it and it’ll save to Facebook so you can read it there later.  Can you hear Readability shaking in its shoes?  They thought about getting websites to voluntarily integrate their Save plugin but decided, eh, a Chrome Extension makes more sense.  And get this, because you’re such a forgetful sad sack, when you save something new you’ll be reminded of what you recently saved.

 

Your c-suite might be waiting for you to tell them content marketing can be totally automated and run by algorithms, no human creativity necessary.  You should quit that company.  Gavin O’Malley writes that Medialink CEO Michael Kassan recently told the content world, “There’s no algorithm that can actually tell you what people are going to like.”  You can make a little better guess from predictive modeling, but people will make gut decisions and marketers have to communicate in more content-like ways.  He says, “What I mean is not that Procter & Gamble or Coca-Cola should be producing the next scripted television show, but they need to integrate their message into that content stream either through native advertising, or more legitimate organic product or brand content.”  Michael thinks, and let us know if you agree, that people don’t want their entertainment and their marketing separate anymore.

 

Facebook changed their News Feed algorithm again.  I know, shocker right?  I should have told you to sit down first.  And if you’re a publisher, you’re not gonna love it.  For you, just about any tiny, slight, remaining notion that you can get your content seen organically based on how good it is, without paying, is pretty much extinct.  The changes are to make sure people see posts from their friends and family higher up in their feeds.  Venturebeat reports it’ll wind up way up there especially if those friends and family posts get engaged with.  VP Product Management Adam Mosseri says, “If it’s your friends, it’s in your feed, period.”  The change also tries to filter out spam and misleading content.  What’s the exact definition of those things?  Well to their credit, Facebook says “we don’t know.”  What they do know, and want to prepare you for, is that some Page admins might see their reach and referral traffic go down.  But we’re used to that now.  Why it’s almost become a tradition.

 

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