JustRetweet and EasyRetweet have, give or take, the same Alexa Global Traffic Ranking. JustRetweet may have a slightly higher PageRank. Note at this point that Alexa Traffic Ranking and PageRanking have no significance whatsoever on the service you receive from these sites.

If the two Twitter tools are that similar, would it be fair to say that it does not matter which one you choose?

The simple answer would be NO!

It does matter which service provider you choose and that will be become obvious when you dig a little deeper into the features of both Twitter tools.

At a glance,  Both Twitter tools share many common features.

• Gain credit from following other people, retweeting their tweets, viewing their websites and tweeting their blog entries. That credit is then deducted when others follow you, retweet your tweets or share your blog posts.

• Purchase credit in different packages.

• Predefine how many credits you want to award people when they follow you, retweet you or tweet your blog entries.

• Draft the tweet messages that you want others to retweet.

• Gain credit from referring the service to your friends.

• Free to join.

Indeed, JustRetweet and EasyRetweet are two very similar services. The end goal is to help you increase your number of Twitter followers and retweets and increase traffic to your website. Broadly speaking, these services can be thought of as a traffic exchange system whereby you follow people and gain credit from doing that and credit is deducted from you when others follow you. Almost everything about the services is free except of course for some premium features that require payment.

JustRetweet Review

JustRetweet is THE retweet sharing service that influential bloggers and social media pros use. It is the site of preference for the support of small businesses. Whether you are aiming for more retweets or more traffic to your website, JustRetweet does it all.

JustRetweet is a credit-based Twitter sharing and Twitter following service. It is free to join. All you need to do is allow a connection to your Twitter account. Upon joining, you are immediately awarded 100 credits. Users of this service can furthermore earn additional credits by following each other and sharing each other’s content. Once your account is set up, you can submit your tweets and offer credits to other users who retweet you or become your follower.

In a way, JustRetweet is a social platform in itself. The aim of this platform is to help you get more Retweets, Facebook Likes and Google PlusOnes. This in turn goes on to provide more social proof to your content and drive more traffic. This service works best if you are already publishing quality content and you only need to further promote it.

The effect of JustRetweeet is two-fold. For one thing, you get more exposure for your content. In addition to that, you automatically gain new Twitter and social followers.

So why choose JustRetweet over say EasyRetweet or Triberr?

1. Getting stared is easy and fast
2. It’s free to join
3. Get more social proof, exposure and traffic for your content
4. Active users automatically gain more followers
5. JustRetweet is a place where you can build relationships with other bloggers
6. It is moderated to limit spam

To get started with JustRetweet, simply click here and log in using your Twitter account details. That will give you 100 credits.

On the site, Activity Summary summarizes who retweeted what you shared, followed you and details exactly how your credits have been spent.

JustRetweet Activity Summary

To earn credits, go to the Dashboard and promote other member’s tweets.

Earn credits!

You can also buy more credits if you want to. Prices are as follows:

Prices

Note that JustRetweet is a retweet-sharing platform primarily intended for use by bloggers and marketers to promote their content. Avoid sharing anything overly promotional or low quality. This includes but is not limited to product sales pages, direct affiliate links, ecommerce pages and get rich schemes as well as spam.

On JustRetweet, you are allowed to submit a total of 3 tweets in a time frame of 24 hours. All tweets must contain a URL and the same URL cannot be submitted more than once in 24 hours.

JustRetweet Submit

== Sign up for an account with JustRetweet HERE ==

EasyRetweet Review

EasyRetweet is broadly regarded as the number one app for promoting your Twitter account online.

EasyRetweet

It is a simple and yet incredibly powerful service through which you can carry your messages to the profiles of other Twitter community members.

EasyRetweet Traffic

EastRetweet has 5 main features you need to know about:

1. Retweet: This is the part of the Twitter app where you can get your tweets and links to reach other profiles as they retweet you. All you need to do is create your tweets and other people will retweet.
2. Recommendations: This is a feature unique to EasyRetweet whereby Twitter members get recommended. Members send tweets to their followers recommending other members based on their different keywords.
3. Followers: Beside retweeting, EasyRetweet has a section called the Follow section where members can choose to follow you to earn some credits.
4. Twitter Info: EasyRetweet is also the Twitter info site where fresh and useful Twitter information is published. Members are allowed to publish articles including links, banners and videos.
5. Website Hits: EasyRetweet allows you to add your website to their database that members will click to visit or take some other action.

EasyRetweet is a free Twitter app. Once you sign up for it through Twitter, you will have two accounts:

• A Follow Account
• A Retweet Acount which is secondary

When you retweet for others, you instantly earn credits in your Retweet Account. When you follow others, you earn credits in your Follow Account.

== Click here to sign up with EasyRetweet ==

Of course, you can also buy more credits if you want.

EasyRetweet Pricing

The verdict

At the end of the day, whether you choose to use JustRetweet or EasyRetweet, the end result will be the same: more followers, more retweets and more traffic for your content and website. The one advantage that JustRetweet offers over EasyRetweet that actually matters is the fact that with JustRetweet, you are able to earn credits with Twitter, Facebook as well as Google Plus activity. It is not only limited to Twitter. With this service, you will be increasing your social signal count on all 3 major social sites. For a person who takes his social media presence with a great deal of seriousness, JustRetweet might be a little better of a choice than EasyRetweet.

Winson Yeung has been involved in Internet Marketing since 2008 and has a huge interest in Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media, and Internet Marketing. He is also the founder of CCArticles, a writing service provider that aims to produce high quality articles at affordable rates. You can add him on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter or Google +.

    

Related posts:

1. Review Of Traffic Exchange Programs
2. 5 Twitter Marketing Rules You Need To Swear By
3. Internet Marketing With Twitter To Boost Sales
4. Don’t Want To Get Banned From Facebook Twitter? Read On…

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Kmart is at it again with a clever follow up to their highly popular video “Ship My Pants” that has had over 17 million views. The play on words this time is “Big Gas Savings” with over 1 million views in 2 days. Like the Old Spice videos that went ballistic, the question remains: They’re very creative and popular, but will these videos get shoppers in stores and buying at Kmart?

Flickr is Biggr. Users now get 1 terabyte of storage. I’ve been a pro Flickr user for many years and during Yahoo’s pre Marissa Mayer days, it had an uncertain future. Now Flickr is adding 1,000 x more storage for users and some new features including full resolution of images and new sharing functionality: “Upload once, send to any device, any screen, any friend, and any follower.”

The user interface has also been updated with the removal of small thumbnails and photos leading the experience, vs. text based navigation. I for one and looking forward to jumping back into using Flickr more often from the desktop, tablet and mobile. Via Flickr, Fast Company.

Arguably the big news in the SEO world this week was the roll out of Penguin 2.0, Google’s algorithmic webspam fighting effort. If your site is engaged in link buying, high volumes of exact match anchor text, or other link focused manipulations to improve search results, there’s a Penguin out to get you. More on Penguin from Matt Cutts, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch and of course, TopRank’s advice on Penguin 2.0 for Content Marketers.

Speaking of SEO and spam:

Google Notifies Sprint Of Spam Penalty; Seeks Advice In Google Help Forums. Apparently a portion of the Sprint site that was open for users to publish content was cited by Google for spamming. This is not a unique situation as Search Engine Land reports, since the BBC and Mozilla have had similar situations. Initially there was no help from Google outside of the notification but Matt Cutts eventually stepped in. As Barry notes in the SEL article, this is a tough one for brands to monitor, but they must if they expect to retain search positions and traffic form the almighty Google. Google Forum Thread. Thanks to Brian Larson for the heads up on this one.

Oh, How Pinteresting!, Introducing More Useful Pins for food, retail products, and movies. This week the nearly 50 million member strong Pinterest added a new feature directed towards commerce: Rich Pins. The new feature will make additional information available besides an image and description which many anticipate will give users more motivation to click through. Since Pinterest users tend to spend 70% more than buyers referred from non-social sites, there’s plenty of motivation for marketers to take advantage of these new features. Via Pinterest Blog, The Content Standard, Marketing Land.

Twitter announces ‘Lead Generation Cards’ to help brands drive qualified leads. Twitter has upped the ante for lead generation by adding 6 types of Twitter Cards as an advertising option for brands. Twitter cards (Summary, Large Image Summary, Photo, Gallery, App, Player and Product) make it possible for marketers to attach media experiences to Tweets that link to brand content. When someone expands your Tweet, they see a description of the offer and a call to action. Their name, @username, and email address are already pre-filled within the Card. Via Twitter Advertising Blog, TNW.

Yahoo has agreed to pay $1.1 billion for blogging platform and social network Tumblr, which is 6 years old and has 100 million blogs and about 300 million unique monthly visitors.What is Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer getting for all that Yahoo cash? Cats, porn and a lot of opportunity to connect with a very attractive demographic. Via Wall Street Journal.

But wait, there’s more!

Yahoo continued the buying spree and purchased a startup that powers games played on smartphones, tablets, consoles or personal computers called PlayerScale for an undisclosed sum. Via TechCrunch.

In other news about the social web:

According to a new Piper Jaffray study, Teens’ interest in Facebook is dropping but their use of Twitter has grown by 50% in 1 Year. I suspect the growth of teens’ use of Instagram and Snapchat is also on the rise.

Nutella Thanks Its Biggest Fan, Founder of World Nutella Day, by Sending Her a Cease and Desist reports AdWeek. But according to ABC News, they then took it back. When legal acts without social media savvy, it can be a sharp sting that gets them on the right track.

From the TopRank Online Marketing Blog Community:

Empathize to Optimize Your Customer’s Journey on the Search Social Web – Carrie Morgan says: “A fantastic read on the same topic is Google’s Zero Moment of Truth, A must for every marketer to be familiar with! Nice post, Lee!! Great job story-telling. =)”

7 Steps to SEO at Scale, Patrick McFadden says: “Plan a Multi-Faceted Approach” Yes! The struggle many face with marketing online is a misguided impulse to put various tactics into separate boxes, instead of seeing each as an aspect of one strategic process.To this day, I see people referring to content marketing, social media marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO) as three different things — as if each is a tactic that can get you there alone. The smart way to treat these things as a holistic strategy.”

What are your thoughts on this week’s online marketing news? Was Tumblr a good call for Yahoo at 1.1 Billion? Do you like the new Flickr? How about Penguin 2.0 – is it doom and gloom or more like, “meh”.

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Flickr is Biggr. Users now get 1 terabyte of storage. I’ve been a pro Flickr user for many years and during Yahoo’s pre Marissa Mayer days, it had an uncertain future. Now Flickr is adding 1,000 x more storage for users and some new features including full resolution of images and new sharing functionality: “Upload once, send to any device, any screen, any friend, and any follower.”

The user interface has also been updated with the removal of small thumbnails and photos leading the experience, vs. text based navigation. I for one and looking forward to jumping back into using Flickr more often from the desktop, tablet and mobile. Via Flickr, Fast Company.

Arguably the big news in the SEO world this week was the roll out of Penguin 2.0, Google’s algorithmic webspam fighting effort. If your site is engaged in link buying, high volumes of exact match anchor text, or other link focused manipulations to improve search results, there’s a Penguin out to get you. More on Penguin from Matt Cutts, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch and of course, TopRank’s advice on Penguin 2.o for Content Marketers.

Speaking of SEO and spam:

Google Notifies Sprint Of Spam Penalty; Seeks Advice In Google Help Forums. Apparently a portion of the Sprint site that was open for users to publish content was cited by Google for spamming. This is not a unique situation as Search Engine Land reports, since the BBC and Mozilla have had similar situations. Initially there was no help from Google outside of the notification but Matt Cutts eventually stepped in. As Barry notes in the SEL article, this is a tough one for brands to monitor, but they must if they expect to retain search positions and traffic form the almighty Google. Google Forum Thread. Thanks to Brian Larson for the heads up on this one.

Oh, How Pinteresting!, Introducing More Useful Pins for food, retail products, and movies. This week the nearly 50 million member strong Pinterest added a new feature directed towards commerce: Rich Pins. The new feature will make additional information available besides an image and description which many anticipate will give users more motivation to click through. Since Pinterest users tend to spend 70% more than buyers referred from non-social sites, there’s plenty of motivation for marketers to take advantage of these new features. Via Pinterest Blog, The Content Standard, Marketing Land.

Twitter announces ‘Lead Generation Cards’ to help brands drive qualified leads. Twitter has upped the ante for lead generation by adding 6 types of Twitter Cards as an advertising option for brands. Twitter cards (Summary, Large Image Summary, Photo, Gallery, App, Player and Product) make it possible for marketers to attach media experiences to Tweets that link to brand content. When someone expands your Tweet, they see a description of the offer and a call to action. Their name, @username, and email address are already pre-filled within the Card. Via Twitter Advertising Blog, TNW.

Yahoo has agreed to pay $1.1 billion for blogging platform and social network Tumblr, which is 6 years old and has 100 million blogs and about 300 million unique monthly visitors.What is Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer getting for all that Yahoo cash? Cats, porn and a lot of opportunity to connect with a very attractive demographic. Via Wall Street Journal.

But wait, there’s more!

Yahoo continued the buying spree and purchased a startup that powers games played on smartphones, tablets, consoles or personal computers called PlayerScale for an undisclosed sum. Via TechCrunch.

In other news about the social web:

According to a new Piper Jaffray study, Teens’ interest in Facebook is dropping but their use of Twitter has grown by 50% in 1 Year. I suspect the growth of teens’ use of Instagram and Snapchat is also on the rise.

Nutella Thanks Its Biggest Fan, Founder of World Nutella Day, by Sending Her a Cease and Desist reports AdWeek. But according to ABC News, they then took it back. When legal acts without social media savvy, it can be a sharp sting that gets them on the right track.

From the TopRank Online Marketing Blog Community:

Empathize to Optimize Your Customer’s Journey on the Search Social Web – Carrie Morgan says: “A fantastic read on the same topic is Google’s Zero Moment of Truth, A must for every marketer to be familiar with! Nice post, Lee!! Great job story-telling. =)”

7 Steps to SEO at Scale, Patrick McFadden says: “Plan a Multi-Faceted Approach” Yes! The struggle many face with marketing online is a misguided impulse to put various tactics into separate boxes, instead of seeing each as an aspect of one strategic process.To this day, I see people referring to content marketing, social media marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO) as three different things — as if each is a tactic that can get you there alone. The smart way to treat these things as a holistic strategy.”

What are your thoughts on this week’s online marketing news? Was Tumblr a good call for Yahoo at 1.1 Billion? Do you like the new Flickr? How about Penguin 2.0 – is it doom and gloom or more like, “meh”.

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For a recent presentation at a corporate communications and PR conference, I polled my network of digital marketing and PR pros working client-side about the most pressing questions they’re dealing with when it comes to integrating Marketing and Public Relations.

Since we’ve been working in the digital marketing and PR space at TopRank Marketing for well over 10 years, it was interesting to see  the diverse feedback from companies of various sizes and industries. But several themes revealed themselves that I think our readers will relate to.

Thanks to feedback from Digital and Integrated Marketing Communications professionals like Corinne Kovalsky of Ratheon, Susan Beatty of Bremer Financial Corporation, Frank Strong of LexisNexis and Pam Didner of Intel, it became clear that one of the key questions organizations are facing is the need to break down silos between marketing and PR.

To help answer that question, I think one of the most fundamental things to realize is that we’re all in the content business.

PR and Communications drive a substantial amount of content creation from developing messaging strategy to content for newsrooms. PR content that can be optimized, socialized and publicized include: blog posts, press releases, case studies, social media content, newsletters, contributed articles, white papers, events (online and off).  Whether it’s text, image, audio or video, most PR pros are involved in content creation on a regular basis.

Content is the currency for building social relationships that can boost earned media.

Digital Marketing is tasked with demand creation and developing leads, and content plays an instrumental role in those and many other marketing objectives. From content marketing strategy to websites and microsites, content is the basis for effective digital marketing. We’ve covered content marketing tactics here before, but they can include blogs, landing pages, social media content, advertising, webinars, email and all media formats from images to video to audio.

Understanding the role that content plays in reaching both brand awareness and customer acquisition goals, the opportunities for integration between digital marketing and PR become clear pretty fast.

Align Goals

When you look at common Public Relations focused goals, they often include: Boosting Awareness Exposure, Influence Positioning, Increase Mindshare, Educate Audiences, Thought Leadership, Reputation, Growing Networks Engagement and even Increasing Sales.

Often these goals are achieved through a variety of efforts that leverage or result in content. Digital PR tactics can range from media relations to gain editorial coverage in publications to events to working with influencers and social networks. Announcements, publicity, promotions and buzz are all the domain for PR and communications professionals.

Some of the metrics digital marketers are held accountable to include increasing website traffic, leads and sales. Content Marketing goals also include revenue related objectives like order volume, frequency and profitability. Efficiency is also aligned with content marketing performance as measured by shortened sales cycles, referrals bottom line ROI on marketing investment.

Since both marketing and PR both speak “increase sales”, it make sense that PR should be involved with content marketing in its planning stages to identify what’s “really” promotable from a media relations perspective.  Building publicity and media relations activities into the content marketing planning process will help marketing extend the reach of it’s message and improve marketing performance.

At the same time PR will have early exposure to promotable brand content to successfully achieve media coverage and network growth vs. trying to make magic happen with last minute requests: “Can you send out a press release and talk to some bloggers about our new product future? It was released this morning”. For both marketing and PR, there can be a measurable effect on sales and we all know revenue is the language everyone understands.

Common Ground:

An extension of aligning goals between marketing and PR is to find the win for those that you would partner with in your organization. Find out how can marketing assets be used to improve the ability for PR to gain media coverage. At the same time, dig into how PR can play a role in content marketing amplification to improve the reach and performance. Recruit volunteers to test cooperative efforts between digital marketing and PR.

Some of the common ground opportunities for digital marketing and public relations include:

• Messaging Story
• Content Planning
• Coordinated Social and Media Relations with Amplification
• Social Listening for Buying Signals
• Content Placement
• Optimizing Messaging Based on Marketing Performance Data

Coordinating marketing and PR in content marketing efforts can find the common ground needed to execute on shared goals. That alignment of objectives can lead to the development of new ways of working together that create a win for everyone involved.

Build a Business Case

Goal alignment and common ground serve as a framework for building a business case. Find a low hanging fruit opportunity with motivated collaborators to show how digital marketing and PR integration can improve achievement of business goals. Then sell the results with performance metrics that execs can appreciate.

One of the most basic examples of this kind of collaboration is a co-created thought leader ebook. We’ve created quite a few of these and they represent the integration of key maketing and PR in a way that is pretty easy to demonstrate value for both awareness and network growth as well as traffic and sales.

Co-created content builds an incentive for participants to promote the content object. Publicity, content repurposing, targeted ads, email promotions, social promotion and optimization combine with thoughtful messaging to create an integrated marketing and PR asset that provides a tremendous amount of value for PR and marketing goals.

In the digital marketing world, skills acquisition is as competitive as it has ever been with PR high on the list.  With more brands publishing content and even competing with publications in their industry, the need for integrated marketing and PR functions within companies is a necessity. The question is, what is your company, large or small, doing about it?

If you would like to learn more about integrating marketing and PR, be sure sign up for the PRSA Digital Impact conference in June where I’ll be presenting ”Attract, Engage and Convert: How PR Can Get Ahead With Content Marketing“.  This topic is also covered at both a strategic and tactical level in Optimize as well.

Image: Shutterstock

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New Google+ Layout: Hangouts, Photos and Stream Reminiscent of Pinterest

Google announced a major update to their social network this week that changes the way Hangouts, photos and the Google+ stream are viewed by users. The decidedly Pinterest-esque layout was just one of many announcements this week out of Google I/O, the totality of which Jeremiah Owyang and Chris Silva dubbed a “wreck.”

“The end result, we hope, is an app that looks and feels great across a family of devices,” Senior VP Vic Gundotra wrote of the Google+ changes. This is in line with Google’s mantra of late: Technology works best when it gets out of the way, and lets people do what makes them happiest: living, learning and loving.

With the announcements of more interconnection of services, Google Maps as a virtual world, Google All Access music streaming and more, Owyang and Silva remind consumers to expect the tools and products to get better, but to know you’re the product. If brands want to play in Google’s sandbox, they’ll ultimately need to pay, they said in summary.

Visit Web-Strategist.com to see the rest of Owyang and Silva’s commentary on what they called a “patchwork set of announcements from a fragmented company,” live from Google I/O.

Online Marketing News Briefs

It’s no surprise much of this week’s news pertains to Google and their products, given their I/O event and a myriad of changes announced this week. However, Facebook also made headlines through their retail social/mobile partnership with Target, as did insightful reports for online marketers from Google and GlobalWebIndex.

Content Recommendation Engine for Mobile Sites Launched by Google

Google has rolled out a content recommendation engine, which makes content recommendations for users at the bottom of the screen on news sites with the service enabled. Sites need just one snippet of code to add this functionality to their site. See more at TechCrunch.

Over Half of Global Internet Users Signed In to Facebook in Q1 2013

Facebook continues to dominate as the most popular social network on the planet, with just over half the world’s online population logging in on the site in the first quarter of 2013. Google+ came in a distant second, with 26% of global internet users, followed by YouTube, Twitter and Sina Weibo. See further analysis of GlobalWebIndex’s report at eMarketer.com.

Target and Facebook Join Forces in Cartwheel Mobile/Social/Retail Partnership

Cartwheel, a new site from a Target/Facebook partnership, has launched in beta and will begin rolling out their mobile/social program for retailers to a select group of participants shortly. The program allows users to browse exclusive deals and sales, with additional savings for social sharing. Learn more about Cartwheel at MediaPost.

Google+ Launches Auto-Hashtagging

As part of the Google+ design makeover, a new feature enables automatic hashtagging in posts. Google will use data from their social graph and analysis to identify hashtagging opportunities and add them to content. Users can remove hashtags they feel are inappropriate. Read more about this new feature at Fast Company.

Mobile Search an Influencing Factor for 84% of In-Store Shoppers with Smartphones

The majority of consumers shopping in-store are using smartphones to help them make purchasing decisions, according to new research from Google. Of those, the vast majority – 82% – are using mobile search, rather than apps or direct navigation to company websites – to access shopping information. Search Engine Watch has additional insights from Google’s Mobile In-Store Research: How in-store shoppers are using mobile devices report.

New YouTube Trends Map Shows Viral Videos Across the US

People in search of a visual way to see which videos are trending across the United States have a new tool, courtesy of YouTube. The YouTube Trends map displays the most popular videos across the country, with the option to drill down by gender, age, location and type of activity on the video.

This Week in the @TopRank Community

Our community – whether at Online Marketing Blog, on Twitter or elsewhere on the web – is a group of insightful, generous marketers always willing to share their experience with other members!

Check out these great tips, comments and quirky news from the @TopRank community this week:

It is very true that we need to be SHOWN how things work. It always makes me laugh when people tell me “I’m a visual person”, as if having a drawing in front of them is the only way they would see it. What they don’t realise is that EVERYONE is a visual person. On the other hand, if you were truly ‘visual’ you wouldn’t need it shown to you – you could see it in your head anyway. That’s what visual creatives do.”

~ from Suffolk Graphic Designer in response to The Power of Visual Content Marketing and Brand Visuals in Action on how your audience learns through content.

Stay tuned to the @TopRank Twitter channel this week for the latest online marketing, social and content headlines!

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What’s your technical IQ when it comes to e-Commerce marketing? It had better be high, or you’re unlikely to achieve success, or at least the kind of success you probably dream of. These days, the field of e-Commerce technology is developing so rapidly that you can’t really sell your products effectively without constant re-education.

It’s a challenge even to keep up with the names and acronyms of all the newly evolving phenomena, and Googling a list of acronyms may not help unless the one you find has been posted within the past year, or more likely within the past few months.

The field of e-Commerce technology is changing so rapidly that you must update constantly.

How does SEO fit into Online Marketing?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) used to be enough to drive website traffic, but now the wide range of techniques under the umbrella of online marketing is required, including Analytics (monitoring the hits you get, and also the “click throughs,” and the “conversions” or sales), social media, and even proper server hosting.

Keywords must be not only placed in your meta tags, but must also populate your site strategically for the search engines to take notice of your site. Saturation (the number of pages at your site that are cataloged by a search engine) and backlinks are crucial for driving traffic. Fortunately, a host of SEM agencies can take care of these complicated details for you.

How is this affecting marketing strategies? First, it is narrowing the range of e-Commerce entrepreneurs. Individuals without the technical skill or knowledge to take advantage of commercial opportunities on the web are simply being left out when it come to the rewards of those opportunities. Along with that comes the growth of the burgeoning industry of SEM agencies.

A few decades ago, the Internet seemed a wonderland where everyone could expand personal opportunities almost without limit. Now limitations have appeared and they are technical in nature. Learn or die has become the normative rule in e-Commerce.

Fortunately, a host of learning programs have appeared, of course. This is e-Commerce, after all, so a demand results in someone showing up to supply it. Adam Smith was right, even in a cyber world context. Are you ready to take advantage of the most up to date changes in the world of web marketing? Well, if not, it’s easy enough to change that!

Understanding The Technical Intricacies of Social Media

Of course, the biggest change in the past few years has been the growth in importance of social media marketing as a tool for selling online and driving website traffic, while also building your brand. Most major sellers have networking sites, and hire professionals to spend time directing and managing that side of their marketing efforts.

Facebook is the largest, so of course at this stage it has the highest volume of users. But it does not offer live help. In fact, it’s rather difficult to get answers from Facebook. One has to sift through page after page of “Knowledge bases,” or wait an eternity for a submitted question to be answered. You may never get an answer.

Some of the other sites may have live help of a chat room or phone variety, but those sites are more likely to charge a fee for your site (as opposed to Facebook, where it’s free), since it’s expensive to staff a help desk in real time, or even an e-mail response capability. Furthermore, those other sites don’t have the gargantuan customer base that Facebook possesses. So most folks go with Facebook, despite the frustrations of using it.

Twitter is becoming an essential tool for the e-Commerce marketer, and it’s easier to use. The site is exceptionally user friendly, and all you really need to know is how to make a tiny URL, and you should also learn how to distill your message to 140 characters. A challenge, but hey, brevity is the soul of wit, so maybe it’s worth it.

Other sites abound, Pinterest, for instance, and with its more business-oriented clientele, LinkedIn. Sometimes it seems that a new social networking site appears every month or so. But these sites are technically easy. They don’t pose the challenges so widespread on the technological side of the e-Commerce field generally.

The appearance of the Smart Phone several years ago has had a tremendous impact on e-Commerce. At this point, a significant proportion of online customers are accessing e-Commerce sites not on their computers, but through mobile devices. This makes a big difference, and a marketer who is not up to date on smart phone technology stands at a great disadvantage.

The profusion of “apps” in recent years has added to the complexity of the field. It is possible to enhance your  sales potential with the introduction of an app, but it involves some savvy about the world of apps, or else some financial outlay to hire experts on the matter.

Other essentials include online transaction processing and electronic funds transfer, both now essentials for e-Commerce success.

Another obvious process is internationalization. In a word, China. The Chinese have gotten into the act during the past decade or so, perhaps belatedly, but with genuine force. Chinese marketers are not to be ignored in the equations of the future, not just in terms of corporate entities, but in terms of workers willing to free lance for low remuneration levels.

The same is true of India, which is flooding the markets for technological services with cheap labor. It is now essential, not just to understand technologies, but to understand the technological workforce, in all of its current changes.

Technology is a two-edged sword. It offers tremendous benefits, but only for those with the expertise to understand and employ those benefits. Technology today, more than ever before, is changing rapidly, at a pace that is daunting even for the most energetic of entrepreneurs. Are you up to the task? If you are, the rewards can be superlative!

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According to a CMI and MarketingProfs study, 91% of B2B Marketers are using content marketing and that means a few things:

First, it means content marketing has gained critical mass within the popular marketing mix and any company in a competitive industry would be hard pressed to attract business without it.

Second, it means competition to stand out with your brand’s content is only going to get harder as more companies adopt content marketing best practices and mature in their skills.

As companies evolve from simply recognizing the important role of content and experimenting with it, to achieving content creation competency and quality, the need to optimize content marketing skills becomes increasingly important. But where can B2B marketers find new ideas and expand their opportunities to grow content marketing capabilities?

The good news is that B2B Marketing innovation is alive and well and can be found in many places. One place I like to look is case studies and awards for successful B2B marketing work.

A few weeks ago I presented at DemandGen Report’s B2B Content2Conversion conference along with tier one B2B marketers like Michael Brenner from SAP, Jill Rowley from Oracle / Eloqua, Ann Handley of MarketingProfs, Joe Pulizzi from Content Marketing Institute and many others.

On top of hearing strategy and practical tactics from speakers, there was a Killer Content Marketing Awards presentation that highlighted some incredible creative, execution and most of all, performance of B2B content marketing programs.

Highlights included:

SunGard – Created awareness amongst IT professionals for SunGard Cloud offerings with a zombie themed campaign. The zombie themed effort resulted in exceeding download rates by 300%, a 5.7% email open rate and 20+ leads.

Limelight Networks – Implemented a “For Dummies” themed education campaign drawing attention to success and failures for companies and their digital presence.  The campaign gained exposure through nearly 10,000 social media and news release views and $200k+ worth of sales opportunities.

Logicalis - Using content assets such as emails, microsite and ebook, Logicalis developed a thought leadership effort that supported sales teams by enabling custom messaging based on the prospects interaction with the campaign. With a target audience of about 2,000, nearly $8 million in new pipeline business was closed.

Sales Benchmark Index – Targeting prospects that were newly hired VPs of Sales, this campaign focused on providing corporate pains with VPs of Sales fail as well as case studies of successes. The promoted ebook was downloaded by target VPs 5,781 times.

Lattice Engines – Partnered with a research firm to create a study showing the impact big data has on sales. A robust mix of content marketing tactics were used to promote the report including: ebook, blog posts, guest articles, video interviews, Slideshare and an infographic. The report was downloaded 500 times, covered by 15 blogs and industry media sites and 1,500 views of the ebook.

Optum – Created an integrated marketing campaign to support the launch of a new solution, support sales and build thought leadership. The content marketing mix included: advertorials, display ads, email, direct mail and a campaign website. The successful campaign earned a 23.5 lead to conversion rate, 475% increase in website traffic, 2,500+ resource downloads, 28% increase in YoY blog followers and $52 million in contract value of new business with less than $ 1million invested.

ADP – Developed a content marketing campaign to connect and engage with their target audience on a ADP solution using white papers and a diagnostic assessment tool. The campaign generated over $1 million in new sales opportunities with several deals closed within the first 3 months of launch.

Demandbase – This education campaign was designed to help B2B marketers make the right content technology investment by using a white paper, infographic, webinar, Slideshare and a live presentation to spotlight tools that can maximize the power of content. The results of the campaign included 1,700 leads, 125 webinar participants, 5,000 views on Slideshare and $1 million in new business.

Xerox – Created a targeted “Get Optimistic” campaign to connect with 30 top accounts and partnered with Forbes to create a magazine that offered relevant business tips. 70% of targeted companies interacted with the microsite, readership increased 300-400% over previous email campaigns, added 20,000 new contacts, generated 1,000+ scheduled appointments, and get this: yielded $1.3 BILLION in pipeline revenue.  Yes, BILLION.

OpenText – Created a personalized new customer onboarding site offering a variety of assets (white papers, checklists, product pages, ebooks, case studies) and content to welcome new clients and provide upsell, cross-sell opportunities. The campaign also included a two phase nurturing program. 1,700 new contacts were identified along with 31 new opportunities worth $1.8 million.

Crowe Horwath – Using 48 pieces of content in 4 different topic areas, this campaign targeted C-level prospects in financial institutions with $1 billion or more in assets across the buying cycle. Content tactics included: executive briefs, case studies, infographics, checklists, Q and A, and Brainshark video. 778 contacts were engaged with a 70% open rate (vs. 10%), 2 engagement worth $250k in revenue.

Here’s the full deck for details on each Killer Content Marketing campaign plus performance data. Enjoy!

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Visual content is certainly trendy – see the meteoric rise in infographics and social engagement with images as proof. Yet the need for content that appeals on a visual level and presents information in a more engaging format than text goes far beyond what is cool or fun to create.

In creating curriculum and learning materials for students (child to adult) and their teachers, I learned just how important visuals are in meeting the needs of different types of learners. This is too often a missing piece in the marketing mindset; we focus on what we want people to do, the action we want them to take. We think of learning styles in terms of learning disabilities, yet the ways in which every person on the planet takes in information should be a major concern for marketers, whose express purpose is to get people to take in information.

Through your content, you may be inspiring, engaging, entertaining. What you are doing though, at the basic level, is teaching. You want your audience to understand the information you are sharing. You want to influence their decisions. Empowered consumers seek out information to help them make the best decision, often considering multiple sources.

Now pair this customer insight with what we know about how people learn: the majority of people are visual learners, either primarily or in combination with other styles. You’ll see a range of stats on the percentage of learners in each group, though 30% visual, 25% auditory, 15% kinesthetic and 30% mixed learning styles is a commonly accepted figure. These are the three major learning styles and though one person may use a combination of styles to take in information, we all lean towards one primary preference.

Kinesthetic learners best retain information they discover through touching, feeling and experiencing material. You might think there is no real “touch” in digital information, yet this is where interactive games and touchscreens are an important tool.

Auditory learners consume and retain information best by listening, often through repetitive information. Podcasting is a good way to connect with auditory learners.

Visual learners, the largest portion, want you to “Show me so I can understand.” You might accomplish this through charts, infographics, video demonstrations, comics, visual e-books, photos, or even animation… the point is, you are acknowledging this unique learning style and tailoring information for best consumption and comprehension.

We saw a fantastic example of a visual learning style recently at Social Media Marketing World, when an attendee shared her visual notes from Lee Odden’s presentation on blogging for business. Taking in auditory and visual information, this person sketched notes rather than writing them, in order to more easily recall the information she wanted to retain later on. It resonated with the social community because others learn this way, as well.

This understanding of how people learn, consume information and are influenced by it lies at the heart of everything we do as online marketers: user experience, content creation, web design, social media marketing and even search engine optimization. We know visuals are important for engagement and social sharing, but understanding the “why” will help you create and optimize content that is truly in tune with your audience preferences.

Now that we know the “why,” check out these examples of companies getting it right with visual content that inspires, engages and most importantly, presents information in a way prospects can understand and retain.

General Electric – Show Me How It Works

General Electric houses their images on Instagram (above) and Pinterest, though they use these same images in blog posts and across their social channels. Their Instagram images, in particular, focus heavily on showing their B2B audience how their products work in real life. Who wants to see a piece of a machine? Show me how it works! They do, and the result is that prospects can picture GE products in action for their own company.

Kellogg’s Pop Tarts – Show Me a Story

The Pop Tarts Facebook Page showcases their masterful visual storytelling skills. Their brand marketers use comics, cartoon characters, and simple images to present information in a fun and engaging way. Their strategy is to entertain, to keep their audience engaged and their brand top of mind. These quirky images are perfect for social sharing and tell stories through single images, or image series released over a period of hours or days. They even have recurring characters who pop up now and again, breeding familiarity and creating anticipation. It’s a winning visual content formula for a B2C brand in a competitive market, where every touchpoint counts.

Rubbermaid – Show Me Why I Need It

Look in your own closet. Now look at Rubbermaid’s closet organization images on Pinterest. Back to your own messy closet. Now back to Pinterest. Rubbermaid shows consumers precisely why they need their product with attractive, high quality photos shares to the social networks their audience members frequent. My closet looks nothing like this. I need Rubbermaid.

Callaway Golf – Show Me How to Use It

Golf brand Callaway has their YouTube channel organized into different types of videos, including instructional clips for golfers. They create videos in series, such as Office Golf Tips and Bones at Work, to create consistency and build anticipation for coming videos. Celebrities like Phil Mickelson appear in their instructional videos to show golfers how to improve their game… using Callaway clubs, of course. Teaching a golf swing absolutely requires video; you would have a hard time learning from written instructions. Callaway just does theirs better than most and have become a reliable resource and authority for golfers, as a result.

Show Me

As you plan your visual content, think hard on the “why.” It’s not about what you want to tell people. What do they want you to show them, to help them make an informed decision and stay connected with your brand? You absolutely must understand what your audience needs you to show them in order to engage and convert, especially when they are bombarded with imagery on a daily basis. This insight and customer-centric perspective will help drive your visual content strategy and you will never run out of creative stories to tell with compelling content.

What factors do you consider when planning and creating visual content in your organization? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Image at top from Shutterstock.

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With that kind of popularity, you would think everyone in business would know what a blog is and would be using them to their maximum advantage. Trust me, I’m in the content business and they don’t.  In fact, brands split just 11% of their total social media budget between blogging and influencer outreach. So just to clear up any ambiguity and to follow the format for this series, here goes:

Definition of Blogging:  Blogging is a form of content publishing leveraging a content management system such as Blogger, Typepad or WordPress that often publishes articles, video, images or audio in reverse chronological form.

Business or corporate blogs are social media and content marketing tools used by companies to provide valuable, interesting content for customers, employees, industry media and other target audiences. Ideally, blog content fulfills a potential or existing customer’s need for information at some point in the purchasing cycle, in order to assist them in making a buying decision.

How Are Blogs Used for Business? Content Marketing Applications:

Internationally, countless companies are using blogs to attract, engage and convert their target audience, though a select few stand out as masters in the corporate blogging trade. Whole Foods Market, for example, has an exceptional corporate blog called Whole Story, through which the grocery brand shares healthy eating tips, recipes, and more. Their focus on providing helpful, non-sales driven information to readers keeps them top of mind as a resource, rather than an advertiser, in the eyes of their fans.

comScore’s blog is an excellent example of a B2B blog that has catapulted them into a mainstream news source, helping to build brand awareness and authority. Their top quality research and information has also helped their authors, like Eli Goodman and Andrew Lipsman, build their own personal brands, as well.

Business blogs are a form of social media in their own right, though they work best as part of an online marketing strategy that uses other social channels for amplification and community building. Blog content should also be optimized for maximum visibility in search.

Business Blogging Pros Cons:

As with any content marketing tactic, there are advantages and challenges to blogging:

Pros - 

• Excellent tool for brand awareness, authority building, storytelling and passive sales messaging.
• Low barrier to entry with no technical or IT skills required to contribute content.
• Ability to measure and track performance.
• Flexible platforms with multimedia capabilities to distribute information in a variety of formats.
• SEO benefits; enhanced visibility in front of people seeking a specific type of information.
• Attract new customers, engage existing ones and convert both to buy – more and more often.

Cons - 

• Can be time consuming to create content.
• Requires a publisher mindset from brands possibly not used to this model.
• Requires planning, organization and editorial control, particularly with multiple authors.
• Creative, unique content can be a challenge.

Expert Opinions on Business Blogging:

Blogging as part of an integrated online marketing and content marketing strategy is practiced and endorsed by top marketers from agencies and brands alike.

“A blog is only as interesting as the interest shown in others.” ~ @LeeOdden, CEO, TopRank Online Marketing (blog)

“Be helpful, give away everything you can, and make sure you put posts together that people feel they can relate to and that have something to add to.”  ~ @ChrisBrogan, President, Human Business Works (blog)

“Traditional marketing talks at people. Content marketing talks with them.” – @DougKessler, Velocity Partners (blog)

“Even when you are marketing to your entire audience or customer base, you are still simply speaking to a single human at any given time. Worry less about sounding professional and worry more about creating remarkable content that other humans can relate to.”  ~ Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer at @MarketingProfs (blog)

Related Blogging Software and Resources:

Recently, I shared 11 of my favorite blog and social content creation tools, including an editorial calendar, Twitter lists and Ubersuggest. Lee Odden has written extensively on blogging for business, including optimizing and socializing blog content, marketing your blog, integrating blogs with content marketing to inspire action and much, much more.

Download a sample editorial plan and keyword glossary to help you organize your blogging efforts and align them with your business goals. These are available free at OptimizeBook.com.

Check out the content marketing courses at MarketingProfs University to help you improve your blogging, presentation and social skills. Be sure to check out Marketing Writing Bootcamp and Content Marketing Crash Course, in particular.

Since we’ve been practicing what we preach about bloggin for over 9 years, there are numerous articles on blogging here at Online Marketing Blog. The content marketing and blogging landscape has certainly changed over the past decade, yet best practices and the importance of blogging in alignment with business goals have remained largely the same. Smart businesses are getting social and using blogs as one of the powerful weapons in their online marketing arsenal to attract, engage and convert their target audience to loyal customers.

What are some of your pressing blogging questions or best practices tips?

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Fast changing trends and serious competition has digital marketers chasing the latest and greatest tactics like hamsters on exercise wheels.

Good advice is both hard and too easy to come by. Search “social media marketing” on Google and there are over 1 billion results.

All the scrambling often means core skills are overlooked. In fact, one of the easiest things a company can do to improve online marketing performance is to stop sucking at the basics.

When it comes to optimizing for search and social media, well implemented basics are as good for search engines and social networks as they are for your customer’s user experience.

Here are a 8 fundamentals worth applying to your organization’s daily content creation, amplification and optimization process.

1. Be the Best Answer: Start by answering a few questions of your own:

• What does your brand want to be known for?
• Is that thing what your customers really care about?
• Do you deserve to be known for that thing?

Look at leaders and authorities for the topics that matter most to your business and observe the deep and meaningful resources they provide. Tap into what makes others so authoritative and incorporate those characteristics in your own marketing. Start the journey to become the first choice amongst your customers for those topics that matter most.

2. Win Friends Influence People: People are social and so too, should your online and search marketing. Some social networks are better than others as stand alone communities for brands, but make no mistake, social signals matter for people and search engines. That means creating, engaging and promoting brand content on social networks to inspire shares and links from people with authority on topics you want to be known for.

Use social search and influence scoring tools like Traackr, Kred, Klout, Little Bird and FollowerWonk to triangulate where the influencers are, topics that matter and incorporate that insight into your content, PR, social and optimization.

3. It’s Not About You, Or Me Or Us. And Definitely Not Them:  With content for the web or social, avoid overuse of personal pronouns like “I,” “you,” “she,” “he,” “it,” “we,” “you,” “they” and objective pronouns “me,” “you,” “her,” “him,” “it,” “us,” “you,” and “them”. Instead, use more descriptive keyword phrases where social sharing widgets will copy your message and where Google is looking in page titles, file names, text links between pages, image alt text and in body copy.

Keyword use is also a fundamental that should not be overlooked. But remember, the priority is on optimizing for people and the experience they have with your content. Copy should flow smoothly and not read like it’s unnaturally using keywords. Find out what phrases your competitors are using to attract search traffic by using SEMRush, SpyFu or Keyword Spy.

4. Facts Tell, Stories Sell: Figure out why customers buy and create keyword optimized content that tells stories about how and why your products solve customer problems.

Talk to sales staff and ask them about how they are so successful and about the discussions they have with customers. Those stories are a goldmine of ideas for great content that matters to people who want to buy your products and services.  Content sourcing and ideation can be challenging, but tapping into the Q and A around topics that matter during the sales cycle reveal a never ending source of meaningful ideas.

5. Optimize for Search Share: While a lot of optimization emphasis is placed on creating web pages and media (images, video, audio) around topics and even specific keywords that customers are actually searching for, it’s also important to make social sharing compelling and easy.

To do that, start mastering the art of title writing to catch people’s attention but also include search phrases. Example, “10 Essential [keyword phrase] Tips How to Boost [keyword phrase] Performance.

Also be sure to include social sharing widgets in your content and experiment with the best formats and networks for your audience. Most of optimization is simply about making it easy for people to do what you want them to do. Finding and sharing your content is certainly near the top of the list.

6. Links Are Like Electricity: Light up useful content on your website by sharing with topically relevant social networks, through blogging and byline articles in industry publications. Find out where your competitors are getting their links by using tools like Majestic SEO, AHerfs or Open Site Explorer.

Do not underestimate the power of media relations and PR for getting into industry publications that also result in links. Whether through feature articles or guest blog posts, contributing content or insight to respected publications that also include a link to your brand’s social or web assets helps brand credibility, sends traffic and influences search visibility.

7. Tune Up Your Engine for Search Engines: Have your website audited by a SEO professional to ensure keyword targeting in content, technical friendliness to Google and Bing, inbound links and social shares. Pages that load fast for people and search engines is good user experience and good SEO.Web Developers and content management systems can be your worst enemy if left unoptimized for search.

8. Live the ABO: Always be Optimizing: Optimization is a continuous process of creating and promoting keyword optimized content on social networks, through industry media and online communities, then monitoring performance through analytics and making refinements.

Be sure to allocate resources for monitoring social networks, tracking and evaluating web analytics and applying conversion rate optimization best practices to ensure your findable and sharable content is influencing action.

The blocking and tackling of online marketing may not be the most glamorous, by why leave so much marketing opportunity on the table with skills and tactics we all claim to be so good at?  Optimized marketing requires a solid foundation and if your organization is having difficulty scaling performance, then maybe it’s time to take a look at the fundamentals.

I think Optimize is a book that covers these fundamentals pretty well, so be sure to check it out.

What are some of the online marketing basics that you see often overlooked?

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