Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Edison Research has just about cornered the market on podcast research and podcast statistics, and their new report, The Podcast Consumer 2017, continues the trend with a deep-dive into the demographics of American podcast listeners.

In January and February of 2017, Edison surveyed 2,000 people ages 12 and older about their audio and social media habits.

I absolutely encourage you to grab the full report (no cost) here. Meanwhile, here are the findings I found most interesting....

If contributing guest posts is part of your content distribution and promotion strategy, you're probably familiar with the following scenario: You write a great article for a guest publication, and at the end, you’re compensated with a teeny, tiny paragraph about yourself.

Unless you wrote the article for purely altruistic reasons, this paragraph, though short, is quite critical. Not only does it connect you to the article on a level beyond your byline, but also, it provides space for links back to your website or social profiles. And who wouldn't want even that little bit of glory?

But what are you supposed to write in that brief paragraph, anyway? How do you make your author bio compelling, powerful, and effective -- without a whole lot of space? As it turns out, there are quite a few seemingly small ways to approach your author bio that can help it have a much bigger impact. But what do they look like, exactly? Read on -- you’re about to find out....

We are a visual culture. People respond better to visual content and even process information more efficiently when presented in a visual way. With so many performance advantages, it’s clear how design can elevate written content.

With the convincing out of the way, let’s talk about specific ways to introduce design and visual storytelling into your content marketing strategy.

We all know that blog posts need images but are you using enough?

One of the best ways to increase the reach of your content is with the right amount of images. BuzzSumo did the math for us, and found that the right amount of images is one every 75-100 words:

“In a study of over one million articles, BuzzSumo looked at how many blog posts with images were shared. Then they looked at how many images, per how many words, got the best results. What they found was articles with an image once every 75-100 words got double the amount of shares of articles with fewer images.”...

Researching, developing, and writing blog posts is only the first half of content marketer’s jobs. The other half of the day consists of making sure that all of your hard work creating the post doesn’t go to waste. Promoting your blog posts on the right platforms and through the right channels is vital if you want your content to be read.

But promotion is a tricky subject. And most of the time, it includes paid social advertising campaigns that are poorly managed and don’t see strong results. With this as the norm, it’s no surprise that some content marketers have started re-posting their blog content on other domains to maximize its visibility.

While this may seem like a good idea and an easy way to broaden your visibility, you can run into some serious trouble with Google here. Whenever you are thinking of re-posting a blog post on another site, remember this bit of expert advice: Google hates twins.

So how can you broaden the visibility of your content to make sure it engages well? How can we all milk each piece of content for every drop of value it has to offer?...

A recent Reuters Institute study, aptly titled ‘‘I saw the news on Facebook’ looks at how audiences recall the source of news found via social media and search. The study takes into account how users recall where they found a particular story (search, social, or by landing directly on a website), as well as going a step further to measure their likelihood of remembering the actual source of the information.

It turns out that accurate source recall is a legitimate concern for publishers. Here’s the key line from the report:

“Less than half could remember the name of the news brand for a particular story when coming from search or social media. Correct brand attribution was just 37% from search and 47% from social media. This compares with an attribution rate of 81% for users who arrived directly from another page on a destination website.”

So on average, less than half of the people clicking links to news stories in their social media feeds could correctly recall the actual source of the story afterwards, leading to the common scenario where someone says they saw a story ‘on Facebook’....

In a world where everyone seems to be constantly churning out content, you may be feel like you’re not doing enough.

However, there’s an upside and a downside to what I’m about to tell you.

The upside is: There is no universal “right amount” of content to publish. There’s no magic publishing cadence for achieving content marketing success.

Rather, the key is to figure out how much high-quality content you can produce on a regular basis – and then maximize it through your distribution channels to reach your goals.

And that’s the downside: You have to find your own best publishing cadence – based upon your goals – through testing, trial, error, and optimization....

Research on social posting frequency is less conclusive than you might think. Before you post on social media, ask, "Is this worth knowing?"It’s good stuff.

But, it’s not true. None of it is true. Because all of those studies look at the success of each post in a vacuum. How many clicks, likes, shares, comments, etc. did a piece of social content get, and what happens to those baseline results when the frequency of publication goes up, or down?

Every single one of these reports ignores an unassailable certainty about success in social media marketing: Put another way, increased frequency doesn’t imperil your success in social media marketing. Instead, your success is mitigated every time you post something mediocre, or worse....

When it comes to writing text for your blog and social media posts, many marketers wonder, "But what's the character limit?" It's never a simple question -- sometimes, it's answered by parameters established by certain channels. And on other occasions, it's more a question of what's ideal.

For example, you probably know the character limit for a tweet is 140, but did you know that the ideal length is actually less than that? (Hold tight -- we'll explain why.) While we've written before about optimizing your actual content, we thought it would be helpful to gather the numbers of character limits -- both enforced and ideal -- for different online channels, all in one place. 

Below, you'll find a more detailed guide to character limits and ideal character counts for posts on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, SnapChat, and YouTube....

When it comes to content strategy, a lot has been said about the importance of keeping a steady stream of fresh content flowing through your distribution channels. Marketers have listened. According to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), 76 percent of content marketers produced more content in 2016 than they did in 2015. That content stream will only increase in 2017.

This trend has been with us for years. According to an October 2016 TrackMaven blogging report:

Over the last five years, the average number of blog posts published per brand per month increased by 800 percent. However, over the same time the average number of social shares per post (from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest) decreased by 89 percent....