English Blog of The Strategy Web - Digital Transformation

Report: Friday is Engagement Day on Facebook

5. May 2014/in Blog English, Content Marketing, Featured Stories/by The Strategy Web

The more work people have the less they have got time to engage on Facebook. Right or wrong? Well, right…

At least according to a recent report from Adobe that states Facebook users engage with brands more on Fridays than any other day on in the week. In their Q1 Social Intelligence Report which analyzes the interaction of Facebook posts and ad engagements, the company found that 15.7% of all impressions happened on a Friday.

In the second place came Thursdays with the second highest post impressions and engagement (14.5%), followed by Saturday (14,4%) with almost the same share of impressions. Sunday appears to be the day when people are not massively engaging with Facebook compared to the rest of the week (13.4%). A detailed interaction overview shows that Fridays were the strongest interaction days examined across all engagements: comments (17%), likes (16%) and shares (6%).

Furthermore, the report which was based on 260 billion Facebook ad impressions across different industry sector like media, entertainment, retail and travel, makes clear that photos and video seem to become the new secret sauce in user engagement on Facebook. Photos still show highest engagement rates in the first three months in 2014. 24.7% of all brand video views in Q1 came in on a Friday. Although people have more time on Sundays, it is the day with the lowest share of video impressions (6.4%). The engagement around video updates were up 25% year on year and 58% quarter over quarter.

What are your findings around Facebook updates? What content types perform and which don’t? Is Friday really such a powerful day for you as well?

Report: How to be more successful with the right blogging tactics

28. April 2014/in Blog English, Featured Stories, Social Media/by The Strategy Web

The questions we usually get from marketers are quite similar: What makes a good blog post? When is the best time to publish? How do questions in headlines perform? And so on. A recent report by TrackMaven analyzed 1.16 million posts from 4,618 blogs and 1.9 million social shares of those blog posts. The results were published in their Colossal Content Marketing Report. The analyzed content included blog posts from various publishers, like content marketers, individual bloggers, and media companies.

The report shows that Tuesday and Wednesday performed as the most popular days for publishing posts. Of the analyzed blog posts 87% were published during Monday and Friday (9 AM to 6 PM ET with a peak at 11 AM-12 PM). This does not say though that weekends don`t perform well. 13% of blog posts published on weekends got more social shares per post on average. Although just 6.3% of posts were published on Saturdays, these still received 18% of the total social shares.

As most marketers strive for engagement to justify their social business activities, one of the findings will be of best interest for them. The most social shares from blog posts came in the evenings around 9 PM-midnight ET (highest engagement 10-11 PM). Special peaks also occur when people get their coffee, meeting hours go down and after midnight TV shows (4-6 AM ET, 7-8 PM plus 1-2 AM).

Some more findings…
– Blog post titles of around 60 characters in length performed with most social shares (average was around 40 characters in length).
– Blog posts with question marks in their title had almost twice as many social shares that those without any punctuation.
– Blog posts with a mixture of capital and lowercase letters achieved most shares.
– Blog posts get most sharings via Twitter (Tweets shares got 38.6% of total social shares) and Facebook (Facebook shares 26.7% – Likes got 33.8% of engagement).

Spot On!
The headline definitely is a key element for blog posts being read and getting shares as on Twitter and Facebook there is not much more to see, and many people won’t even read but still share it the blog post. Although the magic headline might sound like a perfect tactic for blogging, there is more in blogging tactics than knowing when to publish or some rules around punctuation. Good content, relevant aspects, various point of views (interviews) and probably one of the main elements: continuity. Most blogs starts euphoric and die after some weeks. Blogging is a time-consuming challenge but with the right blogging tactics it is not rocket-science.

Report: Most Trusted Marketing Automation Tools

23. April 2014/in Blog English, Featured Stories, Web Marketing/by The Strategy Web

Marketing automation tools are making their ways into the business world, not only for large enterprises but also for small companies some solutions have proven to be promising, and not only since IBM bought Silverpop. However, which tools are the right ones for your business? At least we get some advice now from TrustRadius‘ “Buyer’s Guide to Marketing Automation Software”. They did a report based on 400 in-depth reviews by authenticated end-users of marketing automation products combined with the results of more than 10,000 comparisons performed on the TrustRadius’ website.

The report looked at software solutions that include various demand generation capabilities like email campaign management, landing pages,or even lead scoring. However, the analysis out those providers which just offer one aspect of marketing automation (i.e. only lead scoring). In their focus were those tools that “help to automate and scale repetitive marketing tasks and the analysis of those efforts.”

These were the findings they came up with…

Small Businesses (Up to 50 employees)
Small companies gave quite positive and high ratings with at least a 4 out of 5 (average was 4.3 out of 5 – better than the average in the midsize and enterprise companies). Then TrustRadius ranked the products via two factors: a) average user rating and b) how does the product serve the business segment (determined by the number of comparisons made by organizations of that size).
The leading 3 solutions were HubSpot (4.8, 69% of comparisons by small businesses), Act-On (4.7, 53%), plus Infusionsoft (4.3, 96%). Other solutions like Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua, and Silverpop also got good ratings. Still, they ranked lower as they had a smaller proportion of small business comparisons.

SMB Businesses (From 51 to 500 employees)
The average rating in the midsize company category was 3.9 out of 5. The report shows that a higher demand goes alongside bigger companies and more complex requirements for marketing automation tools. Here, the trusted vendors are Marketo (4.2, 60% midsize category) and Pardot (4.0, 58%). Act-On, Eloqua, and HubSpot also got positive ratings.

Enterprise Businesses (500+ employees)
The average rating for enterprise marketing automation products was 3.8 out of 5. Eloqua showed up to be the top marketing automation software for enterprise companies (4.4, 59% enterprise focus). Act-On, HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot also performed well according to users, but they had a smaller proportion of comparisons from enterprise customers.

Tell us about your findings. Which tools do you use and what has proven to be successful for you? All insights can help other companies make faster decisions.

Why content marketing is like running a marathon (infographic)

22. April 2014/in Blog English, Content Marketing, Featured Stories/by The Strategy Web

Content marketing seems to be the new hype in the business world. But wasn’t it there before? Case studies, whitepapers, corporate brochures, corporate publishing, etc. – did we not have all of this before? Maybe the B2B world was better trained in this topic than the B2C folks.

The guys from Curata now train marketers with a step-by-step content marketing marathon infographic. It will make marketers understand what it needs to become efficient in content marketing, to have the right pace at producing versus curating content, to achieve the perfect help and support from your fans and get to the finish line.

Good luck – and don’t forget to drink some water!

How do men and women use social media and mobile? (Infographic)

11. April 2014/in Blog English, Featured Stories, Social Media/by The Strategy Web

Based on some research from the guys at Nielsen, Pew Research and ExactTarget, the two companies Financesonline.com and Ruby Media Corporation published some interesting facts and figures that are highlighting the different usage of social media and mobile by men and women.

According to the infographic, in general women are more likely to do networking and use social media for relationship, sharing, entertainment and self-help. Men are more fact-driven and look after deals and information, and on the mobile site are more open to scan coupons and QR codes. Men are using social media predominantly for business (27%) and just (13%) for dating. Whereas women are much lower engaged in these two topics with business coming in at 22% and dating only at 7%.

The infographic makes clear that on Facebook, photos and videos (54%) and entertainment or funny posts (43%) are of interest for women, while only 39% and (35%) of men are viewing them. Women are more active in sharing on facebook as well: 50% share with multiple people (men only 42%).

Infographic: How Google Ranks Your Website's Relevance

1. April 2014/in Blog English, Featured Stories, SEO/by The Strategy Web

This is one of those secrets that is discussed in every single seminar we do: How does Google rank websites? Why does my website not rank higher than my competitors? What could be the best SEO strategy so that Google ranks us under the first three results?

The Google’s algorithm is one of the biggest secrets in the marketing world. The 200+ ranking features make it very challenging to find the right web strategy of your content and website structure. So, what’s the best way to develop a “Google-loves-us” strategy?

Neil Patel has created a nice infographic that illustrates the main components of the Google algorithm. Let’s see what he comes up with…

How Google Determines Where to Rank Your Website

Courtesy of: Quick Sprout

Spot On!
The main challenge to drive more traffic via search lies in understanding the holistic approach of Google’s algorithm. Obviously, it is about the final user that works with the website, reads the content and shares it through their own social communication platforms. Over are those days when people though the “link-in-link-out” game will solve the SEO war, when companies got paid for building link farms, and people got money to bring more links in. In the end, the user decides on what they need, and finally the Google Algorithm reflects that.

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