It’s been a couple weeks since Social Media FTW, an annual social media conference in Maine. This year was the third year and I took some notes that you might find fun from a couple presentations I went to:
Session 1: Elijah Young, http://blog.fandura.com
A bit about blogs:
- There are 133 million blogs on the internet
- 94.5% of these blogs are abandoned after one year (The 7.5 million blogs that remain are ‘maintained’, meaning updated at least once a month. (which really isn’t much.)
A lot of people stop blogging because it seems like no one is listening. Bummer. But it’s important to know:
- 90% of people will lurk
- 9% will interact occasionally
- 1% will respond regularly
Some tips to help you be more successful at blogging:
- Comment on the smaller blogs, they’ll appreciate the comment more than the big guys. Build a reciprocal relationship with them.
- Respect every interaction (‘Thanks’ is not an conversation.) Having a meaningful exchange makes you memorable, builds relationships, and is more likely to generate leads for you.
- Interview experts in your field and competitors to build authority. This makes you seem connected and not so selfish.
- If you are stuck on a topic, use Q and A websites, competitor websites’ FAQs, and blogs you are already reading to help you come up with ideas.
- Keep it in perspective. You aren’t blogging to become the next famous person, you are doing it to generate more business.
How to get your blog readers to talk to more people for you.
Session 3: Rich Brooks, http://www.flyte.biz
A bit about video:
- If you are targeting a key phrase, you can rank higher by creating videos with that keyphrase.
- For blog posts, a thumbnail and play button for a video next to the blog post link (for example on Facebook) is more engaging than just a plain text link.
- For Flyte, conversion rate on pages with video was much higher than average site visitor (Contact form over 700% more likely to be filled out, 700% higher than the typical visitor).
Video types:
- How-to
- Testimonials
- Tours
- Tips/Secrets
- Series
- Response
Some tips for Youtube and videos:
- Wondering what keywords you should include in your video file name, video title, video description, etc.? Try the Google Keyword Tool: bit.ly/betterkeywords
- Videos should ideally be under 2 minutes.
- Why companies use Youtube: >55% of market share of online videos on Youtube
- The average Youtube visitor spends >15 minutes/day
- Youtube is the second largest search engine and the third most visited site online.
- You can customize a Youtube background; just create an image that is 960 pixels wide center justified.
- When writing the video description, start with the URL to your website. This will help make sure people see it, and drive traffic to your site.
- You can add a link to another Youtube video in the annotations section. You can link to a website off Youtube as well but that’s a bit more complicated. ;^) But possible! (It involves making it a promoted video and set CPV to one penny and then editing the video so the call to action overlay appears.)
- If you are going to embed the video on your blog or website, it’s best to write a blog post to go with it to make it most findable.
- Tubemogul is a free service that allows you to publish videos to multiple places at one time.
Anyway it was a great conference and I certainly didn’t take enough notes!
Sorry to have missed it? Click here for the slides.