When you respect yourself, others will respect you. It’s important to remain strong and capable of standing up for yourself and your beliefs when times are good or bad.
“Love yourself. It is important to stay positive because beauty comes from the inside out.” – Jenn Proske
It’s important to take a moment and remember to love ourselves because beauty truly comes from the inside out.
On June 30, 2010, Mashable launched Social Media Day as a way to recognize and celebrate social media’s impact on global communication. And eight year’s later social media is now at the heart of all global communications plans and deeply integrated into many peoples daily routines and lives. With the constant changes to social media and new entrepreneurs being born everyday social media is the one component that all successful entrepreneurs, influencers and businesses have learn to understand.
Known for his cutting-edge growth hacks and genius business ideas Vin Clancy went from living on welfare in the U.K when he turned things around learning how to use the internet to make things go viral. He’s just launched his new book Ace The Game: The 100 best growth hacks in the world right now” which is a can’t miss book this year. You can learn more about Vin by visiting his website or blog and joining his growth club to receive strategies and tips to get ahead as a marketer.
Envy,
That’s what a lot of you feel when you look at brands and influencers who generate huge amounts of traffic and sales from social media.
Don’t worry, I get it too.
Now a lot of these people are either: extremely talented, have a lot of money for ads, or have grinded their way to the top of the newsfeed. And I have the utmost respect for the vast majority of them. But saying that, there is another reason why these people/brands reached the summit of their game. It’s because they got there first.
Speed is the most valuable asset to have in this game and striking fast and hard is ideally the way to go about things. Over the past year a lot of people have asked me what the next big social platform is going to be.
Here are 7 of my predictions in regards to the future of social media.
SEO is free (okay you might need to pay for some optimization tools, training or backlinks) but at it’s core optimizing blog posts for SEO is free.
So I reckon that more people at the bottom will be less inclined to dive into social media content marketing and more people will go back to perfecting the SEO for their articles/blog posts.
People love receiving (cool) stuff in the mail. Do you ever get excited about a package arriving from Amazon? I know I do! So if you can physically send something to someone, do it.
Physical mail has a 95%-100% pickup rate, especially if it’s something large like a box. Tip: Call up the office of your prospect (influencer/CEO) and say to their assistant “we want to send x a free pair of shoes what is his/her size?” Then buy the high ticket prospect a nice pair of shoes but only send them one. Tell them in a nice letter “Now I’ve got my foot in the door, I’ll happily give you the other shoe if you agree to go for a coffee with me”
Very cheeky and everyone wants the other shoe.
4. Learn how to grow a Twitch account, this will conquer the earth in the next decade.
This platform will be huge in the coming year, not just for gamers but for everyday folk too. In fact, it’s huge now! The Amazon owned platform now has 100+ million unique users every month.
The channel IRL (In Real Life) has people live streaming everyday things from: painting, drawing, playing music, building things. So why not get there first for your niche and find some new customers.
Maybe I should set up the first live growth hacking channel before someone else does ….
5. People gave up on Facebook chatbots too quickly and no one has done them right yet. Everyone will have them eventually so make yours the best.
When Facebook chatbots came to town everyone went crazy for them, but I’ve seen less and less people rave about them.
For those of you who don’t know chatbots are essentially FB messenger broadcasts that pages can send to anyone who signs up to them.They’re super powerful with many still boasting a huge open rate.
Because people wanted to treat them like an email list they burnt out a lot of people who don’t want marketing messages in their Facebook messenger every other day.
Some of the best bots I’ve seen impart REAL value that people want in their inbox 3-5 times a month MAX. What a lot of brands haven’t realised is that people have joined your bot it’s because they’ve trusted you.
They’ve allowed you into their inner circle that was previously reserved for their close friends and family. Don’t betray that by selling to them everyday. (MsgHero and ManyChat are among for favourite chat bot providers)
A lot of startups and businesses come to me and say “You’re the guy that can get traffic out of thin air using social media? Help us!”
While there are a lot of ways to grow their traffic I always ask to see their current traffic, conversions and email list first. There’s normally a lot of things that people aren’t already doing with their current customers.
So look at your current methods before embarking on completely new strategies.
7. People are still using Twitter wrong
It’s not a broadcast network. It’s a one-to-one network at huge scale. The half life of a tweet is so short, and the feed moves so fast, that hardly anyone following over 200 people will see your one tweet a day.
So use to either send out 24 tweets a day or just simply @ the people you want to contact instead! There is software that will help you do this in an organic and human way (don’t go overboard), but this will allow you to scale and hit many people at once.
I reply to nearly everyone who tweets @ me and I’ve seen many a celebrity and influencer do the same. Start using it right.
That’s a wrap for the predictions (I’ll put my crystal ball away now)
So those are my predictions and observations about social media marketing in 2018.
Whilst this is the way I believe things will play out, It’s important to look back at times and check yourself before you decide to massively change course. If it isn’t broken don’t fix it, this is also known as the “Learn, implement, review” system. This ties into you should work out which social media platform is right for your business.
To be perfectly honest it’s actually quite simple. To start with you should already know the major places your ideal customer hangs out online and that should be your starting point (if you don’t then you have bigger problems to address first!)
Most people try and go for a multi-channel approach and hit all bases. While I too recommend this, it’s very difficult to execute right from the off if you’ve got a small team or work on your own.
If you spread yourself too thin and don’t go in hard on one platform you won’t get any results. I suggest picking one main channel to focus on, and then a secondary channel a little later down the line.
You need to then look at the competition and work out if they are having success by using this platform, then work out how you can start to attract people to your brand instead.
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After dropping my kids off this morning I headed to Starbucks and on line I started to clean up my emails when a headline popped out and caught my attention, People Spend 479 Minutes A Day Consuming Media. A recent article published by Media Post highlights the transformation of global media consumption over recent years. According to Zenith’s Media Consumption Forecast the average person spends 479 minutes, or nearly 8 hours a day consuming media which has risen 12% since 2011 (Click to Tweet).
What’s even more staggering is the projection that by 2020 people will spend 492 minutes a day plugged in with 24% of this time expected on mobile devices. (Click to Tweet)
I’m not sure why I was so surprised by the headline since looking around the line everyone’s face was buried deep into their mobile phones. We’re living in a world where we can access whatever we need on demand and are totally addicted to our cell phones. In fact, Americans check their phone on average once every 12 minutes – burying their heads in their phones 80 times a day, according to a study from Asurion. (Click to Tweet)
The study also found that the average person struggles to go little more than 10 minutes without checking their phone and on average people check every four minutes. The below infographic highlights additional findings from the study and covers the reality of separation anxiety for people. The most staggering example as to the addiction of our cell phones is the the revelation that four in 10 Americans would rather lose their voice for a day than lose their phone for 24 hours. (Click to Tweet)
I’m totally guilty, and equally addicted to my cell phone. I love to put my phone away and have “digital-free” time with the kids before bed without any distractions. It’s always shocking to me when my 3.5 year old son Lucas picks up my cell phone and easily navigates between apps and videos like it’s something he’s been doing his whole life. A swift reminder that he’s downloading my behavior and even more of a need for me to put my phone down and get on the floor and play with my boys. It’s hard, but doable and very necessary.
What do you think of the statistics included within this article? Are you addicted to your mobile device? I’d love to know your thoughts, send me a tweet or leave a comment below!
A short but very important Thursday Thought I’d like to Share…
“With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
We all have good days and bad day but life is short, and unpredictable. It’s up to us to make the best of each day. You never know what’s going to happen tomorrow and nothing is guaranteed so take a deep breath and enjoy today!
Thank you so much to the Event Manager Blog for including my insight and experiences within the newly launched 2018 Edition of Social Media for Events: A Complete Guide to Marketing Your Events Using Social Media.
The guide shares 42 strategies, ideas, tips and tactics on using social media to promote events. Levering social media at live events is crucial for generating engagement before, during and after the conference. However with social media rapidly evolving it’s not something that’s always easy to develop a strategy around especially since KPI’s around live events are sometimes challenging to measure.
I’ve been fortunate to have an extensive event marketing background which has helped me to develop innovative social media campaigns to enhance a variety of live events. It’s crucial to always take chances and push the limit. Failure is important to enable you to measure successes over the long term. Always think outside the box and take chances, that’s how you and you brand can excel and stand out!
So, what are you waiting for, check out the 2018 Edition of Social Media for Events: A Complete Guide to Marketing Your Events Using Social Media.
What do you think of the guide, anything you would add? Leave me a comment below or shoot me a Tweet!
Ahead of the close of 2017 I was thrilled to see my name included as one of the Top 29 Event Industry Influencers to Follow from a newly released article from Tom Pick/G2 Planet. I have extensive experience working within the Event Industry and am thrilled to be included with so many colleagues from one of my old employers BizBash Media.
My father Richard Aaron was the President of BizBash for many years ahead of his recent retirement and took a chance hiring me as the economy was tanking in 2007 to work within his event team. I had just completed my Master of Public Administration and couldn’t find a job that fit my background and he encouraged me to join him and get some experience outside of my traditional interests. Working at BizBash as an Event Marketing Manager I traveled the United States supporting nine core markets learning first hand from him and others how to execute the onsite event managements for all of the trade shows and events the company put together. I developed content for email, social media, direct mail and other channels to convert and engage audiences.
As social media emerged as a dominant channel driving both engagement and revenue for many of our events my interests quickly migrated into learning about digital and social strategy. Within BizBash Events we developed a social media lounge a core part of our large scale tradeshows deepening relationships with Event Influencers within core markets and showcasing what real time event success looked like with giveaways, live twitter feeds and more. We were one of the first to develop this type of strategy and it was fascinating and exciting.
It was love at first sight for me. Seeing social media so deeply integrated into the success of our overall event success really hit home. I knew I had to work to deepen my digital marketing background and move forward in future roles with more focus on social media and the strategies of implementation for ongoing success. I worked alongside a fantastic team and mentor (my father) who took a chance on a young twenty something and deeply impacted my long term career success. Since BizBash I’ve worked at several events and publishing companies (Crain Communications, IQPC, Euromoney Institutional Investor) and have implemented tactics I learned from my event days.
Within my role at CFA Institute I work to support some of our larger global events developing social media strategies for ongoing success. At one of our annual conferences I developed a social media lounge featuring a social media vending machine where a tweet with a unique hashtag dispensed a prize to the participating delegate. Not something you traditionally see at financial events but a real wow-factor and attention grabber for many of our attendees. I’ve also lead our internal team annual kickoff meeting for the last two years bringing some of my old BizBash “outside the box” event skills to make work meetings more engaging including a live graphic artist, digital caricatures and hashtag cookies and chocolates to tie the theme together.
I’m so grateful to Tom Pick and G2 Planet for the Inclusion and to my father for taking a chance on me. It’s important to have a mentor that supports you and helps you refine your skills as the years go on. He’s always been a sounding board for many of my ideas helping me to think outside the box and refine for success and I’m grateful beyond words.
“To be the best, you must be able to handle the worst.”
― Ziad K. Abdelnour
