Content Marketing

May 29, 2016 By Carrie Gallagher

This Is How You Get People to Trust Your Product

Author: firstround.com

Most new tech companies simply would not work without consumer trust. People wouldn’t get into an Uber, list their home on Airbnb, or even buy shoes on Zappos if they didn’t trust those companies to deliver a high quality, secure service. UrbanSitter sets the bar even higher: It connects families with babysitters on the Internet. There are few things that require more faith.

“In many ways, we’re tackling the service that requires the most trust in someone’s life,” says UrbanSitter CEO Lynn Perkins. “If companies can replicate what we’ve done in other sectors, they’ll knock it out of the park.”

So how did UrbanSitter pull this off? How did they build a product that convinces parents that strangers can safely watch their children? Perkins has become an expert in this area, pointing to a combination of product features, logistics, and customer service efforts that have allowed them to become a reliable solution for hundreds of thousands of households nationwide. In this exclusive interview, she shares how UrbanSitter has approached trust-building and how other companies can do the same to grow fast.

Facebook Live Rolls Out Continuous Streaming: This Week in Social Media : Social Media Examiner

Author: Grace Duffy

Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news.

To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.

Facebook Enables Continuous Live Video Support and Geogating: “Facebook will now allow non-stop, long-form broadcasting.” TechCrunch reports that the only tradeoff for the Continuous Live Video API is that “unlike [the] normal Facebook Live stream, there’s no option to let people replay the stream later or rewind to earlier.” Facebook also rolled out a new geogating feature to the Live API, which allows publishers to “make a video visible only to people in a particular location if that’s where it’s most relevant or they only have limited broadcast rights.”

Twitter Adjusts 140-character Limit: “In the coming months, [Twitter will] make changes to simplify Tweets including what counts toward your 140 characters, so for instance, @names in replies and media attachments (like photos, GIFs, videos, and polls) will no longer ‘use up’ valuable characters.” This update will be available over the coming months.

9 Tips for Creating an Awesome Brand

Author: John Rampton

When creating your brand, it’s imperative that you think about everything from your logo to color scheme to to the tag line. You also have to have a memorable brand name, strong message, support system, and all of the necessary legalities, like getting trademarked, in place.

But, that’s only the beginning of your branding process. To help you complete creating your awesome brand, give these nine tips a spin as well.

1. How do people see you?

“The interesting thing about your personal brand is it’s never what you say it is, it’s actually what everyone else says it is,” writes founder and chairman of the award-winning matchmaking firm PCBA Paul C. Brunson. “Therefore, the first place to begin in the building and growth of your brand is to know what people think of you.”

Paul adds that you can find out how others view by: “googling yourself, holding a focus group (of close friends), or asking a life coach or business coach to conduct a 360 analysis on your behalf (we do this for all of our clients and it’s very effective).”

26 Tips for Writing Great Blog Posts : Social Media Examiner

Author: Debbie Hemley

Do you blog? Feel like you’re trying to reinvent the wheel time and again?

Looking for some ideas to simplify your content creation process?

What follows are 26 tips, from A-Z, to help you create optimal blog posts every time you sit down to write.

A blog post contains several areas that require our attention and care. Pamela Seiple refers to six parts of the anatomy of a lead-generating blog post:

Call to action at the bottom

Relevancy—making sure the post is relevant from top to bottom

By knowing the ins and outs of your blogging platform, you’ll ensure that your posts look as good as they can. Take the time to master the visual editor (or raw HTML, if you prefer) so that you know how to format a post, insert an image and embed a video or podcast.

Whether you’re working in platforms such as WordPress, Tumblr or Posterous, it’s good to stay up to date on the features and new versions.

If you’re not comfortable with the more technical aspects of blogging, try to find someone who can be a resource for you to answer questions as they arise.

TV Budgets Shifting to Social? Yes, It’s Time to Worry

Author: Debra Aho Williamson

It’s that time of year again, when the TV networks talk about how great their upcoming fall shows will be — and everyone else talks about whether they will survive the relentless onslaught of OTT, cord-cutting and myriad other challenges.

Social media is one of those challenges. Companies like Facebook have never been shy about touting themselves as excellent companions to TV. They routinely conduct research studies that show lifts in seemingly every metric imaginable, as long as ad buyers use TV and social together.

But this year, eMarketer believes the conversation about social and TV will change. For buyers who want the best way to reach their audience, the growing video businesses of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat now present a viable alternative to TV.

Before I go on, it’s important to say this: It’s not as if vast sums of money will shift from TV to social this year — or even next year. This year, $70.6 billion will be spent on TV advertising in the US, according to eMarketer. Investment bank Cowen and Co. predicts Facebook’s video ad revenue will be roughly $2 billion worldwide this year. So we’re talking about a relative trickle right now. But the trickle can very easily become a strong flow.