Metro statue from a recent trip to Moscow
This post marks number 3,401 on Online Marketing Blog. Did you know? December is our 10 year blog birthday month!
We’ve covered a variety of topics in depth over those thousands of posts, especially the integration of search, social media and content with marketing and public relations.
TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog has been a top ranked marketing blog on AdAge 150 from day one and is the only blog to have been named the #1 content marketing blog 3 times by Junta42 (Content Marketing Institute).
Reflecting back over the past year there have been more changes in the digital marketing industry than seems reasonable to track best practices on. To help with that, I thought it would be handy to have a list of our top social media and content marketing posts based on traffic, shares and engagement.
Social Media Marketing
Social Media Predictions for 2013 – Everyone wants to know what’s next and this post offers my answers that were part of an eBook we developed for our client Dell, who is in the business of providing social media command center services and hardware. Top social media experts in the industry including Ann Handley, Michael Brito, Rohit Bhargava, Toby Bloomberg and more contributed to the eBook. Were the predictions right? You’ll have to check out the post and the eBook to find out.
Social Media Strategy: Where to Start & Why – Nicolette Beard tackled this topic which appears to be high in demand since there were so many page view of this post. Ironically, it didn’t come close on the top social shares posts. But then again, many business professionals who are social savvy aren’t looking to start, they’re looking to advance to the next level. Still, this post outlines essential considerations for starting a social media program – something a lot of those social savvy types wish they’d done to save time and resources.
Top 5 Social Media Questions Marketers Want Answered – Michael Stelzner at Social Media Examiner has been publishing a yearly report on social media marketing and in this year’s report, he outlined 5 core questions that survey respondents wanted answers to. I obliged and answered those questions in this post (including which social media tactics are most effective and how to measure social media ROI) The post had well over 1,000 social shares and many times that in page views.
Social Media & The Law – 11 Things You Need to Know Now – I was very happy this TopRank team-created post put together by Eliza Steely with contributions from Amie, Katie and Emily. This post was coverage of a Minneapolis/St. Paul Social Media Breakfast event that offered quite a few important insights about legal issues and social media that I don’t think a lot of companies are considering.
Social Media Hubs for Brands – Best Practices & 9 Examples – A trend I’ve noticed amongst brands that are maturing in the social media and content marketing is that they have so much social activity and content and no single place to find it all. Hence, the brand social media hub. These hubs take many forms from content curated amongst a brand’s own social media activities to that of their community. This post offers useful examples so you can see what other successful companies are doing to pull together their social streams in one hub.
Successful Facebook Marketing Examples, Tips & A Secret from Mari Smith – The name Mari Smith and Facebook Marketing are synonymous so it was without hesitation that I reached out to Mari to for her advice to be included in a series of social media thought leader interviews for our client Dell and their Tech Page One website. Mari delivers in this interview with several examples and best practices.
Content Marketing
What is Content? Learn from 40+ Definitions – When researching a keynote presentation on the future of content marketing, I tapped our social network for insights and noticed the fundamental question about defining content itself was one that needed to be considered. This post is the result of an informal poll I took on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ asking: What is content? Answers fell into three groups: “Too ambiguous to define”, “Information and media things/objects you make”, and “Content are experiences and outcomes”. Check out the post for specific definitions from our community.
11 Examples of Killer B2B Content Marketing Campaigns Including ROI – Seriously, who doesn’t love a great case study? Luckily, the folks at the Content 2 Conversion B2B Marketing conference provided a great collection of examples showing strategy, tactics and ROI for each of 11 different content marketing programs. From SunGard attracting over 20 leads to Xerox being able to attribute $1.3 billion on pipeline revenue to their content marketing effort, there’s no question companies are doing this right and we can all learn from them.
B2B Content Marketing Tactics: Pros, Cons & Best Practices of Case Studies – Speaking for case studies, they are an excellent content marketing tactic themselves. As part of an ongoing series covering each of 30 different content marketing tactics, this post offers a structured format shared by each of the series including a definition, pros, cons, examples, industry thought leader quotes and best practices. If you’re doing great work, case studies are an excellent format to communicate how effective you are. This is true internally at companies, not just for agencies.
3 Essential Content Curation Best Practices to Boost Content Marketing Performance – Content curation is an essential part of any digital marketing mix. In fact, this post is an example of curated content (with original annotations of course). There’s a lot of buzz about content curation and this post outlines some of the most important best practices including: sources of news, types of content to curate and where to publish curated content. If curation isn’t part of your online marketing efforts, I’d highly recommend drilling down into it.
11 Blog & Social Content Marketing Tools I Use (Almost) Every Day – Miranda Miller (who is now an editor at ClickZ) gave us all a peek at some of the social media and content marketing tools she uses to plan, ideate, manage, promote and measure her social media content efforts. This post had over 1,300 social shares and multiples of that in page views.
10 Content Marketing Tools for Creation, Distribution and Analytics – I had the pleasure of introducing my pal Joe Chernov, who now works at HubSpot, as “content marketer of the world” oops, I mean “Content Marketer of the Year” at this year’s Content Marketing World conference. Joe shared a collection of tools he evaluated with the help of our mutual friend, Rebecca Lieb at Altimeter Group. I really liked the deck and turned it into a blog post for our readers to learn more about content marketing tools that y0u might not otherwise be exposed to.
There you go: 12 posts about social media and content marketing to wrap up your 2013. We’ll undoubtedly continue to cover changes and new best practices in the areas of social media and content marketing, but you’ll also see a lot more mobile, email and digital advertising coverage in the coming year as well.
Which topics would you like to see more of in 2014?
