Still, we shouldn’t ignore the benefits of social media on our emotional wellbeing. Social media isn’t inherently bad for mental health, and it can be positive and uplifting if used in the right way.

1. Social media deepens your sense of community 

Sure, scrolling through social media should never take the place of personal interaction with the people in your neighborhood, at your work, or at your school.

But there are other communities that you don’t engage with everyday, and with which you rarely have the opportunity to engage in-person. These are communities that you build in addition to the ones you’re part of at home. Often, they’re communities you didn’t even know existed, communities of people who share your interests and hobbies and who live all over the country and all over the world.

You might, for example, uncover a global community of backpackers through sites like Couchsurfing and strengthen that community based on your shared interests and through your online connections with them on social media. You might find people who relate to this hobby, who can talk with you and give you advice, and whom you wouldn’t be able to otherwise access in-person.

Or you might be new at a university and join a social media group that’s specifically for new admits. When you feel lost and isolated in a new place, you can find a source of comfort in engaging online with people who are navigating the same problems you are.

We can see this in ever-popular chat apps like Line and WhatsApp. The group chats that these platforms facilitate aren’t merely about making texting more convenient. More importantly, they’re about maintaining relationships with the communities we’re a part of and the people we love.

2. Social media builds personal empowerment

While there’s lots of talk about social media lowering one’s self-esteem, it can also have the opposite effect if used correctly.

When you get involved in an online community, you’re not just developing a network of friends. You’re also engaging with hobbies you love, cultivating your own interests, and shaping your sense of identity, in part, around those hobbies and interests. You create an identity for yourself that grows out of your experience in a community–whether you’re a Star Wars lover or an arts and crafts guru.

Social media platforms can also build personal empowerment by helping you form a network of people who lie outside your family or immediate community but who nonetheless support you in your interests and passions. URIJI, for example, is a platform that lets people share their goals and life projects through images and video, allowing them to use social media to explore the experiences that define them as individuals. It also lets their followers offer donations and words of encouragement, providing users with a supportive digital community.

Because social media allows people to explore their own interests while engaging with their digital communities, it can help boost self-esteem and make people feel encouraged in the pursuit of their goals, whether they’re fitness goals, travel goals, or something else.

3. Social media keeps you in touch with relatives and old friends

Surveys have shown that nearly two thirds of social media users primarily use the digital platforms to keep in touch with family and friends. Social media provides us with updates on the lives of our loved ones back home, filling in the gaps between our infrequent visits. We can see how much our brother’s kids have grown, or we can hear about our friend’s recent trip abroad.

Chat apps have made staying in touch even easier, since they allow us to text and make phone calls without a data plan. The principle of staying in touch is even built into the design of apps like Tinyblu, which sends reminders to users when they go too long without contacting their friends.

Platforms that don’t necessarily involve direct conversation still go deeper than just mindless scrolling. Even the biggest social media platforms are less about stalking and more about keeping up with the ever-evolving lives of the people we care about. We better understand what our friend’s life is like in New York, for example, when we get visuals of her day-to-day activity on Snapchat. This is stuff that we just don’t get over the phone, and it makes us feel a little less disconnected from so far away.

4. Social media keeps you engaged in causes you care about

The purpose of social media, of course, isn’t just to stay updated with friends. It’s also to stay updated with causes and organizations you care about.

Keeping up with the work of your favorite volunteer organizations, for example, can boost your optimism about the causes you believe in. Following the progress of organizations that are important to you helps you stay up-to-date with causes you care about, whether they’re climate change, disaster relief, or something else.

Tracking organizations on social media is also more convenient and efficient than separately visiting each of their websites or reading each of their newsletters. On top of that, mainstream platforms like Twitter and Facebook drive publicity for your favorite causes, spreading the word about important current events. 

5. Social media lets you spread joy

Often, when scrolling through a news site, we’re bombarded with information about global tragedies and local crime–and we’re given little information about worldwide acts of compassion or the kindness of strangers.

Social media sites, though, have proven good vehicles for disseminating more positive information. In fact, unlike on news sites, most of the stuff we read on social media–whether they’re updates from friends or shared posts–is uplifting and, often, humorous.

We might see uplifting pictures and stories like those from Upworthy or Humans of New York. Or, we might see jokes and funny animal videos shared and posted by friends.

While anything–social media included–can be used in unhealthy ways, our obsession with social media is more good than bad. We use social media to stay updated with all the good stuff going on in the world and to add humor to long days at work and early morning bus rides. We use social media to stay in touch with family and friends, and to strengthen our sense of community. And we use social media to empower ourselves as we engage with our passions. All this keeps us a little more optimistic.

The post 5 Ways Social Media Can Actually Help Your Mental Health     appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Luckily 2012 arrived, and with it a refreshing alternative to ordinary advertising straightforwardly dubbed interactive content. It includes: those addicting personality quizzes that rightfully guessed you’re such a Khalessi, polls about random things you couldn’t care less about but still are curious enough to click on anyway, community-ranked listicles of the cutest cat videos this year, and, well, you get the idea. It’s designed to pull you in, grab your attention, and keep you on the site long enough that you’ll purchase something.

Truly, interactive content is a win-win-win for publishers, brands, and users. Let’s see why:

Here’s Why It Matters

It shouldn’t be surprising that something interactive (which is literally a synonym for engaging) is more promising than something static, especially when it comes to brand and publisher marketing. In offering enhanced user experiences, an option for high shareability, and more relevant metrics, interactive content is positioned to overtake static advertisements as the main form of monetization for brands and publishers.

A Better User Experience

If users had it their way, they’d get rid of advertisements and content monetization practices all together. (In fact, they nearly have. I’m looking at you, AdBlock.) But, if brands and publishers listened to users’ concerns — that advertising practices have gotten out of hand — they’d recognize that something has got to change: user experience.

And, interactive content solves just that. It’s entertaining, enjoyable, engaging, and most importantly, subtle. This means users are less likely to shut their browser in annoyance and more likely to continue clicking through the site.

Better Shareability

Today, publishers and brands want one thing: to go viral. It’s simple, more shares, more money. Interactive content has just the right characteristics for increased shareability, it’s amusing, enticing, click-worthy, unique, and designed with the user in mind. It’s much easier for interactive content to get massive shares because it reaches into the fundamental reason people share things in the first place: It captivates them.

Think about show-and-tell from your childhood: would you be more likely to bring in a print magazine advertisement to class or your new Nintendo GameBoy?

More Relevant Metrics

Sure, static advertisements provide brands and publishers with great insights like click-through rates, bounce rates, page views, unique visitors etc. But interactive content as a form of advertising offers all this plus comments, shares, likes, and completion rates. This way, marketers can better pinpoint and understand how and why their interactive content is either succeeding or failing. If, for example, click-through rates on an advertisement are low but there is no indication as to why, how is a brand or publisher going to learn for next time? In adding a social element, the additional metrics that come with interactive content enables the marketer to tweak their content for improvement in the future.

Let’s Get Interactive 

Of course, editorial content as a form of online advertising is nothing new — but that’s just the problem. The digital media world moves fast, after all. If marketers want to keep up with the trends and hold onto the attention of their consumers, they need to constantly innovate their marketing and advertising techniques.

Here are three tips to keep in mind before creating your first piece of interactive content.

1. Outline Your Objectives

First, like before any marketing campaign, it’s essential to outline your objectives and goals.

For example, are you content to build brand awareness, increase conversions, educate potential consumers, or purely entertain? Is it more important that your interactive content receive a higher engagement rate or a longer play time? Who is your target audience — women from New York consuming content on their iPads or teenage boys living on the West Coast with fingers glued to their smartphones?

Finally, you need to think about where you’ll distribute it: on your website, on social channels, or on a third-party site. If you plan to distribute the interactive content via social channels, then virality is the most important. If you intend to feature it on your website, then the interactive options should discourage users from being led to external sites.

2. TL;DR

Now that you’ve outlined your objectives and goals, it’ll be easier to keep your interactive content concise and focused. Today, our attention spans are so short that saying an article is too long to read really isn’t an insult anymore. It’s important to keep your interactive content super targeted, never straying from what the title copy promises.

But, by creating interactive content such as polls, quizzes, and video quizzes, content not only stays hyper-focused, quick, and to the point, but it also gives the viewer complete power to take control of their experience. Thus, marketers can be sure that their audience — short attention span and all — is fully engaged throughout.

Here, for instance, Nutella and the Food Network partnered to create an Apester poll — this way, users are engaged and more likely to read through, enjoy, and absorb the rest of the content. The poll received nearly 17,000 engagements with a double-digit click-through-rate and increased time-on-site.

3. A Strong Call To Action

If a video plays but it lacks a clear call-to-action, did it make an impact? Obviously not.

In any good blog post or landing page, the text will encourage page visitors to take some sort of action, like download a white paper or sign up for a free trial. Well, successful interactive content is no different — it must feature a strong CTA to achieve the goals and objectives you previously outlined.

Remember, CTAs can be strategically placed during any point, not just at the end. This is the great thing about interactive content, you can manipulate it to build tension and place the CTAs accordingly.

For example, here, the content creator used Mapme to create a story by combining maps with images, videos, and text. In a story outlining the best vegetarian restaurants in Berlin, the content creator set custom CTAs to ensure maximum conversion.

The post Why Interactive Content Matters and How to Get Started Today appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Using Social Media In Tandem

Often, marketers forget that marketing automation is meant to complement their already established marketing efforts, namely their social media marketing campaigns. Social media permits marketers and salespeople to slowly nurture a relationship with their prospects, so that their prospects can learn about their brand and eventually become primed for a phone call. Thus, analyzing social media is a great way to gain insights on the type of customers you’re attracting, where your customers are in the sales cycle, which emails are working best, which tweets are bringing in the most traffic, and more. And, this is exactly the type of information you receive when you marry social media management platforms and marketing automation platforms. Essentially, it allows marketers and salespeople to create user-specific information, which they can then analyze to perfect their lead generation and sales nurturing techniques.

Shift from Personalization to Prediction

Lately, many marketers are talking about the rising importance of personalization in their marketing campaigns, but we’re also seeing an incredible increase in automated predictive analytics platforms. Essentially, simply personalizing content and score leads in real time isn’t enough in today’s tech oriented sales and marketing environment. Rather, marketers should be proactive use marketing automation to predict consumer interactions before they actually take place. This way, by visualizing each customer’s interaction and conversion cycle, marketers can stay one step ahead.

In specific, marketing automated predictive analytics enables marketers to easily discover which prospects are about to buy and which have the greatest revenue potential. It does so by reading and analyzing buying signals all throughout the sales cycle and process. That way, marketers can target the customers they know for a fact are primed and ready to buy – easing their job and taking out time wasted on stubborn prospects.

Cross-Channel Campaigns

Single channel marketing, be it mobile, digital, or offline can not stand on it’s own today. Customers are used to interacting with their favorite consumer brands on any given channel and they expect this same type of business interaction in B2B. When new channels are popping up out of nowhere each and every day, marketers can use their marketing automation platform to incorporate each of these channels as soon as they hit the scene.

By utilizing a marketing automation platform marketers are able to handle all of your marketing communications and you can ensure all messages, regardless of the channel originated, are from one place. This way your brand’s message stays highly consistent and relevant throughout your entire campaign.

Of course it’s relevant to utilize your email, mobile, social, and web channels but the offline channels are heard about less frequently. Marketing automation solutions effectively allow you to bring together your online and offline channels so the messages are no longer obsolete and competing against one another, but rather managed and measured effectively in one place as a part of one campaign.

Marketing automation is changing all of the time and as the marketing industry innovates, new techniques keep arising to make the lives of marketers easier. What other trends have you noticed in marketing automation? What changes would you like to see made in the future?

The post 3 Trending Advancements in Marketing Automation appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Learning the basics of content monetization

Put simply, content monetization is exactly what it sounds like—making money from the content that exists on your website or app. We’re not here to lecture you on the benefits of this marketing practice, we know it’s not entirely groundbreaking and has been around for quite some time. After all, it’s been nearly 20 years since Bill Gates first exclaimed, “Content is King.”

Even so, brands often forget that content monetization involves digitizing all forms of online content. If your mind wanders straight to premium content like whitepapers, online courses, and ebooks, you’re not wrong. But you are neglecting an integral part of the practice—that is, interactive and video solutions. As it’s quickly becoming common knowledge that interactive and video advertising bring back the highest click through rates and revenue opportunities, it’s becoming harder to defend the throne of Paypal accounts and downloadable PDFs.

While the marketing world is just now grasping the value of video monetization, we’re not surprised the practice is finally gaining traction. The most outstanding statistic perhaps is that video advertisements boast the highest click-through rate of all digital ad formats—a whopping 1.84%. In comparison, you’re more likely to survive a plane crash than to click a banner ad. As the popularity of video advertisements grow, it’s difficult to choose the best video monetization platform—YouTube is so yesterday.

Why are video advertisements so clickable

First off, they’re memorable. The average person views 1700 banner ads per month, but try to remember even one! On the other hand, video advertisements do an excellent job of penetrating your sensory memory. This is because it both stands out against common, mundane ads, and also evokes emotional impact—two key factors that should always determine your ad monetization strategy. All in all, the combination of audio and visual is an effective way to grab and more importantly, keep the viewer’s attention.

Second of all, video advertisements are amazingly suited for mobile, an industry that has exploded in the last couple of years. And for good reason: by 2018, 38% of the United States will be viewing videos on their smartphones and 45% on their tablets. If we didn’t know any better, it would seem that video advertisements were almost made for mobile. Because video ads take up the entire mobile screen, viewers are forced to watch it and are left without the choice to wait the ad out, open another tab, and distract themselves with cat videos.

It gives more meaning to completion rates, which some marketers argue are not the best measure of user engagement as it doesn’t ensure that the video was actually watched. Additionally, mobile video ads can be pre-cached, meaning they load ahead of time so they can play automatically. The user experience is much more seamless and enjoyable. For this reason, Webyclip and other interactive video tools seem to be the future of video marketing.

In short, video advertising offers endless possibilities for both innovation and increasing revenue, providing brands an entirely new angle to approach a trade that has been around since the Pyramids. While video monetization is still in its early stages, we’re excited to see how the industry progresses.

The post How Video Monetization Is Changing the Ad World appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Without feeling like the Titanic, content curation is one solution to keep us from sinking.

Personally, I believe that the foundation of content marketing is built out of both creating and sharing great content that your followers will be interested in reading. But, we’re faced with a conundrum- with an overwhelming amount of content online, it’s hard to know where to begin. Content curation has begun to gain traction as an answer to all our content problems.

What exactly is content curation?

Many of us are still try to wrap our heads around the idea of what it is and how we maximize its full potential. According to marketing guru Beth Kanter, “Content curation is the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme.” Sounds simple enough.

Let’s say hypothetically, I wanted to publish a new post on my blog about marketing trends and my research led me to an article about “How to predict the future of marketing, interactively speaking”. After reading the article and reviewing the comments, I come up with an article from my own point of view including a link back to the post. Additionally, I share the initial article socially to all my followers in order to build my influence whilst simultaneously high-fiving the author. This is content curation live in action!

Content curation helps you expand your audience and become an influencer. At the end of the day, your audience will be the ones to share your content and spread the word. Many content curators turn to Twitter for all their content sharing needs. They can tweet content several times a day without coming across as ‘spammy’. The proof is in the pudding- as 25% of tweets contain links, but 56% of retweets contain links. It’s no wonder that content sharing via social media is today’s preferred method of content curation.

The downside: create vs. curate

In the world of content marketing, curation does not have a favorable reputation. It makes sense, as ultimately content curation relies on others sharing abilities to leverage your own goals. Many view this as lazy and border line plagiaristic. It can be a touchy subject for marketers. But content curation is not the biggest catastrophe it’s made out to be. It has many benefits and can offer your marketing strategy the right ingredients to achieve your business goals.

So what’s the right way to go about content curation?

Content curation does not mean that you must replace content creation, it should be a marriage of the two aspects. Curating content is meant to alleviate some of the editorial burden and provide an increase in conversions. Your role as a content marketer is made up of one part creator and one part curator. Take note, that when curating content you’re only looking for inspiration to create your own individual content and not to copy someone else’s hard work. This can damage your page rank with Google as well as your reputation.

If you’re already sharing content with your customers via Twitter or any other form of social media- that’s a great start to curating content. However, it’s not enough to be relegated as a trusted source. There are far better ways and tools to curate content whether you’re a beginner, intermediate or advanced content curator.

Content curation for the beginner

Speaking of Twitter. We know that Twitter can be a crazy streaming mess if you’re not already using Lists to arrange the accounts you follow. A Twitter List is a curated group of users that you can create or follow. In Twitter’s attempts to make their service more approachable and user friendly, Lists continue to be vastly underrated. Another perfect example of using social networks as a content curation tool is Pinterest. By following people in your industry, you’ll have access to plenty content ideas. Save these ideas to boards on your account and use them to curate excellent content for you and your clients.

Content curation for the intermediate

Let’s say you’re looking something a bit more comprehensive and you’re willing to fork out a few dollars on a subscription- tools such as Scoop.it is a popular example. Part content curation tool, part social network, Scoop.it allows you to create boards of curated content based on topics you choose, share your thoughts on that content, and connect with others who have similar interests. They also send a daily update about the topics you follow to notify you with the most relevant articles to share.

Content curation for the advanced users

For the serious game players, enterprise-level curation software is the way to go. These type of tools work well for businesses with a team of users, editors and content curators. Curata is a brilliant content curation tool for the high-level user. The tool automates the tedious tasks (search, organizing, and publishing ) while giving you complete, centralized control of the human tasks (evaluation, contextualizing, and approval).

All these tools are effective, but most content marketers simply follow industry blogs and look to social media to fulfill their curation needs. In essence, creating original content and curating content are both powerful ways that you can generate more leads. But, a combination of the two will bring about the best results. Not only, does it enable brands to engage with their audience more regularly, it informs marketers what type of content they should actually invest in.

The post Content That Sells: Curate and Convert Using Social Media appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

No one is immune to these internet tricksters, so what’s a socially active company supposed to do? Lucky for us, there are ways to hack-proof our accounts and reduce potential risks. Learn from other company’s mistakes and follow the S.A.F.E method to keep your social media accounts safe.

S. Secure your passwords

The two most popular passwords still being used to date are 12345 and password. Yes, I’m still in disbelief too! This is one of the only things standing between your company’s social media accounts and it’s hackers. Your business’s reputation is on the line if you get hacked, make sure that each social profile password is strong and that you change them as often as your bed sheets. Try replacing letters with symbols or use a uniform capitalization format that all your employees would know. For example, if your password is ilovedogs substitute one of the letters for a $ sign, so your password will look like this: ilovedog$. As complex as this may seem, it’s one of the easiest ways to prevent hacking. You may want to invest in an advanced sign-on technology that will allow employees to use their own unique passwords to sign into the account to make posts and changes, the more variety the better.

A. Account awareness

Hacks don’t always come from the outside and at times could even come from rogue employees. You may discover that your employees have started dozens of “corporate” social media accounts, often without official permission. By centralizing control over all your social accounts with a platform such as Hootsuite, you will be able to tighten security and strengthen your brand’s online presence across various social profiles. Platforms such as the latter help you to control all social activity in one place. But, infiltrators can still magically find their way in. There are ways to prevent hacking into your beloved accounts with an app like LogDog, which sends you automatic warnings before the hacker potentially compromises a business account. These apps are worth the investment as they help you take social as seriously as you should be.

 F. Follow privacy policy changes

Most social platforms like Twitter and Facebook adjust their privacy policies and security settings quite often. The platforms constantly come up with new ways to keep profiles secure to avoid any security breaches. Keep up to date and follow all the new policy changes on a regular basis, and check out for any options that have been updated that will make life difficult for the hacker. This should be a routine part of your duties as a social media manager as some policy changes have been big enough to alter social media as we know it!

E. Educate your company

It’s only been a few years since social media was in its infancy. Today, it’s one of the pillars of marketing and sales for many companies. So it’s in your best interest to school your employees on basic social media education. By providing your social media managers with structured training on security, compliance issues and even best practices ensures that they are set up with the tools for success. We recommend using Lynda’s extensive library of social marketing training to keep updated on the industry. Specifically their “Up and Running with LinkedIn” and “Pinterest for Business” classes can do wonders for your social media awareness.

Keeping your company’s social media accounts safe is simple, just make sure you’re using the perfect tech systems, appoint the right employees to the task and be in the know on your network updates. And with that, your social will always be S.A.F.E!

The post The S.A.F.E Method to Hack-Proof Your Social Media Accounts appeared first on Social Media Explorer.