YouTube Tips - How do you trigger the YouTube algorithm?

How are your videos going to be discovered?  Some great ideas on how to trigger YouTube's algorithm and get your video seen here. 

Why Your Organic Facebook Reach is Declining

It’s no secret that Facebook’s organic reach has been declining over the last few years. If you are a marketer and have noticed that fewer and fewer people seem to see your Facebook content unless it is boosted, you aren’t going crazy. That is happening and it’s because of the Facebook algorithm.

But there is a reason it is happening and there are ways to beat the algorithm and get your posts seen by the right people at the right time even with the decline in organic reach. Here is an explanation of what is happening to organic growth and how to beat the algorithm.

There’s too much content

Everyone publishes content on Facebook now and everyone wants their content to be seen. That has created a very crowded Facebook newsfeed. Facebook noticed that people were becoming overloaded with content and that organic reach was declining despite the algorithm.

Getting your content seen on Facebook has become an intense competition. Every company is battling to have their content seen by their people. The problem is, many people are fans of companies that directly compete with each other.

Because of that direct competition, Facebook had to make a choice on which content was seen. That choice was driven by two things: content and relevancy.

Facebook wants to give you the content you want

The extreme influx of new content forced Facebook to make decisions on which content was seen organically and which content wasn’t seen. Facebook has always had the goal of delivering people the content they want to see when they want to see it.

This means that whatever content is the most relevant to the Facebook user, that will be the content they will see. Facebook only wants to show people the content that they believe they want to see. Loading the newsfeed with everything that gets published every day is too much. It would drive people from Facebook.

In a nutshell, the relevancy measure is there to help you and Facebook users. There is no point in someone seeing your content if they won’t take action on it. Of course, that doesn’t make it any less frustrating for digital marketers.

Thankfully, there is a way to surpass the algorithm and get the reach you want.

More Facebook ad spend equals more reach

It’s not the ideal solution, but it’s the only one that seems to work every time. While video content and live video content have still managed to perform well organically despite the algorithm, Facebook is turning it’s platform into a largely pay for play model with companies.

Truth is, if you want your content seen, you have to pay for it. Facebook wants to make sure the users see the content from their friends, family, and pages they regularly visit first. If you want a spot on the newsfeed, you are going to have to pay for it.

As Facebook’s ads manager and ad tools have gotten more sophisticated, digital marketers have long been suspicious of the motives. There were rumblings of Facebook wanting to make advertisers hand over more and more money and unfortunately it seems like those rumblings were true.

While Facebook does still reward great content with good organic reach, if you are a brand, you have to pay to be seen. Facebook knows their worth. They know that their users are valuable and they know that brands have little choice but to pay to reach their followers.

Of course, you can still spend time on video and live video in an effort to cut advertising costs. There are plenty of ways to be creative and engage your Facebook followers. Embrace creativity and you will be able to beat the algorithm.

If you want to learn more about advertising on Facebook, my done-for-you system can help.

The Most Important 2017 Social Media Trends

Marketers have to constantly stay up on social media trends. As cumbersome and time-consuming as it may be sometimes, social media is an aspect of business that has to be paid attention to if a company wants to be successful.

The landscape of social media is constantly changing. New platforms pop up almost every day and the algorithms of existing platforms usually change just as you have gotten the hang of the first platform.

Staying abreast of social media trends can mean that you either have a really successful social media year or a really bad year. Here are the most important trends to look out for in 2017.

Live video content

Last year, Facebook and Twitter launched their live video content services and about half of all marketers indicated that live video would be a major part of their social media plan in 2017.

In order to make live video work for you, consider which social media platform your customers used the most frequently. The platform where you get the most engagement is where you will have the most success with live video.

When you plan a live stream, make sure that you are streaming content that your audience will care about. Some good examples are big company-wide events where you’re releasing new products or announcing new initiatives, question and answer sessions with your customers or with high-level executives, and/or product demonstrations.

It is important to not haphazardly throw together live video content. Your customers expect top-notch content and you have to deliver that with your live streams as well.

Messaging apps are the new customer service tools

If you haven’t noticed already, many of your customers reach out to you on social media before they call or email you. Social media and the messaging services attached to social media platforms have quickly become an invaluable customer service tool.

People prefer when they can chat with a customer service representative one on one and don’t have to wait on hold or be bounced around from representative to representative.

Meet your customers where they are. Start to train your customer service representatives in social media. Consider investing in a social media management tool that makes customer service easy. Once you start making this change, your customers will become happier and more responsive to your customer service efforts.

Mobile advertising will become significantly more competitive

Marketing on mobile devices shot up in the last few years. Once people started browsing the web and social media with their phones instead of their laptops or desktops, mobile ads started to become more and more important.

If you were one of the few brands that were early adopters of mobile advertising, good for you! But sadly, there’s some bad news for you in 2017. Mobile advertising is going to get increasingly more competitive as more and more brands start to move from desktop ads to mobile ads.

The mobile ad marketplace is going to get crowded fast and that is going to make it really competitive. Advertisers should be prepared to up the quality of their content and add more money to their mobile ad budget.

While Facebook and Twitter are still going to command a lot of the mobile ad space, Instagram and Snapchat are going to start to become more and more important. People are responding to ads on Instagram faster and better than was anticipated, so Instagram optimized ads are going to be important.

The bottom line with mobile advertising is, companies need to take a hard look at their mobile ad spend and the mobile optimization of their website if they are going to compete. If you don’t have a mobile-optimized site, get on it ASAP as it could take you down this year.

If you want to learn more about social media trends of 2017, take a look at my done-for-you system today.

Outdated SEO Practices to Stop Doing

The world of digital marketing is constantly changing, especially when it comes to search engine optimization or SEO. SEO is one of those cornerstone practices for digital marketers that make the difference between a good online presence and a great one.

Because SEO changes what seems like almost daily, the most effective SEO practices are always changing and evolving. These changes mean that SEO practices are continuously becoming outdated as we learn more about the internet and search engines change their search algorithms.

In order to make sure that your website stays on top and current with SEO, there are a few SEO practices that you should permanently retire if you are still practicing them. To help you out, here are 4 of the top outdated SEO practices that you need to stop doing now.

Focusing on Keywords and Not Clicks

This may sound totally counterproductive to SEO, but you have to stop focusing on keyword density instead of clicks. Having all the keywords on your webpage or in your articles may seem like the best way to get a higher ranking on search engines, but if they aren’t drawing clicks, the keywords don’t matter.

Having the right raw keywords is still important for SEO, but it’s not more important than getting the click. If you want to rank higher, your webpage and articles need to have the proper balance between keywords and clickability.

Take the time to write and create engaging and interesting content that will draw the click and work the keywords in as you do that. It is important to note that we are not condoning clickbait titles and descriptions, but you should take a hard look at what is drawing the clicks and how to apply that strategy to all your pages and articles.

Too Much Anchor Text on Internal Links

It use to be that heavy anchor text on internal links would improve your SEO value. This is no longer the case. Search engines are now taking into account pages and articles that are inappropriately using anchor text to manipulate their SEO ranking.

Make sure that you are using anchor text appropriately. If the internal link is in the header, footer, site navigation, or sidebar, add appropriate anchor text. If you are using it simply to manipulate search engines and it has no other value, get rid of it to ensure that you penalized by search engines for bad anchor text use.

Creating Pages for Every Keyword Variation

Creating new pages for each variation of a keyword is still a very widely used tactic with SEO specialists and digital marketers. This use to be a highly effective tactic to ensure that search engines would rank your page for a keyword regardless of which keyword variation a person searching used.

Google has since gotten savvier about this tactic. It is now suggested that keyword variations are sprinkled into a single page in an appropriate manner instead of having multiple pages for each keyword variation. This signals to search engines that your content is designed to be helpful and useful instead of just to manipulate SEO rankings.

Paying for Links

When companies started to realize the SEO value in link building, companies started to appear that offered to sell links in large directories to help boost SEO value. This worked for a while. Search engines tracked these links as link building activities that signaled that the website being linked to was an authority and this boosted their SEO value.

Google and other search engines have since realized that companies were paying for these links to just boost SEO value and started pushing websites that were using them by downgrading their SEO rank. They recognized that these directories were not a credible source and wanted to discourage the link building manipulation.

As a general rule of thumb, it is advisable for companies to not pay for any links unless it is part of a legitimate partnership. For example, paying a blogger to write about a service of yours that they use and then have them link to your site is okay and helps boost your SEO value, but paying a random site directory to list your link is bad.

If you are interested in learning more about outdated SEO practices and how to make sure that you aren’t using them, check out my website and my done-for-you system to improve your digital marketing.