Social Media Content Marketing

There is money to be made in social media. But it's not being made where you'd think -- or at least where I thought. The bulk of the money is being made by companies and individuals selling services to other companies and individuals with the hopes of making money in social media. Confused? Me too. Thanks to social media, the days of the banner ads as revenue generators are behind us.  Pricing was based on traditional print advertising, but used visitors rather than subscribers as the benchmark. Then when tracking became available, advertisers charged by viewership or "eyeballs", And that morphed into click-throughs,  and later into conversions. To be honest, I don't think they were a good investment once the novelty wore off. Today, I am never quicker with a click then to shut those pop in ads for newsletter subscriptions et al. You still see banner ads (mostly on mobile) but online ads were replaced with search engine ads and corresponding landing pages...

Have you made a post, shared a photo, or commented on one of your social networks that you later regretted? If you answered, "no," then you're doing it wrong. It means you're not posting enough. We all have regrets in life, and I'm willing to bet it's more what you haven't done than did. If you're in social media, you've got to be in all the way. Not that there's anything wrong with reserving comments. I think there are many people who post far too much -- or more to the point, far too much uninteresting junk. No one's ever gone to a comedy show and complained "He was great, but he made me laugh too much." Like wearing yoga pants, everyone has the right to post, not everyone should . However, if you answered "yes" to the question, then congratulations are in order. Not for your poor choices, but for your decision to take chances and recognize your mistakes. Most successful people do both. When I post, I do ...

If your marketing department hasn't gotten the results you expected from your social networking by now, it probably never will. It's not their fault. It's just the wrong channel. I'm a digital marketing consultant who spend his days as a social media strategist, write a syndicated column on social media, have authored social media best practices eBooks, and by some standards, am a pioneer in social media. And I consider myself a social media student as you can't be much of an expert on what's been around for such a short time. So it always puzzles me when a client reaches a frustration level with the results, or rather the lack thereof, that they are achieving from their efforts. They'll say: "I've got my Facebook, Twitter and YouTube pages up. And I'm paying some kid to write content and post and tweet and blog and...I'm not seeing anything."  Sound familiar? Measuring ROI on social media certainly is possible though since there...