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Words of Wisdom: Lee Odden’s Top 9 Insights on How to Succeed at Influencer Marketing 2.0

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By Caitlin Burgess

Today’s content marketing space is a tumultuous one. Content shock, ever-changing search engine algorithms, social media’s midlife crisis, growing consumer distrust in brand messaging—marketers are constantly challenged to adapt and scale their strategies to simply bolster visibility, nevermind reach objectives and prove ROI.

Emerging from the noisy marketing mix is a promising strategic marketing star that can capture the attention of hard to reach buyers, improve audience engagement, bring insightful perspectives to the forefront, and build brand trust and credibility.

Of course, I’m talking about influencer marketing.

Spokespeople, brand advocates, experts—brands have been tapping “influential” people as marketing and advertising partners for a century. And, just as it’s always been, in the modern era of influencer marketing, some love it, some hate it, and plenty of people question whether it “actually works.”

At TopRank Marketing, we see credibility, value, and opportunity in influencer marketing; people crave credible content.

And we also see authenticity, relevancy, and thoughtfulness as defining characteristics of the modern approach to influencer marketing—we call it Influencer Marketing 2.0.

Lee OddenOur own resident marketing influencer and CEO, Lee Odden, has been evangelizing influencer marketing inside and outside company walls since 2012, before the practice in the content marketing realm went boom.

Lee’s been named the No.1 “Influencer Marketing Influencer” by Onalytica, and his expertise on the subject has been featured on top industry publications including CMO.com, Forbes, and Social Media Examiner. Lee was also instrumental in the Influence 2.0 research report in partnership with Traackr and Brian Solis of Altimeter Group.

So, what is the “Influencer Marketing 2.0” approach? Let these words of Lee Odden wisdom—words that have defined how we’ve architected our influencer marketing manifesto—lend some guidance, focus, and inspiration to your influencer marketing efforts.

How to Approach Influencer Marketing 2.0

Co-Create for Greatness

Content is the foundation of marketing. Period. But marketers repeatedly cite that consistent creation of strategic, quality, engaging content is a top marketing challenge.

But as Lee often says:

If you want your content to be great, ask influencers to participate. – @leeodden Click To Tweet

When you co-create content with influencers, you not only provide influential experts with a medium to share valuable insights, but can also provide your audience with a mix of perspectives—upping your storytelling capabilities and credibility. In addition, some influencers already have a desire and knack for creating content, so an opportunity to collaborate will be welcomed and beneficial to your business.

For any kind of content a business creates and publishes to the world, there is an opportunity for collaboration with credible voices that have active networks interested in what those voices have to say. – @leeodden Click To Tweet

However, it’s also important to note that co-created content isn’t inherently valuable or set up to drive gangbusters marketing success. Value and relevance is certainly in the eye of the beholder—your audience. As a result, you need to stay true to your audience and your influencers, which requires an integrated approach that includes SEO and other proven content marketing tactics.

As Lee has said:

With an understanding of keyword demand, B2B marketers can tap into the opportunity to be the best answer … (adding influencers) to that optimized content will give it the credibility and engagement needed to inspire action. – @leeodden Click To Tweet

Influencer Marketing 2.0 In Action

Content planning software company DivvyHQ* took their marketing the “back to the future”, launching a long-running campaign that included a sequence of connected content marketing campaigns featuring relevant influencers.

The SaaS company secured contributions from top content marketers for campaigns that resulted in significant increases in credibility and engagement. Additionally, the campaigns exceeded performance goals and added to DivvyHQ’s bottom line. The end result was this interactive eBook asset.

DivvyHQ Back to the Future eBook

Define Influence for Your Brand & Audience

Influencer marketing is often pegged as a tactic rooted in compensating celebrities or brandividuals with large social followings to push your product or service. But influence isn’t defined by popularity or number of followers:

Influence is the ability to affect action. – @leeodden Click To Tweet

There may be no bigger mistake than focusing on “shiny object” individuals; fame by association is more than hard to come by. There is absolutely a place for brandividuals in your influencer mix, but it’s important to remember that:

Everyone is influential about something. – @leeodden Click To Tweet

Your brand, industry, product or service, and audience is undeniably unique—and influence varies. Furthermore, it may be easier than ever to give the perception of influence. After all, Twitter’s recent purge of suspicious accounts sent some individuals’ follower count into a landslide.

However, the potential is there to validate and build relationships with relevant, experienced individuals—inside or outside your organization; broad expertise and niche knowledge; large or intimate yet engaged followings—who have the ability and willingness to affect action.

Nurture Relationships Early & Often

At its core, influencer marketing is all about brands engaging and developing relationships with individuals—individuals who have relevant topical expertise, reach, and resonance that aligns with the goals of the brand.

But strong, lasting relationships aren’t built overnight. Some influencers are frequently tapped to participate in various projects. In addition, other more niche experts or rising stars may not be as experienced in content collaboration. So, as Lee says, you need to develop rapport with influencers early:

Grow your influencer network long before you need them. The day to create an army of influential advocates isn’t the first day of the war. Find common interests and develop rapport. – @leeodden Click To Tweet

And your work shouldn’t stop after the first collaboration. You need to keep connections hot and mutually beneficial. In addition, for those more niche experts or rising stars, you can help them create more influence for themselves and your brand.

Work with an influencer, you’re friends for a day. Help someone become influential and they’re a friend for life. – @leeodden Click To Tweet

Influencer Marketing 2.0 In Action

Prophix*—a leading provider of corporate performance management (CPM) software solutions—combined original research with influencer content to create crush-worthy content marketing force.

With an interactive quiz, with influencer micro-content featured throughout, serving as the anchor asset, additional tactics such as long-form influencer interviews, email marketing, and more, rounded out this campaign.

The results? In the first 45 days, the anchor asset landing page garnered a view rate six-times higher than the benchmark for a similar resource. It was also the fourth most trafficked page—behind the Home, About Us, and Privacy pages.

Prophix Crush It Interactive Quiz

Entice Participation By Showcasing Value

Whether you’ve cultivated warm relationships or you’re hoping to go beyond social engagement with the first collaboration ask, your success in securing their partnership is grounded in showcasing the mutual value proposition.

Some thought leaders want to bolster or grow their influence, while others simply want to create something their proud of (or their bosses can take pride in). Regardless, be transparent, make sure your ask is relevant, and lead with the value.

Invite influencers to make something together that drives the influencer’s objectives, while at the same time, fuels brand objectives. – @leeodden

Specifically, when it comes to colder relationships, don’t ask too much too soon.

Be thoughtful about how you ask and how you reward when working with influencers. – @leeodden Click To Tweet

Make Amplification Natural & Easy

There are obvious business benefits to working with influencers. Not only do they lend authority and credibility to your content and brand, but they also hold the power to introduce you and your content to their audiences.

Once your co-created content is ready to be released into the wild, at a minimum, provide influencers with the messaging and visuals they need to easily promote on their channels. In addition, make sure the final product lives up to its full potential. Regardless of their intentions for participating, if they’re going to share content with their followings, they need to be proud of it.

If they care, they’ll share. – @leeodden Click To Tweet

Influencer Marketing 2.0 In Action

There are few better examples of this principle in action than SAP’s* interactive microsite designed to help launch their Leonardo platform. Thirty-two influencers were engaged to share their insights on digital innovation topics from blockchain to machine learning.

The content experience was so compelling for the influencers that the share rate was 100%. In fact, several influencers shared multiple times. The content experience was engaging for the audience, too—the microsite had over 21 million social impressions.

SAP Leonardo Interactive Microsite

Put Wisdom Into Action

Whether you love, hate, or question the potential of influencer marketing, it’s undoubtedly on the rise. It’s enjoyed a couple years of big hype, but now is the time to decide if it should be a trusted part of your integrated marketing strategy.

Use these guiding principles and snackable quotes from a pioneer of the craft to help you define what influence means to your brand, and opportunities for collaboration and co-creation.

Speaking of quotes, as the “Prince of Preachers,” Charles Spurgeon said: “Wisdom is the right use of knowledge.”

So, go forth and put your newfound influencer marketing wisdom into action.

Remember how we said that influencers add credibility to your content? Learn how three brands co-created more credible content to drive awareness, engagement, and action.

If you still want more influencer marketing insight, join Lee along with TopRank Marketing Digital Strategy Director, Ashley Zeckman, at their CMWorld sessions to learn how influencer marketing can grow your business. Get the details here.

*Disclaimer: DivvyHQ, Prophix, and SAP are TopRank Marketing clients.

 

By Caitlin Burgess

Sourced from TopRank Marketing

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Not Creating A.I. May Be a Bigger Threat to Humanity, Says Facebook Expert

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By Mike Brown

Artificial intelligence could outsmart and enslave humanity, but our species’ future could turn out even worse if we don’t advance in the field. That’s according to Tomas Mikolov, a research scientist at Facebook A.I. Research, who believes that catastrophic events could have a detrimental effect on society, and it may be machines that save humans from themselves.

“There are these arguments that maybe we should not develop A.I. because it’s going to destroy us,” Mikolov said at the Human-Level Artificial Intelligence conference organized by GoodAI in Prague, Czech Republic on Saturday, describing this scenario as resulting from science fiction drama. “What if actually not achieving A.I. is the biggest existential threat for humans? As the technology is getting increasingly complex, we are producing more artificial substances that could get into the environment. We as humans are actually very bad at making predictions. What will happen in some distant time, 20, 30 years from now if we make some bad decisions? Maybe actually it will be A.I. that will help us to become much smarter.”

Researchers across the industry are grappling with the issue of super-smart A.I. taking control. Elon Musk has called for stronger government regulation, Stephen Hawking warned it could destroy humanity, and roboticist Noel Sharkey is just one of many experts warning about autonomous weapons. A Future of Life Institute survey last year found 15 percent of researchers think A.I. will be either bad or extremely bad for the species.

Mikolov’s comments touch on a more positive aspect of this new technology, though. A.I. is helping save coral reefs, discover new medical drugs, and research new cancer treatments. Norway has used smarter machines to integrate more renewable energy into the grid, while Indian farmers have boosted crop yields by 30 percent in some cases. With NASA declaring last year the second-hottest on record, such advancements could help avoid a major calamity.

Mikolov did agree with Musk on one thing, though. He claimed that developing a symbiotic relationship between man and machine could avoid computers taking over, echoing Musk’s efforts with his firm Neuralink.

Editor’s Note: The Human-Level Artificial Intelligence conference funded Inverse’s travel and accommodation to cover the event, but the organization has no input over Inverse’s editorial coverage.

Photos via Flickr.com/Insomnia Cured Here

By Mike Brown

Sourced from Inverse

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Think Instagram is Your Best Marketing Tool Because of Its Popularity? Think Again

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By Bryan Adams

Here’s how these visual communication platforms differ and why you need to consider what’s best for your brand.

Instagram’s popularity is no secret. With more than 800 million users, 25 million business accounts and two million advertisers, it’s one of the leading social channels and known for its diverse audience. So it comes as no surprise that most marketers assume Instagram is one of the best tools in their marketing arsenal.

It might not be smart, though, to focus all your marketing resources on Instagram. I’ve started using Pinterest a lot more these days–yes, Pinterest–and it’s become a shockingly useful tool for me. I actually prefer it to Instagram now.

Here’s why, and the killer marketing strategies I’ve discovered using it:

Functionality

Instagram is great for uploading personal content and to share your own photos/videos of your brand. You create your page, gain followers and connect; always giving off a more personal experience and Instagram users crave this.

At my agency, which specializes in employer brand, it’s important the content we share demonstrates our business’s authenticity to our audience. It sounds swell and doable. Just be yourself, right? But I remember what it’s like starting out new; having limited employees, the time, resources and having to prioritize tasks.

Instagram does help us do this. But having Instagram to promote your brand, your profile requires a certain level of attention for it to be noticed and reach success. As a new business, you might not have authentic content to post just yet.

With Pinterest, you curate, share and collect quality content, mostly uploaded by others. It’s a great tool for distributing content that doesn’t need to be your own, users just want to be inspired and find ideas.

When my brand was starting out we created a profile based on things we love and built a visual portfolio through pins and boards. This way we were sharing who we were, building expertise, entertaining and connecting with our audience through similar passion.

The platform allows you to segment products and services into tailored groups, which if tagged correctly, can hit multiple target personas. It doesn’t have to be personal to gain engagement and this means there’s no pressure for you as a start-up to get creating content. To establish a following, Pinterest is more practical.

Web Traffic

Social media will only get you so far. You need those leads to get to your site and convert into sales.

Don’t underestimate the power of image search, Pinterest makes it easy for an image to direct the user back to the source as most pins should always include a link. Instagram is famously difficult with links.

I found this useful trying to increase awareness of our blogs and case studies. One simple but effective image could result in major traffic to our website, where users would find both resources and a list of all our services available. This reduced the steps from discovery to conversion, consumers like convenience.

Instagram doesn’t have the option to insert links into comments, posts or stories–unless it’s a paid ad, which isn’t always necessary or financially possible for your business. You can have a link in your text which you can direct users and your followers to, but this assumes a lot about the engagement your content is receiving.

Since the launch of IGTV, we’ve found that we can upload up to an hour of video content–which is a great way of showcasing what we can do. It means Instagram remains good for brand discovery–but you need to have the amenities to get your brand image up to scratch before you can take advantage of it.

Content

The biggest reason I use Pinterest is the shelf life of pins. Pins get discovered a long time after they’re born and continue to drive visits to your sites.

We created one of our most popular boards years ago, and it still gets re-pinned. On other platforms, like Instagram, content is updated as a live feed and posts expire unless users search for your content directly. If you don’t have a big presence on the platform yet, that kind of shelf life unlikely to happen.

Sure, in an ideal world, you’d like to have presences on both platforms. But when you’re first starting out, it’s tough to find the resources and time to simultaneously manage them effectively. Consider which platform can offer you the most value in your current position–and go from there.

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock

By Bryan Adams

Founder and CEO, Ph.Creative@Bryan_phc

Sourced from Inc.

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Messenger Marketing: The New Way To Do Business

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By Omar Jenblat

Within the next two years, 85% of customer-business relationships will be through technology. A huge part of these relationships will take place on messaging apps, where businesses can not only provide lightning-fast customer service but also drive sales. In anticipation, business owners should be perfecting their messenger marketing strategy right now. Facebook Messenger is one of the largest messaging platforms out there, with more than 1.3 billion monthly users.

Platforms like Facebook Messenger are the new trend in the social media marketing world since they allow business owners to reach out to consumers on a large scale through advertisements, then continue to interact on an individual level.

Facebook Messenger Tools For Business

Similarly to WhatsApp Business, Messenger offers a number of tools to help business owners keep their different threads under control. Messenger Greetings are customizable messages that appear automatically when a user begins a conversation with a business for the first time.

Instant Replies are similar to Messenger Greetings, in that they are automatic replies in response to anyone who messages a business. However, these can be programmed to appear after any message, not just the first in a given thread. Saved Replies are messages you can program with common answers to questions like business hours or contact information.

Customer cards, however, are a Messenger exclusive. They give a business important information about the customer at hand to craft the perfect response. Businesses can find information like the customer’s location, local time and even order history.

Why Use Facebook Messenger For Business?

Small businesses can use Facebook Messenger in a number of different ways. Customer service becomes more streamlined and personalized for the customer while there are ample opportunities to increase revenue.

More than half (56%) of consumers prefer to contact customer service representatives over messages than calling a call center. And it makes sense: Issues are often resolved within 42 seconds. Such a quick customer service process helps you get back to more pressing matters while impressing and retaining customers.

According to research, 53% of people prefer shopping with businesses that they can message directly. This is why it is necessary to not only have a Facebook account but also be active on the Messenger platform. Remember to let consumers know what times you will be online and ready to answer questions. Waiting long periods of time without any idea of how much longer the response will take can frustrate customers.

Using Facebook Messenger for marketing is another great opportunity for small businesses looking to get the most out of their advertising budget. The ads cannot seem too pushy or “salesy.” Instead, focus on creating friendly and natural conversations that mention different reasons or benefits why users should continue communicating with your business on Messenger.

Facebook Messenger Ads

Click-to-Messenger ads can be placed on Facebook, Instagram and directly on the Messenger home screen (currently just for the mobile app). The Messenger icon appears on your ad, regardless whether the ad is an image, video or in the carousel format. The best CTA buttons for this type of advertisement are “Learn More” or “Send a Message.” Businesses have the option to create a greeting during ad creation. When a user clicks on your ad, a Messenger conversation will open with your business. If this message was created, it is the first thing users will see. Otherwise, users will be provided a message showing them how to proceed in Messenger.

On Facebook, businesses can also create ads that are placed directly on the mobile Messenger home screen. If consumers do click on your ad, they will be sent to a landing page of your choosing or a Messenger conversation with your business.

Sponsored messages are another type of ad offered on the Messenger platform. These ads are best to re-engage previous customers or Facebook users that have previously interacted with your brand. Sponsored messages are sent to existing threads, which makes them perfect for last-minute sale reminders and updates.

The Future Of Messenger For Business

As technologies continue to develop, there will be even more opportunities for small businesses to take advantage of Facebook Messenger marketing. There are already 100,000 chatbots available on Messenger today.

These chatbots can take the form of a personal assistant and utilize artificial intelligence like Facebook’s M assistant. M can perform many different tasks like reminding you of birthdays or even help you get a ride with Uber or Lyft. M marks the beginning of partnership opportunities with Facebook’s chatbots and AI.

When this kind of technology becomes easier to manage, smaller businesses and organizations will surely be able to create their own projects with M. Using AI to incorporate your business’s expertise and service into a digital personal assistant will increase awareness about your small business and possibly even sales.

Once small businesses are also able to create their own AI-powered chatbot add-ons, it is another platform to advertise products and services. For example, a fashion brand could recommend new stylish pieces from their collection when a user provides their taste as well as clothing size. A restaurant could create a type of interactive menu or offer a delivery service directly from Messenger.

Ultimately, marketing professionals and small business owners will have to wait and see how Facebook Messenger develops as a platform. While ads are available wide-scale and deliver impressive results, it will be interesting to see how chatbots or AI influence social media marketing strategies for small businesses.

Feature Image Credit: Pexels

By Omar Jenblat

President of BusySeed, Cofounder of BusySeed Deutschland UG and coffee connoisseur.

Sourced from Forbes

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Senior Account Executive – London

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Are you looking to further your career in Sales? The most innovative and engaging recruitment platform are looking for ambitious, target driven inside sales execs to join our incredible team.

As a Senior Account Executive, you will be a key member of our sales team, helping to increase the volume of services which existing Jobbio customers are utilizing. This team is still new within our sales department and the successful candidate will have the opportunity to contribute ideas, propose strategies and play and key role in its development.

Reporting to the Growth Sales Team Lead, you will be assigned a portfolio of existing customers and be responsible for onboarding, building relationships, understanding their hiring strategies, and proposing business solutions using Jobbio which will help them achieve their hiring objectives. You will also support your team lead in the coaching, mentoring, and driving productivity of other members of the team.

How you will spend your day

  • Navigate a high volume of sales calls and activity on a daily basis
  • Build trust and effective relationships with your assigned client portfolio
  • Creating and presenting solutions to clients
  • Leading client meetings
  • Build sales pipeline and portfolio daily through calls, emails, campaigns and networking
  • Create and deliver online demo’s of our platform to potential buyers based on their needs
  • Work with Account Executive pod to deliver monthly on target performance
  • Some training to account executive and sales development representative population of Jobbio

Who you are

  • 3+ years’ full cycle technology sales experience essential
  • An expert hunter – comfortable building relationships quickly through cold calling and networking
  • Proven ability to exceed sales targets month on month
  • Excellent negotiation and closing skills
  • Third level education
  • Keen interest in technology
  • Knowledge of the staffing industry is beneficial
  • Team player
  • Salesforce CRM experience is also beneficial

CLICK HERE TO APPLY FOR THIS JOB

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The Simple Twitter Strategy That Helped Us Generate 90% More Clicks

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By Alfred Lua
  • After Twitter changed its rules on sharing identical tweets, we set out to experiment with new ways to boost the reach of our best tweets.
  • This strategy helped us to generate 122 percent more impressions, 87 percent more engagements, and 90 percent more link clicks for our top tweets.
  • It’s incredibly simple to implement this strategy  — you just need to identify your best tweets and retweet them — and it can be done using Buffer or directly on Twitter.com (and Twitter apps). 

Keep reading to see a full breakdown of this experiment and how you can implement it for your own Twitter accounts…

In February 2018, Twitter updated its rules to prohibit sharing tweets that are identical or substantially similar to one another.

Before this rule change, re-sharing top tweets (sparingly) was one of our favorite strategies for increasing our Twitter reach and engagement here at Buffer. And while it was a shame to forgo this strategy, we understand the rationale behind the new rules and are fully supportive of them.

So, rather than dwelling on what used to work, we started searching for other strategies to try.

Here’s one experiment we’ve been working on (and our results in full)…

Coming up with the experiment idea (and testing my theory)

After Twitter had made its rule changes, I noticed that Matt Navara and a few other accounts had started retweeting their own tweets as a way to boost top posts.

This made me wonder if retweeting my own top tweets could be a good way to increase my reach and engagement on Twitter.

So I tested this idea — retweeting my best-performing tweet the following day — with my own account.

Alfred's retweet

And it worked!

According to my Buffer Overview Report, my tweets in June received, on average, 2,356 impressions, 93 engagements, and 30 likes. Whereas this particular tweet received 9,697 impressions, 203 engagement, and 94 likes after I retweeted it:

I saw the same pattern with several more tweets too. And as this strategy worked amazingly well for my personal account, I wondered if it would also work for our Buffer Twitter account.

So with my teammate, Bonnie’s help, we ran a more formal experiment with our Buffer Twitter account…

A Twitter retweet experiment

The plan

The goal of our experiment is to see if retweeting our best-performing tweets could become part of our Twitter strategy. We had two success criteria:

  • Retweeting our own tweets should substantially increase the reach and engagement of each tweet. One of my hypotheses is that the retweet could reach a different audience when it is retweeted at a different time from when the original tweet was published. The second hypothesis is that the existing likes and retweets on the tweet act as social proof, which makes more people want to engage with it. When they do, the Twitter algorithm would, then, show the tweet to even more people.
  • Our followers should find this acceptable. We were looking out for comments on our retweets to see if our followers noticed the retweeting and had an opinion on it.

We had a very straightforward plan:

  1. Tweet like we have been
  2. After one to two days of tweeting, use the analytics in Buffer to a top tweet from recent days
  3. Record the performance of that tweet by taking a screenshot of the stats
  4. Buffer that top tweet to be retweeted one to two days later
  5. After one to two days again, record the performance of the retweet

We started the experiment in June and concluded it in July. Over the period of about a month, we retweeted 10 of our best-performing tweets. And we are very excited to share the results!

A quick note about retweeting

You can only retweet a tweet once.

You could technically undo a retweet and retweet it again (by clicking on the retweet icon twice). I do not have any conclusive evidence that this is beneficial and am not certain that retweeting multiple times is what the Twitter team had intended for that feature.

The results

Drum roll 🥁

I think it was a resounding success!

On average, our retweeted tweets received 122 percent more impressions, 87 percent more engagements, and 90 percent more link clicks. The three tweets with video also had an average boost of video views by 92 percent.

Buffer retweeting experiment data

(We didn’t get many replies for these tweets both before and after retweeting them. I thought I would mention this for completeness.)

Besides the increase in reach and engagement, we were also glad that our followers seem to have found the retweets of our own tweets acceptable. (Or perhaps they just didn’t voice their objections. If you saw our retweets and have an opinion, we would love to hear from you!)

Overall, the experiment validated the idea of retweeting our best-performing tweets to boost their reach and engagement, and we’re excited to integrate this into our Twitter strategy going forward.

So how can you do this for your brand’s Twitter account?

How to retweet optimally

There are two ways to retweet optimally. When I say “optimally”, I mean retweeting your top tweets at the right time to obtain the best result.

The easier and better way, in my opinion, is to use Buffer. With a combination of the analytics in Buffer and our browser extension, you can quickly identify the best tweets to retweet and schedule them for the perfect time.

Here’s how:

Schedule retweets with Buffer

Step 1: Tweet as per usual

Easiest step. 😉 Done? 👍

Step 2: Find your best-performing tweets

Once a week or once every few weeks, go to your Posts Report in the analytics section of your Buffer dashboard. (This feature is available on our Pro and Business plans.)

Your Posts Report will first show you your recent tweets, with the latest tweet at the top. You could scroll down and identify your best-performing tweets with a “TOP TWEET” label. An easier way is to click on the “Most Popular” filter, and we’ll show you all your top tweets in the past 90 days in the order of descending performance.

Top tweets in Buffer Posts Report

If you are on one of our Business plans, you can adjust the timeframe in the upper-left corner.

Step 3: Schedule your retweets

Next, click on the timestamp of the tweets you want to retweet. The tweet will be opened in a new tab.

Tweet's timestamp

Then, with the Buffer browser extension installed, you’ll see an additional Buffer button at the bottom of the tweet. Click on it.

Add to Buffer (with Buffer browser extension)

You’ll see the Buffer composer with a preview of the tweet you want to retweet. You could add a comment to the retweet but for this purpose, we just want to retweet the tweet. So select the right Twitter profile and hit “Add to Queue”.

Buffer retweet

A quick note about timing

For our experiment, we waited only a day or two before retweeting a tweet. That’s because we wanted to experiment with at least 10 tweets but didn’t want the experiment to take too long. My hunch is that it’ll be ideal to wait a few days or even weeks before retweeting a tweet. This will prevent your followers from seeing the same tweet twice within a short timeframe.

Also, you’ll want to space out your retweets with your usual tweets. This is so that you are sharing a mix of regular tweets and retweets, and not a burst of retweets in between regular tweets.

And you’re set!

The helpful thing about using Buffer is that you can schedule retweets in advance without having to wait until a particular day before you can retweet a tweet. If you have found your best times to tweet and added them to your posting schedule, your retweet will be published at one of your best times.

My other favorite advantage is that you can easily rearrange when your retweets will be published (or tweets retweeted), along with your other scheduled tweets.

If you don’t use Buffer, no worries. This can be done manually through Twitter, too.

Retweet manually through Twitter

Step 1: Tweet as per usual

Step 2: Find your best-performing tweets

Whenever you want to retweet your best-performing tweet, go to your Twitter Analytics’ Top Tweets. (Direct link to your Twitter Analytics: https://analytics.twitter.com/)

Twitter will show you your top tweets in order of descending impressions for the past 28 days. If you wish, you could adjust the timeframe in the upper-right corner.

Twitter Analytics' Top Tweets

Step 3: Retweet

Click on the timestamp of the tweet you want to retweet. A good rule of thumb is to pick tweets with a high engagement rate.

(Note: You have to click on the timestamp. Clicking on anywhere else will only bring up a window of the tweet’s activity)

Tweet timestamp in Twitter Analytics

The tweet will be opened in a new tab. Click on the retweet icon, and you’ll be asked if you want to retweet that tweet to your followers. Select “Retweet”.

Retweet to followers

The tweet will be immediately retweeted so you would want to time your retweet. Try to wait a few days or weeks from the day that the original tweet was published and preferably choose a different time from the original published time.

If you wish to schedule your retweets, we would love for you to give Buffer a go. Here’s a 14-day free trial.

And that’s it!

Over to you: What do you think of this strategy?

Whilst we loved re-sharing our top tweets, it’s best to avoid doing that now since Twitter has updated its rules. The next best alternative we have found is to retweet your top tweets. A simple, well-timed retweet can increase the reach and engagement of your tweets, without annoying your followers. This is a strategy that few brands are taking advantage of right now. So I would recommend experimenting with this and see how well it does for your brand (especially before this becomes a common practice!)

Let us know how it goes for you? 😊

(If you disagree with this practice, we would love to hear from you, too. It’s always helpful to have thoughtful discussions, and we can learn together.)

By Alfred Lua

Sourced from buffer

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Sales Development Representative

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Jobbio is continuing to grow which means we need people to help drive our story forward. We are looking for ambitious, target driven Sales Development Representatives to join our incredible team.

As a Sales Development Representative, it is your job to contact senior stakeholders, executives and leaders across Jobbio’s relevant verticals and markets. You will join our newly created Sales Development Team focusing on widening our sales funnel and helping to build relationships with new clients.

For the Sales Development Representative, this is an opportunity to join the headquarters of an Irish owned rapidly growing technology business. As part of this new group, you have the opportunity to learn from the best and move through the organisation at pace as we continue to grow the business at a significant rate.

How you will spend your day?

  • Identifying the key decision makers in target accounts
  • Building relationships with decision makers via phone, email and online/face to face meetings
  • Cold calling and emailing prospects daily
  • Constantly building your pipeline of new leads, contacts and accounts daily
  • Work closely with account executives, senior account executives and team leads to implement a strategy around target clients
  • Learning and training to help you achieve your goals and targets
  • Attending sales meetings, client calls, demos, training sessions, 1:1s to develop your sales skills

Who you are?

  • 1+ years experience in sales, recruitment, marketing, lead generation or a target driven role
  • Enjoy working in a team environment
  • Motivated by reward and opportunity
  • Excellent communication skills
  • You spot commercial opportunities
  • Have a flare for objection handling and love a challenge
  • You get things done and work hard to achieve clear goals
  • Third level qualification in Business, Marketing or other relevant discipline desirable

What we can offer you?

  • Work with the world’s most innovative companies
  • Centrally located office (baggot street) with loads of great food options around
  • Reekly yoga and gym classes
  • Relaxed / smart-casual dress code
  • Monthly team bonding activities

CLICK HERE TO APPLY FOR THIS JOB

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Facebook Takes First Step Toward Owning The Entire Influencer Marketing Space

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By Greg Shepard

Facebook recently launched Brand Collabs Manager, a platform designed to connect influencers with brands. The platform will collect influencer information such as influencer age, gender, location, language, type of posts, topical interest area, content focus and other metrics, as well as links to existing branded content and an insights section which will detail the influencer’s reach and interaction with followers. It will all be presented neatly in an online media kit of sorts.

Brands will be able to input their desired campaign and promotional requirements and then conduct a search using a collection of criteria and filters to arrive at a list of influencers who best meet the needs of the brand and the campaign. Search results pages will display a list of influencers based upon the search criteria, a percentage match to the influencer’s followers and a link to the aforementioned media kit which contains everything the brand needs to know about the influencer.

At this point, there is no charge to either the advertiser or the influencer to use the service, though Facebook will certainly benefit from any resulting partnerships that include paid ad campaign activity on Facebook. There are many players in the influencer marketing space. With influencer marketing set to become a $5-10 billion market segment (according to MediaKix), each and every player will, no doubt, do their best to garner the most from this growth.

With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that there is, quite likely, far more to the launch of Facebook’s Brand Collabs Manager than its current iteration as influencer/brand matchmaking tool.

In a way, social media platforms are somewhat held hostage by their own influencers, users and brands. Most platforms have no control over — and no way to monetize — the organic activity which occurs on their platforms either within posts or buried in comments. Sure, there are guidelines in place that require disclosure but those guidelines only capture a fraction of actual activity.

If Facebook — and every other social media platform — had its druthers, every last post, comment, like, favorite, etc. would be monetized. Since this isn’t and won’t be the case anytime soon, other approaches to monetization must be considered.

It’s clear Facebook would like to capture and monetize as much of this organic activity and the ongoing side deals which occur between brands and influencers as it can in the same way Google wanted in on all the side deal action that was occurring in search. For all intents and purposes, Google has its has its hand in most every element of search. The launch of the Brand Collabs Manager tool just might be Facebook’s first foray into sewing up ownership of the influencer space.

Right now, the tool only pairs brands and influencers within the Facebook platform. Instagram, which Facebook owns, could easily be added into the mix. And while Facebook doesn’t own Twitter, Snapchat and other platforms, there’s no reason the tool — either through acquisition of other, already existing tools or through other methods — couldn’t aggregate all influencer data and offer up a full-fledged tool which would serve the entire influencer space; sort of the way Google now serves pretty much the entire search space.

Yes, there are other, smaller players which provide portions of this solution, but Facebook being Facebook, it’s easy to see this as a first step toward further capitalizing on every possible element of brand/influencer interaction in the space.

While Facebook acknowledges it’ll never be able to directly monetize every last social media interaction, it can certainly indirectly capitalize on a large percentage of brand and influencer activity by becoming the single major platform that connects brands with influencers across multiple platforms.

Would advertisers pay for a tool that easily connected their brand with every possible influencer, no matter their preferred platform? Would content creators pay for preferential placement within the tool thereby increasing their chances of being matched with a brand? Do advertisers and content creators pay Google to increase their chances of connecting with consumers? Yes. Yes, they do. It should be no surprise then that Facebook likely envisions themselves as the Google of influencer marketing.

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock

By Greg Shepard

Serial AdTech and Martech entrepreneur, writer and speaker. CSO/CTO of Pepperjam, an AdTech performance marketing company.

Sourced from Forbes

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Senior Account Executive – Dublin

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Jobbio is continuing to grow which means we need people to help drive our story forward. We are looking for ambitious, target driven Senior Account Executives to join our incredible team. We have 65 people in Dublin with expanding offices in London and New York meaning we’re at a really exciting point in our story!

You are experienced at building senior level client relationships and capable of leading the sales process using a highly-consultative approach. You have an excellent knowledge of how technology can change how businesses scale today and use this knowledge to provide a valued, consultative service for our clients.

As a Senior Account Executive, you are focused on leading large client engagements, prospecting and growing our Sales team.

How will you spend your day:

  • Navigate a high volume of sales calls and activity on a daily basis
  • Build trust and effective relationships with your assigned client portfolio
  • Creating and presenting solutions to clients
  • Leading client meetings
  • Build sales pipeline and portfolio daily through calls, emails, campaigns and networking
  • Create and deliver online demo’s of our platform to potential buyers based on their needs
  • Work with Account Executive pod to deliver monthly on target performance
  • Some training to account executive and sales development representative population of Jobbio

Who you are

  • 3+ years’ full cycle technology sales experience essential
  • An expert hunter – comfortable building relationships quickly through cold calling and networking
  • Proven ability to exceed sales targets month on month
  • Excellent negotiation and closing skills
  • Third level education
  • Keen interest in technology
  • Knowledge of the staffing industry is beneficial
  • Team player
  • Salesforce CRM experience is also beneficial

CLICK HERE TO APPLY FOR THIS JOB

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5 Questions That Will Challenge Your Team to Think Beyond the Short Term

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By Gene Hammett

These six questions will help your team break status-quo thinking to shape a successful future.

Leaders are challenged daily in finding ways to get their teams to think differently. Our organizations tend to fall into patterns that shape the products and services we create. And many times, we get complacent on the way we have always done it — and we all have a hard time seeing other perspectives when we fall into a space of complacency.

This year, Apple CEO Tim Cook, head of the first company to reach a market value of a trillion dollars, gave Duke’s University commencement speech. He shared a powerful message about thinking differently and being fearless. “The greatest challenge of life is knowing when to break with conventional wisdom,” he said. “Don’t just accept the world you inherit today. No big challenge has ever been solved and no lasting improvement has ever been achieved unless people dare to try something different. Dare to think different.”

Growth strategies don’t come from asking the same questions, so consider these six questions I often find myself asking to challenge your teams to think differently.

1. How can we reach our five-year goals in only one year?

Working with dozens of teams to think differently, I have challenged them with an unrealistic time frame. This is where creativity and innovation live. And the answers to this question will give you the most important projects and strategies to drive fast growth.

I use this question with my team to help us pick one major project to go all in on. Over the years, this has allowed us to focus on the right projects, not just doing more work.

2. What would we offer our market in three years if we can’t sell what we do today?

This question requires your team to be customer-centric and think of the desires of the customers beyond what you offer today. It should reveal gaps in serving your customers and allow everyone to see the future. The answers will give insight to the changing dynamics of your market.

3. What would we do if we were fearless with our innovations this year?

Breaking from the status quo and creating something new requires courageous leadership. Courage is moving forward despite fear, letting go of the tendencies to hesitate to spend money on research or to use technology in new ways.

I used this question when working with Patrick Long, president of BizPAL, who works with home service companies to scale. Since then Long has made amazing progress on changing how home service providers can use Facebook in the recruiting process instead of the traditional online job boards.

This innovation to a market that historically has been slow to change has resulted in tremendous growth in revenue and added value for his clients. “Innovation is scary,” he said. “It’s neither comfortable nor easy. However, our commitment to innovation has produced tremendous results when traditional recruiting methods fail.”

4. What part of our marketplace is most likely to be disrupted?

Looking beyond the direct market to the players who want to disrupt your market will help you see areas of future disruption. There could be a group of kids in a garage looking to automate, transform or make parts of your marketplace obsolete.

Challenge your teams to think of the areas that will be impacted first. You can discuss pertinent market indicators and what to do about them so that you are not surprised by the disruption.

5. What failure can we celebrate from this past year?

Failure is a part of growth. This question is about understanding how the chances you took that ended in failure became something powerful to the organization. Maybe it was something you learned about the market or technology that opened up new opportunities?

After selling his digital agency, Jason Swenk, a serial entrepreneur, struggled in finding the right market for his new business helping agencies position their companies for growth and acquisition. When working together, we talked about his strategy and defined a new approach. Looking back on the previous year, he was able to celebrate this failure because his new focus on helping digital agencies exploded in new opportunities took a big change in his mindset.

Now Swenk has helped over 25,000 agency owners all over the world in more than 42 countries and has made millions doing it. All this came from a massive failure he is able to celebrate now.

In his commencement speech, Cook went on share one of the key thoughts he learned from his friend and mentor, Steve Jobs: “Changing the world starts with following a vision — not a path. From him, I learned to never be content with the way things are.”

Let these questions guide you to a new conversation with your teams and allow them to think freely beyond incremental improvement. Thinking differently is not easy, but giving them permission to think beyond the now will open the doors to new opportunities to growth.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Gene Hammett

Speaker, growth strategist, and host of the LeadersintheTrenches.com podcast@genehammett

Sourced from Inc.

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