Previously only available in third-party page management products, Facebook has recently launched Page administrator permissions and post scheduling. Now that these features are native to the world’s most popular social media website, are marketing service providers going to be pressured to deliver more valuable services?

Facebook Promoted Posts: A Step-By-Step Guide (News.Yahoo.com)

Early this year, Facebook announced that a Brand’s Page content is only seen by 16% of its fans. Now that the website launched its slew of ad tools and the Promoted Post feature, businesses have better opportunities to reach out and engage their audience.

Initial Test of Facebook’s Promoted Posts (Baekdal.com)

Thomas Baekdal tries to find out what actually happens when businesses promote their posts using Facebook’s new Promoted Posts. In this thoughtful critique, Baekdal also determines whether the new feature is worth using and paying for.

Facebook’s New Scheduling Feature: 5 Design Missteps (Mashable.com)

After Facebook’s scheduling feature has been launched this week, users quickly discovered several flaws in its user interface. Matt Petronzio explores Facebook’s new Promoted Posts feature and tries to pinpoint and troubleshoot these missteps.

Facebook to Marketers, It’s Time for a Click to Action (BrianSolis.com)

To engage more effectively through Facebook’s social advertising platform, businesses must ensure that all strategies and campaigns commence with a specific purpose.

Creating content for your social media marketing campaigns is a great way to help your brand thrive on the social Web. Original content that is designed to provide value for the targeted demographic can help boost your presence online, attract more people into your fold, and encourage engagements with the existing followers and customers. And sharing those pieces of content on the social networks can really supercharge your Internet marketing efforts, and provide your brand with positive results.

And to effectively carry out any content marketing strategies on the social Web, it’s become the writers and developers’ responsibility to ensure that their pieces are optimized for sharing. Here are a few tips for making your content more sharable online.

Create Great Content

As you may know, content written for any Internet marketing purpose should be engaging, informative, and easy to read. These qualities are valuable in motivating people to consume your pieces, look for what else your brand has to offer, and tell their contacts about it online. And when done effectively, these can compel people to interact with you and your brand, convert them into loyal followers and actual clients, and enhance your brand’s online reputation.

Optimize For the Social Platform

The way you share your content can have diverse effects on how people will gravitate and respond to your pieces. Because of this, it’s important to take note of the different ways every social network and platform can be utilized for your needs. Here, you’ll need to have an understanding of the features and limitations of your intended social media channels.

Twitter, for instance, only allows a limited number of characters per tweet. Because of this, you’re going to have to learn the best ways to trim your messages, include a link to your content, maybe even utilize hashtags, and wrap all these into compact 140-character tweets.

Utilize Photos and Videos

Adding photos and videos to your content not only attract the eye and help layout your content, but they also enhance the message you’re delivering, help you tell a story, and even prompt people to share it with their friends.

• Make sure that the photos or art you intend to use are yours, or at least the owner has allowed you to use them online. This will spare you from any legal problems in the future.
• Always use good quality images. Your content will have a better chance at getting clicked on and consumed on sites like Tumblr and Pinterest where you’re competing for attention amidst pages and pages of colorful images.
• It’s good to have larger images in case your readers would want to look at them full sized. However, merely resizing them on a Web site can greatly affect page load speeds. For this, you can instead create thumbnails that can direct visitors to their full-sized versions.
• The video is an audio and visual medium. Optimize the audios so you can get your message across, and make sure the visuals are contributing to the good user experience instead of being distractive.

Credit Sources

If you used any kind of resources, reference materials, or if you quoted people in your content, never forget to credit them. Aside from it being the right to do from a legal standpoint, attributions can help get your content noticed and even get shared on the social networks. In most cases, these sources are influencers in their respective industries, and being affiliated with them trough your content can be great for your brand’s own reputation.

The sources, perhaps in their own Internet marketing efforts, will be motivated to share your content among their own followers. Naturally, the people who follow these reputable sources will be compelled to visit your site or blog, increase site traffic and engagement opportunities in the process, and even further share your content to their own social spheres.

Among the many strategies brands can get into to market their brands online, creating video content offers a plethora of opportunities across different online platforms. When done properly, social video marketing can help brands have better chances of raising their brand development, follower engagement, and content distribution efforts. And just like any campaign, video marketing entails a great deal of careful planning, effective implementation, and proactive distribution in order to succeed.

Well written videos may be brimming with valuable information for your targeted viewers, but if you make the extra effort to also make them visually appealing, you can make your every footage really pop in more ways than one. Including aesthetics to your focus can help your videos attract people, and motivate them to stay and consume what you have to say. Here are some of the video components you’ll need to jazz up to make great looking videos.

Your Brand’s Logo

Including your company’s logo in your footages will help expand your branding efforts, and will get people to associate your products with whatever good (or bad) content you present. If you can, prominently display your logo on scenes, though there should be considerations. Sometimes, putting up logos in specific scenes can unfortunately cheapen the video production, making it all look like some elaborate platform for product and brand placements.

Shooting Locations

Image by Jonathan Kos-Read

As you plan your video production, you should plan or even standardize the kind of setting for your videos to fluidly present a consistent look and feel.

For instance, videos that review products, offer up tips and how tos, and those that deliver straight news would look good shot in an indoor studio.

Meanwhile, lifestyle and travel-themed videos will work great when shot on location, perhaps within the premises of the store or any kind of establishment you’ll be talking about.

Set and Props

Should you need props or any other set design components, you may want to procure ones that are in good condition. You don’t have to break the bank, but just make sure that things like chairs, tables, devices, and anything else that will show up onscreen look at least decently presentable. When these appear like they were salvaged from the dumpster, they can be distracting for the viewers who may begin questioning your production value, your brand’s budget, and credibility.

On-cam Personalities

People who will be appearing on-cam like the hosts and guests should look camera-ready. No, they don’t have to be glittering, chiseled actor types (that would be great though!), just make them look presentable and pleasant to look at.  It’s hard not to giggle and make fun of the host with chocolate on his teeth, or a guest with hair covering half of her face.

• Hair and Make-up
  Using make-up can help make your on-cam personalities look great. The aim is not to change the way they look, instead you can enhance and highlight good features to make them camera-ready. This lessens any distracting qualities, so viewers can focus on the content they’re delivering.
• Clothing
  Clothes can help solidify the video’s overall look, and at times even help bring out your hosts, guests and your brand’s personalities.

Lighting

Image by Willo Hausman

Needless to say, lighting should be among the top video components you’ll need to invest on. Since we’re dealing with a visual medium, lighting will make a big impact on the quality of your finished products.

Find that sweet spot where the subjects are well lit, but not too much that the luminosity can alter the way things look and wash out visual details. Here, you’ll have to consider the location (indoor/outdoor), the direction of the light, your camera’s white balance settings, and the lighting equipment.

Camera Work

The camera work depends on your desired outcome. Most videos are shot straight anyway with minimal fancy movements and effects, so we commonly set the camera stationary atop a tripod and have it focused on the subjects within the set. In the case of Web series and travel footages, every pan, tilt, angle, and zoom the camera does can contribute to the overall video. It can be instrumental in developing a specific look and feel for different footages, contributes to how viewers may experience and interact with the video, and it can even help tell a story.

Years ago, you’d have to scour through a newspaper’s huge assemblage of articles or watch through a newscast in order to find news and feature stories that you might find interesting. Now, with the rise of the social Web, all you have to do is search through Facebook or Twitter for the freshest news—from those disseminated by news outfits online (and regurgitated by countless blogs), to those links virally spreading via social network chatter.

But because the social media noise is just too thick, there has to be a way to curate all that content to help us zero in on the stories that matter to us most. This is a space where services like Google Currents, Flipboard, and Zite found themselves filling; to sift through the Internet to deliver personally curated content. And joining the fray in this arena is Primatic, a new social media service that scrapes news and other content from all over the Web, and delivers them in a nifty newspaper-like interface for better consumption.

As mentioned, Prismatic takes on the layout of a traditional newspaper, complete with headlines, banner photos, a summary of the content, and a link to read the entire piece from the original source. And behind it is a smart system that enables the service to actually find out what topics interest you.

As of writing, the service is by invitation only, though you can head on over to the site and request for an invite. Once you get approved, Prismatic will begin identifying the topics you talk about on Twitter, including the content you share and who wrote them. However, the sources are not limited to those shared over Twitter; it just uses your feed to understand the topics it may pull in from anywhere on the Internet.

In addition to this, you can also add new interests to your list, bringing in more content into your Prismatic interface.

You can help your blog gain more exposure by using social media. However, each platform has something different to bring to the table; successfully using each is a matter of knowing how to use them. The author offers detailed steps on using each platform to promote your blog.

How To Keep Your Brand Consistency As A Blogger (DailyBlogTips.com)

You need to let your readers gain a clear idea of who you are as a blogger in order for you to reach your goals. One way to do this is by establishing your style and sticking to it for good. You can take various steps to maintain this consistency in your blog as a whole.

14 Proven Ways to Simplify Your Blogging and Get More Done (ProBlogger.net)

Maintaining a blog doesn’t come without certain pressures – such as coming up with an interesting post every time. This pressure is intensified when you need to maintain your blog alongside other responsibilities for the business. However, there are several steps you can take to write a great post without a great deal of effort.

Companies: Stop blogging like you’re Kim Kardashian (BazaarVoice.com)

Nothing turns off readers more than a company blog that only talks about the company. You can better engage your readers by talking about things that matter to them. Find out what these are by asking specific questions.

Four Incredibly Useful Metrics For Small Business Blogging (PushingSocial.com)

While daunting for many businesses, metrics are important in evaluating the effectiveness of your blog. The author shares some advice on using your blog’s numbers to identify any roadblocks to achieving your goals and to improve your performance.

E-mail remains to be an essential communications tool, even with the general public’s obsessions with the connections and engagements on the social Web. It offers closer, more intimate interactions between a brand and its clients, away from the distracting noise that naturally comes with social networks. Aside from this, the benefits and opportunities e-mail marketing can bring to your brand should never be overlooked.

Because e-mail is more of a private affair, it provides the brand multiple opportunities to establish and maintain a closer relationship with the targeted demographic. With it, brands can create client specific strategies, content, and offerings to specific sets of customers in order to achieve any desired results. Here are the different types of e-mail marketing you can use to further your content sharing and customer engagement strategies.

• Special Announcements
  News, announcements, and press releases are sent to alert customers to let them know of new products, services, and promos.
• Exclusive Offers
  You can offer your existing customers special deals, and exclusive content like sneak peeks at new products and services before the general public. You can also send out online catalogues and coupons
• Newsletters
  For brands that regularly create content on their Web site or blog, newsletters are great for condensing the different pieces of content you feature on-site.
• Surveys and Polls
  You can conduct some marketing research by sending out surveys and polls. These questionnaires and polls can help your brand realign your goals and serve your clientele better.
• Invitations
  If your brand is holding an event, you can build you recipient list and then fire up your e-mail client.

Knowing and understanding impressions and the statistics behind every engagement is crucial in measuring a brand’s success on the social Web. For brands leveraging on Facebook, Insights has been doing a pretty good job in helping them understand their progress on the social network. Today, the social media giant has announced that it has improved Insights with a handful of new features to enable companies better monitor their engagements on their social platform.

“The updates provide more insight into user behavior to help you build a more effective Auth Dialog and better Open Graph Integration for your app.” said the announcement on the Facebook Developer Blog.

The latest updates to Facebook Insights will now allow users to easily monitor the number of unique people seeing and accepting their authorization dialogs. And brands with apps that publish stories directly through the Open Graph now have the ability to track the number of unique users who publish, view, and click on these stories.

These additional features will help brands understand the level of engagements they have with their followers through a redesigned, more detailed Insights dashboard that will feature unique user information across a 30-day window.

Authorization dialogs that prompt users under different permissions will be presented with a breakdown of the impressions. It will also show the rates at which users accept or reject permission sets, helping you pinpoint the best permission set to implement to increase user installations of your app.