Exactly what happens when Mari Smith mentions you…

Industry folks call this the “Mari bump”. When you’re fortunate enough to get an endorsement, you can expect to get a nice bump in traffic.  Even a Mari sneeze can do wonders. She mentioned one of my articles in her weekly Social Scoop newsletter. And it drove 434 visits the next 48 hours. It’s high quality– the average visitor stayed …

How to promote a band for the cost of two 12 packs.

by JOSHUA HAMBY I try to help my friend’s bands as much as possible here in Greenville, South Carolina. One of these bands is A Moment Electric (AME). They only started really focusing on their social presence in late December during their album release show. After a few days, their singer Justin had asked what Facebook ads they should run. I suggested …

Is Facebook Collapsing Under Its Own Weight?

That’s what this opinion piece for Entrepreneur Magazine argues.   The writer claims that because the amount of sharing is doubling every year, there is now so much information out there that people can’t cope. And Facebook’s algorithms cannot adjust.   Every time someone logs into Facebook, there are an average of 1,500 pieces of content that they “could” see, were Facebook …

Credit unions banned from advertising on Twitter

Did you know? I can understand banning get rich quick schemes and loan sharks, but the local credit union? Notice that Twitter is banning the small business financial institutions, so the major banks can still advertise. Well, at least they can organically post pictures of their print ads:     Meredith Olmstead from Social Stairway manages social for credit unions, …

Have you tried exclusion targeting?

In Power Editor, you can exclude folks you DON’T want to hit. For Google PPC veterans, this is the equivalent of negative keywords. For example, if you ran a personals site, you’d bid on “dating”, but have “carbon” as a negative to not match on “carbon dating”.   With Facebook, we can choose targets and exclude audiences within them.  For …

How Will Facebook Graph Search Change Sponsored Results?

With Facebook’s announcement of Graph Search, marketers anxiously awaited to see how they could take advantage of the new real estate. Look at all that space! Last fall, “Sponsored Results” started appearing in the search bar. Even though there isn’t much traffic, these ad units are surprisingly powerful. We’ve seen CTR in the 5-10% range, and CPCs of $0.05 – …

What is a Social Media Professor?

With social media becoming the main channel of interaction, establishments such as the University of Louisville now offer courses in it. Also jumping on this trend, University of Florida offers a Masters in Social Media. Hofstra University has worked with us to create a social media curriculum, using our ContentFactory University partnership program where we assist teaching social media and analytics …