Today I’m going to help you cut through the noise and really narrow down which platforms are best for your business. We’ll follow this up with an infographic that will help you better understand your chosen social media platforms.

The 3 Crucial Steps to Choosing the Ideal Social Media Platforms

Looking across the various platforms to choose from, it quickly becomes apparent that not all social media is created equal. In fact, each of them has a unique twist on the concept of social networking.

Knowing this, it’s also fair to assume that you’re going to find a very different audience on each platform. To help your business focus all of its social media marketing efforts on the proper platforms once you’ve finished creating a blog, here are four steps you should follow to choose your platforms.

1. Ask Yourself The Right Questions

Since each platform has a different approach, it’s important to ask yourself a few key questions about the ones you’re looking at:

• What is this platform’s unique approach?
• How do its features meet the needs of my business?
• Which audience uses this platform?
• How much time is needed to have an impact on this platform?

Starting with these key questions ensures that you’re taking the proper approach from the beginning. It will also help you better understand the purpose of each platform you’re considering.

2. Find Where Your Audience (And Competitors) Are

Successful businesses have buyer personas they use to define the various types of customers in their audience. You may have much of this information already, and you should use it to find out where your ideal audience is on social media.

Take a look at this slideshare presentation. done by UTA Brand Studio. Here you’ll find that there are indeed specific audiences that gravitate towards certain platforms. Combine this with research as to where your competition is hiding, and you’ll have a basis for your ideal platforms.

3. Look at the Data

A simple way to help make your decision is to look at the breakdown of today’s top platforms. These numbers will easily help you narrow down your choices. Here are the top platforms based on monthly active users courtesy of Statista:

• Facebook - 1.59 billion
• Instagram - 400 million11
• Twitter - 320 million
• Pinterest - 100 million

How to Master Your Chosen Social Media Platforms (Infographic)

Now that you’ve chosen your platforms that will work best for your business, it’s time to learn more about them. Each one has its own intricacies and hidden secrets. By truly understanding the platforms you’ve chosen, you can utilize the tools and features they offer in the most efficient manner possible.

Take a look at the infographic below, and let us know which platforms you decided to pursue in the comments!

[xyz-ihs snippet="Hubspot-CTA-Leaderboard"]

The post The Ultimate Guide to Choosing Social Media Platforms for Your Business (Infographic) appeared first on RELEVANCE.

With $21 billion estimated to be spent on native advertising by 2018, marketers can’t afford to misstep. Luckily, we can look to groundbreakers in the industry and learn from their experience. Relevance reached out to 14 active and well-respected professionals in the native advertising world and asked them:

“What are some native advertising mistakes marketers are committing?”

Here's what they had to say:

Revcontent

Richard Iwanik-Marques, Vice President of Marketing, LinkedIn

"Native advertising is a relatively young industry, and a lot of marketers are learning as they go, which we love at Revcontent. Testing new strategies and implementations for your marketing efforts are what drive data and new learning that will ultimately lead to sustainable and scalable revenues, engagement and brand awareness for marketers.

One trend I've seen all too often is marketers underestimating the importance of providing a value-added discovery experience to their audience. Instead of telling a story and relating to their audience, marketers moving into the native space are using traditional display experiences that don’t engage with a consumer and almost come off as a digital version of a billboard. The reason native is so effective as a means of driving brand awareness is the non-intrusive nature of the messaging. If you’re creating a campaign for native, put user experience at the forefront of your decision making. If the messaging doesn’t accomplish a true story-telling narrative for the people engaging with your content, it is highly unlikely you will accomplish the goals of your campaigns.”

Storygize

David Osman, Co-founder and CEO, LinkedIn

"Programmatic native advertising supports content marketing. We’ve observed the following mistakes stemming from a misunderstanding of how in-feed native works:

• Absence of Content Marketing Strategy. If a brand hasn’t defined buyer personas, created content specific to stages of a buyer’s journey, or thinks promotion ends with search and social channels, a native ad campaign can’t succeed.
• Lack of Valuable Content. In-feed native ads drive users to content valuable to them. If the brand hasn’t researched their buyer persona’s challenges, crafted content especially for them, and constructed the destination page meant to inspire a predefined action, then the campaign won’t deliver.
• The Bait & Switch. Native advertising serves as a more polite way to engage consumers and direct them to useful content—that’s why it’s successful. If a brand uses an attractive photo and enticing headline and then drops them off on an unrelated or annoying product page, the audience not only loses interest but loses faith in the brand.
• Disregard for Contextual Relevancy. Well executed native ads are relevant to the editorial context of the placement. The idea is to grab the customer’s attention while they’re consuming related content, where they’re likely to click on the ad and find content to inspire conversion."

Nudge

Ben Young, CEO, @bwagy

"The most common pitfall marketers fall into is making their content too short. At Nudge we specialize in tracking native content and have our finger on the pulse of the market.

Content producers are too aware that it is advertising but are losing sight of the end user. The end user is browsing the web and clicks on an article they WANT to read. Don't hold back at 300-400 words: give them more of what you've got.

Half the battle is getting attention, so give yourself the opportunity to hold it when you get it."

inPowered

Peyman Nilforoush, CEO and Co-founder, @ThePeyman

"Display advertising is a $100 billion industry that has failed miserably to engage consumers. Statistically speaking you have a better chance of surviving a plane crash than clicking on a banner ad. The average click-thru rate on a banner ad is 0.05%, meaning 99.95% of people who see a banner ad don’t click on it and they don’t work because they interrupt the user experience instead of enhancing it. That’s why the idea of native advertising has been revolutionary. Simply put, by giving users content that’s native to their experience the ad is now all of a sudden valuable to the user. This is why we’ve seen a dramatic shift of ad budgets from display/banner ads to native.

The biggest challenge, however, is making this change successful. It comes down to the idea that native advertising has to first and foremost be useful for the end consumer; it MUST offer value and it most certainly CANNOT BE DISRUPTIVE. There lies the biggest mistake that some of the world’s largest brands are making when it comes to native advertising:

• NOT using content as the creative for native ads and instead using an image and click URL as if this is display ads 2.0.
• Sending the users to landing pages as opposed to useful content that offers real value.
• Measuring clicks as a success metric. The ONLY metric that matters is engagement and actions that have resulted from your campaigns.
• Paying for clicks and impressions; unless someone reads the content you are promoting, you’ve just wasted your money.
• Running native ads across only one or two channels. Every piece of content has its own audience, and unless you distribute your content broadly across many native networks you are most likely not scaling enough to get sufficient ROI.

While native advertising has been around for a few years, the implementation of it is still very new to the world’s largest brands. The opportunity for native advertising is to be synonymous with advertising, and it begins and ends with the consumer experience."

OneSpot

Adam Weinroth, CMO, @aweinroth

"One of the biggest overlooked opportunities in native advertising is thinking deeply about relevance. Amazon, Netflix, Google and others have conditioned consumers to expect a personally relevant experience everywhere they go online. If your native advertising program isn't part of a broader effort to get the most personally relevant content possible in front of the consumer, you might find yourself earning lots of impressions on attractive sites but potentially very little meaningful engagement that leads to actual business results. The best brands are working to make content resonate at the individual level, and having that relevance span across many different digital channels, not just one."

Bidtellect

John Ferber, Chairman of the Board and Co-founder

"The most common mistakes advertisers make is that they either think they do not have content or they are using the wrong content. Many advertisers will use offer-driven content as a way to engage their audience when consumers engage in a deeper fashion with content that contains value. Value-driven content is educational, informative and engaging. Advertisers need to think more like publishers to be effective in the modern web."

Keywee

Yaniv Makover, Co-founder, CEO, @YanivMakover

"Native advertising still frequently tends to come across as tone deaf to readers. Too often the material lacks cohesion with the rest of the publisher’s content, leaving the audience with a bad taste in its mouth. Consider a serious news outlet posting celebrity puff pieces for a brand shilling cosmetic creams. That disconnect shouldn’t exist in native advertising. In its best form, native advertising provides value to the reader and feels natural among its neighboring content. For the best shot at achieving this, brands might consider working with publishers’ in-house content studios, since they should have the deepest understanding of what resonates with their audiences."

Taboola

Adam Singolda, Founder and CEO, @AdamSingolda

"As an industry, I think the main area where I see a big opportunity is to evolve from branded content or custom studios that were originally invented to drive high impact (“top of the funnel”), into measuring what happens when someone finishes reading a story.

I think we need to evolve from measuring “engagement” into metrics on actions, so marketers feel comfortable doing campaigns again and again. As an example, if someone spent 1- 2 minutes reading an article, should marketers do it again? I’m not sure, but if people sign up to the brand newsletter after they finish reading, that starts to become interesting. It demonstrates they want to stay in touch.

These are not traditional ROI metrics per se, but soft conversion metrics that can help both marketers and publishers work together and build meaningful partnerships."

iQ by Intel

Luke Kintigh, Global Paid Media and Content Strategist, @lukekintigh

"Many brands see the advent of native advertising simply as a new container for their digital ads. However, it is not the format that’s the real promise of native. Rather, it’s how native ads when done right match the format, function, and user expectation of the environments where they are placed. Unless the content inside native ads is as valuable and immersive as the natural content surrounding it, users will reject native ads just as they have with banners and other disruptive ad formats. As advertisers, we must have the mindset that our content can compete and even beat editorial content when it comes to quality and relevance to the end user. It is time to disrupt the age of disruption and show consumers that native advertising is much more than a new ad unit. Native has the capability to add value to the user instead of distracting from it.”

Outbrain

Will Fleiss, Head of Content Marketing, @willfleiss

"A glaring mistake I see marketers make with native advertising is when they only look at each piece of content from the campaign perspective, with a definitive beginning and end. Instead, native should be seen as part of an on-going content marketing strategy that aims to address the complete customer journey throughout the various stages of the funnel. Too often native advertising functions merely as another format for packing self-serving messages into the trusted places where audiences go to find relevant and interesting content when it should be about building a relationship with the consumer. That happens by consistently delivering valuable content that tells a story from one piece to the next."

Relevance

Chad Pollitt, Co-founder, VP of Audience, @ChadPollitt

"The biggest mistake I’m seeing these days with native is the funnel alignment of content. Native is really good at scaled top-funnel content promotion. However, it’s not an effective channel when merely broadcasting mid to bottom-funnel content. That’s what PPC and display are for. Marketers need to use native to tell a story – only delivering mid-funnel content to the people who have consumed and engaged with top-funnel content already. As marketers, we need to respect the buyer’s journey. Native shouldn’t be treated like traditional paid digital channels. Don’t just hand an RSS feed over to the PPC guy and say figure it out. You’ll just waste money and moan about how native doesn’t work."

Adblade

Jon Carmen, SVP of Operations, LinkedIn

"Not putting enough time and effort into ad creative. We see many advertisers that just try to re-purpose Display Ads into a Native Format. Unfortunately, it does not always translate. Native Ads need to be “headline interesting” but by no means 'deceptive.'

Advertisers may be overpaying because their vendor may be less adept at weeding out traffic fraud, which is now at epidemic proportions.

Many digital ad vendors have poor compliance programs which can place an advertiser’s offer in close proximity or adjacent to content or offers which would make most legitimate advertisers wince."

Zemanta

Todd Sawicki, CEO, @sawickipedia

"Advertisers’ biggest mistake with native advertising is applying last click thinking to a top of funnel solution. Native advertising allows marketers to connect users to content. Content helps generate awareness, interest and consideration, and now native advertising allows marketers the chance to market from the very top to the bottom of the funnel online - so start with native advertising to drive larger pools of users who are aware and interested in your product, and then close them with more last click oriented solutions like search marketing or display retargeting."

Native Advertising Institute

Jesper Laursen, Founder, @jesperlaursen

"Here are three of the common mistakes that we see way too often:

• Disguising traditional sales messages like relevant and valuable content. We did a global survey on native advertising in the magazine industry, and one of the biggest challenges for publishers was to make marketers understand that you need to tell real stories that engage the audience. People are way too smart, busy and picky to let you get away with dressing up a traditional ad like a piece of editorial content.
• Failing to integrate a native advertising campaign with content marketing projects running on the company’s own media properties. It doesn’t have to be all about building your permission base, but you should somehow leverage the access to all the eyeballs you’re renting.
• Far too many marketers underestimate how good the content needs to be. Getting your content in front of people is nowhere near good enough. You need to engage, move and motivate people to make native advertising work, and that takes outstanding content. Remember you’re competing against the content of the media you’re running on and that’s usually pretty great. Mediocre content will only make you fall flat on your stomach."

In Summary

To end with a final piece of advice, David Ogilvy, the “Father of Advertising,” said, “It has been found that the less an advertisement looks like an advertisement and the more it looks like an editorial, the more readers stop, look and read.” Armed with this information, nothing can hold you back in creating phenomenal native advertising.

The post Native Advertising Mistakes You Might be Making According to 14 Insiders appeared first on RELEVANCE.

Revcontent CEO and founder, John Lemp, accurately predicted this change seven years ago when starting his company, whose mission is to provide quality native advertising and content recommendation in the media and publishing industry. Relevance recently had the chance to speak with Lemp about the company, its technology’s effect on content marketing today, and predictions for the future.

Revcontent’s Rapid Rise in Content Recommendation

Friends’ evaluations of the industry are what inspired Revcontent’s founding as a response to a growing need. “We came together with this mission because we saw seven years into this industry Native Advertising and Content Recommendation was not all it was hyped up to be,” Lemp said. “We had friends at large media companies telling us the quality of advertising they were getting was horrendous, the revenue was nonexistent and no one was willing to innovate and provide the user experience they desired.”

Revcontent’s aim is to provide publishers and consumers with a content recommendation platform that creates the best possible user experience. “I heard one of our engineers compare us to the iPod of Native networks - we weren't the first just as they weren't the first mp3 player, but we are the most simple and most empowering,” said Lemp.

Boasting a partner list which includes Forbes, NewsWeek, InTouch Weekly, and more, Revcontent has developed into the world’s fastest growing native advertising network, despite entering the industry almost a decade after its competitors.

Holding their publishers to higher standards is what Lemp believes sets Revcontent above the competition. “We don’t want to work with just anybody, and we are extremely selective,” Lemp said. “We saw there was a race to the bottom in a lot of ways. Everyone is bragging that they have 80,000 or 100,000 people they are working with, but the quality of our network, content, and brands are so important.”

Content Marketing to Build User Relationships

The content recommendations made by Revcontent helps their partners build relationships with users. The purpose is to keep users on their site and engaged with the content and the brand. Lemp explained Revcontent’s technology, Revcontent Personal Web, here:

“If you go to Newsweek, Forbes, CBS Television media properties, and more, you will now see a little green gear on the bottom right hand of our units where users can completely customize the ads they see based on what they love. For example, I love my faith, parenting tips, and anything technology - so that’s a few of the customizable interests I would use. We will be rolling it out to across our entire 200 Billion recommendations a month in the upcoming weeks.”

Giving users the power to customize the content recommendations they receive builds a stronger relationship between Revcontent’s partners and their customers.

Lemp believes that creating a better user experience is vital for the entire industry. “Our goal (and we know we’re still growing in this) is to create the best user experience possible. As an industry, the better we get at creating a great user experience, the better we can be,” he said. “It’s more than just us, we want to see the entire industry get better at that,” he said.

The Technology Behind a Business’s Content

Revcontent’s partners seek to provide their users with personalized content and content recommendations because they know it builds trust and a better overall experience. These values extend across industries and paying attention to technology can help companies achieve these goals.

Lemp gave insight into what he believes is most important for improving user experience. Website speed is at the top of the list. He brought up Google AMP to improve site speed. “One of the newer projects out there is Google AMP, who we partnered with, which is stripping out all of the slow annoying bits from mobile web pages and giving users a fast loading mobile experience, which is becoming a must have,” he said.

Providing a seamless experience across devices is also very important. Last year, mobile became users' preferred device to access the internet, and as wearable tech continues to gain popularity, screens are only getting smaller. Lemp noted the importance of optimizing content for all devices. “No one wants to wait three seconds for content to load on an Apple Watch and then not be able to find what they’re looking for because they are exiting out of pop ups or trying to minimize a huge photo,” he said.

The Future of Native Advertising in Content Marketing

Lemp said the one guarantee for the immediate future is change and lots of it. He referenced this article and Business Insider’s Native Ad Report’s statistic that native advertisements will drive 74% of ad revenue by 2021.

Long term predictions from Lemp include the spread of native and the internet. “In the more long term future, eventually native will be all around us, and the internet will not be contained to a web,” he said. “I see a world where the web and the real world become one, and that world will be driven by intelligence.”

He sees Revcontent’s technology as a step toward the future. “ The AI we are building right now for our recommendations is the first step to lead to a more intelligent world around us, a world where this intelligence can lead to a future and deeper intelligence in robotics, a deeper intelligence in all systems,” said Lemp.

“We also always want to make those systems open, so no one can slow down the power of the people and the ability for the future of media to build relationships with people wherever they are. It's our choice - an open world where media, innovation, and freedom flourish or a world defined and controlled by one single company. “

So, what do Revcontent's technology innovations in content recommendation and these predictions mean for marketers today? Adapt to change or get left behind. Brands must be willing to change quickly and learn from mistakes made. Lemp’s final word of advice was to not fear failure when trying new things but, rather, expect it and learn from it.

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