Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

A recent Reuters Institute study, aptly titled ‘‘I saw the news on Facebook’ looks at how audiences recall the source of news found via social media and search. The study takes into account how users recall where they found a particular story (search, social, or by landing directly on a website), as well as going a step further to measure their likelihood of remembering the actual source of the information.

It turns out that accurate source recall is a legitimate concern for publishers. Here’s the key line from the report:

“Less than half could remember the name of the news brand for a particular story when coming from search or social media. Correct brand attribution was just 37% from search and 47% from social media. This compares with an attribution rate of 81% for users who arrived directly from another page on a destination website.”

So on average, less than half of the people clicking links to news stories in their social media feeds could correctly recall the actual source of the story afterwards, leading to the common scenario where someone says they saw a story ‘on Facebook’....

I was on Twitter the other day when something leaped out of the torrent at me. “Create unique article on any topic in just a click,” the tweet said.

Could this be for real? Could a robot do a better job than I — a professional freelance writer — could?

Considering that writers and content creators like me are doomed if so, I figured I better check it out.

TRYING OUT THE WORD-O-MATIC

So I clicked and landed here , a somewhat dodgy looking page that said Unique Article Creator “is the best article generator tool to generate SEO friendly unique articles from your keyword.” The unidentified people behind the site say the tool finds fresh content and then rewrites it to be unique and have stronger search engine optimization (SEO)....

“If you use a poor headline, it does not matter how hard you labor over your copy because your copy will not be read.” John Caples

A good headline is one that resonates with your audience not one that resonates with someone else’s audience. This is why copying a viral headline format that worked on BuzzFeed or Facebook is a bad idea, particularly if you write for a B2B audience.

Our latest research reveals the headlines that resonate with B2B audiences including:

The top phrases that start B2B headlines

The most engaging phrases in B2B headlines

The most shared numbers in business headlines

The top words and topics that resonate with B2B audiences

The optimum length of B2B headlines

Key lessons for business content writers

The research is based on an analysis of 10 million articles shared on LinkedIn. See our methodology note at the end of this post.

There are several nifty ways to go about pairing fonts for your design projects, including this machine learning-based tool and this Tinder-style app. But if you just want to see some great combinations, you’ll want to check out this excellent guide by designer Lou Levit.

It features 50 top-notch pairings that draw from Google’s extensive web font collection – so you can grab all the typefaces you like for free, and use them on web design projects – and they’re matched with beautiful classic art.

The pairings are organized and navigable by font style and mood (choose from Modern, Striking, Eccentric, Classic, Minimal, Neutral, and Warm). That’s handy for quickly finding a combination that suits your needs, whether it’s to professionally present information or announce an event. Plus, you can download the entire guide as a PDF.

Find the guide, as well as tips on pairing fonts and the handy PDF, over at ReliablePSD.

In a world where everyone seems to be constantly churning out content, you may be feel like you’re not doing enough.

However, there’s an upside and a downside to what I’m about to tell you.

The upside is: There is no universal “right amount” of content to publish. There’s no magic publishing cadence for achieving content marketing success.

Rather, the key is to figure out how much high-quality content you can produce on a regular basis – and then maximize it through your distribution channels to reach your goals.

And that’s the downside: You have to find your own best publishing cadence – based upon your goals – through testing, trial, error, and optimization....

You don’t have to wait months or years to get high rankings in Google. Through Google News, you can instantly shoot up to page 1 of Google.

Now Google already gives you a set of guidelines, but here is what I found is effective:

1. You have to write news worthy content – if you are struggling to find news content you can go to Google Trends or any popular news site to see what’s hot.

2. Create a Google News Sitemap – through the Yoast SEO plugin you can create a sitemap. This way when you have news worthy content they will pick it up faster.

3. Your URL structure has to be unique – if you don’t have news related keywords within your URL you are less likely to rank. By having specific keywords you will shoot up to the top for news related queries.

In addition to that, follow the guidelines Google News gives and you will be fine.

Last summer, we looked at the characteristics of successful headlines on Facebook, parsing the numbers in the NewsWhip database to pick commonalities in the titles of stories that attracted a lot of engagement on the platform.

Our findings at the time pointed to great headlines:

– Being conversational and descriptive,

– Speaking to a personal experience

– Being vivid and interesting,

– Not tricking or misleading the readers.

All of these principles remain the same, especially the last factor, which is now generally de rigueur for any sites looking to seriously develop an engaged and loyal readership through social media. Then at the start of this year, we took another look at headlines that were seeing engagement to see if there were any other obvious trends. Now we’ve identified a few new factors of note for successful headlines on social media, based on the data we’ve seen in NewsWhip Analytics.

As well as the advice we’ve already dispensed around headline etiquette on this blog, here are three more factors to consider when looking to pitch the most effective story description to social readers....

Research on social posting frequency is less conclusive than you might think. Before you post on social media, ask, "Is this worth knowing?"It’s good stuff.

But, it’s not true. None of it is true. Because all of those studies look at the success of each post in a vacuum. How many clicks, likes, shares, comments, etc. did a piece of social content get, and what happens to those baseline results when the frequency of publication goes up, or down?

Every single one of these reports ignores an unassailable certainty about success in social media marketing: Put another way, increased frequency doesn’t imperil your success in social media marketing. Instead, your success is mitigated every time you post something mediocre, or worse....