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Employ someone and you have to consider salary, workspace, and equipment; not to mention benefits like medical care and paid vacation time.
Conversely, freelancers are only paid for the work they do.
This is generally (though not always) more cost-effective than taking on someone in-house, and allows you to increase or decrease their workload as needed.
This makes outsourcing extremely flexible, which is a huge win for small businesses.
But don’t get too excited just yet… there’s a hard part: actually finding great freelancers and managing them effectively.
Thankfully there’s plenty of tools designed to help you do just that (and many more being released all the time).
Let’s take a look at some of the more recent additions to the market that can help you to outsource and manage your content creation in 2016...
A study investigating the psychology of social media sharing indicates that people share because they want to make valuable content accessible to others.
When your audience members scrutinize your social media content, they form an opinion about your brand based on what you put out there, and they determine whether to share you content with their own audiences.
The buzz and engagement your Facebook page or Twitter account enjoys in the days or weeks following its launch may die down pretty quickly if you cannot supply consistently high-quality, share-worthy content to your community. Thankfully, content discovery tools are available to help marketers maintain a high level of engagement on social media....
What if we stopped trying quite so hard with our video content marketing? What if we just told our true stories honestly and simply, and with empathy for the very real problems our customers have?
A video from a tiny Arizona startup busts some common myths about using video as part of a content marketing program. There are three other things to love about it, too....
Newsreader app Guide is no more… well, at least in its current form.
The company that once aimed to help consumers better digest the news with a video channel of websites read by its lovable avatars has been reborn as a service for publishers. It’s still focused on the news, but has evolved into a platform that provides online sites with inexpensive quality videos, which may have been originally thought of as being too far out of reach. The new service launches today.
What publishers receive from the reborn Guide is technology that will turn any news article, like the one you’re reading now, into a video. The company says that its process will “auto-generate” multimedia videos in a way that is “inexpensive, fast, and at scale.” Prior to launch, the service had already been in use on 270 sites. Guide claims that the average click to play rate was 19 percent, while the average completion rate was 47.8 percent.
Guide intends to monetize its service through standard fees for voice-over work and advertising inserted into videos placed on a publisher’s website. In addition, it will license its technology through a SaaS offering where publishers can pay per video and on a CPM rate....
Metta helps turning stories into short movies out of pictures, videos, text and sounds that are already published on the web. Polls and quizzes can also be embedded anywhere inside a video presentation to get controlled responses from viewers.
Via Baiba Svenca
Images tend to receive better engagement metrics than regular posts when shared on social networks, so what if you could add underlying content to images in order to further drive brand engagement? Thanks to PassionTag, you can do just that.
PassionTag is a mobile app (currently only for iOS) that essentially allows users to attach content to images via ‘SmartTag’ functionality. The images, along with their SmartTags, can then be shared on Twitter and Facebook, as well as through email and SMS messaging. By leveraging the app, users have the ability to turn static images into interactive photos that contain actionable tags that extend the story they want to tell....
With YouTube Chad Hurley and Steve Chen made publishing videos easy. Now they want to make it just as easy to create them.When Google wanted to boost the quality of YouTube’s content, it gave out $5 million in grants to select creators. YouTube cofounders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who sold the service to Google in 2006, are now tackling the same problem, but with a different philosophy.
They hope that a new app they are launching on Thursday, called MixBit, will make shooting quality video scalable and accessible to everyone.“Unfortunately I think YouTube is going down the route of rewarding the select few around content creation, be it with partnerships or with ways of funding original content,” Hurley told Fast Company. “I can understand, it’s great to stimulate the community and make money available to them. But I feel that’s a more traditional approach to solving the problem. It’s basically replicating the studio model...I’m looking for something that doesn’t necessarily alienate any group of people, but gives them all equal access.
”That apparently includes people who never shoot any video. With MixBit, as with Instagram video and Vine, users touch their phones’ screens to take multiple video clips that the app combines into one video. But only MixBit allows other people to use those clips, if they’re public, in their own videos....
Adding an audio message to your classroom blog or website can be a good way to help deliver important messages to your students and their parents. Posting an audio message, even if it covers the same content as a written message, can increase the chances that a visitor to your blog will take notice of something important.
Adding an audio message to your blog or website is not difficult to do. Here are five free services that you can use to add an audio message to your blog or website....
Twitter has become much more than 140-character blurbs, and now Tweetbot is using that additional content to turn our media-rich feeds into a stream of photos and videos for users to quickly scroll through. An update released today for Tweetbot on iPhone and iPad introduces a new timeline view that displays images and videos — including content from Instagram, Vine, and YouTube — inside of the Twitter feed. The display uses tweets as captions for the content, and it omits any tweets that don't include something to look at. Twitter has been working to enrich its feeds with news stories, images, and interactive content by letting developers create multimedia cards — but so far that effort hasn't exactly livened up the text-based medium on mobile devices. Tweetbot's media stream may do just that; it doesn't require users to actively open content to engage with it, and instead works by surfacing those images and videos. While it may repeat tweets that have already gone by, it's an easy way to catch up on things you may have missed. The new timeline appears to display all image and video content supported on Twitter itself, as well as select outside sources, such as Instagram, that require custom support. However, the view doesn't include all of the frills and shortcuts that Tweetbot's traditional feed has, though it can be quickly toggled on and off at the top of a timeline beside the app's search box. No announcement has been made about when or if the new view will be coming to the desktop, but if it's anything like the mobile-centric apps that it resembles, it could be a while....
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How do you juggle and manage the many hats you need to wear as a social media manager?
Creating content, scheduling shares, engaging with followers, repurposing content, sharing others’ content, community management… This list could go on forever.
The only way to effectively manage social media at scale is with the use of social media management tools that can improve your efficiency, and over time get you better results.
The tools we discuss below help you do that. Many of them have similar features, however they are all different in terms of the BEST way to use them. Choose the ones that fit your your needs and give them a whirl. Here are 17 of the best social media management tools available....
With businesses allocating more and more money at Content Marketing year upon year, it is important to get the most of out of your time. The SEO Experts at Verve have once again compiled a go-to list for you to reference when marketing your content. We have split this list into 4 categories for your easy consumption:...
According to a recent survey by Cision, published in November 2013, 96% of journalists use social media on a daily basis.
The role of journalists is changing. They have a role in finding and filtering content, curating, interviewing influencers, verifying stories, adding context and also adding content such as tweets or videos from eyewitnesses to news stories. This helps explain why a third of journalists in the survey spent over 2 hours a day on social media.
The survey found that journalists typically use social media in one of five ways as follows: - monitoring - sourcing - verifying - networking - pub & promoting.
The proliferation of social networks can be overwhelming for journalists. However, many of the social media tools used frequently by marketers can also be very helpful to journalists to manage their time efficiently. Below is a list of free social media tools that can be useful for journalists....
The player may look (mostly) the same on the surface, but behind the scenes we rethought everything from the ground up. Our re-engineered back end means that videos load twice as fast, and we simplified the front end to make it compatible with way more devices. Here’s a quick(ish) rundown of some of the coolest new features...
Though the tasks have gotten significantly more complex and intellectual, today’s web tools fall into the same general categories, either enabling new tasks (creating infographics) or performing manual tasks faster and more easily (sharing information across multiple social networks and profiles).
Ever wish you could search for something by sketching it rather than using text? Send professionally formatted emails from your Gmail account? Easily develop optimized landing pages for marketing campaigns?
Find tools to accomplish those tasks and many more here in more than 20 of the best cool online marketing tools and reviews of the past year....
The company behind the .co domain has been working to associate .co websites with startups and innovation. Now its founders are trying to make it as easy as possible to start a business online with a new company called Pop.co.
thisBasically, Pop.co is a bundle of online services that should remove any barrier between coming up with a cool idea and building a web presence around that idea. This approach is particularly important in a future where entrepreneurs run “three or four micro-businesses at a time, easy come, easy go, and you don’t have to keep the domain forever,” said CTO Tom Lackner — he suggested you should even be able to set all this up from your smartphone.
Lackner and CEO Juan Diego Calle gave me a quick demo of Pop.co. You just pick the .co address that you’re interested in (assuming it’s available, and if it’s not, Pop.co will suggest alternatives), then the company automatically claims it for you, and you can either use Pop.co’s simple web page editor to create the page with just a little bit of typing, or use its simple DNS editor to point the website to a page you’ve created on another service like LaunchRock or Barley....
Somewhere between a PowerPoint presentation and a full-fledged video is the audio slideshow. Creating audio slideshows can be a good way to add meaning to slides that otherwise might not mean much without a presenter. Here are some ways that students can create audio slideshows....
Not every newsroom or journalist has the resources to take on projects like the New York Times’ Snow Fall or the National Film Board’s Pine Point. Whether you want add a multimedia extra to your text post or create a web documentary, digital storytelling tool Zeega makes it simple to create immersive, interactive stories with a slew of multimedia features and a professional feel. The tool aims to “democratize the web as an interactive audio-visual medium,” said Ahmed Kabil, Zeega’s community manager, during a NewsU webinar that gave a step-by-step tutorial on using the platform. Here are some key features and how journalists can use them....
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Here are some surprising tools to help you manage your content creation inside and outside.