What 1 Million Tweets Taught Us About How People Tweet Successfully

Given 140 characters, how can you make the absolute most of every single word, hashtag, and link in a tweet?

We’ve been excited to test and experiment with answering that question by trying out headline ideas, power words, psychology, science, and more.

Now we’re happy to share the quantitative numbers—based on 1 million tweets from Buffer users—about what seems to drive the most clicks, retweets, and engagement on Twitter!

tl;dr

The top takeaways from Buffer’s study on ideal tweets

We’ll dive deep into all the Twitter data and findings below. Up top, I’d love to share the overall takeaways that we discovered when looking at the success of Buffer users on Twitter.

• For tweets with images, shorter tweets of 20 to 40 characters did best
• For tweets without images, longer tweets of 120 to 140 characters did best
• The most popular tweet length was 110 to 120 characters
• Tweets with images received more engagement than tweets without images
• Tweets without links got more retweets, favorites, and replies than tweets with links
• Engagement for tweets with hashtags seems to rise steadily all the way to 4 hashtags per tweet.

We are so grateful to have partnered with Lemonly on creating the infographics and charts for this research. Here’s the beautiful design the Lemonly team came up with:

See below for more detail on each of these findings.

A note about engagement and data

In this study, we define engagement as the sum of retweets, favorites, and mentions divided by the number of followers of the account.

We chose to exclude clicks from our engagement measure because clicks were only recorded for tweets that included links (around 70% of the dataset), and we wanted to be careful to not skew the effects of our independent variables by giving so much weight to the link factor.

The dataset includes more than 1 million tweets sent between February 1 and February 17, 2015, in the Pacific time zone. (Toward the end of the article, I’ll share some of the limitations and caveats that a dataset like this might entail.)

Now to the results…

How long are the most engaged tweets?

What the data says about tweet length and engagement

You may have heard that the best practice regarding the length of a tweet is to use 100 to 120 characters, plenty long to get your message across while leaving room for others to add their own comments when retweeting you.

As Twitter has evolved, we were curious to find out if that recommendation still holds true.

From looking at the Twitter data, we noticed a couple of interesting trends:

1. For tweets with images, shorter tweets tend to receive more engagement.
2. For tweets without images, longer tweets tend to receive more engagement.

(We defined engagement as the sum of retweets, favorites, and mentions, divided by followers. We excluded clicks from engagement as the data included both tweets with links and tweets without.)

For overall tweet engagement by length—regardless of whether a tweet had an image or not—we looked at the results from all 1 million+ of the tweets we analyzed.

(This scatterplot chart shows the relationship between engagement per follower and character count, and the blue line running through the data is a smoother, to better visualize the relationship between tweet length and engagement per follower.)

You might notice here that although there seems to be a slight rise in engagement when the character count is less than 40 or greater than 120, the increase isn’t significant enough to quite warrant a claim that tweets with less than 40 characters are best.

In terms of raw numbers, tweets with 20 to 40 characters get around 60 percent more engagement per follower than tweets in the 60- to 80-character range.

We’re a bit hesitant to fully claim that 20 to 40 characters leads to more engaged tweets, due to a number of extraneous factors that could be influencing engagement also. For instance, one of the most significant factors to consider here is how many of these shorter tweets include an image. And it’s possible that fewer tweets have these shorter character lengths so the averages are more volatile.

So how many characters do tweets usually have?

Generally-speaking, most tweets are 80 characters or more.

From our Twitter data, the volume of tweets started rising steadily just after the 40-character length, and the volume peaked between 110 and 120 characters (the long-held idea for best length), with another spike just below the 140-character limit.

In another look, we cleaned the text field by removing hashtags, punctuation, URLs, and empty whitespace. We thought this might help better represent the true message of a tweet, minus the branded/business elements.

After cleaning the text we can see that the character count is more normally distributed around 60 to 80 characters.

Our best ideas about what this means

The first thought that comes to mind:

There are many factors that might influence the amount of engagement a tweet gets (e.g. sentiment, tone, multimedia, etc.). It can be tough to say if one tweet length is better than another, so we definitely recommend testing and seeing what works for your tweets.

To try to get a sense of what else might be affecting engagement, we can look at the top performing tweets where engagement tends to be higher in the data above.

Top Tweets by engagement per follower

Here’s a list of some of the top tweets we found in the study (and a thought or two on what makes these great).

Possibly the world's greatest pie chart. pic.twitter.com/C4AZW9WeBF

— Ink Tank (@InkTankMedia) May 16, 2015

What’s great about this: A fantastic, funny image that acts as the focal point of the tweet (the update text here amounts to a really great caption).

When you're playing wii, but then you have to go sing in the Super Bowl pic.twitter.com/orb1ml8aFZ

— Dory (@Dory) February 2, 2015

What’s great about this: The content is timely (our Twitter analysis was pulled during February, which included the Super Bowl), entertaining, and visual. Again, like above, the image and the text go together to make the joke.

This golden retriever GIF is a straight up daymaker. pic.twitter.com/38bOO7wtyt

— The Animal GIFs (@TheAnimaIGifs) February 5, 2015

What’s great about this: Dogs! The subject matter probably helped quite a bit. It’s also benefitting from the animated image and the funny factor.

And here’s a quick chart of all the top tweets:

My first thought when looking at the top tweets here is that almost all of the tweets include images! The number of tweets that included links (12) wasn’t too different from the number that did (8), but 18 out of 20 of the top tweets included a photo.

Which brings us to …

How does including an image affect engagement?

One of our favorite Twitter tips is to include images with your tweets. We’ve noticed a significant increase—sometimes as much as 150 percent more retweets—when we’ve tried this with our @buffer Twitter account.

Does this advice hold true for all users?

In our dataset of roughly 1 million tweets, around 42% of tweets included an image and roughly 58% did not.

How did the amount of engagement compare for tweets that included images and tweets that did not?

Tweets with images consistently received more engagement than tweets without images.

The above chart looks at engagement per follower, which is a way to analyze the data comparatively for those with tons of followers and those with less.

Tweets with images receive approximately 22.8% more engagement than tweets without.

We also ran the higher-level numbers here on average engagement in total. It’s possible that the stats here could possibly be skewed by bigger accounts or outlier results, though in this case, the charts seem to tell the same story – and maybe even to a slightly greater degree – as the one above.

Does including a link mean more engagement?

We know that including a link leads to more clicks (as there’s nothing to click without the link). But what is the effect on retweets, favorites, and mentions?

We found: Tweets with links tend to receive less engagement than tweets without links.

Around 70% of tweets in our dataset included a link, and the remaining 30% did not.

What does engagement per follower look like for these two types of tweets?

Tweets that do not include links received approximately 25.1% more engagement, on average, than tweets that did include links.

The average engagement per follower suggests that tweets without links tend to receive more engagement, and just in case you were wondering about what the average of total engagement looked like:

Our best ideas about what this means

Seems a bit counterintuitive, right? Tweets without links get more favorites, retweets, and replies than tweets with links.

I was fortunate to have the eyes of my Buffer teammate Tom on this data, and he had a really great thought as to what might be afoot here.

My hunch is it could be partly related to how behavior differs across various Twitter accounts.

I have a feeling that businesses and brands might use Twitter moreso to promote external content through the use of links while personal accounts might be more conversation-focused.
Thinking how this might work on Facebook, for instance, if a company with 1,000 followers posts out a promotional link, it might get 10-15 likes while a personal post to 600 friends might get 50-100 likes.

We took this idea and explored a bit further. What is the breakdown of tweets with links vs. tweets without links, based on different follower tiers?

It’s really fascinating that large accounts do post links in the vast majority of their tweets (around 70-80% of all tweets for accounts with up to 16,000 followers), yet the huge accounts—16,000 followers and up—post a relatively large amount of tweets without links!

Could it be that some of the huge accounts are having more conversations than smaller accounts?

It’s an interesting theory and a good reminder that the data we’ve explored here includes everything from everyone who shares with Buffer—both brands and individuals.

A couple extra thoughts:

• Should brands start composing tweets without links? It’d be a good test to try. My best guess is that there’s likely a lot of factors that would be hard to predict. For example, are people less likely to engage with a conversational tweet because it’s from a business vs. from a friend?
• It might also be interesting to mention that tweets with images were less likely to contain links than tweets without images. Since we learned from the earlier takeaway that image tweets get great engagement, it’s possible that images could play a big role in the engagement effect of tweets with or without links, too.

Can including a hashtag improve the amount of engagement you get?

We’ve mentioned in past articles that hashtags help your tweets. We’ve highly encouraged you to give them a try.

Does our new data support this?

Yes!

This plot below shows the average amount of engagement per follower for tweets by the number of hashtags included. It’s fascinating to see a clear positive relationship here. The positive effects of adding more hashtags seems to rise steadily all the way to 4 hashtags per tweet.

So how many hashtags do people usually use?

The majority of the tweets in our dataset, roughly 500,000, don’t contain any hashtags, and slightly less than 200,000 contain just 1. It’s interesting that there seems to be a clear positive relationship between the number of hashtags and the amount of engagement, yet most tweets don’t quite take advantage!

Further notes about methodology

In addition to the way that we went about measuring engagement (retweets plus favorites plus replies), one might also be tempted to give more weight to retweets because they are often considered to be more valuable than favorites or replies. An engagement measure like (2 * retweets + favorites + mentions) / followers could account for this difference in value, for instance. The challenging part was thinking about exactly how much more valuable a retweet is than a favorite or mention. Is a retweet really worth two favorites? We decided to try to keep the measure simple and minimize the number of underlying assumptions and estimations.

Reflecting on our engagement measure, we thought of other factors that might skew the amount of engagement that a tweet gets. The first such factor that came to mind was the number of followers that an account has.

If we think of engagement as retweets + favorites + mentions, then large Twitter accounts are naturally likely to receive more engagement than smaller accounts, even if the smaller accounts follow the best practices of tweeting.

To control for the effect of followers, we used a similar approach used in Dan Zarrella’s awesome study of hashtags, measuring engagement per follower. Using this as a measure of engagement, rather than just retweets + favorites + mentions, helps control for different follower counts and levels the playing field for smaller Twitter accounts.

Further notes about the data

It was fun to look at a slice of tweets from the U.S. West Coast set of Buffer users. Here’s why we chose this particular dataset:

With 1 million tweets we were able do a lot of manipulation quite quickly with a sufficiently large sample size. (Most of the analysis was done on a single computer, and analyzing many millions of tweets on one machine could get quite slow. ) We would love to include many more millions of tweets in the dataset, so we’re looking into using some advanced technologies (Spark and the SparkR package) to scale the analysis. Stay tuned.

Among the limitations that occur with a dataset of this particular size and scope:

• All results will be skewed toward the sharing habits of U.S., West Coast users.
• Seventeen days of data provided a sufficiently large sample, though in the bigger picture it’s somewhat of a short timeframe. It’s possible that other takeaways could have been found if looking at a different or longer set of dates.
• We did our best to analyze the data to account for differences in the size/following of a profile. We weren’t yet able to distinguish between different industries or topics (which we imagine could be quite a helpful next step for future studies).

Over to you

We’re incredibly grateful to share this data with you (and to have Lemonly’s help with the graphs and graphics), and we’re eager to hear your great thoughts.

Our previous data study had such amazing reactions in the comments. I’d love to be available to bounce around some ideas with you here as well.

What questions does this data bring up for you?

What insights might you take away?

What can we help to clarify or explain?

I’ll be hanging out in the comments along with our data scientist Julian to help with anything we can. Excited to chat this through with you!

Image source: IconFinder, UnSplash, Pablo, Lemonly

The post What 1 Million Tweets Taught Us About How People Tweet Successfully appeared first on Social.

Checklist: 11 Things To Do Before Launching a WordPress Site

Are you ready to launch your WordPress site? Each day thousands of new sites appear on the web. That’s why you want to make sure that your website stands out and shines from the very beginning. In this article, we have prepared a handy checklist of things you should do before launching a WordPress website.

Getting Started

Before you start, it’s crucial that you have selected the right web hosting for your project.

While most sites are fine with basic WordPress hosting, in some cases you may need a managed WordPress hosting.

We highly recommend that you read both of the guides above to make sure that you’ve picked the best solution because it’s one of this things that we cannot stress enough about.

For the sake of this article, we will assume that you have already installed WordPress and everything is ready.

Having said that, let’s take a look at the things you should do before you launch your WordPress site.

1. Install a WordPress backup Solution

You should always setup a WordPress backup solution on your website. Backups are like an insurance policy on your website. Should anything go wrong, you can always recover it.

There are plenty of good free and paid WordPress backup plugins that you can setup on your website within minutes.

You want to make sure that the backups are automatically scheduled and are saved on a cloud storage service like Dropbox, Amazon S3, or Google Drive. We recommend using BackupBuddy, it is quick and easy to setup. It can also store your backups on multiple locations. It is also the easiest to restore.

2. Secure WordPress Admin Area

As the most popular content management system in the world, WordPress is often a popular target of hackers. Many WordPress sites run without having to face any of these threats for years, but it is always better to be prepared than to be sorry.

See our list of 13 vital tips and hacks to protect your WordPress admin area.

For all of our sites, we setup a Sucuri firewall which makes your site super secure and prevent you from attacks. It is definitely a way to go if your site is a business.

Sucuri is like having a private security system and guards at your physical business location.

3. Check Your Site for 404 Errors

On a brand new website, 404 errors can create a bad user experience. You need to make sure all pages on your website are loading properly, and there are no missing links.

If you have already added your site to Google Webmaster Tools, then you can find pages giving 404 not found error in your crawl report.

For a new website, it is likely that you haven’t added your site to Google Search Console or Webmaster tools. In this case, you will have to manually browse your site and make sure everything is working as expected. If you have a lot of content, then you can go through your most important pages first like about, contact, registration or login pages, etc.

You can setup email alerts for 404 errors on your WordPress site. This way you can easily monitor and fix them.

4. Setup Email for Your WordPress Site

Failing to send or receive emails from your WordPress site is one of the most common WordPress errors. Some of your email notifications may deliver, but some of them may not.

The reason for this is that most mail servers consider it email spoofing when the sender’s email address does not match the originating domain or server.

Please see our guide on how to fix WordPress not sending email issue.

5. Check All Forms on Your Site

Once you have setup email, the next thing you need to do is to make sure that all forms on your site are working. Test your contact forms, comment forms, email subscription forms, and so on. Make sure every form on your site works properly.

Check your email list and send test emails to confirm that your emails are delivered to the right mailing list. If you are not building an email list, then you should read our article on why you should start building your email list right away.

If you run a multi-author or multi-user WordPress site, then check your login and registration forms. Login with different user roles to check if you need to remove unnecessary items from WordPress admin area for user accounts.

6. Ecommerce Websites

Ecommerce websites need to check the user experience aspects of their websites more thoroughly. You should put yourself in the user’s shoes and try to browser products, add them to cart, and even do a test transaction to make sure everything works smoothly and flawlessly.

If you are selling digital goods, then make sure they are delivered promptly. For physical goods you will need to check your systems for smooth completion of orders.

Some other things you need to check are receipts, invoices, shipping cost calculations, taxes, etc.

7. Check Images, Videos, Sliders

Images and videos make the modern web more interactive. Make sure that all images on your website are loading properly. See our guides on how to speed up WordPress by optimizing images for the web.

You should play the videos on your website using different devices and browsers to make sure that they work as intended.

If you are using a WordPress slider plugin, then make sure that slider is working on all browsers and devices just as you intended it to be.

8. Test Social Integrations

Social media plays a very important role in a successful launch of any product. You need to make sure that you don’t miss out on that.

Make sure that users can find ways to connect with your website on social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, etc.

You should confirm that social sharing plugins on your website are working properly.

It’s also good to enable Twitter Cards, Facebook Open Graph meta-data, and social monitoring tools on your WordPress website.

9. Performance Tests

Performance related issues are usually the main concern during the development phase of a website. But now that you are about to launch your website, it is time to test your website one more time.

Check your website for speed using tools like Pingdom and Google Pagespeed tool. Speed is not only important for user experience it is also an important SEO factor.

One of the best ways to speed up your WordPress site is installing a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache, and use a CDN like MaxCDN.

Most managed WordPress hosting companies like WPEngine comes with built-in caching and includes CDN and backups as part of their plan.

10. Install Google Analytics

You cannot improve without knowing how your readers interact with your website.

Google Analytics is the easiest way to track how your readers interact with your website. It tells you where your visitors are coming from, what they see on your site, when they leave and how well your site is doing.

It is important that you install Google Analytics before the launch, so you can track how your launch efforts performed. It will also help you keep a historical record of the day when you launched and how much your site has grown since then.

See our guide on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress. If you find Google Analytics’ interface a bit overwhelming, then don’t worry we got you covered. See our beginner’s guide on how to use Google Analytics for your WordPress site.

11. Check SEO settings

Search engines are amongst the top source of consistent free traffic for most websites. Optimizing your website for search engines can help you grow your traffic steadily after the launch.

We use Yoast SEO plugin on all our websites. It is a comprehensive site optimization software for WordPress. Take a look at our tutorial on how to install and setup WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast to maximize your site’s SEO potential.

That’s all, we hope this article helped you prepare your checklist of things to do before launching your WordPress site. You may also want to see our list of 40 useful tools to manage and grow your WordPress blog.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

To leave a comment please visit Checklist: 11 Things To Do Before Launching a WordPress Site on WPBeginner.

At Last, You Can Now Add Users to Your Moz Pro Account!

Posted by adamf

Over the past few years, one feature has been requested more than any other. We call it Multiseat, which, at its core, is the ability for Moz Pro account owners to provide unique logins for their team members and/or clients.

Multiseat support is something that we have prioritized, reprioritized, started, and restarted, and for a number of reasons (some good, some less good) we never quite got there. Well, I'm happy to announce that after a great collaborative engineering effort, it is finally here!

We actually launched this feature quietly in August and have been monitoring usage and fixing issues to ensure Multiseat was ready for prime time before promoting it. So far hundreds of people are using it, and everything looks good!

In this post I'm going to describe what Multiseat does, how to set it up, who gets access, and what improvements are on the horizon.

What does Multiseat include today?

This first version of Multiseat supports most of the core functions requested by customers. These include:

You can set up unique logins for team members or clients

With Multiseat, you can add anyone who has or creates a free Moz community profile to your account. Previously the only way to share access was to share your password, which was far from ideal and not a great practice from a security perspective.

Multiseat can be useful in many scenarios:

• Providing access to members of your team
• Offering access to a client
• Inviting a consultant to come help with your campaigns

Before Multiseat, if you were sharing your login, it was a pain to change and redistribute passwords if a team member left or a client engagement ended. Now that logins are separate from your core account, you can revoke access to someone who leaves and keep all of your other logins and passwords intact.

Billing information is now kept private to the account owner

This has been a common request, especially for larger organizations. Credit card and billing information is now kept private and is accessible only to the account owner.

You can independently control which account emails you receive

If your company has a lot of people managing a lot of campaigns, you may receive an awful lot of emails about data updates and completed reports, and for this email clutter I sincerely apologize. The good news is that each person with access to an account can now choose which campaigns to follow and thus limit emails from campaigns that aren't relevant.

You can be a seat on multiple accounts

We've heard that some of you engage with multiple clients, each with their own Moz account. You now have the ability to be added to as many client accounts as you need to. For each account to which you have been granted access, you will be able to log in with your own Moz login and password. No more asking each client to give you their login information, and then trying to remember them all.

Your Moz profile, community history and points will stay intact regardless of which accounts you've joined or left

Another benefit of this update is the separation of community profiles from Moz Pro accounts.

As a seat on one or more accounts, your MozPoints and interactions with the community can now follow you from engagement to engagement.

Sweet! So how do I add add new logins to my account?

If you go to your account settings, you'll find a brand new tab called Manage Seats (http://moz.com/account). Once here, you will have the option to add one or more of your colleagues to your account.

For more details on how to add seats check out this Q&A post.

Who has access to Multiseat?

All Moz Pro customers get access to Multiseat! Depending on your subscription level, you will have access to between 2 and an unlimited number of seats for your team to use. We packaged Multiseat into our existing subscriptions in a way that offers more seats for levels that are are more agency and team-focused.

That said, we are not yet totally sure how customers will be using this feature, so we will learn and tune as we go forward.

The current limits are as follows:

Subscription Level	No. of Seats
Standard	2 Seats
Medium	10 Seats
Large	25 Seats
Premium	Unlimited Seats
Enterprise	Unlimited Seats

What's next for Multiseat?

While we've added a lot of new functionality with this release, there are still some important features that we haven't yet been able to get to. Most notably:

Transfer of account ownership

The next addition we know we need to make is the ability to transfer ownership of an account from one individual to another.

Control over which campaigns a seat can access

For v1, everyone can see all tools and campaigns. We've already received requests to allow the account owner to restrict individual logins so they can only see a subset of campaigns.

Please send us feedback!

This is just the start. We need your help to make this even better. Tell us what critical capabilities we are lacking. Tell us where we built things wrong. Tell us what is confusing. Now that we've launched this feature, we really want to make it work for you.

---

Also, while I have your attention...

I wanted to call out a few other updates that we've made this summer, just in case you missed them:

Mobile Rankings

Not only have we added Google mobile rankings to our capabilities, but we also gave everyone an extra search engine slot so that you can track mobile rankings for all of your existing campaign keywords without giving up any other search engine data you've been tracking. We also added tracking of Google's "Mobile-friendly" tag, so you can see which of the pages you rank for Google considers to be mobile-friendly. Learn more

Search Visibility Scores

It's been a challenge in the past to see how your rankings are trending across keywords. Search visibility represents the percentage of clicks we estimate that you get based on your ranking position(s) for the keywords you track. Filter by brand or any other tag you've added to see visibility for certain keywords sets, and compare your visibility against your competitors. Learn more

On-Page Analysis workflow improvements

After a lot of good customer feedback, we rethought the on-page analysis feature workflow. Aside from a general facelift, we added the ability for customers to add keywords and pages to analyze and track, or to choose them from a list of suggestions that we update each week. Keep an eye out for some more significant improvements to this feature soon. Learn more

You can now keep up with all of our new Moz Pro features and updates

To help you find all of the new features and updates we make each week, we've added a What's New page that is accessible from any Moz Analytics campaign.

Well, that's about it. Thanks for taking some time to read about our new updates, and as always, don't hesitate to let us know what we can do to make Moz better for you.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Why Effective SEO Isn’t Simply About Creating Great Content

It's been argued that SEO is simply about creating great content, but there's much more to it than that.

Why Meaning Will Ultimately Determine Your Brand's Content Marketing Success

Posted by ronell-smith

In 2009 Fletcher Cleaves was a top high school football prospect ready for the next level, eager to do in college what he'd done in high school: rack up yards as a running back. But before Cleaves could realize his dream of playing at the next level, a texting, distracted driver plowed into the car he was driving, forever changing his life's trajectory.

Today, Cleaves, paralyzed from the chest down as a result of the accident, serves as a tragic reminder of something as seemingly harmless as texting and driving can alter lives. It's impossible to watch the video below and not immediately realize three important facts:

1. Texting and driving is a big deal.
2. This young man was unfairly robbed of his future.
3. This big brand nailed the messaging.

Telecommunications brands (and airline companies) enjoy some of the worst customer service ratings on the planet. And to make matters worse, their core messaging via print, radio and online ads is equally atrocious, doing very little to make would-be customers give them a second look.

However, with the latest iteration of the "It Can Wait" campaign, which is rich with stories and features stunning video recreation, AT&T did something all brands looking to make a mark in content marketing should copy: They delivered content with meaning.

The end of utility

We live in a world rich in information and teeming with data. The ability to analyze the results of our content marketing efforts, even in real-time, is as astonishing as it is mesmerizing and revealing. Our teams can know, before a word is written, a design delivered or a report is generated what the results should be based on the assigned key performance indicators (KPIs). The automation present in online marketing can make it feel as though the world we inhabit is more fantasy than reality, as if the press of a button will always lead to the results we expect.

Yet we still struggle with how to create content that commands attention, that nudges prospects to take immediate action, that leads to the vast majority of our customers moving from brand loyalists to brand ambassadors and advocates.

Why is this?

I propose that we've misread the tea leaves.

In the last three years, marketers (even this one) have sung from the rooftops that your content must be useful and relevant, have immediacy, and deliver impact. And if you followed this advice, you likely found a modicum of success, if only for a short time.

How could we expect any different when the customers we're all clamoring for are being bombarded with thousands of messages every day? When that happens, even the most resonant voices get drowned out. And for those of us who've thrown our hats into the usefulness and relevance ring, we've largely committed ourselves to a life of struggle that's tough to recover from.

This line of thinking occurred to me in July of 2014, as I finished Jay Baer's book Youtility during the plane ride home from MozCon 2014. I agree with and applaud Baer for bringing to light the novel term, which he defines as "Marketing that's wanted by customers. Youtility is massively useful information, provided for free, that creates long-term trust and kinship between your company and your customers."

But I'm afraid this ship has largely sailed. Not because usefulness is any less importance, but because the threshold was so low that every brand and their sister jumped online via websites, social media, forums, message boards and everywhere else with information that temporarily sated prospects' appetites but did little to create a lasting impression.

If your desire is to create a brand whose content is sought-after and, indeed, clamored for, you must bake meaning into your content.

Without meaning, your brand's content is adrift

Like many of you, most of my early content-creation efforts were centered around pleasing Google, whereby my inspiration was for thinking in terms of queries:

1: Informational: Where prospects are likely to look for information

2: Navigational: What prospects are likely to be looking for on those sites

3: Transactional: What prospects are ready/likely to buy

The result of this thinking (outlined in the graphic below) was the myriad 350-word posts that now clog the web.

There's a better way.

It's time your content led with meaning, and that process begins with a revamping of the thought process surrounding content ideation and content creation. Why is that important?

We cannot win otherwise, says Bill Sebald, founder of Greenlane SEO, a Pennsylvania-based SEO firm.

"Think about it," he says. "Many brands are still writing low-quality articles that deliver little value and have zero impact to their customers or prospects. That's bad enough, but when you consider the prevalence of these thin content pieces, is there any wonder how the Panda Update evokes fear in these same brands? Being useful is great. It can and does work fine, for a while. But what you want as a brand is lasting impact, people seeking you out, top-of-mind awareness. As it regards content marketing, that only happens when your brand is known for delivering content with meaning, which sticks in the gut of the folks who read it."

(image source)

In All Your Content Doesn’t Matter Without Meaning, Sebald shared five easy-to-follow questions he thinks brands should ask themselves as they work to create content with meaning:

• Did I say anything new?
• Did I say something that will get someone’s attention?
• Is the content part of a strategy?
• Am I really an expert in this topic?
• Did my copy focus on relationships Google knows about?

Any brand committed to asking themselves at least three of those questions before any content is created is swimming in the deep end of the pool, having moved away from the pack and on the way to delivering meaningful content.

After reading Sebald's post, I dug into my notes to discern what I think it takes to win the race for content marketings next frontier.

If your brand is looking to separate from the back, I'd like to share three ideas I've seen work well for brands of all sizes, even in boring verticals, such as HVAC and plumbing.

1. Be where your prospects are, at the time they need your information, with a message so good they cannot ignore you.

As a lifelong angler, I'm keen to compare marketing to bass fishing, whereby bait and location are pretty much all that matters. Or so I thought, until one day I got my hands on an underwater camera and could see fish swimming all around my lure, which they ignored.

(image source)

That's when I realized bait and location are only as good as timing.

No matter how great the quality of my tackle or how well-placed was my lure, the fish must be ready to bite for me to find success.

How your brand can put this thinking to work: Personalize your company's blog by adding bi-weekly or monthly interviews with people who've used your services/products, and who can share information that's hyper-relevant to issues prospects are likely dealing with at the time.

For example, in the month of October a pool company might highlight a customer who maintains their own pool but who hires a pool company for winterization help. Or, in the same month, an accountant might share a video blog of a couple who owns a small business and does a great job of staying on top of expenses.

You might notice that I never said the person spotlighted mentions the brand or even uses them for service. That's immaterial. What's key is (a) the person shares a compelling story that's (b) delivered on your blog and (c) is information they can use right away for where they are in the decision-making process. (It's important that the content not appear salesy because too often the prospects who're most likely to need your services aren't even looking for those services. They're simply suckers for a good story.)

2. Make them feel confident about what the brand stands for, not simply the purchase they might someday make.

One of my favorite words from college is ubiquity. Get to know this word if your brand is to produce meaningful content. Your brand should show up in all the places and for all the things prospects would expect to find you ranking for, conversing about and, more important, being shared by others for.

To instill your content with meaning, it must show up in places and for things prospects likely would expect t find it showing up for. This isn't simply about ubiquity. It shows empathy.

A brand that does this better than most is Seattle-based REI. It's amazing the range of terms they rank highly for. If they sell it, there's a great chance REI shows up somewhere in or near the top of the SERPs for the category.

For example, I simply typed "snow goggles" into the search box, and voila, look who shows up. Also, look who they show up above. Better yet, imagine all of the large eyewear brands they're outcompeting for this position.

By clicking on the query, you immediately see why they're at the top of the SERPS: The content is rich in visuals and answers every question a prospect would ever have surrounding snow goggles.

I discovered the strength of REI's content ideation and creation efforts in 2013, while completing a content strategy roadmap for one of the largest two-way radio manufacturers in the world.

Despite the brand's heft, REI was always ahead of them in the SERPs, with social shares, in online conversations, etc.

When I visited with Jonathon Colman, formerly the in-house SEO for REI, at Facebook headquarters in

San Francisco, I understood why REI had content ubiquity: "From the start, they did something right that continues to [work in their favor]," says Colman, who works for Facebook in the areas of product user experience and content strategy. "They simply focused on creating and sharing the best content for their users, not on marketing."

Those words resonated with me, as they should with you.

How your brand can put this thinking to work

Stop thinking like a marketer and start thinking like a customer. I've written before about keeping and sharing a document that lists the questions and comments prospects and customers share during calls, on social media and via any any other platforms used to capture customer sentiment.

This document could form the basis for content that's written and shared by your marketing team. However, your brand must go farther to deliver meaning through it's content.

An approach I've recommended to clients and seen good success with works as follows:

• Focus on creating one big piece of content per month: This pulls your team away from thinking about creating content for content's sake. It also ensures that the team is able to marshal its resources to research, design, and create content with meaning. The goal with each big content piece is to answer every reasonable question and/or objection a prospect might have before doing business with you. For example, an SEO agency might, in month one, create a big content piece titled "How Small Companies Can Win With Personalized Content," detailing in depth how becoming a popular local expert can earn the brand links, gain press attention and increase overall business. In month two, the same agency might go all-in on a post titled "How Your Mom and Pop Shop Can Beat the Big Guys," whereby they outline an actionable plan for how to smartly use their blog, one social media platform and a small PPC budget to generate awareness, site visits, links and earned media. Prospects are likely to see the agency as the one to help get them over the hump.
• Ignore the competition: Instead of checking the SERPs to see what's ranking highest for content in your vertical on the topic you wish to create, look at the content that's being shared outside your area by brands that have no relation to your vertical. You cannot win long-term by copying a strategy that your competition is better equipped to deploy, so don't emulate them. Look at what non-competing brands are doing to deliver meaningful content. It could be a TV show, even, which you study for how characters are developed. Think of the regional car dealerships who grew to be household names in the late '90s by delivering sitcom-style commercials and ads based off popular TV shows that meant something to the audience. Your brand can find similar inspiration by looking outside your area.
• Make consistency a mainstay: REI wins at content marketing in large part because the brand is consistent. No matter where you find their content, it's thorough and deserving of its place in the pantheon of content marketers. Don't simply pour your heart into the big content piece, then allow everything else to fall by the wayside. Your brand must imbue every area, all departments and any content shared with meaning. This effort takes shape as the development, design and product teams placing users in the driver's seat early on in the process; the marketing team only sharing information that, first and foremost, addresses the needs of the audience; the customer service team creating customer happiness, not quashing complaints; and sales team members frequently checking on prospects, even when no sale is imminent.

The goal here is to, as the saying goes, be so good they cannot ignore you.

3. Help your customers become the best versions of themselves

It's likely you've seen the graphic below online before, maybe even on the Buffer Blog, which is where I found it. The image expertly sums up where I think the brands who ultimately win at content marketing will have to go: Turning away from their own interests and keying in on how the brand can better enable the customer to (a) better do what they endeavor to do and (b) become a version of themselves they never imagined possible.

(image source)

Sound far-fetched? Imagine the car commercials showing an average Joe who is all of a sudden a handsome hero admired by beautiful passersby because of his new wheels.

Your brand can become the means-something-to-prospects darling of its industry, too, with the adoption of three simple steps applied with conviction:

1. Personalization — Develop people (at least one, but a few would be even better) in your company who can become the public face of the brand, who make it easier for prospects to form a connection with the company and more likely that content is shared and amplified more frequently as their popularity increases.
2. Become a helper, not a hero — Stop thinking that your content or your product or your service needs to be life-changing to get the attention of prospects. They desire to be the heroes and sheroes of their own journey; they simply need an assist from you to create a lasting bond they won't soon forget about.
3. Make users' stories a core of your marketing efforts — Let's get this straight: No one gives a damn about your story. Your brand's story only becomes relevant when prospects have been made to feel important, special by you then desire to explore further the meaning behind the brands. How do you accomplish that task? By integrating the stories of customers into your marketing efforts.

How your brand can put this thinking to work

The importance of using an engaging personality to deliver meaning for your content cannot be overstated. In fact, it's likely the shortest path to winning attention and garnering success.

I'll use Canadian personal trainer Dean Somerset as an example. I discovered Somerset a few years ago when he dropped a few helpful knowledge bombs in the comments of a fitness blog I was reading. I then found a link to his blog, which I have now become a religious follower of. Over the years, we've traded numerous emails, interacted myriad times via Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and I've even hired him for training assessments.

Why?

Aside from being brilliant, he's a goofball who takes his work, not himself, too seriously.

(image source)

But most important, the core of every post he creates or video he shares or every Facebook Q&A he offers is helping others become better at physical health and physical fitness than they ever imagined they could.

The result is that, in a relatively short time span, Somerset has become one of the top young minds in the fitness industry, in no small part because he creates heroes with nearly every piece of content he shares. (If you doubt me, watch the video below.)

Don't think for a second that your brand can't do the same:

• Look for members on your team who have personality and who are uniquely qualified to create content (e.g., video, text, SlideShare, etc.) on topics readers care about. Empower them to share, converse and engage around this content, whether locally (e.g., Meetups) nationally (e.g., conferences) or online (e.g., blogs, social media, etc.).
• The script these experts must work from, for everything they share, should begin with the question, "How can this [blog, video, etc.] help at least one person do something better tomorrow that they cannot yet do today?" Answer this question, and you won't simply create meaning for your content, you'll create meaning, relevance and top-of-mind awareness for the brand as well.

It's hard for a brand to escape being successful if this mindset is ever-present.

The last area we'll look at is storytelling, which is very popular in content marketing. And almost no one gets it right.

Yes, people do love stories. They eat them up, especially compelling, heart-wrenching stories or, even better, tales of tremendous uplift.

However, people are not interested in your brand's story — at least not yet.

The only story brands should be telling are those of their users. The brands who have realized this are leaving the brand storytellers in the dust, while turning up the dial on meaning and significance to the audience.

A great example is Patagonia and their Worn Wear video series. Instead of creating ads showcasing the durability of their products, they filmed actual customers who've been using the same Patagonia products for years and who wouldn't trade the brand's products for those of any other company.

These are rabid fans, loyal to the nth degree.

Don't drink the brand storytelling Kool-Aid. Tell the stories of your users.

Identify a handful of ardent fans of your product or service, then reach out to them via phone to ask if they'd mind being part of a short-video series you're doing to showcase people and brands doing great things. (I mentioned a similar approach earlier, which is ideal for the smallest companies. I think this effort plays into a much broader strategy for larger brands.)

Depending on your budget and their location, you could either have a small camera crew visit their office or walk them through how to shoot what you need on their mobile devices. You could also provide them with a script.

Here's the kicker: During the video, they are not allowed to talk about your brand, product or service in any way shape or form.

The goal is to get video of them going about their day, at home and at work, as they share what makes them tick, what's important to them, who they are and why they do what they do.

This is their story, remember? And as such, your brand is a bit player, not a/the star. Also, the lack of a mention washes away any suspicion viewers might have of your brand's motives. Most important, however, you get a real, authentic success story on your website and domain, so the implication is that your brand was a helper in this heroic journey.

If this post accomplishes anything, my wish is that it makes clear how necessary and how realistic it is for your brand to create meaningful content.

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Abraham Lincoln’s Favorite Infographic and the 5 Qualities of the Most Memorable Images

How much more memorable are visuals compared to text?

One oft-referenced answer is that people remember visuals 6 times better than text—an answer referenced in Buffer’s article on the anatomy of a perfect blog post and an answer that led to a lot of great discussion. After reviewing the original research, it’s clear that pictures are more memorable than words. So the next question became:

People remember visuals better than text. But which visuals exactly?

I’ve spent some time collecting the best research and science on pictures, images, infographics, and more, and I’m excited to share with you what I’ve found—along with some specific ways to use these insights in your marketing!

Quick stats on the power of visuals

While attempting to verify the “6x more memorable” stat (it seems quite validated that images trump text, though it could be anywhere from 6x more memorable to 2x), I found all sorts of additional interesting information on visuals. Here are some numbers I can verify:

• Research determined as early as 1894 that pictures are more memorable than text. This eventually became known as the Picture Superiority Effect.
• Sixty-five percent of us are visual learners. This means imagery helps 65% of us understand and remember information.
• A picture is worth approximately 84.1 words, according to cognition scientist Alan F. Blackwell. In his research, subjects created visuals to convey information and then described those images in words. The average number of words it took them to describe their images was 84.1. So a picture may not equal 1,000 words, but using an image in place of 84.1 words is still an impressive shortcut. This means less information for your brain to process and remember.

While it may be hard to pinpoint exactly how much more memorable visuals are than text, it’s safe to say visuals definitely aid memory. So let’s look at what makes an image memorable and how you can use that to your advantage.

Why visuals are more memorable than words

While President Abraham Lincoln may be remembered in part for his eloquent words, he was known to be fixated on one particular image.

The image was an 1861 map of the South depicting counties’ slave-owning populations in shades of black, gray and white.

In fact, the image was so important to him, it was included in Francis Bicknell Carpenter’s portrait of Lincoln and his Cabinet members (seen below on the bottom righthand side).

It literally gave Lincoln a picture of which states he could expect to secede and which might be persuaded to stay with the Union. It’s also an early example of an infographic.

Visuals do the same for us today as they did for Lincoln back then: Help us process complex information quickly.

In fact, roughly half of our brain is devoted to processing visual information, according to The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Psychology, which explains why we’re able to decode visuals so quickly.

In fact, we retain 80% of what we see or do but only 30% of what we read and 10% of what we hear.

All of this is to say, images are easier than text for us to process and remember, but not all images are created equal. So below I break down what makes a visualization memorable to help you optimize your image selection.

1. Choose harmonious colors

Colors help us process and quickly identity what we see, according to one study. In discussing choosing colors for your brand, Leslie Harrington, executive director of The Color Association, notes:

“Color is the most memorable sense. Before anything else, [we] see color.”

In fact, color increases brand recognition by 80%.

Consider Tiffany & Co.’s robin’s-egg blue color. It is so synonymous with their brand, they’ve trademarked the color, and it’s now known as Tiffany blue. Or, for you sports fans, there’s the University of Tennessee’s vibrant orange, which Pantone calls UT Orange. In both of these cases, color is an intrinsic part of the brand.

Not only does color aid brand recognition, it trumps black-and-white images when it comes to memory. But that doesn’t mean you should go color-crazy. Images are more likely to stick if they resemble what we see in nature (so easy does it on the neon).

Something else to keep in mind: 8% of men and .5% of women are colorblind, according to the National Eye Institute, and have difficulty discerning between reds and greens. On the other hand, nearly everyone can see blue, which works out really well for hyperlinks.

If you’re opting for a multicolor image, professors at the University of South Florida determined that harmonious colors are more memorable than non-harmonious colors. Think different shades of green instead of an array of pink, yellow and blue. Harmonious colors are easier to process, making the image more likely to be remembered.

On top of that, an image with seven or more colors is more likely to be remembered than one with fewer colors. A different study pegged the uptick in memorability occurred at more than six colors. Either way, file that under “more colors than I thought.”

2. Include people in your pictures (the more emotion, the better)

You see that stunning pink sunset above? You’ll likely forget it.

That’s right, according to a study on image memorability, a lovely photo of a landscape will probably fall out of your brain with impressive speed. We’re far more likely to remember an image centered on a person, even something as banal as a man on the subway. Even more likely to be remembered are photos of people interacting. Images that focus on a single object also fare well.

However, there are different levels of memorability for images of people. Essentially, the more intense the emotion of the person photographed, the more likely we are to remember it. Partly because it triggers a response in us.

So aim for relatable over stunning when choosing between images. And select emotional expressions over easily forgotten neutral expressions. Take these kids winning a video game in the photo above. Who can’t relate to that feeling of crazy excitement when you win something important to you?

3. No need to find a beautiful image

Is beauty memorable?

The short answer: No. Not in images anyway.

Aesthetically pleasing images, like the picturesque landscape above, aren’t memorable, while this photo of a decrepit bathroom with graffiti on the toilet is.

As MIT neuroscientist Phillip Isola, one of the authors of “What Makes an Image Memorable?,” puts it:

“Pleasantness and memorability are not the same.”

That said, in one instance, at least, beauty might appear to assist memory. You’re more likely to remember a photo of supermodel Gisele Bundchen than you are Ms. No-Name iStock Model. But in fact, that has less to do with beauty and more to do with prior knowledge. We are more likely to remember something or someone we have prior knowledge of.

This means a visual is far more likely to be stored in our long-term memory if it already has meaning to us.

So in image selection and in design, considering using the familiar to your advantage.

4. Create creative infographics and charts

Infographics are beloved for a reason. These pictorials, along with grids and diagrams, are far easier to remember than graphs. This may be because illustrations in infographics mimic what we see in our world to some extent — for example, the cheeses in the infographic below.

On the other hand, the lines of graphs don’t look “natural” — a graph looks like a graph, not like something we find in our day-to-day life. In addition, at their core, all graphs look more or less the same, and that certainly doesn’t up their memorability factor.

The question of chart junk

Yet “memorable” doesn’t always equate to “comprehensible,” according to a study on memorable visualizations. An infographic can be memorable because you spend some time deciphering it. (That said, it’s still recommended to strive for clarity.)

In fact, in that same study, visuals with “chart junk,” meaning visual additions that aren’t necessary to understand the information, were deemed more memorable than minimalist visuals. But it’s worth noting, that there are varying opinions on whether chart junk helps memory or hurts it.

Above we have a very basic example of chart junk with unnecessary lines both on the bars and on the numbers lining the chart, making them hard to see, plus a brick background. It adds up to more visual information than we need, which may increase its memorability but not our understanding.

Instead, a happy medium would be to strive for “functional art,” meaning designers can get creative to pique interest (and memorability) but should avoid any elaborations that impede understanding. Avoid art for art’s sake.

In short, aim for interesting imagery, not a visual obstacle course.

5. Use multiple images to reinforce your point

According to Janet Brain, a learning disabilities specialist, varied visuals are especially helpful in learning — she cites technology, such as interactive computer graphics and videos as helpful, but you can apply the same philosophy on a smaller scale to your projects. A variety of images aid memory because you’re receiving different visual cues that reinforce one main point. This is what infographics do.

You can also apply this to blog posts. For example, don’t stick solely with stock imagery, instead include a combination of grids, pull-quotes, infographics, vintage photos, artwork and video for optimum recall. You’ll notice that in this post I included President Lincoln’s infographic map plus the portrait the infographic appears in. So you’ve been exposed to this map in two different ways in one post, increasing the chances you’ll remember it — and hopefully, this article.

Also worth noting: While images are more memorable than text, images and text together are most memorable of all. No surprise there considering the popularity of infographics and overlaying titles on images. Just like multiple visuals can work together, visuals and text reinforce each other and aid memorability.

Review: How to make your images memorable

So does this mean the only way to stick in someone’s memory is to build an elaborate infographic of toilets of the world in seven harmonious colors?

No. (But that infographic would probably be really, really memorable.)

Instead, determine which memory triggers aid you the most.

Here are some takeaways to consider for your next visual:

1. Numerous colors that are natural and harmonious are most memorable.
2. People expressing emotion and/or interacting are the most memorable subjects, followed by objects. Landscape imagery is forgettable.
3. Beauty doesn’t matter, but prior knowledge does.
4. Infographics are memorable. Graphs aren’t.
5. Functional art can assist memory.
6. A variety of image types reinforce memory.

Personally, I plan to rely less on landscape imagery and look more toward relatable imagery in the future. I’ll also continue to use a variety of images, like I did in this post, where I included artwork, photos, scientific visuals, images with text on them, a vintage infographic and a modern infographic.

But memorability isn’t everything

Remember that your imagery still needs to work with your brand. Don’t scrap your branding guidelines for an array of memorable imagery that doesn’t aid your branding strategy. While reinforcing imagery helps memory, irrelevant imagery is extremely forgettable. It simply distracts.

Aim for memorable, impactful imagery that assists your brand.

And yet, the list above isn’t the only way to memorability. There will always be outliers — a strangely eerie black-and-white landscape that sticks in your mind or a graph of non-harmonious colors on a crazy topic. What I’ve outlined here is not the only way to get a visual to stick. The hope is that following these guidelines will increase your visuals’ chances of being remembered.

Marketing takeaways for memorable images

It’s worth noting that a memorable image doesn’t necessarily equate to an engaging or effective or clickable image. But that’s the natural next step.

So here are a few stats that provide some ideas on how to effectively use memorable images:

• Tweets with attached imagery are nearly twice as likely to get retweeted than those without.
• Presentations that include visuals are 43% more persuasive, according to one study.
• Forty-six percent of subjects in a Stanford University study used website design, of which visuals are an important part, to determine if a business is credible.
• Sixty percent of consumers are more likely to consider a local result with an image.

Can you imagine the benefits if a memorable image were used in all those instances?

Let’s mine our memories!

Think back to images that have elicited a response from others in your work. Why did they work well? What sort of images have you found most memorable in others’ work? Which images from this article stick out in your mind?

Include links in the comments. I’d love to see the visuals you mention — and see if they stick in my memory too!

Image sources: PicJumbo, Piktochart, Visually, UnSplash

The post Abraham Lincoln’s Favorite Infographic and the 5 Qualities of the Most Memorable Images appeared first on Social.

Never Losing the 'What' of Digital Advertising

From media platforms like Pinterest to e-commerce sites like Amazon, brand-to-consumer communication remains driven by search with a comprehension of customer intent the epicenter.