The rise in ad-blocking technologies and decline of organic reach on social networks has forced marketers to find more creative ways to reach their target audiences. To combat these challenges, brands across all industries are lining up to co-create content with their users and industry influencers to help them reach their target customers by the thousands and tell their brand stories. This type of collaborative marketing, facilitated by both online and offline word-of-mouth, has become…
With an estimated monthly viewership of 7 billion, BuzzFeed can teach us all a thing or two about mastering content marketing. The clever wording and cheesy clickbait titles are carefully crafted to grab attention and increase reads. But the secret to BuzzFeed’s success doesn’t lie only in cat memes. It can also be attributed to well-thought-out data-driven decisions. Here are five lessons we can all steal from BuzzFeed when it comes to creating highly engaging…
Agencies that employ external teams or freelancers have always been able to invite those teams to GAIN as Contributors. Originally, Contributors could only create content and save it in drafts. This limited access kept the opportunities of the Contributor role to a minimum. These limitations were set as a way to keep security and control of client work between the agency and the client. Now, we’ve revised the role of the Contributor to allow greater…
Marketers do all they can to avoid contact with spam accounts, but what many don’t know is that spam accounts can come in many different forms to confuse users into interacting with them. This leads to inaccurate analytics if you’re looking to engage with genuine audiences, and in some cases, you might build your marketing strategy based on these faulty results. That’s why it’s important to be informed on how spam accounts can engage with…
You invest plenty of time in your social media marketing campaigns, which you hope to see reflected in your posts’ performance. Third-party scheduling and publishing tools, like GAIN, are a popular aid for Facebook marketing campaigns but have been stuck with the perpetuated myth that these tools can actually decrease post reach. Luckily, many studies, and Facebook itself, are breaking down the real effect third-party publishing tools have on post reach and debunking this myth.…
After almost ten years of hashtags, new studies have led social media influencers to believe that hashtags might not be as useful as they once thought. These studies have compared post performance, with and without hashtags, on popular social media platforms, revealing interesting results. For example, when Caitlyn Jenner was first trending on social media you might be surprised to know that “Caitlyn Jenner” as a keyword set on Twitter trended higher than the hashtag…
If you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t seen Stranger Things yet, then this is all you need to know. The drama-mystery show revived a plethora of nostalgic memories, especially of 80s movies such as E.T. and Goonies, but with fantastically fresh storytelling that instantly captivated millions of viewers and turned the series into an overnight cult classic. The Netflix original series lays the nostalgia factor on thick with 80s fashion and hairstyles, and…
Since 2013, the Internet has been inundated with GIFs. The format may have originally been introduced in the late 1980’s, but it wasn’t until platforms like Giphy, the first and largest repository of GIFs, that the trend really took off. Giphy started to invest in collecting pre-existing GIFs, as well as generating some of their own from trends in pop-culture, to make GIF culture popular. The lo-fi format means animated GIFs are easier to share…
The world of social media is constantly evolving and the marketing tactics that worked last year, or even last month, might not be as effective today. And yet despite the rapidly changing environment, many brands and marketers are still using time-consuming, counterproductive marketing tactics that are doing more harm than good. The end of the year is a good time to reflect on what worked and what didn’t work for your social media campaigns. If…
Despite the fact that Instagram is now being used by 48.8% of brands (and that number is expected to rise to 70.7% by 2017), many businesses have yet to implement an Instagram marketing strategy. Unfortunately, there are still many myths that have created hesitation among businesses when it comes to using Instagram for marketing purposes. These common myths include sentiments that Instagram takes too much time, or that a company’s offerings are too boring to…
