Recent quotes:

Twitter Launches a New Way to Promote Tweets | Inc.com

I'm not in love with the amount of engagement I'm getting on my tweets. My results from boosting individual tweets rendered better results for my ad dollars spent. Also, my followers have not grown much as a result of Promote Mode.

Why I'm Not Melting Down Over the Facebook Feed Announcement - Susan Wenograd

How it’s not a change: Zuck really isn’t jerking the wheel that far in another direction. He IS going back to the original intent of Facebook.

New Research Answers: Is Content Marketing Sustainable? - Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}

We see that the volume of content being published eventually exceeds the interest in the topic and this competition for attention leads to a decline in average shares. Interest in a topic also does not keep rising forever, it typically reaches a peak at which point we see total shares start to fall. Even when interest begins to wane at this saturation point, it is common to see that the number of articles continues to increase. It appears marketers climb on the content bandwagon past the point of effectiveness.

New Research Answers: Is Content Marketing Sustainable? - Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}

In essence, as the volume of content published increases there is a fall in average engagement in terms of social sharing.

Reducing Links to Low-Quality Web Page Experiences | Facebook Newsroom

Starting today, we’re rolling out an update so people see fewer posts and ads in News Feed that link to these low-quality web page experiences. Similar to the work we’re already doing to stop misinformation, this update will help reduce the economic incentives of financially-motivated spammers.

How a Good Communications Policy can Avert a Social Media Crisis (and Actually Get You Customers) | Social Media Today

A good communications policy doesn’t just relegate particular people to particular communication channels. In an age where any employee’s conduct, anywhere, can cause significant damage to a company’s reputation, having overall guidelines in place that allow employees to exercise human judgment - as opposed to rigid, robotic implementation -  can go a long way towards taking context into account.

CMOs On Social Media - Where's The ROI?

A decade after the advent of social media, Chief Marketing Officers still can’t figure out if it’s doing them any good. That’s the startling finding of The CMO Survey, a recently-released survey of 410 CMOs

What I learnt from three years of non-marketing — Medium

In an attention economy attention is given to those who invest time and effort, creating value by putting in valuable energy themselves and delivering something that is of use to those they engage with. When the “one to many” shortcut of broadcasting a sales message to the masses no longer works, what remains is guided by some basic, human principles:

Content Marketing and Social Media Benchmarks for Brands

Marketers are increasingly creating more content but are receiving less engagement from consumers with each piece, according to a recent report from TrackMaven.

Small Businesses Don’t Think Social Media is Important, Consumers Think Otherwise

The research ultimately found that small business owners are not taking social media seriously as a growth tool  – despite that more than half (57%) of consumers say they would be somewhat or very influenced to think more positively about a business after seeing praise online via social media (or review sites such as Yelp).

Does Social Media Engagement Really Matter?

marketing starts with people knowing liking and trusting you. There are a million ways to get your target audience aligned enough so that they know like and trust you, engagement on social networks being only one. The key is to determine for you and your world, how can you get the type of engagement you need in order to do what you need to do. Anything short of this is a waste of your time.

Social Shares and Inbound Links: Insights From New Correlation Data

Thus if you want to create content that gets both shares and links the analysis suggests you should avoid content such as quizzes and simple list posts and focus on longer evergreen content that has more intrinsic value.

The Bot Bubble: Click Farms Have Inflated Social Media Currency | The New Republic

Researchers estimate that the market for fake Twitter followers was worth between $40 million and $360 million in 2013, and that the market for Facebook spam was worth $87 million to $390 million. Italian Internet security researcher Andrea Stroppa has suggested that the market for fake Facebook likes could exceed even that.

Your Content Is Kidding No One | Six Pixels of Separation - Marketing and Communications Blog - By Mitch Joel at Mirum

Content and social media are a different kind of marketing. Content and social media are not a different kind of advertising. If all your brand wants to do is pimp coupons and pushy sales, there's a market for that, but content provides a different brand narrative that has to be approached with an entirely new perspective, and set of marketing beliefs.

What Just Happened? – AVC

the social media phase of the Internet ended. this may have happened a few years ago actually but i felt it strongly this year. entrepreneurs and developers still build social applications. we still use them. but there isn’t much innovation here anymore. the big platforms are mature. their place is secure.

How “Keeping it Real” Became the Next Thing In Marketing - Plus Your Business

Trusting strangers with your fate, however, requires something more than just having a great product to sell or a needed service to offer. People, primarily, do business with people. Whether you are a brand or a small business or a single individual who has created a brand value around their name, the challenge is the same for everyone: how do you make real contact in the first instance? The kind of contact that leads to a mutual sense of understanding and trust developing? The answer is also the same for all: through making contact at a very human level.

4 Ways to Build Trust and Humanize Your Brand - Moz

When a brand is able to make a sincere connection with a consumer, something incredibly powerful happens. Beyond mere fleeting impact, that moment of connection provides a foundation for long-term advocacy, loyalty, and a sustainable bottom line.

4 Audience Growth Trends for 2015 | The Content Strategist, by Contently

“The best practices for audience development are in the media world, they’re in Hollywood,[…]They’re not—with all due respect—with marketers.
When customer content is on your site you gain social shares. You reach the magic land of “friends of friends” – people who don’t know you EXCEPT through the community member who just made an introduction. Reaching “friends of friends” via community is the new advertising.