There are a lot of new features being added to social media. It's hard to keep up with them all to take advantage of their services, so we've gathered some helpful tips for your business to make sure you're seen by your audience, and give them the ability to share your content easily. The feature we're highlighting today is embedded content sharing. On Twitter, this is through embedding tweets. On Facebook, you can embed posts. These features allow you to share your social media content on a variety of platforms. Watch today's Daily Brown Bag to learn about this social media feature and why it's critical for your marketing strategy!
TRANSCRIPTION:
Hello, and welcome to the Daily Brown Bag. Today, we’re going to be talking about embedded social media posts. I’m Chad Hill and I’m joined by Adam Stetzer.
Good morning, Chad. Wow, embedded social media, that’s a mouthful. So, we’re talking about tweets, pluses, and likes on Facebook, on Twitter, and Google Plus. This stuff can be confusing, but we talk all the time on our video blog series and in our forum with our resellers about the role social media has in creating engagement around your content. It’s really indispensable now for content marketing. With Google Hummingbird being released in the last month, we suspect there’s greater signals around social, and we know there’s a greater push toward being useful and answering questions. Social media, once again, plays a role there, and if you’re still not bought into why you should care, just listen to some of these stats. Two point five billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook every day. We have over 400 million tweets every day, and I think the engagement stats are also quite impressive. Seventy-six percent of Twitter users are now actively tweeting. That’s up from about forty-six percent in 2010.
So, even though the overall number of people on these platforms is still growing, and Facebook is still the favorite, by the way, what’s more interesting is that their daily routine is now getting more and more engagement, and they’re actually there sharing, and it’s real and it’s really happening. I think that where small businesses struggle I know a lot of our internet marketing resellers struggle, is, “Yeah, but how do we get practical with this? I hear what you’re saying and I believe the stats, but what can I do? How do I get this thing embedded?” Let’s help them out. What can we do with this?
First, lets talk about what is embedding a tweet and a Facebook post, or even a G+ post. People have probably seen this and not really understood what it was. Now, you’ll often see in many blogs today that, as you’re reading down the blog, there will be a nice little formatted tweet that the blog is referencing. So, usually it’s used to sort of cite a resource in the area. It might be a story about the latest changes to Google and have a Matt Cutts tweet there that people are referencing. And so the way this works, again, some people thought this was maybe just a screenshot, or someone’s taken the effort to make this look nice, but it actually isn’t. What you can do is you can go into Twitter, and on the right-hand side there’s a “more” link by each tweet, and one of the options when you click “more” is “embed tweet.” It gives you a nice little snippet of HTML, you drop it in your blog, and you get this nice, formatted message.
So, that was initially rolled out by Twitter, and then most recently Facebook, Pinterest, and Google Plus rolled out something similar so that you can take that content and embed it in a blog post. So, now that we’ve defined what it is, lets talk about why this matters. There was a study done by HubSpot that said basically that people who blog more than 15 times a month get five times the traffic to their websites than people who don’t blog at all. So, this ties in because now you can sort of connect the social media activities you’re doing and taking relevant and interesting things trending in social media, grab some of that content, and bring it over to your blog to discuss it in a more in-depth fashion. So, that’s really what this is, Adam, and it’s definitely yet another way of doing great content marketing, and it’s another source for pulling in interesting facts.
Okay, so at its most basic level, Chad, the embedded tweet, what you’re saying is that those things that kind of look to the untrained eye like just a screenshot where someone took the time to screenshot tweet and make a graphic out of it, there’s basically a shortcut that basically all of the social media platforms offer that you should be using regularly makes it even easier, and that’s a great little social media blogging tip that everyone should listen to. But I think it’s probably confusing, because it seems a little bit like the cart in front of the horse, because I think most people believe, “Well, I should blog first, create my content, then go to Twitter and other social media platforms, and that’s where I’m going to get the engagement.” Here, we’re saying, “As I’m creating that content, I should go pick up this snippet code.” So, I think it’s interesting because it shows that there’s sort of an interplay, and you want to let people move seamlessly between your content and your social media presence, and even reference other people as a resource that will make your content, overall, stronger.
Yeah, I mean absolutely. I really think in this day and age, when you’re looking for interesting content to create, sometimes you initiate the idea and you want to create a blog post around that and try to generate the social interest for it, and maybe later on you can even come back and update your blog post with some of the social media that happened around it. But, it also can happen the other way, where you take an idea that’s trending in social media and decide to discuss it in a more in-depth fashion. So, it really can work either way. I think the main point is that it’s just another opportunity to connect the social world to your website content and blogging.
Right, and I think that aesthetically, it looks really cool. I’ve seen it and always think it’s a sign of credibility. It’s also a sign that people are connected and talking about what’s hot, because this is the day and age where things that are trending on Twitter get discussed even at CNN and other major news outlets, so we’d like to hear your stories. Are you using this? Is this video helpful? Go try an embedded tweet, tell us about it, and please subscribe to our videos.