<ol><li class="ql-align-justify">Tell, don’t sell.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Use a variety of media–blogs, videos, etc.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Employ SEO best practices.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Stay true to your brand.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Be original; creativity counts.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Write high quality, meaty content.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Build on successes. Learn from failures.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Promote your content on social media.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Be realistic (and patient) about getting results.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Consider working with a professional copywriter.</li></ol>

10 Tips for Effective Content Marketing

<ol><li>Create Relevant, Useful Content</li><li>Tell, Don’t Sell</li><li>Pick Your Media for Content Marketing (Blog, ebook, newsletters, or more)</li><li>Solve Problems.</li><li>Create Case Studies.</li><li>Collect data on any topics related to your business.</li><li>Be entertaining while telling a story.</li><li>Promote your content.</li><li>Be realistic about the result</li></ol>

These quick tips are gold when it comes to content marketing 

A Florida copywriter explains how to generate leads, sales and brand awareness with the right content.

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

How to Build Your Business with Content Marketing

<ul><li>You aren't selling anything to the customer. Instead, you are giving them an opportunity to change.</li><li>Don't use formal language. Instead, talk as if you are the customer's friend.</li><li>Don't state that you "are" experiencing X problem. Say you "might be" experiencing XYZ problems. It enables you to speak to a variety of different types of customers.</li><li>Avoid the word "better" at all costs. For example, a "better" way to live or a "better" workout plan.</li></ul>

Copywriting Tips (1)

<ul>
<li>Be a painkiller, not a vitamin. Vitamins attempts to solve problems the customer isn’t experiencing yet, which is boring. Painkillers are solutions to highly urgent, very painful problems</li>
<li>Sell the result, the educate the customer on the process. </li>
<li>Write copy for 1 reader. Speak to “you”, not “everyone”.</li>
<li>Don’t sell your brand, sell your category.</li>
<li>Teach, don’t sell. People buy because the LEARN why it’s good or efficient.</li>
</ul>

Copywriting Tips (2)

<ul><li>Never blame the customer. Give them an “out.” If someone is bad at math, it’s not their fault. It’s the education system’s fault.</li><li>Separate writing copy for Insiders vs Outsiders. Insiders are people who already speak the language of the category. Outsiders are beginners.</li><li>Ground your argument in a shocking statistic to give you credibility. But keep it limited. “It takes 660 gallons of water to make one hamburger.”</li><li>“According to science…” People love that, so find some research or conduct your own survey.</li></ul>

Copywriting Tips (3)

<ul><li>Organize information into lists. Reading endless paragraphs is hard.</li><li>Don’t oversell the problem. State how it is.</li><li>Don’t oversell the solution with a big song and dance. Just say what it is.</li><li>Give your customers the vocabulary to talk about the new problem.</li><li>Remind the customer what will happen “if they don’t” solve this problem. X will happen, or Y will stay the same.</li><li>Sell the benefits, not the features. No one cares about the features; they only care what it will do for them.</li><li>Remove the fear of “buyer’s remorse”. Offer a refund or guarantee.</li></ul>

Copywriting Tips (4)

And if your friend asked you for a vacuum recommendation, you most certainly would not say, “This device synchronizes efficiencies across multi-level floor plan designs.” This allows you to speak to…

writing

Reading & Writing

20 Copywriting Tips You Should Hang On Your Wall 🧵

Marketing funnel is a system that helps you attract consumers, turn them into leads or prospects, and finally convert them into paying customers.

What is a marketing funnel?

While marketing funnels is the broader term that covers various use-cases, there are several types of funnels you’re like to come across:<ul><li>Lead magnet funnels</li><li>List building funnels</li><li>Webinar funnels</li><li>Social media marketing funnels</li><li>Video sales funnels</li><li>Email funnels</li></ul>As you can see, other than the marketing channel your funnel’s based on, your funnels can also have different goals, e.g.:<ul><li>selling a product or service</li><li>building a list of contacts</li><li>promoting an event</li></ul>Naturally, you might just as well use funnels to collect survey answers or have people sign up for a live demo of your platform.

Types of funnels

Using a funnel and the AIDA model helps marketers visualize the stages and tasks advertising campaigns should fulfill first before the consumer makes a decision to buy a given product or service. If you’re not convinced, take this sales funnel template as an example.Marketing and sales funnels will help you keep your campaigns organized and drive your target audience strategically towards action.For each stage of this so-called customer journey, marketers can choose different tools and marketing tactics to help their consumers advance down the funnel and towards the buying decision.

How marketing funnels work

At the same time, for each of the stages, marketers will be using different metrics and KPIs to report on their campaign progress.To give you a better overview, here are a few examples of metrics you’d likely report on across the three key areas of your funnel – Top of the funnel (TOFU), Middle of the funnel (MOFU), Bottom of the funnel (BOFU).

How marketing funnels work (contd.)

Your audience isn’t yet aware of your brand & your products/services. To change that focus on lead generation.Build a landing page, create a lead magnet, & drive traffic to it.Use social media ads, Google ads, add banners to your pages, send an email to your existing email list (this has to be a target email list consisting of people who you potentially convert at a later stage), sponsor a podcast, or partner up with another business.Remember to pick the right lead magnet for your audience. Not everyone will be interested in an ebook or a checklist.Retarget those who’ve engaged with your ads.

Marketing funnel strategies - Awareness

To help them realize that what you’re offering is the right solution to their problem create an autoresponder email cycle that’ll discuss the different aspects of the topic your subscribers are interested in. Emphasize the strengths of your offer & why your brand should come up naturally when they’re thinking of the topic.During this process, you’ll want your prospects to engage with your brand & products.To step up your game, try email automation. Send them in response to your subscribers’ and users’ actions. You’ll soon see why triggered emails outperform regular emails multiple times.

Marketing funnel strategies - Consideration

To convert your email subscribers into paying customers your email communication should motivate your audience to take action & commit.Emphasize the reasons why they shouldn’t waste any more time. Use the language that works for your audience. Overcome the hesitation by using testimonials, customer reviews, & case studies. If you’re selling an item with limited stock – this is the time to make this clear. If you offer a money-back guarantee, easy or free-returns, a free trial period – all of this should be emphasized in your email sequence.

Marketing funnel strategies - Action

It’s not about driving any kind of traffic to your landing page or squeeze page. It’s about driving the right traffic.Focus your efforts on identifying the audience that’s likely to convert.This means narrowing down your segmentation when setting up social media ads, using lookalike audiences, and observing which users perform your desired action.If you’re seeing that some groups, in particular, are visiting your site and not converting, it’s probably best to remove them from your target group or tweak your ads to fit their needs better.

Marketing Funnel Best Practices - 1. Drive traffic effectively

Your website, landing pages, and emails should be optimized for all types of devices.At the same time, if for some reason the mobile experience for any of those assets isn’t working, ask yourself whether you want to target mobile users at all?See whether mobile users are converting and if not, make a strategic decision whether you want to include them in your targeting.

Marketing Funnel Best Practices - 2. Optimize your communication for all devices

The same lead magnet won’t work for everybody. That’s why you need to understand who you’re targeting and then test your gut feeling.Perhaps a checklist is going to win over an ebook? Or an email swipe file over a 1-on-1 consultation? Evaluate each lead magnet, but don’t just focus on money.Sometimes it’s about how quickly your audience can benefit from the lead magnet and not how comprehensive it is. Ever downloaded an ebook you never actually read because it was too big? That’s what I mean.

Marketing Funnel Best Practices - 3. Choose the right lead magnet

The whole idea behind marketing funnels is targeting customers with the right type of content at the right moment. Don’t ask for a commitment right away.You hint at the address of your order form for those who already arrived with the ‘I’m ready to buy’ mindset. For others, you’ll have to nurture them first.

Marketing Funnel Best Practices - 4. Nurture your leads

This is something we as marketers often get wrong. What we’re looking at are vanity metrics. But what we’re interested in are actionable metrics.Are you really interested in how many people visited your page or how many of them converted? Are you interested in how many people opened your email or how many of them clicked through to your upsell offer?Write down your objectives and then make sure you’re focusing on the right metrics – the ones you have an influence on and which bring you closer to business growth.

Marketing Funnel Best Practices - 5. Get your objectives and metrics right

Even if you know your target audience very well, chances are that you’ve got more than one idea on how to approach them best.Rather than going with your gut, you can evaluate your ideas by running A/B tests. For example, test your squeeze pages or follow up email sequences.When doing so, change:<ul><li> the color of your CTA buttons</li><li>the copy</li><li>the placement of your signup form</li><li>the placement or type of social proof</li><li>videos</li></ul>& more – these elements can help you improve your conversion rates & grow your business, too.

Marketing Funnel Best Practices - 6. Experiment and increase your conversion rates

Do you know what marketing funnels are and how they can help you increase your sales revenue? In this article, you’ll find the definition, examples, and best-practices for creating a high-converting marketing funnel that’ll transform your business.

Marketing Funnels Beginner’s Guide: Best Practices & More

Thought leadership is the delivery of authentic and genuine content that leverages the expertise, insight, and experience of the author, with the goal of sharing that wisdom with others.Thought leadership - when done right - can be an excellent way to reinforce your brand and enhance your content marketing strategy, allowing you to leverage your expertise and build trust with your audience.

Defining Thought Leadership

<ul><li>Define your goals and audience</li><li>Review existing thought leadership in your niche</li><li>Explore the various communication channels in your industry</li></ul>Incorporating thought leadership into your wider content strategy can help you to:<ul><li>Establish the credibility and authority of your brand.</li><li>Generate backlinks, shares, and mentions.</li><li>Attract clients directly.</li></ul>

Core Steps to Developing a Thought Leadership Strategy

Thought leadership is about taking expertise, experience, and tools, and sharing actionable insights.

Identify what exactly you want to achieve.To do this, consult your existing marketing goals, and consider how thought leadership can help you achieve each one — if indeed it can. For example, if your goal is to raise awareness of your brand (and the solutions it’s offering), then a thought leadership piece about, say, accessibility issues facing consumers in your industry can help you get people’s attention.

How to Build a Thought Leadership Strategy: Define Your Goals

Clearly define who your <a href="https://www.semrush.com/blog/complete-guide-to-customer-analysis/">audience</a> is. These people would be aligned with <a href="https://www.semrush.com/persona/?utm_source=ThoughtLeadershipBlog&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=q4_blog_orgcampaigns">your buyer persona(s)</a>, although you should also consider who might benefit the most from hearing what you have to say.Your audience doesn’t necessarily equal your buyers. Your thought leadership strategy might go beyond reaching folks who can purchase from you.

Defining Your Audience

Do the research and see what thought leadership already exists in your niche.Explore the various communication channels in your industry, such as:<ul><li>Online forums and communities</li><li>News resources (online and offline)</li><li>Trade publications and journals (online and offline)</li><li>Personal brand platforms, such as LinkedIn and Medium</li><li>Company blogs</li><li>Social media</li><li>Webinars and seminars</li><li>Conferences</li></ul>Then, start building up your knowledge of what the key existing thought leadership trends and ideas are.

Review Existing Thought Leadership

It’s a good idea to build out a roster of thought leaders. Think about the key experts working in your company. Here are some aspects to look at:Alignment with your brand and its values. If your thought leaders are not firm believers in what your brand is all about, and are not aligned with your story and your position, then it’s unlikely to work.Knowledge and expertise in the field. Another thing that can truly move the needle is passion. Strong opinions, innovative ideas, and concepts. Note that there will always be a risk of making someone unhappy about your beliefs.

Identify Your Organization’s Focus and Its Thought Leaders

Sources of Ideas for Thought Leadership Content:<ul><li>Your/your thought leaders’ unique experience. </li><li>A strong opinion embraced in your company that goes against the industry norm.</li><li>Unique data and statistics you can access due to the nature of your business.</li><li>Industry research and insights.</li><li>Collaboration with your customers and partners. </li><li>Collaboration with existing opinion leaders and influencers in the industry.</li><li>Your personal story and background. People love stories, especially those that are personal.</li></ul>

Create Your Thought Leadership Content: Researching Your Topics 

Our study shows that articles remain the most popular thought leadership content format (91,4%), followed by video (44,1%), webinars/events (36,2%), white papers and research (33,2%), ebooks (29,9%), podcasts (21,7%) and data visuzalitions (20,7%).There are a few things to bear in mind:<ul><li>Consider how the content will be produced.</li><li>Ensure that you’re being open and genuine.</li><li>Stay flexible.</li></ul>

Producing Thought Leadership Content

Giant, well-known organizations with extensive resources tend to organically become thought leaders in their sectors. And yet, thought leadership is all about you creating value, building knowledge, and taking a stand. Small businesses and startups with strong ideas and experienced leaders have the same chances of being heard and followed.

A Small Company or a Startup Creating Successful Thought Leadership Content

Since thought leadership is all about sharing knowledge and unique opinions, there’s no reason why it can’t (and shouldn’t) work in B2C. The rules are the same: make sure you understand your customers, do some research, be genuine and deliver valuable information

Thought Leadership: From B2B To B2C

Strategies and tactics around the <a href="https://www.semrush.com/blog/content-distribution-guide/?utm_source=ThoughtLeadershipBlog&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=q4_blog_orgcampaigns">distribution and promotion</a> of your thought leadership content — and any valuable content, for that matter — are a vital component of a thought leadership campaign. A few tactics to consider:<ul><li>Collaborate with non-competing brands in your sector to produce joint thought leadership content. </li><li>Reach out to relevant opinion leaders and influencers to get contributions (and extra promotional support) for your thought leadership content. </li><li>Try services like Help a Reporter to pitch your content to journalists.</li><li>Analyze content creators in your industry.</li></ul>

Distribute and Promote your Content

Thought leadership is about creating a conversation, so ensure that you follow through and engage directly with the communities, leaders, players, and influencers that are discussing your piece. In a larger organization, you may have brand or reputation management personnel that can handle this, but in a smaller organization, your thought leader may need to be more involved.Keep an eye on whether your thought leadership content is being discussed elsewhere too.

The Importance of Engagement

As with any tactic, it’s important to measure the performance of your thought leadership marketing. Organic traffic is the key benefit of producing thought leadership content (81,4%). Besides, a big proportion of companies also manage to boost social media following/engagement (64,9%), and almost one half generates the actual leads and sales (47,6%). Other benefits include backlinks (44,3%), email subscribers (38,9%), media and PR mentions (34,1%), and invitations to speak at events, interviews, etc. (28,4%).

Measure the Results

Thought leadership requires authenticity, deep expertise, and ideas that strive to challenge the conventional way that things are done. To communicate all of this effectively, it needs to take the form of high-quality content on topics that are relevant, and that your audience really cares about.Therefore, it’s crucial that you conduct in-depth topic research, and put out content that is engaging and unique.

The Bottom Line

You are a brand and a business by yourself.

What is thought leadership? How can you leverage it for your business? And how do you become a thought leader? Explore this ultimate 2022 guide to find out.

business

Business

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

What Is Thought Leadership: The 2022 Guide for Your Business

Hook: Grab attention.Line: Deliver on the promise.Sinker: Make the content resonate.

The Hook, Line, And Sinker Framework

1. The first few bits of consumable content in a piece are there not to deliver information but to make a promise of what's to come.2. Can sometimes be mistaken for "clickbait," and if the subsequent content doesn't deliver on the promise made, or delivers in a subpar fashion, that's a reasonable charge to level.

The Hook: Grab Attention, Make a Promise

1. The Line's purpose is to satisfy the curiosity created by your headline/preview.2. You're producing the meat-a story, an explanation, a dataset, a visual series-that quenches the visitor's thirst for knowledge, entertainment, distraction, or resolution. The key is to do this in a way that triggers an emotional response.

The Line: Deliver on the Promise, Trigger Emotions

1. The Sinker is that singular, powerful, lasting memory that makes a piece stick with you.2. Your job as creator isn't to deliver only one of these potential hits, but to strike those chords again and again throughout your content, then remind the reader/viewer/listener at the end.

The Sinker: Make the Message Last, Inspire Sharing

A simple framework to drive your long-term content marketing efforts.

Despite studying content that overachieves for years, it's only in the past few months that I've stumbled into a mental model I've called: Hook, Line, and

Hook, Line, and Sinker: A Model for Crafting Successful, Viral Content - SparkToro

The question moving forward is: does RSS, or a protocol like it, have a place in the emerging Web3? Do we even need syndication feeds on a web platform defined by blockchains and cryptocurrencies? To find out, I spoke to a founder of a new protocol called <a href="https://rss3.io/">RSS3 </a>, “a next-generation feed standard that aims to support efficient and decentralized information distribution.” RSS3 has no relation to previous versions of RSS, but it was clearly inspired by existing RSS specifications.

However, syndication of content in a blockchain world is not easy, primarily because of the financialization of content platforms. In a nutshell, you have to pay to play — and not just publishers, but readers too. Commenting on or “liking” a blog post that lives on a blockchain requires an addition to the blockchain, which costs money (“gas fees” in Ethereum).

RSS3 is in active development, with the current stable version being v0.3.1. According to its GitHub page, v4 is “in hot discussion” currently. When I first started looking into RSS3, it was unclear to me what its purpose was. Couldn’t a user of, say, a Web3 blog just use traditional RSS to syndicate their posts? But after chatting with Meteora, it became clear that an RSS3 feed wouldn’t be attached to a blog — but a crypto wallet.

Who’s Behind RSS3 and How Does It Work?

“It’s basically a blogging platform that uses your ETH wallet as an account, and stores on Arweave. In that case, a blogger with an ETH wallet won’t need to register with Mirror, but just take the ETH wallet with him to Mirror and start blogging.Since all articles are stored on Arweave, theoretically no one owns it and no one can censor it. Also, all articles are open and permissionless.RSS3 creates a feed for any address, which would include a lot of interesting stuff — including, of course, Mirror blogs. Without RSS3, accessing Mirror’s articles can be very challenging for dApps.”

Mirror.xyz

Meteora says there are multiple apps already being built on top of RSS3, including an app called <a href="https://revery.so/">Revery </a>that allows users to connect as many wallets as they want — meaning you can aggregate all of your RSS3 feeds into one place. Revery reminded me of an old Web 2.0 app called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed">FriendFeed </a>. Launched in 2007, FriendFeed was a way to aggregate all of your social networking and publishing feeds in one place — and it was much beloved by web geeks. Sadly, it was acquired by Facebook in 2009 and was basically never heard from again.

Revery: a FriendFeed for RSS3

RSS3 aims to be the feed standard for Web3. It has no relation to previous versions of RSS, and uses crypto wallets as the basis for feeds.

crypto

Cryptocurrency

RSS3 Brings Syndication Feeds (and FriendFeed) to Web3 - The New Stack

There has been a change from traditional TV settings to utilising phones for fun as the western culture transformation takes hold and consumers begin to live in nuclear family settings. At the family unit level, consumers’ entertainment needs are becoming more complex; they are becoming more personal and preferential in character, with a constant need for new and high-quality content.

The Requirement For New Content 

Viewership is transitioning from traditional television to over-the-top (OTT), and as a result, OTT is becoming a valuable asset for all advertisers. OTT allows for dynamic advertising, which implies that different audiences can receive different personalised versions of an ad. In OTT advertising, there is also a data-driven strategy; the right message is given to the right consumer at the right time.

A Data-driven Approach To Dynamic Advertising

OTT advertising has a far greater viewer rate than traditional TV advertising, and it requires more exposure to build brand lift and accomplish desired objectives.Programmatic OTT plays pre-rolls and mid-rolls, whilst TV programming is replayed on a DVR with the skip feature turned on.

Increased Viewership And Precision In Targeted Demographics

OTT has been experimenting with a variety of advertising forms, including content integration with the story. With the web series Kota Factory, Unacademy did a fantastic job. Another way to run advertising is during content streaming (both live and archived material) and advertiser-funded programmes, as well as other brand solutions.

Advertising In A Variety Of Formats With Focus On Interactivity

The pandemic had a significant role in the rise in OTT popularity, and businesses and brands are taking notice. With OTT advertising gaining traction in India, marketing budgets have shifted.

The pandemic had a significant role in the rise in OTT popularity, and businesses and brands are taking notice. With OTT advertising gaining traction in India, marketing budgets have shifted. Since we were hit by COVID-19, every part of our lives has changed and therefore brands have been realigning their operations and strategy, resulting in…

Why are corporations abandoning television and outdoor advertising in favour of OTT platforms?

<ul><li>71% of businesses prefer Instagram as their top digital marketing platform</li><li>About 90% of Instagram users follow business accounts</li><li>2 in 3 people surveyed feel Instagram conveniently allows to interact with brands</li><li>50% show interest in a brand after seeing its ads on Instagram</li></ul>

Instagram Is Hot In Digital Marketing

<ul><li>To convert to a business account, go to Settings> Account> Switch to Professional account option in Instagram.</li><li>Create a strong Instagram content strategy.</li><li>Prepare a strong content strategy with well-defined KPIs to help you analyze the performance of your Instagram marketing plan.</li></ul>Schedule your posts:<ul><li>Most brands post 1-5 times daily but don’t bombard your followers with posts.</li><li>Create a social media content calendar, as this helps you get a 360⁰ view of your marketing strategy and gives you control over the content you wish to schedule.</li></ul>

Convert Your Instagram Account to A Business Account

<ul><li>With over 500 million Instagram accounts viewing stories daily, it gives you enough scope to: promote your products and services.</li><li>Post content informing your audience about any upcoming events or deals.</li><li>Have casual interactions with viewers to connect with them better and improve your brand’s presence.</li></ul>

Say it with Stories

Use Reels to be more creative with your content and express more with the combination of multiple videos for seamless transitionsAdd to your brand's personality by making your posts appealing and informative using captions.60% of posts tag other users to gain traction.Repost posts in which you are tagged to increase the engagement and visibility of your posts and, in turn, of your profile.IGTV allows you to upload videos as short as 15 seconds to as long as one hour.Track user analytics with the Insights option. It optimizes analytics based on the frequency of visitors.

Use The Tools

<ul><li>70% of Instagram hashtags are brand campaigning strategy-related.</li><li>Prepare different lists of preferred hashtags and keep track of which posts and hashtags perform the best.</li><li>Limit 30 hashtags per post.</li><li>Use relevant hashtags for your business posts that become the reason viewers visit your profile.</li><li>Offer incentives for going through your post and captions, using promo codes and coupons</li></ul>

Play with Hashtags And Promo Codes

82% of people reportedly prefer watching a live video rather than viewing a social media post. Use the Live feature to interact with your audience through comments and questions in real-time.Increase engagement and audience reach by announcing live contests and giveaways to drive viewership.

Go Live

Contests: Instagram accounts that actively post about contests tend to grow their followers 70% faster than those that do not.Sponsored ads can be effective if you have a niche brand.Post sponsored content and contest alerts to improve consumer engagement while increasing your following and visibility.Facebook’s Ads Manager and Power Editor are some of the most effective Instagram marketing tools to create Instagram ads in bulk.You can easily set up your Instagram Shop (Settings, Business, Set Up Instagram Shopping) and use features such as product tags to promote your posts.

Promote Your Stuff

Provide the link to your website through Instagram bio tools such as Feedlink or Linktree to increase engagement and website visits.Use direct CTAs, mention links in your bio, or share your latest Instagram posts to create interest in readers on other social media platforms.

Make Links Prominent

<ul><li>Captions can be as small as one-liners.</li><li>Memes generate more engagement and have mass appeal.</li><li>Use them judicially and ensure that it is relevant to your branding and your brand’s purpose.</li><li>Most of the audience on Instagram are millennials who share memes to communicate on social media.</li><li>Create eye-catching content and publish it directly on all your accounts.</li></ul>

Use Memes

<ul><li>80% of consumers feel companies have become more accountable due to social media channels.</li><li>Either follow the account to study their strategy or partner with them to understand their techniques.</li><li>The latter option can help you both interact with each other's followers and have a chance to increase your audience reach.</li><li>Find accounts that are relevant to your brand and boost its visibility.</li><li>Reply to comments on your posts, comment on posts of those who regularly comment on yours, and wish your followers on special occasions.</li></ul>

Driving Engagement

<ul><li>Focus on the audience's interests beyond your product or brand.</li><li>Create a user profile while conducting market research of your audience, such as defining their demographics, interests, likes, and dislikes to create a holistic brand image while being relevant to the audience.</li><li>Use Stories or profile pages to directly sell your digital gift cards to build a better relationship with your followers and potential customers.</li><li>Geotags: Instagram allows you to tag your location in your posts.</li></ul>

Lifestyle Content

Use Story Highlights to direct users to your product storeYou can either use a previous Story from the Story Archive Gallery or tap the heart icon below on your current Story about your business offerings to ensure continuous and convenient access to existing and potential customers to your store.

Story Highlights

If you find it difficult to promote your brand on Instagram or feel it is time-consuming, try revising your schedule or reducing your posts' frequency or reinventing your strategy, but don't quit the platform.Bonus: The best time to post on Instagram is between 6 AM - 9 AM and 5 PM - 6 PM on weekdays and till 2 PM on weekends.

Instagram is everything you need for Digital Marketing

51 Instagram marketing tips to exponentially scale your brand for better engagement, visibility, ROI, and overall growth.

Discover the world of business and economics.

economics

Economics

Powerful Instagram Marketing Tips To Boost Your Instagram Presence

In a content-driven world, entrepreneurs who see themselves first and foremost as creators could have it the wrong way round.Whether you decide you are on the creator or entrepreneur path matters in making strategic decisions about where to invest your time, money, and energy in your business.

Creators vs. Entrepreneurs

<ul><li>Being a creator is a unique experience defined by building an audience on platforms where audiences can be found.</li><li>Entrepreneurs who identify too much with being a creator first and foremost may well be spending their energy on the wrong things.</li></ul>

The Worlds of 'Creator' and Traditional Entrepreneur Collide

<ul><li>The role of an entrepreneur is to keep their business alive, so they should prioritize building a product or service people actually want to buy.</li><li>Creating beautiful graphics on Instagram, threads on Twitter, or reels on TikTok might feel easier and safer, but in isolation, they are unlikely to move your business forward.</li></ul>

Content Creation Is Not Always the Best Use of An Entrepreneurs' Time

Creating content is often fun, and can feel good when you get likes and comments, but creating demand and selling what you have built is your number one job.Continue to do content creation if it is driving demand for your business and use the sales to pay for the team to support you run the other parts of your business.

Get Into Sales, Not Content

<ul><li>You get to choose if you are on the creator path or not.</li><li>Entrepreneurs don’t always get the choice to choose what to spend their time on, but creators do.</li><li>Creators get to play around in the phases before they make money from their content.</li><li>Being a creator should be about discovering what you enjoy and figuring out what other people find valuable.</li></ul>

Choose Your Path

In a content-driven world we are all creators to an extent. But entrepreneurs who see themselves first and foremost as a 'creator' could have it the wrong way round. Here's why.

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

creativity

Creativity

Why entrepreneurs should be wary of calling themselves 'creators' 

While modern social networks have done a lot to enable human interaction, their infrastructure and operations leave much to be desired. Widespread censorship, arbitrary algorithm changes, privacy violations, intrusive ads, and undue exploitation of creators are some complaints levelled against legacy social networks.Blockchains can help create decentralized social media networks that are user-controlled, censorship-resistant, and private.

Coming Attraction In The Blockchain Sphere: Social Networks

Large social networks have billions of users combined—Facebook (2.91 billion), Twitter (290.5 million), and YouTube (2 billion).Modern social networks wield enormous power in society. Social networks can significantly influence our views and behaviours through the content they feed us.Social media companies implement algorithms that promote negative content to provoke user activity. They harvest user data and sell it to advertisers, who then populate our feeds with intrusive ads. They may even snoop on messages transferred between individuals.

The Problem With Legacy Social Networks

Social media companies earn huge profits from user-generated content but hoard a large percentage of this money. Worse, content creators can be de-platformed without warning, leading individuals to lose their means of livelihood.Moreover, vague content moderation policies and centralized control have made it pretty easy for social media companies to arbitrarily censor users. This is why major platforms like Twitter and Facebook have been criticized heavily for a perceived attack on free speech rights and suppression of opinion.

Biting The Hand That Feeds

Decentralized social networks are content creation and distribution platforms running on the blockchain. Many of these platforms attempt to correct the problems of Web2 social networks as highlighted in the previous section.Steemit, blockchain's answer to Medium, is a content curation platform that allows users to earn cryptocurrency based on the views their content gets.In Peepeth, the Twitter of blockchain, posts (called "peeps") cannot be deleted or altered once published.

Decentralized Social Networks

Web3 social networks may reward users for their time through watch-to-earn, learn-to-earn, play-to-earn, and other incentive programs. Some may even allow users to monetize their data and exchange it for crypto—as opposed to companies solely profiting from user data.

Giving It Back To The Users

Blockchains are distributed across multiple computers in a peer-to-peer system that's difficult to shut down or hack. To take down a blockchain like Ethereum, you'd need to find a way to control thousands of nodes running the network.With blockchain technology, we can build robust social applications that can run forever without interruptions. Dictators would be unable to censor public opinion by banning social media applications.

Why Blockchain Technology is Perfect for Social Media

Many decentralized online social networks have native tokens, which members buy to unlock features, tip creators, or access certain services.The token economy creates as much value for users as it does for platform owners. In some cases, especially when social networks operate as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), tokens give holders the power to vote on the direction of the project. This users-as-members system makes people more committed to the network and ensures its long-term survival.

Token Economics And DAOs

Influencers and content creators could further maximize earnings by creating subscription-based content. Using built-in micropayment systems like Lightning Network, content creators would be able to create steady streams of income instead of relying on platform owners for earnings.Because blockchain projects are (mostly) open-source, users can inspect the algorithms used to control our social media feeds. No longer will Big Tech implement secret algorithms built to exploit user attention or promote divisive and harmful content.

Subscription Based Content

Censorship-resistant social applications are good until people start to spread dangerous messages. It would be difficult, if not downright impossible, to moderate such harmful content and protect users.While decentralized social media networks promise security and failure-resistant operation, low transaction speeds may harm the user experience. Imagine having to wait 10-15 minutes for your tweet to go live on the blockchain. Or waiting for 20-30 minutes for your YouTube video to upload because the network is clogged.

Challenges of Decentralized Social Networks

To truly scale and accept more users, decentralized social networks would need innovative solutions to solve blockchain data storage issues. Potential solutions include storing data off-chain on decentralized servers like Arweave, InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), and Filecoin.Another interesting solution is using blockchains, like Deso, built specifically for social media applications. These blockchain networks typically have better on-chain storage, faster transaction speeds, and other features necessary for scaling social media applications.

The Issue Of Scale

Decentralized social media networks are undoubtedly one of the most exciting applications of blockchain technology yet. Blockchain-powered social applications could create a safer, private, valuable, and better experience for users and fix the broken system we have currently.However, there's still a long way to go before a decentralized Twitter becomes widely accepted. Issues, such as poor scalability, data privacy, and on-chain storage, must be addressed fully before Web3 social media becomes a reality.

Social Media is never going to be the same again.

 Learn what decentralized social media networks mean, how they work, and what benefits they offer to users. 

technologyandthefuture

Technology & The Future

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

Social Media Networks are Coming to the Blockchain

Find 100+ Facts about Marketing & Sales - Curated from inspiring sources like Books, Podcasts & Articles - Genuine Insights from like-minded Users like You!