Make It With Michael

By Jeff Bullas He was bullied so much at school that he was once thrown down a flight of stairs, then beaten until he was unconscious and hospitalized. But despite the outsider tag he had a passion. Born in a small town in South Africa and to the son of a dietitian he had a love of reading. His brother revealed that he read up to two books a day on a wide range of topics. That means he read 60 times the number books that most of us read in a month. He completed 2 bachelor degrees and was selected to start a PhD at Stanford University. After two days he quit to start his entrepreneurial career. By his mid 40’s he had started and built four multi-billion dollar companies. These are in four diverse fields of software, energy, transportation and aerospace. His name? Elon Musk . College is just the start University degrees are a discipline and a framework for learning that can be a ticket to that dream job. The tragedy? That is where most people stop. They have been seen as the t...

By Lewis Crutch If you only follow a few hundred people on Twitter, it’s relatively easy to see what they post and keep up-to-date with their content. Likewise, if you only have around two hundred followers, you can quite easily see their comments on your content and who has taken the time to react and share it. The problem comes when you start following several thousand or more people on Twitter and have around the same number of followers yourself. How on earth are you expected to keep up with all those people, gauge what impact you’re having, and know who is really engaging with you and your brand ? Well, the clue is in the title of this post! You need to start building Twitter lists. Obviously, you’ll still look at your Twitter stats occasionally and explore what’s trending, but building Twitter lists will make your time on social media shorter and more efficient. Twitter lists are essentially filtered timelines, which means that – bonus! – you can use them to grow your own fo...

By Vaibhav Kakkar Is controversy always a good thing for marketing your brand? It’s that age-old question… is all press good press? There are supporters on either side of the fence, both armed with examples that suit their purpose. So which side of the fence are you on? Let’s reframe the question like this: How much and to what extent is controversy good for marketing, and after what point does it get bad? The answer is complex, with several things to consider, like: The level of controversy The subject of controversy The connection between the controversy, the conversation and the brand. This may seem surprising given we are accustomed to seeing high-profile companies running controversial (sometimes highly controversial! ) campaigns, and hijacking conversations on social media to rake in the profits that come from increased visibility. But a study by academics from Wharton Business School found that while “controversy increases the likelihood of discussion at low lev...

By Kaylynn Chong You’re excited about the release of your new product. It’s going to the change the world and everyone is going to love it. You’re thrilled and you want people feel the same. So let’s make sure your product doesn’t just launch, but blasts off into the space. Here are six tips on how to use social media to get there. 6 ways to generate buzz for a product release 1. Create a hashtag Herschel’s unbranded hashtag encouraged users to share their own content and offered the appeal of being linked to like-minded people who love to travel. As a result, the #WellTravelled hashtag has attracted millions of users around the world . Explore the vast terrain of Nevado de Toluca. #WellTravelled #Mexico A post shared by Herschel Supply Co (@herschelsupply) on Aug 10, 2016 at 9:29am PDT This is a good example of a hashtag generating buzz without directly promoting a product—similar to a pre-released product. Instead of advertising its brand name or an actual product, Hersch...

By Jeff Bullas 10 years ago you could hit publish on a blog post, sit back, and watch the traffic roll in… But in 2017 things are different. Even with the growing emphasis on content promotion and social media distribution, it’s still getting harder and harder to consistently generate website traffic organically. It’s more competitive to rank in search engines, and social media sites all tend to be going down the Facebook path of “pay to play”. Organic traffic just isn’t what it used to be. Does that mean that we should all just give up and throw in the towel? Absolutely not. With increased noise and competition for everyone’s attention comes unique opportunities to be different. To find new and exciting ways to deliver value to a very targeted audience and achieve your goals in the process. Here are 5 unique ways of driving highly targeted traffic in 2017: 1. Adopt smart advertising techniques As I mentioned in the introduction, organic reach on social media is slowly deteri...

By Hootsuite We’re proud of the partnerships we’ve built with creative developers around the world. Thanks to their hard work, we can offer you the largest ecosystem of any social media management platform, with over 250 integrations and business applications —from Salesforce to Zendesk. These integrations let you manage more of your social media efforts from a single place, connecting the marketing, analytics, and other business solutions you already rely on every day. But we want to make it even easier for you to do more with Hootsuite. So we’ve launched a new $5 million Integration Fund . It’s designed to encourage talented developers to build even more innovative, enterprise-strength integrations and business applications on our platform. What does this mean for you? By making it easier for developers to build on top of the Hootsuite platform we ensure that your technology investment goes further, letting you connect the tools and solutions you already rely on with Hootsuit...

By Barry Feldman You’re a sales and marketing machine. You’re constantly selling yourself and your ideas. You’re attaching your name to a specific area of expertise and delivering useful content – online and off – to earn more visibility and build trust with your peers. Or you’re not. In either case, you have a personal brand. The question is: Are you working on it to accelerate the success of your career? If so, this post, and my new book, The Road to Recognition , is for you. In the book, co-author Seth Price and I, present 26 big ideas to help develop your personal brand. The chapters presented A-to-Z style, are also crammed with actionable advice. I’m happy to share the ideas with you here and now. 1. Authenticity The road to building a compelling personal brand is paved with authenticity. Understand your personal brand’s all about the real you. Look within. Create a compass based on who you are and the qualities that set you apart. How might you leverage your strengths? ...

By Emily Copp When you’re struggling to come up with new, exciting social content, it’s helpful to look back at your “North Star”—a past post that was really successful. By understanding what went well and why, you can set guidelines that will help you consistently produce high-performing content. We chatted with our social team about Hootsuite’s top-performing social posts, and they gave us some lessons on how to create awesome content every day. 7 lessons from our top-performing social media posts 1. Keep the copy short Writing for social media is no different than any other form of copywriting—being concise is more difficult than it seems. When dealing with complex topics, there’s a tendency to over-explain or oversell. And while that’s okay for a first draft, our social team spends a lot of time distilling concepts into a single sentence or idea. Keeping headlines short is better for click-throughs and shares. For example, in our social apps post , the copy that accompanied...

By Vikas Agrawal There are a lot of different ways to grow your business online . You could explore a new niche, launch a blogger outreach initiative , or invest in social media marketing. But if you want to do something that is cost-effective and comes with minimal risk, then you can improve the efficiency of your content marketing through automation. Wait, what is automation? Put simply, automation allows content marketers to save time on repetitive tasks and focus on other priorities. An example of automation in action is an automated email . So say if a prospective buyer leaves a site before checkout, autoresponder software sends an automated email that details everything the customer left in their shopping cart. Nifty, huh? One of the best and most flexible ways to leverage automation is through a platform like IFTTT – short for If This Then That. IFTTT allows you to connect up different services to create automated workflows or ‘ applets’ . You can also use IFTTT ...

By Dara Fontein Imagine watching the Super Bowl a day after the big game. The experience of watching something unfold as it happens live can’t be replicated. This could be why people spend more than three times the amount of time watching Facebook Live video compared to videos shared after the fact. Continue reading for some of our favorite Facebook Live video series—and get some top-notch ideas for your own social media videos. 1. FundersClub’s Live Q&A The venture capitalist community is “ 93 percent male, white, and over 53 ,” and FundersClub is looking to diversify this world with their monthly Facebook Live series. Facebook Live offers the perfect venue for this accessibility and democratization of the space. FundersClub CEO Alexander Mittal explains : “We’re bringing it right to where people are, where the barrier for entry is a click of a button.” Viewers can tune-in to FundersClub Live Q&A to learn about startups, investing, and entrepreneurship from a wide arra...