Make It With Michael

By Rohan Ayyar The landscape of online marketing is becoming more competitive by the hour. To survive, every company needs to have an edge of some sort. Small businesses need an edge just to make a name for themselves. Big enterprises need an edge to win over more customers and retain existing ones. The harsh reality is, it takes a lot more than a great product or service to succeed. So what do you need? A strong content marketing strategy. It’s a golden opportunity to show off your unique voice and demonstrate how you can improve the lives of your customers. Here are four ways you can use top-notch content to push past your competitors. 1. Do your research There are many ways to keep tabs on your competitors . For starters, follow them on social media, sign up for their newsletters or set up Google Alerts so you can know what they’re doing. Every successful content marketing strategy starts with due diligence. You can also see what type of content works best for them with an a...

By Kendall Walters April was a busy month for news updates—especially for Facebook, who announced a ton of new features and initiatives at their F8 conference. For the tl;dr, watch the live video below highlighting a few of our favorite updates. Let’s get to it. Table of contents Twitter Facebook Instagram Pinterest YouTube LinkedIn Hootsuite Snapchat Twitter Location sharing in DMs On April 3, Twitter announced a new customer service feature for businesses: the ability to request and share locations in Direct Messages . When a business requests a location in a conversation, the person they’re talking to will have the option to ignore the request, share a precise location, or pick a place name from a list. Starting today, businesses can request and share locations when engaging with people in Direct Messages. http://bit.ly/2pPMR1I — Twitter Marketing (@TwitterMktg) April 3, 2017 Twitter Lite On April 6, Twitter introduced Twitter Lite , a pared down version of the...

By Emily Copp Are you getting business results from your activities on social media? In our latest Hootcast podcast , we chat with social selling expert Koka Sexton about how to find and engage potential customers on social media. In this podcast you’ll learn: What social selling is and why it matters How to build long-term relationships on social Tips on how marketing and sales can work together Press play to hear the show in its entirety, or if you don’t have a set of earbuds handy, read the transcription of our conversation below. Q&A with social selling expert Koka Sexton Tell us a little bit about what you do and your path in business so far. My story is a little different than most in my position. I started off in sales many, many years ago—I don’t want to date myself. As a new salesperson I was still trying to figure out how I was going to fit into this new ecosystem that was developing around social media. I first signed up for LinkedIn in 2005 and then I sig...