3 Easy Ways to Track Clicks on the Links in Your Tweets

If you share a lot of links to articles, blog posts, landing pages and other forms of content or if driving website traffic through Twitter is one of your objectives, it’s absolutely necessary to track the clicks on the links you share in your tweets. This will help you determine what types of tweets get more clicks on the links you share and you can take similar steps in the future to craft tweets that drive more website traffic. You can learn how to track the clicks on the links in your tweets below…

1. Use a good scheduling tool:

Using a scheduling tool will automatically help you see how many clicks the links are getting. A couple of good tools you could try are Buffer and Hootsuite. I have described how to use them in my post 9 Brilliant Tools to Boost Your Twitter Presence. As these tools have their own URL shorteners that shorten the URLs in your tweets, they automatically track the clicks on the links you share. After you share your links you can visit the analytics sections of the tools and see what links people are clicking on.

On Hootsuite, visit the analytics page by clicking on ‘Analytics’ which can be found on the menu on the left.

Now choose the ‘URL Click Stats – Ow.ly’ option and then choose the account and links and view how many clicks your links are getting.

On Buffer you can just choose the Twitter account first and then the ‘Analytics’ option on the top to see how many people are clicking on your links.

2. Use Bitly:

Another option would be to manually shorten your links with Bitly and then track who is clicking on them by browsing through your Bitly account. This tool can give you very accurate results.

Also, having a Bitly shortened link in your Tweets can have more positive results as Tweets with Bitly shortened URLs receive the highest number of retweets. Another benefit of Bitly is that it shows you where the people clicking on the links are based.

So the next time you share a tweet, instead of just going with the shortened URL that automatically appears, you can use Bitly and shorten your URL.

It’s very easy to shorten your URL with Bitly. Just create an account and then in the top right corner (in the field) where it says ‘Paste Link Here’, copy and paste your link or type it down, whichever you prefer, and your link will be shortened.

You can then copy the shortened URL and add it to your tweets. Whenever you would like to, you can visit your Bitly accounts and check the clicks on the links.

3. Connect Bitly and Buffer:

You don’t have to go through the trouble of shortening your URLs with Bitly manually each and every time if you have a Buffer account. As you can connect your Buffer account with your Bitly account and then choose the option to shorten your URLs with Bitly.

To connect your Bitly account with your Buffer account visit the ‘Link Shortening’ page which can be found under settings.

You can then connect your account by clicking on the green ‘Connect Bit.ly’ button and then choose the option to shorten your URLs with Bitly by clicking the ‘Use’ button next to where it says ‘bit.ly’.

After you perform these steps any tweets with links you share through Buffer will automatically be shortened with Bitly. You will then be able to view how many people are clicking on those links on both, your Buffer and Bitly accounts.

You can use these methods to also track the links you share on other networks like Facebook, Linkedin and Google+. I have written about how you can use Hootsuite and Buffer for Facebook in my post 3 Time Saving Tools to Help Manage Your Facebook Page.

Use the above tips to track the clicks on the links on your tweets, but don’t stop there. Regularly analyze your tweets and check which types of tweets are getting the highest clicks. Factors like the topic, length, time, etc. should be considered while analysing your tweets. You can then use the results to create tweets with links that get a high number of clicks.

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How do you track the clicks on the links in your tweets? Have you got any tips you would like to share with us? Please leave your comments below.

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Content Marketing Technology Update: 9 Emerging Trends

Content marketing is proving to be the MVP in today’s inbound marketing world, with 87 percent of today’s marketers implementing a content strategy to drive sales, establish thought leadership or increase brand engagement.

Journalism techniques and automation platforms that are processing and mining content are now fused together in this type of digital marketing. Because of this, marketers are exposed to content technology and intensive tasks such as content curation.

Tying these all together can get confusing, especially with complex terms such as semantic search, machine learning and natural language processing. However, the importance of learning these terms is growing tremendously for content marketers. Here’s why.

People want fresh, purposeful content and they want it in one convenient place. Let’s say that place is your website. Now, if they aren’t getting the content they want every day on your site, they’re going to look elsewhere – potentially disregarding you as a dependable source and giving a leg up to your competition. So, how can you get them to stick around? Upload original and curated content, fast.

Content marketers don’t always have the time, or resources, to call in an IT team. If you haven’t mastered the technology behind today’s digital marketing world, and can’t get to that IT resource in time, it can be a recipe for disaster. It’s imperative to understand what’s going on in these behind the scenes technologies to be the go-to source in your field.

Here are nine introductions to these intelligent technologies and how they can be implemented to advance your content marketing strategy and make you a better digital marketer.

Artificial Intelligence

Let’s start with the basics. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a broad term that describes intelligent software and computing, allowing a machine to “think” through programming specifications. Although the term is popularly relatable to robots or video games, AI stands as the backbone to many fields, such as natural language processing and sentiment analysis. These technologies allow content marketers and their constituents to search for and discover relevant content, collect consumer data and explore predictive analytics, to name a few.

Machine Learning

Machine learning is a branch of AI where machines can learn from data and predict potential outcomes. For example, machine learning utilizes predictive analytics to score leads, much like Infer or Lattice Engines, or to learn what content is the most relevant, like Curata. This leverages the potential of big data and allows marketers to focus on the information, or leads, that best match their service.

Natural Language Processing

The science of intelligently understanding or generating “natural language”, the language that humans write, is known as natural language processing (NLP). When a user searches “How much is a cup of joe?” their search results will include coffee prices. Even though “Joe” is also a common name, it doesn’t fit within the context of the sentence. NLP aims to understand the structure of human linguistics, not just the words themselves.

This is useful for content marketers looking to dive into the world of mobile marketing as part of their online marketing plan. NLP can be used to help generate content through automatic summarization, like Summly, on mobile so that the information presented is intelligently discovered, purposeful and presented on one page. Users seeking content on mobile devices don’t have the leisure, or space, to click from tab to tab.

NLP can also be used to help marketers understand customer inquiries and better educate their users, leading to improved buyer satisfaction and content congruence. The NLP experts at Q-go have engineered a new FAQ practice, by matching all of the same versions of a searched question with the same answer, i.e. “I need to change the address on my account,” yields the same result as “How do I update my address?” Information can be more easily found and buyer frustrations, and company costs, are kept to a minimum.

Curata’s ability to surface and analyze content within specific user guidelines, as well as our software’s ability to “learn” to improve search performance can be attributed to NLP.

Machine Translation

This is automated content translation. You’ve most likely used the free translation resources offered by Google Translate or Systran. These machine translation tools can cost-effectively transfer content into new markets, international and domestic, reaching a larger audience and increasing potential for improved brand awareness.

Sentiment Analysis

Just as the name implies, sentiment analysis is an automated NLP task used to determine the feeling or “sentiment” of a piece of content. By understanding the sentiment of content posted by potential consumers on social media, marketers have the opportunity to adjust and present targeted information to those users. Crimson Hexagon has the ball rolling on this application by offering social data analytics to discover how people think by analyzing what they’re saying on the Internet.

Information Retrieval

In order to avoid an information overload, search results must be tapered and precise. Information retrieval is the field of retrieving the correct information given a query. This is the science that Google and other search engines use to return the right content to the inquirer.

Without understanding how Google works, marketers can have a more difficult time optimizing content. A solid understanding of Google’s PageRank algorithm and search algorithm, most recent being Hummingbird, gives content marketers an exponentially better shot at reaching a wider audience. Content curation technologies, like Curata, use information retrieval to identify relevant content for consumers.

Document Clustering

The task behind document clustering includes the automatic grouping together of related content.

Document clustering proves itself useful for marketers because it often powers content recommendation engines to suggest other similar content for the searcher to read, improving the reach of content and usefulness for the user. This automation can also be used to suggest call to actions. BrightInfo modifies original content recommendations for individual site visitors, grouping your related information together to keep them around longer.

Collaborative Filtering

In short, collaborative filtering is a technique used to recommend content based on the content consumption habits of similar users. It filters through large amounts of data to obtain the most useful information available to the user. This technique is used by Netflix and Amazon – consumers who watched X also watched Y. Sound familiar?

This is helpful for marketers to understand how to optimize their content for sites that use collaborative filtering. It also proves as a great example of how content marketing and technology can be used to increase product awareness and drive sales.

Semantic Web/Semantic Search

Semantic web is a common data format for adding metadata to concepts and interpreting their relationship. This automation takes the intent of a query and polishes it to provide more customized search results. When a user searches “Veteran’s Day” on Google, not only does the date pop up at the top of the page in bold letters, but it is followed with a stream of history and news stories on the topic.

Semantic search is a beneficial tool for marketers because it can be used to find extended content related to the initial search, giving that associated content an expanded reach. However, the amount of human annotation required for semantic search is causing user interest to decline, as it cannot comprehensively “learn” from existing preferences to make the search process more efficient. Note the graph below via Google Trends, displaying the declining interest in semantic web since 2004.

Now more than ever, it’s important to leverage the potential content marketing has for your business. Including content in your marketing strategy is essential to establishing thought leadership and staying ahead of the competition. In order to do this effectively, marketers must understand the technology behind the digital content they’re producing. This knowledge will make your content, and content curation, strategy more effective.

Ready to take the step towards content creation and technology integration? Download Curata’s 2013 Content Curation Look Book and see how these companies are using curation technology to enhance their content and take on the digital marketing world.

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Instagram: How To Optimize Your Reach

The first thing you see when you visit Instagram’s webpage is their tagline: “Capture and Share the World’s Moments” – which is the purpose for the multi-billion dollar company (now owned by Facebook). What users actually use it for, however, can vary in a multitude of ways. This is great news for businesses because they can optimize their reach in ways that other social media outlets may not allow for. Not to mention, this untapped demographic may include people that are on Instagram but don’t have a Facebook or Twitter account.

Personally, I’m an avid Instagram user and will swear by its significance in both personal and professional avenues.

Instagram can connect you with people that you would otherwise never have been connected with.

For businesses, this can mean reinforcing their brand identity while increasing revenue.

1. Michael Kors:

At the beginning of November 2013, Michael Kors was the first business to run an advertisement on Instagram – only to be met with criticism from their followers. The statistics, however, show that despite the disapproval from many followers, the results were exactly what Michael Kors had hoped for: in the first 18 hours of its launch, Michael Kors gained 34,000 new followers putting them at 1.3 million followers.

2. Sponsored Posts:

A sponsored post can increase viewership by pushing them to users that are not already following the account. Like Facebook, it promises impressions but not necessarily “follows” or “likes”, and unlike Facebook, you can’t target a specific demographic. In any case, a riveting ad or a great offer isn’t normally rejected by most – so it’s still worth considering.

3. Optimization:

There has been viral videos wreaking havoc on the usage of hashtags – for those who don’t know, a hashtag is the number sign (#) followed by a word or phrase. Some people have abused the purpose of this tool, but it’s actually very useful if used properly. Hashtagging organizes your photos by topic so that interested users can easily access relevant photos.

What are some of your favourite Instagram accounts to follow?

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Go Hard on the Soft Skills for Better Customer Service

In today’s world, a lot of times we think HARD is better. Work hard! Play hard! Drive a hard bargain! But it’s the soft skills that often make the greatest impact in the customer service experience.

Hard may mean strength such as “hard as a rock” versus soft which may seam weak as in “Don’t be a softy.” Apples taste better hard and to many peoples’ tastes, so does cheese.

There may be lots of things that work or seem better when they are hard but when it comes to service, it’s the soft skills that will enable the most memorable results, not the hard ones. Don’t get me wrong…hard skills are essential and important and will get the job done. But, it’s the soft skills that will make the emotional connection and inspire the lasting impact most hospitality leaders desire.

This guest post summarizes my colleague Roberta Nedry’s great post on Hotel Business Review discussing the need for greater emphasis in training the soft skills. Roberta’s focus in hotel guest experience is also critical for call center agents to effectively

In service and even in hospitality curricula, hard skills are often the focus for training and education to deliver effective job performance. Hard service skills include efficiency, responsiveness and accuracy as examples.

• Hard skills are technical and operational actions needed for any one job role or task.


• Hard skills are the procedures and responsibilities in job duties and descriptions.


• Hard skills are the established systems and processes to deliver services and amenities to customers.

This includes things like the system used to take reservations, the procedures followed to check-in a guest, the processes followed to maintain the property, the workflow of preparing for a banquet, and the like. Hard skills focus on the systems, tools and methods used to deliver your products and services to guests.

Soft skills are the behaviors which directly impact guest impressions and feelings. These behaviors have the opportunity to cause positive, negative or indifferent reactions. These behaviors include communication styles, both verbal and non-verbal, attitudes, teamwork, awareness, authenticity, empathy and even leadership amongst others.

• Soft skills showcase the personal side of service.


• Soft skills focus on effective use of team members’ emotions.


• Soft skills rely on behaviors and verbal skills used to effectively communicate.

The personal dimensions of service are the way employees greet guests, the manner in which they listen to their needs and requests, and the care they take in each Touchpoint. It’s the emotional experience that they create for guests! It’s how they make them feel!

Soft skills take guests right to the brain’s emotional reflex. They are the express train for service, especially exceptional service! Hard skills will get them there eventually but may be with less impact and possibly more aggravation. They will also not yield the rewards that the triggering of positive emotions will do via this direct route.

Go hard on the soft skills for better customer service experiences

Soft skills are less tangible but more powerful so they should have constant, consistent and persistent emphasis and understanding. Hospitality leaders need to understand HOW to showcase those behaviors and hold both managers and employees accountable for integrating them into all their daily actions and responsibilities. Priorities and budgets need to be dedicated to professional “soft skill” training and applications so that they become fully part of and integral to any service culture.

Employees need to understand what those skills are and why they will lead to great emotional benefits for both them and their guests. Science supports these outcomes with more and more evidence of how our brains are triggered to direct or respond to the multiple points of contact in our lives. When we understand what those triggers are and how we are impacted ourselves or how we impact others, we can then be proactive about how we handle those points of contact. This is what training in soft skills is all about and what will lead to exceptional service delivery and the most memorable guest experiences.

For example, according to new research, empathy, a powerful soft skill, is a habit we can cultivate, especially once we understand what it is all about. Empathy is a critical soft skill for service excellence. Empathy is about being able to relate to someone else, to step into their shoes, to understand why they might be feeing the way they do or to anticipate why they might feel a certain way.

Empathy is about discovering other people’s tastes and assembling the personal ingredients for service success. Getting better at service delivery and inspiring memorable guest experiences, even in the most simple, brief and ordinary moments, is directly connected to better understanding human nature.

Scientists are producing more evidence that we are “homo empathicus” which means we are wired for empathy, social cooperation and helping others. We just have to trigger that side of others and us and recognize that we are naturally evolving to care for each other or that we have the ability to care.

Caring is a key component and a key soft skill in service delivery. There are many ways to show we care, even with complete strangers and guests with whom we may interact for only a few moments. Smiling is one of the soft skills that can instantly show interest. Smiling with both eyes and voice add even more impact.

Showing empathy and that genuine interest and caring is in play happens with a greeting, a gesture, body language or the tone of voice. It happens through teamwork, through service recovery, through social media, through written documents—through every touchpoint.

Employees need to understand the multiple ways in which they can take guests on that express train to the brain and trigger those positive emotions that yield the most loyal customers. Soft skills need to be part of hiring, orientation, job training and performance reviews.

Soft skills need to be part of daily operations and permeate each level of an organization, both on the frontline and in the back. All roles need to learn more about the variety of behaviors that will impact those with whom they interact, both internally and externally. Leaders also need to design the framework and foundation for service behaviors that are most desired and how they fit into that particular organization.

Exceptional service and great guest experiences start to happen on a consistent basis when this comprehensive understanding of blending soft and hard skills takes place. Research in sociology, psychology and even history support the power of this strategy. Making an emotional connection about how to make emotional connections will be the soft sell that leads to hard profits.

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Manage Your Marketing: Does Everyone Know It’s Planning Season?

If you think about it, “planning season” has predominantly been the domain of marketers. We are almost possessive of the craziness that ensues as we strive to plan marketing campaigns for our clients (or our own companies) for the coming year. In truth, however, planning season, just like everything else in business, does not/should not belong to any one company. In an ideal situation, marketing may be leading the charge to enter into planning season, but everyone within the company is part of the process.

Who should be working with the marketing department to create a cohesive and integrated 2014 campaign? What can they do to aid in the process? Here are some ideas.

Sales

Ultimately, any good marketing campaign will be deemed so based on whether sales rise. Because of that fact, it is essential that marketing and sales work together, at least on the front end of the planning process. Your sales department can offer you customer insights based on in-person conversations. They can inform you about what people are asking for, what competitors are doing, and how your customers and prospects may be reacting to those competitors’ efforts. All of this is valuable information as planning for a new year and new campaigns begins.

Customer Service/Support

Like your sales team, your customer support staff can offer a lot of insight into how customers are interacting with your products or services. If a problem keeps rearing its ugly head, that is something that marketing can either deal with directly or marketing can promote the resolution of the problem once the solution is found. The customer service/support staff should also be aware of what the marketing campaign will entail in generalities so that they know what the company’s message is along with from where customers may be getting their information.

Product Development

The marketing and the product development team can benefit from working together in the planning stage of a campaign. The product development team can alert marketing that some new products are on the docket for the coming year. This enables marketing to perhaps reserve some funds for promoting those new products. Similarly, the product development team can alert marketing that a product contrasting existing products may be introduced. This can impact how marketing promotes the existing product. Planning ahead can prevent messes in the future.

Human Resources

Yes, to a certain extent it may be beneficial to integrate your HR department into your planning process. If you are planning to significantly increase production, for example, you will be able to alert HR that you are going to need to hire more people. Knowing this ahead of time can enable HR to prepare so that the vetting and hiring process runs more smoothly.

The C-Suite

Perhaps the most integral people to incorporate into the planning process are also the most difficult to pin down. Your president, your VP of sales and marketing, your CFO if you have one, and any other members of your management team should offer ideas about how the year to date has gone, what they are hoping to achieve in the coming year, how they want to allocate the budget, and what they want the new year’s budget to be. Ideally, these insights are gathered before the rest of the team really begins to plan. Each department comes to the process with marching orders and a budget in mind, and from there decisions can be made more efficiently and effectively.

While marketing can certainly take on responsibility for coordinating the planning process, marketing should not “own” the plan, nor should planning season become overshadowed by silos or territoriality. In the end, the entire company will benefit far more from a plan to which everyone contributed. Start your year on the right foot. Make sure everyone is involved in planning season.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/amirblumenfeld/1270142719/ via Creative Commons

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How Brands Can Effectively Engage with Social Leads on Twitter

Since social media has gone mainstream, we’ve heard the social media gurus preaching about the importance of engagement. We’ve talked about how important it is to build relationships on Twitter and we’ve even highlighted what brands should know before trying to sell on social.

Yet still, organizations of all shapes and sizes are struggling with the idea of engaging with consumers. Brands have no issue talking to people who talk to them first but tend to have difficulty in getting over the hump to reach out and engage their audience proactively. It’s a resistance that is stopping organizations from getting closer to their customers.

It doesn’t matter how much time you spend on Twitter if you’re not using it effectively. It doesn’t matter how many followers or tweets you have if you’re not tying it back to results. The most effective way to drive results from Twitter is through one-on-one interaction between a brand and their audience. It’s through these pro-active interactions that gives brands an opportunity to help the consumers across their different buying stages and build a relationship like no advertisement ever can. One of the biggest untapped opportunities for brands can be found in brand relevant engagement opportunities defined as a social lead.

Social leads are actionable opportunities in which a brand should engage. They could be someone tweeting that they’re thinking about buying a product/service that you sell or it could be someone tweeting that they’re having an issue with your product. The fact that these conversations have actionable intent make them highly relevant to a business and present an opportunity for engagement that creates a strong relationship that could ultimately lead to a sale.

So, what I want to focus on today is to teach you how to effectively engage with consumers on Twitter. I know it’s only one part of the social media puzzle, but it’s an important part. It’s a part of the puzzle that many people are still missing and one that can close the gap and clearly demonstrate the value of social media. Check out the slides below to learn how to effectively engage with social leads on Twitter:

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Understanding Paid, Owned and Earned Media

Question: Our B2B has a very small marketing group and we keep hearing about “Earned” media being what we should focus our limited resources on. Can you explain paid vs. owned vs. earned media and provide any guidance on which we should focus on?

Let’s start this one off with a little story.

I’m a brand new B2B provier of “SuperWidgets.” As an organization we strive to up our marketing visits so we decide to go all in on digital marketing.

The first thing we do is register a domain, build a website, populate it with content and then create accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and every other Social Networking site we can think of. The content we put on all of these properties that we own would be referred to as “Owned Media”

After two hard weeks of pumping out new blog posts and tweeting our hearts about our ”SuperWidgets,” Senior Management is disappointed to see that our efforts haven’t converted to millions of page views, thousands of new followers and likes on Social Media and at least 500 new customers. (Snark)

So they demand that we up the ante and immediately start driving more traffic to our site.

To do this, our B2B organization goes out and buys keywords on Google and partners with a digital advertising firm to find sites where we can put advertisements about our “SuperWidgets.” This effort would be reflective of our “Paid Media.”

Finally, after appeasing management by gaining a spike of “hopefully valuable readers” through our paid marketing we reconvene as a team and say…

How do we get our customers to be our advocates? We want our customers to share with their networks about how great our SuperWidgets” are because let’s face it. People don’t click on banner ads and paid ads like they did and as much as we are working on our “Owned” media, customers trust their peers more than they trust brands!

The media we are seeking here is what is called “Earned Media” and it is the most powerful and most difficult to obtain.

The Skinny on Earned Media

To generate Earned Media, brands need to work on executing their owned and paid very well to draw attention and convert their traditional mediums to brand advocates.

In the old PR days Earned Media was merely getting your stories placed in media sources rather than having to pay for advertising. The biggest shift here is the platforms have changed and with most brands having their ecosystem of owned media, it comes down to getting your network and word of mouth marketing to push your story into the eyes of more potential brand advocates and customers.

So to quickly sum up the original question. Earned Media is a very good goal for a marketing campaign, or an overall marketing strategy. To get to the point of successfully earning additional media I recommend focusing hard on your ecosystem of paid and owned to make sure you are getting exposed to the right audience and earning the trust and support of those that can help spread the word.

For a great article from Forrester Research explaining the difference between Paid, Owned and Earned you can click here

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