Your 5 Favorite Digital Marketing Articles of the Week

It’s hard to keep up with the latest news in the world of digital marketing, isn’t it?

We curate content using Trapit all week long, and we keep track of which stories you’re reading and sharing. It’s always fun to see which stories resonate with our audience. This week, I thought that I’d share the most-read stories with you.

With no further ado, here are the articles that you and your fellow marketers couldn’t get enough of.

Enjoy!

1. 6 Key Shifts in Thinking about Social Media

By Donna Moritz on Entreprenuer

Social Media Examiner released its 2014 Social Media Industry Report. The 52-page report is a lot of text for a social media manager to digest – given that we, social media managers, tend to think in 140 characters.

Fear not, though! Donna Moritz highlighted a few of Social Media Examiner’s findings. For instance…

• 68% of marketers plan to increase their blogging efforts
• Facebook is losing its sexiness. Only 43% of marketers believe that their Facebook marketing is effective.
• Nevertheless, Facebook continues to be the social media channel of choice for B2C marketers. For B2B marketers, however, LinkedIn is at the top of the list.

2. 72 Hours in the Life of Content on Twitter and other Social Media

By Adam Charles on Social Media Today

What happens to your content after its posted online? Adam Charles looked at his articles on Social Media Today and examined their lifespan over 72 hours. For him, Twitter was his most popular platform.

Adam offers some logical explanations for this:

It’s really easy to push out tweets and the nature of it means we often don’t think twice about tweeting. It requires less thought if something is within our sphere of interest to share it. Whereas, perhaps there is an extra layer of decision before posting it on narrower networks.

It makes sense, but what does that say about a site like ours? At Trapit, we typically have more shares on LinkedIn than any other network. Does that mean that our readers are less capricious than Twitterers?

Just something to think about. (By the way, you can read that article about content curation here.)

3. 6 Digital Challenges for the New York Times’ New Editor

By Seth Fiegerman on Mashable

The content marketing world was abuzz this week because a 97-page NYT report was leaked. Again, for those of us who are used to reading 1,200-word op-ed pieces, trudging through a 97-page report is akin to climbing Mount Everest. Thankfully, the internet has distilled the report.

For me, the key takeaway had to do with the idea of recycling and repurposing old content. Though the NYT has over 14.7 million articles in its archives, the editors “rarely think to mine our archive, largely because we are so focused on news and features.”

That certainly got me thinking: How can we repurpose some of our old content?

4. Want a job in media? Think digital

By David Amrani on Digiday

Even if you’re not looking for a job, this article has some good reminders. For example, our society has created a dichotomy: On the fuzzy end of the spectrum, we have the artsy and writerly types, and on the hard, techy end of the spectrum, we have the math and science types.

But as this article reminds us, the writerly types need to be able to do math nowadays. Whether you’re a writer, an editor, or a content marketer, analytics are “part of the job.” C’est la vie.

5. How do we measure the value of content? A Look at Coca-Cola

By Richard Stacy on his blog

Are social shares an indicator of effective content?

Mark Higgison of the University of Brighton seems to think so. He criticized Coke’s new content marketing strategy. As Mark points out, the number of social shares for Coca-Cola’s branded content aren’t really that impressive. This led to a snappy exchange between Mark and Ashley Brown, Coke’s Director of Digital Communications and Social Media.

If you like a good fight, you’ll like this article. For me, what I found interesting was Richard Stacy’s take on all this:

Consumers rarely want content, they want information. They want answers to questions. They want response to complaints or suggestions.

In their books and blog posts, content marketers always instruct us to educate or entertain our audiences, and at times, the advice of B2C marketers can lean towards the entertainment side of things. It’s nice to read about someone emphasizing the educational aspects of content marketing.

So there you have it…

5 breakdowns of 5 content marketing posts from the last week. If you’d like to discuss any of these stories or add an article to the list, leave a comment below.

Until next time,

-Mark