Twitter

Luxury accessories designer Michael Kors launched its “What’s in Your Kors” digital-media campaign Tuesday, focusing its efforts on Facebook-owned photo-sharing network Instagram, as well as Twitter. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

This situation sound familiar? You have an idea, then lose it, then come back to it again. You write it down quickly, check some email, get derailed, jump into a meeting, grab a coffee, then settle back in … only to hate what you thought of in the first place. You have no problem writing a post once you have an idea, but coming up with the idea in the first place can be the hardest part. It’s too easy to spend minute after minute staring at a blank screen, the cursor blinking back at you, taunting your idea paralysis. It's a shame you can't crumple your computer screen and fire it towards the trash sometimes. Look, I know first-hand that blogging can be hard. Often, it feels like you can’t get writing until The Muse drops by -- which may or may not be at an opportune time. But the secret to generating blog angles at scale isn't creating more of those mythical "lightbulb" creative moments. It's about organization and regiment. It's about planning ahead. It’s not about forcing a moment of brilliance every time you open your blogging tools. It’s about making each and every idea work harder for you. So whenever you have a single blog post idea: Stop! Don't write just yet. Instead, focus on generating as many story angles from that single idea as you possibly can. Here’s how to do it. From One Idea to Many: An Exercise Below is a visual describing how you might use one blog post idea to create multiple blog post angles. We’ll walk you through each step of this exercise, but we’ll continue to reference the below graphic throughout the post. In this exercise, we’ll work with three elements of a blog post (audience type, story structure, and content format) to come up with multiple pieces of content. Depending on your content strategy, you may have more blog post elements to tweak, but we’ll use these three for the purposes of this post. First, come up with a solid blog post topic that your audience will love. Sometimes the hardest part about coming up with multiple blog post ideas is thinking of the first one. But in order for this “idea machine” to work, you need to already have an idea in your head. The idea generator above works best if you start with a topic or concept that actually matters to your audience. It's not always best to talk about what your favorite blogs are talking about -- you need to take the pulse of what matters to your specific prospects, leads, and customers. If you’re feeling stuck, check out the performance of your top posts, dive deep into social media monitoring tools, and chat with customer-facing coworkers to get a pulse on what your audience wants to learn. Through this research, you’ll get both a quantitative and qualitative look at what your audience wants to hear about -- and maybe a topic to get started. Once you’ve chosen a topic, you’ll need to refine it into a specific blog post angle. To show you how to do this, I'll use an actual topic that we’ve written about recently: proper social media etiquette for marketers. Next, choose a category under each blog post element to generate a story angle. To refine your initial topic, make a selection under all three categories to generate additional story angles. (Note: You may have multiple choices under each blog post category -- for example, you can have both slides and text in a blog post.) You choose your target audience (executives at prospect or customer companies), the story structure of your post (a list), and the medium to use (slides and text). You've now framed a broad topic like social media etiquette into a tangible story angle: a slideshow with text detailing a list of social media etiquette best practices for CEOs. You may have even learned recently -- say, in this previous HubSpot post ;-) -- that odd numbers created more effective lists, so your first title becomes, "11 Social Media Etiquette Tips for CEOs." Boom! Story angle #1. But you’re not done yet … Then, pivot the headline ever so slightly to generate additional story angles. So n

You probably knew that social media was popular – the rapidly-growing audiences of Facebook, Twitter and the other top platforms are heavily touted, after all – but a new study has unveiled just how big social networking has become, and, perhaps more impressively, is becoming, around the world. In their Worldwide Social Network Users: 2013 Forecast and Comparative Estimates report, eMarketer has determined that one in four people worldwide will use social networks in 2013. This equates to a rise of 1.73 billion social media users from 1.47 billion in 2012, and this global audience is expected to jump to an incredible 2.55 billion within the next five years. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

It appears that Twitter may bring a smaller, but more active, audience to brands than Facebook does. A new study from social advertising and analytics startup Optimal examined data from 4,330 brands to determine whether each brand’s Twitter or Facebook following outpaced the other. The results are definitely interesting. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The IRS lists that there are over 1.1 million nonprofit organizations in the United States -- so nonprofit marketers, like the rest of us, have their work cut out for them. Getting people to care deeply enough about an issue is extremely challenging, particularly given the number of emails, invitations, and requests most people get on a daily basis. So, how does a nonprofit stick out from the pack? One nonprofit chose to focus on radical transparency, giving donors the security and comfort of knowing that every dollar they donated would directly benefit their mission. This is the story of how charity: water embodies the inbound nonprofit, and why HubSpot and charity: water are partnering to transform nonprofit marketing. (Learn more about the partnership in this video, and keep reading for more about charity: water's inbound giving strategy.) One of the fundamental principles of inbound marketing is building an online community of individuals who know, love, and share your brand with others -- and then moving their engagement along to inspire them to take action. Historically, nonprofits have put themselves and their mission first. Instead, charity: water decided from the beginning to put their supporters at the center of their organization, by empowering them to tell their own personal stories of how they became connected with the cause and fundraise individually to help end the world water crisis. In short, charity: water created a new model to make their marketing efforts more personalized, which in turn made their entire approach more lovable. We’ve outlined more details on how and why charity: water is the model for the inbound nonprofit in this post, and how that benefits their fundraising efforts, their donors, but most importantly, the villages they bring clean water to every year. I hope you find some inspiration in their approach, and perhaps some ideas to take away for your own nonprofit fundraising and marketing. Dollars to Projects: The Power of Proof Sharing the impact of your organization’s funds raised may not have been a high priority in the past. But with the growing debate of overhead vs. impact, supporters are looking for the results of their donation more and more. Charity: water has woven this concept into their model from the beginning. For instance, founder Scott Harrison shared the GPS coordinates of the first wells that were built to everyone that attended his birthday-party-turned-fundraiser, where he raised the first $15,000 dollars for charity: water. From that, Dollars to Projects was born -- a program that “tracks every dollar raised, showing you the water projects you helped fund for people in need.” Here's how it works: After charity: water designates an individual’s given funds to a project, they email a custom project report with pictures and results. Here is an example of a water project report a supporter might receive: The hope for the future is that in 10, 15, 20 years, their supporters will be able to see the impact of their previous fundraising campaigns or donations and see how they have affected one person -- or an entire village -- by supporting charity: water. But whatever a donor or fundraiser can give or raise, the proof of their impact is right there for them to see. Captivate an Audience With Video With an annual September Campaign that raised over $2,000,000 in 4 months last year, charity: water brought the story in Rwanda to thousands of computer and phone screens with five distinct videos. The first of the series was a movie-like trailer that launched the campaign on September 1, 2012, narrated by founder Scott Harrison. The story isn’t just about the country's need for clean water. The video highlights the recent history of struggle in Rwanda, as well as the need for education and new roads. In fact, clean water isn’t mentioned until a minute and thirty seconds into the four-minute video. Images of the children and mothers carrying water from dirty water sources shows yo

In March, Twitter announced via its developer blog that its API v1 would officially retire on Tuesday, May 7, 2013, then gave developers a reprieve with a May announcement that the API 1 shutdown wouldn’t take place until June 11. Now the transition to API V1.1 has officially taken place. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Is there such a thing as a perfect tweet? Sure there is. While the content that you post on Twitter will vary depending on your business, paying close attention to how you tweet can dramatically improve your engagement rates. Having a clear call to action, being mindful to use proper punctuation and shortening URLs (with Bitly) are simple steps everyone can take to optimise the quality of their Twitter output, maximising reader interest and significantly improving ROI. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Did you know that with more than three million active Twitter users, and a 300 percent year-on-year growth rate, Saudi Arabia ranks number one in the world as the fastest-growing Twitter nation? Moreover, Arabic is the fastest-growing language on Twitter, and 88 percent of the Middle East’s online population uses one or more social networking sites each day. Indeed, social media usage throughout the Middle East is very much on the rise, with Facebook, Twitter and Google+ all popular in varying degrees through the Gulf region, and LinkedIn has a particularly strong presence in the business-focused UAE. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Twitter’s Canadian office has officially opened its doors, with managing director Kirstine Stewart at its helm. After a month of behind-the-scenes media action and 10 new employee hires, Twitter Canada is ready to roll. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Rumors are circulating that Facebook may be adding video to Instagram at its June 20 product announcement. Many news outlets suggested that Facebook would be introducing a news reader prior to this speculation. The introduction of video to Instagram would be a direct response Twitter’s video sharing service, Vine. Since its public release for iOS in January, Vine has grown significantly in popularity and its release for Android earlier this month has only bolstered this following. There are several clues suggesting that video may be the next step for Instagram, which now boasts of 100 million active users. For example, Facebook has prevented Vine from using its friend-finding feature. By doing this, Facebook looks embed users into its platform first, rather than a service like Twitter. Another instance of Facebook protecting its brand is how it is preventing Instagram uploads from being posted directly onto Twitter. Users can still share Instagram photos on Twitter, but users need to click the link to see them. By directing users back to the Instagram platform, users will spend more time in the photo sharing application. It also helps with ubiquity for the Facebook and Instagram brands. From another perspective, it would also be strategic for Facebook to introduce short video sharing to its ecosystem. With talks of adding auto-play video ads into the News Feed, Facebook could be looking to familiarize users with the concept. With more users sharing short videos, video ad units may not seem as intrusive. For the June 20 product announcement, Facebook sent snail mail invitations with the outline of a coffee mug. Though this motif would suggest that Facebook would be announcing a news product, some have speculated this as simply a diversion to the actual announcement. With the introduction of hashtags last week, it is also possible the social network may be introducing an improved blogging platform made more powerful with Graph Search. Though it may be one of these assumptions or the other, it is likely that Facebook will add all of these features in the nearby future. Main image courtesy of Shutterstock.