It’s a cautionary tale replayed endlessly across one of the world’s most influential community-driven platforms.

But for brands, Reddit can no longer be dismissed as a marketing minefield to be avoided. The platform has around 108 million daily unique visitors worldwide, and users spend an average of around 16 minutes consuming content per session — far more time than on many other social platforms.

Perhaps most importantly, the site’s sprawling archive of authentic conversations now serves as one of the primary gatekeepers for AI Search. Google’s $60 million-per-year agreement to license Reddit content signals that this influence is now entrenched at the highest levels of SEO and GEO.

The message for marketers is unambiguous: The rules of digital influence are being drafted on Reddit, whether you’re participating or not.

Reddit Has Traditionally Been Thorny Territory for Brands

Historically, Reddit has been hostile to overt marketing efforts. The graveyard of brand blunders is filled with failed AMAs and cringey misfires: Nissan, REI, and travel ticketing site Skiplagged have been dragged for clumsy attempts at engagement. Electronic Arts’ now-infamous 2017 defense of “pay-to-win” mechanics in Star Wars Battlefront II earned the most downvoted comment in Reddit history.

The platform’s persistent hostility to brands is tied to three deeply structural and cultural dynamics:

1. Authenticity above all. Reddit’s entire ethos centers around authentic, user-first contributions rather than top-down brand messaging.
2. Community-driven scrutiny. Every subreddit has its own culture, rules, and moderators, which means outsiders — especially brands — are expected to adapt seamlessly to the community.
3. Anonymity breeds candor (and crass comments). Under the cloak of anonymity, Redditors can be brutally honest. They won’t hesitate to tell you exactly what they think of your brand, and they have a keen nose for sniffing out inauthenticity.

As a result of all of the above, traditional marketing tactics that may work elsewhere are swiftly rejected here. Marketing-speak is mocked, subtle self-promotion is quickly exposed, and contrived campaigns are dismantled within minutes. (If you want a vivid illustration of this, just head on over to r/HailCorporate, a subreddit dedicated to unmasking brand intrusion.)

Reddit’s upvote/downvote mechanics also impose real-time accountability on content. Public comment and post histories are visible by default — though since June 2025, users can hide it from their profiles. (Moderators, however, retain 28-day access.)

Finally, moderation can be a rude awakening for brands accustomed to sanitized feedback loops. Volunteer moderators enforce each subreddit’s rules publicly and quickly. Missteps can result in instant removal or bans. And unlike platforms where content disappears, Reddit has a long memory: Deleted posts often persist via archives and mirrors, which means that one ill-conceived campaign can haunt a company for years.

2025 Reddit: New Rules, New Tools, New Stakes

All that said, Reddit in 2025 is simply not the same beast it was in 2015. The platform is evolving, both in how it equips brands and in how its culture is shifting under the spotlight of AI search.

New Tools for Marketers

Recently, Reddit itself has signaled openness to brand partnerships and data licensing deals — a perhaps not-unrelated response to the widely publicized revenue struggles leading up to its 2024 IPO.

Whatever the motivation, over the past five years, the platform has rolled out a slew of products that signal a new posture toward brand participation, including:

• Reddit Pro: A native suite of analytics, post scheduling, and community insights to help brands engage more effectively.
• KarmaLab: Reddit’s in-house creative team, built to help brands craft content that won’t instantly get flamed.
• AMA Ads: Launched in 2025, these let brands promote upcoming Ask Me Anythings in relatively “safer spaces” than past free-for-alls.

These tools make it clear that Reddit is building out infrastructure to help brands participate without breaking community norms.

AI Search: Raising the Stakes for Authenticity

Despite the hurdles involved, there’s real urgency for brands to engage with Reddit. If you’re not active on the platform, you’re forfeiting control of how your brand is represented in AI-generated answers. Competitors or critics will happily fill the void.

A few clear indicators of Reddit’s growing influence in digital discovery include:

• AI systems cite Reddit constantly. After OpenAI’s July 2025 update, Reddit citations surged 87% and now account for over 10% of ChatGPT’s references.
• Search engines elevate Reddit threads. Google increasingly surfaces Reddit discussions when users want lived experiences, not polished marketing copy.
• Meritocracy rules. In Reddit’s culture, genuinely helpful contributions — not ad spend or brand size — determine visibility. Smaller, scrappy brands can punch above their weight if they provide genuine value.

The TL;DR: The world’s toughest focus group is now also the training ground for AI, and brands can’t afford to sit it out.

Subtle Cultural Shifts

The culture is also softening, at least in pockets. In certain subreddits, more specialized experts — engineers, academics, clinicians, etc. — are welcomed when they contribute genuine expertise. The implicit bargain is simple: Show up as a person first, a brand rep second.

How Brands Are Experimenting Successfully

Even with the tailwinds created by new tools and shifting community norms, it’s no excuse for brands to fall back on lazy campaigns. Success on Reddit requires a radically different playbook that centers patience, humility, relatability, empathy, and a focus on providing value.

A few brands getting it right:

• The Economist has run thoughtful AMAs with its editors, leaning into expertise rather than pushing subscriptions.
• Mint Mobile earned credibility by having employees (including Ryan Reynolds himself at times) participate directly in r/mintmobile, answering questions and cracking jokes rather than shilling.
• Purple Mattress launched r/LifeOnPurple, a community dedicated to sleep health. Instead of spamming product links, it became a global focus group where users traded advice.

There can be real results tied to these efforts. Mint Mobile, for instance, has seen over 44% of its social media referrals (more than 101,000 visits) come from Reddit.

On the other hand, there are real risks. Brands have very little real control over even the most branded of subreddits; a recent comment on the Purple community, r/LifeOnPurple (headline: “Purple has no moral fiber”) highlights how quickly conversations can turn critical.

Technical Brands and Radical Helpfulness

Technical audiences reward brands that bring real resources to the table. Sharing a GitHub repo, being candid about a failed migration, or troubleshooting alongside users builds more trust than a dozen blog posts.

Imagine for a moment a parallel universe to the scenario at the top of this article. In this alternative outcome, the same company’s lead engineer joins a thread about database performance concerns. She candidly shares the team’s journey migrating 50 million records, drops a link to their GitHub tool, and highlights both successes and setbacks. The community responds positively; screenshots begin circulating on X. Months later, her answer resurfaces when developers search for scaling advice.

This example showcases the real value of Reddit for brands: credibility meets connection at scale. In a world in which AI slop dominates feeds, people are flocking to Reddit presumably because of the very human, messy, and unfiltered exchanges that happen there. By showing up authentically — not aggressively — brands stand to win trust and gain relevance.

Contently helps the world’s top brands create stories that resonate with real people — and stand out to both audiences and AI.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs):

How do you measure success for brand activity on Reddit?

Engagement looks different on Reddit than on other platforms. Metrics include upvotes/downvotes, comment sentiment, referral traffic, and whether brand posts are organically referenced in other threads. Increasingly, success also means being cited frequently in AI Search results.

Can paid ads work on Reddit, or is organic participation the only path?

Reddit Ads can be effective, but they perform best when paired with authentic community engagement. A promoted AMA or native-style post without organic credibility often falls flat. Brands that invest in both paid reach plus ongoing community presence may see the strongest results.

What types of subreddits are most open to brand participation?

Smaller, niche, interest-driven communities (tech, health, hobbies) tend to be more receptive when brands bring expertise. Large default subreddits like r/funny or r/pics are usually hostile to overt marketing. The key is finding communities where your brand can add value to conversations that are already happening.

The post Reddit’s Resurgence: How the Internet’s Toughest Crowd Became AI’s Favorite Source appeared first on Contently.

But that makes sense. It’s extremely difficult to turn a profit without offering (or leveraging) some kind of tech, which means marketing those products has become very complex. It’s looking more and more like the intro sequence of HBO’s Silicon Valley.

Among the legions scrambling toward profitability are tech startups (unicorn or otherwise), legacy companies adding new branches of innovation, B2B tech, and consumer tech, just to name a few. Many are chasing the path set forth by the technology titans: Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook.

We’ve surveyed the offerings of some of our favorite tech companies in order to bring you a short list of stand-out content marketing. Most of us could learn a thing or two from these industry leaders.

Slack | The State of Work Report

Every brand wants to carve out a space of authority. Releasing a branded data report on your industry is the perfect way to do that. Published by Slack, the company that brought you the biggest disruption to corporate communication since Gmail, the annual State of Work report isn’t just a nice advertisement; it’s a genuinely useful piece of content for anyone who needs to think about how workspaces are built.

By gathering data, Slack makes a compelling case for streamlining office communications. The report is interesting enough that the company doesn’t have to seed CTAs throughout the copy, but any reader who enjoys it will likely conclude that Slack knows the lay of the land really well.

2019’s report found that workers who feel misaligned from their company’s central goal are the most likely to feel unhappy in their jobs: “When we’re not in sync with our company’s goals, we tend to feel more pessimistic about where our company is headed, and that’s reflected in our perception and experience of our workplace across a wide range of factors, from collaboration to productivity to compensation.”

What’s one way to connect your employees to your C-suite and a company’s high level strategy, you might ask? Downloading a chat program like Slack might help. Just saying.

Buffer | The Science of Social Media

There’s a paradox to branded podcasts. Every brand on earth wants to create an engaging podcast, but it’s hard to think of listeners who actually prefer branded programming.

But, like GE’s incredible show The Message, Buffer’s branded podcast is actually an exception to this rule. If you’re looking to dive into issues related to communication, marketing, and publishing, during your commute, you could do worse than tuning in to Buffer’s The Science of Social Media.

In one particularly interesting episode, co-host Heather-Mae Pusztai breaks down social copy into more detail than seems possible. “Consider the specific letters in the words you’re using,” she said, “particularly when it comes to stop consonants and glide consonants. Stop consonants are those that cause the vocal tract to block when pronouncing the consonant. Glide consonants do not obstruct the vocal tract and are quite frictionless when spoken.” Stop consonants, according to Pusztai, are ideal for clustering around your CTA, because they force the reader to pause.

Additionally, Buffer writes up a blog post for each podcast episode, which is a really great way to drive additional traffic and ensure that your audio content ranks on search. The Science of Social Media is just a great content product, and it enhances Buffer’s brand identity without getting into the promotional weeds.

Blendtec | Will it Blend?

The conceit of Blendtec’s massively popular YouTube series is simple: using their blender products, the company tosses in ridiculous objects to see if their patented blade technology will shred it. Put simply, “Will it Blend?” is a masterwork of a social campaign—it’s actually a deft bit of product marketing, wrapped up in a platform-specific package that respects the kind of content YouTubers like.

Based on the tone, costuming, and set design, you can tell watching the videos that Blendtec didn’t just start churning out this content on a whim. It researched what works on YouTube, and it paid off. The brand’s channel has 876,000 subscribers, and the top video (blending an iPad) has been viewed 18 million times.

Bumble | The BFF Tour

When I was single and living in a new city, I relied on Bumble for finding dates. For that, the app rocks. But when it came to finding girlfriends to meet up and confide in, I was definitely out of luck, relying on long distance phone calls with faraway buds.

Thanks to Bumble’s BFF option, singles can use the dating app to meet up platonically with new people. This update to the dating platform was launched with a live events tour, which followed a traveling airstream trailer. It’s that fun loving, surprising bit of event marketing (and content marketing!) that lands Bumble on our list.

Capitalizing on the “pop-up cocktail event” craze that’s been sweeping the nation for over a year, the BFF Tour offered a social setting for lonely singles trying to find their crew, and it fit perfectly with Bumble’s other marketing events.

Dell Technologies’ Perspectives | Girl Scouting for the STEM Age

Modern consumers want to purchase goods and services from brands that reflect their personal beliefs—the data tells us that much. That’s why creating content about empowering girls in STEM was a great move for Dell Technologies, the tech company that puts out the digital magazine Perspectives.” (Full disclosure: Contently partners with Dell Technologies to produce Perspectives.)

By describing a tech-related event that might seem small to most audiences—one girl scout troop leader taking her girls to a coding academy—Dell Technologies centers its brand in a detailed discussion. The story’s existence implies that the brand values even the smallest movements in its industry. Best of all, it leaves the reader feeling inspired about the world.

Squanch Games | Branded subreddit and discord

Few creators have a better understanding of our digital world than Justin Roiland, co-creator of the uber-popular cartoon Rick and Morty and head of the VR brand Squanch Games. Maybe because Roiland’s cartoon picked up steam in online fan communities, he was fully aware of the power of user-generated content when he launched his games studio.

Instead of waiting for consumers to start conversations about Squanch, Roiland and his team created dedicated spaces on the platforms their target audience was already using: Reddit and Discord. Combing through the discussion channels, you don’t see a lot of intrusion or advertisement from Roiland himself—unless he’s doing an AMA (Redditspeak for “Ask Me Anything” session)—but both websites are linked on Squanch’s homepage. They bear an official stamp of approval, which makes users feel like their conversations are being heard.

No matter how you fit into the technology industry, you can find creative ways to stand out by studying your target audience. That’s the bright line connecting our favorite content marketing campaigns from tech brands. The best ones meet consumers halfway.

The post 6 Examples of Incredible Content Marketing From Technology Companies appeared first on Contently.

Since then, we’ve tried to develop a regular Reddit presence here and there, with inconsistent success. Some posts drum up conversation and upvotes; most do not. Reddit differs from the other big distribution channels like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You won’t get anywhere just posting links with a line of copy. Recently, however, Reddit has implemented a new strategy to improve its relationship with publishers. Updates include a “News” tab, profile pages where publisher accounts can post their own content and AMAs, and a native video uploader. Additionally, Time Magazine struck a deal last year to have its editorial staff work with Reddit’s audience team to incorporate user-generated content into more stories.

Could this be a new era for the brands and media outlets that have largely ignored Reddit in the past? I spoke to Alex Riccomini, the company’s director of business development and media, to find out more about the recent changes.

What prompted the new features that bring publishers closer to your users?

Reddit has always been a place for people to find and engage with news and content they care about. We have more than 330 million monthly users, and many of them come to Reddit specifically for news content. According to a Pew Research study, roughly 70 percent of Reddit users come to the site for news. Publishers have a lot to gain from developing their audience on Reddit.

For some time now, we’ve been partnering with publishers and news organizations, and building products and tools to support news consumption and engagement. Starting with embeds in 2015 and extending to other products like our CrowdTangle/Taboola integrations and editorial partnerships with Time in 2017, our work with publishers speaks to an organic evolution of an already existing user and publisher behavior.

The goal is two-fold—to create more opportunities for publishers to engage with audiences that are interested in their content, and to give Redditors more of the content they enjoy discussing on platform. It’s a win-win.

What feedback have you gotten from both users and publishers?

When publishers engage on Reddit while being mindful of its unique culture—The Washington Post, National Geographic, Bleacher Report, and Dallas Morning News are some great examples—the reception and feedback from redditors has been incredibly positive. Since many users come to the site solely to find and discuss news and journalistic content, that presents a fairly obvious value for publishers.

The rule of thumb for publishers on Reddit is participation over promotion.

That said, Reddit is a complex ecosystem that takes time to learn and understand, so we’re continuing to invest resources in helping educate and support publishers in how to be successful on platform.

Reddit has had a reputation for a while as being “anti-publisher.” Do you expect to see that perception change now?

Reddit, as both a company and network of communities, has always loved publishers and their content, but it’s only been in the past couple of years that we’ve doubled down on developing those relationships and creating open lines of bilateral communication. However, redditors are notoriously skeptical of sources (and users) who come across as too self-promotional. There’s a balance of promotion and engagement that publishers must consider when building Reddit into their engagement strategy.

What does Reddit define as “promotional” content? I know that’s gotten publishers flagged in the past, so I’m curious as to how the restrictions have changed.

The rule of thumb for publishers on Reddit is participation over promotion. It’s a place for conversation. Where publishers may run into trouble is when they simply use Reddit as a platform for distributing their own work as opposed to engaging in conversation about it or other relevant topics. Different subreddits also have different rules. For example, some don’t allow links at all. It’s important for publishers to be thoughtful of their audience and spend time understanding the community cultures in which they’re engaging.

What do you hope the future of Reddit/publisher relationships will look like?

We see huge potential for publishers to create a natural flywheel for engagement on Reddit. When publishers produce content that gains traction on platform, this drives conversation, which then enables them to produce even more compelling content.

A great example of this is Time’s AMA on the recently lifted Saudi ban on female drivers, where the questions they received led them to create a follow-up editorial recapping highlights and insights from that conversation. Content creation from Reddit can also transcend formats, like with Endless Thread, our podcast collaboration with WBUR, where each episode delves into a subreddit community and explores their compelling stories. These are just a couple of examples of the potential for our relationships with publishers

Our goal is to collaborate with publishers to strengthen that meaningful and engaging interplay between platform, publisher, and audience.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

The post Can Reddit Be a Friend to Brands and Publishers? appeared first on Contently.

Before trying to live healthier, I had no idea how much fitness content was floating around online. We’re surrounded by messages about our bodies all day, and every few years someone will proclaim they’ve developed a shiny new way to get healthy. Blogs from athleisure brands, food companies, gyms, doctors, hospitals, dance studios, and fitness companies all churn out content on the fad diet du jour.

There seems to be a latent suggestion online, one introduced by brands, that we all need to decide what kind of healthy person we want to be. Are you a body-builder? A dancer? What are your “trigger foods”? Are you a meal-prepper? Which app do you use to track calories, nutritional facts, workouts, and progress?

Since so much content about health and fitness comes from brands and Instagram models, quality and trust aren’t always guaranteed. Every progress photo includes a promo code in the caption, and every protein powder brand has a blog of free workout routines. There’s such an emphasis on products and promotion, perhaps more than any other industry. Approaching all of that marketing as a consumer revealed a few crucial insights about approaching an audience, improving content distribution, and finding the right tone.

Let audiences build their own communities

I’ve read a lot of branded blog posts which end with something along the lines of, “What do you think about this topic? Make sure to sound off in the comments!” The hunger for attention is obvious and understandable. But talking about your body is personal. I only allow the women in my inner circle to follow my private “wellness” Instagram, and I try to avoid telling coworkers and friends about my new regimen.

The brand that coaxes its audience into engagement most effectively seems to be Under Armour, which owns the wildly popular free app MyFitnessPal. Under Armour separates its content across three blogs and an original video channel, all of which have comment sections filled with earnest people asking questions. There’s also a subreddit with more than 10,000 subscribers, and it’s impossible to read other fitness subreddits without seeing their app or products mentioned in discussions. I don’t know if employees name-drop Under Armour across the site, but if they do, the copy sounds pretty genuine and helpful.

“I started gaining weight in college because of my schedule and not taking care of myself. I realized that I hadn’t been putting myself first and I needed to take a step back and start doing things for me.” . Gabrielle Scozzari was dealing with a demanding grad school schedule when her weight started to get out of her control. At 205 pounds, she realized her late nights and calorie-heavy dinners with friends weren’t doing her any favors. She also recognized that she hadn’t been prioritizing the one thing that was most important in life: her health. After completely overhauling her diet — like cutting back on restaurant outings and nights on the town — Gabrielle lost 70 pounds with the help of tracking her meals and finding healthy recipes on the MyFitnessPal blog. But her diet wasn’t the only lifestyle change she made to improve her health. With a more positive outlook on total body wellness, she found a serious passion for fitness and began to focus on daily workouts to strengthen her “new and improved” body. Today, she regularly posts proof of her sweaty workouts, delicious and healthy meals and the rest of her fabulous life to her Instagram account @fitlifeofgab. Keep crushing those workouts, Gabrielle! . . . #TransformationTuesday #weightloss #weightlossjourney #weightlosstransformation #beforeandafter #fitspo #fitness #fitspiration #myfitnesspal #MFP

A post shared by MyFitnessPal (@myfitnesspal) on Jul 31, 2018 at 2:21am PDT

There’s a difference in fitness content between asking rhetorical questions into the void and congratulating customers on their journey to better health. When your brand posts before-and-after photos of “regular” looking people who credit your products with their success, the call to action (like, comment, and subscribe) is implied.

Answer questions and respect SEO

Luckily for fitness and health brands, people are constantly on the hunt for updated information. Though the business of losing weight is pretty simple—eat less and move more—those who change their lifestyles need a place for good information.

I found most of the blogs I follow regularly by simply entering questions into Google. Over time, I’d end up on the same few sites, which never dealt in clickbait. If I’m googling “foods rich in protein,” for example, I’m not going to sit and read a body builder brand malign all the lesser protein powders on the market and then buy a giant tub of his favorite. I might, however, bookmark a branded blog populated by writers who admit that finding time to cook is hard before getting into some recipes.

Follow- @howtocountcalories for more like this. – Calorie dense vs. nutrient dense. Which one would you pick? . While it’s totally ok to treat yourself, being aware of how quickly processed food calories can add up can help make sure you’re not hindering your goals. More info below: . Coffee shop run: Venti mocha frap Iced lemon cake loaf Monterey jack & egg sandwich . My day of eating (I’ll probably eat a little more): Breakfast – Paleo protein pancake + 1/2 cup blueberries Snack – half a grapefruit + handful of almonds + @foursigmatic lion’s mane Lunch – Egg salad jar Supper – Lamb, tomatoes, + purple cauliflower Dinner – Chicken soup Night snack – dark chocolate + four stigmatic cocoa . . Credit- @meowmeix : #cleaneating #healthyfood #fitfood #healthyeating #healthychoices #cleaneats #healthylifestyle #glutenfree #nutrition #paleo #cleanfood #protein #healthyliving #eathealthy #fitnessfood #weightloss #iifym #lowcarb #healthylife #flexibledieting #instahealth #mealprepmonday #getfit #healthybreakfast #breakfast #mealprep #determination #fitfoodie #healthyrecipes

A post shared by Comparing Calories Vs (@caloriecomparing) on Jul 5, 2018 at 1:10pm PDT

After reading hundreds of blog posts, it becomes easy to discern the difference between content made solely to promote a brand and good content that answers user questions. The former makes the argument that this brand’s method of weight loss is the only worthwhile strategy. The latter invites the audience to continue consulting the brand during a long-term journey to wellness.

While I’m reading a blog post about protein or metabolism or squats, I try to pick out the implied CTA. If the only CTA is “buy our product,” I won’t return to the site. If the CTA points to signing up for a free newsletter or downloading a pass for a free session, I’m more likely to travel further down the marketing funnel.

Tone is everything

To create good content, brands need to lock in on a subset of people they want to communicate with directly. (I don’t mean determining how much weight they want someone to lose.) Asking questions about the audience is always a helpful exercise. How do their friends speak to them? Are their cardio playlists full of gay anthems or disco or death-metal? Do they want to feel powerful or alluring?

That’s the key: Be specific with your target audience.

The dance studio I attend runs a blog called 305: The Online Mag. The visual branding of the studio is so potent that you can spot it from a block away. (305) Fitness is a neon dance and aerobics studio that tries to recreate the ambience of a Miami club in the middle of the West Village, and the blog reflects that. The copy sounds youthful. The brand went all out with personal stories for Pride Month from their trainers. You can also find goofy recipes for cannabis food, dance moves, and cute ways to tie back your hair while you workout.

Some consumers won’t want to read “5 Females Who Changed the Music Industry” or download a Cher workout playlist by entering their email address, but those who do will commit. And that’s the key: Be specific with your target audience.

The post What the Health and Wellness Industry Can Teach Us About Good Content appeared first on Contently.

Tesla’s investment in the Gigafactory is the company’s latest bid to accelerate sustainable energy adoption. “It’s worth highlighting the sheer scale of the Gigafactory,” Elon Musk, the famed CEO of Tesla, said in an address to Nevada legislators, who brokered the deal. “It’s not just going to be the biggest lithium ion battery factory in the world—it will be bigger than the sum of all other lithium battery factories in the world.”

In addition to its size, viewers have said it looks like its own city, the Gigafactory signals a significant shift in Tesla’s business model. While the company is often assumed to be a luxury auto-manufacturer, the Gigafactory is the manifestation of Musk’s mass-market vision.

In a 2006 blog post, Musk revealed his secret plan to “Build a sports car/ Use that money to build an affordable car / Use that money to build an even more affordable car.” Eleven years later, Musk has done just that.

Tesla used profits from the company’s first model, the sleek Roadster, to invest in its next iteration of luxury electric vehicles: the Model S sedan and Model X SUV. This, in turn, produced sufficient funds to develop the company’s first affordable electric vehicle, the Model 3, priced at $35,000.

The dramatic pivot into the affordable market raises questions as other competitors race to claim their slice of the electric vehicle pie: How will Tesla compete with other affordable manufacturers? And what will its marketing strategy look like now that it is no longer strictly a luxury brand?

From luxury to mass market

From the beginning, Tesla’s marketing budget has been notoriously slim. The mythology is that Tesla ran on a $0 marketing budget early in its life—which is not entirely true, but the company’s investment in marketing was limited, to say the least. Tesla had practically no advertising budget, resisted hiring a CMO, and operated out of a series of showrooms rather than automobile dealerships.

Rather than invest in traditional marketing, Tesla focused on earned media, capitalized on a generational thought leader (Musk), and cultivated an active community of fans around the concept of sustainability.

Tesla’s most valuable marketing tool to date is its earned media coverage on energy projects, such as the Gigafactory, and its disruption of the traditional auto industry. Elon Musk regularly conducts interviews about his personal background, innovation, and his plans for colonizing Mars. While most of these stories do not directly relate to Tesla products, they reinforce the narrative that Tesla is a leader in sustainability and innovation. Such coverage has been—and remains—a critical part of Tesla’s strategy to remain top of mind.

In a 2013 interview with AdAge, Jeremy Anwyl, vice chairman of Edmunds, explained it this way: “You have to credit [Musk], who’s very Steve Jobs-like in how he deals with the media. A lot of the attention is not generated through what we consider traditional advertising. It’s really through social media.”

Alongside Tesla’s YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter pages, a good portion of that social buzz comes from Tesla’s subreddit, which features contributions directly from Musk. Whether it’s announcing a commitment to Mars exploration or commenting on hygiene habits, Musk is an integral part of the Tesla community.

This community, while easy to overlook, points to one of Tesla’s key differentiators: Company leaders understand the importance not only of engaging with consumers where they live, but also inspiring wider discussions built around the brand.

Community engagement has even spawned a new marketing avenue for Tesla: user-generated commercials. After Musk received a letter from a fifth-grader who noticed there were many good “homemade” Tesla commercials, and that perhaps Tesla should have a contest to determine the best, Musk took her up on her idea.

Yet as Tesla moves into a mass manufacturer of affordable electric vehicles, inspiring that core community of fans may not be enough.

The knowledge gap

While Tesla has generated an impressive amount of buzz surrounding the new Model 3 electric vehicle—by March 2016, 115,000 customers made a down payment of $1,000 on the Model 3 before knowing what it looked like—experts believe Tesla and other electric vehicle manufactures haven’t done a great job of educating the market.

According to Micheal Smyth, assistant director at the National Alternative Fuels Training Consortium (NAFTC), there is a gap between consumer interest in electric vehicles and knowledge on the available products. “The public knows about alternative fuel vehicles, especially electric vehicles, but somehow they still don’t have the basic knowledge on what an electric vehicle does and the different types available,” he said. “Many times we get questions asking, ‘Well, which one should I buy?'”

As a nonprofit, NAFTC does not direct consumers toward any particular brand, but Smyth is surprised by the overall lack of content that explains the high-level differences between alternative energy cars, the benefits of each type, and the basic mechanics of specific vehicles. “If your average consumer is interested in electric cars and doesn’t understand how the vehicles operate, there is a lot of education that is left to be done,” he said. The knowledge gap presents an opportunity for organizations, including brands like Tesla, to lead the conversation.

Tesla had practically no advertising budget, resisted hiring a CMO, and operated out of a series of showrooms rather than automobile dealerships.

Tesla’s blog essentially functions as a media toolkit for company announcements. It’s two main competitors—General Motors’ $30,000 Chevy Bolt EV and Volvo’s $40,000 electric car expected to be available by 2019—also lack a substantial body of content to bridge this consumer gap.

GM has a “Sustainability” portion of its website, though articles function as press releases, announcing company developments in sustainable production. Volvo, too, has a site section called “CSR & Sustainability” that highlights how cities around the world are working with the automaker to invest in clean energy, but each piece focuses on Volvo rather than consumer education.

“Every manufacturer is bringing out more electric drive vehicles,” Smyth said. “But as far as I’ve seen, there is no place where consumers can go for the basic information on how these vehicles work mechanically or address their specific needs.”

No one would disagree that Tesla’s earned media marketing strategy has won customer’s hearts. But as Musk’s company moves to colonize the affordable electric vehicle market, it’s fair to ask if his brand’s earned media prowess and brand power is enough to win customer’s wallets as well.

The post Can Tesla Ride Earned Media Forever? appeared first on Contently.

This is the fill-in-the-blank cliché that marketers and entrepreneurs bandy around at every tech and marketing conference. That includes Web Summit, which brought 70,000 tech folks around the globe to Lisbon to pitch, drink, and wonder just what the hell happened in America on Tuesday night.

On Wednesday, the PandaConf stage was the de facto home to those who had actually built communities. After Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian gave an electrifying talk on the past, present, and future of Reddit, I was joined on stage by two of the social media world’s sharpest minds: Sarah Leary, the founder of Nextdoor, a neighborhood-specific social network that’s spread across America and Europe; and Josh Elman, the famed Greylock VC who’s worked at Facebook and Twitter and invested in community-based platforms like Medium, Musica.ly, NextDoor, Airbnb.

During our discussion, they revealed some secrets that could help marketers and entrepreneurs develop online communities in 2017 and beyond.

Find your hero

Nextdoor wants to empower the people who use the site. Individual users, not Nextdoor employees, are the ones tasked with starting each neighborhood community. It’s up to them to launch a group and get people living close by to sign up. To succeed with a model like that, you need to identify the people willing to put in that special effort and empower them to work on your behalf.

“You have to find people who are really motivated, and then give them the tools [to succeed],” Leary said, emphasizing that the needs of those early users should drive your product roadmap. “Based on the needs to that hero, you build a product that scales to hundreds of thousands or millions. […] The biggest mistake I see is people saying, ‘I’m going to build something and then hold off on the community for later.’ That almost never works.”

Don’t go broad—go deep

A lot of newer social networks focus on a few metrics, like users or daily active users. But in the early days, the relationships between those users almost matters just as much.

Elman knows. He played a central role in growing many of today’s major social networks. On stage, he said that the key is to find a cluster of people who want to coordinate and communicate in one place with a specific purpose.

According to Elman, you need that critical mass if you want to scale. As a result, community builders should try to measure depth of engagement instead of only looking at how many people use the platform.

“Don’t go broad, go deep,” he said.

Specifically, Elman looks at the rate people engage. He also warned others to watch out for an unbalanced community. If there are a few very loud users and a bunch of passive users, it may create the illusion of activity, but it could also be a sign that the community isn’t healthy.

“Role-model” the behavior you want to see

When building an online community, there’s a decent chance you don’t just want people to use your site or app. In all likelihood, you want them to use it in a specific way that fits a larger vision. Elman asserted that you need to influence users by “role-modeling” the right behavior.

“When you start a community like Reddit, you had a lot of negative trolling and fostered that in the early days, and that became a big use of the overall community,” he said. “Versus when you start something like Nextdoor, and it’s about neighbors helping people who need help. Or on Facebook, where people were sharing what’s going on in their lives.”

This dynamic extends to how businesses use your community. If you don’t model the right behavior for them, brands will often spam users. But if you show them a specific way to use the platform—such as responding to customer service complaints on Twitter, or engaging with the community on Nextdoor—you’ll reduce the chance of brand abuse.

“Model the behavior [you want], and you’ll see everyone start to follow,” Elman said.

Start small

Over and over, we see large corporations attempt to launch online communities and fail miserably. In Leary’s view, those large-scale efforts are destined to be duds.

“One of the reasons why we see larger companies really struggle to create any kind of community-based platform is because you have too many people rushing into the community too fast before the decisions have been made about what the community wants or how it should scale,” she explained.

While you may want to make a huge splash if you’re a Pepsi, Coca-Cola, or Nike by launching to the masses, it’s actually smarter to start with a small beta test for your hero users and slowly expand the community as momentum builds.

The post How Brands Can Build Online Communities That Aren’t Lame appeared first on Contently.

But as Fortune explained in a big profile of Reddit earlier this year, that danger has dissipated as the platform has focused its latest ad efforts on native content. Instead of leaving brands to their own devices, internal teams have used their intimate knowledge of Reddit communities to help brands build campaigns that pop off. The strategy appears to be working. A Coca-Cola campaign, for instance, asked Reddit users to choose which Marvel superhero matchup would make the best Super Bowl commercial, and over 400 people responded. Reddit reports that advertising revenue is on the rise, with 70 percent of advertisers staying on quarter over quarter.

Since returning to the company as executive chairman in late 2014, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian has played a hands-on role in the company’s turnaround. Leading up to his keynote speech at Web Summit in Lisbon this week, Ohanian and I chatted over email about his activism, how Reddit is changing for brands and publishers, and the future of online communities.

You’ve been pretty outspoken about Donald Trump during this election season. What’s your take on the relationship between the tech industry and politics? Should industry leaders be more outspoken?

Technology and social platforms like Reddit have given everyone an opportunity to have a voice in the national conversation. As creators of these platforms, it’s important that we have a relationship with Washington since many of the decisions they make can have serious consequences for the future of the open internet and our industry.

I’ve had a long history of being outspoken on these issues that affect our industry (e.g., SOPA, PIPA, startup visa, net neutrality, etc.), but leaders in tech should at the very least be engaging with their representatives because it’s a lack of communication that often gets us into problematic situations.

What’s the future of internet communities like Reddit? It seems like there’s a huge financial gap developing between feed-based platforms (Facebook, Instagram) and communities built on one-to-one interaction (Reddit, Twitter).

Reddit is the internet’s largest example of a community platform, which has no peers, but does have an opportunity that the world hasn’t seen before: insight and access to the word-of-mouth conversations that influence us all. We’ve only started to see the potential of it with our native ads—these sponsored conversations have been huge successes for small companies and large multinationals alike.

When a brand like Toyota or Coca-Cola comes on Reddit, they can target specific communities and start discussions there that are actually engaging and enjoyable for users. You’ve never been able to digest and engage the zeitgeist in real time until Reddit—this is where people are deciding what shoes to buy and what movie to watch, and for the first time ever you can see the water-cooler discussion as it’s happening worldwide.

We’ve seen many huge brands come to Reddit to engage in a human way. Recently, Coca-Cola ran a campaign on Reddit that asked users which two Marvel superheroes they would most like to see battle it out in a Super Bowl commercial. Yes, an advertisement about an advertisement. And Reddit loved it—the discussion was 97 percent upvoted!

What we saw were huge organic engagement numbers. People were writing hundreds of long, creative narratives and, on average, spent 12 minutes reading this discussion.

What about publishers? Is there anything publishers can do to get their content to take off?

The easiest thing to do is start using our lovely embed tools to easily grab and attribute Reddit images, comments, and posts. We built these because writers were all using Reddit to keep tabs on their beats and kept asking for an easier way to embed the great content and give attribution to redditors.

That’s where I think the future of the media industry is headed, those niche dimensions of news that are vital to a functioning democracy.

When it comes to engaging on Reddit itself, imagine being invited to a dinner table where people are all discussing an article you wrote. How would you engage with them? This is exactly how you should think about engaging on Reddit. Often, introducing yourself and fielding questions from these highly engaged readers will generate new ideas and content. For instance, a New York Times reporter joined a conversation on Reddit (r/news) about a recent article he wrote on prison beatings and got so much out of it that he wrote a follow-up article just about the Reddit discussion.

Is the proliferation of a mobile, app-based internet a threat to Reddit?

It was an opportunity because we didn’t have a native mobile app. We had the chance to build one from scratch on iOS and Android. Over half of our traffic is already on mobile (web and native combined) and with a beautiful, beloved, and fast app in both app stores, we’re going to keep growing even faster on mobile.

So much of the content on Reddit is already created and hosted on Reddit itself that we can keep making bigger leaps in the user experience on mobile.

Nick Denton said he still thinks communities and user-generated content are the future of media. Do you agree, and, if so, what will it take for them to succeed?

I definitely agree. One doesn’t need to look much further than the discussions happening in communities like r/westworld or r/nfl right now to see content generated by redditors that is as good or better than traditional media outlets.

It’s not the latter’s fault, it’s just that a room full of even a thousand of the best-paid, smartest, most amazing writers is never going to be able to keep up with hundreds of millions of people across the planet using software to surface the best and most timely ideas.

A lot of content sites are going to struggle unless they’re providing the kind of expertise or long-lead-researched content that a billion disparate people can’t logistically do. That’s where I think the future of the media industry is headed, those niche dimensions of news that are vital to a functioning democracy, but not the tempting clickbait that’s just derivative of an article someone already wrote on Reddit.

This interview was lightly edited and condensed.

The post Alexis Ohanian Reveals How Brands and Publishers Can Thrive on Reddit appeared first on Contently.

What he didn’t have to worry about, however, were compliance and approvals, plugging a brand message into his content, or getting in trouble for experimenting on a new platform. All he had to do is tell a great story. And he did, across several platforms.

That’s a big reason why GE Reports has become one of the most successful examples of content marketing. The blog has hundreds of thousands of devoted readers, its stories regularly go viral on Reddit and in the press, and coverage of it ultimately ties back to the GE brand.

On Tuesday, I hosted an Adweek webinar with Kellner to find out more about his content strategy as GE Reports’s editor-in-chief. (Watch it here.) Here are the five keys that Kellner revealed.

(Full disclosure: GE Ventures is a Contently client.)

1. It’s all about the “transaction of content”

Many marketers create content without fully considering their audience, taking their time and attention for granted. Not GE.

“You need to pay people something for their attention,” Kellner said. “You need to give them something of value. Something they want to know or use somehow.”

For example, GE Reports published a story about a revolutionary indoor farm in Japan powered by LED lights made by GE. The indoor farm grew lettuce two and a half times faster than a conventional farm and cut waste from 50 percent to 10 percent. Compared to the average farm, it was 100 times more productive per square foot.

When all was said and done, over a million people read the story on GE Reports.

A GE Reports reader posted the story to Reddit, where it was quickly upvoted by the site’s community. “It soon made it to the top of the front page of the internet,” Kellner said.

Going viral is tough to predict, but GE’s success isn’t by accident. The company gave its audience something of value—a story about a technology that could help solve world hunger—and was rewarded. When all was said and done, over a million people read the story.

2. You need to retire the press release

For the past few years, Kellner has been touting one of my favorite messages in content marketing: You need to retire the press release. Reporters are numb to whatever comes over the wire. But a great story catches their attention.

Take this story about a 150-pound steam turbine developed by an engineer at GE Global Research. It’s strong enough to power a small town, but even more amazingly, it runs on carbon dioxide. A press release about this technology might have slipped by reporters, but instead, GE Reports wrote a compelling news story about the subject. The also story went viral on Reddit, reaching the third spot on the homepage.

After the viral boost, the article drove roughly 300,000 views to GE’s blog and was picked up everywhere from Scientific American to Popular Mechanics to publications in China.

“You want to raise awareness for the brand. You can go directly to your audience but also to journalists,” Kellner told me. “Normally, you’d spend hours and hours going to lunch with reporters. But this is much more effective.”

3. You don’t have to break the bank to find your story

GE Reports is a surprisingly lean operation, considering the depth and breadth of stories it produces. Kellner explained that content marketing isn’t something you have to throw a ton of money at if you have your eyes and ears open for a good story.

For instance, Kellner spotted a Gizmodo story about a kid who built an entire Boeing 777 airplane out of manila envelopes. The detail was incredible. Kellner realized that GE builds the 777’s engine, making it the perfect story for GE Reports.

“No one had sat down with him and talked to him about the whole process,” Kellner said. “We got access to him and did a Q&A with him. There are enthusiasts [for your brand]. Look at what other people are doing and use it to your advantage.”

4. Go beyond the blog

GE Reports is one of the more popular brand blogs you’ll find, but Kellner knows that it’s just the beginning.

“You don’t want to just have a website,” he said. “It’s a storage room. You want to have these assets like a Lego block that you can break up and use on different channels. Periscope, Snapchat, Facebook Live.”

GE has been one of the first brands on most social platforms, including Instagram, Periscope, and Snapchat. That willingness to experiment is driven from the top down by CMO Linda Boff. As she told me earlier this year, “Sometimes you scrape your knee and a platform goes away, but I’d say it’s a greater risk not to be there trying it, because in this world you don’t know what’s going to necessarily take off.”

Kellner was in an airplane over Lake Michigan because he was flying 500 miles with Brad Mottier, who runs GE Aviation’s business and general aviation edition. Rather than just taking pictures and writing a blog post, Kellner juggled between his DSLR camera, the GE Reports Periscope account, and the GE Snapchat account. He engaged tens of thousands of people in real time.

As much as Kellner loves cutting-edge live-streaming platforms, he also gives a big shoutout to the most “old-school of digital platforms.”

“For us, it’s also about email,” he said. “We email our newsletter to 20,000 people every day, and we really see it set off that wave of traffic.”

5. Build a culture of content, and tap your employees for stories

When I interviewed Kellner two years ago, he talked about how the tenets of journalism had helped him build relationships and find stories throughout the company.

“It’s basically just old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting,” he said. “You have to go to the factories. You have to develop sources. You have to go to the labs and see what those guys are doing. It didn’t happen overnight for me. It took me a while to develop my network of sources and to figure out who’s working on what.”

Kellner has expanded that network by taking off his reporter hat at times and putting on his tweed professor’s jacket. He travels to GE offices around the world giving writing workshops to employees. Often, they turn around and pitch him stories.

One story, for instance, was about St. Helena, the remote island where Napoleon died in exile. Alaynah Boyd, a GE communications specialist who attended one of the workshops, pitched Kellner on a story about how GE was helping open up the first airport on the island.

The story didn’t come across as self-promotional. The angle focused on the business and history. Only one sentence mentioned GE. That focus on the story, and not the the brand, is Kellner’s greatest secret to success.

“Content can’t always be about you,” Kellner said, “and the outcomes shouldn’t be self-serving to your brand.

Images via GE Reports.

The post 5 Reasons GE’s Content Goes Viral on Reddit (and Everywhere Else) appeared first on Contently.

After dealing with the effects of a creative rut, my momentary joy was erased when a Google search revealed that my latest idea had already been done by The Huffington Post, Mashable, and Forbes.

I was dejected, sure, but also surprised. I didn’t expect all those sites to cover content marketing. Now, they write about anything and everything. According to Digiday, Forbes was reportedly publishing 400 articles per day a few years ago. With big media outlets, blogs, and brands pumping out story after story, it’s easy to feel like there’s nothing new to say.

But if your job is to write and edit, there’s always something new to say, if you’re willing to put in the work. When it’s time to brainstorm, here are a few places you can turn to generate ideas.

1. Your employees

No one knows your product and industry better than your employees, right? If you’re stuck creatively, getting input and ideas from coworkers is a simple yet effective way to learn about problems and insights that you might be overlooking.

And it’s okay if employees aren’t gifted writers or don’t have time to contribute articles. You can always interview them instead and create a list of story ideas. In some cases, you can even use the exchanges for videos, podcasts, and Q&As, like when General Electric published an interview with the company’s chief digital officer about innovation.

(Full disclosure: GE is a Contently client.)

2. Reader comments

Comments should be more than an engagement metric. If you ignore the trolls, you’ll find that people are (sometimes) capable of sharing intelligent ideas online—particularly on social media. You can use these comments as inspiration for stories or even collect the best comments on a topic as a standalone piece. If you don’t have a large social following to tap into, use free social media listening tools like Twitter Advanced Search to see what people are saying about an industry or news story. The New York Times even used this approach to develop its own interesting collection of reader comments.

3. Reddit

Reddit, also known as the front page of the Internet, is one of the best ways to keep your finger on the pulse of what’s trending. To find information on a specific topic, do a Google site search by using the “site:” command. For example, if you’re looking for ideas on budget travel, search “site:reddit.com budget travel” and Google will surface thousands of reddit.com results, ranging from entire subreddits about traveling on a shoestring budget to recent, popular threads like how much to budget for travel.

4. Company archives

Nostalgia can be a very powerful catalyst for engagement and earned media. If you work for a legacy company, check your archives for material that can be repurposed into compelling content, whether print or digital. Coca-Cola Journey, for instance, resurfaced vintage Coke ads last year in an image gallery. Esquire, meanwhile, put its entire 83-year archive online so users could see old-school articles and ads.

(Full disclosure: Coca-Cola is a Contently client.)

5. Internal website searches

When people use the search function on your website, these searches can—and should—be tracked in your analytics platform. This tactic captures direct insight into the mind of your consumers without the costs and effort needed to set up focus groups or large-scale studies.

Search data not only shows what content people are looking for, but it also reveals what they’re not finding on your site. If people consistently search for tips on cooking chicken, for instance, and you don’t have any how-to articles on the topic, your internal data can clue you in on the need to create that content. Not only will you help your customers, but you’ll also keep them from looking for it somewhere else, perhaps on a competitor’s blog.

6. Quora

Similar to Reddit, Quora’s Q&A platform is replete with user-generated gold. What it lacks in scale compared to Reddit, it makes up for in quality. If the topic calls for it, Quora’s most upvoted answers tend to be in-depth dissertations, and the site also attracts subject-matter experts. In some cases, companies can use Quora to find out what people are saying about their products and services, similar to sourcing ideas from employees.

7. Forums

Think of a topic, no matter how obscure, and there’s probably a forum dedicated to it. The Chinchilla Club, Yo-Yo Experts, and the International Guild of Knot Tyers are just a few gems among the number of oddly specific forums online.

Niche forums can provide insight into uncommon topics better than most mainstream sites. If you’re short on pitches, try browsing the top conversation threads to get an idea of questions that you could answer with useful content.

It helps to remember that everyone struggles to come up with original ideas from time to time. But if you want to make sure writer’s block doesn’t curtail your publishing efforts, you need to put yourself in a position to turn the lightbulb back on when inspiration strikes.

The post 7 Smart Ways for Content Marketers to Beat Writer’s Block appeared first on Contently.

The move comes at a delicate time for the company, which is still reeling from a highly publicized user rebellion that shut down much of the site and resulted in the resignation of former CEO Ellen Pao[note]A separate Wired article deemed this episode an “epic meltdown.”[/note]. Much of the public anger was a result of small-scale attempts to reel in what had become an unruly and often vehement community of groups that, despite their relatively small size, had come to define the site’s reputation as a place for the worst kind of online hatred. Between reprehensible subreddits like r/rapingwomen and r/coontown—which have since been banned—and an intimidating user interface, the site was scaring off new users and advertisers alike.

In comes Upvoted, which will explicitly distill the best parts of Reddit—incredible stories, discussions, and creativity that often end up aggregated on sites like BuzzFeed and Gawker—into an editorial venture meant to make advertisers and users feel comfortable.

Launched today, Upvoted features a variety of stories and formats. Take this article about how people spent their last day before a suicide attempt, or, for a less heavy example, this piece on what would happen if a black hole formed in your pocket. There’s even a weekly feature showcasing the art of popular user Shitty_WaterColour.

There seems to be only one prerequisite to publishing: Reddit users must influence every single piece of content. Sometimes, the editorial team will simply add an introduction and then copy in existing text; other times, they will interview outside sources to answer a user’s question user; and in some cases, they just present a Reddit thread in a journalistic style. Experimentation seems to be the name of the game so far.

Reddit and the rapidly changing content landscape

Despite the surprise debut, the website has been a long time coming. Reddit has produced a podcast, also named “Upvoted,” since January, and had launched a weekly newsletter in April. And for months, employees had been talking about their pivot to content. Alexis Ohanian, Reddit’s co-founder, discussed the company’s changing posturing this June with AdExchanger:

The majority of content on Reddit became stuff users were creating themselves, not just linking to. That was a huge shift, and in response to that, especially over the last six months, we have been trying to build as many tools as possible for publishers, who clearly love our content, [using tools like] “embeds,” but also enabling new ways for us to reach our current users and new users wherever they want, whether that’s video or audio. We have this unfair advantage because we are as much a technology company as we are a media company, and we want to take advantage of it.

That last line is especially true: Reddit, along with other social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat, is as much a media company as it is a technology company. The difference here is that Reddit is among the first to launch its own editorial venture—but it’s not the first.

Tumblr, which shares a resemblance with Reddit—including NSFW sections, a dedication to free expression, and a confusing interface—launched Storyboard back in 2012 to help package and share all of the unique content published on the platform, hiring seasoned journalists to make it work. In other words, Storyboard was very similar to Upvoted, except that Storyboard mostly published on partner sites like The Daily Beast, Time, and New York magazine[note]A move that is pretty much unthinkable now that social media has come to dominate distribution in the media industry.[/note].

The problem? Storyboard was shuttered after only a year due to poor results. This insightful Pando article attributes the failure in part to the odd relationship between social media and editorial—they may seem similar on the surface, but quality editorial can often run counter to social media’s core competencies of openness and sharing.

Reddit will have to keep all of these factors in mind as Upvoted matures.

What this means for brands

Like other social media companies, Reddit wants to host native content. In fact, Ohanian explained that publishers came to them with that exact request:

After Facebook announced the New York Times/BuzzFeed Instant Articles thing, we started getting inbound from people saying, “We want to publish articles directly on Reddit.” We had honestly not thought about it, but it’s given us the confidence to start exploring it from a product standpoint.

Whether Reddit is still considering creating such a product is under wraps, but it wouldn’t be surprising to see a product similar to Instant Articles in Reddit’s near future. Upvoted is just the latest example of how content distribution, and the Internet itself, continues to rapidly evolve.

Soon, media companies will publish their content directly on every major social media network. They already do it on Snapchat Discover; Facebook Instant Articles is still in testing but should be released soon; Twitter is making similar moves; Apple has Apple News; and LinkedIn and Medium already suck up much of the content that would traditionally come from blogs.

Behind all these moves toward proprietary publishing are attempts to consolidate power and user attention, which, in turn, will bring in more advertiser money[note]Reddit intends to run only native advertising on Upvoted.[/note]. Upvoted won’t have any separation between editorial and advertorial creation, making Reddit the latest in a long line of media publishers to break down this traditional barrier. The company has also discussed creating video campaigns for brands that could live on Reddit and the wider Internet much like a a traditional ad agency would, which parallels Facebook’s Anthology initiative.

Reddit’s power play also highlights one of the big draws of proprietary publishing over an open web: more control over the content itself. Facebook, for example, has never been a place for free speech, which is one reason marketers love it. Similarly, Upvoted will provide a more sterile, controlled arena for Reddit to woo advertisers. The fact that the site features no comments or upvoting (despite the name) is particularly telling of just how much control Reddit wants.

Overall, Upvoted is a sign of the times more than anything—and a signal that Reddit has entered an increasingly heated arms race to control where and how content is seen and distributed. Make no mistake, the war for content is only getting started.

The post Reddit Takes on Gawker, BuzzFeed With Upvoted appeared first on Contently.

The popular online community is known for being completely controlled by what its users want— free of corporate influence. In fact, the site is called “the front page of the Internet” because it’s constantly being updated by redditors with the most popular content across the web.

As an incentive for not shilling self-promotional, low-quality spam, reddit users get “karma,” or points for their comments and links that are upvoted. As a result, it’s pretty hard for a company to promote itself on reddit without sparking a huge backlash from the online community.

However, some brands have been savvy enough to promote themselves on reddit without invoking the wrath of the Interwebs. How? By giving audiences good content. Since most of the content on reddit is generated by users rather than brands, it begs the question: How can a company get noticed on the site? Here, we look at how five companies have managed to rule reddit.

1. Adam & Eve

Warning: This Live Q&A from April of last year on reddit is not safe for work. Yet if you know what kind of company Adam & Eve is—a purveyor of sex toys and everything that comes along with them—you shouldn’t be surprised.

The marketers at Adam & Eve thought of a truly genius way to get reddit users talking without pushing their brand too heavily. The company’s sexologist, Dr. Kat, logged in and candidly answered reddit user’s questions about sex. The Q&A was so popular the doctor even went back on the platform to give more advice a few months later.

Adam & Eve’s company name is barely noticeable throughout the Q&A, save for the “[sponsored link]” tag that appears next to Dr. Kat’s username in the transcript, and the title of the event itself: Q&A here TODAY with Dr. Kat, Staff Sexologist at AdamandEve.com.

Instead of promoting toys, Adam & Eve made the wise decision to give reddit users the valuable resource of a sex health professional. This kind of marketing shows how companies can be sensitive to their users’ needs and tailor the content accordingly.

2. Ikea

Sometimes your company doesn’t have to do anything in order to get on reddit. If you create funny content, the Internet can do the work for you. For example, Ikea once published a print ad offering a free crib to any babies born exactly nine months after February 14, 2013:

Image via Adweek

The ad has over 1,000 comments and almost 2 million views on reddit, proving that the key to reddit success is encouraging users to fornicate. Unless, of course, you’re posted up in the Oval Office.

3. President Obama

Reddit’s AMA (Ask Me Anything) feature might be the perfect option for your company if you have a famous figurehead. But regardless of who that figurehead is, that person can’t compete with the President of the United States. In 2012, the POTUS used reddit to host a half hour virtual Q&A. According to The Washington Post, the traffic was so heavy that reddit had to shut down temporarily.

However, other people who are less famous than the leader of the free world have still hosted successful AMAs on reddit. As Fortune noted, tech leaders like Brian Krzanich from Intel, Emmet Shear from Twitch, and Jeremy Stoppleman from Yelp have all held very popular AMAs. While opening yourself up to questions from the Internet can obviously be risky, it also proves that you are willing to confront sensitive topics without hiding behind the walls of the press release.

4. Glamour Magazine

To promote Anna Kendrick being on its cover, Glamour Magazine recently had the star recite some gems of water-induced wisdom from the subreddit “Shower Thoughts.” For example: “They should announce a sequel to Groundhog Day, and then just re-release the original.” Hard-hitting stuff, I know.

Kendrick even threw some philosophical musings of her own into the mix: “Does a frozen yogurt headache burn less calories than an ice cream headache?” Check out the full video below:

As Adweek notes, this kind of quirky, Internet-friendly video is out of character for Glamour. Yet it’s fast becoming one of the publication’s most popular videos. The lesson? Brands should try and take themselves a little less seriously. Everyone loves a good laugh— and viewers will be more likely to share a video they think is funny.

5. Nissan

Nissan hosted a thread on reddit in 2014 which asked users, “If you could have one thing from Amazon, what would it be?” According to Digiday, the company then proceeded to actually buy some of the items that users listed, from 4,500 lady bugs to 30 months of reddit gold, the company’s premium membership. All of this gift-buying was done to promote Nissan’s new car, the Versa Note.

Then, things escalated quickly. Amazon drove around a large package until it was spotted by a redditor who created the thread “What’s the largest item you can have shipped from Amazon? Because I think my neighbor just got it.”

Image via Digiday

Yep, Amazon had just delivered an actual Nissan to someone’s front door. According to Digiday, other subreddits about Nissan and Amazon popped up after the image above became popular on the site. All of this content was created by reddit users, not by advertisers from either company. As Kyle Luhr, a senior digital strategist at TBWA\Chiat\Day who worked on the Nissan campaign, said in an interview with Digiday, “We had a plan for it, but were honestly surprised by how big it got.”

While companies can plan for months to create the “perfect” reddit campaign, it’s clear that the online community holds the ultimate power. And that’s how they want it. Yet if your company makes it onto the front page of the Internet, you will be known as a brand that can leverage very entertaining content to connect with consumers.

Still not convinced that reddit can be a great tool to promote yourself? Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Barack: “By the way, if you want to know what I think about this whole reddit experience – NOT BAD!”

The post 5 Brands That Rock Reddit (And What You Can Learn From Them) appeared first on Contently.

A few weeks ago, ad tech company Keywee raised $9.1 million from the likes of Google’s Eric Schmidt and The New York Times Company to help brands and publishers distribute their content to the people most likely to read it, about a month after Taboola raised a staggering $117 million in its bid to accomplish the same goal.

In the year or so prior, similar companies like Sharethrough, TripleLift, and SimpleReach all raised millions of dollars with the intention of using some algorithmic sorcery to put a brand’s content in front of the highest number of consumers likely to purchase one of its products, at the lowest possible cost to the marketer.

During that same time period, Yahoo, AOL, and Google all either developed, acquired, or were reported to be working on a content recommendation platform of their own.

Are you sensing a trend?

Simply put, Keywee’s round of funding is the latest indicator content marketing has reached a tipping point: Major brands are all generally in agreement that creating stories people enjoy is a big part of any successful marketing plan. And in such a crowded marketplace, it’s not enough for brands to merely create great content and stick it on their owned media properties. The winners and losers in the space are also being determined by how well they can build an audience for that content by acquiring new readers from other sites across the Internet.

Unsurprisingly, venture capital firms, startups, and the tech industry’s biggest players are lining up to help brands find their next loyal customer and woo them with the stories they’ve spent hours perfecting.

“I think it’s very easy to see that distribution is one of the big challenges today—it’s not an afterthought,” said Keywee co-founder and CEO Yaniv Makover. “You have to pay for distribution, and if you’re paying for distribution, you might as well get it right.”

If you’re unfamiliar with Keywee, the tech platform uses a text-scanning technology to determine the characteristics of a piece of content and then distributes that content to the members of an advertiser’s target demographic who are most likely to be interested in it. Right now, the platform purchases space across Facebook, Yahoo, and Reddit, and uses information about prospective readers to customize the headline and image that will be used to get their attention in the feed.

In a sense, Keywee and platforms like it are doing for sponsored content what the first demand-side platforms did for display advertising. They give marketers a chance to automatically tap into inventory across numerous websites while using data to reach the most desirable users.

Graham Hunter, head of growth marketing at the startup training program Tradecraft, said these platforms have emerged because as display advertising lost its effectiveness due to cookie clearing, private browsing, ad-blocking, and banner blindness, marketers started to see the value in branded content.

The ascendance of the Taboolas, Outbrains, Sharethroughs, and Keywees of the world has no doubt also been hastened by the rise of Facebook and the mobile web, which changed the way people consume content. Where users once actively sought out entertainment on their own by visiting their favorite websites, they are now content to stay on Facebook or Twitter and wait for whatever pops into their newsfeeds. In fact, a recent report from Shareholic found that Facebook’s share of web referral traffic has grown more than 275 percent since December 2011. The social network is now the referral source for about one quarter of all web traffic.

That means brands need to be proactive about pushing their stories directly to consumers.

When I spoke with Intel content strategist Luke Kintigh for a story I wrote last month, he told me that, over the years, his team has shifted from spending 90 percent of its time creating content and only 10 percent for distribution to allocating equal time for the two tasks.

“People are looking for a new way to find marketing performance in the digital age,” Hunter said. “You’re seeing the same exact technologies that drove programmatic display now being applied to content marketing.”

The importance of developing a multi-pronged approach to content distribution heightened when Facebook started limiting organic reach for brands toward the end of 2013. According to Colin Nagy, the Barbarian Group’s executive director of media and distribution, Facebook’s changing policies have made it expensive to get good reach on the social network, pushing marketers to experiment more with content recommendation platforms like Outbrain and Taboola.

Ultimately, Nagy sees a world where brands and agencies will be able to use a single platform to create, measure, and distribute their content across the Internet, a future you can see foreshadowed by the growing number of partnerships between companies that help brands create bcontent and social distribution platforms. Contently, for instance, is an official partner with Outbrain and LinkedIn, and Percolate is a partner with Socialcode.

“Rigorous analytics are essential, but also, I think it is important to stretch and try new platforms and not expect the world right off the bat,” Nagy said. “I like brands that are willing to experiment with new platforms and publishers without over-committing … There’s a fine balance to be struck.”

So where does all this leave the platforms vying for brands’ advertising budgets?

Contently VP of Marketing Raymond Cheng believes the content distribution war will be won by the companies with the best algorithms, those that can bring in lots of data and accurately predict what content will resonate with consumers.

“Generally speaking, you want to go with somebody that’s a little more established because it means their models have had time to get better,” Cheng said. “You also want to go with a vendor that has extremely awesome account management support, because getting started is really hard and you don’t want to blow a lot of money and figure everything out on your own. You want to have an account manager who will sit next to you and help you iterate and hold your hand and help you get better.”

As for Keywee, the company will be looking to improve its product over the next several quarters by expanding its platform to offer placements on LinkedIn and Twitter. The company is also planning a subscription service through which customers will be able to use its performance analytics in the content creation process.

“A lot of the technology [around content distribution] needs to be rebuilt, and it creates a very big opportunity that’s relatively untapped,” Makover said. “I think it’s very, very early in the way amplification is being done.”

In the meantime, Keywee and its competitors will be hard at work trying to do whatever they can to capitalize on that opportunity.

As for who will come out on top in the end? Well, we’ll just have to wait and see, but ammo and alliances seem destined to play a big role.

The post Keywee and the War for Content Distribution Supremacy appeared first on Contently.

If you imagine your brand voice as being at a dinner party, the way you speak to a roomful of strangers reflects your voice and identity—but only in that isolated setting. What if instead of a dinner party, you’re in your living room with your closest friends? Your identity and personality don’t change, but the way you communicate does. You adapt to the new context, and change what you say and how you say it based on the norms of the situation.

Approaching cross-channel content is no different. You don’t speak the same way in a white paper as you do in a tweet, but the “you” who’s speaking remains the same. The core identity and message should stay constant. What changes is the context.

Accomplishing this kind of segmentation is easy in some ways—turning blog or microsite content into newsletter content doesn’t require reinventing the wheel when it comes to tone. But when you add Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Medium, Reddit, and countless other platforms to the mix, things start to get messy.

Each of these platforms has its own style, vagaries, and audience. The context is always changing, and you have to adapt to each setting, or else you’ll face two possible outcomes, both of them bad: 1) Your brand voice will sound at best diluted and weak, at worst schizophrenic; and/or 2) You’ll get hit with the dreaded accusation of tone deafness, a charge reserved for brands who tragically misread the norms and contexts of digital platforms, and then shove their feet in their mouths . (Here’s an example; here’s another one.)

So how do you maintain some level of tone/voice continuity across all of these different settings? If I had a perfect one-size-fits-all answer, I’d have spent this week peddling it at some SXSW booth. Unfortunately, it’s a wholly subjective endeavor that involves constant judgment calls—much like creating content itself.

The best practice to make cross-channel continuity as seamless as possible is to establish a strong foundation for your voice in the first place. One of our initial tasks when creating a content strategy is to produce a Style Guide that outlines what the voice is, and what it isn’t, in as much detail as possible. What words or phrases would your brand never use, if any? What headline would it never run? On a broader level, why are you creating content in the first place, other than to create touch-points and lure people into your funnel and all those other business objectives that have little to do with whether or not someone actually wants to read or watch a piece of content?

Workflow is also an important tool for voice continuity. Once your content strategy is established and executed, chances are high that the person writing every blog post is not the same person writing every tweet or the same person publishing every thought leadership article. So the question becomes: How do you have multiple people all communicate with the same voice/tone?

One obvious answer is: Only hire people who care deeply about content. Make sure that the people you task with creating your content actually enjoy doing it and are talented at doing so. And beyond that, make sure that you only staff people on your content team who truly “get” the brand voice.

A bit more wisdom on this from Kevan Lee, who works on content for Buffer:

What’s been key for us is in bringing on people who are closely aligned with the values at Buffer. This has had the effect of allowing people on the team to speak naturally with customers, and the natural way they speak is in line with the message we hope to send as Buffer. Things are quite smooth this way; we feel confident in having multiple people in ‘voice and tone’ positions and knowing that the right emotions and feelings will come across to the customer.

At the end of the day, content isn’t about perfection. You don’t have to wring your hands over whether every tweet is a perfect representation of your brand’s voice. But you do need a strong foundation and a team that understands it on a deeper level, so that they’re capable of doing a gut-check to determine if something, or anything, is really off. Imagine if your Breaking Bad obsessed friend—you know, the one with six Los Pollos Hermanos tees in his closet—started ranting that Bryan Cranston was the worse actor of his generation. It would creep you out. Similarly, it will irk your audience if your brand sounds like one thing one day and something entirely different the next—making it something you have to avoid at all costs.

Melissa Lafsky Wall (@Lafsky) is the founder of Brick Wall Media.

The post How to Craft a Brand Voice That Carries Across Platforms, Formats, and the Space-Time Continuum appeared first on Contently.

Take Riot Games, the company behind the massively popular League of Legends. On January 28, Riot released a 45-minute documentary, titled Frequencies, that follows the daily challenges and triumphs of the five-person team dedicated to making the game’s music.

For those out of the gaming loop, League of Legends is an online game in which teams of five compete to destroy each other’s home bases. The game is free to play but earns revenue (a lot of revenue) from in-game micro-transactions. About 67 million people play every month, and last year’s World Championship match series in Seoul, South Korea, attracted 27 million viewers.

Despite the massive fan base, Riot has traditionally been tight-lipped when it comes to revealing how it makes the game. For hardcore League fans, Frequencies offers a rare inside look.

“Having played the game for five years now and always following the music they put out, it really is exciting because they’ve always been a pretty closed-doors company,” said Andy Baker, president of the collegiate e-sports club at Wittenberg University. “They are transparent, but they make sure they hide what it is they’re doing to really surprise and please the fans.”

Baker doesn’t seem to be alone in his excitement: The video has racked up over 400,000 views on YouTube since its release.

Caleb Slain, the director of the film, was originally hired by Riot to direct a short film about their music department as employees developed the soundtrack for a new character. The company, he said, felt their music department would make for a good behind-the-scenes story about what goes into making a video game.

When that character’s release was postponed, the project evolved and Slain decided to spend a couple of weeks with the music department and immerse himself in their daily routine.

The documentary ended up following the music team over the course of three projects: working on the music for the entire game; creating a music video for a character, Amumu; and creating an album for Pentakill, a heavy metal band inspired by the game.

“We were just kind of living in this atmosphere with these people,” Slain said. “I think you feel that in the film. You’re just kind of living there, lingering, and roaming around.”

While Slain said he hoped to create a documentary accessible to everyone—even non-gamers—the greatest support has come from fans of the game. “I think first and foremost [Riot] wanted to create a documentary that the one hundred million people who played the game would enjoy,” he said.

It seems unlikely the film will inspire anyone who isn’t already familiar with League of Legends to start playing, but it’s an excellent example of a company prioritizing relationships with its existing users. The film allows gamers to connect with the people involved in the nitty-gritty creation of the game, giving them the chance to learn about a facet of the production process they may not otherwise have known.

“They really put the priority on pleasing their player base instead of the immediate profit like many other companies,” Baker said.

So far, the fan base seems to have enjoyed the documentary. Many have taken to Reddit and Twitter to post their appreciative reactions.

https://twitter.com/Eldurislol/status/561186838933938176

The top comment on Reddit, with 769 points, was a plea to “watch [the film] in its entirety,” while another praised the film’s authenticity and exclaimed, “This is the type of content I would love to see more of.”

As the company website says: “We splashed around in uncharted waters with Frequencies, and we hope to roam these regions again as we share more Riot stories.”

For the many fans of League of Legends, the next story can’t come soon enough.

The post How a Video Game Company Gained Ground With Documentary Filmmaking appeared first on Contently.

Maker’s marketing tradition began with the the work of Margie Samuels, who co-founded the label with her husband Bill. While her partner perfected the stuff inside the bottle, she designed and directed everything from its unique shape and red wax seal to the company’s insignia, as well as the messaging and typography that we still see on its labels today.

Since then, the brand has made a smooth transition into the digital age, embracing the new ethos of content marketing and social media wholeheartedly. Maker’s has also built an impressive loyalty program, which, combined with their social and content marketing efforts, has created an engaged, bourbon-loving audience.

Let’s take a closer look at how they’ve done it.

Ambassador status

When it comes to customer retention, it doesn’t get much more effective than Marker’s Ambassador program. To earn the title, fans of the Kentucky bourbon pledge to share their preference for Maker’s with friends, family, and acquaintances in exchange for a variety of perks, such as getting their names engraved on a brass plate and stuck on their own barrel of bourbon.

Ambassadors follow their barrel’s progress from start to finish, a period of six to seven years. When their bourbon is ready, ambassadors can buy their very own bottle complete with custom labels.

The program as a whole upholds an air of exclusivity and prestige, affording its brand ambassadors an array of benefits including holiday gifts and invitations to special events, along with the chance to dip their prized bottles in that iconic red wax for a final personalized touch.

It’s a powerful way to establish a long-term emotional connection between company and customer, helping to ensure retention for years to come. These ambassadors are brand loyalists that are interacting with the company directly, rather than casual fans that simply follow Maker’s on social media.

In short, according to brand and marketing expert George Rudenauer, what Maker’s is offering are “feel-goods.”

“There are lots of wonderful, fine quality spirits out there, but people aren’t buying them because of high ratings—it’s the feel-good element,” says Rudenauer. “Maker’s invests in brand meaning in everything they do, and for consumers, it’s not all about the liquid and how it tastes. It’s about what it stands for and the excitement behind it.”

Social media and content savvy

That excitement is just the kind of thing fans like to see and share on social media. So far, Maker’s is active on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and Facebook. Each social media channel maintains a healthy mix of content with everything from photography and behind-the-scenes happenings to original videos and evergreen cocktail recipes that tend to amass over 100,000 views—especially when holiday time rolls around.

For instance, “How to Make a Bourbon Ball” has garnered over 600,000 views since its YouTube debut in 2012, while a visual addition that was recently posted collected over 300 Likes within two hours on Facebook.

The social team also does a great job of shining a spotlight on user-generated content by consistently regramming, retweeting, and sharing all kinds of fan commentary and interactions. It’s the kind of connection that helps fuel further engagement by motivating and maintaining an active and ongoing exchange, while also guiding fans to ongoing and upcoming events, initiatives, campaigns, and new products.

2013’s innovative “You Don’t Know Bourbon” campaign, for example, generated a remarkable level of engagement on Facebook and Twitter by using an interactive quiz to test “bourbon geeks'” knowledge of the drink. According to Rachel Ford, the senior content strategist at Doe Anderson, the quiz surpassed the team’s original goals with a completion rate of 80 percent and an average engagement time of 144 seconds.

A foray into Reddit was similarly successful, which surprisingly few brands can honestly claim. Maker’s Mark was the first liquor brand to test the platform’s waters in December 2013, and last spring published a simple yet effective campaign that took advantage of the Kentucky Derby to reel in user interest.

Redditors were asked to comment with ideas for whiskey-themed racehorse names, which garnered over 1,000 responses within a week.

Digital and physical presence

“Maker’s Mark does the 360 of the brand very well,” says Rudenauer. “Wine and high-end spirits in particular have a great social opportunity. Knowing your audience, speaking with transparency, and employing good content strategy is key.”

The brand’s recently revamped web redesign embraces these ideals, with a landing page that now features a large-scale introductory image, below which visitors can find a grid of photos that lead to whichever part of the site or brand that interests them most.

“There are many different ways you can choose to engage with the brand, before [Maker’s] even has a statement of who and what they are,” Rudenauer continues. “You can go right to where you want to go instead of having to go through what they may want to say first. That’s very clever and forward-looking, and it speaks to their strong sense of an all-encompassing message.”

To top it all off, Maker’s offers year-round tours of its distillery, an exercise in complete transparency that, according to visitor services, has drawn about 110,000 people over the past year. That’s a lot of traffic for a small town like Loretto, Ky., whose population was reported as just 721 in 2013.

Overall, Maker’s has blazed a path in marketing that demonstrates that legacy brands can utilize the new tools of the digital age just as well as anyone. Their marketing provides valuable content and engagement, the kind that just might turn bourbon geeks into Maker’s geeks.

The post How Maker’s Mark Built an Engaged Community of Bourbon Lovers appeared first on Contently.

The chart below, based on a just-released analysis of over 300,000 sites and 400 million visitors by Shareaholic, reveals how drastically the web has changed over the past two years. The biggest surprise: Facebook made a quantum leap and now drives a quarter of all web traffic.

Three years ago, Facebook was a relative blip compared to Google, driving only 6.53 percent of all traffic. But since then, its share of overall traffic has exploded by 277.25 percent, even though its user base only expanded by 60 percent over that time period. So what’s going on? As Shareaholic’s Danny Wong points out, it may be the result of “a far more engaged user base. According to Nielsen, Americans spent an average of 15.5 minutes each day on Facebook in August 2011. In November 2014, eMarketer published a study which suggests the average user spends 42.1 minutes each day on the ubiquitous social network.”

It’s important to point out that when we say social traffic is catching up to search in terms of power and importance, we’re not really talking about social media. We’re talking about Facebook.

Save for Pinterest, which only started gaining momentum in May 2011, every social network has seen its share of referral traffic drop over the past three years. And even Pinterest has begun to plateau of late. While Pinterest peaked with a 7.01 percent share of overall traffic in March 2014, that figure dropped to 5.06 percent this past year.

“[T]he platform has yet to realize its full potential,” Wong writes. “To do so, it needs to quickly shed its isolating for-women-only image and develop more mass-market appeal.’

The most notable disparity, however, may come after Pinterest. The remaining six social networks drive less than 2 percent of total web traffic. That includes the darling of the media and marketing world, Twitter. The platform spent the last five months of 2014 stuck below one percent of total traffic and has seen a decline of 24.41 percent since December 2011.

Of course, these numbers should be put in perspective. Every social network is going to work differently for every brand and publisher. Twitter still consistently drives about 20 percent of our traffic here at The Content Strategist, about three times that of Facebook. I’m not fretting about these stats because I don’t see the marketing and media crowd—our target audience—abandoning Twitter anytime soon. Likewise, I doubt most beauty and fashion brands/publishers finding success on Pinterest are worried that the network’s share of overall traffic has dipped back down to 5 percent.

But still, Facebook’s explosive growth—particularly over the past year—is worth paying close attention to. The network’s share of referral traffic has grown 59.58 percent over the last year alone, and it’s due to a lot more than increased engagement.

Facebook’s master plan

It all started in the fall of 2012, when Facebook started driving exponentially more traffic to publisher sites by giving them a prioritized place in the algorithm. From September 2012 to September 2013, TIME’s referral traffic from Facebook increased 208 percent. BuzzFeed’s went up 855 percent. And Bleacher Report saw an increase of 1,081 percent.

Overall, Facebook reported in October 2013, “average referral traffic from Facebook to media sites has increased by over 170%—almost tripled—in the past year.” In December 2013, they confirmed that was due to an algorithm change meant to prioritize “high-quality articles.”

Let’s go back to Shareaholic’s data. You can see Facebook’s share of referral traffic begin to creep up beginning in the fall of 2012 before quickly accelerating through the end of 2013.

You can pretty much read the story of Facebook over the past two years through this graph. Following the great algorithm spike at the end of 2013 came the crackdown against viral sites like Upworthy that were—to an extent—gaming the system and polluting news streams. Simultaneously, Facebook began restricting organic reach for brands to less than one percent of their followers while continuing to improve the reach of top publishers. This was a masterstroke by Facebook, which foresaw the changing economics of the media world as well as anyone.

By the start of 2014, content was truly becoming a commodity. Both B2B and B2C brands were investing far more in content marketing than ever before and needed a way to get more eyeballs on their content. And though Facebook was restricting brands from reaching the fan bases they had spent years growing, Facebook was also rolling out more robust, highly targeted native advertising options that would deliver those eyeballs as long as brands were willing to pay.

Brands and marketers spent months complaining about this pay-to-play system, but at the same time, they couldn’t ignore that Facebook was offering one of the most efficient uses of paid media out there—particularly when it came to mobile. It comes as no surprise Facebook’s ad revenue skyrocketed to $3.2 billion by the end of Q3 2014 as brands bit the bullet and paid to promote their content.

Via Business Insider

By 2014, native advertising exploded, with the biggest budgets going to top publishers like BuzzFeed and The New York Times, both of whom commonly command six-figure deals for sponsored content campaigns. Those publishers needed to ensure people would actually see those native posts in order to justify the expensive price tags. So with Facebook driving huge referral traffic to those sites, paying to promote brand-sponsored campaigns became a logical and easy solution for them to ensure the success of their native advertising programs.

Facebook 2015

Heading into 2015, Facebook is in an incredible position to continue their traffic dominance. The revolt over Facebook’s brand crackdown has largely subsided, and marketers have embraced Facebook for what it is: an incredibly powerful and efficient place to pay to promote your branded content.

But as David Carr reported this fall, publishers are wary of befalling a similar fate. The more traffic Facebook drives to publishers, the more reliant publishers become on the News Feed gods. Lately, Facebook has been trying to convince publishers to host their mobile sites within the social network’s walls and split the revenue. The social giant claims they’re pushing for the partnership because they want to improve the user experience through improved page load times, but publishers also realize Facebook knows the power of a one-sided, dependent relationship.

Carr brilliantly compared Facebook to “that big dog galloping toward you in the park. More often than not, it’s hard to tell whether he wants to play with you or eat you.” I prefer the metaphor of the mysterious god: You don’t know whether it wants to save you or smite you until it’s too late.

The post In One Chart, the Story of How Facebook Came to Take Over the Media and Marketing Worlds appeared first on Contently.

Though the strength of Obama’s initial campaign came from a self-created social networking site and a somewhat primitive use of Facebook (at least by today’s standards), his team has since proved itself adept at creating and distributing compelling content across our fractured media landscape.

For evidence of the White House’s talents for content marketing, look no further than the administration’s online ownership of Tuesday’s State of the Union address, which generated 2.6 million tweets and was discussed by nearly 6 million Facebook users.

Before, during, and after the speech, the Obama team pushed content to Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to reiterate the president’s legislative goals and keep citizens engaged.

The White House’s multi-pronged attack serves as a great example of how content marketers can, and should, capitalize on the opportunities presented by web 2.0.

Here are five tips we can take from the Obama administration’s content strategy.

1. Dominate the second screen

According a report issued by Nielsen last year, 84 percent of smartphone and tablet owners use their devices while they watch television. This gives brands the opportunity to use social media either to reinforce the messages they are sending on television or to reel in attention they otherwise would not have gotten.

In the case of the State of the Union, the White House used its Twitter account to underscore important quotes from the speech, aided by photographs or presentation slides when appropriate.

"If you truly believe you could work full-time & support a family on less than $15,000 a year, try it." —Obama pic.twitter.com/MsHkVdUnhM

— White House Archived (@ObamaWhiteHouse) January 21, 2015

On WhiteHouse.gov, the administration aired what it called an “enhanced” broadcast of the speech, in which a live feed of the event was supplemented by visual aides that provided facts and figures on issues like climate change and international trade.

The team then pushed three-minute video chunks of the enhanced broadcast to its 3 million Facebook fans, and posted the videos to the White House YouTube channel, as well.

All of this helped the administration capture viewers’ attention throughout the speech, regardless of whether they were looking at the television in front of them or at the mobile device in their hands.

2. Be accessible

One way to keep people coming back to your brand is to make them feel like your interactions are part of a conversation rather than a monologue.

In the hours leading up to the speech, the White House made an appeal to transparency by releasing the president’s prepared remarks on Medium. This gave regular folks the sense that Obama was communicating his message to them directly, rather than leaving them with the feeling that he was speaking only to members of Congress.

Today, he will continue the conversation by doing an interview with YouTube stars Bethany Mota, GloZell Green, and Hank Green, during which the popular creators will be able to ask him questions submitted by their fans.

Finally, the White House has encouraged citizens to share their feedback on the president’s legislative agenda on social media using the hashtag #SOTU.

3. Give people something to snack on

With a nearly infinite number of entertainment and information options available on the web, there’s no guarantee that you will have someone’s attention for an extended period of time.

That’s why it’s important to feed your audience a steady diet of shortform content they can consume in whatever time they happen to have available, whether they’re browsing Tumblr during a short break at work or checking their Facebook feeds while on line at the grocery store.

The White House regularly updates its social media feeds with photos and short videos—like this nine-second clip promoting an upcoming event with West Wing star Martin Sheen—that remind people of the issues at hand without requiring them to burrow into a 5,000-word policy document.

4. Collaborate with people your audience cares about

From the very beginning of his first presidential campaign, Obama has burnished his image by receiving endorsements from a wide array of celebrities. In the process, he’s provided one of the few obvious answers to the question, “What do Philip Roth and Hulk Hogan have in common?”

During the 2012 election, he teamed up with Girls creator Lena Dunham for a humorous, polarizing YouTube video endorsing his candidacy. Later, the president himself would appear opposite Zach Galifianakis on an episode of the Funny or Die video series “Between Two Ferns” to tell people how they could sign up for health care under the Affordable Care Act.

In both cases, Obama’s team worked with influential people to deliver the president’s message to the celebrity’s fans, rather than hoping those fans would come to WhiteHouse.gov on their own.

While your brand might not have its choice of A-listers willing to pitch in, partnering with a celebrity your target demographic cares about is a great way to expand your audience.

5. Understand that no two platforms are exactly alike

Anyone looking to be successful creating content for the web needs to grasp how people look for different things when they visit different platforms.

For instance, a series of artsy photographs people would appreciate on Instagram wouldn’t play nearly as well on career-focused LinkedIn.

To that end, the Obama administration has always been smart about creating content that is native to the platform it is being distributed on. When he did a Q&A on Reddit, he won over the forum’s potentially hostile community members by closing with a reference to one of their most popular inside jokes.

And while the White House primarily posts photos and videos on its Facebook and Twitter feeds, its Tumblr account is peppered with the GIFs that are popular on the platform. Meanwhile, the administration’s LinkedIn presence is all business, featuring brass tacks policy analysis from senior advisor Valerie Jarrett.

No matter what your message is, it’s important to tailor your execution to the platform you are delivering it on. The Obama administration gets it, and content marketers should take notes no matter their political persuasion.

The post 5 Ways the White House Kills It at Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

Enter Ryan Hoover, who launched Product Hunt in late 2013 with the sole purpose of helping people find new apps, product, and services. Since then, Silicon Valley has been buzzing as investors and entrepreneurs watch the site obsessively. But Product Hunt isn’t just for consumers and investors; it has quietly become an excellent resource for journalists hoping to be the first to break the story on the next big tech sensation.

Journalists in the tech industry often report on products based off press releases, but as Casey Newton writes on The Verge, Product Hunt is an important resource since “product coverage in the press is often driven by public relations, which is available only to the already rich and well connected.”

However, with a more level playing field, not only does every startup have a chance to get discovered, but every journalist has a chance to make an important discovery.

In May, for example, TechCrunch’s Romain Dillet described his experience with iOS-to-Mac notification app Notifyr and told the audience exactly how the story came to be: “When I first discovered this new app on Product Hunt yesterday, I immediately installed it.” Dillet seems to have scored the story first—scooping the likes of Mashable and Gigaom.

Product Hunt is an extremely simple resource, set up very similarly to Reddit and Hacker News in a way that lets the community dictate what’s popular. Products are submitted by users, and anyone can upvote. The leaderboards take into account upvotes and time posted in order to give every entry a chance to be seen. Where Product Hunt differs is only invited members can comment. These commenters are often industry influencers, journalists, and business owners, which is a bit elitist, but it removes the need for constant moderation and limits the amount of dumb commentary that can infect a discussion whenever the Internet mob gets involved.

The easiest way to search for scoops is to monitor the site’s charts for trending or extremely popular stories. The less-than-easy part is sifting through the chart toppers for products that could potentially be superstars. Product Hunt’s first big hit was the profoundly useless, yet wildly popular app Yo, which became popular after a number of tech bloggers spotted the app on the site’s rankings. Spotting the next Yo also takes some luck, but Product Hunt also provides daily email blasts that cover noteworthy products as well as curated lists from editors or special guests like rapper and investor Nas.

Since anyone can submit a new item, there is still a certain level of clutter among the site’s rankings. A story worth telling could be somewhere in the middle of the charts, a genius product that simply didn’t get the most upvotes that day but clearly has potential to become popular. But this is where hidden ideas could help an ambitious journalist find the scoop before someone who works for a publication with more cache.

The ideas are there; now you just have to go find them.

This article originally appeared on Contently’s sister site, The Freelancer.

The post Tech Journalists Should Use This Story Idea Goldmine appeared first on Contently.

Yup, I’m talking about “Serial,” the weekly radio show that delves into the 15-year-old murder of a teenage girl in Baltimore. The brainchild of the audio gurus at “This American Life,” this new offshoot is already breaking records, becoming the fastest podcast in iTunes history to reach 5 million downloads.

Despite its old-school medium and lack of cross-channel packaging (no YouTube channel posting hidden outtakes, no Instagram feed showing episode-relevant photos, etc.) “Serial” has all the touch points of a viral hit, inspiring rabid Reddit boards and nonstop media coverage and a fan base that has crossed oceans (British devotees have begun organizing “‘Serial’ listening parties”).

It even passed my personal “virality” test: Both my mother-in-law and my landlord have heard of it.

From a storytelling perspective, it’s not hard to see why the traditional radio format can still rivet a modern audience. What makes “Serial” so addictive is the same recipe that’s been making stories addictive for decades: gripping subject matter spun in an artful narrative. Host Sarah Koenig carefully ushers us into her investigation of a real-life crime drama: a young woman murdered, her possibly-innocent ex-boyfriend sent to jail for it, and a group of people giving accounts of what happened—at least one of which is certainly a lie.

The storyline is old as dirt, and the incremental reveal of Koenig’s findings is the same tactic that’s been riveting listeners since the 1940s, when people raced home to turn on “The Adventures of Superman.”

For marketers who want to derive meaning from all this, or learn the “secret sauce” for replicating “Serial”’s success, there’s good news and bad. Bad news first: The only way to recreate the show’s results is to find as gripping a story and weave as masterful a narrative. Koenig brings every element of good reporting to the table—including knowing how to invest a TON of time interviewing, researching, and hunting down leads. By episode 7, she’s been at it for six months. Great investigative reporting and careful editing are still key, and there are no shortcuts to doing them well.

Also keep in mind that with any runaway success like this, there’s bound to be controversy. Criticisms have popped up about the possible glorification of a young woman’s murder and Koenig’s questionable attention to the race and ethnicity of the key players.

Now to the good news: “Serial” does offer two useful takeaways.

First, there’s the proven appeal of a story told in real time. For all the talk that longform is dead and audiences have the attention span of a snail, here’s evidence that you can still inspire lasting devotion to a story told over the course of months and compel your fans to obsess over every detail. “Serial”’s case is complex, and Koenig’s investigation is an intricate maze, but audiences are right there through even the most exhausting details (piecing together every cell phone call placed in a high school senior’s day is no small feat).

The reason for this unwavering attention brings us to Lesson #2: the importance of stakes. What differentiates a fun-but-forgettable story from a riveting one is its impact on real lives. In the case of “Serial,” a man’s future rests on the line. The convicted ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, will either continue to sit in a maximum security prison or be exonerated. The possibility for real-time redemption shoots the series’ importance into the stratosphere. Big stakes bring big audiences.

Putting all this in context for brands is a case-by-case matter—suffice it to say most companies won’t be willing to align themselves with a convicted murderer, no matter how progressive their brand publishing efforts are (after all, Syed may wind up being guilty). But “Serial”’s runaway success is good news for everyone in the business of telling stories on the Internet. If anything, it’s comforting to know that the old rules still apply, and the future of storytelling is the same as it ever was.

Melissa Lafsky Wall (@Lafsky) is the founder of Brick Wall Media

The post The Biggest Lessons Content Marketers Can Learn From ‘Serial’ appeared first on Contently.

One of my earliest memories of doing so was my first time jumping from a diving board into a swimming pool. Or, rather, of walking slowly out on the plank, standing frozen in place for the most terrifying minute of my life, and crawling backward on hands and knees to the ladder.

I was humiliated. More importantly, I had set a bad precedent for myself by bailing out when the going got tough. It wouldn’t be until well into adulthood that I’d finally face my “fear” of heights.

Everyone gets scared sometimes. In life. At work. We’re afraid of being rejected, disappointing others, getting hurt, having cockroaches crawl in our ears (okay, maybe that one’s not universal…), missing out on important things. In a word: We’re afraid of failing.

I dedicated a chapter of Smartcuts to the science of failure, and the balance that the world’s most successful people and companies manage to achieve between taking important risks and minimizing the odds of catastrophe. One thing that struck me from the academic research on the subject was how we humans tend to explain our successes and failures in ways that allow us to live with ourselves afterward. We distort reality—tell ourselves what we want to hear—and that gets in the way of our progress.

In the case of Shane vs. The Diving Board, I told myself that it wasn’t in my control: I simply “had a fear of heights.” I externalized the reason for my failure.

It wasn’t my fault. It was the phobia. Yet there was nothing inherently more dangerous about me jumping off the board than anyone else. I’d watched dozens of others jump; it was safe. In reality, I chose to indulge my fear.

I don’t have a clinical phobia of heights. As an adult, I’ve climbed to the top of skyscrapers and bridges. I’ve jumped from railroad trusses into rivers. I’ve been scared nearly every time, and that’s kept me from making stupid mistakes. I’ve managed to operate despite my fear. And I’ve done much scarier stuff in my life and as an entrepreneur without backing down. Every time, my confidence muscle gets stronger, and I get better at pushing myself to do important things in life—which by definition are hard or scary.

Not long ago, I came across a Reddit post that articulates the tiny rule that’s helped me do this, to overcome the voice in my head that tells me to be scared, to walk on that stage or make that phone call or tell someone that thing they don’t want to hear.

Writes Reddit user Draconax in response to the question What life rule do you have for yourself that can never be broken?:

I count to 5. This is a secret rule I have for myself. Whenever I don’t want to do something (something small like getting out of bed, to something bigger, like asking a girl out), I count to 5 in my head. Whenever I reach 5, I have to do it. I have never failed to do what I set out to do once I hit 5, so it always works for me, in a weird sort of way. I know that if I didn’t do it, the “rule of 5” would cease to exist, and since I need it to exist, I have to do what I said I would do. It’s a weird paradox, but it works.

TL; DR: If there’s something you know you need to do, just count to 5, and then you must do it. And so you will.

Like he says, it sounds paradoxical, but I can attest that it works. I have plenty of neuroses that I’m still fighting, but when I know I need to do something that scares me, I take a breath, count to five, and go. (My rule is that I actually start moving on 5, not on the beat after. So if I’m about to go on stage in front of a big crowd, I count, “1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – MOVE!”)

Sometimes we jump off that diving board and land in a bellyflop. But we live. In fact, after you flop a few times, you realize it’s not that terrible.

But a surefire way to fail is to not try at all. After fighting my internal naysayer all my life, I’ve realized I can’t change human nature, but I can redirect my fear of failure. What motivates me to jump on the count of five—now that I’ve committed to it—is the fact that I have to live with myself if I don’t.

The post This Insanely Simple Rule Will Help You Overcome Your Biggest Challenges appeared first on Contently.

Most of the time, the difference between success and failure is planning. While engaging audiences in real time does involve making some impromptu decisions, there are ways to prepare and strategize for creating social content around major events.

ShareThis, a company that makes social data actionable for publishers, marketers, and advertisers, just released its “Q3 2014 Consumer Sharing Trends” report. Surveying over 450 million users, over 3 million sites and apps, and 120 social channels across the ShareThis network, the new study provides an intriguing analysis of consumer sharing behavior from July to September 2014.

Specifically, the report focuses on sharing behaviors surrounding big events, such as Apple’s big iPhone 6 launch, the ISIS attacks, Derek Jeter’s last game, and the Ice Bucket Challenge.

Its key findings can prove helpful for content marketers looking to optimize their strategies for creating custom content both in real-time and with programmatic tactics.

Here’s what you need to know:

1. Show up to play.

The major takeaway for content marketers is that audiences prove to be 5x more engaged with shareable content in the hours and even days surrounding a buzz-worthy event. On the actual day of a big news or media event, shares can draw in 186 “clickbacks”—clicking the link on a social share, like a tweet or Facebook post.

In order to tap this ready-to-click audience, content marketers need to be on the front lines of their content hubs and social networks. Still, showing up is only half the battle. Once you’re there, how can you make sure you’re pumping out the right content?

2. Give audiences what they’re looking for.

The obvious piece of advice here is to give people the content that they want. Is Apple doing a big launch event? Write about Apple products. Is Derek Jeter’s last game coming up? Tweet something clever and informative about Jeter’s historic career. While those are tried-and-true tips, for more buzz-worthy events, marketers should expand the scope of their content even wider than that.

ShareThis found that during the opening game of the NFL season, users shared 8x more sports content than normal—and it wasn’t all about football. In fact, content about soccer saw the biggest lift in shares. Similarly, during Shark Week, audiences shared 16x the amount of animal/nature content than usual, with a 13x surge in sharing of content about TV shows across the board.

The report also found that event sharing is highly localized. For example, the earthquake in Napa sparked a social sharing surge in California and its bordering states. With this information, content marketers can customize their content based on the interests and concerns of a specific geographic audience.

3. Know what your audience on each platform wants.

What are your social channels good for? Varying types of content, apparently.

In those precious 2–3 weeks surrounding a major event, Facebook is the place to have a steady presence, sucking up 85 percent of sharing activity. However, if you want to spike your traffic with quick, real-time content, Twitter and Reddit prove to be the most effective platforms for more reactive sharing, with Twitter activity reaching 3x its usual volume within 2–3 days of an event.

Content marketers can also hone in on certain social networks depending on which type of event they are creating content for. For example, entertainment events have high sharing rates on Facebook; sports events prompt more conversation on Twitter; and international news events spread like wildfire on Reddit.

4. Meet users on the second screen (both kinds).

ShareThis makes a bold declaration: Tablets, not smartphones, are the true second screens.

While watching broadcast TV events, viewers were doing 2x the amount of sharing on tablets, presumably in real-time while the shows were being aired. For example, during the NFL kickoff, tablet sharing increased by 159 percent, while smartphone sharing only increased by 2 percent.

Also, in the weeks before and after an event, users conducted 72 percent of their social sharing on mobile devices—that’s 33 percent more than average. During the actual event, sharing on mobile devices spikes to 85 percent, while sharing on desktops dips to roughly 15 percent.

Any worthwhile content marketer is already laser-focused on mobile, but she has to also know how and when to leverage those devices for maximum content exposure and engagement.

5. Never underestimate millennials.

Remember that high-peak sharing time within the first 24 hours of a major event, when sharing spiked by 5x? It turns out, users aged 18–25 are largely responsible for that, sharing 2.1x more often than usual around that timeframe overall.

Older audiences shouldn’t be discredited, since they join the discussion in earnest in the days and weeks following the events. But when it comes to real-time engagement, content marketers should never underestimate the power of millennials and how they behave while using social media.

The post 5 Tips for Creating Engaging Social Content Around Big Events appeared first on Contently.

It turns out you can engage your audiences just as effectively by curating existing work as you can by creating new material. Here are five specific approaches that you can take for curating content:

1. Create conversations by comparing and contrasting existing text

Lapham’s Quarterly publishes the works and documents of some of history’s greatest thinkers and presents shortened segments in brief articles. For example, here is visual artist Francis Bacon and author Joan Didion, separated by three centuries, ruminating on memory and notebooks. People don’t necessarily have the time to read dense historical texts; they want something easy to digest. Lapham’s Quarterly does this by offering a clear theme.

Given their constraint—focusing on content that already exists—Lapham’s Quarterly has been forced to innovate on presentation and context. In its Conversations section, the journal has turned to a technique familiar to most writers who have graduated middle school: comparison and contrast through textual analysis.

In content marketing, these conversations could show two sides of a debate and allow the reader to side with the writer who makes a more valid argument. It could also feature text that offers two complementary ways of thinking about a single problem.

For example, think about content marketing as a whole, a concept that basically boils down to the creation, publishing, and distribution of media. While branded content may not have an extensive history, you could potentially study the background of journalism and media to get interesting ideas for your own work. Or use biographies about media moguls from different eras—profiling, say, William Randolph Hearst and Rupert Murdoch. Comparing great thinkers throughout history will interest your readers with a truly unique hook.

2. Simplify dense text or transcribe speeches

Dense content isn’t always dated. Contemporary academic articles are usually written for precision, not for conciseness, which can cause some readers to turn away.

Recently, some students put together a site called Useful Science, which is a collection of links to academic papers summarized in tweet-sized one-liners. It makes concepts and implications simple for readers and instantly brings people value.

Useful Science, a crowd-sourced project anyone can contribute to, can be as simple as offering a link to a scientific article. In May, bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell tweeted, “A group of Canadian grad students have created a website that elegantly summarizes scientific findings. It’s genius.”

Each industry has its own studies, predictions, and set of articles that can be curated. Sometimes, if a niche is too narrow, intersecting with a larger niche can draw in enough readers. In the case of Useful Science, practical health or psychology tips carried more than enough substance. For another example: Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings successfully combined creativity and art.

3. Curate existing crowdsourced interviews

Reddit’s Ask Me Anything series has become extremely popular and spawned a new type of interview format: Multiple users can directly ask questions to subjects. Sadly, Reddit’s user interface isn’t necessarily the most conducive to viewing in-depth interviews.

Why not repackage it and present it in a classic Q&A format?

While Reddit has been a great platform for initiating and facilitating communication, Interviewly is a solution that fine-tunes the dialogue by displaying the content in a clean, familiar, and intuitive way. Even with all the disorganized content out there, there are plenty of possibilities for curating an interview with the right presentation—think Storify, Quibb, Inbound, or Growth Hackers.

4. Collect relics and put them on display

Relics don’t necessarily have to be old, but they do have to be remarkable and delightful.

The Book Cover Archive is one project in that vein that looks purely at book cover designs and designers. Designers and writers can both find inspiration without having to go to a library. The archive contains more than 1,000 books, and the curators also run a blog that focuses on covers and designers. Although the site is a great fountain of inspiration, the minds behind the Book Cover Archive don’t appear to be as active as they once were. Now imagine if a book designer, design agency, or publisher were to create a similar collection in order to generate more inbound leads from authors or agents.

5. Appeal to nostalgia

Using nostalgia to appeal to an audience is usually a smart move. Dig up photographs, text, tapes, or any other media that you can find from a specific decade, and sit back as users project their own experiences onto your content.

Retronaut, for example, collects tens of thousands of pictures and presents them in a linear timeline. By displaying everything from past advertisements to modern-day buildings, the site gives viewers a glimpse into previous generations and a more holistic view of the world we live in today. While Google Images might have more clutter and fewer curated images, Retronaut’s high-quality snapshots are presented in a distinctly attractive manner. It also promotes engagement, since you never really know what you’ll find from a collection of photographs that spans more than two centuries.

Because curating one item takes less time overall than creating one item (e.g., discovering a photo vs. scouting locations, taking a photo, editing it, and uploading it), curation opens up the possibility for brand publishers to create a larger project that contains audio, visuals, and text. Doing so could make it simpler for publishers to distribute these various types of content to the right audience, such as audio to Soundcloud, visuals on Pinterest, and text on Twitter.

Closing thoughts

Regardless of the size of your content marketing budget, curation can serve as a scalable option to engage readers without breaking the bank.

Don’t overthink it. Create entirely new content experiences simply by curating existing content and presenting it in ways that will please your audience more than the original source.

The post How to Use Curation to Create Unique, Original Content appeared first on Contently.

Here are a few lessons that content marketers can learn from journalists in order to improve their results:

1. Put as much effort into the headline as the rest of the article

In journalism, a good or bad headline can mean the difference between a breakout article or one that falls flat. Journalists carefully craft their headlines to attract reader attention. From the days of yellow journalism to the modern incentive-powered , journalists crafted their headlines to attract reader attention rather than to just sum up an article.

A great headline is an art that journalists perfect by practicing it a thousand times over. Former news writer Gem Muzones explains on the Spiralytics blog that a good title is one that is “informative and catchy enough to let your reader know what the post is about without giving too much away.” In other words, a headline is a promise to the reader that’s fulfilled with the rest of the piece.

If you’re looking for more actionable advice, try out this tactic: as Upworthy Editor-at-Large Adam Mordecai explains on Quora, media companies like The Onion and Upworthy “crap out 25 headlines as fast as possible.” By the time you churn out headline 21, you’ll be so desperate to choose a headline that you’ll produce something unexpected—and that will be the eyebrow-raising headline of perfection.

And if you want to dive even deeper, check out Copyblogger’s advice for writing magnetic headlines.

2. Know your audience well

Journalists are not usually born with a foolproof understanding of their readers. Often, they earn readers’ attention by spending time in the trenches and immersing themselves in the topics that they choose to cover. For example, Hunter S. Thompson became a member of Hells Angels when he was investigating the famous motorcycle club, and he learned firsthand about how they operate. Today, you don’t necessarily need to join a biker gang, but you do need to be wherever your readers are—whether that’s Twitter, sub-Reddits, gamer forums, or SXSW.

Journalists also interview members of their demographics in order to learn what sparks their readers’ interests and what they ache to read. Although its journalistic value is questionable, Cosmopolitan Magazine frequently tested topics and headlines to see if they would resonate with readers.

Content marketers face the same challenges journalists do: both are competing for reader attention. They should therefore treat their readers with respect.

And don’t just find out what your readers want to read; find out how they want to read it. When Financial Times created their fastFT service, they prioritized speed and reaction time because they knew how much their audience valued it.

3. Make it last

Content with a long shelf-life will remain relevant in the pipeline; you can pull it out of your back pocket when you’re in a pinch. Journalists understand the importance of both “hard news” (reports on events and occurrences) and “soft news” (interviews, feature stories, op-eds). As a content marketer, that means you can’t simply focus on breaking industry news; evergreen content is also an important part of the mix.

Posts built for the long haul are much better suited for search engine optimization, because they keep attracting links and shares over time. And this trait isn’t exclusive to blog posts. Check out Wells Riley’s guide entitled, “Startups, this is how design works.” It has attracted over 70,000 shares between Facebook and Twitter.

In order to provide the most value possible, maintain your evergreen content. Update each of these articles at least every couple of months to keep them relevant.

4. Brutal honesty is the best policy

An old Latvian proverb is translated in English as, “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.” Journalists understand the importance of checking their facts and doing their research. The cost of publishing misguided information can be huge. One time, I misheard a company name in an interview and published the wrong name. My unfortunate error dominated the comments in the article, as well as the related tweets. Such an accident will overshadow the rest of the article.

On the other hand, don’t let a fear of mistakes keep you from publishing. Despite my oversight, some readers were still able to acknowledge the merit of the piece, and it gained thousands of pageviews for the publisher. Admit your errors, learn from them, and apologize. (In audio or video interviews, I now Google company names and industry terms before writing about them. I also do my best to find text transcriptions.)

5. Keep your eyes peeled

A large part of journalism training involves finding sources for potential stories. Journalists are always on the lookout for the next article, and they pounce when a subject says something unusual in an interview or when an unexpected event happens. Stay updated on industry news and look out for recurring trends. For example, as he was conducting research, 99U’s Sean Blanda noticed that a lot of successful startups tended to have a founder who was pushed out. This observation sparked a conversation with New York Times columnist and author Nick Belton.

There are a lot of ideas floating around the publishing world every day. When you’re reading industry news or interviews, use tools like Evernote or Delicious to clip quotes and ideas. When you’re stumped for content, jog your memory by digging through these archives for ideas. Give your brain the space and time to develop a unique perspective, which you can then build into a post.

Or tell your story to a friend. See if they ask any questions, where in the story they became confused or particularly inquisitive, and what sparks their interest. If they offer little to no reaction, then your idea may be stale or irrelevant, however, if they seem strongly engage with your narrative, then you may just have figured out a way to turn that coal of an idea into a diamond.

Closing Thoughts

Journalists have mastered the art of sharing relevant information in the form captivating stories, rather than by just reporting dry facts. For instance, how do you tell a story about the creation of the dictionary? When journalist and broadcaster Simon Winchester looked into the histories of the inventors, he’d noticed some interesting events that occurred, and he took the opportunity to reframe the story to be about murder and insanity—two much more exciting topics.

While the original subject remained the same, Winchester used his research to provide an enticing angle and eventually attract more readers. Brands can similarly use these strategies to create compelling stories around their products, and turn excited readers and viewers into loyal consumers.

What’s the deal with the Content Strategist? It’s something we created at Contently because we believe in a world where marketing is helpful, and businesses grow by telling stories that people love. Take advantage of our tools and talent and come build that world with us.

The post 5 Content Marketing Lessons from Journalists appeared first on Contently.

Why We Create and Share Cat Videos and Why It Matters to People and Brands (Fast Co.Create)
Finally! An article legitimizing the value of cat videos! Memes, more than just distractions, are  tools for elevating the everyday, building relationships, and empowering communities. There’s even room for brand marketers to jump inwithout looking overtly gimmicky.

Facebook Drops ‘Sponsored Stories’ As It Pares Down Ad Formats (AdAge)
You might be surprised to hear that as of yesterday, Facebook had 27 different ad formats. Over the next six months, they’ll be cutting that number in half. Word on the street is that its ‘sponsored stories’ product, for one, will make an official exit.

News360 Puts ‘Native Advertising’ into Its Personal News App (PaidContent)
Two big trends — custom news and native ads — are joining forces to help brands reach new audiences. News360, an app that creates personalized collections of news reading material, has signed up three brands to test a new native advertising experience. Advertisers can choose to pay for exposure based on an engagement metric of their choice.

Redditors Angry Over New Rules in /r/atheism (GigaOM)
Community-controlled content is a difficult beast, and here’s yet another example as Reddit’s moderators enforce new rules for one of its very popular “subreddits” — and the community’s responding with an uproar. The intent is to keep “atheism” central to the core discussion, discourage off-topic posts, and keep trolling to a minimum.

The post CONTENT WATCH: The psychology of cat videos, and more appeared first on Contently.

After 16 Years of Agency Life, Copywriter’s First Solo Ad Is an Instant Hit (AdWeek)
After 16 years of ad agency life, copywriter Matt Bull took a leap of faith in himself to pursue the path of self-employment.

His first gig? A billboard for a local restaurant that’s been up-voted to the front page of Reddit. Here’s a look into the creepy, counter-intuitive, and hilarious style.

Tumblr Adds Sponsored Posts, and the Grumbles Begin (GigaOM)
Two weeks have passed since Yahoo bought Tumblr. The biggest change so far? Sponsored posts.

Users aren’t happy and some feel that Yahoo has ruined the community. Will attitudes change, and will the Tumblr community warm up to the new look and feel? Only time will tell — here is how the online advertising giant is navigating a tough sell.

When It Comes to Slaying Asian-American Stereotypes, Ads Lead the Way (AdAge)
Online ads are power tools — not just for selling, but for social good as well. Writer Bill Imada claims the Asian American community has made its biggest strides in advertising.

In the past few years, more Asian Americans have been cast in commercials and mainstream roles. The consequence? Dozens of opportunities for Asian American actors. Can advertising help accelerate growth for other communities as well?

35 Guilty Pleasure Twitter Accounts (Mashable)
This one made the list because it’s Friday. You’re welcome.

The post A Copywriter’s Breakthrough, Tumblr’s New Revenue Stream, Ad Stereotypes appeared first on Contently.