'Cascading Content' Social Media Strategy for the Busy Professional

Every business owner and professional at this point should at least know that social media is vital to a healthy business. However, not every busy professional has the time or money to dedicate to social media – or so they think. Jay Berkowitz of Ten Golden Rules has created a model called ‘Cascading Content’ that provides a simple social media strategy for any company or individual. The infographic below illustrates the concept:

Click image to view larger

Think of Cascading Content like a waterfall: you must start with a full pool, or in this case, a main piece of engaging content, such as an article, press release, video or presentation. You add this main content to your website (it’s great fodder for the search engines) and then break it up into smaller bits that are digestible by the different social media sites. For example, the long version of this blog post is an articlethat is posted on the Ten Golden Rules website and has also been sent out in an e-newsletter. Once this blog is posted, I will write brief posts for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, G+ and, since we have a cool infographic, I can even post it on Pinterestwith a link back to the full article.

There were three articles that were written for the e-newsletter and posted on the website, so I can follow this process for all three articles. Although this should not be the only content in your social media channels, Cascading Content is a quick and easy way to stretch the great content you do have over several weeks to populate your social media channels and engage your audience. And remember, people like to get their content in all different ways – some prefer reading a blog post like this one while others would rather receive an email or follow a page on Facebook. With the Cascading Content model, your content is available in whatever format your audience chooses to see it.

How do you manage your social media currently? Have you ever tried anything like Cascading Content or would you follow this model? Tell us about your experiences in the comments below.

Insights on Ways to Improve Facebook Page Engagement

Dan Zarrella, The Social Media Scientist at HubSpot, created a useful infographic on how to get more likes, comments, and shares on Facebook. I encourage you to check it out as you will discover insights that are meaningful for testing with your Facebook Page.

Below are a few highlights that I want to bubble up to the surface:

• Day of the Week: Posts published on Saturdays and Sundays receive a higher like percentage than those posted during the business week.

• Self-Relevance: In contrast to other social media platforms, posts with a high number of self-referential words (i.e. “me”) tended to get more likes.

• Hour of Day: Content posted later in the day (Eastern Time) gets more likes and shares. Likes peak around 8pm while shares peak earlier, around 6pm.

Although this infographic was developed based on data from more than 1.3 million posts published on the top 10,000 Facebook Pages – I still recommend you “test” for your specific business. Even though many of the stats may apply across several industries, that doesn’t mean it will also apply to yours. Moreover, it’s critical that you leverage Facebook Insights to really dig into your community’s engagement behaviors.

What useful nugget of information did you draw from this infographic?

Like this post? Connect with Erika Barbosa on Google+.

Image credit: owenwbrown

The 3 E’s of Marketing [INFOGRAPHIC]

Ten Golden Rules is jumping on the Pinterestcraze with its first infographic, or “information graphic,” as a web marketing tool. For this foray into the graphics space, TGR’s CEO Jay Berkowitz created a visualization of his “3 E’s of Social Media.” Utilizing a mix of cartoon-like images, photos and text, the 3 E’s are illustrated and explained for easy reference and recall. The final test will be to see how quickly and thoroughly this graphic spreads through the web via Repins, Likes and Retweets. Graphics are extremely popular these days with new sites like Pinterest and apps like Instagram gaining millions of users in short amounts of time. Infographics in particular are a visually appealing tool for disseminating statistics and concepts in an easy-to-digest manner. Have you used infographics to market your business? Use the comments section below to tell us about your experience.