10 proven ways to stand out from the crowd in a content snacking era

This post was originally posted on cmo.com - they have great content for marketing directors and any marketers/ Social Media guys, you should check them out!

Have you ever wondered:

- With adblockers everywhere, on desktops and now even on iPhone, how can I serve my content to consumers?
- How can I maintain my interaction rate on social networks?
- Should I enter the race for content and frenetically publishing stuff?
- How can I stand out with video on Facebook since it’s muted by default?
- How does viral marketing work? What about buzz?
- What are the differences between Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat? How can I split my content?
- What are the best practices for Instagram?

If so, this presentation and this article are for you!
If you think it is hard to get your content out there today, well, I have a bad news from you...the content saturation era is only beginning.
Several studies show that content production is going to intensify and we expect the amount of content to rise by 500% by 2020.
A lot of agencies are trying to get money out of this war by producing too much over qualitative content (and over-priced), assuming that consumers will only snack on it.
But this is not the right answer!
Millenials are extremely sophisticated bullshit detectors and posting more won’t do the trick.
The Volkswagen case is hurting all brands: “Who can you trust if you can’t even take a German car manufacturer seriously? ?
Today, creating good content is only a starting point. Mark Schaefer invites you to ignite your content. Here are 10 rules on how to do so:

1. Visual, visual, visual
It is easy to understand that consumers will always go to visual storytelling because it talks to their gut and it’s the most easily understandable content.
It goes faster, which is key in our era.

2. Visual listening
Brands often forget that the most important thing to do on the social web is to listen.
Actually, a lot of consumers are using your brand or product without mentioning you – it is essential to visually analyze web content. You’ll learn a lot from your consumers and what they associate your brand with.

3. Find your niche
One of Airbnb’s founders made it clear that “you’re better off building something that 100 people will love rather than something that 1 million people will kind of like”.
The web is structured in vertical communities. You have to decide who you want to target and produce specific content for that segment of people.
To do so, you need to go back to your sense of purpose and your values, and make sure your content is relevant for your brand, relevant for consumers AND relevant for the platforms.
It means you have to master the platforms.

4. Become a hub
Why should you try to put your content on existing websites when you can be at the center and become the information hub in a specific niche?

5. Give consumers a way to express themselves
Animated GIFs are everywhere in conversations on the social web.
If you are one of the 800 million Facebook Messenger, you’ve probably noticed that they added an item which proposes animated GIFs relevant to what you’ve wrote.
No brand has taken advantage of this yet...

6. Create useful content
When Marketers tell me about Instagram or Snapchat because they want to reach the famous ? Millenials ?, I come back at them with figures – those platforms are still small.
According to Global Web Index, the coolest platform for teens remains Youtube.
It is their search engine, where they try to understand and learn.
Use this platform as it should be used – to answer questions, create how-to’s...
Don’t believe people who tell you that the content should not be longer than 45 sec / 1 minute.
The average How-to’ from a beauty blogger lasts 10 minutes. The objective is actually to help you make yourself up for real (including pausing from time to time).
Have you ever tried to make up your face in 45 seconds?

7. Respect the codes
When it comes to vertical communities, whichever ones you target, there are codes that you have to respect (vocabulary, places, leaders, pop culture...) in order to join.

8. Influencers are the new leaders
When teenagers are asked about their 10 favorite celebrities, all of them are famous Youtubers.
It is obvious that you have to integrate them in your strategy, although this may not be as easy as “post for money”.
They have a very close relationship with their communities. If they fail, they will lose what they’ve spent building.
Therefore, they won’t fail and this is the reason why they are still credible.

9. Buy media
If you still believe in the magical “buzz”, somebody should tell you that it’s mostly about luck.
Yes, there are rules to follow and ingredients to add. But how much amazing content just hasn’t been seen, simply because the brand wasn’t lucky with the timing or because its media purchase wasn’t big enough?
If you want your content to be seen, buy media... Especially on Facebook, where your organic reach is almost 0 but where there are no adblockers (on the mobile app).

10. Mobile centricity
Mobile is pretty much everywhere, but you need to remember that mobile means a small vertical screen.
We are used to horizontal film and it’s very difficult to imagine another format.
In fact, no platform is optimized for mobile, whether it be Youtube, Dailymotion, Vimeo or Slideshare.
However, Snapchat claims that vertical video has a much better completion rate.

You’ll find this advice and much more in the presentation, I hope you’ll enjoy it! We are very lucky marketers.