There’s so much information around these days that it’s hard to know what to read but I have come to rely on information provided by HubSpot which is one of the leading authorities on digital marketing. So it was with great interest that I downloaded this free e-book by @DanZarrella which you can obtain here: http://go.hubspot.com/ebook-busting-marketing-myths/
In a nutshell, the myths that are busted are as follows:
1. Social media is for conversations, not broadcasting. His research showed no correlation between the number of comments a blog post received and the amount of traffic that blog post received. He found the same with Facebook – no useful relationship between the amount of feedback on a wall post and the number of people that see that wall post. And on Twitter highly followed accounts tend to have a lower percentage of their overall tweet stream starting with an @. He suggests that the key is in broadcasting more interesting content – and shows that there is a positive correlation between the amount of links tweeted and the number of followers.
2. “Please retweet” doesn’t work. “Please retweet” was found to be an effective call to action – 51% of tweets containing the phrase were retweeted compared to only 12% of those that didn’t. “Please retweet” gets three times more retweets than “Please RT”.
3. Don’t market on the weekends. Whilst Twitter retweet activity peaks later in the day on Friday, Facebook shares peaked on Saturdays and emails sent on the weekend had a much higher click through rate (CTR).
4. Don’t call yourself a “guru”. Accounts that had the word “guru” in their bios had 100 more followers than the average user.
5. Send less email. The older a subscriber is the lower their response rate is. There is no drop off in click through rates when sending more email messages
6. Klout is worthless. There is a relationship between high Klout scores and incoming links and traffic. Those brands which were doing well on social media according to Klout were also doing well on their web site according to more traditional measurements.
