When surveyed, a good majority (53%) stated that they dedicated less than 5% of resources to optimization practices. The small sliver of those who invested 25%+ of marketing budgets were twice as likely to see higher levels of conversion rates. Simply put, the companies who are spending more on optimization are truly reaping the benefits.

One thing in particular that the study pointed out was that digital marketers regarded social sharing as the most effective way to boost conversion rates:

• 39% saw activities such as putting social sharing icons on pages to be “very effective,” followed by 37% who indicated that third-party credibility, such as security seals, achieved a similar outcome.
• 37% consider social sharing, live chat or instant messaging to be very effective at increasing conversion rates.
• 34% find social sharing to be a “very effective” mobile tactic for conversation rates. 47% found it to be “somewhat effective”.

As users of Po.st, you are already ahead of the curve compared to your digital marketing peers! Social sharing clearly has a direct and measurable impact for marketers.  As you might have already discovered, using content or product sharing buttons powered by Po.st provides a free and easy way to access social analytics and insights about the influencers within your audience. With that knowledge comes the power of optimization, which not only drives up your conversion rates and sales, but also ultimately guides your business toward a positive impact.

Faster Page Load Time

Our sharing tool aggregates sharing buttons into one JavaScript tag. Since the code is a lot lighter than numerous individual tags, your site’s page load time will be much faster. This leads to a better user experience and faster discovery of your content.

For example, after HomeAway.com removed 7 directly integrated buttons and replaced them with one Po.st tag their pages loaded 31% faster!

Centralized Analytics

When using multiple tags or providers for your sharing buttons, you will have to log in to each account individually to view their social analytics. With Po.st, all your comprehensive sharing data is in one spot. You will be able to see your website’s volume of shares, clicks, virality, what content is getting the most shares, which social networks are preferred, and more! Learn more about the Po.st dashboard here.

Monetization

Po.st is the only social sharing tool that gives its publishers the option to monetize all their users who share content. After a piece of content is shared, a confirmation message and an overlay ad appears. We call it the ATS (After The Share).  You receive a premium CPM from Po.st – these are new impressions that don’t affect your existing ad banners.

“Po.st is the perfect sharing tool for our site, BrainyQuote.com. We love the widget, excellent analytics, and shared revenue.”

- Jeff Rich, CEO, BrainyQuote

Click here to learn more about the ATS.

Customizable

You can create the exact look and feel you want for your sharing buttons by using Po.st. Whether you want your buttons above the content or below, vertical or horizontal, with counters or without, it’s completely up to you! You can choose from an assortment of social network buttons and since all the buttons are coming from Po.st, they will have a clean, uniform layout.

Our proprietary ‘P-Share’ button is a way to enhance your site’s shareability. When users hover over it, it serves as a drop down (see below image) and gives your viewers more sharing options without cluttering your page with additional buttons.

To get started with Po.st, click here!

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to the Po.st team at publishers@po.st.

For a live example of how Guess is using this feature, you can check out their recent custom link (po.st/1981Jeans) on the Facebook post here.

To start customizing your short links, simply sign into your Po.st account and shorten a link as normal. Once the shortened link pops up, click the pencil icon to “edit link” and enter in your desired text.

Since Facebook’s News Feed algorithm gives up to 1,300 percent more weight to “shares” than “likes” when it comes to which activities are shown near the top of a user’s feed, it’s important that web pages and ad creative provide users with easy ways to click to share to Facebook as well as other social networks.

The takeaway for both brands and publishers: be sure you prominently display both the Facebook “share” and Facebook “like” buttons on your website’s pages.

This month, the Po.st team will be attending some great networking events that we wanted to share with you.  Let us know if you plan to attend and we would love to connect!

Upcoming Events:

What: Digiday Publishing Summit

When: March 17^th -19^th

Where: Montelucia Resort & Spa (4949 E. Lincoln Dr., Scottsdale, AZ 85253)

More Info: http://digidaypublishingsummit.com/

Digiday Publishing Summit (DPS) is the leading digital publishing conference, where old and new, meet up to have progressive discussions on the challenges and opportunities in a media category that’s constantly evolving. Digital media has taken the publishing industry by storm. Both large and small publishers must constantly evolve in order to stay afloat in the ever-changing environment. The traditional way of doing things no longer guarantees survival — in fact, it more than likely guarantees failure. At the Digiday Publishing Summit, hear from those solving the problems — both old and new — with which publishers today are dealing and how they are working to move the industry forward. Rebecca@RadiumOne.com (VP of Business Development), Luis@RadiumOne.com (Sr. Manager of Business Development) and Kevin@RadiumOne.com (Sr. Marketing Manager) will be attending Digiday.

What: EyeforTravel’s Social Media & Mobile Strategies for Travel 2013

When: March 18^th -19^th

Where: Hotel Nikko (222 Mason St, San Francisco, CA 94102)

More Info: http://events.eyefortravel.com/social-media/

Now in its 6^th year, EyeforTravel’s Social Media & Mobile Strategies for Travel (formerly The Social Media Strategies for Travel Conference) is the leading strategic and networking forum for senior Online Travel, Tourism and Hospitality executives working in the areas of social media and mobile. The summit will bring together leading global hotels, casinos, airlines, OTAs, cruises, destinations and more from North America and beyond for 2 days of best-practice strategies, cutting-edge trends and vigorous debate – as well as powerful networking with an unrivalled industry elite. Feel free to email Peter@RadiumOne.com (Business Development) or Katelyn@RadiumOne.com (Account Manager) if you will be there!

Recently Attended Events:

What: SFAdPub Meetup

When: March 5^th @ 7pm-9pm

Where: Location Varies

More Info: http://www.meetup.com/sfadpub/events/104168382/

The SFAdPub is a monthly meetup for ad publishers and web startups looking to learn from each other and share advice. Each month they focus on a different topic, this topic being “Optimizing Affiliates and Ad Placements – Tips and Best Practices.” Reach out to Katelyn@RadiumOne.com if you plan to attending the next meetup in April!

What: 5^th Annual Women’s Leadership Conference

When: March 6^th @ 8am-6:30pm

Where: The City Club of San Francisco (155 Sansome St., San Francisco CA 94104)

More Info: http://www.ewip.org/conference/ewip-leadership-2013/

The 2013 Exceptional Women in Publishing (EWIP) event marks our 5^th year of bringing you our signature all-female roster, and our 15^th year as an organization. Expect a day brimming with insight and intelligence. Each session of this daylong event will be packed with practical takeaways, creative ideas, and lively discussions about the successful business and content models of today and tomorrow. You’ll come away with a sharper understanding of how each media platform connects you to readers and customers and how you can leverage all of them—print, digital, mobile, and web—to attract and engage new audiences.

Happy Sharing!

WIth Po.st, not only will your visitors have access to share your content through any social stream, increasing your site’s traffic, but you also have the option to make money off of this social activity. This is the most common and desirable option amongst our publishers. Monetizing the share allows publishers to generate revenue through the sharing events already taking place on their site. After someone shares a piece of content through the Po.st buttons, a 300×250 advertisement will appear next to the buttons with a share confirmation (see example here). We pay off of a net CPM (cost per impression) on social shares with 100% of the ad revenue going straight to our publishers. It’s that simple!

However, if at any moment you no longer want to see pre-selected ads from Fortune 500 companies, this ATS unit can be customized to support your own message or advertisement. This space can promote your own personal call to action such as advertising a product, service, social media page, contest, event or whatever you’d like, it’s totally flexible! Below are a few examples of current publishers taking advantage of this ATS opportunity.

(WeatherUndergroud.com; eMarketer.com; SoccerWithoutLimits.com)

Sharing buttons are important for all websites, but advertisements are not for everyone. If at any time you do not want the ads on your page, simply contact publishers@po.st and we’ll take care of that request for you. Po.st sharing buttons will continue to work as usual, your analytics will track the same, but you will no longer see an ATS ad or generate revenue.

Po.st sharing buttons add value to any site no matter the content. By providing easy and measurable sharing capabilities along with share monetization, Po.st can help take your site to the next level. Contact publishers@po.st to get started with any of these ATS options!

Happy Sharing!
The Po.st Team

RadiumOne presents this year’s social winners in an infographic that is based on social sharing popularity.

5 Efficient Strategies to Boost Your Content Marketing Results

An increase in traffic may be bad news for motorists, but it’s music to the ears of online business owners. In its essence, content marketing is about attracting a pervasively larger online following in order to drive your business, and a social sharing platform such as Po.st makes it easier to accomplish this effectively.

If you want to get in on the many benefits of expanding your reach and attracting a broader audience, consider these five strategies for ramping up your content marketing results:

1. Partner Up
There’s nothing new about teaming up in business to achieve mutual goals, and it’s a concept that certainly works when it comes to content marketing. By seeking out partnerships with other websites, you can multiply exposure and reap numerous rewards, from increased ad impressions to higher search rankings.

Partners need not be of the same industry, but should be complementary in nature. Good examples would be a blog on professional development teaming with a site on personal finance, or a parenting website hooking up with an outlet that specializes in providing healthcare advice.

• Choose a partner website with a respectable amount of traffic and strong reputation. Make it a priority that the target demographic is a viable fit for the content you are marketing.
• Trade guest posts, run product features, and seek creative new ways to expose your content to a broader audience.
• Capitalize on Po.st’s revenue generating features, such as audience segmentation data collection, which supplies tangible ways to monetizing your shared content by increasing the relevance of your advertising.

2. Open Channels
It would be futile to attempt to be active on every single social media channel, but it’s a mistake to limit your efforts to just a few. In addition to having a solid presence on social heavyweights like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and LinkedIn, identify secondary channels that are known for driving referral traffic, as well as up-and-coming networks where you can increase your exposure.

As you expand your network, strategically add sharing buttons to make it easy for your audience to distribute your content, boosting your inbound traffic while improving search engine ranking.

• Create content for emerging channels proven to be impactful in driving referral traffic, such as Pinterest and Slideshare.
• Recycle or breathe new life into your most popular existing content, tailoring it to fit each unique network.
• Reduce the workload by using the Po.st platform to share your content across more than 30 of the most important social networks.

3. Energize Your Following
Whether it’s a major TV broadcast like the Grammy Awards or a giant international corporation such as Nike, you’ll find these entities are very clever and diligent about putting their audience to work. It’s one of the smartest strategies you can employ in content marketing, calling on your following to tweet about your program or contribute content to a forum or blog. The idea is to get your social media marketing campaign to work for you 24/7, as the conversation continues online and your content flows through ever-expanding circles.

• Make it simple for your audience to share by using Po.st’s customizable social network buttons.
• Create community-oriented features on your website that allow your clients or users to contribute. Solicit recipes, how-to videos, personal anecdotes, or creative photography – anything to encourage quality content creation and engagement.
• Always encourage comments to your posts and shares, and monitor and respond to live threads to keep the conversation simmering.

4. Create Sharable Content
Concentrate on producing content that people are enthusiastic about sharing. Make it approachable, digestible, and insightful, capitalizing on trending topics and appealing to the most basic human tendencies. What are people more inclined to share with their friends, family, and associates: a link to a lengthy technical blog post, or something likely to make them laugh or save them money?

• Create bite-sized bits of content and utilize visual media to make statements that can be absorbed at a glance.
• Use Po.st to generate affirming automatic pop-up confirmations when content is shared, creating the valuable opportunity to also deliver targeted “After-the-Share” ads.
• Offer incentives for sharing your content on popular channels such as Facebook or Twitter, like a discount on a premium item or entry into a sweepstakes.

5. Collect and Analyze Data
By structuring a highly interactive website and a multi-layered social media campaign, you can not only proliferate the sharing of your content, but discover facts about your target demographic via collected data: where they are from, what they like to do, and how they respond to the way you interact with them. Generating lots of traffic is a good thing in e-commerce, but the results are multiplied when you use data analysis to fine-tune your efforts.

• Learn more about your visitors and their experiences on your website by offering incentives to take surveys.
• Build your following on channels that are virtual data mines, such as Google+, LinkedIn, and Facebook, which offer direct insight into the lives and habits of their users.
• Use Po.st’s social analytics dashboard to help cull and analyze data, making it possible to do everything from creating more compelling content, to identifying potential new audiences.

Final Thoughts
Content marketing, when performed effectively and with purpose, can help you to grow your business and generate more revenue. By using these strategies and others in conjunction with the Po.st social sharing platform, you can achieve your goals faster and more efficiently.

What other tips can you suggest for more effective content marketing? Let us know at publishers@po.st!

Happy Sharing!

With the way that social media has impacted our lives, it comes as no surprise that social applications and online services have made our day-to-day as well as special event preparations (like V-Day) a breeze. With today being Valentines Days, I felt it was necessary to point out how making arrangements and purchases for this anticipated day can turn from stressful to simple.

No matter what you are want to do, there is an app for that…seriously. What did you have in mind for today? Dinner and a movie? Easy! Oh wait…you did make plans ahead of time, right? Don’t worry, we have you covered! With OpenTable you can make last minute dinner reservations online or with Munchery, you can have a local chef make you a gourmet meal and deliver it to your house.  Next…movie! There is no waiting in line or fear that your romantic flick is sold out with Fandango. Buy your tickets online and have them waiting for you at the box office. Now if transportation is an issue, book a limo with Uber or style it up with a Lyft pick up and have chauffer drive you and your date to your destinationthat social applications and online s

You didn’t forget the flowers did you? Well, instead of running to the grocery store, order two dozen red roses from ProFlowers.com or have someone purchase the flowers you want and have them delivered through Task Rabbit. But if you really want to win over your special someone, send them chocolate covered strawberries from Sharis Berries (trust me, you can’t go wrong here!) Now it’s time to set the mood. No need to bring out your Boys II Men CD’s, choose a romantic station off of Pandora or use Billboard’s Top 50 Love Songs of All Time on Spotify.

Now it is time to relish in your accomplishments of romance. Share your eventful evening with your social network by posting pictures, check-ins and tweeting about love. Also, If you have any creative social media tactics, plans or suggestions of your own to share with the world, make sure to let us know by using the hashtag #PostVday.

Good luck and we hope you survive Valentines Day!

Happy Sharing!

- Po.st Team