surprizezunltd: Digital Media

Ever wondered to what other use the squeezed short urls of some seriously long links could serve, other than obviously acting as their zip versions?

As you probably know that the entire activity through social sharing is traceable unlike the one that happens through emails and instant messaging. Hence, this zone of online social sharing that is not invariably tracked is called the Dark Social, which basically includes emails or instant messages sent to exclusive people or groups. So, for tracking the sharing activity that happens through not so obviously tracked medium is one of the areas where those shortened urls could be used.

I know the popular wisdom suggests that nothing apart from the social big-wigs like Facebook and Twitter could dominate the online sharing scenario. But to regard that knowledge as a fallacy would be the latest study commissioned by RadiumOne.

The study simply summarises that a lot happens outside the realms of what a lot of us think and understand about the online sharing theories. As per the study, the Dark Social share surpasses the combined activity of all the popular social media put together.

Dark Social: Revealing the Dark unseen side of Social Sharing

If the figures are to be believed, about 84% of people share content online, out of which 93% use Dark Social media. Also, 32% of those online sharing ones share only through the Dark Social. Though, one of the most defining findings of the study is that 69% of the entire sharing activity happens through the Dark Social, whereas the big brother of social media - the Facebook only accounts for 23% globally.

It would not be incorrect to deduce that what viva voce is in the offline world, Dark Social is its reliable counterpart in the online one. Coming to think of it, Dark Social activity is bound to happen between two strong contacts and hence, the probability of an actionable recommendation is more likely.

Hence, the time is right for the content marketers to get into some serious deep dive into the emails of their recipients.

This is 2015 and the phrase Social Media Management has evolved a whole lot. It is simply much more than acquiring a chosen user name with the top Social Media accounts and using them to stay in touch with the people you know in the real World.

Here I am referring to the Social Media Management for a professional use, which would help in the streamlining process for the branding and content management for personal as well business identities.

Although there are numerous tools available which are notably popular amongst Social Media enthusiasts; but for the sole purpose of keeping things simple, I am only mentioning the ones which are by far simplest in terms of usage and are absolutely frugal.

Have a look and feel free to discuss your experience(s) using them.

1. CANVA

Being a writer I have always struggled when it comes to associating an appropriate picture or a graphic art with my write-ups. I know that our very own Google has been a darling in providing an option for using ‘labeled for reuse’ images. But sadly, that particular option only takes care of the licensing problems, the dire need for an appropriate graphic content to complement the written content is not addressed properly with it. That is when I researched and got to know about CANVA.

Canva is simply a graphic art designing website that gives you numerous images based on the key-word that you provide. They do ask for a dollar for buying them, but the free pictures are available with their water-mark. Let the last part of the last statement not let you lose your curiosity in Canva. It is because the water-mark is almost non-existent with the careful camouflaging done by the minds at Canva.

By the way, the graphic art on this article also uses water-marked images from Canva. I bet you checked twice to confirm that.

2. GOOGLE ANALYTICS

It goes without saying that Google Analytics is the tool to administer all your campaigns on the World Wide Web. It is pretty easy to configure with a basic Gmail account to access all the associated statistics related to a website. For anyone not much obsessed with data (unlike me) can do simply well with the basic information provided in the dashboard report that comes up on the front page with statistics like – number of users, page views per session, bounce rate et all with respect to different time frames. As long these figures are in good health, everything would seem to be working fine in general; but for specific campaign related stuff, the CONVERSIONS feature of Google Analytics comes in handy. It can be used for tasks which require to know activities on a campaign like “how much downloading activity happened” to “how many registrations” and of course everything related to the E-commerce arena. With power-packed features available for E-Commerce tracking, everything related to a particular sale gets a deep-dive into a pool of information. Sofrom the referral landings, time-lag in-between the purchases to sales figures pinned down to locations,all will be at your disposal with few clicks.

3. BUFFER

Even if anyone has been remotely associated with any Social Media activity, they would surely agree on creating killer content as a means to survive in the game. Time and again the particular task of creating an engaging content has to be repeated in order to achieve time stamp in the minds of the audience. Since the content cannot be created magically all the time, in such a scenario application like Buffer comes to rescue. One can simply create a lot of content and then schedule it to be posted on specified time frames with the Buffer. Buffer then automatically shares the content on those optimal time-frames (user-specified) in order to receive maximum visibility. Also, the application allows sharing third-party content that is doing the rounds on the internet via the user’s social handles. This particular feature is very useful for interim periods of lag in-between sharing of self-created content. It keeps the user base engaged with the relevant content from other users while getting to see it shared by your own social identities.

4. BITLY

Services offered by Bitly became popular through Twitter’s stringent 140 characters service. Bitly simply shortens any url so that it gets condensed to fit into the default character settings of Twitter or any other social media. This one is my favourite of all and I simply cannot do without it. Although Twitter also offers a url shoterning service, but since it is only limited to Twitter, so I end up using Bitly a lot. One particular shortened url works for all my social media handles and I also get an accurate statistics on it with the insights that it’s advanced analytics features provide. It is a great tool for spreading mass coupons and discounts.

5. ZEMANTA

Zemanta is something I have on all my blogging platforms as a default add-on. It is easily compatible with all the major browsers and the moment content comes to the scene, it promptly starts featuring relevant pictures and related content alongside the blogging window. It also helps in suggesting context driven labels/tags and in-text links as well. My favourite feature of Zemanta is the ‘Related Articles’; it gives the user an option of including related content of fellow bloggers and in-return allows the user’s post to be available for sharing by other Zemanta users. This feature simply works as a Share-some-link-love and get it back thingy. You never know when a little social sharing ends up serving as a good karma for you.

Disclaimer: The content for this article is entirely based on my experience of working things around in the Social Media Sphere. I would love to know your experience with these tools and specifically others that you are hooked on to for your campaigns.