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#ContentCircus 2-2-21 Recap: How to Create Buyer Personas For Your Content Marketing Strategy

Last night, we had another great conversation at #ContentCircus on Twitter, this time discussing How to Create Buyer Personas For Your Content Strategy. Let’s jump into some of the key takeaways:

When you start creating buyer personas, you want to define who the persona is. For that, you need customer data. If you work for a business, your sales, marketing and customer service teams should be able to help you define your ideal customer. If you have a retail business, you and your employees that are in regular contact with your customers can give this information. If you are still uncertain who your ideal customer is, you can create a persona for who you would want this customer to be.

 

After collecting demographic data about your persona (age, gender, occupation, income, education), you want to move on to addressing the personas pain points. What are the issues and problems they face every day, that you can address via the content you create? Giving customers the solutions to their problems is a wonderful way to create content that drives sales, and loyalty.

 

https://twitter.com/chippermuse/status/1356791739323940868

When creating content for your personas, you want to be aware of where the persona is currently getting information, and which sources it trusts. You also want to know what type of content they prefer. Do they want to read long blog posts on their desktop, or do they want to see short videos on their smartphone? By understanding what type of content they want and from what sources, it helps you tailor content to meet the expectations of your customers.

 

Finally, when you are creating your personas, you want to define where the persona is in the Buyer’s Journey. We discussed creating content for each stage of the Buyer’s Journey back in December at #ContentCircus, here’s the recap post for our conversation. Additionally, you want to define the persona’s role in making purchasing decisions within their organization or household. Can they authorize purchases independently, or will they need approval from their boss or spouse?

 

So that was our discussion last night at #ContentCircus of How to Create Buyer Personas For Your Content Strategy. If you want to join the next #ContentCircus, it happens every Tuesday night at 7pm Central. Just follow the #ContentCircus hashtag. Next week’s topic will be Winning Strategies For Content Creation on Twitter! See you then!

 

Bonus: I wrote about How to Create Buyer Personas For Your Content Marketing Strategy here yesterday. In that post I also added the persona for Sarah, to give you an idea of what a persona looks like so you can better understand how it can help your content creation efforts.  Here it is again:

 

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How to Create a Buyer Persona For Your Content Marketing Strategy

If you want to take your content strategy to the next level, one of the smartest moves you can make is to create a buyer persona(s) for the content you create.

 

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is an abstract representation of your ideal customer/client/donor/partner. Ideally, your sales and marketing department will already have existing buyer personas that you can work off of. If not, you’ll need to coordinate with these departments to create new personas.

What the big deal about a buyer persona? Think of personas as a ‘day in the life’ snapshot of your ideal customer. Personas help the content creator quickly and easily understand the person it is creating the content for, as well as the type of content that can best meet the needs of that person. Personas help give your content creators structure and direction on the type of content they should be creating. In fact, if your personas are developed correctly, you even set your content calendar with your personas instead of topics. For instance, on Monday you write a post for Sarah, on Wednesday you write one for Isaac, and Friday is for Jennifer.

 

Where do you get the information to create your buyer persona?

In other words, how do you determine who your ‘ideal’ customer is? A good starting point is to talk to your sales team. This group typically has the most hands-on experience working with and connecting directly with your customers. Also check with your marketing team, and see if they have done any customer surveys. Your ecommerce team can also help with information about who your customers are. Finally, talk to your customer service team, they can give you a different set of customer insights, which we will talk about in a minute.

These are all in-house sources of information. You can also look at market research, especially research done about customers in your industry and vertical. Also, study your competitors and try to get a sense for who they are targeting with their sales and marketing efforts, this will give you a sense of who their ideal customer is.

 

What does a buyer persona include?

There’s multiple areas of information that you want to focus on to help define each buyer persona that you create. For each of these areas, you want to be as specific as possible, while still being accurate. For instance, you don’t want to say your ideal customer is a male aged 18-34, because that’s a pretty big age range. You want to shorten that age range as a much as possible, while still being as accurate as possible.

Demographics

This is the first area of information you want to focus on. You want to include basic information such as gender, age, martial status, income level and educational history. If your company is a B2C, then you want to also make sure that your buyer persona clearly defines that person’s role within the family. You want to know how your persona relates to the other members of the family, and whether or not this person has direct control over purchases or not.

For a B2B, you want to clearly define the person’s role within their company. You want to clearly define their responsibilities within their company, as well as where their position fits within the company hierarchy. As with a B2C persona, you want to clearly define if this persona has direct control over purchases, or if they must work with someone else within the company to secure that purchases are made. In both scenarios, you basically want to know who has the ability to authorize a purchase; is it the persona, or someone else.

The persona’s pain points and worries

Here, you identify and detail what ‘keeps them up at night’. You detail what problems the persona faces in their home and/or business life. This is done to help the content creator understand the problems that your products and services help solve. You can also detail what worries them, and also what excites them about being in their position, whether it be in a personal or professional setting. For instance, if your persona works for Company ABC, detail what they like about their job, and dislike. Talk about the issues the persona faces on a daily basis that the persona feels is holding them back. These are problems that the persona faces, but they also can give you a sense of what type of content you should be creating to address those problems, or at least communicate how your products or services can address those problems.

What type of content does the persona prefer, and from what sources?

Here, you want to gain insights into the type of content your persona is looking for, and why. Do they want video content that can demonstrate how your products and services work? Do they prefer posts or articles that can explain how they work? Also, where do they get their content from? Do they consult blogs, or do they prefer to more ‘mainstream’ sites? You basically want to know what sources does the persona trust for information, and in what form does that information exist?

Where is the persona on the buyer’s journey?

At this point, let’s quickly review the buyer’s journey:

Buyer's Journey, Creating Better Content

You want to establish where your persona is on the above buyer’s journey. This will give you insights not only into the type of content the persona needs based on their location on the buyer’s journey, but it will also show you how to craft the content in order to move the buyer to the next stage. This is also a good place to review if the persona has direct control over purchasing decisions, or if they must convince some other person or party to approve purchases.

 

Meet Sarah, your new persona! 

This is a very basic persona I created in roughly a half hour using the format outlined in this post. You can go far more in depth than this, I’ve worked with clients that had about four times as much information in their personas. I just wanted to give you an idea of what this would look like.

Note that just from this simple persona, you can get a much better idea of who your ideal customer Sarah is, and how to create content that’s useful to her. You can see she needs content that helps her with her time management issues. So any products or services you sell that can help her save time as either a business owner OR a mom, will resonate with Sarah. You can also see where she is on the Buyer’s Journey, plus you get a sense of her income. Smaller purchases that can benefit her in either role as a mom or business owner, Sarah can likely make by herself. A major purchase would likely require she and her spouse to consult first. Additionally, her age tells you that she is likely more comfortable with emerging digital technologies and how she prefers to consume and interact with content.

 

So that shows you how personas can truly take the effectiveness of your content strategy to the next level. What I love about personas is they help bring clarity to your content creation efforts. Anything that helps clarify who you are creating content for, and what type of content you should be creating for them, helps you create better content, in less time. I’m all about doing more in less time, and personas can definitely boost your productivity when it comes to creating content.

Need help creating buyer personas for your content strategy? Email me and I’ll be happy to assist you!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: US Adults’ Digital Usage Up, Facebook DAU Down, Clubhouse’s ‘Oprah’ Moment?

Happy Monday, y’all! I hope you’re ready for an amazing week as we say goodbye to January and launch into February! Here’s a few stories I noticed to get your week off in the right track:

 

eMarketer has found that US adults spent an extra hour with digital content in 2020. Now my first thought was, workers that typically commute to work stayed at home in 2020, so they gained back an hour of time right there. This is all about understanding and focusing on the changes in your customer and client lives as more of them are now working from home. This, and all indications point toward an increased appetite for digital content, and that creates opportunities for your company, if you know how to leverage them.

 

Ironically, as the above eMarketer study finds that US adults are spending more time with digital content, comes this story from Social Media Today that found that Facebook’s number of Daily Active Users in the US was actually DOWN in 2020. Count me in that group, over the last few years I’ve gone from checking Facebook a couple times a day, to now maybe checking a couple of times a week. Most of the time I now spend with Facebook is with Facebook Groups that are devoted to marketing and business. I think we will see core user usage metrics fall or stagnate for both Facebook and Twitter in 2021.

 

My timeline this morning was all abuzz with Elon Musk popping into Clubhouse. Probably 75% of the tweets in my home feed were about this. When celebs use a social media platform, it brings a lot of extra eyes to it, and Musk’s popularity is white hot right now, and that will definitely benefit Clubhouse.

 

That’s it for this week’s Monday’s Marketing Minute! Hope you have a wonderful week and don’t forget to check out #ContentCircus tomorrow night on Twitter at 7pm Central! This week we will be discussing How to Create Buyer Personas For Your Content Marketing Strategy! It will be a great discussion on a very valuable topic! Tomorrow post will be on the same topic, so see you back here in 24 hours!

 

Oh wait…let’s do one more! I thought this story from The Hustle about the illicit trade for the world’s most expensive fish was interesting, but click through and check out the photos of the fish.  Yeah, I know, $300,000 for a fish is completely bonkers, but look at those colors! The fish themselves are absolutely gorgeous!

 

Ok I’m done, see you tomorrow!

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The Shift Back to a Decentralized Social Web Has Begun

In 2018, I wrote this post about how I felt we were a year or two away from beginning to shift back to a decentralized social web experience. At the time, the primary reason I cited was a severe degradation of the overall user experience on centralized social sites like Twitter and Facebook.

When trying to understand the difference between a centralized and decentralized social web experience, look at it this way:

Centralized: Twitter and Facebook. A lot of people, talking about everything. Control rests with the platform, not the content creator.

Decentralized: Blogs. Far fewer people, talking about just a few topics. Control rests with the content creator since it is their blog.

 

So in 2018 when I wrote the above post, the ‘control’ issue hadn’t yet raised it’s ugly head like I knew it would eventually. As we are now all aware, Twitter and Facebook have gone to great lengths to remove content it feels is objectionable on its platforms over the last few months. Some people feel what Twitter and Facebook has done in removing content is completely just and acceptable, others feel it is outright censorship that must be addressed. My view has always been that once a platform starts making judgement calls on what content is or is not acceptable for its community, then we have started down a very slippery slope. And the angle of that slope is completely dependent on the objectivity of the humans that moderate the content on their platforms.

But more than anything else, it has long worried me that platforms like Twitter and Facebook are acting like publishers and exerting increasing amounts of control over the content that can be published on its platforms. This concerns me not only as a content creator, but also as a consultant who works with companies on building and executing digital strategies. My advice is simple:

I recently discovered that former Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger shares some of those concerns, and is working to address them, in his own way:

What Larry has done, in essence, is take back control of his tweets. He’s built a way on his blog to ‘tweet’ from his blog, then send the content to Twitter. So if Twitter decides to remove his content, that just removes it from Twitter, the content will still exist on his blog. Here’s an example of a ‘tweet’ he created on his blog, then sent to Twitter.

To be fair, this attempt is painfully crude. But it does work. What this could lead to eventually could be a scenario where content creators post short 140/280 character thoughts on their blogs, which are then sent to Twitter in the form of a tweet. Over time, a sort of ‘reader’ could be developed similar to the blog readers that pull in a blog’s RSS feed, so that we could subscribe to the ‘microblog’ feed from our favorite bloggers and viola…you could subscribe to the ‘tweets’ from your favorite content creators and bypass Twitter altogether!

The momentum toward a decentralized social web where the individual content creator has more control over their content is growing. And in an evil scientist sort of way, guess who is jumping in and trying to get in front of the decentralization parade?  Twitter.

 

Twitter can sense that a lot of its users are upset with its recent censoring of content, and are moving to other content creation tools. So the company tries to get in front of that rush, and secure the tools and functionality that it feels users will move to, such as newsletters.

The tug-of-war over a decentralized vs centralized social web is also one of control vs convenience. Right now, the pendulum is swinging back toward control for content creators, especially businesses that create content. When you are building your content team, focus on hiring managers that have a proven track record of developing engagement and community around content. This will make the process of detaching from social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook far easier for your business.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: All Eyes on Clubhouse, Kroger’s Smart Shopping Cart, B2C Marketing Priorities

Happy Monday! Hope you’re ready for an amazing week, off to a rainy start here, but at least it’s not bitterly cold! By the way, a quick thought, I know a lot of us are really worried about everything that’s happening in the world right now and even locally. A few weeks ago I was driving and listening to the news and just felt overwhelmed with all the ‘bad’ news and stories. Suddenly, I had this thought come into my head ‘You are responsible for your own happiness”. That thought has given me a lot of comfort and calm since, as well as a feeling of empowerment! I hope it does for you as well!

On with the news…

 

So I’ve always had this rule when it comes to ‘new’ social media tools; I usually wait a month or so to try them out. This is because marketers being marketers, we want to overhype every new social media tool, each tool or site immediately becomes the new Facebook killer or the new Twitter killer. So I generally wait a while for the hype to die down, then see if anything sustainable is left.

But I’m jumping in a little faster with Clubhouse simply because the tool offers a different experience than most. If you aren’t familiar with Clubhouse, in a nutsell, it’s an app (only for iOS currently) that has audio chat rooms. You pick a chat room and LISTEN to everyone, you don’t chat by typing. The app is super hot, even though it’s in closed beta and you can only join if given an invite, it still has over 2 million users. I think this speaks to how we are hungry for new offerings in the social media space. 10 years ago, it seemed like a hot new social media tool came out every 3-4 months that everyone gushed about. We haven’t seen that environment in a long time, but I think the pendulum may be swinging back. Clubhouse has some obvious monetization issues to work out both for itself, its investors and hosts, but the future looks bright. For now.

 

Ok I would love this if it came to Wal-Mart, which I only shop at when I have to. The biggest reason why I can’t stand Wal-Mart is going to checkout and seeing those massive lines. But a new ‘smart’ shopping cart that Kroger is testing could make the buying process in grocery stores so much easier! It lets you scan items as you place them in the cart, link up your loyalty cards and coupons, even pay with your credit card! That would help eliminate the biggest detriment most people have to grocery shopping, the checkout line. It’s all about finding and addressing the pain points that your customers have.

 

This always blows my mind. I saw this story from Marketing Charts on top priorities for B2C marketers in 2021.  The top three priorities are: 1 – New customer acquisition, 2 – increasing engagement, 3 – increasing customer loyalty. These are pretty standard, and new customer acquisition is almost always the top priority for all marketers. Yet the same marketers that plan to focus on customer acquisition, loyalty and engagement typically won’t invest in the customer advocacy programs that drive all three. These same marketers could deliver on all three by investing in advocacy programs such as Voice of the Customer, Brand Ambassador and Customer Loyalty programs. And the hell of it is, such advocacy programs are much easier to create, execute and measure in a B2C environment.

So those are some stories that caught my eye on this Monday! Hope you have a wonderful week, check back tomorrow, I’ll have a new post up on how the push to decentralize social media is underway, and look at two people that are making it possible. One you will expect, the other will definitely surprise you! See you tomorrow!

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#ContentCircus 1-19-21 Recap: How Do You Create Content When Your Business Is Closed Due to Covid

We had another fantabulous #ContentCircus on Twitter last night on the topic of How Do You Create Content When Your Business Is Closed Due to Covid. I wanted to share some of the takeaways. For further reading, check out yesterday’s prep post:

 

So the problem that a lot of content creators are having now that their business is closed or limited to the public, is that they aren’t sure how to adjust the content they create. My advice is to focus on content that goes ‘behind the scenes’ or ‘backstage’.  Content that gets into how your business is run, why it is run the way it is. We talked more about this last night:

 

 

Focusing on such content does two things: It appeals to our love of nostalgia, but it also helps educate customers on how long your business has been around. And even if your business isn’t that old, creating content from the owner’s point of view is still helpful, It helps the customer understand who the owner is and why the business is so important to them.

 

This type of ‘under the hood’ content is great for educating the customer on the product creation and packaging process, and for helping them appreciate its value. Obviously, you don’t want to give away any proprietary secrets or anything of the sort, but you can give customers a better sense of how your business is run. That helps establish your expertise as well as create trust with your customers.

 

When creating content that focuses on your employees, you just want to give your customers a better sense of who these people are.  You can talk about what they like about working for you, which products they enjoy making. Or even give them a chance to talk about themselves, their hobbies, how they are adjusting to covid, etc.

 

And finally, just as you created content that highlights your employees, you can create content that showcases your customers. Focus on your most loyal customers, give them a chance to share their story. And that’s another point worth mentioning:  If you’ll notice all four of these areas of content are really dealing with storytelling. Telling the story of the history of your business. Or the story of how your products are made, or the stories of the people who make them, the people that buy them. So don’t think of this as new types of content that you will ditch once your business fully reopens, storytelling is a wonderful art to learn and it leads to amazing content!

 

So that was our #ContentCircus for last night. You can check out the entire conversation here.  Hope you can join us next Tuesday at 7pm on Twitter for the next #ContentCircus!

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How Do You Create Content When Your Business is Closed Due to Covid

Many retail businesses across the country and world have had to abruptly adjust its sales strategies over the last year due to concerns over covid. Local and state restrictions in most areas have impacted capacity and in many areas businesses aren’t allowed to have customers in store other than to pick up an order.

This has also impacted businesses’ content creation efforts. What happens when your content strategy was to highlight the in-store experience, and suddenly your store isn’t open to the public?

The answer is you adjust. In this post I’ll give you some ideas you can use to boost your content creation efforts even if your business isn’t open to customers. Additionally, this will be the topic of tonight’s #ContentCircus on Twitter, starting at 7pm Central. So this post will give you plenty of tactics to get you started, then you can join #ContentCircus tonight and get even more ideas.

Bring the Backstage to the Front of the Stage

Whenever I work with clients on developing advocacy programs, such as a Voice of the Customer, Loyalty or Brand Ambassador Program, one of the discussions we have is what type of content they should create to support these initiatives. I always explain to the client that your ‘fans’ want content that goes ‘behind the scenes’ or that gives them ‘special access’. This content is a great way for the brand to develop deeper ties to the customer, and customers who are your fans, want this type of connection and content.

For the purposes of this post, let’s assume our business is a bakery called Sally’s Sweet Tooth. Sally’s content has been mostly focused on pictures of her cakes, pies and pastries, maybe a mention of new creations or sales. She posts the pictures on Instagram and Facebook, and has some pictures up of all her offerings on her website, but she isn’t updating the content there as often as she should be. Sally likes to also highlight her store in her photos, as well as the happy customers. But she’s at a loss now as to how to keep creating content at the same pace since her bakery is closed to the public and can only accept pickup orders. Without customers in the store, Sally can’t figure out how to create content at the same clip as she has been and her engagement on social is starting to fall.

The key for Sally is to take her content backstage. Before, Sally’s content focused completely on the store itself and the products being sold in the store. But there’s so many more sources of content that Sally could showcase:

  • The history of Sally’s Sweet Tooth
  • The baking process
  • The bakers who work for Sally
  • Sally’s customers

 

The History of Sally’s Sweet Tooth. Sally can create content create content that shows how and why she got into baking, why she wanted to make a career out of it. If her bakery has been in business for a long time, she can show pictures of the bakery in current and previous locations, if applicable. This is very effective if the business has a long history, because it helps speak to the success of the business. Plus, we all love nostalgia, we all love ‘origin stories’. Any content Sally can create about herself and her business and its history simply helps to humanize the business and it makes it easier for customers to connect with her.

The Baking Process. Here, Sally can go inside her kitchen and show how she and her bakers make the delicious sweets and pastries that her customers love. This would also be a wonderful opportunity for Sally to create content that educates her customers on the precautions she and her bakers take to ensure a clean and safe environment. Sally can help put her customers’ worries over covid at ease by demonstrating the precautions Sally’s Sweet Tooth is taking to ensure that her customer’s health and well-being is protected. Plus, customers love this type of content, it helps establish the baker’s expertise and makes the customer more comfortable buying the product being created.

The Bakers Who Work For Sally. Sally should regularly create content that gives customers an idea of who her bakers are as people. Let the bakers talk about why they love baking, what makes them want to create food for other people. Have them talk about their favorite cake or pastry to make, and what it means to them. Also, don’t be afraid to let your employees talk about how they are dealing with covid and the change its made in their lives. For many employees, this can actually be helpful for them to share their stories, and for your customers, it gives them a better understanding of the people behind the name badge. When we better understand the people we do business with, it makes us more likely to want to continue to buy from them.

Sally’s Customers. Finally, Sally would be smart to create content that focuses on her customers. She can talk about long-time customers who have stuck by her for years.  She can talk about creating a special cake for Megan’s wedding and what it meant to create it. And don’t be afraid to create content that promotes your customers. We are all facing hardships right now, feel free to create content that champions your customers and promotes them as the rock stars that they are.  They will appreciate it, and you will feel good about putting the spotlight on the people that keep you in business.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: NBC Universal’s Marketing Bet on The Office, How Morning Brew Got a Million Readers

Happy Monday, y’all! Hope everyone had an amazing weekend. Last week was my birthday, so I decided to take Monday off, then on Tuesday I got a bit sick and decided to rest for a couple days and before I knew it, it was Friday and I’d lost the whole week here!  So sorry, I will try to make it up to you this week, starting today!

 

So NBC Universal is doing something interesting with its new streaming service and its hit series The Office. I found this story in The Hustle newsletter and unfortunately they didn’t tweet a link to it. NBC Universal is actually building out the service around one show; The Office.  They have a freemium plan that gives you access to the first two seasons of The Office. If you want more, you pay for it, and get all the seasons as well as additional ‘superfan’ content. It will be interesting to see if more streaming services move toward packages built around individual programs. I could see certain very popular shows having enough of a fanbase to add in bonus content, maybe access to Zoom calls with actors from the show, etc, and that being a standalone product. If this was done around shows that are in the catalog, this could really work well.  A package for Cheers fans, or Friends fans that includes Zoom ‘reunion’ calls with the actors, or something similar.  For your business, think about your more profitable product or service, and how that could potentially be a draw to attract new customers.

 

This tweet is a few months old, but I’m just now seeing it and it had such good lessons that I wanted to share. The Morning Brew is a wildly popular business newsletter that last August reached a milestone of having one million people open a single newsletter.  If I have 500 people open mine, I’m thrilled! There were many key takeaways from the article, but the two I noted were that they didn’t focus on number of subscribers, they focused on levels of engagement. Their goal was to get each subscriber to open that first email, with the thinking being that when they do, that greatly increases the chances of them being an engaged reader.  One thing they do that I think is genius (but really won’t work unless you have a huge list) is they send out 4 different subject lines for each newsletter to a small subsection of the list.  Then, they see which subject line led to the most opens, and pick that one to send out to the remainder of the list. Another smart thing is they promote the newsletter via other newsletters! The thinking was that people that like newsletters, will read multiple ones, so advertise where their attention already is, on reading another newsletter!  Check out the article for some great insights on building your own newsletter audience.  This is definitely a priority for me in 2021!

 

Finally, let’s wrap up with a share from the fantabulous Kelly Hungerford. You can never go wrong with Kelly! She points to a CoSchedule study that found that 32% of customers would leave a brand they claim to love after just one bad customer experience. Showing empathy for your customers via your content and interactions can go a long way toward keeping unhappy customers!

 

Thank you so much for reading, I will be back tomorrow with another post, and remember that tomorrow night on Twitter we will have #ContentCircus, starting at 7pm Central! Be safe and be careful this week!

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Why Twitch is a Game-Changer For Letting Millennials Influence At Scale

Have you ever seen something, or heard an idea, and you knew it was significant, but you also knew that you didn’t fully appreciate why it was so important? I’ve spent a LOT of time with Twitch streams the last couple of years. The content creators are highly entertaining, and the best ones are great marketers, so I enjoyed watching the streams from that angle as well.

First, let’s back up a minute. What is Twitch? In short, Twitch is a site where people go to watch other people play video games. I know, on it’s surface, it sounds ridiculous. Why would anyone watch someone else play a video game, when they could play one themselves? But if you have children who play video games, it’s a safe bet they have spent time on either Twitch or YouTube watching people play those same video games. Often, people start out watching Twitch streams because they want to learn how to get better at playing a particular game. Twitch has functionality to let content creators stream themselves playing video games. But additionally, Twitch has chat functionality, which lets streamers talk to members of their chat inbetween games, and sometimes even during games. In fact, Twitch streamers can talk about (almost) any topic with their chat. You can go to Twitch and subscribe to a content creator’s stream, and this gives you access to join the streamer’s chat room and talk to other subscribers, as well as the content creator.

So I began to spend more time watching streams on Twitch over the last couple of years. I could tell all along that there was something bigger happening that I really didn’t fully grasp. So I kept watching, until one day, something clicked. I noticed that that the streamers kept referring to their chat as ‘chat’. As if the entire chat (and we are talking millions of followers in most cases) were a real person, and more importantly, ONE person. It’s common to hear streamers playing and then say things like:

“Chat, you’re doing that thing again!”

“My chat is saying the same thing.”

“Chat, I’m not playing that game, just stop!”

Now this may seem insignificant, but what these Twitch streamers have done, intentionally or not, is they have found a way to connect ‘individually’ with millions of people, at the same time.

They’ve found a way to scale their ‘personal’ attention from one person, up to millions at a time.

The biggest problem in dealing with traditional influencers is that their personal attention can only scale so far. If you’re wanting to work with an influencer on Twitter or Instagram, they can’t individually connect with more than a few dozen people. After that, it becomes problematic. This is why brands have begun to work more with microinfluencers or T-Shaped Influencers in recent years, because even though these influencers have much smaller followings, their networks are typically more niche and they have a much better ability to connect with their followers on an individual level. Which is one of the key drivers of true influence.

 

Twitch is different

A problem with traditional social media is that influencers lose the ability to connect with and influence individuals as their network grows. Twitch is different because it effectively lets the influencer livestream around a topic that the network is already interested in; video games. Chat functionality lets the streamers/content creators stay engaged with individuals and the content creators can even play games with the members of their network. All of this helps streamers better connect with more people. If you think about it, this is similar to a radio talk show. The host can take calls from the audience, so that gives them another layer of engagement. But with Twitch, they can talk in chat with the streamer, or the streamer can play a game with them, and they can talk directly with the streamer while playing the game with them.

These multiple layers of engagement make it easier for a streamer to build and hold influence with its audience. Think about someone on Twitter with say 250k followers. They can tweet, post Fleets, and livestream. But most will only tweet. They can interact directly with with individual followers, or with multiple followers via a hashtag. But the Twitter platform doesn’t lend itself to engagement at scale like the Twitch platform does.

 

What’s the key lesson here? 

What is influence? My definition is that influence is the ability of a person or entity (such as a brand) to create a desired change in behavior in a person (likely a customer) or other entity. We need to trust someone to be influenced by them, and a key way to achieve trust is interaction. This is where the traditional influencer model of one to many breaks down at scale. But, the functionality built into Twitch (chat room, being able to play games with subscribers) helps the content creator/streamer overcome the influence at scale issue, to a degree. So if you’re vetting influencers to use in your marketing campaign, one of the key factors to look at is the platforms they use, and each platforms ability to help the influencer achieve one-to-one interactions with its network.

Another way to look at this is if you are a brand that creates content, how can you best one-to-one interactions with as many people as possible? Maybe you do a sponsorship working with influencers on a platform like Twitch, or maybe you try using these platforms yourself.

Just focus on creating as many positive interactions with each member of your desired audience. That helps facilitate trust, which helps create influence.

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#ContentCircus 1-5-21 Recap: How to Audit Your Content

We had another fabulous #ContentCircus last night on the topic of How to Audit Your Content. The last two weeks have really taken off, I appreciate everyone’s participation and sharing their smartitude. Here’s a link to the transcript from Hashtracking. I wanted to highlight some of the great points made during the chat:

 

Readability is a big area to address when doing a content audit. Anything you can do to better organize your information and make it easier for the reader to understand key concepts, is a good thing. Honestly, a lot of this comes down to simple stuff that we can all do, and #ContentCircus participants had some great suggestions:

 

After I’ve addressed readability, I will then move on to editing the actual information in the post. Is any of it outdated and needs to be removed? Is there a new case study or research study I have found that I can add? Also keep in mind as I add or remove material, I am still addressing readability, that carries over throughout the entire process.

 

Next we moved onto discussing using the proper search keywords and phrases during your content audit. Luckily, #ContentCircus community had many helpful suggestions for keyword research tools!

 

Next, we covered adding visual elements to your audited content. Note that as we address things like font size for text, headings and subheadings, now adding visual elements, we are (hopefully) making it easier for the reader to process information. That’s what we want. The easier it is for our ideas to flow to the reader, the more likely they are to understand those ideas, and their impact.

 

Finally, we talked a bit about Calls to Action. Whenever you audit your content, you should add a Call to Action that encourages the reader to take some next step based on who they are, their intent, and what action you want them to take.

 

So that was our first #ContentCircus chat of 2021! We had a wonderful discussion on auditing content, and I hope you can join the next #ContentCircus, which is every Tuesday at 7pm Central, on Twitter! Just follow the #ContentCircus hashtag!