VERSION 2.0, September 2014

Creating Contenton Blurbi

Written by Tyler HandleyCEO, Blurbi Inc.

Table of Contents

I. What is Blurbing/Blurbi?

II. Using the Blurbi Platform

III. Content Curation

IV. Producing Successful Blurbs

V. Finding the Perfect Hashtags

VI. Monitoring for Stolen Content

VII. What not to do

VIII. More Tools

I. What is Blurbing?

Everyone’s heard the word “blurb” before. It’s one of those rare terms that’s used regularly but whose definition tends to escape common understanding.

So what is a blurb?

You’re probably most familiar with Blurbs as the promotional statements on movie posters and album releases.

A blurb taken to its only logical conclusion:

Humour is truth. Blurbs are easy to poke-fun at because they inherently leave a bad taste in your mouth.

They’re “In your face” They treat you - the audience - as ignorant consumers. No one actually pays attention to these Blurbs. I know they suck, you know they suck, we all know they suck. Blurbs suck.

I digress. Let’s break down the characteristics of a traditionally sucky blurb. They’re:

Short Catchy Selling focused Assertive, bordering on pushy Attributed to a well known source

A Blurb for the social era

Marketing used to be a one way medium, akin to yelling at an audience through a megaphone. Customers were lumped into target categories and then shown ads based on those categories. With the rise of the social web marketing shifted to a focus on targeting customers socially. What we now call “outbound mar-keting” still exists in large numbers, but new socially-focused “inbound market-ing” techniques have taken a large chunk of the proverbial pie.

Inbound marketing consists of creating and sharing highly relevant content to help attract fans, nurture them, and then turn them into both customers and promoters. Social Media and Blogs have shifted marketing towards a conversa-tion, not a pronouncement. It’s a two way street where potential customers are not treated as numbers, but as friends. Friends share content with each other - content which they’re both interested in - content of value other than the value of the company’s product or service.

You can see how a Blurb like “best action movie of the summer” wouldn’t bode well on a movie’s Twitter feed. The new Blurb for the social era takes into ac-count that fans won’t share a pushy pronouncement of no external value, and sharing is KEY.

Posting shareable Blurbs to a social media page increases the chance that fans will re-share, comment on, or favourite that content. This is a big deal because the more actions that are taken on a blurb, the more likely it is that the Blurb will be seen by more people. Marketers use terms like Reach, Exposure, In-fluence, and Virality to describe this phenomenon. On Blurbi we define and measure this phenomenon with FameRate - a measurement of reach and en-gagement using 26 different parameters.

Another aspect of the re-defined blurb is regularity. Sharing content constantly exposes a brand image to its fans. A traditional Blurb was a one off attributed to a well known source. New blurbs adhere to a consistency that creates social validation in its own right. How many companies create a Twitter profile just for legitimacy?

Lastly, blurbs are now about honesty and positivity. There’s nowhere to hide on Social Media. What’s said is said, no take-backs. Positivity in most cases lends itself to transparency, which is informed by honesty. There’s a reason there’s no “dislike” button on Facebook. There’s very few instances where neg-ativity breeds positive exposure.

The Blurb re-defined

“A short and shareable piece of social media content that provides value to fans”

Usually short (140 characters or less)

Always engaging and shareable

Friendship focused

As passively promotional as possible

Consistent with brand voice Often focused on the value added aside from the value of the prod uct/service itself

Positive

What is Blurbi?

If you’re reading this manual you should probably know this already. Never-theless, this is how we proposition Blurbi in our pitches and presentations:

The Problem

We are tackling two problems:

1. Social marketing is impossible without great content, but many brands are dissatisfied with the performance of their social media content when it doesn’t drive the type of engagement that can be seen in their bottom line.

2. Some brands simply can’t produce enough social media content to drive en-gagement, so they outsource their content to marketing agencies.

The Solution

1. Blurbi is a web platform for sourcing social media content from a roster of top marketing pros. Blurbi focuses on offering the highest quality short form content “blurbs” for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest, with a focus on visual representation.

Blurbi uses trade-secret analytics, called FameRate, to measure the success of each blurb. This helps both the brands and marketers refine their blurbs for higher engagement rates. Content continues to get better over time.

Blurbi currently integrates with popular Social Media Marketing Platforms like Hootsuite and Buffer. Soon it will also offer integrations with Hubspot, Buddy Media, Lithium, Sendible and Kapost.

2. Blurbi offers an Agency account for marketing agencies to acquire social me-dia content for multiple clients.

Value Proposition/s

Blurbi’s data-backed content drives more engagement for brands looking to up their social media game. It takes away both the time commitment of producing social media content and the confusion associated with lackluster social media engagement.

In this section I’m going to run you through a step-by-step example of how cre-ating content for clients on Blurbi works.

Step 1

Fill out a profile for yourself. This includes adding the industries you have ex-perience creating content for and linking your personal social profiles. We use this to match you with relevant clients.

Step 2

Read matched client’s profile and browse their social channels. Get a feel for their voice and the type of content they share.

II. Using the Blurbi Platform

Step 3

Have a look at the client’s editorial calendar and the messages they’ve sent to you. They’ll let you know exactly what they’re looking for at exactly what times.

Step 4

Pitch blurbs for them to use on their social channels, based on their profile, edi-torial calendar, and messages. Use their voice and add relevant hashtags. You might share a link to something their fans would be interested in, or you might suggest a custom image to be designed for the blurb. Suggest this custom image in (brackets) at the end of the blurb.

Step 5

The client might just accept your blurb outright, but usually they’ll give you feedback. You can find feedback in the “feedback” section.

Creating a blurb

What the client sees

You see their feedback in red

Step 6

Use feedback to refine the blurb. This feedback might be the go ahead to create a custom image. Click the little pencil button on a feedback blurb to re-fine the text and add an image if required.

What a completed blurb may look like to the client

What the client sees

You see their feedback in red

Payment

We track the amount of blurbs that clients accept from you and use for their social profiles. At the end of each month we compile the amount and pay you$15 for every one.

Linking

Make sure you post the full un-shortened link, or the link will break. We shorten it for you once it’s posted. The Twitter counter at the bottom of your “blurbi-field” takes this into account.

FameRateTM

The foundation on which Blurbi stands is supported by two pillars: Great con-tent and showing why that content is great. The FameRate score is what allows both you and the client to track the success of content. It’s a very high-level score indicating the social success of a blurb. We track 26 different parameters, primarily the accumulation of engagements taken on a blurb (likes, comments, shares) and the reach/influence of the users conducting those engagements. The higher the better. Go to the “social” section of a brand’s profile to find the blurbs you’ve written for them and their FameRates.

III. Curating ContentSometimes you’ll need to find some amazing content to pitch to a client, so you’re going to need a bunch of places to find the best content around. In this section I’ll share with you some great resources and methods for content dis-covery, broken down into 5 categories.

RSS Feeds

With these you’ll want to organize “themed” lists of content feeds. This helps you conform to a consistent brand image, because you’re attaching that image to the image of your regular content sources. If these are the right sources (i.e. the ones your client’s audience wants) then your content will show coherence.

Feedly*Digg ReaderBundlePostThe Old Reader

Keyword Curation

These are good when you’re struggling with finding content from other sources. Just type in a relevant keyword and these tools will surface relevant content. Most of these surface content that is already being actively shared, but most also cost money. Pagemodo’s content section is free, so naturally we recom-mend it.

PagemodoContentDJBuzzSumoCurataScoop.itHootsuite BufferKloutTrendr

Twitter Lists

These are a great for curating content being shared by Top Influencers in com-munities. The benefit of curating from Influencers is that this content will likely be on the bleeding edge of an industry, thus lending your content a progressive and trendy vibe. Have a google for “Twitter lists” and you’ll be directed to some of the best industry lists around, to which you can subscribe (found on the left hand side of a list page). If you’re familiar with a particular industry it’s ideal that you start creating your own Twitter lists as well. To manage lists we sug-gest you use a free account on a platform like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite.

Here’s a great list of lists you can subscribe to.

Other Sources

List.lyPostPlannerGoodreads QuotesStorify

More to come...

*On the Blurbi writer’s Facebook group you’ll find a regularly updated .OPML RSS feed list, broken into “interest categories.” Load the list into any free RSS reader and you’ll have plenty of content. For Feedly (which we recommend) follow this link to upload the file: http://feedly.com/index.html#opml

IV. Producing Successful Blurbs

Images

Images always win. Posts with images receive a 39% higher engagement rate than those without. Though you don’t always have to suggest an image with a blurb, you’ll increase your chances of a client accepting your post if they know a great accompanying image is coming. If you’re attaching a link, always make sure there’s a relevant image attached. We automatically pull the thumbnail images from the website you’re linking to. You can see this when you paste the link into the blurb creation box. You can then scroll through and choose the most suitable image. Make sure to choose the widest image possible, as they appear much nicer on Facebook feeds.

Facebook scales uploaded images to various sizes depending on the original size of the image. If you upload a landscape scaled photo then Facebook will scale your image to a width of 504px, the same thing happens when you upload a portrait scaled image, except Facebook scales it to 504px vertically, then adds grey to the sides to fill it out to a width of 504px. If you want to make the best use of space design images that are 504px by 504px. However, I personally like when images are more around 504px wide to 300px high as they’re easier to view in a feed.

You can find images from several sources, depending on the client. Some cli-ents will upload their own images in messages for you to use. These will also appear in their profile under “design.”

If you’d like to add your own image, make sure it’s free to use. Here are some good places to look:

One Dollar Photo Club - Huge selection of images that only cost $1 to use.

Flikr - They have a great creative commons section, with free to use images.

These all have a limited selection, but they’re high-quality and free to use:

Unsplash Death To The Stock Photo PicJumbo Gratisography IM Free

Our suggestion is to use Canva. It’s a great place to not only buy images in perfect Facebook size for $1, but also to overlay text on to any image.

IV. Tips for Producing Successful

Other Tips

If a client’s competitors are talking about something, you should be too. Unless it’s about them, of course.

The entire message of a blurb should be understandable within 3-5 seconds. If you’re commenting on a piece of content, the gist of the comment should come in the first half of the sentence.

Put yourself in the shoes of the client’s fans when blurbing. Would you truly be interested in seeing this blurb on their Facebook or Twitter feed?

Keep blurbs short. Across every social network, shorter posts see more en-gagement. Keeping a blurb under 140 characters is also ideal so that the client can post it to Twitter. Make sure to make a mental note of which clients use which social networks. You can view this in their profile, under their profile picture. If a client doesn’t use Twitter, your blurbs can regularly exceed 140 characters.

Including 1-3 relevant hashtags will increase exposure and result in higher FR scores per blurb. Try not to use anymore than 3-4 or it will come across as try-hard.

If something current is of interest to a client’s fans, blurb about it.

Apply your client’s preferred tone of voice to a blurb

Place a period at the beginning of your blurb if you’re starting it with an @ reply. This makes sure that the tweet also appears on the clients page, not just as a mention on the pages of the person who was mentioned.

Make “You” your most used word. The client’s fan is the subject, not the cli-ent’s brand.

Write naturally like you would talk.

Periodically asking fans to like/comment/share blurbs will increase FR scores. This gets annoying if it’s done too often.

V. Finding the Perfect HashtagsLike mentioned in the previous section, using hashtags will increase the chanc-es of your blurb being shared on Twitter, and will consequently increase your SI. In the future we’d like to build a hashtag recommendation engine into your side of the Blurbi platform, but in the meantime you’ll have to settle for finding hashtags elsewhere.

We recommend you use Hashtagify.me

It’s straightforward and effective. Just type in a hashtag you’re familiar with in the top right search bar and you’ll receive a relational graph of hashtags used alongside the one searched for. On the right-hand side you’ll also get a list of the top 10 tweets with that hashtag, from within the past few minutes.

There are two important stats to take away from the relational graph. A) the shorter the distance between the centre hashtag (searched for) and the sur-rounding hashtags correlates to how similar they are and B) the size of the circle surrounding the hashtag correlates to how popular that hashtag is - the bigger it is the more used that hashtag is.

Contrary to intuition, you’ll want to choose the hashtags in circles that are of medium size. The hashtags in the largest circles will often go unnoticed as they’ll quickly disappear amongst all of the other tweets using that hashtag. The hashtags in the smallest circles may not be used enough to be recognized (this depends on the hashtag as well, as the smallest circles in some sets may still be extremely popular). The medium circles are likely to garner the opti-mum visibility - enough people are using that hashtag so that’ is popular, but not enough people that yours will disappear immediately.

Two other options you can play around with are Topicurious and Ritetag.

VI. Monitoring for Stolen BlurbsMany people ask us, “if you’re presenting the content before it’s paid-for what’s stopping the client from just stealing it?” To combat this we have a Hootsuite feed of all of the clients on the site that we use monitor for stolen blurbs.

You should ideally be following all of the clients you write for on a platform like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck. It’s easy to create a Twitter List of your clients to check they haven’t stolen any of your content. If you feel that they’ve stolen or too closely copied content they didn’t pay for contact us. We’ll look into it. If we feel they’ve copied it we’ll give them a warning. 3 warnings and they’re off the site. Adios!

VII. What Not to DoEven though your client’s have full preview of blurbs before they share them publicly, controversial and just plain bad blurbs reflect negatively on both you and the platform. We give clients on the site the option of flagging you if they think a blurb of yours is bad or controversial.

To keep yourself safe, here’s a list of things you should never do.

Never:

Share items of no interest to your client’s community

Trash talk a client’s competitors or fans (though this can be done in good spirit. Just make it’s funny and not vagrant.)

Make spelling or grammar errors (there’s room for a small amount of “internet speak” but don’t overdo it)

Act racist, ignorant, misogynistic or mean spirited.

Add copyrighted images with the “add image” button.

Share content produced by your client’s competitor.

Post a link that contains nudity

Swear

Submit one blurb to several clients that mentions something completely unique to one of the clients

VIII. More ToolsRiffle - View a brand’s/individual’s Twitter profile to see what hashtags and URLS they use. Also good for seeing who they mention.

BlueNod - Discover influencers with a unique network graph.

Trends24 - The lastest top trending Twitter topics.

FreePik - Free graphics. Some great stuff but you have to hunt.

Facebook GraphSearch - Get creative and search for interesting connections between brand pages and people.