Brighton SEO has been and gone once again. A 4:30am start meant that we witnessed the rarest of all sights - Oxford with no traffic. Once we arrived in Brighton, we grabbed a coffee at my favourite coffee shop, Small Batch Coffee before heading straight into the dome with no queuing, a great improvement on the entry system compared to previous years!
If you’ve never been to Brighton SEO the layout is simple. There are 4 main sessions throughout the day split into four tracks; technical SEO, future of search, insight and measurement, and content and links. Tilly and I stuck to the Content track through the day covering social media, PR, content creation and link building. Here is a roundup of a few of my favourite sessions.
Lessons Learned on the way to Half of a Million Twitter Followers - Cathal Berragan @CathalUK
One of the most inspiring sessions I’ve seen at any conference, Cathal Berragan gave this session on his 20th birthday. It's not the way most people would celebrate their 20th but Cathal is not like most people. When he was just 17 he started his first Twitter account @examproblems) and gained 50,000 followers in less than three weeks. Shortly after gaining this following, someone offered to buy the account, but instead of selling it, he worked with the company to grow and monetise it. Soon he was getting offers to work with Spotify and Koppaberg. Cathal gave up university to take a position as Content Director for Social Chain, who now have a reach of over 209 millon with their network of over 5000 influencers, and control some of the UK’s most influential Twitter accounts including the amazing @MedievalReacts.
Social Chain now work with some of the world’s biggest brands to promote their products including films, apps, music and sales. By sharing the brand across all of their social channels, they can get a product trending in a matter of minutes.
So what can we learn from Cathal? By creating content that people will find entertaining you can quickly grow an audience that will continue to grow itself through social shares. I also learnt that if you’ve found something you enjoy and are good at, hold on to it and do everything to can to make it work.
What we can all learn from the content strategies of premium brands - Lucy Freeborn @LucyAF
One of the most entertaining talks of the day came from Lucy Freeborn of Leapfrogg. It started with a Mexican wave (sadly she accidently deleted the video), followed by some swearing and lots of great tips and insights on what we can learn from premium brands.
Most of the insights came from Leapfroggs reports which you should read here. The reports look at how brands are creating engagement through their various channels and give them a score out of five. Lucy talked in depth about the reports and what we can learn from the best performers.
Looking at how premium retailers create their content across multiple channels gave me some great ideas that hopefully I can use with our clients. These include looking at how content is structured and separated (the simpler the better), having a consistent style across all channels, but tailoring it for the specific audience and bringing products to life with reviews, great imagery and video.
Your Content is Awesome, Now What? Stacey MacNaught @staceycav
Having heard Stacey talk at a previous Brighton SEO, I was really keen to listen again and she didn’t disappoint. Stacey started by listing things that should never happen. After mums on Facebook and selfies, the next thing is content campaigns with no promotional plan or budget. You should never put your content out and expect it to get noticed. It probably won’t.
Stacey’s first tip was to make sure that you have a target audience and to keep this audience in mind while creating content and working on the designs.
Stacey’s next point that really resonates with me was “if outreach is the only thing you do to promote your content, then you are not doing enough.” I think this is something we all are guilty of at one point or another, but need to stop doing. So how can we promote better? Define what success looks like. By doing this, you can work out what and who you’re creating your content for, because your target audience may not be the same as your target customer. Work out where your audience are by looking at tools like the YouGov profiler and Facebook Audience Insights. Stacey’s great example was “don’t target your nan on Twitter, if she thinks tweeting is a thing birds do”.
Another key point Stacey talks about is the headline. On social channels, many people won’t read your whole post, they might share it after reading the headline and description, so make sure you’ve got a great headline that fits with your messaging.
Another way of promoting your post is through Adwords. This is something not many people think about when promoting content, so the keywords that you’re targeting could be cheap as they are the words that most people will be using as negative keywords such as statistics, information or how to. Our own Ben Morel has written a great post on how to set up your Adword campaigns.
So that’s my round up of another great BrightonSEO. If you want to know more about any of the sessions, the slide decks from all of the sessions can be found on Slideshare, or are being passed round on Twitter under the #BrightonSEO hashtag.
