Forbes recently released a top 40 list of the most influential people in social media. Some of those people are brand leaders and some of those social media influencers are brands to themselves. While the personalities on the list differ, one thing which all on the list have in common is the understanding that social media and search, more than ever, are about fresh knowledgeable content over self promotion.
You could take it from Matt Cutts or you could take it from the brilliant CEO of Moz, Rand Fishkin. Whoever you take it from, these days fresh informative content is king. As search has progressed over the past fifteen years, Google has morphed from a paid search platform putting the emphasis on purchased backlinks, public relations campaigns and digital marketing campaigns to an organic search favoring platform putting the emphasis on informative well written content placed on theme relevant websites designed to answer the search queries of searchers.
Google has morphed from what is now considered black hat SEO to knowledge sharing and website architecture.
On the social side of the board, content means more than ever. While it is true a good portion of Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Youtube are vehicles for self promotion and/or banal comments on the everyday meanderings of life, it is also true that those very same platforms are being utilized and rewarded more and more for providing users with interesting, funny, though provoking content designed for virality and spreading information rapidly.
Overall though, the idea of what constitutes viral, informative and shareable content is morphing from web 2.0 to web 3.0.
Content Marketing on Social
Due to the limited capabilities of hardware and software, the early days of the Internet were dominated by rudimentary websites carrying minimal design aesthetic, small amounts of visual content and large portions of badly formatted text content linking to somewhat theme relevant websites. As hardware and software has evolved, the ability of the Internet, programmers and designers to provide heavier content displayed on prettier more organized websites.
By the time major social media players like Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr came about; Internet technology had progressed to a point wherein embedded heavy data information into a fleeting 140 character stream of thought was second nature. Due to the infrastructure capabilities of both ISP’s and data center providers, embedding a heavy data flow player video into a Twitter feed or sliding frame of a responsive design website required nothing more than a few clicks of a button based on Cloud infrastructure.
This change spurred along the content revolution we are all now living through. With Internet infrastructures as strong, flexible and powerful as ever, the majority of content which was once considered viral content – text based with minimal visual data – has given way to content which favors heavy media data – videos, gifs, photos, Vines – with minimal text based content. This is the sole reason why Buzzfeed and Mashable are as popular as they are. With their never ending visual parade of delights, both websites (along with a ton of others) have figured out that data heavy visual content is more digestible and viral than text based news stories or blogs.
Coming full circle, the need for fresh content on social is now driving the majority of clicks produced to internal and external websites. Without fresh visual content, social feeds like Twitter and Tumblr simply do not work.