If the hashtag possessed the ability to feel, it would surely have an identity crisis. It’s been mistaken for a number sign and a pound sign. It also bears an uncanny resemblance to the sharp sign in music, as well as a Chinese character that describes an ancient system of distributing land.

Yes, life for this humble metadata tag would be mighty confusing. As it happens, hashtags can be confusing for content marketers, too. We know we need to use them, but what’s the best approach? Facebook’s recent decision to support hashtags (users were already able to include them in status updates, but they weren’t clickable) has upped their cache in social media content. As an integral part of social and content marketing platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Google+, hashtags represent an important means of digital marketing and communication.Continue Reading

The secret is out: Content marketing is instrumental to modern branding success. Branded content has transformed the way we market our products, affecting not only the look and feel of advertising, but also shifting the consumer’s perception of what brands have to offer beyond their tangible wares. To a degree, branded content has become synonymous with delivering value. We use it to dispense useful, interesting, entertaining digital information to a content-hungry audience of consumers.

But there’s a problem. Content marketing is becoming too popular. It’s so prevalent now that its efforts are cluttering up the web. Consumers are being bombarded in much the same way as they were 10 years ago, when banner advertising had started to take off. One of the advantages of investing in content is our ability to differentiate ourselves from our competitors; but increasingly, our competitors are doing exactly what we are. How, then, are we to continue to attract a crowd? What can we do to maintain our audience’s attention and mitigate the risk of “content blindness?” Continue Reading