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New Years

Blogs Motivate and Support New Year’s Resolutions

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Have you set any New Year’s resolutions for 2016?

Approximately 45 percent* of Americans make New Year’s resolutions, but only about eight percent are successful in reaching their goals. Among resolutions for 2016, the top categories included:

  1. Self improvement or education-related resolutions (47 percent)
  2. Weight-related resolutions (38 percent)
  3. Money-related resolutions (34 percent)
  4. Relationship-related resolutions (31 percent)

The Motherhood analyzed anonymous Facebook conversations on the topic of New Year’s resolutions leading up to the start of 2016. Here are some interesting points we uncovered:

  • Top general topics mentioned included: family, friends, health and religion.
  • The most-shared links included links to fitness/health sites, travel sites and blogs.
  • People ages 24-35 are most actively talking about their resolutions on Facebook.

Most of us know that New Year’s resolutions can be hard to maintain. As this FastCompany article states, it’s because resolutions often require changes in habits, which are difficult to make (or break)!

Finding Support Online

From our perspective, blogs, social networks and other online communities have a huge opportunity not only to serve as a source of information and motivation, but also to help with accountability and support for those wishing to make a change in their habits. In fact, of the most-engaging links about New Year’s resolutions on Facebook, four of 10 were links to blog posts. Further, the most-shared blog post link included a free printable to help people define goals for 2016!

Last year during this resolution-making time, Kentico Software released survey results that showed one-third of those who made New Year’s goals planned on searching online for products or services to help support them in their endeavors, and 38 percent planned to turn to sites or apps that can help them track their progress throughout the year. (Apps such as Charity Miles and StickK help hold users accountable by tracking progress while adding a charitable aspect.) Furthermore, the report stated that 26 percent planned on using blogs and other sites to help them achieve their resolutions.

We recently saw the supportive nature of the online blogger community in action during a campaign we hosted on behalf of a weight loss client. During the first half of this blog tour (second half results are not yet available), 91 percent of blog post comments and 83 percent of Facebook comments showed support for the influencers’ weight loss, demonstrating a strong sense of community, as well as the involvement and interest of the readers.

Bloggers: What is your experience with your online community support system and New Year’s resolutions?

*University of Scranton, December 2015

 

New Year’s Resolutions You Can Use

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Earlier this week, The Motherhood team members from across the country – Seattle, St. Louis and New York – met at our new headquarters in Pittsburgh to discuss planning and goals for 2015. Along the way, we identified a few “New Year’s Resolutions” – action items both large and small to help our company make strides throughout the year.

Here are three examples that could be beneficial for you, too:

Dust off neglected social media accounts.

Although The Motherhood has hosted a profile on LinkedIn for many years, it always has been overlooked in favor of building our presence on Facebook and Twitter. That will change in 2015 as we expand our focus and tidy up our social media platforms across the board. Our starting point for review and changes has been Ragan’s suggestions for 21 steps to a perfect LinkedIn profile. Some of our favorite advice:

linkedin

1. Your headline should be catchy, and include key words and phrases that you would want to turn up in Google search results.
  • Our suggestion – like everything online these days, you need to maximize for SEO! Think about what your desired audience might be searching when they’re looking for someone like you.
2. Write in first person.
  • Our suggestion – avoid industry jargon that will make your readers’ eyes glaze over. Be informal and conversational. This isn’t a resume, it’s social media.
3. At least 500 connections. Social proof is important online. It leads to credibility and authority on the Web.
  • Our suggestion – start with manageable chunks, such as a goal of adding 30 people by the end of the month, and go from there.
4. Use a professional photo.
  • Our suggestion – artsy pics and selfies have their place on Facebook and Instagram, but encourage your employees to maintain more professional profiles on LinkedIn. You might consider using a square design of your logo for the company profile photo, as we have.
5. Daily status updates to provide value to your network. Share your latest blog post, presentation or content worth passing along.
  • Our suggestion – you don’t need to spread yourself too thin if you prefer to focus on other social networks, but start with a goal of sharing one LinkedIn post each week and go from there.

Find new ways to connect efficiently.

One of our major projects for 2015 involves finalizing a proprietary database and project tracker we’ve been working to build to our exact specifications – from the ground up – for months. The end goal is to create a system that centralizes and consolidates our communications with clients, employees and blogger partners to maximize everyone’s time.

You don’t need to build your own system to find ways to connect more efficiently, however. You could start simply by cleaning up your emails, using these 10 tips from The Muse.

Stay tuned for more information about our proprietary database when we roll out the new system this year!

Evaluate online tools that could help improve your performance.

The Motherhood’s structure is highly virtual, and with team members in four different cities, we do plenty of work in the cloud. There are some fantastic tools available to facilitate this structure, and we use many of them. In 2015, we plan to work on identifying additional resources that could prove useful in revamping our website, reporting campaign results to clients and more. Here are a few we’re considering:

rebelmouse

1. Rebel Mouse: Aggregate content online in an attractive, personalized format, creating one central hub of images, videos, status updates and more ­­– helping to build communities and tell stories through social, mobile and web platforms. In other words, it does all the heavy lifting of populating and updating your web pages with great content.

buzzsumo

2. Buzz Sumo: Analyze top-performing content across social channels – within your industry, for your own brand or company, or among competitors. We love the idea of being able to identify the most successful, engaging content at a glance.

powtoon

3. PowToon: Free method of creating animated videos and presentations. With Powtoon, you can create and edit video clips and upload straight to YouTube or to your computer to distribute as you like. Video has become a popular request among our clients, and PowToon is a fun twist on the traditional format.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions on what we’ve shared, feel free to leave them in the comments! We would love to hear your personal or business resolutions for 2015.