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Have you been staying on top of the latest social media news updates? If not, the team here at Flair Interactive has you covered. Here are five of the latest social updates for this week: 

• 12 overlooked Facebook features That Help Marketers (Social Media Examiner)

Just about everyone and their mother (and their grandmother, at that) is on Facebook, or at least has used it at some point. But do you know all the helpful tools and features you can use on Facebook as a marketer? This article takes you through 12 such features that might be helpful to you in your social media marketing.

• 4 Social Media Hacks You Overlooked That'll Skyrocket Your Traffic (Neil Patel)

Overlooked features seems to be a theme this week. But this article doesn't just talk about Facebook; it talks about how to make sure your marketing is effective among ALL social networks you choose to use in your social media marketing strategy.

Back in 2014, we wrote a blog post that offered a few social media tips. Four years later, social media is as important as ever. 

In our last blog post, we noted that the majority of marketers use social media for:

• customer loyalty
• improving SEO
• brand recognition and
• to drive sales

Social media can also be a great way for your potential customers and leads to get to know you and your company. Often, potential customers may be interested in what you do and want to know more, but they don't feel comfortable enough to reach out yet. When you give them a little peek into your company, they'll start to get more comfortable and may reach out themselves to start a conversation.

Stop what you're doing right now. Close your eyes, and picture your idea of success. What do you see?

A high-paying job? A fancy car? A business idea that took off? A happy relationship?

Now ponder this: in any of those images of success, do you see the risks that were taken and even the failures that happened alongside the success? Or do you only see the bright and shiny 'success,' packaged up in a pretty bow?

Chances are, you're in the latter camp—like most people. And because people believe success is often devoid of failure and struggle, it stops people from even trying. It's too big of a risk to try and possibly fail, they think, so why even begin? The same holds true for potentially challenging, time-consuming or risky marketing activities or campaigns. 

Back in 2012, MOZ posted a great blog and video about how to delight the pants off of your community. 

It had some helpful tips, including:

• Give them points/thumbs up/stars
• Thank them
• Be human
• Show personality
• Make it easy
• Take it to email
• Take it offline
• Make it personal

Source: Moz

Looking for some new ways to create more content? Check out the latest Whiteboard Friday from Rand Fishkin. "3 Creative Ways to Give Your Content Efforts a Boost."

In this brief video, Rand talks about how you can use the following techniques to more easily create engaging, SEO-friendly that your users will love:

• Seek out niche groups
• Leverage complimentary products and services
• Partner with influencers to create high-visibility content
  

You know how all of those so-called "marketing experts" are telling you that they know the ONE guaranteed way for you to increase traffic or generate more leads and conversions online?

Or do you ever feel like you can't keep up with the latest industry terms and "sure-fire tactics" that everyone insists are the ONLY way to go to increase traffic, leads and conversions? It's enough to make your head spin sometimes.

Here at Flair, we don't offer a cookie-cutter or one-size-fits-all approach and we don't rely on one approach for our own internal marketing efforts either. However, we do carefully track what we're doing to determine which tactics, campaigns and content work best for our own particular audience and business, just as we do with our clients.

That's why some metrics from a marketing campaign that we did this week really caught our attention. Yesterday (Thursday, June 1 2017), we published a blog post with an infographic titled "5 quick ways to improve your SEO and rankings" at 2:09 p.m. We then shared it on all of our social media channels and boosted the post for $63 (a max of $9 per day for 7 days), choosing to show it to people who fit our target audience for that particular service (owners and managers at small businesses within the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom and India).

Hubspot reports that "marketers who prioritize blogging are 13x more likely to achieve a positive ROI on their efforts."

Those are great odds and definitely worth pursuing.

If you haven't started a blog for your organization, now is a good time to do so. To get you started, here is a step-by-step guide to developing and posting a blog through Hubspot. 

If you want to take your marketing campaigns to the next level, you've got to test them. How do you do that? With A/B testing. It's sometimes called split testing. What is A/B testing? It's basically comparing two versions of a web page, email or banner to see which one performs better.

You can compare these by showing the two variants, calling them A and B, to similar visitors simultaneously. See which one gives the best conversion rate and then use that one moving forward! It's simple, but also necessary.

Viral content is different than any other form of marketing content. It's in a category of its own. I see it as the sardonic hipster teenager of the family who doesn’t study but somehow aces all of his tests, and is constantly pontificating about some profound realization that just occurred to him.

So why is this kid so popular? Why is he so successful? Flair Interactive provided some helpful thoughts on what makes content go viral back in October 2009. Now six years later, here are some additional thoughts on what makes viral tick and stick. Viral content tends to:

• Give readers a sense of identity
• Fuel readers' egos
• Create connections
• Promote causes
• Entertain or amuse readers

After a hectic work week, it’s easy to feel a little loopy. But how about a little crazy, as coined by Jim Metcalf (see quote below)?

As marketers, we’re inherently split in multiple directions. We’re natural dichotomies. We work quickly but with precision. We work strategically and hands on. We work collaboratively and independently. But most importantly—we’re creative with an inherent drive for results.

This natural inclination to bend the rules just enough within structured environments, and think outside of unorthodox confines in order to get results is, in fact, what makes us marketers. So in this instance, “a little crazy”, , seems oddly appropriate.

In celebration of our sensible insanity, here are some viral marketing videos that truly accentuate our eccentricity.