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Contributor Guidelines for Mention’s Blog
Thanks for your interest in writing for the Mention blog! Guest posts are an excellent opportunity to for us to educate our audience on a broader range of topics outside of our team’s expertise, while giving other marketers a chance to “borrow our audience.”
Blog posts from our industry friends and colleagues also challenge us to look at our industry and the way we approach our work in a new light. Call us selfish, but we like learning too.
Below are a few things to keep in mind when submitting an idea for Mention’s blog. Please read the whole document before contacting us. To submit your topic idea, send an email pitch to content@mention.com.
What Should You Write About?
Our blog focuses heavily on media monitoring and social listening, but we also cover other, related topics our audience is interested in.
Our audience is mainly digital marketing, PR, and communications professionals at agencies and medium-to-large companies.
Specific topics we would love you to write about:
- The top social media management tools
- What’s the difference between social media management and social media monitoring tools?
- Customer loyalty or customer success (how to excel at either/both)
- Campaign strategy: How to build and monitor your marketing campaigns
- Social media services that agencies should offer their clients
- Client onboarding: How to build satisfied customers for life
- Competitive benchmarking
- Brand advocacy
- Real time monitoring
- How to avoid an online crisis
- How to find influencers
- The top PR tools you need to use
- Influencer marketing platform (like how to choose your …)
- Instagram influencer marketing (like Ultimate guide to …)
- How to monitor social media
- How to measure your brand impact
- How to find social media influencers
- Executive branding
- Competitive tracking
- Instagram engagement guide
- How to get more Instagram likes
They enjoy reading about things like:
- Social media marketing
- Digital marketing strategies & tactics
- Brand awareness / reputation management
- Influencer marketing & collaborations
- Public relations
- Crisis communications & management
(Need help coming up with a topic? Try some of these brainstorming ideas!)
Goals:
- To provide our audience with actionable tips, tools, and general strategies that will help them become better communicators online.
- To give readers advice that they can put to work immediately after reading.
- To share unique perspectives on topics that are considered over-saturated, much like social media.
Audience:
- Mention customers — an international crowd of of 500k+ marketers and communicators, with a focus on digital marketing agencies and midsize digital marketing departments.
- Anyone looking for insights and best practices on social media, media monitoring, and digital marketing.
Guidelines:
- Submit your post via Google Docs and share it with content@mention.com.
- Length: we like going in-depth, but also writing concisely. Aim for the 1,500-2,000 word range for most posts.
- Your post should be well-written original content free of grammatical errors.
- The article should reflect the Mention-style of writing. Be helpful, friendly, and informative. Feel free to have a sense of humor in the article, as long as it’s respectful.
- Avoid being overly self-promotional in the body of the post, but feel free to link to your website in your author bio.
- It’s fine to use your own company as an example/use case if sharing experiences or lessons.
- We love when guest bloggers find a way to link back to our older posts that relate to the topic you’re writing about.
- Cite any quotes, data, images, or third party content used.
- Include at least one high-res image or high quality graph in your post.
Format:
- Title: Each word in the title should be capitalized.
- Subheads: Capitalize only the first word in each subhead.
- Bold any noteworthy points.
- Put punctuation inside quotes. “This is how you would punctuate a quote.”
- We love the Oxford comma. So does Vampire Weekend.
- We use just one space between sentences.
- Capitalize the first word of a bullet point.
- Use subheadings, lists, images, and short paragraphs to break up chunks of text.
- Conclusion: Title your conclusion however you like, as long as it neatly wraps up the post nicely and recaps all points made in the body of the post.
- We like to add a call to action that prompts readers to leave a comment. It’s optional, but preferred.
- We use a click-to-tweet plugin to highlight tweetable comments throughout the post. Leave comments in the Google Doc highlighting which pieces you’d like to be tweetable.
Additional Items Needed:
- A short bio (2-3 sentences).
- Links to your Twitter account and website.
- Email address linked to a gravatar.com account.
Post-Publication:
- We appreciate all the shares we can get. Please share your post from your personal social accounts, and your company account if you feel so inclined. 🙂
- Keep an eye out for blog comments and respond to each, even if it’s with a simple “Thank you!.” Your best bet is subscribing to the discussion before it starts via Disqus (or use Mention 😉
- We will usually post our articles to GrowthHackers.com or Hacker News. If so, we’ll send you a link and request an upvote. Feel free to share!
That’s all, folks! If you have any questions, email content@mention.com. Due to the high volume of submissions we receive, it may take up to 3 – 5 working days for us to respond.
