The Lowdown on Why Denver's So High on the Startup Scene Hotlist

Denver has been hovering in Boulder's startup-scene shadow, but the "little sister" city has been drawing its own star power of late.
"It feels like it's in the new frontier of the entrepreneurial hot spots," says Chris Myers, co-founder of BodeTree, a venture-backed startup that provides financial analysis and reporting tools for small businesses. Myers had been living in Phoenix up until recently, when he relocated to join his business partner in Denver. The company's headquarters are located in downtown Denver in a building originally constructed in 1865.
Denver is home to the consumer product innovation company UrgentRx and health-care application iTriage. And according to a recent ranking by the Kauffman foundation, Denver has moved from the 9th most popular startup scene to the 4th from 1990 to 2010. Also, on Monday, the city's second annual Denver Startup Week kicks off.

Quality of life. Part of what makes Denver so popular is the undeniable quality of life benefits that come with living in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Biking to work. Hiking on weekends. An hour and ten minute drive to Vail for skiing in the winter.

Fewer distractions for talent. For tech startups in Denver, the less concentrated startup density tends to draw a more committed employee. "When you look at hiring talent and bringing people on, especially for a tech startup, you know, the story has always been, 'It has got to be the Bay, or it has got to be in Flatiron [New York City],' or something like that. And there is great talent there, no question about it. But it is just a different dynamic," says Myers. In The Valley and New York, "you have a lot of people bouncing from one thing to the next to the next to the next."

"Been-there-done-that" sentiment. The laid-back, outdoor oriented, environmentally-friendly culture of Denver is extremely attractive to burned-out, overworked employees. "You get the people who have 'been-there-and-done-that' in the Valley and New York, and they are ready for just a change of pace," says Myers. "You are still getting top notch talent, but you know, you move quickly in those areas, and people want a different pace of life."

Developing entrepreneurship community. "It is getting there," says Myers. And that it is not already there is precisely one of the benefits to being part of it. In Palo Alto or Mountain View, Calif., "there is an established community, which is good and bad. Breaking into that community can be hard. It is like cliques in high school. There is an unspoken set of rules of how to interact and things. I think there are benefits with that, but a lot of times there are drawbacks," says Myers.

Constantly working to position yourself can be distracting. "You are not really focused on the business that you are building, you are focused on how you fit into this ecosystem of startups and VC's and who is cool and who is not and who is growing and who is not," says Myers, who also in the same breath added that he was not disavowing that there are benefits of a developed and sophisticated entrepreneurship community.

Launching a startup in the bucolic greens of Denver does come with some handicaps, too. Here is a look at some of the negatives:

It can be harder to get money than if you were on a coast. BodeTree closed a $1.4 million round of venture capital in April with a couple of Denver-based VCs, but it's harder to prove your chops to venture capitalists and investors in New York and San Francisco from the middle of the country. "When you are talking to them and you are giving them your pitch and you are telling them your story, invariably it always comes up, 'Oh so you are not in The Valley? Oh, so we don't really invest in businesses outside of The Valley,'" says Myers. "Now, a good idea will always get funded. But you don't have that same face-to-face, 'Hey lets go grab drinks.'"

If your startup builds upon the infrastructure of a tech-giant, it could be hard to be in Denver. "If you are a social app that ties into Facebook, you are going to want to be by Facebook. If you are a real, youth-oriented type of solution, you are going to want to be in those hotspots," says Myers. But if you're startup like BodeTree that caters to a demographic not tied to companies in the Valley or in New York, being in Denver may be a boon, because you are embedded with your customers more directly.

The Denver airport is in the middle of nowhereseville. If you are inking deals on a regular basis, you spend a lot of time in the air. The Denver airport is not conveniently located to the center of town, says Myers. "It is about a million miles away from the downtown," says Myers. It's actually about 30 miles. But once you hit the exit for the airport, you have to go another nine miles to get to the airport. "I have no idea why they put it out there."

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3 Big Milestones in the Development of Twitter 'Language

Kudos to Quartz, which is celebrating some social media pioneers. The site recently published a post that reveals the very first hashtag, @reply and retweet—the holy trinity of Twitter engagement. 
The first @reply comes to us from Robert Anderson, who, according to his bio, is now a creative director at payments-app company Square. 
Even since, the @ has meant that you’re talking to someone or, at the very least, mentioning them in a way that you want them to know you’re talking about them. 
The @reply became an official Twitter feature in 2007, about a year after the site launched. 
Chris Messina brought us the first hashtag: 
Although that tweet was published in August 2007, the New York Times didn’t declare hashtags a trend until much later, in this 2011 article. 
It’s noteworthy that the first hashtag was aimed at creating “groups,” where now they’re just used to annoy people who don’t know what a hashtag is or label jokes about the latest news item. 
And the first retweet? You can thank Eric Rice for that. 
Wow. That’s prescient.

With Facebook's Media Referral Traffic Up 170%, Site Announces 'Stories to Share'

Facebook's partnerships with media organizations seem to be paying off.
Today, the social network reported the average referral traffic from Facebook to media sites has increased more than 170 percent this year. 
The company went into more detail claiming TIME saw traffic grow by 208 percent, referrals to listicle-loving BuzzFeed rose 855 percent and sports site Bleacher Report is up a whopping 1081 percent.
Facebook also noted the more media sites post, the more traffic will be driven to a site, claiming referrals jumped 80 percent when posting frequency increased. 
But that doesn't mean businesses should go on a posting frenzy by providing updates every other minute, as this will be looked upon as spammy to your readers. Facebook states, "there’s no magic number of how many more posts will impact referral traffic for all Facebook pages. Page administrators should test how increased posting impacts their referrals, Likes and overall engagement."
With these released findings, Facebook has decided to up its game with the media. The company is testing a feature called Stories to Share. The tool will allow the social network to suggest which articles organizations should post to their Facebook page. So, if there is a story on Entrepreneur that is hot but hasn't yet been posted on Facebook, the company will recommend we put it on our page. 
All this focus on getting the media on board, has helped Facebook nab the No. 1 spot for referral traffic from social networks, according to digital tool company Shareaholic. According to the findings, Facebook accounted for more than 10 percent of traffic to media publications, up 58.8 percent from the same time last year.
While Facebook nabbing the No. 1 spot may not come as too much of a shock, it is interesting which social network came in second place: Pinterest. The wedding-loving, food-obsessed pin site managed to beat out Twitter, LinkedIn and Reddit. In fact, with more than 3 percent of media referrals coming from Pinterest, it drives more traffic than those three sites combined. 
Shareaholic's Social Media Traffic Report was based on 13 months of data collected from 200,000 publishers.

Social Media for Small Business: Choose Wisely, Then Execute

Editor's Note: Entrepreneur's Ask the Expert column seeks to answer questions about everything from starting a business to growing one. To follow the column on Twitter -- and ask a question -- use hashtag #ENTexpert, or leave a comment below. Your query may be the inspiration for a future column.
Q: What tips do you have for small and midsize businesses on a tight budget to get started using social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, along with website development and search engine optimization?
- J. Zeches
A: This is a broad list. SEO, website and social media pretty much sums up earned and owned media. However, there is a common thread among them.
No Miracles. There are no magic tools, techniques or cures. Marketing has always been hard, and the internet hasn't changed that. So when figuring out which route to choose, follow a few simple rules. First, avoid tools or services that seem too good to be true, as they probably are. Second, know your resources, and spend them wisely. Lastly, pick a strategy and stick with it.
For companies that don't have a huge budget, here's how I'd prioritize:
1. Website: No matter what your business is, your website is the central gathering place. This should be your biggest investment. To ensure the best user-experience, you should strive for your site to:

• Load in zero seconds
• Be usable on mobile devices and the desktop
• Not waste a user's clicks or time
• Never have any kind of error
• Present only unique content on each page
• Provide every visitor with a strong Return on Time Invested, or ROTI. If someone visits your site, they're making their first investment in the form of time. You must provide a return on that investment.

Obviously, you can't completely meet any or all of these six goals. But you can get as close to perfect as possible, and if you get closer to perfect than your competitors, you'll outperform them across all channels, including SEO and social media.
When you are starting out and getting your website off the ground, keep it simple.
Build your first site on a basic platform, like WordPress. Spend money on making your site easy, stable and responsive.
If you need ecommerce, look at a hosted shopping-cart service like Volusion or Shopify. Don't try to reinvent online shopping. In my career, half the ecommerce-based businesses I've seen fail did so before they launched their site. Think about that. Again, keep it simple.
Before your site is ready to go live, click everything. If you see any "not found" or other errors, like slow-loading pages (compared to other sites in your industry), lousy writing or broken layouts, get your developer to fix them. You paid for something that works, not something that kind of works.
If you accomplish those goals at launch, you've made big steps toward strong SEO and social media campaigns.
2. SEO: You should make sure your website development takes into consideration SEO. If you built a good website (taking into account the above suggestions) so that search engines can easily find and classify the unique pages on your site, I'd suggest leaving other SEO tactics alone for now. Yes, there are techniques that help but all cost a lot of money and resources.
That said, if you are looking to hire an SEO expert make sure they can explain their tactics to you in a way you understand. If they can't, do not hire them. SEO is the outcome of a lot of good things coming together, not some secret recipe. Anyone who says otherwise will do more harm than good.
3. Social media: As mentioned above, ignore any secret tricks. Don't get fooled by some charlatan hawking a $470 exclusive course on how to "dominate social media" or a similar pitch. You are better off doing it on your own.
In a perfect world, you'd be present and responsive on every social network. This isn't a perfect world. When starting out, focus on one platform. I'd begin with Facebook if you're a B2C company and targeting an audience between the ages of 25 and 55. LinkedIn is a better bet if you're a B2B company. Twitter can work for both B2C and B2B but only choose this network if you know your audience spends most of their time on it. Google+ and Pinterest also has implications for search and social.
Then, choose a time each day (morning is best) to check your social media channel. It can be 15 minutes, 30 minutes or 5 minutes. Whatever you can spare, but do it every single day -- without fail.
For small businesses, I know it's tempting to try a shotgun approach. Build the website, try SEO for a little while, move to Facebook, and when that doesn't seem to work, jump to another social media site like LinkedIn.

How Social Media Really Affects Spending (Infographic)

How exactly does one go from friending to spending? In July, Vision Critical market research released "From Social to Sale," a survey of social media purchasing trends, to answer that question. 

 The findings just may make you rethink your social marketing practices.
 

Heads Up Music Lovers: YouTube to Create Streaming Music Service

When it comes to music, YouTube is said to be making a big move that might have Spotify looking over its shoulder.
Six million customers pay Spotify $10 each month to listen to any song in its library, commercial free, at home or on a smartphone. Now YouTube wants in on the on-demand action. The Google-owned video streaming service is said to be working on its own on-demand music platform that could compete with Spotify head to head.
The service, as Billboard reports, will likely let mobile users stream an unlimited number of songs, on-demand, for free. A premium paid service could offer users unlimited access to Google's subscription All Access music service, ad removal and an offline mode.
Spotify, in comparison, charges users $5 to listen to artist- or track-based radio stations commercial free. On demand access and offline mode costs $10.
YouTube's main objective, however, is to attract more users to advertise to. YouTube would remove the ads if you pay them, but that's the revenue they're really after. In contrast, Spotify hopes users will pay them to get rid of pesky ads, which interrupt free users after every 15 or so minutes of music play.
When contacted, YouTube declined to comment about its plans for a new music service.
"We're always working on new and better ways for people to enjoy YouTube content across all screens, and on giving partners more opportunities to reach their fans," a spokesperson said. "However, we have nothing to announce at this time."
For years, high school and college students have been using YouTube in just this way: streaming official and unofficial uploads of their favorite songs instead of downloading them from someplace like iTunes or even illegally. YouTube's new plan could make it easier to use the service in a manner people already enjoy.
Last month, YouTube announced plans to let users temporarily download video clips to be watched offline later. Both features could potentially give artists more exposure and revenue since fans will be able to enjoy their content more frequently and in more places such as airplanes and subways.

What Twitter's New Scheduled Tweets Mean for Marketing Your Business

Twitter has announced a new tool exclusively for Twitter Ads users – Scheduled Tweets. It lets the users create a tweet and then schedule a date and time for it to be sent out, up to a year in advance.
What does this new feature mean for marketers? How do they use Scheduled Tweets? How can they maximize its value? Is there anything they should be aware of? And what does this mean for similar services like Buffer?
I hope you’ll get the answers to all of these questions in this post. Let’s get into it.

How to Schedule Tweets

If you haven’t already signed up, go to ads.twitter.com to sign up for an advertiser account. Then, you can either select the blue “Compose Tweet” button or go to the new “Creatives” tab and select “Tweets”

Select “Only Scheduled Tweets.”

And select “Compose a Scheduled Tweet” or “Compose Tweet”:

You’ll be presented with a box:

Select Scheduling and write your message, and then select a date and time:

Once you’ve formed the perfect tweet, select “Schedule Tweet.” Then, you’ll see a notification box:

And you’ll see it in your “All Tweets” column:

By selecting “Only Scheduled Tweets,” you’ll see that list:

Now that you know how to use Scheduled Tweets, let’s get into what you can use it for.

4 Awesome Things You Can Do with Scheduled Tweets

1. Anticipation of a Timely Opportunity

Do you know that you will need to tweet something two months from now?
Would you like to craft your tweet right now and schedule it to be sent at a specific time?
With scheduled tweets, you can do just that. Write your tweet and have it sent at the optimal time. Let’s look at a few examples where you can do that.Many tweet out current or upcoming sales:

Do you have a sale coming up and know you’ll be too busy to hop on Twitter to tweet about it? Or worried that you’ll forget? In this case, it’s great to use Scheduled Tweets.

2. Share Links

You probably already follow a few accounts that share links multiple times a day. These accounts share links to articles, blog posts, videos, and any other resources they think their followers would find valuable.
With Scheduled Tweets, you can add links to your account and schedule them to be sent at specific times every day. You also can throw in a “Promoted Tweet” once in a while.

3. Targeting a Specific Geo-time Zone

Do you live in the United States but have a lot of followers in Beijing? Do you want to send out tweets mid-afternoon their time but don’t want to wake up in the middle of the night to do it?
With Scheduled Tweets, you can do that and not worry about having to wake up at 2:00 AM. Just write your tweet, set the time it will be sent (time-set is your local time), and sleep peacefully through the night.

4. Testing Timing Effectiveness

If you’re curious about the optimal time to tweet, use Scheduled Tweets to help. Just spread your tweets across multiple times and view the effectiveness once they’re sent. If you see a particular time when a tweet got more traction, schedule tweets to be sent around that time.
Be sure to take a look at our Science of Social Timing Part 1: Social Networksinfographic for more on this topic.

A Word of Caution

After the Colorado shooting on July 20, the NRA sent out a tweet that morning, roughly nine hours after the tragedy. Filmmaker Michael Moore (a strong supporter of gun control) noticed:
As you can see, thousands retweeted Moore’s post, making the original unintended NRA tweet visible to thousands of people. The unfortunate part is that this was likely a scheduled tweet, one that the NRA didn’t think to delete.
Even if you’re not the NRA, it’s always a good idea to pause your scheduled tweets during a tragedy or big news event. A few others have learned the hard way that it’s not about them or their brand during tragedies. A simple message like this that notifies your followers will work well:

What This Means for Buffer

Many have been curious about what this means for a service like Buffer, which is similar to the Scheduled Tweets feature. I asked Leo Widrich, Co-Founder of the company, for his reaction. This is what he said:

“I’m very excited about Twitter building out a scheduling feature. I believe that confirms the need for people to post Tweets at the right time, which is something we’ve been trying to optimize for over the past few years with Buffer.
“As for Buffer specifically, I believe Twitter’s new scheduling has some very positive implications as it helps educate lots of new people who didn’t know beforehand that you can actually schedule Tweets.
“Since Twitter’s main focus isn’t just scheduling, I think that Buffer is a great extension to it as we offer a lot of features beyond just scheduling, such as other networks, like Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn, social analytics, as well as timing optimizing and smarter scheduling options.”