| |
Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’
Tuesday, May 7th, 2013
LinkedIn has come a long way. It started out small and grew steadily, gaining a huge following in the business-to-business market. It’s also very popular for job seekers to post their resumes. In fact, LinkedIn has been seen largely as an online resume database.
There are plenty of reasons for using LinkedIn for social media:
- You can be introduced to potential prospects by your business acquaintances
- People you have done business with can endorse you
- You can answer questions and make yourself a resident expert on your niche topic
- It’s a great place to network for any professional business
A recent announcement by Constant Contact gives you one more reason to use LinkedIn. It’s becoming more visual.
Successful Internet marketers know the value of a good graphic – an image, a video, an icon, whatever. Graphics keep people interested and really do a lot of selling on their own. If you’ve stayed away from LinkedIn because it was boring, you don’t have to any longer. It is becoming more graphic.
This is one more reason to start using LinkedIn. Not only can you attract potential business partners and clients, but you can use graphics and other visuals to highlight each aspect of your social profile at Linkedin, making it more powerful overall.
I’m glad to see good things continue improving.
Tags: graphics, LinkedIn, Social Media
Posted in Social Media | No Comments »
Friday, April 26th, 2013
Online marketing has increasingly grown since its inception in the early 1990s. For a long time, it was mainly constrained to search engines. Since 2005, however, social media has taken on a much greater importance. Instrumental in that growth have been such sites as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Pinterest.
YouTube is the most popular video hosting and sharing website. The other three have been main purveyors of powerful images.
Twitter is mostly for text, but savvy tweeters have found ways to make their images shine through the service. Facebook, however, has largely become a place where people share their images through their smartphones, giving rise to a whole new way of connecting with people. Pinterest is itself a phenomenon. Built entirely for sharing images, marketers have used it to embrace the challenge of sharing product images and driving traffic to their websites. It’s working.
People like to see what they are buying before they buy it. That’s why the J.C. Penney and Sears catalogs were so popular a few years back. Now, shopping catalogs appear online, and people are flocking to them.
Images are great marketing. They allow your customers to see what you have to offer, to get a view of what they are about to purchase. If people can see it, they can determine its value more clearly in their minds. And that’s why images are such powerful marketing tools.
Tags: e-commerce, images, online marketing, Social Media
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | No Comments »
Thursday, April 25th, 2013
People are emotional creatures. Salespeople know this. That’s why they understand that people make buying decisions emotionally and justify them logically. The same can be said of sharing content on social media sites. The key is to appeal to people’s emotions. Here are 5 ways you can do that with your content no matter what niche you are in.
- Show that you care – The most basic way to appeal to your audience’s emotions is to show them that you care. Let them know that you care about their concerns, their needs, their desires. When people feel that you care, they are more likely to share your content.
- Make them laugh – Laughter is great medicine. It’s also a great way to connect to your audience. If you get people laughing, they will remember you. And they will share your content with their friends.
- Be nostalgic – People love to remember the good old days. Those days are usually when they are young adults, free from the control of their parents, in the world alone and single, with little responsibility and extra money to spend on having fun. Remind them how great those days were.
- Be human – Give people a reason to like you. Let your personality shine through.
- Take up a cause – People like to support good causes. Whether it be literacy, breast cancer, or starving children in Africa, if you take up a good cause, then you will get other people who care about that cause on your side.
There are a lot of ways to make your content more shareable. I’ve presented five of them. These are all powerful ways to connect with your audience. What else can you think of?
Tags: content, sharing, Social Media, social sharing
Posted in Social Media | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 24th, 2013
The Web changes. So does SEO. In fact, SEO is not the same today as it was 10 or 15 years ago. Below are 4 distinct SEO ideas that are no longer valid, yet I hear people talking about them all the time as if they are still good and valid ideas. These ideas are as outdated as silent movies.
- You need meta tags – Not really. The keyword meta tag is no longer necessary. The search engines ignore them. You should too. As far as the meta description tag goes, it’s still useful, but the search engines don’t always use it. It’s supposed to be the snippet searchers see in search results when your website comes up. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.
- Search engine submission services get your site indexed – No they don’t. At one time, that was true. But it hasn’t been true for at least 10 years. You don’t need to submit your website to search engines. Just build a few inbound links and they will discover your site.
- You need a keyword-based domain name – It might help. It might not. This is just one ranking criteria, however, many websites rank well for keywords that are not in their domain name. Branded domain names work just as well. Just look at Google, Bing, and Facebook.
- Social media isn’t necessary – Absolutely incorrect. In today’s search engine marketing climate, social media is every bit as important as organic SEO. In fact, the two are intricately intertwined.
Tags: search engine optimization, SEO, Social Media
Posted in SEO for Small Business | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013
If you haven’t heard the term transmedia storytelling, don’t be alarmed. It’s a fairly new term and one that hasn’t really been co-opted for small business marketing purposes. But it should be.
You can read about it in this Wikipedia entry.
New entertainment channels are starting to use transmedia storytelling more and more. In fact, some of your favorite television shows probably also have multiplayer video games and maybe use Twitter to post tweets and persona comments from their characters. It’s getting to be more and more popular to do so.
In fact, some of the popular TV shows are doing this, including Defiance and The Walking Dead.
So how can businesses use transmedia storytelling to do better marketing?
There’s no one way to do it. There’s probably thousands. But here’s an idea. Use your blog to post in the voice of your business mascot. Use Twitter and Facebook in a similar fashion but create different posts. You can also link to your blog posts on those social media sites. Additionally, create an app or video game where customers can interact with your mascot or perform tasks that teach them about how to use your services but in a fun way.
The idea here is to get creative. Use your imagination for better marketing by taking principles from transmedia storytelling.
Tags: media, Social Media, storytelling
Posted in Social Media | No Comments »
Monday, April 22nd, 2013
Analytics is one of the most important marketing tasks for any organization. If you don’t know how your website is being used and who is it is being used by, then you can’t act on that information. Your marketing will go a lot more smoothly if you have actionable data. That is, whatever you measure can be changed. Whatever you don’t measure can’t be changed.
Real time analytics has its own advantages. It’s just not enough to know that you got 10,000 unique visitors last month. That doesn’t tell you what’s happening on your website right now.
One reason why real time analytics is important is because you can see who is on your website right now, where they are from, which pages they are viewing, and what actions they are taking. With that information, if you need to present specific information to target those real time visitors better, then you can make the necessary changes as you need to.
Another reason real time analytics is important is because you can track visitors and make changes to your marketing on the spot if you need to.
Let’s say you just kicked off a new social media campaign. How will you know it’s working if you can’t monitor real time information? By looking at your metrics in real time, you can see if your social media campaign is getting off to a good start. You can see it working right before your very eyes. If it’s not working, you can tweak it at the very moment you realize it isn’t working and keep on going.
Tags: analytics, metrics, real time analytics, Social Media
Posted in Tracking & Analytics | No Comments »
Monday, April 8th, 2013
Which is these three is most important: Authority, Branding, or Social Media?
I’m going to answer that question for you today, but before I do let’s discuss what each of these does for you.
Social Media
We’ll start with social media because, in my opinion, it doesn’t matter until you’ve established the other two.
Social media is a tool. It’s a means to an end, not an end to itself. If you have nothing to promote, then being on social media is just a presence. You can’t generate leads for a product that doesn’t exist. You can be an expert at building relationships through social media, but if you have no place to take those relationships once you’ve established them, then you’re doing all your work in vain.
Social media is an important marketing tool, but it follows from branding and authority. It doesn’t establish them.
Branding
Branding is the act of defining yourself, your company, or your product. Obviously, you have to have a product or business entity before you can brand it.
While branding is important for establishing your identity in the marketplace, there’s still got to be an element that precedes it. That element is what I’ll discuss next.
Authority
Authority is the voice behind your identity. In some ways, authority establishes your identity. In other ways, however, it communicates it.
You can use social media to present your authority, but your authority is the raw material of your company’s brand. Your identity in your niche derives from your authority. Before you can do anything else, you have to establish your authority. That is done by creating useful, valuable content that is consistent and earns respect among your peers.
Social media, branding, and authority are all important for online marketing, but the first two follow on the heels of your authority. Put first things first.
Tags: authority, Branding, Social Media
Posted in Small Business Internet Marketing | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 2nd, 2013
Hashtags are becoming ever more popular. But why?
Constant Contact says 40.7% of hashtag users use them to express their personal feelings about things. But another 34.1% use them to follow brands. 10.4% use hashtags to promote corporate or social events.
Let’s back up a little. 34.1% of hashtag users use them to follow brands. That should tell you something.
What it tells me is that hashtags are useful tools to promote brands on social media. Currently, Twitter, Instagram and Google+ are the only social media sites (that I know of) using hashtags. Facebook has plans to incorporate them some time in the near future.
If you’re on social media, then I highly recommend using hashtags to promote your brand. But you should figure out a way to do it creatively without annoying your followers.
Here are a few guidelines for using hashtags for brand promotion:
- Keep them short. Don’t create hashtags that take up more space than your message. 10 characters or less is best.
- Don’t use them on every post. Just use them when appropriate.
- Check to see if a hashtag exists before creating one. If a hashtag already exists that may be appropriate for your post, then use it. You may discover a whole new group of followers just by using an already existing hashtag.
- If no hashtag exists for your topic, create one.
- Use at least one branded hashtag, but don’t overdo it. Just use them for your overall brand, if appropriate, and for specific products or services if you think you can get a following.
Hashtags are not hard to use. They can enhance your social media branding experience and open you up to whole new markets.
Tags: Branding, hashtags, Social Media
Posted in Social Media | No Comments »
Thursday, March 21st, 2013
Today is Twitter’s birthday. The social media service turns seven. ABC News has seven suggestions on how you can celebrate this momentous occasion. I won’t recount them. You can read the article. But I do have seven suggestions of my own.
If you’re in the mood for celebrating Twitter’s birthday today, here are seven ways you can do that and still have fun:
- Look for seven tweets you can retweet. Retweeting is one of the really cool features of Twitter. If you see a tweet in your stream that you think your followers can benefit from, retweet it.
- Find seven links that are not self-promotional and tweet those throughout the day.
- Follow seven new people.
- Update your header or add a background to your Twitter account.
- Attend a Tweetup.
- Invite seven friends or business associates to join Twitter.
- Find a page on your own website to promote using Twitter. Self-promotion isn’t a bad thing if done in moderation. If all you do is promote yourself on Twitter, then you’ll likely lose followers and your engagement will be low. Pepper your Twitter stream with self-promotional content but keep it leaning heavily on the value side.
Twitter can be a lot of fun, and there are some effective ways to make use of Twitter for your business. Find them, and celebrate Twitter’s seventh birthday.
Tags: Social Media, Twitter
Posted in Social Media | No Comments »
Thursday, March 14th, 2013
Funny how language transforms us. When we communicate with our friends on social media we send them a “shout out.” But should we really be shouting? Especially indoors?
As the old adage goes, there is a time and a place for every purpose.
Shouting and listening both have their places. Here’s a hint, though, when it comes to starting your social media campaign. Listen first, shout later.
If you are just taking to social media on behalf of your business, take the time to listen first. Put your ear to the ground and hear what others are saying. Understand what’s being said. Just as important as the what, however, is the how. Listen to the tone of the conversation. It’s important to fit in, or you may find yourself being cast out.
After listening for a while, start interacting. Not shouting, interacting. Do it in a whisper. In other words, engage with your friends and fans, but don’t just start selling them stuff. Don’t go crazy with the self-promotion. Not yet.
As a general rule, you should share useful, valuable non-promotional information 3-5 times as often as you promote your own products and services.
Start with earning people’s trust. After they trust you and like you, then they’ll be more accepting of your promotions. If you just jump in and start promoting, then you could rub people the wrong way and send them running before they get to know you. Then you’ll be crying.
Tags: Social Media, social media marketing
Posted in Social Media | No Comments »
|
|
|
|
| |
|
