Archive for the ‘social media general’ Category
Friday, March 5th, 2010
Blogging to an audience is all about putting out good content that will keep readers coming back for more. If you deliver quality over quantity, your audience will be more interested in bookmarking your site, subscribing to your RSS, or signing up for your e-mail newsletter. Make your readers stick and grow your following by creating an e-mail newsletter.
E-mail newsletters are a great way to promote your company, brand, and/or blog. If you have valuable information to share, creating an e-mail newsletter tells people that you have value and authority. Keep it fresh by separating your blog content from your e-mail newsletter so that both are unique. Giving unique content to your audience with your e-mail newsletter also entices them to subscribe, so they don’t miss out on your work.
Try to keep your E-mail newsletters on a schedule. Creating a schedule and sticking to it gives your audience some predictability and something to expect. Try not to bombard them with e-mail so you keep your content in demand, rather than becoming annoying spam. Once a week, maximum, or bi-monthly is a good start.
Offer contests, giveaways, and discounts. Offering something to your audience keeps your content valuable and worthwhile. Keeping your content worthwhile generates traffic to your blog and website that will remind your audience that you are an authority, and you appreciate their loyalty. Another great way to give value to your audience is by offering them sneak peaks on projects that are not officially available to the general public.
Tags: "ezine articles", communication, e-mail marketing, social media marketing
Posted in article marketing, social media general, social media marketing | No Comments »
Sunday, January 3rd, 2010
In my previous post, I write about the advantages of social media marketing for your business on Facebook. Here, I will focus on the differences between Facebook fan pages and Facebook group pages and any advantages or disadvantages from a business perspective.
The differences between Facebook fan pages vs. Facebook groups are minor, but one of the main advantages to Facebook fan pages is indexing. Fan pages are accessible to the public and can be picked up via search engines. This means that fan pages have a greater chance of being noticed and will show up on your friend’s feeds when you join. Group pages can only be seen via Facebook and does not have public access. While that makes it harder to search, group pages have the viral advantage of being able to send or invite your friends to join; a feature that fan pages do not have.
Another feature unique to group pages is sending private messages. An administrator has the ability to send messages directly to a member’s inbox, while Fan pages can only send messages that show up on the notification bar on the bottom right hand corner of your web browser. While the notification bar alerts you when a new notification is up, users often ignore the feature due to unwanted or unnecessary “spam” messages that often clog up the notifications.
So which option is better for business and social media marketing? While most of the basic features are the same, the key differences between fan pages and groups are major enough to warrant an examination. Fan pages are more versatile because you can connect your blog rss feeds to automatically syndicate, and add web applications. Administrators are not known publically and fan pages do not connect with the administrator’s personal account. The fan page can be seen more like an entity rather than an individual. This makes it more attractive for celebrities, brands, and businesses, who may hire someone to manage their accounts. Fan pages also do not have a member limit while group pages cap out at 5,000.
In summation, fan pages are the better option for social media marketing and a businesses web presence, but groups can work great for smaller ventures related to a more specific cause or social media campaign, such as marketing an event.
Tags: business social media, communication, creative marketing, facebook, Facebook page, social media campaign, social media marketing
Posted in blogging, social media general, social media sites | No Comments »
Thursday, December 17th, 2009
As we’ve already covered, social media marketing is all about connecting with your audience, as opposed to selling products. Think of it as a conversation. The more web presence your brand or business has, the more avenues you have towards conversing with potential customers. Brand awareness, customer service, and engaging with your customers should be your primary focus, but how can you turn that into sales?
Vanity Address
Once you’ve created your Facebook page, you can apply a vanity address that reflects your business name. Use this vanity URL when linking your Facebook page on your blog and/or website. This ensures that your social media marketing campaign is established and credible.
Join the Conversation
Add status updates that provide useful links and content related to your business. Social media marketing is about engaging with your market niche and talking to them on their level, like friends. One of the best places to network in a real world environment is through parties, and social events. Not everything should be about business and finding people through parties establishes your trust as a friend first and business second. Think of Facebook as an online party. You can’t build trust by being aggressive on selling. Talk to your potential customers as friends and the sales will come naturally.
Fan Pages, Group Pages and Events
Part of your social media marketing campaign can include the creation of fan pages, group pages or events. This is another tool to build community around your business and connect with your audience. Create an event page when marketing an upcoming event and use fan pages or group pages to keep people updated on your business.
Facebook Ads
Facebook ads are a cheaper alternative to marketing your business. What’s smart about social media marketing through Facebook is that you can use profile information to your advantage by using keywords, age brackets, etc. to market to specific audiences. Through the very nature of Facebook pages, businesses can use target marketing to successfully advertise to specific users.
With these general tips, you can start to build your Facebook web presence in no time. If you decide setting up a Facebook page is too hard to maintain, or would like assistance with your social media marketing, we can gladly help. Are you ready to join the conversation?
Tags: "social networking", facebook, Facebook page, social media, social media campaign, social media marketing
Posted in social media general, social media sites | 2 Comments »
Monday, August 17th, 2009
We see SEO and SEM firms, social media marketing firms, firms that specialize in link building, firms that specialize in article syndication, and many other subsets of Internet marketing. To business customers who don’t know a lot about marketing on the Internet, this can lead to confusion and a real difficulty finding the right service provider.
To make matters even more complicating, every SEO firm has a different approach. This was bound to happen. There is so much new technology on the Web that naturally some firms are going to emphasize certain strategies over others. I use the SEO and social media marketing strategies that I’ve developed over the years and found most effective.
Some of these strategies include:
- Creating profiles on the 10 major social media sites
- Regularly using four or five social bookmarking sites
- Investigating niche social media sites
- Cultivating community on social media sites
To keep up with the new technologies, a social media expert is constantly trying out new tools, exploring new platforms, and also utilizing older networks they’ve learned how to mine for traffic. We are looking for what works the best in terms of viral marketing and exposure for a site.
Social media marketing is organic; it evolves over time. To give you an example, I have been submitting posts to StumbleUpon, a social bookmarking site, for about two years. Only recently, however, have I begun to reap the benefits of my submissions. Now, when I submit a post to StumbleUpon, I am almost guaranteed to get traffic—and lots of it. For a couple days last week, I was receiving over 1,500 unique visitors to my site per day.
So how did I do it? Patience and dedication. You learn the best places to submit links for your specific content. You learn how to make viral content. You learn how to properly “tag” your submissions with labels that people can easily find. You also learn the importance of community cultivation. This means communicating with people on social media sites about their projects as well as yours, and sharing similar interests with them.
“Sharing” is the keyword in social media. Collectively, we act as filters. We direct people to the best content; the content that will interest them. We help each other find things.
Identify the niches on the Internet where your business topics are discussed. You can find these niches by running a keyword search on any social media site. Create a profile or many profiles, and start to engage people in your area of interest. Join groups, add comments, and write reviews of other people’s links and blog posts.
Your social media campaign will not happen over night. That is the truth. The good news is that once social media begins to work for you and your business, traffic will exceed your expectations. These services have been created to produce viral effects. Your submissions are at the whims of large numbers of people. You need to assimilate yourself into the social media environment before you can direct traffic to your sites, and promote your own content.
Learn how to create a social media Squidoo lens for your business
Tags: niche social media, social media, social media marketing, StumbleUpon
Posted in social media general | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
Social media come in all shapes and sizes. When it comes to link-building, however, we give priority to the social media that delivers the most traffic. Let’s go over the two most important factors that influence search results: (1.) links to your site from high-ranking pages (2.) creative content.
Squidoo is a social media platform that allows you to create a hub page around a given topic. That topic can be your favorite artist, books you’ve read, or your business. People have created Squidoo lenses (another name for Squidoo pages) on nearly every conceivable topic. The Squidoo site generates a lot of traffic from the web and is constantly referenced as one of the best ways to build links back to your website.
So what is a Squidoo Lens? A Squidoo lens is a webpage built with modules. These modules enable you to integrate Flickr photos, a blog feed, text, video, and many other features.
As with all social media, you will have to register to the site first. After you register, you’ll be able to make your first lens. If this is your first time making a Squidoo lens, we recommend you try the Magic Builder, which is basically a wizard that helps create the page for you.
- Have a concept behind your lens. The concept I chose for the Tempo Creative Squidoo lens was to aggregate all of Tempo’s companies onto one page, provide information and links to each company, and include the company blogs. This is a good strategy if your web business has a parent company and several smaller ones.
- Choose your url wisely; it will appear after http://squidoo.com/yourname. You can put a keyword in place of “your name” or simply use your business name. For example, the Squidoo lens for Tempo Creative, Inc. is http://squidoo.com/tempocreative
- Choose a title for your Squidoo Lens. When choosing a title, pick something that will grab people’s attention and also give a good description of what the page is about. The title for the Tempo Creative lens is, “Fun, Creative Web Company: Tempo Creative”.
- Pick a category. The category for your Squidoo lens will determine the page style and the modules, but you can always add and delete modules later. You can also change your category later if you want. For Tempo Creative, I used the category “business” because the lens is about Tempo Creative, Inc.
- Add content to your lens. Remember the second most important factor I mentioned is creative content. So be unique in terms of text. Make sure the information is relevant, useful to large groups of people, and humorous or interesting. When creating content for a “business” Squidoo lens, you may have less creative freedom but you can still organize your content in an interesting way.
- Add images to your content. Everyone likes pictures. When you choose images for your Squidoo lens, be creative. Don’t pick stock images that everyone has seen; do a little searching for eye-popping images. For the Tempo Creative lens, I decided to use caricatures of the people who work at Tempo. There’s a different caricature for each company owned by Tempo.
- Use the feed modules. If your company has a feed, use it! By integrating a feed into a Squidoo lens, you give the page currency. This is more effective than a static page for directing traffic back to your blog. For the Tempo Creative lens, I integrated two different blog feeds.
- Don’t include modules that have no purpose. Always keep in mind with social media, you don’t want to clutter the page. So only include modules that support your content and help to streamline the information.
- Add links to your text content. The clear advantage to building a Squidoo lens is the “do-follow” links. “Do-follow” links are the links you put into your Squidoo lens which direct traffic back to your site. In contrast to “no-follow” links, “do-follow” links improve your site’s Page Rank with Google. To add links to your text content, simply use the html for links: <a href=”http://tempocreative.com”>Visit our site!</a>
All in all, if you are looking to build links to your website, a Squidoo page is the way to go. It’s easy, highly searchable, and and effective way to increase Page Rank and traffic.
If you enjoyed this post, you may be interested in “How do I create a Facebook Page?”
Tags: "squidoo lens", "tempo creative", social media, squidoo
Posted in social media general | 2 Comments »
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