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Social Marketing: YouTube

August 28, 2011 YouTube 1 Comment

A well-cultivated YouTube presence can add dynamism to your outreach strategy and connect you to folks you haven’t met. Your followers and friends will appreciate the break from text information (and maybe you will, too).

  • Original content that’s true to you: There are plenty of ways to express yourself via video, with solid content and a fresh point of view. Here are a few ideas to start your engines:
    1. An introduction: your staff in the title sequence of a classic TV show, a dynamic office tour
    2. An interview: a vet in your pet store, your firm’s least-wonky accountant with tips on charitable giving
    3. A “how-to”: how you unroll your hot air balloon, your new head chef making scones
    4. A time lapse/process piece: a sped-up video of your latest interior design transformation, a slow-motion breakdown of how you crash test the motorcycles you build
    5. A “man on the street”: ask lots of folks at that publishing conference what book they loved as a child, ask the children at your company picnic to try defining what Daddy actually does as an actuary
  • Inviting people to watch: Put the “social” in social marketing: share on Twitter, Facebook, in the company e-newsletter, with your entire staff, to contacts at other companies, and bloggers you know.
  • Connect, connect, connect: If you look at the spaces around the videos, you’ll see a myriad of ways to be social that many organizations overlook.
    1. Comment: It’s an easy way to dip your toe in the water while lending your opinion and expertise to the conversation.
    2. Share: Share relevant videos via your other social media networks. Bonus: you can leave a comment that you posted the video elsewhere as a free and easy way to promote your presence on those channels, too.
    3. Create a playlist: Include videos that are smart, fresh, innovative, and relevant to your work. Stakeholders will be directed to additional information, and you’ll be one step closer to being considered their go-to source in your industry.

No one on staff that knows how to optimize your YouTube channel?  Call us!  Your Social Strategist will work with you and our on staff SEO experts to optimize your YouTube channel for search and put together a strategy that will boost your web presence and give your prospects great content.

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3 Blog Posts Your Readers Will Love

August 23, 2011 Blog Marketing 1 Comment

These days, it seems like everyone is blogging. Think of a subject and you are sure to find at least one blog about it. With all that information available on the internet, how do you make your content stand out and keep readers coming back? In this post I’d like to explore three ideas; “Evergreen” posts, “Hub” pages and the use of multi-media.

“Evergreen” posts

Everyone loves to publish breaking news and it’s a great way to get page views. Unfortunately, current events have a finite life span and soon turn into old news. A better post is one that has no expiration date. Examples of evergreen content are recipes, travel guides, reviews of restaurants or products and interviews with people of interest. These types of posts can be used as reference material for others and keep people coming back time after time.

“Hub” Pages

If you have an idea for a series of articles that share a theme, the best way to present them is on a Hub page. This page would have a paragraph or two that introduce the theme and then the rest of the page would contain the links to the related blog posts. At the end of each individual blog post, you would put a link that send the reader back to the hub page so they can continue their reading. This method keeps your collection of articles organized and easy to navigate.

Multi-Media

A great way to keep people interested in your content is to use photos, videos and other artwork to grab the readers attention and demonstrate or illustrate the information in your text. If you are not able to host this content locally due to storage limitations, there are many free services online where you can upload video and photos and link or embed this content back into your blog posts.

Using these three methods are fun and interesting ways of changing up your blog’s content and keeping your readers and you interested in your blogging. These three ideas can help you produce a professional, well organized blog with exciting content that keeps people coming back for more.

For more information on our blogging services, contact us!

Top 5 Business Blogging Questions Answered

August 21, 2011 Blog Marketing 3 Comments

What’s the best blogging platform?

There are a variety of blogging platforms available.  Some platforms like WordPress allow you to host the blog and integrate it into your website.  Others like Tumblr & Blogger host the blog on their site for you.  Determining which platform would work best for you really depends on what you’re looking to do with it.  If you are just starting out blogging, Blogger and Tumblr are much simpler.  Point, click and done…your blog is ready to go.  WordPress is a little more sophisticated, has a lot more options with design, function and thousands of plugins to play with.  If you would like some help setting up your companies blog, contact us.  We’re happy to help!

 

How does blogging help my business?

Blogs help your business in several ways:

  • Shows current & prospective clients you are an expert in your niche
  • A steady flow of new content to your website (if it’s hosted on your website)
  • Providing additional content to your site will improve your SEO

 

What are some good WordPress apps to use on my blog?

  • Google XML Sitemaps is an excellent app.  It automatically generates an XML sitemap for your blog allowing search engines to index it better.
  • OnlyWire for WordPress is one of my favorite apps.  This amazing app gives you the ability to post to 48 social networks with the push of a button!  There are 3 different programs available – Free which allows you to make up to 300 submissions per month site however every time you submit you have to do a capthca solver which is a little time consuming but deciphering the captchas is probably the biggest issue as they aren’t always clear and it has ads.  It also has a 1 user & 1 website limitation.  The next level is Blogger, Publisher, Webmaster which is a great deal at $10 a month, no ads, no captchas but has the 1 website & 1 user limitations.  The enterprise level is Corporate & SEM which is the whole enchilada, no limitations, ads or captchas.
  • Wibiya Toolbar is another super cool app that puts a bar at the bottom of your blog that gives visitors the ability to tweet, like, share, watch videos on your YouTube channel and much more.  You have tons of customization options to have the bar match your site and different items you can allow your visitors to see.
  • Sexy Bookmarks is another sharing app (sharing is caring!).  This app puts sharing capabilities into the posts themselves.  It also has many options to customize where the sharing bar is placed and what bookmarking sites you’d like to have shown.
  • Scribe SEO is a plugin from Copyblogger.  It’s unique qualities are what makes it one of our favorites.  The Keyword Research tool gives you info on how many searches are done annually on the keyword you searched helping you to choose the best keywords for your post. The Content Optimizer analyzes your title, meta description and content and gives you a score based on severl different factors that will help to improve your blog’s “findability”.  It then gives you a breakdown of the keyword analysis giving you the primary and secondary keywords based on use, advice on how to change your keywords, other keywords used in your blog post, suggested tags to use, what your post will look like in SERPs (search engine results pages) and SEO best practices.  The Scribe Link Building tool is super cool.  Based on your primary keyword, it does a search to find internal link building opportunities, external opportunities that give you detailed info on other blogs and websites you can get authoritative links from and it finds the most influential people in social media that talk about your topic.
  • SEO – There are at least 100 different SEO plugins to use for WordPress but the SEO plugin that I’ve found works the best is actually included on the Genesis Framework by StudioPress.  If you don’t have one of the Genesis Themes, you can download the All in One SEO plugin which available through the plugin search on the left side of your WordPress admin page.  It has a lot of options for optimizing your blog posts for search engines.

 

How do I drive traffic to my blog?

Driving traffic to your blog can be done easily through integrating social media and social sharing into your blog.  Using an app like OnlyWire helps get the word out about your posts to many different social bookmarking sites giving you more opportunity to be seen.  Sexy Bookmarks & the Wibiya Toolbar help by making it easy for your current readers to share your posts.

Using social networking sites like Twitter & Facebook are also great ways to get your content out there and inspire new visitors to visit your blog.  Twitter in particular is a great traffic driver as you can make several different posts a day and not have to worry about crowding someone’s feed.  You can also use hashtags to extend your reach.  Facebook is a little more strict, not in policy but it you start posting 3+ posts per day on your page you’ll more than likely see a rapid decrease in likes depending on what your fans are used to.

 

Sub-Domain vs. Sub-Directory (sometimes called a folder)

blog.mywebsite.com vs www.mywebsite.com/blog

This is a controversial question in blogging.  Both have their advantages.  The advantage to using a sub-directory (www.mywebsite.com/blog) is the link juice and PR (PageRank) is sent to your main URL which helps in search engine ranking whereas with sub-domains the sub keeps its link juice and PR.  The advantage of using a sub-domain is they are considered unique from the main domain and can be used to separate content that is different than what your site is about.  If you’d like to learn more check out this post by Matt Cutts on Sub-Domains vs Sub-Directories.

 

Do you have questions about business blogging you’ve not had answered?  Please comment below!

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How to Get Retweets & Increase Followers

August 19, 2011 Twitter 1 Comment

A tweet is like a tree falling in a forest; if no one hears it, it doesn’t really make a sound.  Successful marketing via Twitter depends on how far and wide you can spread the noise about your business, product, or particular niche offering. Here are a few tips on how to get retweets and increase followers:

If you aren’t fascinated by it, don’t tweet it: Your contribution to the Twitterverse should be fresh, engaging, and unique to your company’s brand and niche point of view. Set yourself apart with insider info, useful observations, and truly cool stuff.

One good retweet deserves another: You’re following interesting people: experts in your field, innovative researchers, and colleagues from past projects. If they share information that would be interesting for your followers, pass it along, giving credit where credit is due: RT@InnovativeSquid: new info on artificial reefs is crazy! reef.com/new You’ll show up on InnovativeSquid’s radar as an engaged follower, making it more likely that she’ll jump on board your bandwagon and pay more attention to the fascinating stuff you share.

Ask and ye shall receive: Use nine of your precious 140 characters on the magic word: please RT. Used judiciously, this polite request indicates that you really think this information needs to get out into the world – and your name along with it.

Build a base of followers, one follower at a time: You might be baffled as to why that kindergarten teacher from Oslo is following your polymer research firm, but be sure to welcome him to the fold. Set aside five minutes every morning or afternoon to thank all new followers via tweet: Thanks to @OsloTeacher for following. Your kids are our next scientists!  You’ll show up in your followers’ feeds, which puts your name out to all of their friends. And of course, follow OsloTeacher – if only to figure out why the heck he’s following you.

Interact, don’t preach: Got time to do some comp design work? Ask your followers to nominate and vote on who among them has the worst logo. The winner gets a little of your time and talent, and you’ve shown a little more of your personality and engaged them as individuals – not a faceless mob.

Implementing these strategies might mean you’ll soon be the expert on how to get retweets and increase followers – or you could please RT what you see here!

 

For information on our social media marketing services, send us a quick request!

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Slay The Monster: Custom Facebook URLs

August 18, 2011 Facebook 2 Comments

Wondering how to get your own custom Facebook URL?  This is a quick guide on how to change the URL for your Facebook Business Page.

Why would you want a custom URL?

  • Branding your business
  • Easier for your customers to remember
  • It doesn’t cost you anything

*Note: You MUST have a minimum of 25 people that have liked your page.

While logged into your account, enter http://www.facebook.com/username in the address bar exactly as shown here.  Do not enter in your username, type it exactly as shown.  If you are already logged in, simply click the link provided.

This brings you to the page where you can change your URL.

In the drop down menu, choose the page you wish to change.  Enter in the space provided, the new username.  Your URL will look similar to this – http://www.facebook.com/businessname.

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5 Paid Social Monitoring Tools

August 6, 2011 Social Monitoring 2 Comments

 Need an upgrade?

This is part two of our Social Monitoring Tools posts.  For companies that are looking for a more comprehensive social monitoring program, check out the six tools below.

Radian6 – Radian6 is probably one of the most popular social monitoring programs available, here’s why – Radian6 Engagement Console is amazing.  It’s a desktop platform that helps you listen, engage and collaborate between departments and teams.  The dashboard features social CRM and analytics integration, workflow management, data filtering, segmentation, easy reporting and more.

 

Sysomos – Sysomos has two products, Heartbeat which is their monitoring and measurement tool and MAP (Media Analysis Platform) which offers insight and business intelligence.  What we like about Sysomos (beside the clever product naming) is the customization of the dashboard, competitive analysis, the key metrics measurement and the geography and demographics which tells you where conversations are taking place (country, city, state) and by gender and profession.

 

Viralheat - Viralheat offers an easy to use dashboard, enterprise settings and an interesting feature called Human Intent.  Human Intent is Viralheat’s analytics platform.  With Human Intent, you can easily identify leads, integrate with Salesforce securely and train it to verify leads and check for accuracy.  What’s great about Viralheat is the price and it’s a nice platform to learn about social monitoring.

 

Trackur – Trackur’s easy to use dashboard is one feature that should not be overlooked.  Many of the  tools on this list are really comprehensive and can get really complicated if you’re new to social monitoring.  Other nice features are TrackurRank that helps you to understand the influence and reach of people discussing your brand and Trackur Insights which is Trackur’s analytics which analyze your saved searches and lets you know what’s buzzing.

 

SAS Social Media Analytics – SAS has a plethora of software offerings for businesses.  We’ve found that SAS’s Social Media Analytics is a fantastic program that features data integration, text mining, analytics (of course), mobile interfacing, a media intelligence portal and conversation center.  Each of these is a reason to use the program but if you’re looking for more, what we love about it is the competitive intelligence tab which allows you to compare your brand with your competitors and the phrase cloud which helps you gain insight into how consumers talk about your brand or products.

For information on our social media marketing services including social monitoring, send us a quick request!

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5 Free Social Montioring Tools

August 5, 2011 Social Monitoring 1 Comment

 

Wondering what people are saying about your business? Your competitors? What about being able to find people that are actively searching for your products and services right now? The importance of socially monitoring conversations is growing. Check out these 5 Free Social Monitoring Tools to help you get started!

 

Google Alerts – We love Google Alerts because they are delivered directly into your email or feed, get only the best results delivered or all of them, receive search results from News Sources, Blog Posts, Videos & Discussions and get them delivered once a day, once a week or as they happen.  You can also change the settings for each keyword you track.

 

Social Mention – A social media search and analysis program that lets you pull information from over 100 different social networks in real-time and puts it into a single stream of info.  Another feature of Social Mention are Social Media Alerts.  Much like Google Alerts but specifically for Social Media.  Very cool.

 

Kurrently - Kurrently searches Facebook and Twitter in real-time and offers a few different options on stream speed, looking at just Facebook, just Twitter or both and where you want to search – on Kurrently, Google, Bing, Baidu or YouTube.

 

Monitter – Monitter allows you to do keyword searches in Twitter real-time and gives you an organizational dashboard featuring columns for your searches.

 

Addictomatic – The cool thing about Addictomatic is customization.  Type in your keyword, click create….tada!  Your very own social monitoring dashboard with info from a variety of sources including Bing News, Google Blog Search, Twitter Search, Youtube, Wikio, FriendFeed and many more.

For information on our social media marketing services including social monitoring, send us a quick request!

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10 Best Social Media Blogs

August 3, 2011 Social Media 2 Comments

 


What’s the best thing about blogs? There’s a lot of best things. My favorite thing about blogs is the education and different points of view I can get from millions of people. What’s the best thing about blogs that have passionate authors? They LOVE what they do and you can see it in every sentence. Social Media is a huge industry and growing bigger every minute. Each blog on our list has a common thread – passion for social media and knowledge out the wazoo! We’ve compiled a list of the 10 best social media blogs out there. Enjoy!

Convince & Convert

Why we love this blog – Jay Baer provides info you can start using right now. Each post is well thought If you want to see, well… hear Jay in action, check out the Facebook Success Summit 2011 taking place on October 5th. It’s an online event you won’t want to miss!

Hubspot

Why we love this blog – Hubspot is great because they are so technical.  It’s a true geek’s blog!

Social Media Examiner

Why we love this blog – Social Media Examiner comes from Michael Stelzner, Author of Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition and his team.  With the array of  experts and unique content, you can’t help but to subscribe!

Copyblogger

Why we love this blog – Blogging is Social Media glue.  At Copyblogger you get expert advice on improving your blog and writing skills.

MarketingProfs Daily Fix

Why we love this blog – Although this blog isn’t completely dedicated to social media, its one of the best marketing blogs out there.  Ann Handley, the Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs really understands the audience and I believe has her finger on the pulse of marketers everywhere.

Social Media Explorer

Why we love this blog – Jason Falls has been putting out solid content for years.

Mari Smith

Why we love this blog – How can you not love this bubbly, Canadian Scot? Mari brings her personality and passion for social media to every thing she does. We love you Mari!

 Kikolani

Why we love this blog – Kristi Hines is the brain behind this great social media blog.

Mashable

Why we love this blog – If you want to know what’s going on in the world of Facebook, Twitter, Google, social media, etc, you can’t avoid Mashable.  The best social media news blog around!

Chris Brogan

Why we love this blog – Chris really has a firm handle on marketing and how to use it to build your brand and business.  He’s got his hands in tons of cool and interesting things like being CEO of  Human Business Works, Co-Founder of Podcamp, and writes for some great business magazines like Entrepreneur and Success.  Check out his blog and you’ll see why we love it.

Soshable

Why we love this blog – JD Rucker and  his blog Soshable has been putting out great content since 2008.  Who doesn’t love getting great content on a regular basis?

 

 

On a side note – A big thanks to everyone that shares their passion no matter if its for social media or bee keeping.  I believe passion is essential to living a happy life and hope that everyone finds their passion!

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Facebook Success Summit 2011

July 26, 2011 Social Media 0 Comments


Have you heard the buzz about Facebook Success Summit 2011—the web’s largest online Facebook marketing conference?

Before I tell you how this virtual summit will help your business attract great customers and prospects, gain a unique competitive advantage, and measure your Facebook marketing results, let me share a story with you.

PROOF FACEBOOK MARKETING WORKS…

About a year a half ago Michael Stelzner (founder of Social Media Examiner) started a Facebook page for his blog that targeted marketers and small business owners. He also integrated core Facebook functionality into his website. Almost overnight, a large and loyal community emerged on his Facebook page.

He was skeptical at first. But now he has more than 50,000 active Facebook fans. And Facebook is the number two source of traffic to his website. Facebook was instrumental in generating 1.7 million dollars in sales for his business last year.

Michael’s story is not unique. More than 10,000 websites are integrating Facebook functionality every day! With 750 million active users, Facebook offers an incredible opportunity for marketers.

Your customers (and prospects) are using Facebook every day. It’s a new marketing frontier because Facebook bypasses all the costly middlemen and allows you to engage directly with your customers and prospects! AND this presents an enormous opportunity for you.

SO WHAT’S THIS ABOUT?

Michael (and his team) have been working for months to bring the best minds in social media together in a fully online event called Facebook Success Summit 2011.

A significant 2,900 marketers and business owners from around the world attended his last Success Summit. Businesses were transformed. In fact, 96% of attendees said they’d attend again.

This summit’s focus is to empower you to implement successful Facebook marketing tactics, track and measure your Facebook ROI, and see how successful Facebook campaigns were executed. Nineteen of the world’s leading Facebook superstars will be summit instructors.

Presenters include Guy Kawasaki (author, Enchantment), Mari Smith (co-author, Facebook Marketing), Dave Kerpen (author, Likeable Social Media), Paul Dunay (co-author, Facebook Marketing for Dummies), Jesse Stay (author, Facebook Application Development for Dummies), Robert Scoble (co-author, Naked Conversations), Michael Stelzner (founder, Social Media Examiner), and experts from Intuit, PETCO, Applebees and Intel.

Plus join Jay Baer (co-author, The Now Revolution), Chris Treadaway (co-author, Facebook Marketing), Amy Porterfield (co-author, Facebook Marketing All-In-One for Dummies), and Andrea Vahl (co-author, Facebook Marketing All-In-One for Dummies)–just to name a few.

Attendees at our last summit included well-known organizations such as General Mills, American Express, Intel, San Francisco Giants, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Intuit, Harvard Business School, 3M, Kellogg, Staples, General Electric, MetLife, HP, Fox TV, LexisNexis, and the U.S. Army. But you don’t need to be a big business to benefit!

This is the world’s largest online Facebook event designed to empower marketers and business owners to master Facebook marketing. And the great news is it’s a live online conference you can attend from your home or office.

Go here now to learn more about the Facebook Success Summit 2011!

Here’s to your success!

**Nineteen of the most successful Facebook marketing pros will show you how to use Facebook to market and grow your business. Remember, the experts teach the sessions live (and it’s all online). So you don’t need to leave your home or office!

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Twitter Apps Increase Tweet Potential

July 7, 2011 Twitter 0 Comments

Twitter is a useful tool for marketing. With apps you can boost your “Tweet Potential”. Tweet Potential is a term we came up with to describe how much potential your tweets have to make an impact, get re-tweets and grow your following.  Check out these cool Twitter apps to improve your Tweet Potential!

HootSuite Pro

If you haven’t checked out HootSuite, drop what you’re doing and go sign up! It will make your life much easier and help keep things organized. HootSuite is a social media dashboard that where you can schedule and publish to multiple social networks including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Ping.fm, MySpace, Mixi and WordPress. You have the ability to monitor conversations, manage RSS feeds, and track your social reach. HootSuite has a free version that is excellent for social networkers. Hootsuite Pro offers some major incentives for a very low fee of $5.99 per month. Unlimited social profiles & RSS feeds, enhanced social analytics, ability to add a team member, integration of Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, opt out of seeing promoted tweets, receive influence scores and URL parameters. Whew! For anyone active in social marketing, this is a must-have. It’s ease of use is also a contributing factor to making our list of “apps worth using”.

Social Base

Social Base is a new product available from oneforty.com. The cool thing about Social Base is it combines several social marketing tasks, provides you with the tools and gives you a checklist to mark them off as you go. You also get a 30 day free trial to check it out and see if you like it too!

Actionly

Actionly is a social media listening platform that allows you to monitor keywords, your brand, competitors, products and industry terms across multiple networks.

Cool features: Actively will automatically tag a comment or tweet with a positive, negative or neutral rating, allowing you to take action as necessary.

Finding influencers is an easy task with Actionly since they are located and placed under the influencer tab for you. You’re able to look at their past tweets to verify their “influencer status” and then interact with them straight from Actionly.

Reports can be scheduled to be sent to your boss, yourself or your client and are sent out by 9am EST.

Raven Tools

Raven Tools is not just social marketing software, it encompasses many different areas of internet marketing but for purposes of this post I’m going to focus strictly on the social tools. Raven pulls info from all of your social profiles and keeps them under the social tab. The different sub-sections and various things each one does is amazing. Below are a few of the major details about each section. Personas – Like many others, you may use different social networks for both business and personal functions. I personally have several different Facebook accounts, a couple Twitter accounts and a couple youtube channels. Keeping up with them all is tricky and I often forget to update some of them. With Personas, you place all of your profiles in one place. It stores characteristics, account details and easy access to all of your social profiles. Facebook – Analytic details including likes, comments, fan posts, page views and traffic to your website.

Twitter – Analytic details including tweets, connections, mentions, friends, reach and traffic to your website.

Youtube – Analytic details including views, subscribers and traffic to your website. You can also view the different videos you have on your channel, monitor them and check the activity of each video.

Monitor – Monitor blogs, microblogs, videos, comments, bookmarks, images, events, news, audio and Q&A for specific keywords.

KnowEm – Allows you to register your brand or username with multiple social networks.

Forum Search – Enter in a keyword and OMGILI (oh my god I love it) searches communities, discussion threads and message boards to find your keyword and give you the results by date, title and excerpt. It does not tell you where the information was posted however and can take you anywhere from linkedin.com to webhostingtalk.com. This is a  great tool when looking for ideas for blog articles.

 

For more information on our social media marketing services, check out our website!

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