Social Media Marketing: How to Use Social Media for Marketing Social media marketing is a powerful way for businesses of all sizes to reach prospects and customers. Your customers are already interacting with brands through social media, and if you're not speaking directly to your audience through social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, you're missing out! Great marketing on social media can bring remarkable success to your business, creating devoted brand advocates and even driving leads and sales. Social Media Marketing 101: What Is Social Media Marketing? Social media marketing, or SMM, is a form of internet marketing that involves creating and sharing content on social media networks in order to achieve your marketing and branding goals. We’ve created this guide to provide you with an introduction to social media marketing and some starter social media marketing tips and training to improve your business's social presence. With these tips, you can begin developing your own social media marketing expert plan.
New Data: Why Your Fans Aren't Following You on Social Media When it comes to social media, many of us take an “if you build it, they will come” approach. Popular advice tells us that consumers want to be able to connect and engage with brands on just about every platform imaginable, so your brand should hop on any new platform immediately. (What’s your Ello strategy, by the way?) But does that approach actually work? New research from HubSpot suggests otherwise. Where Consumers Expect You to Be Our new study on study based on responses from 569 consumers, The Social Lifecycle, revealed that consumers have high hopes for brands. Not surprisingly, Facebook and Twitter are the most popular platforms -- 84% of respondents expect you to be on Facebook, and 64% expect you to be on Twitter. Then, things get messy: Instagram, Pinterest, and Google+ have around 30% of respondents. Instagram is more popular among the younger set (18-44) while Google+ is expected more from older consumers (45+). When we break things out by gender, more differences emerge.
Tools to Centrally Monitor Your Social Mentions Do you want to find company mentions beyond news articles and blogs? Do you want to monitor social mentions and metrics? Mention and SumAll each offer a single dashboard so you can track mentions on social media, websites and blogs. In this article you’ll discover how Mention and SumAll provide all the data you need to get the big picture of your online presence. Find out how to centrally monitor your social mentions. Mention Mention.net is a real-time Internet listening tool that lets you create alerts (similar to Google Alerts). Alerts Creating a Mention alert is easy: Simply click Create Alert and fill in the parameters. When you get your results, if there are too many or they’re irrelevant, you can filter them by adding ALL or NONE keywords in the advanced settings. Add the keywords or phrases you want to monitor. On the next screen, you can choose what to monitor. Are there websites out there that you know are promotional or provide aggregated or irrelevant content? Dashboard Price SumAll
10 SEO Tools for Small Business Search engine optimization (SEO) is a small business website's best friend. From driving traffic by ranking higher on search engine results to maximizing content marketing campaigns and improving Web advertisements, SEO can help a business build its brand, expand its reach and, ultimately, increase revenue. SEO doesn't just happen on its own, however. 1. What better way to improve your SEO than by going straight to the source? Google AdWords — Find the right keywords to use based on search volume. 2. If you need help with SEO-friendly keywords, you can get thousands of keyword ideas instantly with a keyword suggestion tool such as Ubersuggest. 3. Is content marketing part of your business plan and branding strategy? 4. SEO covers everything from your website to social media accounts and everything in between, but this doesn't mean you need to log in to multiple services to measure performance. 5. How SEO-friendly is your website? 6. 7. Don't know where to start with SEO? 8. 9. 10.
10 Successful Social Media Campaign Tips Starting a successful social media campaign requires planning and putting together a sound strategy. Here are 10 tips that will get your campaign off the ground with a bang! Start with a clear goal. Before launching a social media campaign you have a lot of planning to do. You must first decide what your primary (and secondary goals) for the campaign are. You then must list out how you will measure whether the campaign has reached its goals. What tips do you have for starting a social media campaign? April 9, 2012
Social Media Marketing Podcast helps your business thrive with social media by Michael Stelzner, Social Media Examiner How to Choose the Most Effective Social Media Platform for Your Brand [INFOGRAPHIC] Go where your audience is This is a basic of marketing, digital or not. For example, If you are selling custom hunting bows, you wouldn’t advertise in the Vogue magazine. Instead, you will analyze the reader demographics and psychographics of each magazine to determine which magazines will allow you to best reach your target audience. This same process should be used for determining which social media platforms you should focus the majority of your efforts on. The infographic below from Social Barrel analyzes the audiences that frequent ten of the most popular social media platforms to help you decide where you should focus your efforts. Most Suitable Media Types By Platform To help you understand what to post on these various social media sites, this infographic explains which types of media are most suitable for each social media platform. What are Your Objectives? Improve SEOIncrease traffic to your siteIncrease brand exposureImprove customer engagement
Becoming Recommended: How to Build a Business Others Love Recommending Do you rely on word of mouth to promote your business? Are you wondering how to get more people to recommend your product or service? To learn how to build a business that’s highly recommended, I interview Paul Rand. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. In this episode I interview Paul Rand, the CEO of Zócalo Group, an agency that specializes in digital, social and word-of-mouth marketing. Paul explores how your business can become highly recommended. You’ll discover what motivates recommendations, the importance of targeting the right influencers online and the six steps to getting more positive recommendations for your business. Listen as Mike talks with Paul Rand about how to build a business others love recommending. Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below! Listen Now Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed Build a Highly Recommended Business inShare467
6 Powerful Tools For Analyzing Keyword Relevance I am going to share 6 tools that we use to optimize websites for both PPC and SEO. First, the tools that use search engines’ own algorithms to compute the relevancy of keywords for a web document: 1. Google AdWords Keyword Tool – use the website option to find how Google AdWords look at a page’s relevancy: Google AdWords Keyword Tool Yahoo! 3. Microsoft Advertising Intelligence How to use it? Hint: add a term to the page title or description then run the tool again – surprise. Notice: the tool seems to be taking into consideration the back links pointing to the analyzed document, so sometimes you will find keywords which you might think are not important on the page, or not present at all. The second round of tool are not that powerful as the ones above, and will work mostly like term/theme extractors rather than relevancy tool: 4. Web Developer Document Outline 5. W3C Semantic Extractor 6. SEOmoze Term Extractor Tool Pitstop Media offers ROI focused SEO services. Rating: 8.7/10 (6 votes cast)
10 Smart Ways to Increase Sales through Social Media It’s the holiday season, and smart retailers aren’t just advertising their Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales on television. They are also coming up with social media strategies to increase online sales throughout the remainder of the year. Social is bigger than ever, and you’re guaranteed to reach thousands, if not millions, of people with a few well-placed posts. It’s also a lot cheaper to run a social media promotion than it is to invest in offline media. Even a Google Adwords campaign can add up, and social media posts cost only a little bit of your time to pull off. Plus, you can hear the reaction from potential customers in real-time, which can help you tweak it in strategic ways to increase response. Here are nine smart ideas for using social media to boost your online sales this season. 1. If you’re doing a big holiday sale, don’t be afraid to hashtag! 2. Flash sales are a great way to drive sales because they create a sense of urgency. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Social Media: The Free Beginner's Guide from Moz Chapter 1 Introduction What is social media? "Social media" is a way for people to communicate and interact online. While it has been around since the dawn of the World Wide Web, in the last 10 years or so we've seen a surge in both the number and popularity of social media sites. Publishing content has become exponentially simpler over the last several years, which has helped skyrocket the use of social media. For businesses, the shift in web consumerism and accompanying rise in social media brings both opportunity and responsibility. Is social media just a fad? Over the last several years, there has been an explosion of growth in popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and many others. Looking for sources? Why does my company need social media? Whether you are running a small, local operation, or heading a global, enterprise-level effort, the statistics above make it clear: Your customers are online. Relationships Feedback Integration