So who are the main players in social media right now? We have a list running through some of the most prominent social media sites and why you should consider using them for your business. Check out the infographic below to learn more about these sites and how they are growing.
Facebook is still on top, not surprising really. It now has over 1.15 billion users, 50% of which log in every day. Just think of all those potential customers. Due to Facebook being so regularly experienced on mobile, users are exposed to marketing and brands even more frequently outside of the home.
Google+ has shot past the competition into second place and is now the fastest growing network ever! If that’s not reason enough to jump on the wagon, how about the fact that using it can make your business much more discoverable.
Twitter remains an important player. With 36% of marketers finding a customer via Twitter in 2013, you should consider making this top microblogging location a part of your marketing mix.
LinkedIn should be an obvious choice for any business looking to make connections, check out competitors, share content and keep up with the business world. Even more so now that it has over 200 million users.
Flickr, Instagram, Pinterest and other image based networks might not be the right fit for every business, but if they are for yours, you should rush to them and get interacting with their user bases. Instagram alone is 137 million strong!
See the original infographic here and check out some more affiliate marketing infographics on pinterest.
SEO experts, writers, marketers, and business owners have been writing about guest blogging for years now. Guest blogging is something that should help your company improve it’s branding and visibility, SEO, and reader satisfaction, so knowing you need to create a guest blogging strategy is pretty much a no-brainer. However, as Google continues to grow and develop, guest blogging is becoming trickier. It’s hard to know how to be successful when it comes to building links and exposure anymore, so of course it makes sense to go to the man with all the answers: Head of Google Webspam, Matt Cutts.
A Quick Recap: Why Guest Blogging Is Beneficial
For those who are unfamiliar, guest blogging is essentially the act of writing a piece of content, publishing that content on a different (but related and relevant) website on the web, and then earning a link back to your company in an author bio in return. As discussed above, guest blogging is a great way to build up your linking portfolio as well as earn you visibility with a new audience and really show the world that you know your stuff.
There are a few different strategies used by companies today. In general, how you want to setup your guest blogging has been according to your niche and size, and this isn’t going to change. A few different ways it has worked in the past include:
Hire a guest blogging agency. This is usually what very large companies do when they have a lot of guest posting needs. There are many agencies out there that do nothing but guest blog and build links for websites, and if you do your research, you can find plenty that produce great content.
Hire a team of in-house writers. This is usually the option for larger companies who don’t like going the freelance route. It gives you more control.
Hire freelance writer/writers. This is probably the most popular option. If you just want a little bit extra visibility, hire one or two writers to freelance is an easy way to make it happen. Be careful though and always monitor these writers!
Guest blog on your own. This is usually the route for very small companies. If you’re just getting started, and particularly if you work in an odd niche, this should work just fine.
As you can see, some of these strategies produce quite a few guest posts. In the past this was a great way to improve SEO because you earned a lot of authoritative backlinks and all of that visibility, not to mention it allowed you to really work with a variety of blogs (also good for SEO). While this still works, Cutts says that moving forward guest blogging approaches need not be quite as forceful.
Why Cutts Say Moderation Is a Necessity (And How to React)
The biggest thing to understand is that Google is working to put less emphasis on linking and more emphasis on the actual content. While backlinks will still be important, they aren’t as important, and therefore Cutts explained in his latest video that moderation is the key to success moving forward. You can watch the video below:
As you can see, Cutts does make it clear that Google can easily tell the difference between a guest blog and a blog that paid for links, so no worries there. Still, moderation will allow you to make sure that you are not just spinning articles; you’re actually writing meaningful content, which will be better for your reputation in the long run.
Do you have a guest blogging strategy that doesn’t worry about moderation? What do you think is the best way to use guest blogging to your advantage? Let us know your story and your thoughts in the comments below.
Amanda DiSilvestrogives small business and entrepreneurs SEO advice ranging from keyword density to recovering from Panda and Penguin updates. She writes for HigherVisibility.com, a nationally recognized SEO firm that offers online marketing services to a wide range of companies across the country.
As the SEO world has recently been turned on its head by the new Penguin 2.1 and Hummingbird algorithm we at reelWebDesign.com are compelled to focus more on two areas:
Helping small businesses with local SEO (getting you found locally on the web with geographically driven keywords and intentions in mind).
Helping you with social media marketing and content production.
Our focus will be in these two areas more than ever and it will benefit your business and ours in many ways. How? Google’s new algorithm is centered around people and helping them find what they are looking for. In essence they have bcome the new ASK.com (even though they’d never admit it), but where ASK had failed to deliver good results Google claims that they will deliver excellent results, and who am I to argue with them as they do own the worlds largest search engine! So content is what we are going to focus on for our clients. However, many local businesses like pizza parlors and locksmiths don’t need to answer a lot of questions for their consumers and others just don’t have time or money to create fresh content, for these businesses they just need to be found! That’s the second part of Google’s algorithm: where having citations is more important than ever (a citation is basically a listing on any of the major local directories and social networks on the web i.e. Foursquare, Yelp, zagat, 8Coupons, Citysearch etc.). So we have partnered with Yext to make it inexpensive, consistent and easy to implement. Note: Consistency is extremely important as the search engines will see the same business as a separate entity if listed with different names, phone numbers or addresses. This inconsistency will water down your search or ‘Google juice’, thereby lowering your ranking.
In addition to teaming up with Yext® we are offering a free Google plus/places listing optimization as part of our local SEO plan. Google, as no surprise, values it’s own social networks, Google Plus and Google Places over all others. We believe this focus on providing relevant content, social media management and marketing and local SEO with Yext® as our partner will provide excellent results for all new and current customers. Please watch the video below about the Yext® service.
Our focus will also be to deliver responsive or mobile ready web design (responsive web design is developing a website that changes or responds to diferent sized screens for a better user experience. Example: Our website is responsive and will appear differently on your laptop, tablet and phone).
Why responsive/mobile ready?
Analytics firm BIA/Kelsey has predicted that mobile search queries will overtake desktop queries by 2015. If your website isn’t mobile ready then you’ll be missing out on the larger piece of search. Compound this with the push in the SEO world to focus more on local search and you’ll understand that mobile search is the area of largest growth and the best bet for acquiring new customers from this point forward.
Social Media
So where does social media fit into the equation? Social media is similar to the old word of mouth marketing… on steroids! It allows for your message to be broadcast to countless people in an extremely fast fashion. It also helps with search engine rankings. The more a post is shared the more the search engines see it as valuable. Google+, although an underused social network by most, is extremely important as Google values it above all other social networks. For this reason we post your message to the main 4 driving forces on the social web: Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. If you have a blog we’ll also post your article/blog post to various other networks as well including: Delicious, StumbleUpon, Plurk, Newsvine, Scoopit, Diigo, Folk and Hubpages to name a few. This will not only boost your viewership but also your Alexa rating which influences search engine ranking as well. It is from the social networks that search engines are able to personalize your user expereince and give you results that are customized for your personal liking’s. So as you can see social media is an extremely important factor in online marketing and its value to both people and search engines is growing more important every year.
Conclusion
It’s been a tumultuous year in search marketing but I believe I know where it is all headed and I see why Google is doing this great transition. With Google watches, glasses and more voice search integration on the horizon the way we perform and undertake search is going to change dramatically. Search will move more towards speech and visual cues with geographical underpinnings wrapped around your personal likes and dislikes i.e. personalized mobile search. People will be asking more questions about: ‘what’s in the area’, ‘how to do things’, ‘what do you know about this’ and ‘what’s going on now that I would like’. From this information, surprisingly, we can see that small businesses do have a future as there will be more of a need to discover and cater to micro-niches. So as long as we, small businesses, focus on a niche and excel at it we can have a successful life as Google and other social networks will actually be driving people towards us.
The future brings more focus to everything, the question is what will your business focus on, and our job at reelWebDesign.com will be to find you your appropriate crowd through all of our partner networks including our latest, Yext®.
The world of marketing is changing rapidly. In the information age, traditional methods of advertising have begun to lose their luster, forcing companies to raise the bar on how they market their brands and products. Central to this new advertising paradigm is content marketing: attracting customers not by “selling” them a brand, but instead by creating interesting, entertaining, or compelling content that will guide customer behavior without making an explicit sales pitch. Many large brands are now making effective use of content marketing to change the way customers engage with their brand.
Vouchercloud®
When it comes to variety, Vouchercloud® offers instant delivery of money-saving coupons on mobile devices and voucher codes for online shopping. The use of social media and YouTube is to showcase its content marketing and is delivered well. Check out this video below, that silently showcases a family enjoying the benefits of Vouchercloud® as they travel through a fictional restaurant meal, train ride, and movie theater — all without making a traditional sales pitch. Videos such as these showcase the benefits of services that Vouchercloud offer without the need for spokespeople or even explanations of their services, instead focusing on a brief, entertaining video that shows customers what their service is all about and the discounts they can save.
Timex®
For its iconic IRONMAN brand, venerable watch company Timex® knew it had to break out of its traditional advertising practices and focus on a new kind of marketing. They eventually unveiled the “I am a Runner” campaign, choosing to focus not on the products themselves, but on the storytelling opportunities involved in running and the Ironman challenge. Timex® already had a strong connection to the Ironman running challenge, and so capitalized on that connection by creating a Facebook app that collected runners’ stories and photos and allowed real athletes to share their experiences.
Burberry®
Clothing company Burberry®, one of the oldest fashion brands in the industry at 157 years, sought to freshen up their market image and take some new approaches to advertising. Investing heavily in digital advertising, Burberry® launched two projects. The Burberry® Acoustic project, unveiled in 2010, featured a series of videos showcasing up-and-coming British musicians (all wearing Burberry® clothing, of course), and the Burberry® Kisses project involved a website that allowed users to capture their unique “kiss print” on their computer webcams, modify the kisses with virtual “lipstick,” and then share with others. The focus on customer engagement and participation spread awareness of Burberry’s iconic brand.
Red Bull®
One of the most memorable and resonant content marketing campaigns in recent memory has come from Red Bull®. The energy drink company took its slogan (“Red Bull gives you wings”™) to the limit when, as the centerpiece to their “Stratos” campaign, they sent daredevil Felix Baumgartner into space to perform a record-breaking dive from low orbit. The video of the jump, which showed Baumgartner’s successful plummet to earth at Mach 1.25, garnered over eight million simultaneous live streams on YouTube. The photos of Baumgartner’s landing on Facebook gathered over 200,000 “likes” within minutes of its posting. Red Bull created massive awareness for its brand and raised the bar for content marketing everywhere, without turning the Stratos event into a commercial.
The scale and scope of Red Bull’s® marketing efforts have raised the bar for other content marketers worldwide — not every company, obviously, can afford to send a man into space to promote their products. But in the world of content marketing, ingenuity and creativity frequently trump limitless budgets and high production values, and with enough inventiveness, even the most modest content marketing effort can achieve a massive audience.
Author: Hannah is a writer who works alongside the travel, fashion and food brands for vouchercloud.com. We look forward to hearing your thoughts on content marketing for success and any tips you may have.
SEO experts, writers, marketers, and business owners have been writing about guest blogging for years now. Guest blogging is something that should help your company improve it’s branding and visibility, SEO, and reader satisfaction, so knowing you need to create a guest blogging strategy is pretty much a no-brainer. However, as Google continues to grow and develop, guest blogging is becoming trickier. It’s hard to know how to be successful when it comes to building links and exposure anymore, so of course it makes sense to go to the man with all the answers: Head of Google Webspam, Matt Cutts.
