Tag Archives: Social Media Marketing

The Complete Beginner’s Guide To Social Media Marketing

Organic SEO, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, ,

twitter-mobileHave you avoided a move towards social media marketing? For the uninitiated, social media can seem like a waste of time. But marketing is about more than frittering away time on Facebook. It can be a genuine source of profitable income and could give your SME the traction it needs to grow.

So how do you get started? How can you avoid wasting time on social media? And what tools are there to give you a helping hand?

Planning Your Strategy

Social media marketing is a time-consuming process, so be aware of this from the second you start to plan your strategy. That means:

  • Don’t waste time on networks that aren’t relevant to your industry.
  • Don’t sign up for too many networks and attempt to run all of them at once.
  • Don’t write off a network because it looks ‘boring’.

Remember: social media marketing is about using resources wisely. Bad your brand name on every site, by all means (you can use this tool to help). But don’t actively use every single network on the web. Put some in reserve and concentrate on the key networks first.

The networks you use will vary depending on your industry; LinkedIn is surprisingly good for generating referrals for B2B customers, while Facebook excels in generating interest for B2C. If you work in a different niche, such as recruitment, LinkedIn is the obvious choice, but there are other networks you can use too; you’ll find a list in this handy PDF.

Using Automation to Keep Focus

Once you’ve chosen your key networks, you need towork out how to best use your limited time in order to post updates and interact. Many brands choose to oursource this to a social media management company or agency. If you’re going it alone, automated tools can help.

There are two main types of automated social media tools. There are some that distribute one update to different networks by placing them in a queue and posting to a schedule; Buffer is a good example of this. Then, there are others that link social networks together with triggers so that an action on one results in an action on another. For example, you might want a tweet to trigger a Facebook post. Look into Zapier if this sounds useful.

Automation should be used sparingly in social media. The clue’s in the name; you still need to personally interact with fans and followers to get results. But automation gets you part way there by making link posting easier and faster.

Final Thoughts

We’re fast heading towards a world where social media marketing isn’t optional; it’s basically a prerequisite of building a great brand. If you don’t get involved now, it’ll be more difficult to build a presence on social media later when your competitors are more established.

Like SEO, social media is an ongoing activity; a marathon rather than a race. But put the effort in, focus your resources correctly and adjust your approach to fit your niche, and soon you’ll reap the rewards.

By Sam Wright

Sam Wright is an SEO expert and writer. If you’re looking to advance your marketing career, Sam recommends taking a look at the Brand Republic job boards.

How to Get More People to Read Your Articles on Social Media

Blogging, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Web Traffic, ,

social media Social media is a wonderful tool that helps expand the networks of a lot of people and businesses, and it’s especially great for people who want to share information. If you write a lot of articles and want them to get more attention, then there are a lot of things you can do to make this happen. If you’re not sure where to get started, then take the tips that are listed below. These can help you make the most of those articles you work hard to write so that they get more attention and you see more traffic through your social media sites.

1. Use Stumbleupon

This is a great tool for driving a lot of traffic to web pages because it finds content and then recommends it to users. It gives even smaller social media accounts the chance to get noticed, so it can be very useful if you’re just getting started. In fact, many users have had their sites get tens of thousands of hits just because they used Stumbleupon to drive traffic to an article they wrote. The best part is that if people like what you wrote, they are likely to follow you or bookmark your site for future use.

2. Use Your Connections

It never hurts to use your friends, especially when it comes to social media sharing. Get some of your friends who have popular accounts through social media. Ask them if they would be willing to share your article with the audiences that they have. Their sharing (and linking back to your websites) can result in a lot of traffic to your site and an incredible amount of exposure to your article. Tell your friends that you will share their articles as well, especially if it’s related to content you already have.

3. Submit to Editors

Article publishing is becoming much easier than it ever was before, so it’s something you might want to try out for yourself. As long as you don’t have a piece that is a complete ad for your products or company, you may be able to get it published. There are tons of websites you can find by doing just a simple search online for editors looking to publish articles. Send it out along with information about yourself so that the editor knows more about you. Also make sure you only send a portion of the article as a teaser, and so your content doesn’t get stolen. If you have a great article then it can easily lead to exposure through publications you may have never considered!

4. Publish it Online

If you only save your article on your computer and send it out as an e-mail, it is never going to get noticed. Instead of just sending it out to a few people, mass market it! Publish your article on your most popular social media site and then link back to it on all of your other accounts. For example, you could post your article on your blog and then link to it through your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and any other accounts. This is basically free advertising and can lead to thousands of people seeing your article without you have to do more than link to a page!

5. Use Digg

The website digg.com is a great website for people who are looking to get their interesting articles written. It’s packed full of great articles about political issues, science, the internet and so much more. You can submit to them a link for your article and see if it gets approved. If it does, then you will soon get a ton of traffic to your page. This can lead to a lot of views, but also a lot of loyal followers, if they enjoy the information that you write.

6. Keep at It

Don’t let one unsuccessful article ruin your writing for good. Keep doing it and you may find that your future pieces are more popular than you could have imagined. You never know what topics are going to gain the interest of the masses and get you more popularity on your social networking sites. Just make sure you still write articles that look nice and have good content, or else people may not want to continue reading them as you release them.

Author Bio: Joe Laden is the owner of WBTutorial.com where he reviews the best website builders and writes helpful tutorials like this Weebly tutorial.

Getting the Most ROI From Your Social Media

content marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, , , ,

Getting the Most ROI From Your Social MediaSocial media is very common for today’s business and many brands are doing all they can to establish themselves via these platforms. As many big brands have learned social can be a very challenging platform when it comes to measuring return on investment.

For companies that developed on conventional metrics and advertising models, it can be troubling understanding how valuable the online ROI is to their brand. Luckily, there are several must-know social media ROI growth tools that can be used to help succeed in this emerging marketing area.

Engage

The internet is full of user-generated content, chatter, tweets, videos and blog posts. You can empower participation by addressing customer concerns, fixing problems and harnessing the authority of brand advocates.

Remember, it is easier to fix problems than it is to ignore them. People are looking to interact and establish relationships with brands on the web. Indulging those fans through social interactions, real replies and product giveaways separate the companies or businesses that succeed from those that get stuck in the dark.

Keep Content High Quality

You should make sure that all content you publish is premium. Take advantage of Tumblr, social media and WordPress to craft strong messages. Be familiar with the rules and ensure you follow them.

Each network calls for a particular approach and language (Facebook posts are not written in a similar manner as tweets for example). Abide by a calendar for posting, and center on making the followers feel as part of the brand’s family. Applying platforms solely as selling instruments rapidly alienates clients. Employ social media experts and fight the lure to convert websites into content farms or computerized feeds.

Be Real

It is impossible to fake it on the web. You might think you have it all under control but people will smell your lies, and this will not go well for your brand. Very committed brand advocates who support your product will be the initial ones to make a noise when they sense shady behaviour or content which does not tie in with the brand culture.

When unsure, it is advisable to ask your community for assistance whenever it comes to content (they will appreciate being taken into consideration).

Incorporate Real-Time Apps

Integrate social media in all aspects of what you do. A good number of companies using Twitter feeds, ratings, reviews and comments on homepages have increased user engagement. Although this might sound very easy, adding these tools is very crucial. It empowers users to connect and share content. Moreover, constant updating betters search engine visibility more than pages that are static.

Experiment

If you do not risk something, you will gain nothing. This is true, particularly as far as social is concerned. Test tone, style as well as fresh monetizing tools, for example ‘native advertising’, which supplies sponsored content, Facebook stories and also tweets. As social media is always changing it is very important to keep experimenting with new strategies and tools to keep at the very forefront of this medium.

Our guest blogger, Jon, works with many large brands social media accounts in Perth. When not on the laptop, he is out surfing the waves of the Australian coast.

Keyword Vs Brand Inbound Links

Blogging, content marketing, guest blogging, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Viral marketing, , , , ,

internet marketing strategyWith Penguin 2.0 upon us you should be adjusting your inbound link campaign accordingly. Matt Cutts (Head of Google Spam) has given us plenty of warning about Penguin 2.0 and how you should tacking your link building.

You Will Not Get Ranked With Links Alone

Internet Marketing is not just about link building anymore; you need to focus on various other factors as well if you want to perform well on search results. If you take a look at the below graph, inbound marketing does play a large part in search engine rankings, but you cannot just focus on link building.

If your website has poor onsite SEO, no regular blog posts, no social signals and no brand signals, you will never rank. Every section in the above graph is as important as the other. Do not think of Internet marketing as ranking high on Google, instead think of it as earning high traffic volume as your goal.

In this article I will be only discussing about inbound links, Brand vs Keyword. I thought I would add this note and graph so website owners wouldn’t think creating backlinks alone would earn them more traffic!

How Your Links Should Be Created

For those of you that are not 100% keyed up with inbound marketing, I will quickly go over it. Do not do any of the below:

  • Pay for backlinks.
  • Waste your time adding links in headers, footers or sidebars.
  • Join any link scheme or automated service.
  • Include your link in spammy content.
  • Have your link on irrelevant, untrustworthy sites.

Basically keep your links looking natural by guest blogging quality content with your link included naturally.

Keyword Backlinks

For many years now having keyword backlinks used to play a huge role in the positioning of your website on Google, not so much today. A keyword backlink is your targeted keyword used as an anchor text and usually pointing back to your homepage.

I believe keyword backlinks are important, but something you shouldn’t focus all your attention on. You should never only focus on your homepage, you should always build links to all web pages within your website. Every page is important, not just your homepage so build links to all.

If you wasn’t already aware, you should only try and optimize 2 main keywords for each web page, anymore than 2 will start looking unnatural. From these 2 keywords you need to build a list of variants using Google Keyword Tool and Trends. If you are using the same keyword backlinks to your pages, it will start looking unnatural. This is why having a list of variants will keep your links looking natural with the added advantage of being ranked higher for more key phrases.

Brand Links

Brand backlinks are anchor links that contain your company name, website address or a company employee. Branding is huge with Internet marketing at the minute and will be for many years.

Creating brand backlinks will increase your websites traffic on search results in the long run. The key is creating the quality content surrounding your backlink. If your end goal is to get ranked for keywords along the lines of ‘Builder London’, your content should be focused around that theme. For example, you could write an article on how buildings have evolved in London over the past 100 years. This content will be high value and of interest to users, at the same time, 100% focused on your keyword. Instead of using a keyword backlink, use a brand backlink. This way Google will connect your brand and website with the theme of your article (Builder London), thus increasing your sites authority and trust, which will then lead to higher rankings for this keyword, amongst other variants.

Brand backlinks will give your site more authority over keyword backlinks as your content will be connected to all text within the article. Not around the targeted keyword link.

Maintain A Ratio

Before reevaluating your inbound link campaign, have a company generate an internet marketing strategy for your business, not only for your links, but for blogging and social signal. If you are promoting all of these sections, your site will see a return on visitors. I would suggest creating 5 brand links for every one keyword backlink. This way your inbound links stay looking natural.

By Kev Massey – Kev is the Sales Manager at SixtyMarketing and writes the majority of blog posts for SixtyMarketing giving free, useful Internet marketing & web design tips. Please follow Kev and his team on Facebook for their latest posts.

Last updated by at .