Tag Archives: Social Media Marketing

How You Can Use Instagram For Marketing

Blogging, Instagram marketing, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, , ,

instagram marketingIt takes more than just having an Instagram account to market products on the site.  There’s a lot more to it than just posting a bunch of photos, too. You need to have a full blown strategy that works and that is effective.  So before you start blindly posting pictures of your products and taking over your followers’ feeds, make sure that you have a good grasp of what types of photos are the best for marketing purposes.  The following are some great ways to use your photos for marketing your company on Instagram.

Think of the Environment of the Photos

Not everyone has a product that works in every photo or that could really be called interesting.  If you find that no matter how you shoot the picture you’re just not putting out photos that have that ‘wow factor’, then you need to rethink the photo shoot.

It may be that the item is boring but your background is boring, too.  You can really boost a photo by showing an action shot of the item with interesting people using or wearing it.  A great location could also be a way to turn out a more interesting photo.  If your office is by the beach, try a setting with waves crashing in the background.  If you live in the desert, use some cactus with a beautiful sunset to make the photo phenomenal, for example.

Show the End Result

Many people in the service industry, like beautician, car detailers and other industries do a wonderful thing for their customers.  If your company is in this type of industry then you should post photos that show what you started with and how it turned out.  Post a photo of the hair before you cut and styled it and then after.  You can do the same with the nasty dirty car that you made look brand new.  This is a great marketing technique that has been used for years and has been very effective. You might also benefit from paying for instagram followers but remember they won’t give you interaction, only a boost to your numbers.

Don’t Forget Geotags

You may not know this but you can actually geotag your photos so your fans can see your location.  Even if you have a website, there will be local people who you want to visit your brick and mortar store.  This is a great forum to get more people to your store or physical location by offering discounts for those who say they saw your photo contest on Instagram.  You could also offer a discount to the first two or three people who show up and says they saw your ad campaign on the site.   Geotagging is a great way to get your physical location out to a wide group of people that live in your physical area.

Instagram is a great marketing tool if you use it effectively.  Don’t forget to make your photos interesting to all your followers by showing your products in interesting locations or by showing before and after pictures that highlight your service.  Don’t forget to geotag your pictures so you can get more people to your physical location.

What other tips would you add?

Our guest blogger info:
Susan Darling loves Instagram and writing tips and hints to help others learn how to get the most from it when using it for business or for pleasure. She posts photos of nature scenes and flowers and also has an IG account for her business.

5 Must-Haves for Social Media Management

SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Web Design, ,

social mediaSocial media has grown from a curiosity to an integral piece of corporate strategy in the space of only a few years. Nearly overnight, companies have brought on whole teams of specialists to craft effective social media strategies and manage multiplying numbers of social media accounts. Companies are hungry for better social media tools to engage their constituents. Below is a list of five features key to delivering on a social media strategy.

1) Scheduling
Social media doesn’t sleep, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to! Ensure your social media management tool of choice allows you to schedule messages in advance. So even if you’re in New York, you can schedule messages out to your customers in Tokyo during their workday.

If you want to take scheduling to the next level, look for a tool that offers the ability to schedule large batches of messages at once. This will be a super useful time-saver when it comes to managing campaigns or contests that require heavy messaging around a certain period of time.

2) Geo
When it comes to interacting with your customers, those in different locations may have different needs, speak different languages or follow different trends. You’re going to want a tool that optimizes your searches and filters your searches by language to help you curate relevant content for different demographics.

3) Keywords
Social media is also an effective way for businesses to keep their finger on the pulse. Setting up keywords or search streams provide insight into what is trendy among your customers. This can help you develop a marketing strategy that focuses on customer’s lifestyles and personal preferences.

Keywords are useful for keeping track of competitors’ activities but they’re also useful for tracking brands that are complementary to your offering. If your product is often purchased in conjunction with another product, keep an eye on the complementary product’s social media activity to take advantage of promotions or recent sales, as these are potential leads ready to be converted.

4) Collaboration
It takes two to tango especially when it comes to being social. Collaboration is key when it comes to developing and executing an effective social media campaign. Ensure your social media management tool enables you to seamlessly collaborate with your team to ensure you execute an integrated social media management strategy.

Social Media Marketing5) Reporting
Gone are the days of social media purely being about ‘building buzz.’ It is now a line item in budgets as companies invest resources in these channels and there is an expectation for reports which show ROI for social media outreach.

Make sure your tool has the ability to analyze important metrics such as click-through rates on shortened links, clicks by region and top referrers. It’s also important to have access to Facebook Insights and Google Analytics.

The most effective tools will provide the ability to access in-depth granular metrics on the efficacy of your social media programs. This will allow you to determine which messages resulted in the highest number of conversions, which platform is providing the greatest return and which time of day is most effective to drive traffic.

What does it take to go Pro?
Social is here to stay and to maintain a competitive advantage, businesses need to stay abreast of this ever-evolving space. HootSuite Pro help teams engage with audiences and analyze campaigns across multiple social networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn from one secure web-based dashboard.

By Peter Marino

HootSuite - Social Media Management

9 Ways to Effectively Use Pinterest for Marketing

Pinterest, SEO, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Web Design, , ,

Pinterest MarketingSo you’ve decided to enter into the fastest growing social network, Pinterest, and you want to know how to use it effectively to better market your business, product or service? Good choice! Lucky for you I compiled a list of what I believe to be the 9 most important tactics for Pinterest marketing…so far.

1. Keep Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in Mind

Google, Bing and Yahoo! all stand at attention when new and original content is made and shared socially. Therefore, as with any other web marketing undertaking you should optimize your pins with links, categories, keywords and hashtags. It is very important to pin images and content from your website and not just uploading it because a link from Pinterest to your site is a page rank 7 (PR7) back link (very important in SEO terms).

2. Share Other Businesses Content on Pinterest
Why should you share, like and pin other peoples content? Because if you share they’re more likely to share. This is especially important for newcomers to Pinterest. As Mom always said, you won’t make friends unless you share.

3. Pin Your Videos
Create a pinboard for videos and pin all of your current videos there. Video trumps text in terms of social sharing on the web so if you got them, flaunt them!

4. Share Images from your Blog on a Blog Posts Board
Nothing engages more than images so make sure you have great images to go along with your blog posts and post them to an appropriate Pinterest board.

5. Make and Share Infographics
We live in a world of instant gratification and infographics fulfill that need with straight to the point visual information. You can show how why people need your product or service passively by presenting beautiful visually enticing data. People share and read infographics much more than articles so if your not using and sharing infographics to get your point across your missing a huge social sharing opportunity.

6. Pin Your Product and Service Images with a Pinterest Board
Almost everyone has an image to showcase a particular product or service on their website (if you don’t you should!). Pin that image with a full description of the service onto a “Product” or “Services” Pinterest board for your company. If you have a Book make the cover of the book the cover picture of the board. If you’re a fitness trainer put your best ‘before and after’ shot on the cover of your weight loss program board. Be creative and get attention, after all Pinterest is all about image!

7. Make an ‘Events’ Board
If you hold live or web based events often then you should have a pinboard for events. This will allow people to get to know you personally while also promoting your event to a larger audience.

8. Create a Slideshare Boards
Slideshare, if you’re not familiar with it, is basically a social sharing site specifically for PowerPoint presentations. You upload your Slideshare presentation and share it with fellow SlideShare friends and hopefully they’ll share it with their friends, and so on. This is a great way to show your authority and expertise in your field and potentially gain business from it in the long term. You should share your work across all of your social networks including Pinterest.

9. Analyze your campaign using Reachli

Reachli analytics for Pinterest

Use Reachli for Pinterest Analytics

If you haven’t heard of Reachli you will. Formerly called Pinerly, they track all of the analytics on your Pinterest account so you know what’s being shared, liked and seen. Analytics is always the most important tactic for tracking ROI and it’s no different on Pinterest.

By Peter Marino on Google+

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HyperSmash

YouTube as a Marketing Tool

Social Media Marketing, , , , ,

YouTube has only been online for a few short years, but it has quickly become one of the hottest destinations on the Internet. Once a little-used medium due to slow Internet connections, the widespread use of broadband has made online video a popular attraction. YouTube is one of the first sites to have been built around online video, and its ease of use and variety of videos has made it extremely popular.

Marketers were quick to catch on to the possibilities presented by YouTube. They began to create “viral videos”, clips that were intended to draw interest and spark widespread distribution. YouTube’s embed feature allows anyone to place videos on their blog or website, so by creating funny or informative videos, marketers could spread their message far and wide.

Any online marketer can harness the power of YouTube to promote his products, services and website. Here are some types of videos that tend to do well:

* Popular commercials – If you have a television commercial that has brought you lots of business, putting it on YouTube can get you more mileage out of it. And best of all, you don’t have to pay for airtime.

* How-to videos – While some Internet users just want to be entertained, many of them come online looking for information. How-to videos allow them to see how something is done rather than just reading about it. Businesses capitalize on this by producing videos about how to do things that relate to their products or services.

* Video from special events – If you’ve held or participated in a conference, seminar or other special event, posting a video of it on YouTube could get you lots of traffic. So don’t forget to take your video camera along!

* Funny videos – Lots of Internet users visit YouTube when they need a good laugh. If you can whip up a funny video that features your products or services, there’s a good chance that it could be highly rated and go viral.

A frequent mistake of YouTube marketers is just uploading their video and hoping for the best. Here are some simple steps you can take to increase your video’s chances of success.

* Take care to put your video in the right category, and make full use of tags. Add tags that describe your business and products, as well as the video’s subject matter. This will help users find your video more easily.

* Write a good description that contains keywords that one might use to find your video. Also, be sure to include your site’s URL in the description. Always include audio in your video as well!

* Be sure to allow embedding, comments and ratings. Allowing others to embed your video will give it more exposure. Making it possible for them to comment will generate discussion, which is also good for your video’s success. And allowing ratings could put you higher in YouTube’s search rankings if people like your video.

YouTube is an invaluable marketing tool. It gives businesses the opportunity to use the popularity of online video to their advantage. Anyone can create a video with Windows Movie Maker and upload it to YouTube, so why not give it a try if you haven’t already?

By Peter Marino