Welcome back! If you followed the advice in our previous blog, you've got buyer personas, a content audit, and some content templates for what you'd like to see in your web content. In this installment, we'll be discussing how to take that information and use it to create more a more specific content strategy for different aspects of your website.
Editorial Strategy
Your website should have a well-defined editorial strategy behind it, just like any publication. This will be strongly based off your buyer persona(s) because this is all about finding ways to create content that appeals to your core customer base.
This also keeps the content consistent, so that it has the same "feel" throughout your site. Here are a few things to consider:
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Self-reference: Will you refer to your business as I, we, or only by name?
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Will content be written with a first, second, or third person POV?
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What's your overall tone? Serious? Playful? Friendly?
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How will graphic elements be used, and for what purposes?
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Do you use content-heavy chunks of text, or short blurbs and bullet points?
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What social media content will you include?
Web Writing
Once you have your editorial content strategy defined, start looking at how it applies to your written web content. What sorts of topics do you want to cover on your site and in your blog? Will it be "strictly business," or will you talk about issues not directly related to your product? This should be aligned both to your overall business goals, as well as to your buyer personas.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO is, of course, one of the fundamentals of web marketing, and you need to define how you're using it.
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Are you going to just target Google (which currently owns more than 2/3 of all searches) or will you also include second-tier search engines like Bing?
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What keywords will you be using, and at what general percentage level?
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How closely will you tie your content into social media to fish for links?
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How often will you update your sitemap?
Metadata Strategy
Metadata is easy to overlook when talking about content, because it's content that very few human beings ever see. Metadata is almost exclusively targeting the content spiders that search engines use to catalog the Internet.
In general, if it can be metatagged, it should be. Create procedures to guarantee your metadata is as rich as possible, and to decide which keywords to include in it. Similarly, don't neglect rich snippets, Google's new attempt to improve on old-style metatags.
Content Management Strategy
Whether you use a Content Management System or not, you should still have procedures in place for ensuring your content is easy to develop, upload, cross-link, and revise as needed. Content can be easily reused across different platforms, saving you time and money, if you have a good content strategy governing how it's cataloged and accessed.
Content Channel Distribution Strategy
Going beyond your website itself, what other content channels are you going to use? Each has different purposes and will appeal to different demographics. Consider, for example, what you'll post to Facebook versus what goes on Twitter. Will you have a YouTube channel, or host files on your own server? Will advanced content like whitepapers be put behind an information-gathering gateway?
Phew...
Well, that's enough to consider for one day. In the next few installments, we'll be digging into a few different aspects of your content strategy in more detail: how do deal with content management, how to future-proof your content, and how to get your content writers to write to these guidelines.
See you then!
Call DeepSky Marketing to find out how you can create a meaningful and profitable content strategy for your company. DeepSky Marketing is a company that provides businesses with profitable marketing systems and verifiable return on investment (ROI). To schedule a brief no-cost consultation call 707 823-3888.
Today, we're continuing our series of high-level discussions about developing a content strategy for your website. As the title suggests, we'll be spending the next couple posts talking about the "nuts and bolts" of developing this content strategy.
As with the last few posts, this isn't about developing the content itself. It's about thinking about how and why you're developing content, so that your content can be aligned with your overall goals as a business.
Developing a Buyer Persona
For a content strategy to really work, you need to have one or more well-defined buyer personas. We touched on this in the last blog, and it's simpler than it sounds. A buyer persona is just a written description and psychological profile of who your customers are. Depending on the scope of your business, you might only have one persona (ie, "B2B customer interested in concrete products") or multiple personas, if you market to different areas and demographics.
Here are a few things to think about when developing this:
- Basic demographics: age, sex, background, socio-economic status, etc.
- Shared areas of interest among your customers.
- Common problems confronting them.
- Resources they're likely to turn to when solving a problem.
- Detail-oriented or "big picture" focused?
- Familiarity with the types of services you offer.
The more detailed and insightful you can make this profile, the more directly you can target your content to your customers.
Conducting a Content Audit
Content audits are time-consuming and somewhat tedious, but they can be invaluable for making sure your content is in line with your goals. Simply put, you review your website, page by page, cataloging details of what's included in them. This is generally best done in a spreadsheet, so you can then start analyzing the data and looking for trends.
When conducting your audit, look for:
- Type of content: picture, video, text, slideshow, etc
- Subject matter
- Keywords used
- Purpose: Informative, sales pitch, outreach, etc
- When created and last updated
- Buyer personas targeted
One side benefit to this approach is that it also allows you to identify pages on your website that are broken, out of date, or in need of updating. By spotting these pages, you can clean up your site.
Putting It Together and Creating a Content Template
Once you've got your buyer persona(s) and your content audit, you can start really strategizing. Ask questions like, "Does this content appeal to my buyers? Is it relevant to them? Is it presented in a way that will catch their interest?" If you find a page where the answer to those questions is mostly "No," that page needs to be revised or removed.
If you find trends that seem to be working well, such as pages that are especially effective, you should also create a content template. This is exactly what it sounds like. Make one or more templates that should be used as guidelines for your content, to help keep your site cohesive and focused on your larger goals.
This template should cover areas such as:
- Targeted buyer persona
- Message
- Purpose
- Tone
- Call to Action
- Guidelines for fonts, color, style and tone
Our recommendation would be to have a different template for each different "style" of message you present. A sales page is going to look significantly different from an instructional blog post, for example.
Pushing Ahead
Once you've put these elements together, you should have a good idea how your content strategy matches up to your overall goals. Until then, stay tuned. Our next post will address how to take this "big picture" information and apply it to specific areas of your web marketing.
Call DeepSky Marketing to find out how you can create a meaningful and profitable content strategy for your company. DeepSky Marketing is a company that provides businesses with profitable marketing systems and verifiable return on investment (ROI). To schedule a brief no-cost consultation call 707 823-3888.
In our last blog, we talked a bit about content strategies: how to make sure you know why you're engaging in content marketing, and making sure that the content you create matches the goals you've set for your content creation. We're going to be expanding on that in the next several posts, digging into the nuts and bolts of creating and utilizing a content strategy to boost your Internet marketing efforts.
The topic du jour is a very basic question: just how do you go about creating a content strategy, anyway? This is pretty abstract "big picture" stuff, and it's all about making sure you've got a framework and goals in mind before you get started.
Creating a Content Strategy.
Before getting into the nitty-gritty, there's one important definition to keep in mind: "content." What is content, anyway? Basically, anything you put online is content. From the text, to the pictures, to the metadata hiding in the HTML, it's all content and it all needs to have a purpose behind it to be put to best use.
So, with that in mind...
The End is the Beginning.
To create a content strategy, you have to know what your goals are. Ideally, before even beginning to blog, Tweet, or put any more content online, you should work out for your company just what you're trying to accomplish. Just like any plan of action, you have to start by considering the end, and then work your way there.
To do this, you need to know two things:
Know Your Company's Goals.
This is the time to pull out that copy of your company's Mission Statement and whatever high-level strategic documents you have access to. What is your business truly trying to accomplish? Is your focus on great customer service? Being a leader of forward thinking in your industry? Putting out the best value, cutting the fat to maximize your margins?
These sorts of questions inform your content strategy. If your goal is customer satisfaction, you'd probably want a friendly and personable online presence, with social media interactions geared at being fun and engaging. If you want to be seen as a deep thinker, you might gear your content more towards fellow members of your industry rather than towards the public.
Think carefully about what kinds of content could align with these overarching goals.
Know What Your Customers Want. (And Know What Customers You Want!)
As has often been observed in business, a company rarely goes bankrupt from giving the public what it wants. Go have a powwow with your marketing guys and get all the customer data you can off of them. What's the average age of your customers? Gender? Ethnicity? What sort of life do they lead? What sort of interests do they have?
Your content should reach out to them, making itself relevant to their wants and needs.
At the same time, your content strategy can also involve outreach. What customers do you *want*? If you're a business with an older customer base who's trying to reach a younger demographic, making fun use of social media can get you those leads. This all ties right back in with your company's needs.
Build Content That Serves Both Masters.
Once you know what your company is trying to accomplish, and what your customers (current and future) want, build content around that. Use stylistic choices such as voice, tone, and point-of-view to make the most engaging content possible.
Fundamentally, if you can engage your customers while advancing towards the overarching goals of your company, your content strategy will be a success.
Call DeepSky Marketing to find out how you can create a meaningful and profitable content strategy for your company. DeepSky Marketing is a company that provides businesses with profitable marketing systems and verifiable return on investment (ROI). To schedule a brief no-cost consultation call 707 823-3888.
We've probably all seen it as we've browsed company websites: the blogs that, clearly, no one reads. You find a nice-looking site, it seems to have good products, but when you look at the blog, it's nothing but post after post of generic information with no comments from readers nor any Likes/Retweets on social media.
Most likely, what those sites lack is a clear content strategy. That's what often makes the difference between effective inbound Internet marketing and simply blogging into an uncaring void.
Content Strategies in Internet Marketing
It's hard to exactly define "content strategy" in a single phrase. It covers both the reason and the methods for your online communications. Basically, like any other marketing effort, Internet marketing needs to be targeted. You should have a good understanding of your demographic base, and produce content that they actually want to see.
It's not enough to simply put your message out there. Your message has to be planned and formatted to create a real impact among the people you want as your customers.
The Four Guiding Ideals of Content Strategies
In a recent article, Rachel Lovinger identified four key elements of a good content strategy, in regards to engaging your customers and leads. I find they work best as questions to ask yourself, to decide if you're on the right track with your content:
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Is it relevant? Are you making posts that are relevant to your market's demographics? This covers both style of writing and the actual content. If you aren't posting on subjects your market is interested in, in a style they want to read, they probably won't be interested.
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Is it useful? This isn't just about factual accuracy. Architectural concerns such as the structure of your site and its ease-of-use factor in here as well. Your site should be easy to navigate, and provide a wealth of information that draws in both visitors as well as search spiders.
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Is it efficient to produce? One of the key benefits to Internet marketing is that it can be quite inexpensive to engage in, compared to traditional marketing. Are you producing content in a way that's cost-efficient and uses available technologies to spread its reach?
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Is it comprehensive? A good content strategy is integrated into every aspect of your website. Issues should be covered in depth, and you should look for gaps in the presented knowledge to keep putting new ideas forward. Making it comprehensive also leads to it being more dynamic and engaging.
Developing a Content Strategy for Internet Marketing
Answering those questions is a good start, but to have a truly effective content strategy, you need to go deeper than that. You need to think about the purpose of your online content, besides "to increase leads." What sort of "face" do you want to put on your company? What narrative voice will you use? What are you trying to tell your visitors about yourself in your blogs and Tweets?
Of course, the best way to decide this is to have a deep knowledge of your customers. Understand what they want, and you'll be able to see how to deliver it to them. Dig into those market research reports and see what you can discover.
Look to the Future
You might not strictly need a content strategy to get your ideas online, but having one goes a long way towards making your Internet marketing efforts a success. The better you can articulate the purpose of your content marketing and how you are delivering content that your customers want, the more mileage you'll get from your marketing.
Call DeepSky Marketing to find out how you can create a meaningful and profitable content strategy for your company. DeepSky Marketing is a company that provides businesses with profitable marketing systems and verifiable return on investment (ROI). To schedule a brief no-cost consultation call 707 823-3888.
Chances are, you've only got so much time that you or your staff can devote to social media. Once you've got the first three or four accounts set up, you're going to have to start making some decisions about what sort of priority to give to the other social media services. You can't be on all of them, not unless you've got a lot of money to spend on image management firms.
Today, we'll be taking a look at two of the lesser-used social sites, Google+ and Pinterest, and talking about why you might want to choose one or the other, rather than trying to use both. They've got very different user bases and goals, so you might not need to use both, depending on your business objectives.
Pinterest
Right now, Pinterest is something of a gamble. It's a brand new site, only a few months old, and as of writing it still doesn't have open signups. (You put your name down as wanting an invitation and you generally get one by email a few days later.) It only has something like 10-12 million users at the moment, so it's only just getting off the ground. Also, its focus exclusively on images may limit its appeal.
That said, it has some very unique attributes and could rise to be one of the dominant social sites. For one thing, Pinterest's user base is overwhelmingly female. Males only make up about 17% of its user base. Further, its principle topics are mostly about fashion and home décor, along with design and travel elements. If you're looking to market to women, Pinterest is definitely of interest.
Also, Pinterest has potential as a virtual storefront. One of the most common uses for it at the moment is as advertising space for users of the crafts expo site Etsy, and it seems to be filling the role well. If the appearance of your products is a major selling factor, Pinterest could become a big part of your online marketing.
Google+
Google+ is, of course, Google's attempt to spin off a social media service from their existing search, email, and YouTube services. Despite a huge amount of hype at launch, the service has struggled somewhat to find a market niche. They currently have something over 100 million users, which is nothing to sneeze at, but also rather lacking compared to Facebook's 800+ million subscription base.
Generally, the user base of Google+ is significantly tilted towards men, who make up 63% of their user base, and these men are most often college students and software developers. In other words, in a broad sense, Google+ is popular among intellectual guys who are into technology. If that fits one of your core market demographics, Google+ is the service to pick.
Also, as we've mentioned before, Google+ is continuing to try to use social media to influence their search results. If your brand has a strong social presence and a lot of positive recommendations, it might be worth investing time in Google+ in the hopes it will pay off with better inbound marketing and search screen results later on down the line.
The Decision
This is really an apples-to-oranges comparison, so we aren't going to say one is definitively better than the other. It's mostly a question of reach and demographics. Google+ probably has the edge, just due to its larger user base (and the fact that it's backed by Google), but Pinterest has a lot of potential, especially if you're looking to reach out to female demographics. Fundamentally, the choice revolves around who you're most interested in marketing towards.
Call DeepSky Marketing to find out how you can integrate Social Media into your online marketing efforts. DeepSky Marketing is a company that provides businesses with profitable marketing systems and verifiable return on investment (ROI). To schedule a brief no-cost consultation call 707 823-3888.
When people are thinking about social media sites, there's a major one that often gets overlooked: YouTube. Honestly, it's not just about sharing cats and conspiracy theories. With over 4 billion videos viewed a day and at least 800 million unique users (their own numbers), YouTube has incredible outreach potential. If you make good use of it, YouTube can be a huge boon to your online marketing and outreach efforts.
Here are some tips for making the most of YouTube!
Create a Channel.
Much like other social sites, you can create an official channel that hosts all your videos, and that fans can subscribe to. This is a great way to make sure all your videos are easily accessed by anyone who wants to see them. This also makes it easier to host your videos on YouTube and link to them within your webpages.
Fill Out Your Profile
Don't forget to fully fill out your profile within the system. Besides being the source for actual information about you, a complete profile also gives a small boost to your search results. Don't forget to include links to your website and other social media efforts!
Keep it Short & Snappy
Internet users have notoriously short attention spans, and brief videos tend to get a lot more views than long ones. If you want to address a lot of questions, try breaking them up into a series of shorts sort of like video blogs, where you address one specific topic per video in 2-3 minutes. Even better, once you've got a number of these, you can use them to build a video FAQ of sorts.
Go Behind the Scenes
People still love learning how stuff works. Whatever industry you're in, think about making a series of shorts showing your manufacturing process or life around the office. Making your product interesting tends to make people more interested in your product itself. Shorts based on your staff can help humanize you, and make you seem less like a corporate facade.
Shoot to the Top
Since Google owns YouTube, YouTube can be a shortcut to the top of Google's search engine results screens. Generally, when someone runs a Google search, the top couple videos related to that search are displayed at the top of the list. Having a popular or well-liked YouTube video can instantly put you in front of a lot of searchers.
Go for Humor
With the exception of political content, nearly all YouTube videos that “go viral” are funny. While we won't say it's an absolute necessity, it certainly helps a lot in encouraging people to share your content. This is a good use for overlays as well. Meta-commentary on the video in popup text is popular among younger users, and helps demonstrate self-awareness.
Make Full Use of the Description Area
While a complete description is helpful, the description area can be used for quite a bit more. You can include more information on the products being shown, or even use it as extra advertising space, complete with custom links and social media referral buttons. It's also a good place to put your own links to related videos, rather than relying on YouTube's automated system to find them.
In short, YouTube is all about giving people entertainment value that's wedged into a 2-5 minute short. The more successful you are at that, the more people you'll have sharing your videos. If you get good at it, you can vastly increase your appeal and the number of viewers you're reaching with each video.
Just try not to get drawn into fights in the comments section.
Call DeepSky Marketing to find out how you can integrate YouTube and other Social Media into your online marketing efforts. DeepSky Marketing is a company that provides businesses with profitable marketing systems and verifiable return on investment (ROI). To schedule a brief no-cost consultation call 707 823-3888.
OK, so, how many of you have LinkedIn profiles? Most of you, right? Now, how many of you actually use them?
If you aren't making good use of LinkedIn, don't feel bad. LinkedIn is big, confusing, and somewhat intimidating, especially to new users. It's not a surprise that a lot of people just use it as a host for their resume and don't get involved otherwise, but actually, LinkedIn has a lot of potential for your business.
Whether you're part of a large company or a solo freelancer, it can be a great tool for expanding your business. The trick is learning to use it effectively, so we'd like to let you know a few strategies for making LinkedIn work for you.
Powerful LinkedIn Strategies
1) Get to know the Advanced Search. When you run a regular LinkedIn search, it operates like pretty much any other dumb search function, matching up profiles to whatever you're searching for. However, the "Advanced" search expands the functionality to include pretty much any sort of search you could possibly want.
You can search by name, industry, and job title, among other things. If you shell out extra money for one of their paid services, you also get access to the Premium Search, which allows you to filter by criteria like seniority level, company size, and years of experience. It's a powerful tool, and one which can let you hone in on exactly the people you're looking for.
(Be careful with those subscription services, though. You may not need to turn LinkedIn into a legitimate expense beyond the time investment.)
2) Join groups, then make one! Participation in Groups within LinkedIn is a great way to be noticed. If you answer questions well, you can gain Recommendations and generally increase your online status. Even if all you do is lurk and occasionally answer, you can make a lot of quality contacts this way. Additionally, you can directly message anyone who's in a group you're also in, even if you aren't already first-degree connections.
However, the real goldmine comes from creating your own group. Once you're somewhat established as an authority, if you make a group of your own, it has a good chance of becoming popular. Plus, you'll have close connections with everyone who joins it. This can be a seriously powerful way of making yourself a hub of LinkedIn activity.
3) Use the Direct Advertisements. A lot of people don't even realize that LinkedIn has its own open advertising service, but it's there and it can be a huge boost to you. The basic interface is a marketer's dream: you can micro-target your ads to extremely specific demographics, like only specific job titles and company sizes. You don't have to worry about paying for impressions from users you aren't interested in.
Additionally, their ad service has surprising flexibility. You can choose between pay-per-click and per-impression rates, and you can get started for fifty bucks. You can make up to 15 variations on the same campaign, and use LinkedIn's robust analytics to track which ones are working best. And the ads can appear all over the site, from users' pages to the homepage itself.
Basically...
If you've got a LinkedIn account, start making use of it! It's free (usually), and if you just employ some basic strategies for building connections, you can quickly build a great network of business contacts that can be a resource for years to come. Focus on making yourself a valued member of the community, especially on groups, and be discerning when making connections. That's it!
Call DeepSky Marketing to find out how you can integrate a Social Media presence into your online marketing efforts. DeepSky Marketing is a company that provides business owners and managers with profitable marketing systems and verifiable return on investment (ROI). To schedule a brief no-cost consultation call 707 823-3888.
As things stand right now, Twitter is probably the second most-popular social media outlet for marketing, after Facebook. (One of these days, I'm gonna get through a blog without mentioning Facebook, really!) Twitter is deceptively simple at first glance, and it does definitely have a "what you see is what you get" vibe to it. There's very little gimmickry about Twitter as well. It really is 90% about who you know, and writing things that they like.
However, despite its seeming simplicity, there's still a definite strategy to reaching Twitter stardom. We've broken this down into three steps which, while it might take you awhile, will allow you to harness Twitter as an effective marketing and outreach platform.
Ready? Off we go!
Twitter In Three Mostly Easy Steps
Phase One: Stake Your Claim
Signing up for Twitter is an extremely simple process. First you create an account, and then you spend a few minutes filling in your profile with information. This really should only take a few minutes.
Don't rush the profile, though. Since your Tweets are necessarily short, your profile is where people will be looking to find out who you "really" are. Make it complete, reasonably fun to read, and don't forget a link to your website! Also, give it a custom background (to give it a distinct look) and make sure to select an interesting profile picture. Try to use something more creative than just a corporate logo. In addition to your profile newly minted Twitter users should write up a few Tweets to give prospective followers a sense for what they’ll be in for when they “follow” you. In my book the best Tweets contain two elements: a well-written headline and a link for more information. Bitly.com is a place you can go to shorten the URL of a website or YouTube video you find interesting.
After that, announce your new account on your website and other social media ventures, add "Tweet this!" buttons to your site content, and start Tweeting! Good Tweets are a mix of mostly business and a little pleasure. The main purpose of ANY Social Media campaign is to provide useful information to your target audience. That said, don't shy away from mentioning cool things at work, feel free to complain about last night's ball game or the latest developments on your favorite TV show too. You should show personality through your Twitter presence.
Phase Two: Reach Out And Touch People
Eventually, you're going to want to start garnering more followers than just fans of your company. Since any sort of direct sales and marketing are difficult on Twitter, the key to it is gaining credibility and a widespread following.
You'll want to start sending polite @user tweets to people you consider important. They could be industry leaders, popular thinkers, or other influential types. Don't just spam them with requests; follow their Twitter accounts and make active contributions to discussions. The hashtag “#” symbol is a way of starting, or participating in, a conversation about a specific subject. Make your voice valuable and people will start following your Tweets.
You especially want to look for users who are called "Super-Connectors." These are people who have large numbers of both followed users are followers, and they tend to become hubs of social activity on Twitter. Get a couple of them retweeting you, and you'll vastly increase your outreach.
Phase Three: Here Comes The Science
Once you've established yourself on Twitter and have a decent following, it's time to start leveraging it. Get Tweetdeck and possibly some other social media monitoring tools, and start actively watching discussions about you. Look for opportunities to jump in and add to the conversations, to keep getting more people watching. Start tracking and graphing your response rates, looking for trends.
Also, for several months now, Twitter has been promising a full set of Web Analytics, which are currently in beta. Once it's released, it will make it vastly easier to scientifically track the effectiveness of your Twitter efforts. Keep your eyes open.
To Conclude...
Twitter is all about influence. Your tweeting efforts should be aimed at making yourself popular, and becoming close with other influential users. Keep that in mind, and you'll do well on Twitter.
Call DeepSky Marketing to find out how you can integrate a Social Media presence into your online marketing efforts. DeepSky Marketing is a company that provides business owners and managers with profitable marketing systems and verifiable return on investment (ROI). To schedule a brief no-cost consultation call 707 823-3888.
There's a lot more to Facebook marketing than just posting clever status updates and your favorite pictures. Once you dig beneath the surface a bit, there's a surprising amount of depth to the possibilities it presents for marketers. So, to get away from all this endless financial talk about Facebook, let's go back to focusing on what it should be all about: marketing opportunities between you and your potential clients.
While there are a lot of interesting aspects to Facebook marketing, here are our three favorite tools that you should branch into using as you expand your operations.
1) iFrames
Have you seen Facebook pages that look like miniature websites? They're using iFrames, and they're becoming increasingly popular as a way for online businesses to add functionality to their web presence. iFrames can be used to display web pages hosted offline, as well as allowing you to add apps with a multitude of functions, from online polls to direct sales areas.
iFrames allow you to move your Facebook page beyond simply being an outreach effort to being an active part of your internet sales. Visitors can be guided to specific areas of your website, or simply given a virtual storefront. People in the music industry are especially making use of Facebook as a sales-driving tool, but any business with digital products can benefit from this method.
2) Insights
A lot of new Facebook users don't realize that Facebook has an integrated dashboard, called Insights, which is excellent for analyzing your Facebook presence. You need to have 30 “Likes” to make the Insights page functional. Stats like the ones listed below can be tracked over time. With Insights, you can quickly accumulate a lot of data on the performance of your page and see who is showing up and how often.
Here are a few stats that are useful to track:
- Likes: Your level of “likes” may not allow you to directly calculate any returns, but it's still a nice stat to have, and a sudden drop off may be one of the first warnings you get if something is bothering your fan base.
- Reach: This is the number of people who saw your post or story. Also, you can look at a graph of the age and gender of the people you are connecting with.
- Talking about this: This is the number of people who have created a story from your post. Stories include: sharing, liking or commenting on your post, answering a question, and responding to an event.
- Check-Ins: Check-Ins are a great way to get free advertising! When your customers “Check-In” on Facebook, either because they showed up at your location or an online event, each of their friends will see where they are and what they are doing which is an implicit testimonial for your company, product, or service.
3) The Share Button
Finally, a word or two about the humble share button. The ability to allow users to instantly share any page on your site is great for helping your blog posts and other content go vital. Just about anything you publish should have a "Share This!" button attached to keep you closely tied to social media.
However, one thing to remember is: do not ask for shares. That you have a share button is already an implicit invitation. Asking for shares or nagging people to Like you on Facebook tends to be viewed as sounding desperate. If you post good content, the shares will come.
In short...
Take your Facebook marketing to the next level. With interest in it only growing at the moment, now is a fine time to look at expanding your Facebook use and making it a true tool in your online marketing strategies.
Call DeepSky Marketing to find out how you can integrate a Social Media presence into your online marketing efforts. DeepSky Marketing is a company that provides business owners and managers with profitable marketing systems and verifiable return on investment (ROI). To schedule a brief no-cost consultation call 707 823-3888.
There's a rather big, intimidating world of social media out there. With so many competing services all trying to draw in users and advertisers, it can be hard to tell which ones are really worth your time and attention. After all, one of the main benefits of social media marketing is that you can do it quickly and cheaply. It defeats the purpose if it turns into a hassle or a time-sink.
So, to help you sort out your options, we wanted to make a quick list of the Top Five social media sites, in descending order of importance. If you're looking to expand your social media coverage, these are the bases you need to have covered first.
The Top Five Social Media Sites for Marketing
1)Facebook. Is there any doubt that if you can only do social marketing on one site, Facebook should be that site? With over 850 million members, it's got the most eyeballs looking at it, as well as having by far the highest minutes-per-day rates of any site on the Internet. Plus, it's a great place to have discussions with your fans and get feedback from them. However you use it, your Facebook page is likely going to be the hub of your social media efforts.
2)Twitter. Following behind Facebook a bit in numbers, but making up for it with growth, is Twitter. With 500 million users, it's the second-biggest social site on the Internet. Its format of micro-messages is challenging to utilize in your social media marketing, but on the other hand, being a daily trend can get you a lot of attention. Use it mostly for more casual interaction. A few major announcements here and there are OK, but for the most part, Twitter is pretty informal.
3)LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the Facebook of the business world, and with 150 million users, it's doing pretty well for itself. It is pretty much exclusively used for promotion your products and looking for contracts, and profiles and pages are expected to be glorified sales shows. One unique feature of it is that while you can ask anyone to have a “Connection” with you, if they refuse, it hurts a ranking of your reliability. Since you want your reliability rank as high as possible, you need to be careful about hitting strangers with requests.
4)YouTube. YouTube is, of course, all about video, and it's common for businesses to have an official YouTube account for their promotional materials. You can use it as cloud storage for videos on your website, or focus on developing your YouTube profile as its own landing page. There's one bonus to YouTube, however, puts it above most other sites: it can help your SEO directly. Google searches which popular YouTube searches will put the top ranking YouTube videos at the top of the list. So, even if your normal search screen results rankings are low, a single popular YouTube video can send you straight to the top of page one.
5)Pinterest. I'm going out on a limb here, since technically Pinterest doesn't even have open signups yet, but I think it's justified. Pinterest is a sort of virtual corkboard where you “pin” pictures of your own, or that you simply find online. You can create themed montages covering any subject, and connect with other users. The reason I'm including it is that, despite not even being out of beta, it's already attracted a huge range of commercial users. Small shops are using it as virtual storefront, and apparently having success.
Got a different opinion? I know many people thing Google+ should have made it onto this list. There are good reasons to argue this position. Let us hear your thoughts in the comments!
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