Category : Internet Marketing
Putting Together a Social Media Plan
Recently we were asked if someone could promise 2500 unique visits to their business website a month—from social media alone. It’s a good question to ask—there’s no point in working on a social media plan unless it drives traffic to your site, and brings conversions. But when we replied asking about their numbers on current social media channels, we were told that they have 25 fans on Facebook, and have yet to set up a Twitter or Linkedin account.
Our answer? Yes. It is possible, but not right away. Social media is a gradual exercise, not something that can be completed once and forgotten about. When you’re starting from scratch, it will take some time to truly gain a following and get some results. You need to have a social media plan.
Why you need a social media plan
To stay on top of current trends
Social media platforms come and go. If you set up a MySpace account for your business and left social networking years ago, you’ve fallen behind. There are new platforms announced every year, and each one updates and changes from month to month. You need to be on top of the latest social media advances, and so does your business.
Your customers are there
One thing that every business owner knows is that you need to be where your customers are. Your customers are on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and StumbleUpon without you—so join them!
Your competitors are there
Many small and large businesses have come to see the importance of marketing on social media, and they’re out there talking to your customers, while you’re not. Don’t let them take control of your market!
But if you can’t…
Sometimes it just isn’t possible for you to keep up a social media plan. If you don’t have the time to check your social media outlets once a week, much less every day, get someone else to. Designate a person on your team, get your daughter to handle it or hire social media services—just don’t neglect it. Social media is only becoming more popular, don’t fall behind—get a social media plan in place!
Optimizing Your Linkedin Business Page
Earlier this week, we discussed how to optimize your personal Linkedin profile, and a few Linkedin networking tips to make your profile be more effective. Today, we’re talking about the Linkedin business page. This is the page that features your business, so it’s very important that it have all the information it needs.
It’s pretty easy to set up your Linkedin company page, as long as you have a company email address tied to your Linkedin personal profile. After you’ve made sure that your business isn’t already on Linkedin, simply visit the Add Your Company page, and enter your email address and business name! After clicking continue, you’ll be able to create the page and add your company’s information.
Once you’ve completed your company page, you’ll be able to edit information through the tabs lining the top. You’ll have “Overview,” “Careers,” “Services” or “Products,” and “Analytics.”
Overview
This is your main page. This is where you can find the synopsis of your company, employees, and contact information on the right side. You can also grab some “Follow us on Linkedin” code at the bottom of this page.
Careers
In the Careers tab, you can post job openings, to be seen by people browsing your company page. This would be a great way to get real professionals to apply for your job. However, this part of Linkedin does cost—$95 for a 30 day posting. You can see this information by clicking on the Careers page. If you don’t have any job postings, the tab will not show up. This goes for the other tabs, as well—if you haven’t posted anything, people will only see your Overview.
Products and Services
Place your services and products on the third tab—this is especially important if your company is specifically business-to-business. Other professionals who stumble upon your company profile might just need what you have to offer.
Analytics
This tab is only viewable to employees at your company. Here you can see how your company’s Linkedin performance compares to other businesses in the same industry. It’s important to note that you won’t have any statistics until after being on Linkedin for a couple months—views and visitors take a while to start appearing. There are several different graphs on this page, and you’ll want to get familiar with all of them.
Linkedin Status Updates
The newest feature for companies on Linkedin is the Linkedin status update. This tool was released two months ago, and isn’t being used as much as Linkedin would hope. It works just like a status update on Facebook, and can be a great way to drive traffic. Be sure to utilize this feature when creating your Linkedin business page.
Although Linkedin isn’t the most popular or the most used social network, it is still a very important part of professional networking. Use the Linkedin company pages to your advantage, and tell us how it works for your business! And while you’re on Linkedin—be sure to follow our company page!
Using Linkedin for Professional Networking
When marketing a business in social media, people tend to focus on two fronts: Facebook and Twitter. As a matter of fact, most people even skip the second and focus on the first. Facebook is a great marketing tool, of course, but it is certainly not the only one.
Linkedin tends to be tossed under the bus when it comes to social media. People aren’t as active on Linkedin as they are elsewhere, so the site is sometimes considered out of date. Unfortunately, this means that it is often neglected as a social media marketing tool. While it may not be the most popular social network, Linkedin has its own niche—professional networking.
Linkedin Social Networking
Linkedin was built for professionals, and if you fall into that category, you should be networking there. Although the layout may remind you of Facebook, the position it plays is completely different. Linkedin describes itself as “the world’s largest professional network on the internet.” With more than 100 million members, they’re absolutely right; this is the kind of network that you want to be a part of.
Your Profile on Linkedin
It’s easy and free to sign up for Linkedin, and worth the time that you’ll have to put into it. You can start out by filling in past employers, your current job, a picture, summary and your specialties. You can also add your business website and Twitter account!
But the most important part is connections. You can import your email contacts or search for friends and co-workers, but it’s very important that you grow your connection list as much as possible. If you have a large amount of connections, you’re considered an influencer—something you want to be seen as in professional networking.
You can create a personalized URL on Linkedin by going to your profile page and clicking ‘Edit’ next to your Public Profile link near the bottom. You can then change your public profile URL in the box on the right. Be sure to pick something memorable and lasting. Although you will be able to change it, you shouldn’t. You will lose people who have bookmarked your profile in the past, as well as search engine traffic.
Be open and be visible on Linkedin; share business-related posts, and be sure to interact with your connections. Make sure that your profile is connected to your business, and that you share a few links back to your website every so often.
Linkedin Business Marketing
We’ll be posting another blog on Linkedin this week—but focusing specifically on Linkedin company pages. Check back this Thursday to see!
If you want to see what a Linkedin company page looks like on Linkedin before our next blog publishes, follow our Linkedin page!
How to Choose the Right SEO Strategy
We have talked about the importance of SEO maintenance previously about how you need a monthly active SEO plan to stay ahead of competition and rank high on the search engine results page (SERP). To help you choose the right SEO strategy, we will focus on what should be included in the SEO maintenance plan.
- Rank Reports – It is important to have a rank report run so you can monitor your rankings on the SERP. There could be fluctuations due to actions done by your competitor, new sites being added, and changes in the search engine algorithms. Rank reports are a must for a SEO strategy.
- Keyword Research – Competitors can try to outrank you for different keywords or long tail phrases. This means that keywords that you used to rank high for might not be optimal for you to appear on the SERP. Some keywords receive more traffic while some receive less. With the keyword research in your SEO strategy, you can determine what keyword phrases will work best for you – such as whether to rank well on high traffic keywords or target niche ones with possible better conversion rates.
- Competitive Analysis – A competitive analysis in a SEO strategy provides you with a summary of where your competitors are in terms of their SEO efforts. You can see how your competitors are ranking for your keywords and other site elements. Also what are they factors contributing to them ranking well on the SERP. Through that, you can decide the direction of your SEO efforts in order to compete. Factors that come into play include inbound links, meta tags and keyword density, and seo content.
- SEO Copywriting – It is important that your SEO strategy includes SEO copywriting because of the need for fresh content. It is important that new pages or articles are added on a regular basis as it can help expand your reach with more keywords and ways your visitors can find you. Having fresh content is also one of the important SEO ranking factors.
We have outlined the components of what we think is important for SEO maintenance, thus should be included in a SEO strategy. There are other components that are important, such as link building and social media—as outlined in SEO ranking factors. Let Smart Solutions come up with a customized active SEO strategy for you. Contact us now to find out how we can help your business.
Timing Twitter | Scheduling Tweets Ahead of Time
If you are in charge of managing a business Twitter account, you know how time consuming the service can be. Professionals suggested that you tweet several times a day, but every time you log into Twitter, you end up spending time that could be better spent elsewhere.
Frankly, you don’t have the time to stare at Twitter all day. The minutes that you spend on the site are taking away from other important projects, and even though it’s beneficial—it isn’t necessary.
Scheduling Twitter updates is an important aspect of social media marketing. If you don’t have a grasp on how to do it—or a service to help you, you are losing valuable time. We’ve listed a few of the basics below, to help you get started with scheduling Twitter.
Finding a Twitter Scheduler
If you don’t have a Twitter scheduler in use already, than it’s time to start looking into the different options available. There are several great services, and we’ve listed a couple of our favorites here:
This is the tweet scheduling service that we use, because you can simply log in with your Twitter account, and you’re ready to schedule. You don’t have to remember another password! It’s as simple as it gets, though, so you won’t have any other feature but the scheduling.
This is probably the most popular system for scheduling Twitter updates. It comes with a lot of other features other than scheduling though, so if you’re looking just to schedule, this service might overwhelm you. You can also monitor your other social networks on Hootsuite—so it isn’t strictly Twitter.
TweetDeck has actually been acquired by Twitter. It’s a program that you can download right to your desktop, program tweets, look at mentions and messages, and monitor other social media platforms, as well.
This service is a lot like Twuffer, but you can also use it for Facebook. We don’t recommend using a scheduling service for Facebook, but it’s an option you have with this website. You can log in straight through your Twitter profile—no extra password to remember—but it’s not the service we chose, because it isn’t as pleasant to look at as Twuffer is. If you’re scheduling tweets as much as we do, you need a site that’s easy on the eyes.
Scheduling Twitter Updates | Putting Together a Twitter Schedule
Once you’re set up with a Twitter scheduler, you’re going to want to figure out a plan:
- How many times will you tweet a day?
- How many links, mentions and hashtags?
- What time of day will you schedule Twitter updates for?
- How often will you load tweets into your Twitter scheduler?
You can save a lot of time by scheduling twitter updates, and it’s something we suggest for all of our clients. However, sometimes it’s still too overwhelming to put together a Twitter schedule and keep your business Twitter account updated. If you want to save some time and stress, give us a call about our Twitter monitoring services.
Internet Marketing Tools for Your Business
There is a wide variety of internet marketing tools for your SEO and social media needs. Some internet marketing tools are free, some are paid. So how do you pick the best internet marketing tool for your business?
At the Bend WebCAM 2011 conference, Taylor Pratt from Raven Tools presented Tools of the Trade, which covers an array of paid and free internet marketing tools. The key features of any tool should help you with the following:
- Save Time: If a paid tool saves you several hours per day, sometimes paying $150 per month might well be worth it.
- Centralize Data: Some internet marketing tools provide the ability to keep all your information in one location, in an organized manner.
- Collaborate: A good internet marketing tool would allow the ability for users to collaborate.
- Reliable: This would possibly be the most important aspect. Your internet marketing tool needs to be reliable.
There are the traditional tools that help with keyword research, content management, social media management, link management and link research. However, there are also the non-traditional tools that people need to look out for. These non-traditional tools help with microdata, monitoring, usability, and technical analysis.
Microdata
Microdata help search engines and spiders understand the information on the website. It is important to have clean code so that information can be processed quicker and better.
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Online and Social Media Monitoring
The online and social media monitoring tools help you keep track of what is being said about your business, online—good or bad. By keeping track of the positive and negative, you know what your customers like or dislike about your business, and what can be done to improve.
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Usability Testing Tools
Websites have to be user friendly and provides information within reach of visitors. If visitors do not know where to click or find it hard to navigate, it really defeats the purpose of having a website. There are some usability testing tools that help you with increasing the usability of your website.
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Technical Analysis
A good technical analysis tool would help with evaluating code, determine if a website has a search-friendly design, and helps with IA setup.
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Writing SEO Content for Your Website
Writing for the Internet can be difficult. Writing SEO content is even harder. Readers are getting more demanding—speed, ease and informative. Studies have shown that readers skim. When skim readers read an article, they expect content to be short and straight to the point. Don’t expect the reader to stay long if you beat around the bush. Now, the challenge is to balance good content with SEO.
Writing for the Web
It is important for your website to be informative. If you don’t offer readers what they want, they can leave quickly with a simple click of the mouse. How do you get readers to stay?
Short and Sweet: Don’t use fancy words to try to sound more profound when a simple word will do. If readers get confused, they will not read your content. Allow your content to flow smoothly so readers enjoy reading and stay longer on your website.
Paragraphs: I have seen websites that have pages and pages of information with no paragraphs. Paragraphs help readers understand your writing better through organized thoughts. When there is a new paragraph, it is a signal to the reader that the topic is either being developed or that the writer is moving onto another discussion.
Active vs Passive: The active voice is shorter, more assertive and easier to understand. Passive usually requires more cognitive effort from the reader—this stresses the reader and forces them to leave. For example, take a look at “My hard work was appreciated by my boss” (passive) and “My boss appreciated my hard work” (active). Which requires less effort to understand?
Scannable text: As I mentioned earlier, many are skim readers. Readers scan a page to find answers to their questions. It also helps them understand the topic better. When writing for the web, create text that is scannable—headers, bold, and bullet points.
SEO Copywriting
It is important to create search engine friendly content to allow your website to rank well on SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). To rank well, you need to have the following:
Well-researched keywords: You need to understand keyword research and select the ones that can help you rank. By ranking well, visitors can find your site, leading to conversions. Keywords need to be relevant to the content on your page—search engines look at this when ranking your website. This also helps readers understand your content better.
Keyword rich content: Through the effective use of keywords throughout your content, search engines can rank you better. However, a website that is covered with nothing but keywords does not provide readers with the information that they need. You are merely optimizing your site for robots—this defeats the purpose of having a website. Good SEO copywriting involves the proper use of keywords that flow with content.
URLs, titles, descriptions and headers: Your URLs, titles and descriptions have to be well used as search engines use these when figuring out the content of your website. A good SEO copywriter will be able to integrate keywords into them and the content.
Characteristics of a Good SEO Copywriter
Good SEO copywriters are a unique bunch of people and they tend to have the following characteristics:
- Deep understanding of keywords
- Inquisitive
- Able to tell stories
- Adventurous
- Deep digger
- Solves problems
- Able to surprise and delight
- Enjoys research
Smart Solutions’ SEO Content Writing Services
At Smart Solutions, our SEO team is able to balance good content with SEO. We have the right people with the right characteristics that can create great content for your website. Our experienced SEO content writers that can help you with the following:
Contact us now to find out how we can write SEO content for you.
YouTube Video Marketing – Part 2
Google offers ‘AdWords,’ Facebook has ‘Facebook Ads,’ Twitter has ‘Promoted Tweets’ and Linkedin gives us ‘Ads by Linkedin Members.’ While we take advantage of these search and social media sites offering ad programs—why not look to YouTube for ad space as well?
If you’ve ever watched a video on YouTube, you might have noticed the different types of YouTube ads on the site through your experience.
- Arrive at YouTube and you will see the masthead ad.
- Search for a YouTube video and you will see the featured videos along the side.
- Click through to the YouTube video you want and you might get the 15-second ad before the video with promoted videos on the right.
- After your video finally starts, you will get pop-ups throughout your time watching.
Although these advertisements can be intrusive at some times, they are also strategically placed. No matter where you go on the YouTube site, you are sure to find one business or another trying to get brand recognition and clicks.
While you’re deciding what aspect of YouTube advertising would be best for your business, it would be a good idea to keep in mind what we talked about in YouTube Video Marketing Part 1—knowing who you are advertising to. YouTube allows you to choose your target demographic—whether based on age, gender or both. You can also target by keyword, interests or individual channels. YouTube offers such a wide range of targeting techniques that will ensure your success in your YouTube video advertising.
As with Facebook, YouTube offers Insights as well. After you have started your YouTube advertising campaign, you will be able to track the data for every aspect of your promotion and improve on it, so that each subsequent one will be better than the last.
YouTube grows its viewers every day, and is only going to get more popular as time goes on. After all, YouTube is the second most popular search engine, after Google. Don’t hesitate to get started with marketing on YouTube, whether it is through your own channel or YouTube advertising.
For more social media tips and techniques, follow Smart Solutions on Twitter and Facebook!
Social Media Marketing for Business
People are social animals. We like to connect with people in a way that’s conversational and communal. This is the reason for the popularity of social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter—each of them is highly reliant on the social aspect, being able to communicate with your all of your friends in a single place. But it isn’t just friends in social media—it’s also businesses.
There is only one thing that stops businesses from using social media consistently; it isn’t that people don’t realize the significance of using social networking—it’s that they just don’t have the time.
The Smartz Social Pak – Social Media Packages
Smart Solutions has eliminated that barrier with the all-new SocialPak. This social media package comes in different varieties, depending on what your business requires for social networking.
We cover three different social media sites for our customers—Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. We chose these three because they are each the top in their own field. Facebook is the all-time largest social networking site; Twitter is the most popular micro-blogging platform; and Foursquare is the top location-based service provider.
Each of the websites offers its own value to a business, and that’s why we offer them both individually and as a group—not every business will need all three.
SocialPak – Social Media Monitoring and Social Media Set-Up
In our LocalPak, there are two different options for you to choose from: The Social Media Monitoring packages or the Social Media Set-Up packages. Again, the choice of which package to use depends on what you’re looking for in your business. We outline some ideas below:
You might want SocialPak Monitoring if…
- You need regular posting on your social media
- You don’t have enough human resources
- You want all your monitoring compiled in one place
- You want weekly reporting
You might want Set-Up SocialPak if…
- You don’t understand how to optimize keywords
- You need a headstart
- You want to stand out right away
- You need to remodel your social media accounts
Give us a call today, if you’re interested in learning more about the Smartz SocialPak. Don’t fall behind in social media marketing. Get Started Now!
Twitter Analytics Tools
For businesses using Twitter, it’s always been a hassle trying to track the impact of your tweets and links. Because Twitter has never offered Twitter business analytics or statistics, we’ve all had to use outside sources—Hootsuite, Tweet Counter and other Twitter analytics tools.
Twitter has Announced Twitter Web Analytics
This has now changed for Twitter users. Last week, the Twitter Developers announced Twitter Web Analytics—an analytics tool that you can access right inside of your Twitter account. No more using outside sources to track your reach, now you can do it straight from the source.
This new update is going to be a great tool for people using Twitter for business, and it’s certainly taken long enough for it to get here!
As you can read on the Twitter Developers blog post, the Twitter business analytics tool won’t be released to the general public for another couple of weeks, after the pilot group has tested it.
There isn’t any word yet whether or not this Twitter statistics update will be for a price, but it’s better than paying an outside source for things you can now get from the inside. This could be a hurt for Hootsuite and other Twitter analytics tools—we’ll have to see how it all pans out.
Let us know if you see the Twitter Web Analytics inside your Twitter account anytime soon, and follow us on Twitter for more updates like this!
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