Social Media Marketing: Where to Begin?

By Tabitha Jean Naylor

The buzz on social media is that small businesses are succeeding more and more, thanks to websites like Facebook and Twitter. Of course, the buzz is all over because of social media websites.
There are many reasons to utilize social media for marketing, as many business owners are already aware. Beginning to advertise can be stressful enough, but finding how and where you’re going to market is another step in the direction of confusing.

To make matters worse, with all of the social media outlets available, you’re left with the mind-blowing question: where the heck do you start?
Knowing the pros and cons of the social media outlets available for marketing can help provide assistance in choosing where to begin your advertisement process.

Facebook

Facebook is usually the first place to begin advertising and marketing on, because it is used so often on a daily basis by a number of users, including you.
Some of the pros for marketing on Facebook are:

Marketing on Facebook makes it easy to target an audience. In fact, Facebook now has ads that appear in the suggested interest of each user, so targeting is almost inevitable.
With the continuously growing use of apps on Facebook, choosing the right apps can help promote your business. A lot of the apps available are great for driving traffic towards your page.
Facebook allows users to easily access information about your business as well as its employees and owners. It can give you the option to remain personal or completely anonymous when uploading information onto your business page.
Commenting and sharing gives users the option to spread the word about your business or company, bringing more potential clients your way.

Cons of Facebook marketing are:

A lot of communication is required, especially if users are consistently sending messages to your company. Your lack of a response can make the consumer think you’re unavailable or not interested in their business.
It is time consuming to set up the perfect page as well as respond to all of your followers.
You must pay to advertise on Facebook and their advertisement prices vary.

Pinterest
Pinterest is another new and developing social media outlet to market through.
Some of the pros are:

Marketing is mainly visual. This allows the readers to get the picture rather than reading through a boatload of text.
The audience available to market through seems endless. There are so many different kinds of people who use Pinterest, so the ability to market to people you hadn’t intended is possible.
Whatever your business or company is selling or marketing can be specifically searched, making it easy to find. If the user types it in, or even a keyword attached to it, it can be found.

Cons:

Your pins can get lost or go unseen. It’s almost like rankings on search engines. If they’re not frequently viewed or re-pinned, it’s almost like they disappear.
Your page requires a lot of updating because users want to see new pins from you regularly or you’re just another follower on their list of friends.
Liking and repining can get confusing and may not actually bring the attention your page needs.
The rules of Pinterest read along the lines of ‘no self-promotion’. This can make things fairly difficult.

Twitter
Last, but certainly not least, is Twitter. Twitter users can be a great audience to market to.
Some of the pros are:

Tweets are easy to see because they immediately pop up and are not hidden by other posts or long written stories from other users.
Everything is straight and to the point. Whatever it is you’re trying to say, the reader will be able to digest because of the 140 character limit.
The Twitter world is like Pinterest: endless. There are so many users on Twitter, many of whom are willing to follow anyone because of their following count.

Cons

The 140 character limit can also make it difficult to get in what you need to, to persuade interest to your business.
Twitter is not good for visuals. Unless you’re a celebrity or close friend, clicking on links to visit the picture is almost too inconvenient.
Twitter must pre-approve you to promote your business. Like Pinterest, that can make things very difficult if you’re unsure of the process.

The 4 Habits of Great Content Marketers

Great content marketers aren’t born, they’re made.
Want to stand out from the crowd? Develop the following habits.

1. Follow a Routine

Routines can be a powerful tool for artists, politicians, CEOs, content marketers, and just about anyone else who is trying to build something extraordinary. There’s no blueprint for what routine is going to work for you. But if you’re embarking on a creative project, it’s in your best interest to develop one.
Have your best ideas before bed? Truman Capote embraced the fact that he was a “horizontal author” who couldn’t think unless he was “either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy.”

Everyone has different daily rituals. There’s no one-size-fits all solution. Figure out the habits that help you produce your best work, and schedule time to support those habits.

2. Read

In the world of marketing—like most worlds—knowledge is power. And we marketers operate within an environment that is constantly changing and innovating. The best way to ensure your content is contributing to the signal and not the noise is to read—about digital trends, about top campaigns, about the companies our industry leaders celebrate.
If you don’t understand what separate good content from great content, you’re not going to be very successful.

3. Embrace the Struggle

In an interview with the Paris Review E.B. White said, “A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.”
Creating a well-oiled content marketing operation is hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The best content marketers embrace the struggle. They push through outdated processes in the name of innovation. They buckle silos. They see the chaos and miscommunication rampant within their marketing team and roll up their sleeves.

4. Don’t Assume

In 2012, Harvard Business Review published an article revealing three common assumptions marketers make when it comes to identifying what customers want:

Most consumers want to have relationships with your brand.
Interactions build relationships.
The more interaction the better.

The findings revealed in this article proved that all three assumptions were dead wrong:

People want relationships with their family and friends, not a business.
Shared values build relationships, not interactions.
There is no evidence to suggest the more interactions a brand has with a customer, the more likely that customer is to purchase.

It’s not the content marketer’s job to build warm and fuzzy friendships with the people they hope to do business with. It’s the content marketer’s job to figure out what their target audience needs and what questions they have. With that information, they must meet those needs and answer those questions with highly-targeted, high-quality content.

10 Benefits of Social Media for Business Every Skeptic Should Know

By Kristina Cisnero

Sharing content with thousands of followers at once isn’t the only benefit of social media for business. Small businesses all over the world have been discovering the ways social media can contribute to success and growth in all areas of their companies. However, there are still skeptics who still don’t see or understand the benefits of social media for their business. In this post, we go over 10 benefits of social media for business that will turn skeptics, like your boss (or even yourself!), into believers.

Here are 10 benefits of social media for business

1. Social media is an easy way to learn about your audience

For businesses in any industry, the key to success is knowing your audience. Social media makes this possible, and easier to accomplish than ever. With tools like Facebook Insights in Hootsuite you can learn the dominant languages spoken among your social media audience, as well as their age and gender. This knowledge can help you cater campaigns and product offers to your target audience, which will provide you a better return on investment.

2. Social media helps target audiences more effectively

Geo-targeting is an effective way to send your message out to a specific audience or demographic based on their location. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter have tools that allow you to communicate the right kind of content to your audience. For example, in Hootsuite you can target by ‘Location’, ‘Language’, ‘Age’, ‘Gender’, ‘Relationship status’, ‘Interested in’, and ‘Education’ on Facebook, and ‘Country(s)’ on Twitter. For example, if you want to send out a post to people who speak Spanish, geo-targeting is an easy and effective way to do it.

3. Social media helps find new customers and expand your audience

Social networks like Twitter allow small businesses to locate their current customers or seek out potential customers. For example, if you open a new coffee shop in the neighbourhood, you can create a geo search in Hootsuite to locate anyone tweeting about needing a morning cup of joe within your area. After locating those tweeting about coffee, you can start reaching out to them, and invite them to come try a hot bevvy at your new coffee shop.

4. Social media allows you to receive instant feedback from your customers’ perspective

Social media for business gives you instant access to positive or negative feedback, which provides you with valuable insights on the customer perspective. For example, if you launch a new product and share it on social media, you’ll instantly learn what your customers think of it. Another way to gain customer perspective with social media is by learning how they use your product; brands often base new products or services on their customers’ original ideas.

5. Improve market intelligence and get ahead of your competitors with social media

With social media monitoring you can gain key information on your competitors, therefore improving your market intelligence. This kind of intel will allow you to make strategic business decisions in order to stay ahead of your competition. For example, you can create search streams in Hootsuite to monitor mentions of your competitor’s name or product. Based on your search results, you can improve your business to offer something your competitors are missing.

6. Social media can help increase website traffic and search ranking

So you built a website for your company, now what? One of the best benefits of social media for business is using it to increase your website traffic. Not only does social media help you direct people to your website, but the more social media shares you receive, the higher your search ranking will be. For example, if every person who follows Hootsuite on Twitter retweets this post, it’s more likely to rank higher in Google’s search engine results page for variations of “social media for business.”

7. Share content easier and faster with social media

In the past, marketers faced the challenge of ensuring their content reaches their customers in the shortest possible time. With the help of social media, sharing content got easier and faster. When you use social media for business, specifically for sharing content about your business, all you need to do is simply share it on your brand’s social network accounts. But keep in mind that getting your customers to share your content with their followers means you need to make sure your social media content aligns to your brand and interests your audience.

8. Social media helps generate leads for one third of the cost

Social media is an easy way to generate leads. For example, Hootsuite’s marketing department was built around content and social platforms, and Twitter ads has allowed us to scale, increase reach, and fuel demand generation. Hootsuite promotes two types of content via Twitter Ads: ungated content (free content requiring no email address for access) and gated content (free content requiring an email). Sharing gated content on social media is a great way for any company to generate leads.

9. Create meaningful relationships with customers through social media

Social media is great for creating meaningful relationships with your customers. For example, social media allows tourism brands to create dialogue with travellers, therefore creating relationships with customers before, during, and after they have booked a trip with the company. This kind of social media dialogue between brands and customers is something traditional advertising will never achieve.

10. Social media lets you increase brand awareness and reach with little to no budget

Social media for business has allowed companies to increase brand awareness and reach of their brand at little to no cost. The costs associated with these strategies are a lot higher with traditional advertising methods. Recently, marketing departments across companies started hiring community managers to increase brand awareness and reach through social media. Community managers foster relationships with online audiences in different regions. At Hootsuite, we have community managers for each of our three regions: APAC, EMEA, and The Americas. This helps us make sure we keep expanding the reach of our brand to those regions and maintain relationships with key stakeholders.

Read more at business2community.com/social-media

NEW 2014 UPDATE: Facebook Page Layout & Tabs

Tabs under your cover image have been removed in the latest Facebook layout update. It may be time to edit your landing page navigation.

To edit your App pages, go to Settings>Apps.

Added Apps
You can Edit Settings clicking on the link.
-Custom Tab Image (111x74 px)
-Custom Tab Name

APPS panel now appears on the left side under the ABOUT profile panel.
Click Manage section to move APPS layout position.
Drag to reorder.

To rearrange APPS order, click Move on top navigation bar under Cover Image.
Move>Manage Tabs
First APP will appear on top navigation bar that should be linked to a primary landing page.

Most traffic on Facebook comes from a News Feed, a post you create or ad you run - via mobile devices!

Cover Image
Your Cover Image banner should be 851x315 px. Page title text appears over the bottom of the image.
You can add a 64 px tall shadow across the bottom that will appear behind the title text.
There is about 667 px between the Profile image to the end of the Cover Image.

Embed Links
Active links can be put in 3 places.
Add links to image descriptions for your About, Image Cover and Profile photos to drive traffic to a post or page.

Your website link will not be visible in the About section for mobile devices. Include a link in the About text that will be visible for mobile users.

Third Party App Creators
Many are not viewable on mobile devices!
Use 22Social for creating Facebook Apps that are mobile friendly. First app is free, then $22/month. Get for free with 3 paying referrals.

Free Awesome image slider from cssSlider.com

We're excited to announce the cssSlider, a pure CSS image slider. Create beautiful image sliders entirely in CSS. No jQuery, no JavaScript, no image icons, no coding!

It's amazingly fast, light, responsive, and retina-ready. Works on all modern devices and browsers. KenBurns, Slide, Fade, Zoom effects and some flat skins are available (more coming soon).

At the moment Iconion is in Free Beta status and available for Windows and Mac.

5 Ways to Increase Facebook Traffic

Here are a few tips to increase "Likes" on FB.
Giveaways don't attract users who stay.

1. Ask a question...
Builds community.
-What should I do? Preferences?
Wondering How..? Want To..?

2. Share your life...
People like to know about you.
-Who are you?
Share something unrelated to your business.
-Insert Instagram posted photo into FB.

3. Share complimentary products...
-Share a photo of a product and link to it, but not in direct competition.
-Let person know that you shared their work.

4. Behind the scenes...
-Take photos while working.
-Post to Instagram and then FB.
Shows people your process and hard work that goes into your business.
Can combine with a question.

5. Facebook Fan Special...
-Offer 5-10% off a particular item or range of items
24 Hour Special, short term with nice payoff
-Promote around other social networks to drive to FB page.

Ads on Facebook Using Page 'Likes'

Build Lists - Make Sales - Make App Ad Pages on Facebook

Sell your Affiliate products.
Get higher conversions for shares, sales and leads.

List Growth
-Write copy results based
-Give good reason (free giveaway, report)
-More tangible the result, the better

Facebook Insights show demographics of visitor traffic.

Advertise on Facebook
-Page Likes
60% cheaper than Website linking ($1.10 vs. $2.50)

Show Advance Options:
-Include colorful image
-Text: "If you like this, press Like."

Landing View:
-Sign Up Page to FB Tab App squeeze page

AUDIENCE
-Set Age demographics...
-Active credit card user
-Purchase behavior
-Interests:

lower case interests are more precise for higher CTR

Create FB Tab for landing page
-Build Opt-In list.

"Intro-enter your name, your email, click to GET INFORMED," to auto responder

-2 Step Opt-In on bottom of content post.
"Click to stay informed. Starting with our free Recipe Book."

-Use animated GIFs in ad posts to attract attention
-Include video in posts to increase shares

Schedule posts

Use crowdbooster.com to schedule future automatic posts

Create an Ad on Facebook Fast

Here's how to quickly create on ad on Facebook.

Go to facebook.com/manage

Click on "Create an Ad" button at top right.

Advertise on Facebook:

-Page Post Engagement

for business page to run post as ad that shows in News Feed

-Page Likes
See Ads on Facebook Using Page 'Likes'

-Clicks to Website

Insert a photo of something happy or pleasurable

-Choose Mobile News Feed

70% of FB ad traffic comes from mobile users and is cheaper

-Click Remove from Desktop News Feed

-Type in headline that is clear and descriptive

-Insert text that is conversational and explains where it goes

AUDIENCE:

Target your visitors age...

-Create New Custom Audience by uploading an email list

Run split campaigns to test ads

-Interests

Think of your competitors. Target and narrow.

-Categories

Don't use as they are too broad

Bidding:

-Bid for clicks

-Pricing: Manually set maximum bid

Even bidding $1, may pay much less with good ad

(usually $.10-.30 per click)

5 Creative Ways to Write Persuasive Call to Action in Your Blog Post

By Anil Valvi

You might think that it is not important for you to write call to action in your blog post. But, is it so?

If you want your readers to leave their comment on your blog, you write call to action. If you want your readers to follow you on Twitter and become your fans on Facebook, you write call to action. If you want your readers to sign up to your mailing list, you need call to action. The same is true when you promote your product to your blog readers. You need call to action. So, call to action is important for your blog, and it is necessary for you to learn about how to write it effectively.

Here are 5 creative ways to write persuasive call to action in your blog post:

1. Don’t Be Afraid To Ask People to Do Something after Reading Your Post

Many bloggers are afraid to write call to action because they don’t want to come up as pushy and demanding toward their audience. But, this is just not true. When you write a call to action, you are not being pushy or demanding toward your audience. In fact, you are motivating and encouraging them to take the next action. You are not forcing them. You merely invite them to do so. So, don’t be afraid to ask people what they need to do next after reading your blog post. This is important, because when you feel afraid, you won’t be able to write an effective call to action and it will not be compelling enough to motivate your readers.

2. Tell Them the Benefit of Taking Action

You have to remind your audience about the benefit of taking action in the end of your post. It’s not about the benefit for you or your blog, but it is about the benefit that your readers will instantly get once they do the proposed action that you ask them to do. For instance, if you want them to sign up to your mailing list, you should tell them about the benefit of signing up to your list that they can get instantly. Remember, people will not be motivated to do something unless they can get the advantage of doing it. And it is much better if they can get the advantage instantly instead of later.

3. Make It the Next Logical Step

Make their action the next logical step that they should do after reading your blog post. It will go like this. If your readers love your content, logically they will want to get more content, right? Thus, if they want to get more content from you, logically they should stay tune with the latest updates on your blog. In order to do this, they need to follow you on social media because you will always post the latest blog updates there. So, it’s the logical step that they have to do. If your call to action can become the logical step that your audience can do after reading your content, they will just go with the flow. But, if the call to action is completely off-course for them, then they will not respond well.

4. Give Them Time Limit

People are constantly buying limited edition products because of one thing: lack of availability. The rarer something is, the more demand it will get, provided that it has good value to offer. So, it can be applied to your call to action as well. When you give your readers the time limit to take action, you will be able to encourage them to take action immediately. For instance, if you are giving away an exclusive offer to your mailing list subscribers for only the next 7 days, your readers will be willing to sign up to your list immediately just to get a grab on your offer. But, if there’s no time limit, your readers will not feel the sense of urgency to join your list. As a result, it will give less positive response for your call to action.

5. End with a Question

When you ask question to someone, he or she will naturally answer your question. Try it with your call to action. If your call to action is a question, then naturally your readers will respond to it. This is true when you are asking your readers to leave their comment. Once you write a full blog post, you will end it up with a question: “What about you? Do you have some other ideas that you want to share?” And it will automatically motivate people to write comment to share their ideas. Thus, the discussion will start. So, it’s a good strategy for you to end your blog post with a question in order to encourage people to take action immediately.

Those are some creative ways to write persuasive call to action in your blog post. If you want your readers to engage with you and become an active part of your blogging community, writing an effective call to action for your blog post is necessary. If you apply those creative ways for your call to action, you’ll get better response from your blog readers.

Webcasts: Enterprise Social Media Success Leadership by Example

Enterprise Social Media Success Leadership by Example

WordPress Multisite Can Be Structural Advantage For SEO

By Phil Singleton

WordPress is by far the most popular content management system for small businesses. It’s super easy to use and when structured properly, great for search engine optimization. WordPress also gives you the ability to create a ‘website of websites’ or your own network of sites, on a single installation.

You can find the official networking explanation of WordPress Multisite here. We will not get into the background or specifics of WP Multisite in this post, but there are some great posts around the net of this topic such as this beginner’s guide.

In a nutshell, WP Multisite enables you to create a network of websites on a single installation of WordPress. This means, you can have one ‘super admin’ with network wide control, then create an unlimited number of separate websites, each with their own unique moderators and users. In one common application, for example, you could have a main domain with generic content and a subdomain with niche specific or geographically specific content. OK, so what does that mean in real world applications?

The following is a practical example of a WordPress Multisite website. This following link is to the main or ‘parent’ of a WordPress multisite installation website which shows content geared for a national audience:
http://bloggerlocal.com

Next, here is an example of a secondary or ‘child’ website on the same domain and WordPress installation. In this case, all of the content is different from the parent website, including the content, images and meta data, and in this example, all content is geo-targeted for a city:
http://kansascity.bloggerlocal.com

Another example of a targeted use of WP Multisite is for niches. So, as an example on the same domain, here is a child site niche-targeted for photography:
http://photographers.bloggerlocal.com

How does this help for SEO?
While there may be some subdirectory vs subdomain debate regarding the importance and influence of domain structure for search engine optimization, it’s pretty clear that subdomain structure is treated differently that subdirectory structure. Regardless, using WP Multisite is not appropriate for all businesses nor is it pure SEO structure advantage. The main benefits of using a subdomain structure in WordPress Multisite for possible SEO advantages are likely only realized when using this technology with a genuine and comprehensive approach, and for the following reasons:

1. The subdomain address is technically a separate website address. Yet, search engines likely neutralize any potential benefits of trying to use subdomains in and of themselves as and SEO advantage.

2. The subdomain website is technically a separate installation of WordPress, meaning, it’s a separate CMS, with a separate blog and users. Chances are that installing a full website on a subdomain shows this is a website and not a thin microsite or page. This is why you can see that free Web 2.0 blogs on blogger.com and wordpress.com, etc. subdomains can achieve rank when they publish high quality content.

3. The child site content is quality and unique: this shows the search engines that the child site should achieve rank for its niche or territory. Then each child site’s SEO potential can be further strengthened with unique social signals and NAP (name-address-phone number) citations if appropriate.

4. It’s possible to map a unique domain, ie a separate domain to a child site. Having a unique top level domain (TLD) mapped to a child is clearly be an SEO advantage as a child site with a unique domain to the parent site would have to be treated like a separate site by the search engines.

While WP Multisite may not be a fit for most small businesses, it certainly offers an awesome, cost effective structure for many types of businesses. Businesses such as restaurants, franchises, chapter-based organizations, property management firms, etc. could all benefit from this type of “site of sites” networking structure. By having the ability to carve out niche and geo-targeted child sites, there may be significant SEO benefits as well.

Nifty Google tricks you should know about

By Chris Smith

While most users know how to perform a search, use Gmail or navigate with Maps, they may not be aware of some of the nifty hidden tricks Google has included in its online services.

By adding “timer” after an amount of time, you can set up a timer inside the browser, and the alarm will sound when the time is up.

In case you don’t know how to say long numbers in English, all you have to do is type “=English” immediately after the number that’s giving you headaches, and Google will type it in English – you probably already know that you can perform math calculations and unit conversions (including currency) right inside the Google Search bar.

Is Social Media Necessary For Getting New Customers?

By David Cuevas

Being a successful entrepreneur requires the ability to develop potential customers by using any means necessary. If you are not currently active on social media marketing channels like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, you can bet your competitors are and they are producing significant results.

83% of marketers indicate that social media is important for their business.

The number of businesses that say Facebook is critical or important to their business has increased by 75%.

Social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing.

Still think social media is a fad? Here are some usage stats for you.

The fastest growing demographic on Twitter is the 55-64 year age bracket. This demographic has grown 79% since 2012.
The 45–54 year age bracket is the fastest growing demographic on both Facebook and Google+.
For Facebook, this group has jumped 46%.
For Google+, 56%.
YouTube reaches more U.S. adults aged 18–34 than any cable network.
Every second two new users join LinkedIn.

Social media can also be used to help you find more details about your business than you ever imagined possible. An example of the power of social media is the use of hashtags and trending topics, which allow you to find specific information about your company, what people may be saying about it, or even find insights regarding the market in which you are involved.

Now What?

Social media is a vital tool that is readily available and will help your business reach new customers and grow in ways – and at speeds – that more traditional marketing can’t accomplish. As the statistics above show, social media usage has gone mainstream. Because people are spending significantly more time on social media sites, the battle for the attention of all of these eyeballs has also intensified.

Develop effective social media campaigns.

Social media marketing is now becoming a necessity for most businesses.

Companies MUST move in this direction by allocating resources to sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest. While costs have increased, the rewards are significant. Social media has quickly become the best way to develop social influence and increase brand awareness on the web.

Be sure to implement social media into your marketing campaign today, as it will be the best way to keep up with those around you.

5 Reasons Brand Strategy and Social Media Should Work Together

By Liz Papagni

While a social media department that exists in a silo is certainly better than none at all, it’s not nearly as effective as an integrated brand strategy.

Social media is now the most popular online activity, accounting for 27% of time consumers spend on the internet. 74% of marketers consider their presence on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other major networks an integral part of generating new leads. Simply put, the potential of social media is far too great to not use to its fullest potential. The most effective marketers today actively work to integrate their content marketing and communication across platforms, so their customers and prospects can benefit from their company’s consistency and clarity.

Consider the following reasons why your social media should be a cohesive component of your greater brand strategy:

1. You’ll Remove Inefficiencies

If your social media isn’t actively working to elevate your organization towards its larger goals and KPIs, the effort could be wasted. As Rocky Cipriano points out, integrated marketing communications are naturally a better use of limited resources: “your marketing is more powerful when every advertisement, every email, and every marketing piece communicates consistently.”

Not only will consistent brand messaging allow every Facebook post, Tweet, and Pinterest pin to further your company’s unique value proposition and personality, you’ll ensure that your social media inputs are aligned with your goals as a company.

2. You Will Achieve More Effective Content Distribution

While creating custom content is a highly effective way to help your organization increase lead generation and customer conversions, your blogs, whitepapers, and other forms of web content simply can’t exist in a vacuum. Every 24 hours, 2 million blog posts are published. The science of content distribution has become a crucial component of being noticed in an era of content saturation.

By aligning your social media with your content creation strategy, you’ll achieve more effective promotion and distribution of your brand’s content assets, allowing your organization to maximize exposure and ROI on major social networks.

3. You’ll Build Stronger Relationships

While the internet has drastically changed human behavior, the fact remains that trust is an enormously important factor in motivating human behavior. Studies have found that the average consumer doesn’t care if 70% of brands disappear tomorrow. The remaining 30% includes organizations who’ve managed to transcend transactional relationships and build greater trust with their prospects and customers. Your social media outreach should include the same messaging and strategy as your brand position, so your customers know what to expect and are able to begin trusting you.

Additionally, a social media strategy that’s integrated with your larger marketing goals will allow your social media managers to more effectively target their posts to your buyer personas. By tailoring your messages to you ideal customer, you’ll improve your chances of capturing the business of your most profitable prospect segments.

4. You’ll Avoid Brand Confusion

Brand confusion is a real and dangerous threat to modern organizations. Research by the Harvard Business Review has found that differentiation has become more challenging today due to a proliferation of new brands, and even worse, that most modern marketers are doing nothing to solve the problem. The key to eliminating this threat is to avoid thinking in a promotional or limited-time mindset, and focus on longer-term goals. If your social media posts are consistent with your brand’s personality or tone, you’ll likely achieve much better differentiation than your competitors who don’t have the same long-term outlook.

5. You Can Achieve “Triangulation”

Marketing thought leader Aaron Perlut believes that earned media outreach is effectively useless if you’re not moving toward “triangulation;” which is defined as the integration of social media, search marketing, and PR. Your social media posts shouldn’t just be viewed as updates to your Facebook or Twitter audience, because they’re so much more. Social media has the potential to be the cornerstone of your brand’s web presence, which is why it’s important to ensure that each piece of outreach is effectively targeted, and consistent with your brand strategy as a whole.

80% Of Social Media B2B Leads Come From LinkedIn

Social media continues to grow as a lead generation avenue, and according to a new infographic from Oktopost, 80 percent of B2B leads were through LinkedIn.
Oktopost is a social media marketing platform, and analyzed over 100,000 posts spread across four major social networks.

Here’s the percentage of B2B leads generated through each social network:

LinkedIn – 80.33 percent
Twitter – 12.73 percent
Facebook – 6.73 percent
Google+ – 0.21 percent

According to Oktopost, B2B leads are most likely to convert between 1 and 4 PM.

Here are the most popular posting methods on LinkedIn to generate leads, followed by conversions:

Discussion Groups – 96.22 percent of posts, 86.30 percent of conversions
Company Pages – 0.59 percent of posts, 10.07 percent of conversions
Personal Profiles – 3.20 percent of posts, 3.63 percent of conversions

The average length of a B2B-related LinkedIn post is 248 characters, and one out of every three posts contains a question mark in its subject line.

Social Media B2B Leads Come From LinkedIn (Infographic)

What’s the answer to generating more blog visits?

11 Ways to Boost Traffic to Your Company Blog

By Carter Hostelley,

Read more at http://www.business2community.com/b2b-marketing/11-ways-boost-traffic-company-blog-0812475#h26bioVYPSU1Wvey.99

Writing more posts seems to be the new clarion call (with the disclaimer that it still needs to be quality content) since you can only break through the tsunami of content your prospects are drowning in by pouring on more of your own, right? While there’s some truth to this, not all companies have the budget to hire dedicated content creation teams like the folks at Salesforce, Marketo and Hubspot.
What’s a content marketer to do? Here are 11 ways that companies of any size can use to drive much more traffic to their blog.

1. Start with SEO

I know you’ve got an SEO keyword list in someone’s Dropbox folder — you may even have an agency helping out to hone and manage the list. Just make sure whoever is responsible for writing blog posts has access to it and is referencing the list for headlines, section titles, links, etc.

2. Enable Social Sharing

Are you making it easy for blog visitors to share posts on social media? Are social sharing widgets prominently placed and easy to find? And don’t forget to offer the option to share on LinkedIn and Google plus. Include the sharing widgets on the blog summary page too, since many folks share based on headlines — even if they don’t end up reading the full post.

3. Write From Your Prospects’ Perspective

This one continues to be a struggle for B2B marketers. Here’s an easy way to think about it: write your blog posts from your target reader’s perspective (what helps them?) and write the call-to-actions with your company in mind (what helps you?). Making blog posts about prospects “pain” will keep them reading, and make them more likely to share with their social networks.

4. Focus on Getting Blog Subscribers

Over time, your most reliable source of traffic will be those that signed up to receive blog updates via email. Yes, email still trumps social media when it comes to driving visitors. So make email subscription your main call to action for the blog. Why not go further and set up a “light-box” to prompt blog visitors that linger on the page for more than 20-30 seconds to subscribe?

5. Leverage Social Media Channels

Your team has taken the time to build out a decent following on social media, so go ahead and use it. Share your company posts on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. And don’t think one-time. Instead, create a series of status updates and tweets for every blog post (think: three to five) and promote daily for the next week or so. This is where tools like Buffer come in.

6. Promote Your Blog on Your Homepage

Don’t treat your blog as the ugly stepchild and make it hard for people to find. Instead, it should be prominently listed and easily accessible from the main website navigation. Also consider highlighting the latest posts within a featured blog posts section of the homepage.

7. Make Blog Posts a Key Component of Email Marketing Efforts

Are you including your latest blog posts in your email marketing to customers, prospects and channel partners? If you haven’t been, now’s the time to start.

8. Promote in Relevant Communities and Forums

LinkedIn groups are a great place to showcase your thought-leadership posts. And most industries also have other communities and forums that reach your target audience. Make sure and share your latest blog posts in groups and communities that your prospects participate in. Having said that, just keep in mind the guidelines of any group on how best to share your blog posts.

9. Get Bylines and Do Guest Posts

While this is one is less about generating blog traffic, it’s still very much about getting your company’s blog posts read. In particular, those posts especially fine-tuned to help address the pains of your prospects. Industry publications and blogs that already reach your target audience are a great place to get a monthly byline or submit guest posts. Tip: run your post in the industry publication and then, a couple days later, drop it into your company blog.

10. Invite Your Employees to Share

I’m a big fan of employee advocacy. If your company is writing quality blog posts then why wouldn’t employees want to read and share them on Twitter and LinkedIn? Just imagine if you could get even 10 percent of your workforce to help promote your company blog. That could generate lots of traffic, right?

11. Post More Often if You Can

Not every blog post has to be about thought-leadership. For example, do a weekly roundup of industry news and other topics you found interesting and shared on Twitter. Also leverage your other content marketing and media campaigns for posts. You know, write blog posts about an upcoming webinar, latest white paper and company news. Just remember that every blog post should be written with “why readers should care” in mind. Don’t be surprised if you can generate three to five posts a week, or maybe even more!That’s our list, what’s yours? Any others you’d recommend or find work best?

7 Unbelievable Mobile Marketing Success Stories

Mobile is opening up a whole new landscape of communication that we can use to reach customers.

Have you thought about how your company can leverage mobile marketing to increase sales?
When the sky is the limit and the opportunities seem endless, it can be difficult to develop an initial strategy. Reading blog posts and reaching out to thought-leaders is a good way to gain knowledge, but how will you use that knowledge to craft a killer mobile strategy? Learning by example can help get you started.

Here are 7 mobile marketing success stories that will inspire your own mobile marketing efforts.

Google Tools You Didn't Know Existed

Webmaster Tools

Google's Webmaster Tools allows webmasters to monitor a site's health and traffic. Additional tools include a Structure Data Markup Helper and Google Places for Business.

Google Fonts

Google Fonts offers open source web fonts for all to use privately or commercially. As of now, there are 629 font families available. Filter fonts by thickness, slant, width and script.

Google Developers

Google Developers houses a plethora of resources that developers can use, tools such as internationalizing different websites and live presentations of tutorials. Developers can also join groups in a local area for meetups and collaboration.

Google Sky

A part of Google Earth, Google Sky allows you to explore space and star systems. In collaboration with NASA, using images from the Hubble Telescope, Google Sky is one of three subsidiaries of Google Earth, the others being Google Mars and Google Moon.

Schemer

Schemer is like a combination to-do list and social event planning app. Connect via your Google+ account, enter your preferences, and Schemer will offer some things to do around your area. A great tool for travelers who want to make the most out of a visit, as well as for locals who want to find something to do on an otherwise boring day. You can also collaborate with the friends in your Google+ Circles and see who wants to do the same things as you.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in Google Docs Tutorial

Want to know how to use the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology in Google Docs/Drive? This tutorial shows you how to use the OCR technology to convert images with text to an editable text document in Google Docs. Have fun digitizing!

danedtech.com/2012/10/16/optical-character-recognition-ocr-in-google-docs-tutorial

Google Translate Beat Boxes When You Type This Gibberish

Now, you can enjoy some a cappella, sung by Google Translate.

If you insert the below nonsensical string of characters into Google Translate, set the "to" language to German and press listen, you'll hear a beat boxer. Just copy and paste to try for yourself.

pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk bschk pv bschk bschk pv kkkkkkkkkk bschk bschk bschk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk bschk pv bschk bschk pv kkkkkkkkkk bschk bschk bschk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk bschk pv bschk bschk pv kkkkkkkkkk bschk bschk bschk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk bschk pv bschk bschk pv kkkkkkkkkk bschk bschk bschk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk pv zk bschk pv zk pv bschk zk bschk pv bschk bschk pv kkkkkkkkkk bschk bschk bschk

Now supports 63 languages...

German, Greek, Japanese and now Bengali is spoken by some 300 million people, and Tamil is the official language in parts of India as well as Sri Lanka and Singapore. The service has supported the most commonly spoken Indic language, Hindi, since 2008.

The support for these new languages is now live on Google Translate.