Archive for the ‘social media’ Category
Social Media: Is It Right for Your Business?
Understanding whether or not your business needs to be using social media is a critical component in the development of a strategic marketing and public relations plan. To make this decision, you need to understand who your customers are by segment and then comprehend where they place their attention and how or if they use social media.
Do they use SM?
Not every business’s customers are using social media or are spending the majority of their time there. As an example, I don’t believe a wholesale lumber yard’s customers (who are general contractors and homebuilders) are spending time engaged in social media. But research can tell you whether or not they do.
Flowtown posted a blog article that makes the point eloquently:
Not everyone has the patience for the cultivation and care social media marketing requires to do it well. They look for short cuts because they are fixated on the wrong numbers and placing value on the wrong things. For those with patience there are rewards, though: There are many case studies out there to prove that social media marketing can be a valuable addition to a company’s marketing mix; it can enhance and amplify their traditional and online marketing efforts and can have a positive impact on a company’s brand, customer service capabilities and, eventually, sales.
In the race to social media and the rapid adoption in the past years, many have “jumped on the bandwagon” who mistake the reasons to be involved in social media.
Social Media Truth
Social media is not about saving money, using free tools or broadcasting messages. It is about creating a positive relationship where one receives permission to converse and share interesting content, ideas, and thoughts. Sometimes those are about our core business, and sometimes they are about where to find the best priced business lunch.
*Photo Credit: Flickr Creative Commons user Intersection Consulting
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Tags: 7 Ways to Promote Your Blog Posts
Is your blog like a field of dreams? If you write it they will come? Readers can be developed with promotion.
So you write posts for your corporate blog or your personal blog. And you’ve learned how to make your posts interesting and have been writing regularly. Hopefully you are doing this to provide a body of information to your clients and attract new clients as well. You may be doing this to enhance your SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and bring traffic for your targeted keywords.
Blogging, is not an “If you build it, they will come,” sport. You must do as the newsboys of the last century did and stand on the digital corner and promote your blog. If you don’t you’re wasting your valuable writing effort and time. You can dramatically increase traffic to your blog by using a few tools.
It only takes a small bit of effort to get your posts promoted.
The most effective promotions tools that I’ve used are grouped in three categories:
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-Social Media
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-Blog Feeds or Syndication
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-E-mail marketing
Let’s look at each way to promote your blog content:
Social Media:
Facebook Pages
You can easily link your blog content to your Facebook Business Page with the application Networked Blogs or at a minimum you can manually post links to your blog’s latest articles.
Using either Twitter or preferably HootSuite you can write interesting leads and connect them with shortened URLs that provide trackable stats to measure your results. You can schedule your tweets to show up in your stream so you know they go out when your readers are most often reading.
Su.pr
Su.pr is a syndication service that allows for link shortening and tweeting. You can immediately tweet or schedule the tweet about your blog content. Write a very compelling headline and watch the stats. You can download them and you can also see what suggested posting times will get the more response.
Blog Feeds and Syndication:
RSS
Almost every blog has a built in RSS feed. If yours doesn’t, you need to be sure to make that happen. This allows readers who find your content of value to subscribe in their choice of reader, pulling your content to them. One of the most popular readers is GoogleReader. Personally, I use Bloglines, but to each her own.
Feedburner
Feedburner is the most often thought of feed distribution service. Now owned by Google, it provides great stats and shows how your feed has been used and how many clicks back to your site have been taken to interact with your post.
BlogBurst
This syndication service promotes qualified blogs to high traffic websites. BlogBurst says, “We promote your blog…Our top-tier publishers display your blog content on their sites. Clicks on your byline drive referral traffic to your blog. It is a distribution and matching service designed to widen your blog’s reach and drive traffic to your blog regardless of other affiliations you may have.”
E-mail:
Signature
How many e-mails to you send a day? While the usage of e-mail has dropped off, it is still a primary business communication tool. Provide a link to your blog in your e-mail signature. Feedburner provides code to allow you to have an animated badge with recent headlines, so e-mail recipients will actually see your blog’s headlines and be enticed into reading. But if you choose not to use the Feedburner animated headline rotator, you can at a minimum provide a hyperlink to your blog.
By using these tools I can guarantee you will dramatically increase your blog’s readership. And isn’t this exactly what you want to do?
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How to avoid Twittercide
Ashley T. Caldwell of The Modern Connection and I were invited to lead a Twitter workshop for The Center for Women. Live5 News in Charleston came over to talk to us about Twittercide and how to stay out of trouble.
Twitter is a great tool to help you connect to current and potential customers, just be careful what you say.
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When is an image, more than an image?
Image properties and search engine results
While working with a client to create a blogging plan and editorial calendar, we reviewed the firm’s website.
I realized that the company didn’t have proper Alt Tags for their images and that their images were named with the “out of the camera” names common to digital cameras, like image5678.jpg.
Search Engines Like Alt Tags
When they support your SEO goals with proper Alt Tags and image names
By not having keyword relevant Alt Tags and image names as well as captions, this client and you may be missing an opportunity to increase your website’s inclusion in search engine results pages (SERPs.)
Google Likes Keyword Alt Tags
Google and other search engines search the Alt Tags and image titles and include images in their organic search results. In addition, web searchers are now getting more sophisticated in their searches and are searching images just as we search “normal” web content.
Image Properties
If you have a content managed website with a framework such as a Joomla, Drupal or WordPress you have the ability to make these changes. Image Properties for each image allow you to set the Alt Tag for each image. In WordPress, for example which is our preferred CMS, you can set these properties for each image in the Media Library or in an image gallery, such as a gallery created with NextGEN. Use your targeted keywords when adding Alt Tags and you’ll help your SERPs.
WordPress Media Library and Image Names
In the past when naming images, webmasters often used underscores between words in an image name. Underscores are not comprehensible to search engines so you should instead use hyphens between words. If you are using WordPress, you can set the name of the image in the Media Library when you import the image. WordPress does not require you to add the hyphens. Just remember to use keyword rich names for images that are relevant to the image content and post content.
Image Selection
When you select images for your blog posts, select images that are relevant to the post’s content and give them captions that are also relevant to the content. When you place the image in the page, place it near the most relevant content.
Images Can Support SEO Goals
Following these few guidelines will support your search engine optimization goals and will help your website’s rankings. If you’ve not followed these procedures in the past, you can update your site or have your webmaster do this for you. By doing this you will also be freshening up your content as well.
**picture frame image courtesy of designshard on flickr creative commons
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Better blog posts
I’m a member of a group blog, Dress4Dinner, a blog whose goal is to “bring back dinner” as a way to entertain in the home and “make it sexy” again. We each host a dinner party in our homes and write about our planning, execution and wrap up of the event. One of my blogging partners asked for advice on how to dress up her posts so they are more visually appealing and easier to read.
She took note of my use of subheads and the way images were being displayed in the posts and said she’d like to “dress up her posts a bit.” Here are the things that I suggested to her.
Use subheads like this
First, using subheads related to the following paragraph is a tidy way to eliminate long blocks of unbroken copy. Second, for the reader with little time, subheads allow for quick scanning of pages as well. Third, you can make them keyword rich and support your SEO goals.
Use images to add impact
There are many sources of images. A few that I’ve used are royalty free stock sites such as iStock and Stock.XCHNG. Another good source of images for blogs is flickr creative commons attribution license area. A note: There are restrictions on the usage of all these sites’ images. You must adhere to the terms of use for each site and each work.
I like to use image management extensions that provide more flexibility in your blog posts. In our WordPress based blogs and websites created for our clients, we use the NextGEN gallery tools. You can display a group of images as thumbnails, as a slide show or as an image gallery. While the gallery options in WordPress have improved, they are still not optimal. NextGEN is very easy to manage and use and really dresses up your blog posts.
Other tips on writing better blog posts
Several posts of recent have offered tips and thoughts on how to create compelling and punchy content. HubSpot’s blog post addresses ways to create posts that are designed to support your SEO and Internet Marketing goals. Robert Holland on Ragan offers his tips to make blog posts sticky.
To paraphrase what my high schools friends would say to me in 1973, “write on.”
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Social media is not a fad
This video about the domination of social media came over a year ago. It’s been refreshed with the latest stats and provides compelling evidence that Social Media is the dominant medium.
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Twitter Follow Friday, April 9
Here’s my follow Friday list—this Friday we’re focusing on writers we love to read:
@CPEats – her local food Tweets keep us up to date
@thepioneerwoman – her images and words are the heartland
@ruthreichl – her Tweets are food/sensual poetry
@IsabellesTravel – her travel Tweets keep us in the know
@TannerLatham –he writes about the real life
@maryalicemonroe – because she’s always sharing something great
@angiemizzell – great local voice
@TLynnNews – she is always in the know about what’s happening in Charleston
@TheGourmetGirl – sharing the best news about food, drink, eating.
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Don’t Shoot the Bloggers
I do a fair amount of public relations consulting for advertising agencies. This helps them save money. They have a senior PR person on call, but not on the payroll. Because of this arrangement, I have the delight of working with a number of agencies in the greater Charleston area, as well as some outside the area.
Bloggers are not a target. They are a source. Listen to them.
This morning one of my ad agency colleagues phoned to ask (on behalf of a client who posed this question to the ad agency) how best to create a list of bloggers so the client could “shoot out a release to them.” At which point, I said, “Ummm, I wouldn’t encourage that if I were you.” My colleague said the client wants to send a release, implying that they just wanted to shout out the message into the ether and hope that someone hears it.
He doubted that they would heed my advice; the best way to get the attention of bloggers is to have a relationship with them. You can’t just fire off a release to a blogger and expect that they’ll show interest unless it’s a world-class, earth shattering story. Bloggers have their own voice and editorial calendar.
In case you haven’t been around in the past few years, professional bloggers have developed compelling content rich blogs that many readers subscribe to. Each bloggers’ voice is the equivalent of a direct line to people very interested in the topic of the blog or the bloggers thoughts/ideas.
Being able to successfully pitch bloggers requires that you subscribe to and read their blogs. That you follow them on Twitter. That you comment on their posts and understand their editorial tone. Not too much different than what one should have been doing with print publications; advice which is often ignored. Don’t wait around to create relationships. Do it because it is the right thing to do. You can learn a lot from reading the same information your customers are interested in. And if you can’t take time to do this yourself, consult with a public relations professional who is familiar with bloggers in your industry.
If you want to have bloggers interested in the story that your company has to share, plan ahead. Read the top bloggers in your industry or for the customers you serve. You can find them by looking at which blogs are top ranked on Technorati, or most frequently bookmarked on Delicio.us.
Don’t wait until you just want to “shoot out a release” to develop relationships with bloggers and understand what their audiences care about. Do it now because they offer invaluable insight into the mind of your consumer.
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Tips for using Twitter to promote your business
As Twitter has matured, many small business owners have joined the conversation. However, there are those out there who have tried it and don’t understand how it works. Or they have “looked into it” and are not sure where to begin.
Recently I’ve discussed social media with several groups. There are so many who feel that the whole Twitter world is going to swamp them. And there are those who are afraid of appearing silly. My number one tip is to remember that this is social media. Your goal is to be social. Your task is to engage, learn about your neighbors and develop community.
If you’re having issues trying to determine how to tweet, what to tweet or when, this post from Mark Hayward on Twitip will help you understand some of the fundamentals.
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Social media conversationalists
Forrester Research publishers of one of my favorite business books, Groundswell, released research that quantifies a new category of those active in social media. Dubbed conversationalists, these users are active and influential.
According to Forrester, Conversationalists are,
56% female, more than any other group in the ladder. While they’re among the youngest of the groups, 70% are still 30 and up.”
Recently I was a presenter with Shauna Heathman of Makenzie Image Consulting at the Columbia, SC National Association of Women Business Owners discussing personal branding whenone of the attendees asked others at the meeting, “Do you read blogs?” Her question stimulated discussion about of who reads and publishes blogs. Only a few did not regularly read and comment on blogs. However only 2 attendees maintain and write a blog. Earlier in the presentation the majority of the women recounted using their Facebook profiles to support their businesses’ marketing. Forrester’s more scientific research confirms my “woman on the street” first-hand knowledge.
If you want to reach the customers (and I mean women) who make 85% of brand purchasing decisions, you need to be active in social media. Eight-six percent US women now have a profile on at least 1 social networking site a 48% increase. (Up from 58% in 2008.)
Women are conversationalists. Our brains are wired that way and data show how we have leveraged our innate ability into a powerful force.
