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Monthly Archives: October 2013

MailChimp for Designers

31 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Email Marketing, Mail Chimp

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Email Marketing

 Maybe you’re a freelance web designer hired to create email templates. Maybe you work for an agency, and you’re setting up a client’s MailChimp account, designing their templates and teaching them how to use the application. Maybe you’re a web design consultant. In any case, you can use MailChimp to create beautiful emails for your clients and see to it that their email marketing plan is successful. MailChimp got its start as a web design firm, so we’ve made it a priority to create a system that empowers both designers and their clients.

That said, if you’re looking for a completely rebranded email marketing solution that encourages you to charge a penny per send, then you should look elsewhere. We don’t want you to click every button and send every email for your clients, because as a web designer, your expertise goes far beyond button clicking. If you agree to hold a client’s hand throughout the entire process without teaching them anything, you’ll be forced to become an email marketing manager and a deliverability expert and a professional copy/paster. That’s not what you’re trained to do— and you probably wouldn’t enjoy it, either.

Different clients will want different services—you might choose to limit your email marketing work to template design, and that’s perfectly fine. But if your clients are looking for more involvement from a creative agency, you should know how to set up their account, create their templates, and teach them how to use MailChimp so they can send their own emails.

The setup phase usually involves general MailChimp training, creating accounts and lists, consulting your client on list management, and coding templates. Your client might even ask you to help them determine what kind of templates they need or how frequently they should send campaigns.

After setting up your client’s account, work with them to determine which features they should use. Set up social sharing options like auto-tweet, and add a signup form to their Facebook page. If your client has a blog, tell them about our RSS-to-email feature. Look into how to make it personal.

From there, teach your client how to send a campaign, and introduce them to MailChimp’s reports. Check in often to see how their campaigns are going, and ask if they need any new templates. Down the road, you might even want to look into API integration. And of course, always keep an eye on your client’s list to make sure they’re not spamming.

Once you learn your way around MailChimp, you can apply to become an Expert–our Experts Directory connects email marketers with creative agencies. Now, let’s get started.

Manage Your List

In order to manage multiple clients’ email marketing plans, you need to know how to build lists and group them. First, decide if you’re going to set up multiple accounts, multiple lists, or just create multiple groups within one list. Here’s the breakdown:

One list, no groups

If your client plans to send only one type of newsletter to one group of people, and they want every one of their campaigns to go to every one of their subscribers, then you should create one simple list in MailChimp.

One list, multiple groups

If your client plans to send different types of content to different segments of one subscriber list, then create one list for the company, and divide it into groups. For example: A nonprofit might have separate groups for volunteers, news, board of directors, and more—no need to bug the board with the volunteer schedule. And when the content applies to everyone, they can send a campaign to the entire list.

Multiple lists

One account with multiple lists makes sense for people who have more than one business. We know it’s tempting for web designers to set up one agency account and a list for each client, but it’s a bad idea. We recommend an account for each client for a few reasons: First, if you only have one account, you can’t give your clients access to your account, because other clients’ data is there too. Second, if certain clients take over their own email marketing and get in trouble for spamming, then your account will be shut down—and you could lose a lot of business over it.

Multiple accounts

Agencies that send email campaigns for different clients should create a separate account for each client—you don’t want your data for one client mixed with data for another. Plus, if you part ways with one client, you can simply remove that account from your keychain (we’ll get to that later).

Design Your Campaign

Ready to design a campaign? First, you’ll choose or create a template. We have tons of Predesigned templates to choose from, or you can choose the Basicoption for a simple layout. Additionally, our Drag & Drop editor makes campaign creation quicker and simpler.

But as a web designer, you probably want to create your own.

If you’re providing your own code, choose Import. If you want to create a template for your clients, choose Code Your Own.

MailChimp’s template language makes it easy to code your own HTML emails that will allow your clients to adjust colors, fonts and more—without breaking the layout or messing with your code. And our template language uses CSS comments and a few special HTML attributes, so you don’t have to waste your time learning another language. (But if you’re not proficient in HTML and CSS, then using our template language isn’t your best bet.)

If you’re using a DOCTYPE declaration in your HTML email, you should use the Transitional Doctype:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/ TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

You should also use this meta tag in conjunction:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

CSS styling

Inlining CSS styles is the standard for making sure template designs retain their integrity within an email client. If you’re designing a template for yourself, this isn’t an issue. But if you’re designing for a client, inlining the CSS styling by default within the markup keeps them from making style changes to any editable sections within a template using the app’s editor. That happens because the inline styles always override what a user enters. Emails leaving our system have their CSS automatically inlined, so it’s not necessary to do it beforehand—it’s only necessary to ensure that the CSS styling would behave correctly in the first place.

Your email’s layout should be no wider than 600 pixels in order to allow proper viewing in most email clients. As a rule, avoid using floats and positioning in your email templates.

Remember to set the @theme declaration in your CSS for the page background, header, footer, and content space, so the templates can be quickly customized with MailChimp color themes.

Background images

You can use background images in templates, but getting them to work consistently across all email clients is tricky at best. Consider yourself warned. Using the “background-image” CSS property declaration to set a background image on an element is probably second nature for you—but unfortunately, a lot of email clients disregard the convention.

So if you plan to use background images, you need to know which clients support them, and which will require you to do a little more work to make sure your design is consistent across multiple platforms. These major email clients do support the background-image property:

  • Yahoo
  • Gmail
  • AOL
  • Apple Mail

These major email clients don’t support the background-image property:

  • Hotmail
  • Outlook
  • Lotus Notes

What can you do to make sure your email looks best across all clients? Two things:

  1. Make sure that when defining background images you’re using the “background-image” property and not the compound version of “background” as in:
    background:#FFFFFF url("bg-image.jpg") repeat;

    Using individual properties (like background-image, background-repeat, andbackground-color) instead can overcome issues of partial CSS support where the client doesn’t understand compound values in a CSS property.

  2. Use the often ignored “bgcolor” and “background” HTML attributes on your table and body tags. This can circumvent your CSS issues completely, since you’re using HTML code that’s older but still well supported.

Ideally, you’d have something like this:

<head>
  <style>
     #email {
       background-image:url("bg-image.jpg");
       background-color:#336699;
     }
  </style>
</head>
<body>
  <table background="bg-image.jpg" bgcolor="#336699" id="email">
    table stuff here, just like 1999!
  </table>
</body>

Editable sections

All mc:edit areas must have unique names (like mc:edit=”box1” and mc:edit=”box2”). Template content is attached to these names and stored in the database accordingly—so regardless of where in a template the mc:edit area is, if it shares a name with any other area, it’s going to duplicate any content entered (and it can trigger the loss of content). For simplicity’s sake, you should limit the number of editable spaces in your template and name all editable spaces consistently. The name you assign via mc:edit=”somename” is used to create a field in the database to store the user’s content. If the editable spaces aren’t consistent, and your client switches templates after writing the content, they could lose their copy. Use these conventions for common content areas:

mc:edit=”header”

to name your email’s header

mc:edit=”header_image”

to name an editable header image

mc:edit=”sidecolumn”

to name an editable left or right side column

mc:edit=”main”

to name the main content space

mc:edit=”footer”

to name your email’s footer

And remember, don’t place editable images within an editable content container.

Merge tags

The following five merge tags should always be included within your templates (generally in or near the footer);

*|UNSUB|*

unsubscribe link

*|FORWARD|*

forward to a friend link

*|UPDATE_PROFILE|*

update profile link

*|HTML:LIST_ADDRESS_HTML|*

list address

*|LIST:DESCRIPTION|*

list description

The *|UNSUB|*, *|HTML:LIST_ADDRESS_HTML|* and *|LIST:DESCRIPTION|* are required by law under the CAN-SPAM Act. If you don’t use them, your campaign might get rejected.

We’ve got lots more great merge tags you can place in your templates—check out our merge tag cheat sheet for a longer list.

External links

When you’re including links in an email, include the target=”_blank” attribute in your anchor elements to make them open a new browser window or tab when emails are viewed in web-based email clients. Here are some handy links to include:

<a href=”*|UPDATE_PROFILE|*” target=”_blank”>change subscription preferences</a>

A link for users to update their subscription preferences.

<a href=”*|ARCHIVE|*” target=”_blank”>view this email in a browser</a>

A link to let users view the email in a browser.

<a href=”*|LIST:URL|*” target=”_blank”>visit our website</a>

A link to your website.

<a href=”*|FORWARD|*” target=”_blank”>forward to a friend</a>

A link to let users forward the email to a friend, usually somewhere prominent.

(It’s a good idea to make a cool button treatment for it where possible to encourage sharing.)

Declaration blocks

MailChimp requires that you define editable CSS styles using declaration blocks. The formatting is pretty specific:

**/
* @tab WWWW
* @section XXXX
* @tip YYYY
* @theme ZZZZ
/*

@tab

The @tab declaration establishes a tab within the template editor. It’s best to keep these broad (think Page, Header, Body, Footer). This is the only required declaration.

@section

The @section declaration establishes a subsection within a tab, and allows you to split styles into more specific areas. For example: In “@tab Page” you could have subsections like “background”, “title” and “subtitle”—anything broad enough to be applied to the email as a whole. This declaration isn’t required, but it keeps the editor from becoming too complex.

@tip

The @tip declaration allows for a short line of helper text that appears when a user is editing styles within the app. It’s not required, but it’s helpful if the style being edited could be confusing.

@theme

The @theme is used to set five specific default styles: “page,” “main,” “header,” “title” and “subtitle.” Once they’re set, the user can call on these styles to be automatically applied to selected text or areas within the template. In order for a heading to work correctly (title or subtitle), the CSS class has to be set correctly: either .title or .subTitle.

Only these five arguments are used in @theme, so it’s not necessary to set @theme for anything else. The “page” theme defines a standard background color for an email. The “main” theme defines an email’s default font style and color. The “header” theme should be used for the background color of the “View in this browser” (preheader) section, or leave it off entirely. The “title” theme defines the email’s primary heading. The “subtitle” theme defines the email’s secondary heading.

Editable content areas

Add the mc:edit=”section-name” attribute to any elements with content that should be editable. The attribute opens the WYSIWYG text editor. Its value should be alpha-numeric and unique, and edit values can’t be the same as any other in your template.

Editable image areas

An editable image within a template can take a few attributes in order to allow users to insert the content they want. An editable image structure follows a normal img tag html structure, with our attributes added, and with specific CSS rules:

<img src="xxx.jpg" mc:allowdesigner mc:allowtext style="max-width:600px; max-height:250px;" />

mc:allowdesigner

The mc:allowdesigner attribute lets the user trigger the header designer. This one’s only needed for the 600px images that are a main focal point of a template—it’s not necessary for smaller content images.

mc:allowtext

The mc:allowtext attribute lets the user replace an image with text. Again, this is only needed on large-scale images (like header images), and it shouldn’t be used on content images.

We strongly recommend using the max-width CSS rule in order to keep an image from blowing out the set width of the template. The app supports the max-heightrule too. When these rules are used on an img tag, they constrain the image size and show size limitations on an editable image within the app’s template design screens.

Repeating content areas

mc:repeatable

The mc:repeatable attribute defines a content block that can be repeatedly added to the template. When using mc:repeatable, make sure to use proper nesting of items. An mc:repeatable section should never be contained within anmc:edit section. Instead, nest your mc:edit sections within your mc:repeatable blocks. Never nest mc:repeatable blocks within other mc:repeatable blocks, mc:edit areas within other mc:edit areas, or mc:edit images within mc:edit areas.

Template design best practices

Don’t wrap your email’s content text in standard HTML tags if other people are going to use your template—avoiding unnecessary tags will help minimize confusion and errors if part of the tag is deleted within the editor. To style your content, simply target the container it’s in with CSS, instead of targeting the content itself.

A simple way to set up your editable styles is to alphabetize your CSS rules. Don’t go overboard with providing editable styles—try not to repeat styles from section to section if a global style will have the same effect. And try to pare down the number of styles you have for any particular item. For example: With heading styles, only consider color, font family, font size, and font weight as your editable styles—this will help keep a lightweight editor interface.

Leaving out a title in the email template can bring up some difficulties when using social sharing functions. It’s best to include the html title tag and include the*|MC:SUBJECT|\* merge tag within it. This allows the campaign title to be pulled in automatically.

Save your template under My Templates, without content and with your necessary editable areas, and use it to create your campaigns instead of replicating a campaign and re-editing previous content every time you want to send.

Check out our template language resources for more info on MailChimp’stemplating language, tutorials and email template packs and plugins.

Testing your templates

Don’t forget to thoroughly test your templates. MailChimp has a spam filter checker (look for Inbox Inspector under your Account tab) that’ll tell you exactly what your email’s spam score is, and what you need to change if you want to improve your chances with spam filters. It will also show you what your campaign’s going to look like in all the major email applications. For more information, visit For more information, visitmailchimp.com/features/inboxinspector.

Inbox Inspector tests your email before sending, but consider it just one tool in your toolbox. Practical testing, by creating different accounts with different email services and sending to them, can also help you get your templates just right. It pays to research just which CSS rules email services and clients render correctly, and which ones are ignored.

For additional information about designing your email campaigns, visitMailChimp’s Email Template Reference.

Avoid Spam Filters

You work hard on your clients’ emails, and we wouldn’t want all that hard work to end up in spam folders. Your clients can make sure their newsletters go straight to their subscribers’ inboxes by learning how spam filters think. Spam filters look at a long list of criteria to decide whether or not an email is junk. The list of spammy criteria is constantly growing and adapting, because spam filters learn more about what junk looks like every time someone clicks the This is spam button.

Common mistakes to avoid:

  • Using spammy phrases like “Click here!” or “Once in a lifetime opportunity!”
  • Going crazy with exclamation points!!!!!!!
  • USING ALL CAPS
  • Coloring fonts bright red or green
  • Coding sloppy HTML (usually from converting a Word file)
  • Sending an email that’s nothing but one big image
  • Sending a test to multiple recipients within the same company

Warning signs that your client is spamming:

Can you tell if your client is spamming? Unfortunately, it’s the most common issue we see designers having with email marketing, and we’ve had to shut down a lot of agencies for their clients’ bad email-marketing practices: sloppy list management, poorly designed emails, purchased and old lists. This stuff gets the client—and the agency—reported for spamming, and often blacklisted.

Again, you should have a separate account for every client. If one of your clients is spamming on your account that they share with some of your other clients, then everyone gets shut down. And you probably lose a lot of clients as a result.

If your client has their own account, MailChimp can be the bad cop when it comes to spamming. But in any case, your role as an agency might be to consult your client on email marketing best practices, so you need to notice the way they manage list.

Understand Your Reports

You’ve worked with your client to create a beautiful and unspammy campaign, and it’s out the door. Now what? Take a look at your client’s MailChimp reports so you can analyze the campaign’s performance and make notes for next time.

Click the Reports tab and then on the title of the campaign. It’s especially important for agencies to know what the reports mean, not only so they can impress their clients with all the opens and clicks, but also so they can make informed recommendations for upcoming campaigns. In the next section, we’ll explain how to take it a step further by rebranding these reports so your client can see them without having them log in to MailChimp.

Subscriber activity

If you want to know even more about your clients’ subscriber activity, click theReports tab, then select Subscriber activity from within an individual report.

These reports give you extra insight about your clients’ recipients, like who opened the emails and what they clicked. See a real-time report for each recipient’s email activities: when they opened, what they clicked and when they came back. You can even generate a list of people who did not open, and send them a modified campaign.

Social tracking

MailChimp’s Social Stats allow you to watch your campaigns make their way around Facebook. To find out how many people like your campaigns, click Reportsin your MailChimp dashboard. Select a campaign and click Social Stats.

The like stats are located under Facebook Activity and organized by subscriber. You can see how many times each subscriber liked your campaign, and how many other likes they generated. Good to know!

We even track comments and analyze their sentiments with our Facebook Comments feature.

Twitter stats are located in the same place as Facebook stats: Click the Reportstab in your MailChimp dashboard, and you’ll see a list of all your campaigns. Select a campaign and click Social Stats.

Under Twitter Activity, you’ll see how many times your campaign has been tweeted and retweeted, who did the tweeting, and a timeline of all tweets. Only tweets that include the automatically generated eepURL for your campaign are included in this report, so you might have even more tweets than you think.

To really dig into what these stats mean and how you can learn from them, check out MailChimp’s Understanding Reports guide.

Collaborate

You’re already juggling plenty of tasks, which is why we focus so intently on collaboration features. We realize that email is not your job, but it is a part of your job, so we’ve created some features and integrations to hope you collaborate better with your clients.

Multi-user accounts

MailChimp’s multi-user accounts allow you, the account Admin, to grant permission to Managers, Authors, and Viewers, depending on how much access you’d like for your collaborators to have. Some people will work on your campaign, others will send, and some will only want to see the results. Now you can make those decisions.

Comments

Our email designer allows you to leave comments on campaigns. Start a conversation with your coworkers, or make sure something important gets changed. Your collaborators can respond to your comments in real time, complete tasks, and leave their own feedback so everyone’s on the same page.

Experts

If you’re a freelancer or agency looking for work, and you know your way around MailChimp, then check out our Experts program. Experts are freelancers and agencies who know email design, coding, and programming. We have a lot of customers who need help with their email marketing— with list importing, HTML email design, API programming, e-commerce and more. MailChimp’s Experts database gives users a list of third parties who can help them.

You can learn more and register to become an expert at experts.mailchimp.com.

Keep Your Data Safe

MailChimp has lots of security measures in place to keep your data safe. But when you’re responsible for your clients’ email lists, it’s especially important to stay informed and paranoid when it comes to security.

Security questions

MailChimp asks you to create security questions for your account, so that if we ever detect anything weird, like a login from a suspicious IP, we can ask one of the secret questions to make sure you’re the one logging in to your account. You have an option to force the security questions whenever we detect a login to your account from a different IP that you normally use. This is a great way for creative agencies to keep their clients’ data super safe.

To activate the security-question feature, log in to MailChimp and click Account > Username/Password & Security Settings. Check the Ask Security Question When Your Location Changes under Security Questions.

Email/SMS notifications

If you want to go the extra mile when it comes to email security, sign up for our security notifications. We’ll send you an alert via text message or email whenever we detect any of the following:

  • A login to your account
  • An API key has been generated
  • An account key has been created
  • Your contact info has been changed
  • Someone has attempted to download your list

To activate the feature, log in to MailChimp and click Username/Password & Security Settings. Under Notifications, fill in your mobile number, or your email address if you’d prefer email alerts.

Now you’ll get a simple message every time a security event is triggered within your account. We’ll include the IP address and approximate geolocation, to give you an idea of where the attempt is coming from.

AlterEgo

AlterEgo is the two-factor security web app we created to add an extra layer for thwarting phishing attacks and breaches caused by insecure passwords. It works by generating a temporary auth code only accessible on a user’s mobile devices, and requires that code for entry. We offer a 2% discount for any MailChimp user that activates AlterEgo. Think of it as a “good driver discount” you’d get from your insurance company.

MailChimp takes security extremely seriously. But you have a responsibility to protect your clients’ data too, so make sure you’re using a safe password for your MailChimp account that you don’t use anywhere else, and stay on top of our security updates. Check out our Email Security guide for tips on how to protect your data and what to do if you get hacked.

We appreciate what you do as a web designer. Our creative users are special to us, and we work hard to make MailChimp a product that you’re excited to use and share with your friends and colleagues. Thanks for taking the time to learn your way around MailChimp. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to contact our support team at mailchimp.com/support.

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Making the Most of LinkedIn Insights

31 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in LInkedIn

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Advertising, Analytics, LinkedIn Insights, Marketing

Making the most of LinkedIn Insights

Do you have a Company Page on LinkedIn for your brand and business? If not, stop reading and use this guide to take care of that first.

Back already? Ok. Now that you have a LinkedIn Company Page, that means you have a home for your business on LinkedIn. One of benefits of having a Company Page is that you can share Status Updates. Just like your personal LinkedIn account, and any other social network, status updates can include something about you or your business, an article you’ve written, or an article someone else has written that you want to share. On LinkedIn, those status updates can even include files and video andSlideShare presentations.

After you’ve been sharing updates for a while and have attracted some followers to your Company Page, you’re going to want to start paying attention to the analytics that LinkedIn provides. These are called Insights, just like on Facebook Pages. LinkedIn actually provides three sets of statistics: Per Post, Follower and Page.

Per Post Insights

Per Post Insights are specific to each status update. Simply go to your Company Page and scroll down through your previous updates. Below each update, you will see information detailing how many followers viewed that post, how many times it was clicked, and what that percentage is in regard to engagement.

For example, here’s a post from a few days ago to The Social Media Hat on LinkedIn. This post was one of our articles and as you can see, the post received 29 impressions, 4 clicks, and a result of 13.79% engagement. The engagement percentage is based completely on the ratio of clicks to impressions. So while the information does not tell you how many followers you had at that time (we had 78-80 at the time of that post), the engagement metric is unrelated to the number of Company Page followers.

LinkedIn Per Post Insights

Also note that the update states “Shared with all followers.” If you create a status update and choose to target specific follower demographics, this will be reflected in that line.

Follower Insights

To the right of the status update field, you will see a link to get to Follower Insights. The Follower Insights page provides an extensive look at not only how many followers you page has, but your growth and engagement rates, and demographic information about your followers.

LinkedIn Follower Insights

At A Glance

The report quickly illustrates how many followers your page has and how many have been added within the last 7 days. It goes on to tell you how many impressions your page has received total, and your average impressions per status update. You can review how many updates you’ve shared within the last week, and your average engagement per update as well.

Company Update Engagement

Below that, is a useful graph called Company Update Engagement. This graph demonstrates how your company page has done month-to-month.

LinkedIn Company Update Engagement

As you can see, the graph demonstrates how many clicks, comments, likes, shares and average engagement for each month. It shows 6 months at a time so if your page is older than six months, use the navigation arrows just below the graph to scroll back and forth.

Follower Demographics

The Follower Demographic is an example of where LinkedIn really shines.

LinkedIn Follower Demographics

Broken into tabs for Seniority, Industry, Function, Region, Company Size and Employee, you can see exactly what kinds of people are following your brand. These segments are also similar to the options you have when choosing to target new status updates.

Company Update Impressions

This simply demonstrates the total number of impressions for all your status updates, per month. As with any monthly statistic, you have to ignore the current month since the numbers will be incomplete. And since total impressions is a factor of both your number of followers and your number of posts per month, this graph does not seem to provide much value.

Recent Followers

The Recent Followers area lets you know specifically who has followed your company recently, providing their name, title, profile image, geographic location and their connection to you personally (1st degree, etc.).

Members Following & New Followers

Members Following and New Followers both display how your Company Page followers have grown month-to-month, simply shown in different graph styles.

LinkedIn Members Following

LinkedIn New Followers

Obviously you want to see not only growth in the number of followers, but increasing levels of growth each month.

Analysis

So what can we distill from the information LinkedIn is providing here?

First, you can see how effective your efforts to promote your Company Page have been. Are you regularly adding new followers, or not? Have you done anything recently to recommend people follow your page, and if so, what were the results?

Second, you can take a closer look at the people who are actually following you. Are they the kinds of LinkedIn users that, frankly, you want to target for your business? If so, then continue to do what you’re doing. If not, then you may need to reevaluate the content that you’re sharing, frequency, or how you’re promoting your LinkedIn Company Page.

Page Insights

Your Page Insights is about the visits and activity on your page, regardless of whether or not the visitor was already a follower.

It starts with how many page views you’ve received you received in the past week, as well as percentage comparison to the previous week. It then illustrates how many unique visitors and how many page clicks.

Page Views

The Page Views graph gives you a great sense of how much traffic your LinkedIn Company Page gets on a month-to-month basis. You can tab between the entire company page, or just your Career or Products & Services sections (if you have them).

LinkedIn Page Views

Likeany website, your hope is that page views will increase each and every month.

Page Visitor Demographics

Just like the Follower Demographics chart, your Page Visitor Demographics will illustrate for you the kinds of people who are viewing your Company Page and where they come from.

LinkedIn Page Visitor Demographics

One interesting exercise for businesses would be to dig into the demographics of Followers and Visitors and compare them, as well as Page Views compared to New Followers. You will always have far more people who view your page than follow it, but that ratio, and the demographics of those followers, is something you should hope to improve.

For instance, in February and March The Social Media Hat received about 100 views a month. In February there were 18 new followers but in March, with about the same number of views, there were 33 new followers. We can then go back and compare the status updates posted in February to the ones post in March and look for differences and improvements to emulate in the future.

Unique Visitors

This graph simply illustrates how many unique visitors you’ve had each month.

Products & Services Page: Clicks

Out of all of your page clicks, this graph shows you how many clicks were for your Products & Services Page.

Careers Page: Clicks

Out of all of your page clicks, this graph shows you how many clicks were for your Careers Page.

Note:all statistics are reflective through the previous day.

Analysis

As mentioned above, these statistics can really help you identify not only how many new followers you’re gaining each month, but what kinds of followers you’re gaining and whether or not the things that you’re doing to promote your page are working.

The nice thing about LinkedIn Insights is that the information is presented in easy to digest graphs that take just moments to digest. Anyone from the CEO and business owner to the social media manager or agency can regularly review these analytics and pull relevant information from them.

Reviewing them regularly though is the key. If you wait until March to review how you did in December, you certainly aren’t going to remember anything special that you did four months ago and you’re going to have to do some digging to determine what you posted, where you promoted the Company Page, and so on.

A quick note about LinkedIn Company Page promotion…

I mentioned several times that you can and should be promoting your Company Page. While LinkedIn does not currently allow Company Pages to participate in discussions, there are a number of ways that you can promote your page, including:

  • Display a link or icon to your LinkedIn Company Page on your website
  • Include a link or icon in your email signature
  • Occasionally promote the Company Page on Facebook, Twitterand Google+
  • Send a note to other LinkedIn members who fit your customer profile
  • Maintain your own LinkedIn Group and occasionally promote your Company Page
  • Mention your Company in LinkedIn Status Updates where appropriate

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Ten Blogs Every Marketer Should Read

25 Friday Oct 2013

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Bloging

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Best Practices, Blogging, Marketing, Online Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, social media tools

Introduction

As marketers (or aspiring marketers), we have it pretty darn good. Why is that? Because marketers, by our very nature, are accustomed to sharing information, insights, tips and best practices. In fact, sharing (and publishing) knowledge is one of the things we love most about our job.

What can you do if you don’t yet have a body of knowledge to share? You follow and read the marketing thought leaders. Learn from the best, while getting a sense for how they share their knowledge. One day, you may find your likeness etched into the Mount Rushmore of Marketing thought leaders.

Let’s highlight ten blogs that every B2B marketer should read.

Amy Porterfield: Social Media Strategy

marketing resources

Amy Porterfield is a social media strategist who helps clients “maximize the power of social media and increase the success of their online marketing efforts.” Amy provides actionable tips on social media engagement. She’s a great storyteller, as well – just read through the About page on her site.

Selected post: What to Do After People Opt In to Your Email List

As marketers, it’s quite easy to take our email opt-in list for granted. Source 1,000 new opt-ins last week? Great. We just completed a white paper yesterday, so we’re going to email all 1,000 of them, with “hot off the presses” in the subject line.

Instead, Porterfield encourages marketers to give email subscribers great value over time and make sure your messages resonate with them: in other words, treat them like gold. Your email subscribers should be valued on par with your customers. In fact, many of your customers are already on your email list. Wouldn’t it be bad if they opted out?

Moz: Content on SEO and More

top 10 marketing blogs

Moz began life as an SEO consulting company and has grown into a content site, online community and software provider. For me, Moz has become a go-to site for all things SEO and Google, from Penguin to Hummingbird to “Not Provided.”

Selected post: Taking Advantage of Google’s Bias Toward Hyper-Fresh Content – Whiteboard Friday

While my schedule doesn’t always sync up, I like to set aside from time on Friday’s to catch the latest “Whiteboard Friday” from Rand Fishkin, Moz’s CEO and Co-Founder. Fishkin always has timely and interesting things to share – and the depth of his content is always impressive. As just one measure of content effectiveness, take a look at the number of Comments he receives (61 comments in the selected post above).

Ann Handley: Social Media and Content Marketing

B2B marketing blogs

I’ve been a reader of Marketing Profs for quite some time. I read the book Content Rules, which Ann co-authored with C.C. Chapman. I’ve also attended a number of Marketing Profs webinars and online events.

Selected post: A Simple Content Marketing Org Chart

My selected post is not from Marketing Profs, though. On her personal blog, Ann provides an org chart for the content marketing team. Some organizations have a single person allocated to content, while others may have teams of hundreds. It’s not the numbers that are important here, it’s the roles and personas that Ann outlines. Did you see a role here that’s not filled on your team? Think about filling it.

Seth Godin: Best-selling Author and Thought Provoker

top marketers

Things I look forward to each day: the sun rising. And Seth Godin’s daily blog post. I’ve enjoyed a number of Seth’s books. On his blog, he takes a different approach. Each post is short and succinct. They deliver a key insight, or they make you think (or both).

Selected post: Marketing good…

This one made me think. My takeaway is: good is no longer good enough. Our marketing, along with the products we’re marketing, need to be great.

Jay Baer: Best-selling Author and Social/Content Guru

social content

Jay Baer is founder of Convince & Convert, who “help you get better at social media and content marketing through audits, strategic planning and ongoing advice and counsel” (source:http://www.convinceandconvert.com/about-us/).

Selected post: 11 Big Myths About Social Media and Content Marketing

I’m not a big fan of myths: after all, if something’s a myth, I shouldn’t pay attention to it, right? Except that I should, when peers, colleagues or industry contacts believe in such myths. I may need to dispel a myth in order to gain budget or project approval.

KISSmetrics: Analytics, Marketing and Testing

analytics and marketing

KISSmetrics provides web analytics software. Each blog post they publish is so rich in detail, I almost feel guilty getting it for free. Their blog content covers a fairly wide range of topics (i.e. more than analytics and testing). Because I need to allocate a fair amount of time to read and digest their content, I usually save pieces for later (i.e. outside of the work day), when I have dedicated time to read them in full.

Selected post: 58 Resources to Help You Learn and Master SEO

Sometimes, content curation can be as big a task as writing original content. This post features a broad and comprehensive set of SEO resources. I may need to allocate an entire weekend for this one.

Paul Gillin: Speaker, Writer, Consultant

I’ve been reading Paul’s blog ever since I worked with him (a number of years ago). Paul has published a number of books, consults with brands and speaks and writes frequently.

Selected post: 8 Data Points about the Importance of Customer Experience

When assembling a presentation, I often need to find interesting and relevant statistics to include. Sometimes it can be very challenging to find them! If I was doing a presentation on customer experience (or, the related field of Customer Experience Management), Paul’s post would be my go-to source for related stats.

Brian Solis: Author and Analyst

Brian Solis is a best-selling author and principal analyst at Altimeter Group.

Selected post: Broadcast Yourselfie: How teens use social media and why it matters to you

If you’re in B2C, you probably know about the technology and social media habits of teens. If you’re in B2B, your knowledge of teens may related to the ones in your household. I’m in B2B and don’t have a teen at home, so I found this post fascinating. Today’s teens will be your target customer in a few years. It’s best to understand them now.

Jeremiah Owyang: Entrepreneur and Thought Leader

Jeremiah Owyang is Chief Catalyst (and founder) at Crowd Companies. Formerly, Jeremiah was a research analyst at Altimeter Group.

Selected post: Meet the Resilient Corporations

Jeremiah always seems to be at the leading edge of what’s coming next. His current focus area is the collaborative economy and in this piece, he explores the advantages gained by resilient corporations. They gain advantages “by reducing risk through variability, being agile by flexing when needed, and scaling by leveraging others to handle the load.”

I read Jeremiah’s blog for a big picture view of things coming down the road.

Marketo: Best Practices in Online Marketing

Marketo is a leading provider of marketing software. Nearly every week, I learn something new about Marketing via their blog.

Selected post: Here’s How to Maintain Your Email Marketing List for Engagement and Better Deliverability

Whoever proclaimed “email is dead” must not have been a marketer. For demand and lead generation, email is still an important tool in our arsenal. And I think a lot of marketers still struggle with things like subscription management and deliverability. Read this post from Marketo co-founder Jon Miller and your email management will be the better for it.

Our Infographic

We’ve assembled an infographic of these ten extraordinary thought leaders. Enjoy!

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Why Google’s New Hummingbird Algorithm is Good News for Serious Content Creators

22 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Google Analytics, Google SEO, Google+

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algorithm, Best Practices, Google Analytics, Marketing, Metrics, Online Marketing, SEM, SEO, social media tools

Image of a Hummingbird

On October 3rd, 2013 Google announced a major search algorithm release called Hummingbird.

Uh-oh.

Does this mean your content-driven business is in jeopardy? Is keyword researchdead? Are you going to have to reengineer your entire content strategy?

There’s no question that the Hummingbird algorithm is only the beginning of change in search optimization, but smart content creators can be prepared to thrive in this — and any — environment that may come in the future.

This release is basically a platform that enables Google to better handle “conversational” search queries.

To illustrate this, consider the difference between these two queries:

  1. “golden gate pictures”
  2. “give me some pictures of the golden gate bridge”

 

The first query is formed the way people have learned to enter entries using a keyboard. This has been our primary input method since web search was born.

Keyboards are not natural human devices, and even for fast typists they are a bit of an awkward device to use, so learning to abbreviate queries to talk to a search engine is a generally accepted practice.

However, the rise of mobile device usage brings some new challenges.

The mobile keyboard cometh

While many continue to type with the keyboards on phones and tablets, they are a bit more awkward to use.

Over time, people are going to increasingly gravitate to voice search in environments where that is acceptable (e.g. environments where speaking to your device is not seen as intrusive).

Voice queries are far more likely to fall into the pattern of the second query above — natural language queries.

As in all things search, Google wants to dominate mobile search too.

Google wants to process “real” speech patterns

Having the best platform for processing conversational queries is an important part of that, and that’s where Hummingbird fits in, though it’s just the beginning of a long process.

Think of Google’s Hummingbird algorithm as a two-year-old child. So far it’s learned a few very basic concepts.

These concepts represent building blocks, and it is now possible to teach it even more concepts going forward. It appears that a lot of this learning is derived from the rich array of information that Google has on all search queries done on the web, including the query sequences.

For example, consider the following query sequence, starting with the user asking “give me some pictures of the transamerica building”:

 

The user looks at these results, and then decides to ask the next question, “how tall is it”:

 

Note that the latter query recognizes the word “it” as referring to the Transamerica Building because that was identified in the prior query. This is part of the sophistication of natural language queries.

Another example is the notion of comparison queries. Consider the query “pomegranate vs cranberry juice”:

 

The Knowledge Graph

These examples involve Google’s Knowledge Graph, where natural language search benefits from the ability to pull real-time answers to queries that understand the specific context of the query.

Note that the Knowledge Graph has accepted some forms of conversational queries for a while, but a big part of Hummingbird was about expanding this capability to the rest of Google search.

I have seen people argue about whether or not Hummingbird was just a front end translator for search queries, or whether it is really about understanding more complex types of user intent.

The practical examples we have now may behave more like the former, but make no mistake that Google wants to be able to do the latter as well.

The mind reading algorithm

Google wants to understand what is on your mind, well, before its on your mind.

Consider Google Now as ultimately being part of this mix. Imagine being able to have Google address search queries like these:

  1. Where do I find someone that can install my surround sound system?
  2. What year did the Sox lose that one game playoff?
  3. What are the predictions for the price of gas next summer?
  4. What time is my dinner on Tuesday night, where is it, and how do I get there?

No, these queries will not work right now, but it gives you some idea of where this is all headed.

These all require quite a bit of semantic analysis, as well as pulling in additional information including your personal context.

The 4th question I added was to show that Google is not likely to care if the search is happening across web sites, in your address book, or both. Not all of this is Hummingbird, per se, but it is all part of the larger landscape.

To give you an idea on how long this has taken to build, Google’s Amit Singhal first filed a patent called Search queries improved based on query semantic information in March of 2003. In short, development of this technology has taken a very long time, and is a very big deal.

The implications of a Hummingbird search world

It is important to remember that this step forward being described by Google as a new platform.

Like the Caffeine release Google did in June of 2010, the real import of this is yet to come. Google will be able to implement many more capabilities in the future. The implications to search in the long term are potentially huge.

For you as a publisher, the implications are more straightforward. Here are a few things to think about:

1. Will keywords go away?

Not entirely. The language you use is a key part of a semantic analysis of your content.

Hopefully, you abandoned the idea of using the same phrases over and over again in your content a long time ago. It will remain wise to have a straightforward definition of what the page is about in the page title.

I’ll elaborate a bit more on this in point 3 below.

2. Will Google make the long tail of search go away?

Not really. Some of the aspects that trigger long tail type search results may actually be inferred by Google rather than contained in the query. Or they may be in the user’s query itself. Some long tail user queries may also get distilled down to a simpler head term.

There will definitely be shifts here, but the exact path this will take is hard to project. In the long term though, the long tail will be defined by long tail human desires and needs, not keyword strings.

The language you use still matters, because it helps you communicate to users and Google what needs and desires you answer.

3. You need to understand your prospect’s possible intents

That is what Google is trying to do. They are trying to understand the human need, and provide that person with what they need.

Over time, users will be retrained to avoid short simple keyword-ese type queries and just say what they want. Note that this evolution is not likely to be rapid, as Google still has a long way to go still!

As a publisher, you should focus more attention on building pages for each of the different basic needs and intentions of the potential customers for your products and services. Start mapping those needs and use cases and design your site’s architecture, content, and use of language to address those.

In other words, know your audience. Doing this really well takes work, but it starts with knowing your potential customers or clients and why they might buy what you have to sell, and identifying the information they need first.

4. Semantic relevance is the new king

We used to speak about content being king, and that in some sense is still true, but it is becoming more complex than that now.

You now need to think about content that truly addresses specific wants and needs. Does your content communicate relevance to a specific want or need?

In addition, you can’t overlook the need to communicate your overall authority in a specific topic area. Do you answer the need better than anyone else?

While much of being seen as an authority involves other signals such as links, and perhaps some weight related to social shares and interaction, it also involvescreating in-depth content that does more than scratch the surface of a need.

Are you more in-depth than anyone else? If someone has some very specific scenarios for using your product or service, does your content communicate that you address it? Does your content really stand out in some way?

What’s it to you?

As noted above, this is going to be a journey for all of us.

While Google’s eventual destination is easy to imagine (think Star Trek’s on board computer), Hummingbird has only scratched the surface, and the steps along the way are hard to predict. That will be driven by very specific developments in technology.

For you, as an author, blogger, publisher though, your path is reasonably clear as well. Focus on becoming the recognized authority in your space.

Thanks to Bill Slawski of Go Fish Digital for input on some of the specifics of this article (note that all the speculations are mine, not Bill’s :) ).

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Pinterest Drives More Traffic to Publishers Than Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit Combined

16 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Pinterest

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Metrics, Online Marketing, Pinterest, Pinterst, SEM, Social Media Marketing, web traffic

Pinterest-thumb
Facebook accounted for more than 10% of overall traffic to publishers in September, by far the most of any social network, according to data released Tuesday from Shareaholic, a social plugin service that collects data from 200,000 publishers reaching 250 million monthly unique visitors collectively.

SEE ALSO: Top 20 Fashion Accounts to Follow on Pinterest

Pinterest drove 3.68% of traffic to publishers in September, the second highest of the social networks on the list and three times as much as Twitter, which ranked third. In fact, Pinterest’s share of overall visits increased by 66% year-over-year, more than any other social network. Pinterest now drives more traffic to publishers than Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit and Google+ combined.

shareaholic1

While most of the social networks tracked in the study showed significant year-over-year gains in referring traffic to publishers, referral traffic from Reddit and StumbleUpon declined 35% and 27.5%, respectively. Google+ remained essentially stagnant year-over-year and continues to refer the least traffic to publishers of the major social networks included in the study.

 

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Bing SEO Ranking Factors 2013 Study By SearchMetrics (do they really matter?)

15 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Bing Search Engine

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Tags

Analytics, Best Practices, Bing, Search Engine Metrics, SEM

Article by Barry Schwarts via Search Engine Land

Searchmetrics has released their SEO ranking factors for Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, today. Similar to their Google ranking factors, Searchmetrics analyzed 10,000 popular keywords and 300,000 websites appearing in the top 30 search results and looked at how various factors correlated with rankings.

searchmetrics-bing-ranking-factors

The top five key findings were:

(1) Top brands rank higher on Bing, as they do in Google.

(2) Backlink numbers are closely linked to higher rankings on Bing

(3) Social signals closely linked to higher rankings

(4) Quality content is important for search rankings

(5) On page technical factors are a must have

Here is a chart showing the Bing ranking factors by importance:

Bing v Google rank correlation chart_Jul13

The interesting part also is that when Searchmetrics compared the first page of search results on Bing and Google, they showed that 24.7% of the URLs listed were the same and 37.3% of the domains were the same. This clearly shows there is a difference in the results between Google and Bing.

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4 Ways to Write LinkedIn Messages That Actually Get Read

14 Monday Oct 2013

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in LInkedIn

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Tags

Advertising, JOB SEARCH, JOBS, LINKEDIN, MOBILE SOCIAL NETWORKING, NETWORKING, Social Media

If I could marry Marshable, I would, I just love them!

linkedin

Imagine you were at a networking event, and you spot someone you don’t know but would love to. Maybe she has your dream job, or maybe he runs a great business that you’d like to model yours after.

Would you ever walk up to this person and blurt out a question or request for his or her time, sans context, gratitude or even introductions?

Probably not — but it happens all the time on LinkedIn.

The amazing thing about LinkedIn is that it allows you to connect one-on-one with nearly anyone in the world. But I can’t tell you how many people I see squandering this opportunity by sending brief or automated messages that don’t give people any meaningful reason to connect — à la “Can you help me?” or “I’d like to connect with you on LinkedIn.” It’s lazy, it’s unprofessional, and it’s highly unlikely to get a response.

Spend a few more minutes crafting a personalized note, and you’re much more likely to make the connections you’re looking for. Try these four steps to writing a LinkedIn message that will get opened:

Step 1: Start with a Specific Title

Before you write the message, ask yourself: How do I know this person, and why am I reaching out to him or her? Is this someone you know and need advice from? Someone you share a contact with and want to know more about? A stranger with whom you’re hoping to connect for the first time?

Use that information, then, to craft as specific a subject line as possible: “Following Up from Last Night’s Event” is more likely to be read than “Following Up.” “Fellow Teacher Interested in Urban Education Reform” is better than “Loved Your Speech.” “Mutual Contact?” Don’t even think about it.

Earlier this year, I used LinkedIn InMail to ask a total stranger for professional advice. I knew that titling my message “Hello” would be a waste of a first impression, so I went with “FellowDaily Muse Contributor Seeking Advice.”

Step 2: Introduce Yourself

When you see someone you don’t know well but are hoping to speak with, you usually give him or her a one sentence background: “I’m Sara — we met at the 10th anniversary event” or “I’m Sara, and I loved your latest blog on climate change.”

Don’t skip this step on LinkedIn. 

You should never assume your contact will just click on over to your profile to learn about you

You should never assume your contact will just click on over to your profile to learn about you or see how you’re connected — be proactive (and respectful of the other person’s time) and write a quick intro.

 

The first paragraph of my InMail, for example, read, “My name is Sara McCord and I am a fellow contributing writer for The Daily Muse. I very much enjoyed [the latest piece she had written].”

Whether you use this sentence to include your mutual contact, where you’ve met or your shared background, tailoring your intro for the specific contact shows that you’re serious about connecting with him or her.

Step 3: Get to Why You’re Writing — and Fast

When it comes to emails, the shorter, the better. People are time-crunched, and you can lose their interest just as quickly as you got it if you segue from a pithy intro into a drawn-out monologue of why you should be connected or a lengthy recitation of your resume.

Keep this in mind as you craft your second paragraph, the meat of your message. Quickly dive into why you’re writing — and “just to be connected” doesn’t count. Why do you want to be connected? Do you love this person’s updates or products? Do you want to book him to speak at an event or invite her to guest post on your site? Do you want to ask this person questions about her company or background?

Let that topic sentence guide a paragraph (only one!) where you get into a few details: e.g., “I’m reaching out because I need advice. I’m in the midst of _______ and have some questions about ______.”

An important note, though: Make sure your ask is commensurate with your relationship. There’s a big difference between asking someone you don’t know if she’d be willing to spend 10 minutes on the phone with you talking about the interview process at her company and asking her to put in a good word for you with the CEO.

Step 4: Wrap it Up and Say Thank You

The last two lines of the message are your closing moment — think the “I look forward to hearing from you” at the end of the interview. You want to be gracious, but also make sure it’s clear what you’re asking for.

Try this: “All this to say, might you have time to [provide feedback, write a recommendation, make an introduction, whatever]? I greatly appreciate your time and expertise.” Remember, you’re asking a favor of someone you presumably don’t know well enough to call or email, so this thank-you is crucial.

These same strategies work if you’re requesting to add someone on LinkedIn — just shorten up the wording in each step. It takes just a couple minutes more than sending that automatic message, and it’s much more likely to get results.

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Why Your Facebook Ads Absolutely Stink

13 Sunday Oct 2013

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Facebook

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Advertising, Engagement, Facebook, facebook page insights bug, Social Media Marketing

For the last 6 years I’ve run ads on Facebook (yes, all the way back to Facebook Flyers in early 2007), and it was fun to go head-to-head against traditional PPC players.

They would create hundreds and hundreds of ads meticulously over days, just like they’d do on AdWords, while I’d just create one ad in 10 minutes.

We’d wallop them every time.

No amount of multiplication of headline, image, and body would make up for poor targeting and copy that wasn’t clever. One well-placed ad could drive more fans, better CTR, or whatever metric you wanted.

Using job title targeting, Facebook search ads, custom audience targeting, and all other forms of micro-targeting made it an unfair game to compete against folks who were used to selecting keywords as their only target.

The search guys would make their large batches of ads and then let them sit. The “set it and forget it” tactic works well in AdWords, since it’s not the same people searching those keywords from day to day. But on Facebook, we knew we had to rotate our ads every few days.

But in the last year, things have changed.

The newsfeed has become so important, as well as sponsored stories, conversion spec, the offsite pixel, putting paid media behind ad dollars, open graph integrations, email collection paths to conversion, and so forth. And the traffic costs a lot more now– no more penny fans, at least not in the US.

The newsfeed has forced us to become publishers who have to constantly write fresh “ads”. They’re not even ads, so much as genuinely interesting content that is worth sharing– or at least interesting enough to warrant filling out a form to get more info.

And because it’s so much harder to get into the newsfeed, we have to pay our way in. Then we have to run page post story ads to amplify user interactions on top of our page post ads. One of these is to get into the newsfeed– the follow-on is to amplify interactions from that exposure.

The net result of these interests multiplied against multiple postings and put into sponsored story combos is that we have to now create hundreds of ads if we’re going to be effective. Posts in the newsfeed live for 60 minutes, as opposed to a whole day, so we have to keep producing. We have to chain ads together to create impact.

Some people call this “programmatic ad buying”– the idea that we now need computer systems to generate ads based on rules, and that fuzzy logic can automatically find the look-alike audiences that we’d never be able to create manually.

We’re running ads for a fast food chain where the ads are triggered by the temperature hitting a threshold in any of the hundreds of cities they have stores in. We’re pulling in weather API data to trigger these targeted messages.

Another client has ads that automatically amplify posts that are especially engaging. We call this “throwing gasoline on the fire”. Nobody has the time to watch every post and hit the button if things get hot.

You could run ads that trigger when a competitor becomes active, so you could surf on their popularity. I’m sure you have some ideas in your head on what criteria you’d have your own ads trigger.

Dorothy, isn’t this a long ways from Kansas?

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Why News Feed Contests Are Worthless (By Themselves)

13 Sunday Oct 2013

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Facebook

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Engagement, Facebook, facebook page insights bug, Social Media Marketing, welcome campaign

Facebook recently announced a change in their news feed algorithm. One of the biggest parts of this change is the filtering of “high quality” versus “low quality” content. Without being too explicit, Facebook has strongly suggested that “low quality” content consists of asking for comments, Likes, and shares.

Also, if you remember back to a couple weeks ago, Facebook has completely changed up their requirements for running contests. Now, instead of being restricted to third party apps, you have the option to run contests straight from your news feed – for free*.

Since this change, you can require Facebook metrics – Likes, messages, and comments (NOT shares) – as forms of entry into your contest. Some of this is probably due to the fact that tons and tons of pages were already doing this and it’s hard for Facebook to police, but there’s probably a little more to why Facebook did this…

I mean, why would Facebook make this change to their news feed filter, then turn around and “legalize” news feed contests? If running an effective contest involves using Facebook metrics and a strong CTA, it seems pretty fair to say that your typical contest on Facebook will look like, “Click Like to win a free cupcake!” “What does ‘wi-fi’ stand for? Comment below for your chance to win a free router!” “Post a pic below of your favorite vacation spot and you could win a free trip there!”

So I’m allowed to make statuses like the above, asking for Likes and comments … but they probably won’t get shown in my fans’ news feeds. Uh, my head hurts…

This reasoning from Facebook is why running a highly successful contest from your news feed also requires creating an ad that drives traffic to it. *Not really that “free”, huh?

What to do about it

Well for starters, you could run a Facebook ad. Keep it short and sweet with an engaging picture. If you don’t get good results from that, here’s why your Facebook ads absolutely stink.

You also have the option of using third parties. Now, I know what you’re saying – Why would I use an extra service that’s probably not free to do something I can do for free? I totally understand, just hear me out…

With news feed contests, you really aren’t getting anything in return for your prize, giveaway, discount, whatever, except for some nice news feed engagement and a little extra exposure. There’s no data collected, re-marketing opportunities, or opt-in forms to be filled out. You basically just have the opportunity to engage your fans and get more Likes. And at the end of the day, Likes don’t necessarily pay the bills.

Just remember, it all comes down to what you are looking for…

If you want a totally free, no-extra-software option, run a news feed contest. Still want to run a news feed contest, just with a little more assurance that your fans will see it? Run a Facebook ad alongside. Want to collect more info on your fans and market to them later? Acustom Facebook app is your best bet.

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What Google’s Hummingbird Update Means for Small Business

12 Saturday Oct 2013

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Google Analytics, Google SEO, Google+

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Advertising, Best Practices, Google Analytics, Marketing, Online Marketing, social media tools, Strategy

“Hummingbird’s emphasis on conversational search queries and natural language parallels the growth voice powered search via iPhones and Android devices,” said Amy Leefe, a digital marketing consultant at Arketi Group, a high-tech B2B public relations and digital marketing agency. “Google has been driving toward deeper support for long-tail queries for some time, and Hummingbird takes this further by concentrating on answers versus data.”

google1

This is because the keywords people use to search the Internet do not always reflect what they are actually looking for, unlike in real life or when using a voice search on mobile devices.

“For example, people may type things like ‘buy yoga mat Buckhead’ in Google on a browser, but would say a command verbally such as, ‘What’s the closest place to buy a yoga mat to my home?'” Leefe said. “A traditional search engine might focus on finding matches for keywords, such as finding a page that says ‘buy’ and ‘yoga mat,’ for example.”

Instead, Hummingbird helps Google understand the meaning behind those words to deliver better search results, Leefe said.

“It may better understand the actual location of your home, if you’ve shared that with Google,” she said. “It might understand that ‘place’ means you want a brick-and-mortar store. It might get that ‘yoga mat’ is a particular type of workout supply carried by certain stores. Knowing all these meanings may help Google go beyond just finding pages with matching words.”

It’s up to businesses, however, to help Hummingbird tell Google that their page is the page users are looking for.

It’s up to businesses, however, to help Hummingbird tell Google that their page is the page users are looking for.

“Businesses need to consider as many queries as possible, and what the searcher could really be asking,” said Bill Sebald, owner of Greenlane Search Marketing, a search engine optimization consulting group. “If your business is relevant for a search like, ‘the best plasma TV to buy,’ are consumers looking for bang for their buck in this case? Or rationale as to why it’s the best? Popular opinion? Content should now expand to cover as many meanings as possible to be more appetizing to the Hummingbird algorithm.”

As an added benefit, the Hummingbird update also gives businesses more topics to write about and provides an opportunity to update older, evergreen content that suffers from short-sighted tunnel vision, Sebald said.

“Content for the sake of ‘words on a page’ doesn’t have the base value it once had,” Sebald said. “Now, your content really has to answer something. This should move content strategy higher on the list of business marketing objectives; it’s now even more important for desktop and mobile SEO.”

The Dark Side: Is Google Stealing My Data?

One of the biggest changes Hummingbird has to offer is search content displayed right on search pages.

“Say you were searching for Total Recall because you can’t remember what year it came out. If you type in ‘Total Recall,’ Google will bring you back the results it normally does, but on the side, where there was normally blank white space, it will show you the IMDB picture, description, release year, actors, etc.,” said Mike Evans, owner of Boost Rank SEO, a Jacksonville, Fla.-based SEO company.

Although this is helpful for users, it can do a disservice to businesses, Evans said. With this feature, Google not only scrapes content from other websites to display information on search pages, but the process also promotes a Google-only user experience.

“Basically, what Google is doing is trying to keep you on their properties as long as possible,” Evans said. Instead of visiting a website for the information, Google makes the data readily available.

“Imagine you were NBA.com and someone searched for ‘Miami Heat score.’ Google would scrape your site, take your information and display it on the search page. So instead of driving visitors to your site to check the scores, now they have all the information they need and go about their day — and you just lost a visitor,” he said.

In the case of Total Recall, Google also provides a “Watch It Now” link that will take users to Google Play, if applicable, Evans said. Similarly, a search for “flights to Los Angeles” will display airfares that direct users to Google Flight Search, and a search for Staples Center takes you to a Google event ticket search when you click on an event.

“Whenever possible, Google will try to route you to one of their properties, such as YouTube, Play, Picasa, etc.,” he said.

So what should businesses do when Google takes your data and uses it to prevent customers from visiting your website? Adapt, Evans said. “Businesses are going to have to offer something else to their visitors to make it worth the click for them to go to the site.” Although Google does not tolerate content scraping, Evans said businesses have to roll with the punches.

“The Big G gets to make up their own rules,” he said. “If they want to take your data, they do. As an Internet marketer, I’ve learned that’s just part of the game. You’ve got to adapt and roll with it.”

 

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