7 Obsolete Social Media Tactics – by NEIL PATEL

13 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Best Practices

Tags

Best Practices, Marketing, MOBILE SOCIAL NETWORKING, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, social media tools, Strategy

You already know social media marketing is a channel that can drive traffic and sales, but the question is: are you actually seeing an increase in traffic or sales?

Chances are you are not. Why? Because you are using obsolete tactics that aren’t effective anymore.

If you want to change that, just avoid these 7 strategies:

Obsolete tactic #1: Posting whenever you’re free

Posting daily or whenever you have time isn’t ideal. Why? Because your followers may not be online when you are posting.

That means no one is going to see the content you are promoting.

Simply Measured has some free tools that show you when you should be posting. It will analyze your user base and tell you the days and times the most optimal for engagement.

Here is an example report for Instagram:

Once you figure out the ideal days and times you should be posting, sign up for Buffer (free), and start scheduling your posts.

Facebook posts are the exception. If you schedule them, you’ll see your share and like counts drop. Instead, you’ll have to post on your Facebook profile yourself and schedule posts through Fan page by clicking the clock icon.

Obsolete tactic #2: Selling directly to your audience

Once you have a big following, you’ll want to start convincing them to buy whatever you are selling. But just posting a link, telling your followers to buy your book, product, or service, won’t do much for you.

The only time I’ve seen it work is when a sale or a discount is offered, which isn’t an ideal scenario.

What you need to do is drive your social media fans through a funnel. First, collect their emails, and then offer your products or services through email.

A good example of this is Josh Flagg. He started driving people to a blog, where he collected emails. Within a few months, he collected just over 2,000 emails.

He then launched a webinar course for $499 dollars, and within 24 hours, he made $12,974 in sales. When he promoted his webinar product directly to the group, he didn’t even generate $1,000 in revenue.

The reason this works is because you are getting your fans to make micro commitments. Eventually, when you ask them to make a purchase, they are more likely to say yes.

Obsolete tactic #3: Trying to game your follower count

I’m continually seeing people follow thousands of users in order to build up their accounts on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Some people even go as far as buying thousands of fans. The big numbers may make you look cool, but they will eventually hurt you.

Why? These social sites are getting smart at analyzing how many of your followers are actually engaging. And if the ratio is poor, your content won’t spread much, which will cause you to get less traffic compared to having a smaller fan base that actually engages.

So, instead of trying to game the system, start looking at your competitors. See what types of content they are posting that causes engagement. Test posting similar types of posts. And avoid posting content that doesn’t get likes, comments, or shares.

Obsolete tactic #4: Sharing without optimizing

Sharing content from your site isn’t as simple as copying and pasting your URL on a social site. If your website code isn’t optimized for social media, you’ll notice that when you share your content on these sites, no images appear:

When you optimize your code, social sharing will look more like this:

So, how do you ensure your site is optimized? You add social media meta tags to your content.

The difference is huge. When I implemented this on Quick Sprout, my Facebook traffic went up by 174%.

Obsolete tactic #5: Being self-promotional

I started participating on social sites because I wanted to grow my brand, traffic, and sales. I didn’t really care about anything else, and people saw it.

People started to unfriend and unfollow me, and I wasn’t getting any social traffic. But once I started sharing other people’s content, answering questions, and just helping people out, I quickly noticed that I started to build a loyal following.

The loyal following eventually converted into traffic and sales once I started to build a funnel similar to Josh Flagg’s. But when I was just being self-promotional, I didn’t generate one sale.

Make sure you help people out, answer their questions, and share content from others within your industry. You don’t have to promote competitors, but you should be promoting news and content sites.

Obsolete tactic #6: Linking directly to someone’s site

When you share someone else’s link, you are driving traffic to their site and generating no traffic in return. That kind of blows.

What if I told you that every time you promote someone else’s site, you can actually drive more traffic back to your site?

There is a cool social tool called Sniply, which puts a promotional box on any site you share.

When you drive traffic to others, there is a chance that some of those visitors will come back to your site.

Obsolete tactic #7: Adding one too many social sharing buttons to your site

If you want people to share articles on your site, what do you do? Add social sharing buttons to your site, right?

But did you know adding one too many social buttons to your site can hurt your traffic? I tested placing 3, 4, and 5 different social media options on Quick Sprout. When I reduced the button count from 5 to 3, I was able to increase my click-through rate by 11%.

So, instead of treating your site like Nascar and promoting every social site out there, focus on just 3. Pick the sites that resonate most with your readers. Chances are it is going to be Facebook, Twitter, and one other social site.

And if you are wondering what kind of social buttons you should be using, try the plugin Flare. It’s flexible, it looks pretty, and it’s free.

Five social media skills millennials don’t have

10 Friday Oct 2014

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Best Practices, community manager, Content Marketing, Hootsuite, Marketing, Online Marketing, Social Listening

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Best Practices, Online Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, social media networks, social media tools, social sharing

Shared from Ryan Holmes

Don’t assume younger staff will know everything about running a clever social media campaign.

They’re the generation brought up on Facebook. Some have never known a world without the Internet. The innermost details of their lives have been exhaustively Instagramed and they get their news from Twitter, not TV.

But when it comes to using social media in the workplace, millennials – the generation whose birth years can range anywhere from 1980 and 2000 – can be surprisingly, even dangerously, unprepared. “Because somebody grows up being a social media native, it doesn’t make them an expert in using social media at work,” says William Ward, professor of social media at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. “That’s like saying, ‘I grew up with a fax machine, so that makes me an expert in business.'”

For students and recent grads, some social media 101 is definitely in order.

Lacking in critical areas

According to Ward, who teaches a series of popular undergraduate and graduate courses on social media at the university, millennials are lacking in a number of critical areas. While they’re very good at connecting with people they already know, they often fail to understand the professional opportunities and pitfalls posed by networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

“Companies hire millennials because they think they’re good at social media. Then their bosses discover they don’t have those skills and get frustrated,” Ward says, noting that social media expectations are often higher for millennials than for older workers, who may be just as inept.

For students and recent grads entering the workforce, some social media 101 is definitely in order. In particular, career-minded millennials desperately need to brush up on these five social media skills:

1. Knowing when not to share

Recently, Business Insider attracted attention for firing its CTO, Pax Dickinson, because of comments he made on his personal Twitter account. While Dickinson’s Tweets on women and minorities were especially offensive, the situation hints at a larger issue. Millennials sometimes fail to appreciate that personal profiles can have professional repercussions. Twitter, Facebook and other networks are largely public platforms; comments made can – and often do – get back to bosses. As the Dickinson case shows, few employers are eager to associate themselves with off-color or offensive content, even when it may be intended as a joke.

2. Using social media to actually save time

According to a 2013 Salary.com survey, the most frequently visited personal website at work is – you guessed it – Facebook. As networks proliferate – and millennial employees not only check Facebook but post on Twitter, browse Instagram and more – social media has the potential to be a devastating time-suck. Yet it can also be a time saver in the office. A recent McKinsey reportnotes that social media has the potential to save companies $1.3 trillion, largely owing to improvements in intra-office collaboration. Internal social networks like Yammer enable employees to form virtual work groups and communicate on message boards. Instead of endless back-and-forths on email, co-workers can post and reply in continually updated streams. None of this is revolutionary, but millennials are often still in the dark on ways Facebook-like innovations are being taken behind the firewall.

3. Understanding how to crunch the numbers

While millennials often have an intuitive understanding of what resonates on social channels (hard to go wrong with cat GIFs), quantifying what works and what doesn’t is another matter. Should the success of a Twitter campaign be measured on the basis of retweets, mentions, replies, referral traffic or sales leads? What are the best times of day to post on Facebook and what is the optimum post frequency? Which analytical tools are best for crunching the numbers? While social media is about authentic, human interaction, it’s also an arena where data can easily be collected and applied to improve results. Knowing what data to look for, where to find it and what to do with it separates real experts from mere social natives.

4. Mastering the multi-network shuffle

It’s one thing to be a Twitter guru or have a huge LinkedIn following. The real talent lies in orchestrating different platforms to work together and in understanding the niche each fills. Visual networks such as Instagram and YouTube, for instance, are increasingly the foundation of campaigns by social-savvy brands such as Nike, Red Bull and Mercedes. Catchy images and videos are, in turn, seeded onto traditional text-based networks such as Twitter and Facebook. From there, links lead viewers back to blogs and company pages, sending customers spiraling deeper into the sales funnel. Meanwhile, uniform hashtags across platforms help unify and track the overall campaign. Even millennials with deep social credentials often fail to understand the profound multiplying effects of integrating different networks.

5. Networking professionally on social media

By the time millennials graduate, many have dutifully filled their LinkedIn profiles with part-time positions, internships, extra-curriculars and academic accomplishments. But the network’s true job-finding power is often overlooked: Hiring managers and CEOs who would normally be out of reach are often just a connection or two away. In fact, you don’t need to be connected at all. A paid feature called InMail, for instance, enables users to send emails directly to any one of LinkedIn’s 277 million members. Truly enterprising job seekers can hunt down big fish like Richard Branson, Bill Gates and Deepak Chopra, then send a pitch straight to their inbox. Notoriously footloose millennials – forever in search of the next job opportunity – might well take this tip to heart when searching for greener professional pastures.

The plug ‘n play myth

Of course, amassing these skills is no short order, and millennials aren’t the only offenders. “The real problem is that we expect people to know these skills without providing any training,” social media professor Ward says. As the number of social networks expands and platforms are used in more sophisticated ways, it’s unreasonable to expect anyone – even the most plugged-in users – to just intuitively get it.

But there are options for millennials hoping to brush up on social media skills. “There are lots of online training programs out there,” Ward explains, “though some are better than others.”

He cautions learners to stick to programs offering industry-recognised certification, like the most widely used offering, Hootsuite University, an offering from my company which has seen 50,000 people enroll since it was started in 2011 and is also used in 400 higher education programs.

For millennials competing in a tight market, these skills – unheard of just a decade ago – can mean the difference between finding and keeping a job. “Students using digital and social media professionally in an integrated and strategic way … have an advantage,” Ward says. “[They’re] getting better jobs and better internships.”

What is Action-Gating? And How Can I Use it to Drive Results on Facebook?

04 Thursday Sep 2014

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Facebook

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Best Practices, Engagement, facebook page insights bug, Social Media, social media tools

Did you hear, Facebook is dropping like-gating, or more to the point they will no longer allow companies to practice like-gating. If you have not heard, about Facebook’s decision to prohibit the practice of like-gating on its site, read on.

what you need to know:

On August 7, Facebook announced an update to its Platform Policy to prohibit the practice of like-gating — or requiring someone to like your Facebook Page in order to receive an incentive.

Facebook’s decision to ban like-gating is based on a simple but an important idea — “to ensure quality connections and help businesses reach the people who matter to them.”

Facebook has given businesses 90 days (until November 5, 2014) to comply with this policy change.

Why is this important?

If you’ve been on Facebook for a while, you won’t be surprised to hear that Facebook has undergone a lot of changes in recent years.

As Facebook grows, the social media company has come to understand how important ensuring quality connections between users — and the businesses and organizations they follow — is to their own long-term success.

One of the ways that they have done that is with the News Feed algorithm, which controls the content users see in their feed. Facebook uses a series of factors to determine which content users will find interesting, and as a result, only show your content to a portion of your Facebook audience.

The removal of like-gating takes that a step further.

Facebook believes that if people like your page only to receive an incentive, then they may not be engaged or interested in what you’re sharing after the promotion is over. Instead, Facebook wants businesses to encourage customers and potential customers to like their page without requiring them to do so.

They believe that this will allow you to build a fan base that is more engaged, and as a result, more likely to interact with your business and act on the content you share on Facebook.

How does the change impact your business on Facebook?

Well you will want to take steps to update both your Social Campaigns product and your Facebook Fan Promotion campaigns prepare for the November 5 deadline.

This change in particular will affect those people who like me use Constant Contact to collect an email address from new fans after liking my Page. The belief being that the best way to build a meaningful relationship with fans on Facebook is to move them beyond liking your page and onto your email list.

This allows you to take ownership of your contacts. It also keeps you from having to worry about further Facebook changes that make it difficult to reach your audience.

So while we they will be removing the ability to like gate a piece of content, coupon, or sweepstakes; You can still continue to make it easy to grow your email list on Facebook with our email action gate.

What is an action gate?

With an action gate, you can still require users take some specific action before redeeming a coupon or entering a Facebook contest, without forcing them to like your Page.

There are a number of benefits of using an action gate on Facebook.

One of the biggest benefits is that you’re able to engage your current fans beyond the traditional like, comment, or share. This means that you’ll not only have the opportunity to grow your email list, but you’ll also be able to strengthen relationships with the people who like your page and even turn them into new or repeat customers with an exclusive offer.

In addition, action gates allow you to think differently about the campaigns you decide to run. While like-gated offers limit your ability to extend your reach beyond Facebook, action gates allow you to easily promote your offer across different channels and drive people to an offer, hosted on your Facebook Page.

This is a great opportunity to encourage your connections on different social channels to like your Page, without requiring them to do so. Even if they don’t choose to like your Page at first, you can still use email to continue the conversation and potentially include links back to your page in future messages.

Here are a few examples of action-gated campaigns you can run:

Capture leads on Facebook with an exclusive download: While a like gate only allowed you to add new fans, an action gate allows you to capture new leads on Facebook and nurture them with email. One of the best ways to capture a new lead on Facebook is to offer an exclusive download with helpful information. After adding a new contact to your email list, you can easily send a follow up email with more information, or even create an autoresponder email series to help introduce them to your business.
Turn current fans into paying customers with a special offer: Because you’re not just focused on adding new fans, an action gate is a perfect way to reward current fans with an exclusive offer. We all know how difficult it can be to turn all those likes, comments, and shares into actual business results. Think of a special discount your fans would love and promote it to your fan base. After providing their email address, they will receive a coupon in their inbox.
Run a sweepstakes and keep the conversation going: With an action gate, you can run a sweepstakes on your Facebook Page that people can enter by providing their email address. When the winner is chosen, you can contact them via email and even reach out to non-winners after the contest is over. You can create a separate list within Constant Contact, and send targeted emails to introduce new subscribers to your business. You can also reward non-winners with a separate offer, and encourage them to visit your store, restaurant, or office.

Ready to get started?

There are a number of ways you can use action-gating to drive real results on your Facebook Page.

The use of like-gating will end on November 5, but you can start planning your action-gated campaign today.

What is a winning blogging strategy

27 Tuesday May 2014

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Best Practices, Bloging, Content Marketing, Google+, Marketing, Online Marketing

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Best Practices, Blog, Blogging, Google Analytics, MOBILE SOCIAL NETWORKING, Online Marketing, SEM, Social Media, social media tools

t’s pretty much common knowledge that these days, any business, particularly an online business, should have a blog. But how? And why? What is this platform going to do for your brand? Are you selling products? Are you building a community? Is it about building awareness? And most importantly, who’s it for?

These are all questions you should be asking yourself before you put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboards. Now let’s get onto the how… Check out our first five easy steps to a winning blogging strategy below:

Brainstorm

Whether you’re starting from scratch or you’ve already got something up and running, stop and get your team together! A brainstorm between your writers, marketing gurus and whoever else might be involved is a must for any successful blogging strategy. This brainstorm should be happening about once a month. If you’ve been blogging previously, get your analytics up in front of everyone – what posts have been successful? Which have been the most shared on social media? Take these factors into account when you’re coming up with topics for the next month.

If you haven’t started with content yet – no problem! This next tip’s for everyone: Have a close look at your competitor’s posts. Jot down any articles that have high share-rates. You should take inspiration from these, and write a related post.

Another one for the newbies: if you haven’t already decided on how many posts per week you’d like to publish, now’s the time to do it. Keep in mind you’re going to want to stay consistent, posting the same amount each week and on the same days too. Knowing these details will help you come up with a content calendar.

Schedule

Once you’ve decided on the number of posts you’ll be publishing per week, and per month, you’ll be able to create a rough plan for a content calendar. Do some research! Look into when your target audience is online the most. This is when you should be posting and promoting.

Clients

We know that we’ve talked about knowing your audience and clients before, so we’ll keep it brief. If you know your clients, you’ll know what they’re after in a blog. Whether it’s craft DIY tips, quirky ‘behind-the-scenes’ footage or informative marketing advice, you’ll know it and you’ll be able to provide it. Knowing your audience is also knowing the purpose of your blog, which is something that should be decided straight away in order to get your strategy underway. Check out these 5 Critical Tips for Identifying Your Target Audience from Technori.

Writers

If you’re just starting out, or your business is relatively small, you may have already decided that you’ll be writing the blog yourself. That’s completely understandable! Just be aware that there are a few things you should get your head around when it comes to creating great content. Firstly, you should make sure that you’re an avid reader of other blogs. This is great in terms of keeping an eye on the competition, but also knowing what’s out there in general, and knowing what’s possible within a blog platform. Reading will provide you with inspiration in terms of both structure and subject matter. Make sure you’ve got a list of go-to blog examples to devour.

The above still applies to writers that you’ve hired, but hiring the right writer is also crucial. Obviously, the right person depends on the purpose of your blog. For example, if your aim is to sell a complicated product, you’ll need a writer who is also an expert in what you’re selling. This writer will need to provide a lot of insight, and so it may be appropriate that in this instance, your product manager take on the blog themselves, or at least train the person you’ve brought on board.

Make sure your writers are great at creating catchy headlines. Obviously, these are the first things your audience are going to see – you want your headlines to inspire enthusiasm and interest, as well as be optimized for SEO (but we’ll get to that).

It’s one thing for you to know your audience, but make sure your writers know it too. Make communication with your writers a big priority – they should know not only your audience, but the goals of the business itself, what’s it all about? Check out these guidelines for creating great content.

Style Guides & Editors

The importance of the language you use on your online platforms should never be underestimated, but in this case – this isn’t all an editor and a style guide are for. Of course you don’t want spelling and grammatical errors throughout your content, but there’s something as equally important: consistent style and tone. It doesn’t matter if you have one writer or twenty – you want all your written content to be of a similar nature, it needs to represent your brand after all.

Early on in the content creating process, put together a style guide for your writers. This can list everything from preferred spellings and topics to cover to how to format headings. If your writers follow this carefully, you will be rewarded with consistency throughout your whole blog, no matter how many writers you have.

Analytics

Installing analytics is a must for every website owner. These are brilliant tools that allow you to track and measure your success, enabling you to identify successful posts, and use this information to create similar posts. The most commonly used tool is Google Analytics, which offers an extensive breakdown of your site, traffic and audience. Some of our favourite features?

Audience. This lets you view your demographic, their interests and behavior.
Acquisition. See where your traffic is coming from – is it direct or from an organic search? Is it from social media or an email marketing campaign?
‘Real Time’. See how many people are on your site at this exact moment; what they’re looking at and where they are in the world.

It’s amazing what you can learn about your audience and your own content by reviewing your analytics on a regular basis. Did we mention it’s free?

Keyword Research

If you know your audience you’ll have a rough idea of what they’re searching for when they hop onto the world wide web. Once you’ve got this in mind, you can play ball seriously. There are a number of keyword planning tools available for you to choose from. There’s Google Adwords Keyword Planner which can tell you how often a term is searched for each month, as well as suggest similar terms to use. This is one of the few free tools available, some of the paid services include Market Samurai and Raven, which also offer SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Packages.

Another tool we’ve just discovered is ReSearch.ly. This service filters conversations from 1000 days of social data so you have insight into your target audience’s “influence, sentiments, demographics and psychographics”, allowing you to “get inside your reader’s head”. ReSearch.ly offers newbies 10 free searches before they have to subscribe, so have a play around, and see if it’s something that could work for you.

Once you’ve done your keyword research, you can get your writers on board and discuss how to integrate these terms into your written and visual content. Think outside the box here, use your keywords in your image captions and alt tags, if possible have a category title using a keyword… Be sensible though, you still want your content to be super easy to read and share-friendly.

If all of this is new to you and you’re a little confused – no problem! Check out Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO & Keyword Research here.

Link

There’s one more thing to consider before you put your blog post out into the world: Links. Your post should be an authority on whatever subject you’ve chosen, but there will always be offshoot subjects you haven’t covered, or have covered in the past… Never miss an opportunity to provide your readers with more information, whether it’s from your own site or a fellow blogger’s. Creating internal links (these connect from one of your posts to another post on your site) are great because they keep your visitor on your site, exposing them to more of your content. This also means that you and your site keep more of the ‘link juice’ (yes, that’s a real thing). Alternatively, by linking to an external source, not only are you showing your readers that you’re a good sport, but you’re also starting a relationship with like-minded bloggers and paying it forward. This encourages others in your industry to interact with you and your brand, which ultimately brings more traffic your way.

Publish

That’s right, we’re finally here. You’ve done all the grunt work; the brainstorming, the researching, the writers’ training, the style sheet and you’ve trawled through your analytics… Now’s the moment you’ve been waiting for. Hit ‘Publish’ and give yourself a pat on the back, a cheeky afternoon beverage or a nap (or maybe all three). You deserve it.

Promote

Unfortunately, the work doesn’t end there. Now you’ve got to give your latest post the best shot of reaching the most people on the web. Firstly, be sure to include sharing options at the bottom (and top) of your posts. You want people to share your content quickly and easily, which means making sure there are as few steps for them as possible. Next, promote your new post across all your social media platforms – use call to actions to grab attention and prompt interest. Another detail to remember – get your writers on board with social media sharing as well. It’s equally beneficial to them, as it gets their name and work out there for readers, but creates brand awareness for you as well.

2014 new Rules for Content Marketing

23 Friday May 2014

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Content Marketing, Online Marketing, WordPress

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Best Practices, Blogging, Engagement, Social Media

Before you start thinking about marketing your idea or brand, a good thing to do is plan your brand awareness marketing campaign. Without a specific plan, there is little you can expect to achieve in this harsh social media climate where everyone is trying to be seen. There are an unlimited number of things you could do to get attention, but when it comes to getting the word out, these 21 new content marketing rules are something you should have a look at.

We have visited the topic of content marketing many times before, but it seems there are plenty of things left to talk about in order for all of us to reach the people that we really want to reach. I was thinking the other day about how we here at Bit Rebels could reach further into the airwaves of the Internet and reach people who have yet to discover the compact news flow that we have to offer. I had a short discussion with my partner, and we agreed that we would look into several other approaches. But that’s just it, there are so many approaches that you could sometimes get lost in the noise of it all.

When I think about content marketing, I always end up at the same place, which is original and engaging content that people want to send to their friends and loved ones because they either find it interesting, funny or even shocking. Unfortunately, any blog or online newspaper runs the risk of becoming a gossip or a surprise generator website in the bad sense of the words. Is this good or bad?

21-Content-Marketing-Rules-Infographic (1)

As you can see, the questions are many and they will most likely never end. That, on the other hand, is a good thing because that means that there is always room for improvement and refinement. When it comes to the content marketing rules we can consult a fresh infographic presented by Kayak Online Marketing called 21 New Rules Of Content Marketing.

It should be said that even though many people would like there to be sure ways to succeed with brand awareness marketing, it’s the content marketing rules that determine the outcome of your social media marketing campaign. When you know how to update, interact and engage on social media, half the battle is already won. There are plenty of examples of this where ordinary people have become social media icons in the eyes of the ordinary users.

With these new content marketing rules, you definitely have a better chance of slipping through the social media noise and actually ending up on someone’s top list. It won’t be easy to adapt all of these, but the more you can incorporate into your campaign the better. As always, when I write articles concerning this topic, I say that it’s through engagement, transparency and presence that you will reach ordinary users who are the true engine behind social media.

Three Social Media Rules Your Business Needs to Break

19 Monday May 2014

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Best Practices, community manager, Facebook, LInkedIn, Online Marketing, Pinterest, Yelp, YouTube

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Best Practices, Community Management, Facebook, Google Analytics, LINKEDIN FOR BUSINESS, Pinterest, SEM, Social Media, social media tools, Strategy

If you stay up to date on social media trends and advice, you have likely heard that you need to post a lot of content, get as many fans/followers as you can, and post when most of your fans are online. Rules are meant to be broken, and I’ll explain why it is necessary to break each of these rules.

1. Post a lot of content

Yes, you need to post content. A lot of it. But this stress on always posting can result in substandard content. On Facebook, you should never post more than twice a day, and even twice a day can be too much. Instead, aim for 5-7 times a week. When you post too much content, you increase your chance that you are just adding to the social media “noise”. Instead focus your effort on creating smaller amounts of high quality content. Quality over quantity.

Why to break this rule
The Facebook algorithm works in a way that it tries to guess what you want to see. One way this is accomplished is that if you normally click on a business’ Facebook page, it is more likely to show you their content. If your business is posting too much low quality content, people will stop clicking. And when you actually do post good content, less fans will see it.

Real world example
There is a restaurant I frequent that I “like” on Facebook. They post any and everything on their Facebook page (they post about 5-10 times a day), whether it is related to the restaurant or not. The result is that I NEVER see their content in my news feed because I first ignored their nonsense posts. What good is my like if they never get their message to me?

2. Get as many fans as you can

We all want more fans. But if these fans are never going to purchase your product or service, what good are they? Social media can easily become a popularity contest: “we have more fans than you.” But worthless fans are, well, worthless. Actually, they can be much worse than worthless….

Why to break this rule
Remember that Facebook algorithm? Another way it works is that when you post content, it shows it to a handful of your fans. If these fans interact with your content, Facebook then shows it to more of your fans. If you have fans that don’t actually like your product/service, they won’t interact with your posts. This means that it will be more difficult to reach your fans who actually are actually interested in your business.

Real world example
While doing consulting work with an Italian restaurant, we quickly learned that if we focused our Facebook advertising to the local area, we received two-three “likes” for every dollar we spent. When we just aimed for total likes, we doubled that number. We could have spent a relatively small amount of money and gotten hundreds of likes. The problem was that the likes all came from Italy, a demographic that was unlikely to ever visit the restaurant or interact with the content. Aim for quality fans over a large quantity of fans.

3. Always post when the most fans are online

You want to get your message out to fans, and you want that message to reach the most screens as possible. Knowing when your fans are online is essential. The Facebook newsfeed works in a way that rewards current content, and makes older content unlikely to show in a person’s newsfeed.

Why to break this commandment
You certainly need to post when most of your fans are online, but you do not need to do it religiously. Focus most of your posting at peak hours, but switch up your timing once or twice a week. This is important because certain fans have different Facebook use habits. This means that if you always post at the same time, you are likely missing fans that have different schedules.

Real world example
We found that a sports rehabilitation physician had more success with his posts after he varied up his posting schedule. He often included exercise tips, and saw his engagement increase after he started posting later in the day. By posting later in the day, he was able to reach fans that otherwise had been missing his posts. Now, these fans are more likely to see all of his posts, no matter the time of day he posts.

Twitter for Marketing and PR – A Comprehensive Cheat Sheet

05 Monday May 2014

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Twitter

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Advertising, Best Practices, cheat sheet, MOBILE SOCIAL NETWORKING, Online Marketing, SEM, Social Media, Twitter

witter offers a social network and microblogging service that is the go-to place for real-time rumors, news, customer complaints and service. All messages or “tweets” are capped at 140 characters, which enforces brevity and clarity of thought.

It’s also the originator of the hashtag, at least in its modern sense and usage. Twitter is in the process of rolling out a major profile redesign, with a greater focus on photos and content cards.

The People

Twitter claims to have 18 percent of all Internet users as account holders. Its users tend to be city dwellers (20 percent). The numbers drop to 14 and 12 percent in suburban and rural communities respectively. Users are usually younger adults, and they’re more likely to access the site on a mobile device (60 percent).

The Challenges

Twitter is rapid-fire copy. To stand out, brands need to consider clever wording and visual media. The new profiles will dedicate significantly more real estate to the header photo, offering brands additional space for creative imagery.

The Tips

1. Optimize your bio. You could fill your bio with hashtags and humor, but if you intend to use Twitter for business, your bio needs to be a miniature version of your LinkedIn profile. You can be funny but make sure to share essential information about who you are, what you do, and where to find you.

2. Set up searches. If you want to turn conversations into conversions, you have to monitor mentions of your brand as well as relevant and competitive keywords.

3. Don’t forget the hashtag. If you want to track tweets and conversations, use a hashtag. It not only lets conversations be found more easily, but also allows you to measure your Twitter efforts.

4. Use Promoted Tweets. If you want your message to reach more people, you’ll have to pay to do it. Two tips for Promoted Tweets: define and target your audience and don’t run your promotion for too long. If you need to run it for an extended length of time, find different ways of stating your message.

5. Implement Twitter Cards. You can share Vine videos or attach images to your tweets, but if you want to provide a richer experience, you’ll want to delve into Twitter Cards. By adding some HTML to your website, any tweets of your content will include applicable visual media.

6. For Twitter’s official guidelines, go to Twitter for Business.

2014 Top Social Media Channels

03 Saturday May 2014

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Bloging, community manager, Facebook, Google Analytics, LInkedIn, Marketing, Multi Channel Marketing, Online Marketing, Pinterest, tumblr., Twitter, Yelp, YouTube

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Community Management, Engagement, facebook page insights bug, Marketing, MOBILE SOCIAL NETWORKING, Online Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, social media tools, Trending

My clients are always asking me “What is the best social media channel” and I always answer the same, “the one that works best for you. Truth is that not all social media channels are the same, just as not all businesses are the same. I recommend using the channel(s) that best suite your particular business. However to keep the the ranking monkeys happy here is the industry list of social media channels ranked by use, and popularity.

How to (correctly) Use Hashtags to Increase Your Social Media Presence

16 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Hashtags, Twitter, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

hashtags, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Social Networks

Hashtags first started out on Twitter and have made their way onto all of the most popular social networks including Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and Google+. A hashtag is a symbol used to mark a certain category on social media.

The use of a Hashtag in a strategic way can be effective when creating popularity around your brand or business. Finding relevant conversations and interesting people to follow is one of the key uses of hashtags along with increasing engagement.

It is important as a business to understand why hashtags are so important, especially onTwitter. Below you can see some great statistics around how hashtags improve a business’s online interaction when it comes to Twitter.

Hashtags have become somewhat of a trend which isn’t necessarily a good thing if a user doesn’t understand why they are using a hashtag and the reason behind why they are so powerful. Here are three benefits to using hashtags;

1)Gain Followers

Using the right hashtags when trying to build engagement can increase your following extensively over just a few days.

Improve Reputation

If you show expertise when using a hashtag to start a conversation, people will see you as an influencer and follow you because of your reputation.

Get Information

Searching the right hashtags will allow you to find vital information on an subject matter.

When using hashtags on Social Media, they can lose their value if not used correctly. Hashtags should have a purpose whether it is to increase engagement or following, their is always a reason. Below are 5 uses of hashtags that you should be aware of.

The whole idea behind a hashtag when using one is to make sure it is not to obscure or too long. Remember that a hashtag is only effective is people are actually using it. If it isn’t popular enough, it won’t help you boost your profile however you don’t want your post to get lost if your hashtag is too popular.

It’s great if you are using hashtags and you understand why you are using them but you also need to make sure you measure conversions and by this I mean making sure that you are using the right hashtags. If your key performance indicators (below) have not increased since you have changed your hashtag strategy, you might need to revise your plan.

If you don’t know how to measure the above KPI’s, you can use hashtag applications and social analytical tools to measure your businesses performance. To see how certain hashtags are performing in general, you can follow the conversations yourself or Google the specific hashtag to see how it is performing.

I hope you now know how to use hashtags to increase your social media presence.

Images taken from Digital Formation World

Facebook Has Made New Algorithm Updates: Spammy Social Marketers Beware!

16 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by leonidesignoryblog in Facebook, SPAM, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Behavior, Best Practices, Branding, Community, Community Management, Content, Engagement, Facebook, Marketing, Research, Social Customer, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Social Networks, Strategy

Facebook has made an update to the News Feed algorithm that has been a long time coming. If you are like me, you are very tired of being asked to Like a photo to save a baby seal or seeing the same content over and over. This kind of content is NOT social media marketing. Thanks to the most recent Facebook News Feed algorithm update, spammy marketers will have their page content devalued. These people will undoubtedly be the most vocal when it comes to the reduced Reach conversation, but that is another blog post entirely. Before we dive into the changes, let’s revisit what makes the newsfeed algorithm tick. In short, the more engagement you get, the more people you will reach. If you want a more lengthy explanation, take a peek at this great graphic from TechCrunch

You might notice that this equation doesn’t include Negative Feedback which is another important aspect of the algorithm. The recent updates were actually developed by monitoring what triggers a Negative Feedback action and appear to be a step in the right direction when it comes to user experience. Here are the updates Facebook has made to stick it to spammy social marketers.

Frequently Circulated Content

If you are in the habit of just reposting what you have seen work for other pages on Facebook, stop what you are doing. The News Feed has been optimized to de-emphasize pages that publish content that has already been uploaded to Facebook over and over again. Early testing of this update has shown that people hide 10% fewer stories overall. Many marketers switched from content creating to content curating last year, however it looks like it’s time to think about switching back.

Spammy Links

With the explosion of publishing on Facebook came the rise of super spammy links. You know exactly which ones I am talking about. Spammy links feature misleading titles that prompt users to visit websites that promise awesome things like cute baby animals but then serve a website riddled with ads. By measuring how frequently users engage with the original post containing that link, Facebook is now able to better detect these spammy links. Early testing of this update has shown a 5% increase in people clicking on links that take them off of Facebook. This demonstrates that people are seeing more relevant and valuable content in their News Feeds. Be sure that your messaging about a link is accurate and engaging enough to get people to leave feedback.

Like-baiting

Like-baiting is pretty straight forward and we have all seen these posts. Any post that explicitly asks users to Like, Comment or Share the post in order to get further distribution is considered like-bait. It used to be social media best practice to include a call to action in each post. Well, it might be time to take a different approach. Facebook has made a change to better detect these posts and make sure that they aren’t shown more prominently over content from users’ friends or highly relevant pages. Facebook says that this update won’t impact pages that are genuinely trying to encourage discussion, only those pages that repeatedly ask for engagement. I would suggest that you don’t need to abandon this approach altogether, however few and far between might be the best bet.

So what have we learned? People don’t like spam in their News Feeds and neither does Facebook. These slight updates to the algorithm should hopefully make big impacts when it comes to user experience. How can you ensure that your Facebook content strategy isn’t considered spammy?

Do your best to start creating fresh content. Even if you see something that is working for another brand, try to recreate it with your own spin. As marketers we have to begin creating new stories and not just retelling old ones. I would recommend starting with a blog.
Make sure that the text and titles that accompany the links you publish are accurate. Bait and switch will no longer be effective.
Continue to encourage people to engage with your content, however do so with restraint. Great content doesn’t always need a call to action. People know what to do at this point.

Cross posted with permission from Social Media Today

Authored by: Nathan Mendenhall

Obsolete tactic #1: Posting whenever you’re free

Obsolete tactic #2: Selling directly to your audience

Obsolete tactic #3: Trying to game your follower count

Obsolete tactic #4: Sharing without optimizing

Obsolete tactic #5: Being self-promotional

Obsolete tactic #6: Linking directly to someone’s site

Obsolete tactic #7: Adding one too many social sharing buttons to your site

Share this:

Like this:

Shared from Ryan Holmes

Lacking in critical areas

The plug ‘n play myth

Share this:

Like this:

what you need to know:

Why is this important?

How does the change impact your business on Facebook?

What is an action gate?

Ready to get started?

Share this:

Like this:

Brainstorm

Schedule

Clients

Style Guides & Editors

Link

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

The People

The Challenges

The Tips

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: