Archive for the ‘social media’ category
The Latest and Greatest: Getting Started with Pinterest
If you do Facebook, or keep up at all with what is going on with the world of social media, you probably know about Pinterest. Right now, it is the hottest thing going. Pinterest lets you set up virtual boards on which you pin images you collect by visiting Web pages, or by re-pinning items that other Pinterest users have already pinned. It’s a lot of fun, but our question here is: Does it have value from an Internet marketing standpoint? The answer is yes, although certain types of business may be a more natural fit for the Pinterest concept.
Pinterest is visual. It’s pictures. Therefore, any type of business that sells visually interesting products is a natural. For instance, I am somewhat of a collector of guitars and amps (much to my wife’s chagrin), so I have a board with pictures of items that are in my collection. If I had some kind of business related to guitars, such as selling vintage guitars, I could do this same thing to actually display what I had for sale. Sure, there are lots of places where you could display my inventory online, but why not go where the people are? Anything related to visual arts or crafts is also a natural fit for Pinterest.
As soon as I created my Pinterest account, I noticed that people started following me. Many were people that I knew from Facebook. Some were people that I had never heard of. I would advise that before you use Pinterest, you begin maintaining a Facebook account and build up a nice friend list. Then segue into Pinterest.
The trick to getting material into your Pinterest account is to install the Pin It button from the Pinterest interface on your bookmarks menu. Then you are on a page you would like to pin, you just click the button. Before you start pinning, you should set up your boards. Going back to our vintage guitar dealer example, maybe he has a Fender board, a Gibson board, and a Peavey board. Or maybe he just has one board for everything. Either way, he needs to have a board on which to place his pins. When he selects something to pin, he will choose a board on which to place it.
Like most of the social media sites, you should follow others as well as having people follow you. And you should pin interesting things from others’ boards onto your own. The more social you make it, the more exposure you will get.
If you are a service business, you may wonder if you have any use for Pinterest. The answer is yes. You don’t just have to pin “things.” You can pin content as well (the pin itself will still be a picture, but it will link to the content). But if you pin something like that, it should be interesting.
We’ve just skimmed the surface, but if you are the type that like to look for every advantage, you should give Pinterest a try. But my advice is to not just approach it from the standpoint of a way to promote your business, but really get into it. Have fun with it.
How to Become a Google Recognized Authority in Four Easy Steps
It is becoming increasingly more important for you to establish to Google that you are a real person creating legitimate content in order to get more leverage from the content that you create for your search engine marketing. There are a lot of little details for doing this, but what follows is a quick and dirty four step plan for becoming a Google authority.
1. First set up for yourself a high quality profile on Google +. Add a photo, and take advantage of any opportunity Google presents to give more information. And go ahead and follow some other people to start forming your circles.
2. Then create an account for yourself at www.ezinearticles.com, the top article directory. Go ahead and fill out all the information, including a photo. Add your Google + profile link to your Ezinearticles.com account by clicking the Social Media dropdown on the main menu and then selecting Google +.
3. Add your ezinearticles.com profile link to your Google + account. Click on Profile, then the Contributor to link. Add your Ezinearticles.com profile page link as a public link.
4. Begin publishing articles with your ezinearticles.com account. Place at most two keyword links to your website in the resource boxes for your articles.
This is a super simplification, but that’s it in a nutshell. You’re basically forming a chain that Google can follow to establish that you are a real person and a legitimate creator of content. If you do this over time, Google will consider you more of an authority, thus showing favoritism toward your published articles, and possibly increasing the likelihood of favoring your website in search rankings.
Getting Started with Facebook Contests
Have a contest is a great way to spread your brand on Facebook. However, it’s not as simple as just announcing that anyone who likes your business gets entered into a drawing. Facebook has a very strict set of rules about how contests should be conducted. You don’t want to risk having your account banned. So the best way to pull it off is to use a third party service already set up to do contests.
One that I have used recently is www.shortstack.com. It is easy to use and works great. But there are many of these now, so look at some different ones and find the one you like the best.
One advantage of using a third party service is that it can automatically store you contest entries into a database. Setting up a contest is a little bit complicated, but using a service like this will walk you through it, saving you a ton of time.
As far as the actual prize, it is certainly nice if it can be tied to what you actually sell. If you sell some kind of product or service that people would really like to win, and you can legally give it away, then you can make that the prize. Sometimes it’s not so obvious, however. So you may have to just pick some kind of prize that would be desirable to your market. Maybe give away a trip or an ipad. You get the idea.
If you are busy running your business (aren’t we all?), it is easy for your social accounts to get stale. Hosting a contest is one way to get people liking your account, and it gives you something to talk about. It keeps things moving.
Contact Work Media if you could use some help with your Internet marketing campaign.
SEO Ain’t What It Used to Be
Search engine optimization ain’t what it used to be. Back in the good old days (pre-Google) all you had to do was use your keywords in your meta-tags, title and copy. You had a very good chance of ranking in search engines for the keywords. Then Google came along the with the idea that the number and quality of links pointing to your website, as well as the text content of those links, was a good indicator of your websites relevance. And thus was born the linking campaign. Now, it’s a lot more difficult than that.
Google remains the leader in the search engine race, still owning a large percentage of all search engine traffic. So it makes the most sense to optimize for Google, and work down from there. So what is Google looking at these days? Increasingly, Google is taking social media into consideration. In a way, they are sort-of forcing your hand into using Google Plus. Although other social media platforms certainly come into play as well.
Google is now looking for links to websites or social media profiles contained in social media accounts. Want to have your website appear highly ranked to your prospects? Then become social media friends with them. This will increase the likelihood that those individual see your website prominently in Google.
And ultimately, aren’t you most concerned with your website being found by those most likely to purchase your products or service?
And putting aside the idea of improving your visibility to your social media friends, it is very likely that this process will improve your rankings to anyone. If Google sees that lots of people promote your website in their social media accounts, then that will likely have a similar effect to having lots of external links from other websites.
So now you need to think of SEO in a couple of areas. Certainly, you still need to continue the process of optimizing your website in the traditional way. In other words, make sure that your web pages use your keywords in the correct way. And make sure that you have a catalog of high quality external links pointing to your website, especially links that contain your primary keywords.
A much newer area of optimization is concerned with the visibility of your website in the local portion of Google search results. This is called local SEO. I’m not going to go into the details, but there are a number of things you need to do to improve the chances of your website appearing prominently to those searching for your business in your market area.
And of course the newest area involves using social media to influence search results. Regardless of your opinion on the effectiveness of social media as a lead or sales generation tool, it cannot be denied because of its effect on your search rankings.
So regardless of your comfort level being social online, it now must be a part of your overall Internet marketing strategy
Need some help? Work media would be glad to assist with this process. It is time consuming and not necessarily all that intuitive. Call us today at 615-375-8793. Or e-mail us at info@workmedia.net.
How the Little Guy Can Take on Expedia
Work Media has been doing some business with a company in the destination lodging industry and they have, like everyone else in the industry, an interesting and difficult problem that I think is probably going to be more prevalent across other industries over time – the problem is well-funded, much larger competitors crowding them out – crowding them out of search rankings and obtaining traffic that should be their’s. In this case, it’s companies like Expedia and Travelocity that are both crowding the search results and becoming such dominant players that companies like our client have no choice but to get leads from them.
Interestingly, in this case, most people don’t realize they get the same deal just by working directly with the company in the first place.
We’re finding that there are two strategies which the local companies need to utilize in order to fight back. These strategies are being local and being social. Local optimization and social media marketing. Expedia is not a travel agency located in Miami, Florida. It is not a hotel located in Nashville Tennessee. That Nashville, Tennessee hotel has an advantage from a local search perspective because it has a local address which can appear on Google maps and thus can have a strong presence in Google Places. Similarly, that Nashville hotel can build a following and an audience for itself on Facebook, Twitter and other social media properties. It can have a personality specific to its market. It can have a conversation. It can be of much greater use and value to those looking for a Nashville hotel than Travelocity or the other large travel aggregators.
So the key to competing against these types of much larger, better funded organizations is to combine aggressive SEO with strong local optimization and very systematic social media marketing. If you want to take it even farther than that, you mix in paid search and e-mail marketing – the two other components that can add even greater leverage to the overall package of strategies.
In this particular post we’re not going to go into the details of local search optimization or Facebook marketing. But needless to say, just do it. Go set up a Google places account. Set up a Facebook account. Set up a Twitter account. Start updating these accounts daily. Even if initially you don’t have any friends or fans, you got it started.
New Book Almost Done
Well, yes, I am still writing 30 minutes every day per my New Year’s challenge to myself. Then where the heck all our your blog updates then (you might ask)? Lately I’ve been devoting all my time to finishing up our next book, titled something like:
Be the Magnet
(How to Use Social Media and Content Distribution to Attract Customers and Business Opportunities)
The book is about using social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Squidoo.com, in conjunction with a content distribution campaign (articles, blogs, etc.) to spread your brand, generate visibility, and drive traffic to your web site. The book is being finished up, I’m working on artwork, and am about ready to set up the review copy that we will order from our publisher.
So we’re excited and believe it will be something a lot of people will want to check out. So that’s why no blog updates lately…just too busy finishing up something bigger!
Don’t Be Lazy with Your Social Media Marketing
Jerry Work here. I have returned to the business of finishing our next book, on the subject of social media marketing. It has been 90% written for a couple of months; I just haven’t had the enthusiasm for the project to finish. But I’ve rededicated myself to getting it done and out to the public.
It’s funny…as I read through what I’ve written, I keep saying to myself “man, that’s a good idea…I should do that…” You see, I’ve spent a ton of time this year studying social media, experimenting with Twitter and whatnot, but then when things get too busy around the office, I tend to drop it so that I can concentrate on getting the work done.
But it can’t be that way.
You have GOT to be systematic if you are going to use social media as a marketing strategy. If you post on Twitter once a week, that is going to do absolutely nothing. If you update Facebook once a month, you might as well be invisible. These things have got to be done every day.
I have blogged quite a bit here and in my Twitter marketing blog about automating certain tasks so that your accounts stay updated even when you don’t manually update them yourself. But I’ve discovered something else about myself that I think is probably applicable to most people: once you stop doing something, it is difficult to start back up. So for the last few weeks, my Twitter account has pretty well been on auto-pilot. Sure, it is good because I have kept it going, but social networking is MUCH more effective when you involve yourself…when you read what others around you are saying…when you are part of the community.
So be better than I have been lately. Get your systems in place to automate your accounts, but make sure you set aside a little bit of time each day to log into Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or whatever you’re into, and update your account. Respond to what some other users are saying. Look for new friends.
Just do it!
Updating Twitter with TweetLater and TwitterFeed
The deeper we dig into the Twitter world, the more different ways we are finding to take advantage of it. I (this is Jerry) have to admit that I am much more intrigued by Twitter than I am with Facebook. I have yet to really realize the benefit of Facebook, although admittedly part of it is that I just haven’t put that much effort into it. Part of it is time. I do all of our social media work, and after taking care of our clients, I have fairly limited time for self-promotion. But it is also that I just don’t “get” Facebook like I get Twitter. Twitter is an incredibly simple concept, yet remarkably powerful in the things you can do with it.
I think the best way for a business to manage a Twitter account is with a combination of automation and manual posting. For automation, my number one tool hands down is Tweet Later. I really can’t do Twitter without it now (the pro version, not the free version which is much more limited in what it can do). However, one issue with using Tweet Later to automate your account is that you pre-program your messages, so the tweets that originate from Tweet Later are not really tied to events actually happening.
That’s why I have started combining Tweet Later automation with automatic posts from TwitterFeed. The purpose of TwitterFeed is to let you stream your own blog to your Twitter account. That is a nice feature, but what I have started doing is creating an RSS feed based on Google alerts, and then feeding that into TwitterFeed to in turn update my Twitter account with news items. So now, my account is automatically updated with a combination of pre-programmed messages about my industry, along with Google news results. And of course I do a fair amount of manual posting as well.
If you are active with Twitter, it can keep your name in front of a lot of people. And if some of those people like what you have to say and start retweeting your messages, then there is a powerful viral effect.
I have devoted many hours the last few weeks to a study of Twitter. If you would like to learn along with me, I invite you to check out my blog devoted to the subject, The Twitter Marketing Blog, at www.thetwittermarketingblog.com.
Social Media: Walking Down a Hallway with Lots of Doors
There is a classic business metaphor that associates being in business with walking down a hallway with lots of doors. Just walking down the hallway (the state of conducting some kind of business) will reveal opportunities that you could not see until you walked down the hall. In other words, moving forward with some kind of business plan will cause you to meet people and come upon situations that may change the course of your business. That is fine, however, because it means that you are recognizing opportunities that you would not have seen if you had not taken action.
The concept of using social media to promote your business falls very nicely in line with this idea. Sites like Facebook and Twitter will allow you to make a social (sort-of) connection with many people you would not have otherwise known. And that is where opportunities come from. The more involved you are with these sites, the better your chance of using them as a tool for opportunity creation.
However, your chance of creating opportunity is better if you focus your friend/follower generating activities on those with some type of connection to your industry for geographic market. For instance, a bankruptcy lawyer in Memphis would be well served to follow and be followed by residents and business owners in Memphis. When one of those people needs help with a bankruptcy issue, they will know who to contact.
It is also necessary to keep your eyes open. If you operate your account in such a way as to get as many friends or followers as you can but you never read what those people have to say, you will not be aware when the possibility arrives to offer assistance or propose business alliances. If the number of people you follow is small, then you might be fine just using the default twitter interface. However, as your accounts grow, it can quickly become difficult to keep up with what is going on. Therefore, it is highly advisable to use a software solution to help you manage your social media accounts.
There are several on the market, and I have spent time finding a solution that works well for me. It would be a good idea for you to do the same. The one I like the best is TweetLater (http://trytweetlater.com), which automates many functions of managing a Twitter campaign, such as posting tweets, sending direct messages, and searching for new relevant users to follow. A good application for just keeping up with what people are saying is TweetDeck (http://tweetdeck.com), which lets you view your Facebook friend updates and Twitter follower updates in the same interface.
New Direction for Work Media
Work media is enjoying our new office located in downtown Dickson. Our productivity is up and our travel time is way down. We can all get to the office in 15 minutes or less, which uses more time to spend researching Internet Marketing strategies and applying them to our clients accounts. If any of you ever find yourself in Dickson (about 1/2 hour drive west of Nashville), we invite you to stop by for a visit. We are in the old Ragan arcade on main street.
We’ve been getting really heavy into social media and video. We have begun recording a lot of video footage, including short 12 second video four 12 seconds/twitter. Of loading videos to 12 seconds has a definite SEO advantage, in that it can result in the creation of a lot of web pages with a keyword links pointing to your main site. This is somewhat of an advanced strategy that could have a powerful long-term impact on a search engine optimization campaign.
Combining video, social media, and content distribution is definitely the state of the art in search engine marketing. We invite you to contact us today to talk about creating and implementing this type of marketing campaign for your business.
By the way, if you’re into Twitter, you should check out our Twitter blog, http://twitterforbusiness.blogspot.com.
By the way one more time, I invite you to check out our 12seconds page, http://12seconds.tv/channel/lawfirmseo. As the name implies, this particular channel is intended to discuss law firm marketing, but it pretty much all applies to any type of business.