Archive for category Social Media Marketing
Five Ways Companies Get Social Media Wrong
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing on August 20, 2012
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Social Media is not the place for the hard sell
It is incredibly common for small businesses to merge Sales with Marketing and spend all their time on Social Media trying to push people to buy, buy, buy. Unfortunately, this hard-sell strategy doesn’t work. Most social media users don’t scroll through their timelines wondering what they can buy that day – users are looking for entertainment and information. Provide value and your potential customers will keep coming back to you.
Social media is about building relationships and growing trust. So when your followers are wondering where they want to shop, or who they want to have a business relationship with, your company name crops up first.
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Social media isn’t all about self-promotion
People will follow your company because they want to know what your business is doing and when your next event or what your next special offer is, but remember that party where you got stuck with the guy who wouldn’t stop telling you about his speedboat, and never asked any questions?
You may feel like that update that doesn’t have a link to your site or product is a wasted update, but imagine the valuable feedback you could receive from your followers by asking a couple of questions a day about your brand image, latest product, or most recent conference. Thank the responders by name, and you might just have a customer for life!
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You don’t have to be on all of the platforms
At RoryMartin.com we keep on top of all the social media platforms in order to best advise our clients, and from our research we can tell you this: some platforms are more appropriate than others for certain businesses. Rather than spread your limited budget over ten social media accounts, pick two or three which already appeal to your target demographic and focus your efforts there.
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Don’t try and keep up with the big brands
Just like in tip #3 – as a small to medium-sized business, you have limited resources for marketing or promotions. Huge brands can afford to host big-ticket giveaways to promote their new products or services, but giving away a heap of iPads might be outside of your budget.
Instead, think creatively and work out something relevant to your business – find something that your target market will appreciate and which showcases your company’s particular skills.
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Social media isn’t “free” or “additional”
Social media is not something that you can just tack onto regular marketing campaigns, or entrust completely to the new intern. Many companies that treat social media in this way are the first to complain that social media is useless. Social media should be fully incorporated with marketing strategies from the beginning, with an employee whose job description requires that they spend a certain amount of time actioning these strategies. With dedicated time, and money going towards social media strategies, the improvement in ROI should be immediately noticeable.
If you don’t have the manpower to administer your own social media marketing you may consider partnering with a company that specializes in social media strategy – like the team at RoryMartin.com. With a little time and patience, your business can attack the social media vertical with success.
Have you noticed any of these pitfalls in your own social media strategy? Do you have any other social media mistakes to add to this list?
Be Consistent in your Social Media Marketing Strategy
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing on July 30, 2012
As Seattle-based consultants for social media strategies, one of the most frequently asked questions we receive from clients is “How much time should I spend on social media?” and what usually follows is “How many times a day should I post to Facebook? How many times should I tweet? Am I Pinning too often?” Our response is always the same – stay consistent. Perhaps this doesn’t sound like a straight answer, but consistency in marketing wins out over gimmicks every time.
Creating consistently good blog and website content will bring people back to your site over, and over again. Even if social media didn’t exist, people still have this habit of talking to each other about consistently great articles, videos, questionnaires or giveaways. A giveaway might sound like a flash-in-the-pan strategy, but not if you make it a regular feature every time a new product comes out. Customers will flock back, hoping to win that great new item, every time. Set yourself a schedule and post certain articles and videos regularly each week or month. This encourages your audience to return at certain times, whether prompted to by social media or not.
Handily, social media does exist and brands need to be consistent there too. It’s really no use setting up profiles on all social media platforms and then never updating them, or updating them sporadically. If people choose to follow or Like a brand, they want to know they are going to receive up to date information, regularly. If there are no updates on your Wall for the past three days, they’re going to look elsewhere. For optimum engagement on Facebook, post 2-5 times per day, but what’s more important on social media is frequency of updates. Post, tweets and updates should be spaced out throughout the day and evening (and night, if parts of your audience are in different times zones) so that followers and fans have less cause to feel annoyed and overwhelmed by a sudden influx of updates over the space of an hour (your allotted time that week to ‘do’ social media).
There are plenty of tools available to help businesses and companies to schedule their content and social media updates, or you can arrange a meeting with one of our Seattle social media experts to talk you through a consistent and engaging social media strategy.
What Can Social Media Marketing Do For Your Business?
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing on July 23, 2012
There are plenty of businesses who jumped on the social media marketing bandwagon, set up accounts on every platform they could name, and then expected followers to appear and sales to skyrocket. When this doesn’t happen, many companies give up on social media, claiming that it “doesn’t work”. And they’re right. Just joining these platforms won’t “work” to make sales, there is so much more to be done before that will happen. It may even be that a company never achieves a direct sale from their social media presence. Why is this? What does social media marketing actually achieve?
The first thing to understand is that regular people don’t use social media as customers. They use it as a way to connect, and as we’ve seen through the Social7 program, they use it to build community. People use Twitter to talk about what they’re thinking, when they’re thinking it, and read their friends thoughts too. They use Twitter to catch up on the latest global news, and to feel a part of a larger conversation. People use Facebook to see what their friends and family have been up to, to share cool, funny links they’ve found, and to upload and view holiday snaps. People don’t tend to head to Twitter or Facebook thinking, ‘I’m going to make a purchase today, let’s see what’s being sold on Twitter and Facebook’.
This is why sales streams don’t “work”; because businesses are using social media the same way they would use a billboard or a banner ad. These methods of advertising tend to have captive audiences – commuters stuck in traffic or sat on trains, blog audiences & website visitors. Social media is all about choosing whose updates you see. When someone agrees to Like or Follow a company which then pushes the hard sell, the Unfollow button is right there, waiting to be pushed.
The key to a business having a presence on social media is to first understand why people are there in the first place – as connectors. People like to share what’s going on in their lives, and they do this on social media. They might @ mention the brand of a great dress they bought, or a new brand of ice-cream they tried, or even where they got their concert flyers printed. Their followers click through the mention, see the brand’s feed, and maybe go to their website. Social media is really about giving current customers the capability to be brand ambassadors. Companies can leverage the networks of their client base in order to gain wider brand exposure, and potential new customers – even without hundreds upon thousands of actual followers. And this is how social media “works” to create sales.
Do you use social media to promote your business? How do most people interact with you on these platforms? Are you thinking of using social media marketing? Get in touch with our Seattle web marketing experts to arrange a consultation today.
Social Media Marketing and Content Marketing: The Difference
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing on July 9, 2012
When we at RoryMartin.com talk about social media marketing, we often conflate that with content marketing. While they are both used to the same end, there are some subtle differences which it pays to be aware of.
Content marketing is about drawing attention to the content on your website, and is done through blog posts, infographics, videos – whatever content aligns with the branding of your business. Social media marketing is about encouraging engagement on the various social media platforms which are out there. You can already see how easy it is to conflate the two. Of course, social media marketing promotes the content which is on your websites, and we work to make sure that the content goes viral. In order to do this, however, we need to understand the differences between the two types of marketing.
Firstly, it is necessary to have interesting and engaging content on your company website in the first place. No matter how much a post or product is plugged on social media, there will be no retweets or shares if the content doesn’t excite people. What’s new in your industry? Can you put a personal spin on it? Is there anyone you could invite to comment on a certain topic? What happens when you put your product in a blender? Can you get a cat involved? (Not in the blender, please.) Maybe you think your niche is tapped out for new things to say, but be assured, there is always another angle for what you are saying.
Secondly, you could have the most fascinating video in the world on your website, but it’s useless if nobody ever hears about it. We use social media to get the word out that this exists, and people need to see it. How is your network these days? Are you promoting other people’s work and informing your followers about fresh facts and photos? Are you engaging with other people in the way that you hope they will engage with you? Social media is definitely not a place of something-for-nothing. We hope that people will love our fantastic content enough to share it because of what it is, but users are much more inclined to pass on the work of someone who has supported them, too.
Thirdly, we need to be tracking statistics. Even when you have achieved that perfect balance of fantastic content and a healthy, engaged network, it’s still possible that some updates will tank and seem to be ignored. There could be any number of reasons for this, but by keeping an eye on sharing and engagement statistics, you’ll be more aware of why this might happen.
We hope that by remembering the differences between content marketing and social media marketing, you’ll develop that healthy, engaged network which just loves to share your insightful content, but if you find that one or the other is off balance, get in touch with our Seattle social media and content marketing experts today.
Content Marketing For Search Engine Optimization
Posted by Rory Martin in Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing on June 20, 2012
Will content marketing ever replace traditional methods of garnering attention for your brand? This is a question which raises a lot of ire on the internet, as traditionalists point out that blogs and social media will never have the reach of an advertisement placed during the Super Bowl (as if every company can afford to do that!) and content marketers and search engine optimization specialists, like the team at RoryMartin.com, retaliate with the fact that people use search engines before doing anything: buying a product, booking a holiday, hiring a service, going out for dinner.
When people are using search engines to help them make all of their decisions, then your company needs to be ranking high for the keywords they’re plugging in. Content marketing is a part of search engine optimization, and it works like this:
Search engines love fresh content
We all assume that the latest news must be the most accurate, and so does Google. Having a blog which is updated weekly is the perfect way to start your journey to the top of the rankings.
Search engines search for authoritative sites
The way that a website’s authority is measured can vary between search engines, but a big part of authority is how many people are sharing your content. It’s unlikely with a static site that you’ll frequently get enough people linking to your page on Super-Cool Jacuzzi X9500 to boost it up the search rankings – unless you have an offer on! – but if you wrote a blog post about how to clean it, or the latest celebrity to purchase it, then you might find a lot of interested readers deciding their networks would be interested too. Social signals are very important in the early stages of ranking. If your article gets shared by many influential people, you get a higher exposure for a limited amount of time.
Search engines value consistency
Social media shares will boost your page rankings for a certain period of time. This is usually about a week, depending on how large your network already is, and where the post is being promoted. If your article is good, though, this is about the time that people will start linking to you.
There is no long-term ranking without links from one site to another, but if you are publishing new content weekly and it is being shared regularly, then your website should remain consistently ranking highly for your chosen keywords. In fact, you can choose different keywords to rank for each week!
Content marketing also builds familiarity, likeability and trust among current customers, potential customers and most importantly, people who interact online with potential customers. If you need to determine a content marketing strategy, RoryMartin.com’s social media and SEO experts can help.
Create a Cohesive Social Media Brand for Your Business
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing on June 14, 2012
People who come across your content online should be able to recognise your brand immediately, whether or not your logo or company name is there. This is what we call social media branding and it’s implemented across all your social media platforms -from Twitter to your blog, from Instagram to Pinterest – creating a brand personality.
If you have a good marketing campaign in place, then you know your target demographic, and hopefully you’ll have a tone set for your advertising, but what a lot of companies forget is that branding goes so much deeper than the font you use in your posters. Branding is in the way your employees answer the phones. Branding is in the way your shop staff greet customers. Branding is an on-going process, and it happens every time a potential customer or client interacts with your business.
The question which you need to ask yourself is: Does my brand have a personality?
And the second question you need to answer is: Is that personality cohesive across all our social media platforms?
Many companies use the different platforms in different ways, and this is recommended as users go to Facebook for a different experience than Twitter, or Pinterest. However, in trying to appeal to the varied ways in which people use social media, a company’s personality, or branding, can get lost in the haste to gain ‘Likes’ or get ‘Pinned’. It may even be that what ‘works’ in gathering this validation does not actually fall in line with the company’s values.
Perhaps your target demographic are adventurous and fun-loving, but you suddenly receive a lot of likes on Instagram for a photo of your boss’s dog. So naturally, you start sharing a few more photos of the dog because it gets good engagement. Adventurous, fun-loving people love dogs too, right? Except, you sell climbing gear and no-one’s ever scaled Mt. Everest with a dog. (Not with its own crampons, anyway.) People who start to follow you on Instagram who love dogs then go to your website, which is dog-less, and they get upset. People who add you on Instagram because they enjoy your funny climbing stories on Twitter get confused because all they’re seeing is dog pictures.
This is the time to sit down with your social media manager and discuss a cohesive brand identity for your social media marketing. When you decide what your brand personality is (and this might be different from your target demographic’s qualities) then anyone should be able to run any of your social media accounts using this information as a touchstone. Every tweet, photo, update, link and pin should reflect your brand identity, to the point where customers and internet users are able to recognise your signature style without having to see your logo or company name.
Use Instagram to Promote your Brand
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing on June 4, 2012
You probably heard about Facebook purchasing Instagram for a cool $1 billion back in April, and you probably already have a Facebook page for your business, because that’s where all the cool kids are at, right? So now that Instagram has accepted Facebook’s friend request, how can you use Instagram as a part of your social media strategy?
The best part about Instagram for businesses is that it can be seamlessly incorporated into your current social media campaigns. The app allows you to share your photos via Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Posterous and Foursquare simultaneously, so you can take one photo, render it beautiful/quirky/vintage with Instagram’s processing features and share it immediately with all your followers on each of these platforms, all from the comfort of your phone.
When it comes to the actual photo, it isn’t necessary to snap the pic through the Instagram app. It’s possible to use photos taken previously through the phone camera, or even upload photos from your computer to your phone and pass them through Instagram. If you’re running an advertising campaign and want to get some high-quality snaps out there on the platform, that’s the way to do it. However, Instagram users prefer real-time shots of actual events, so if you, or someone in your company, is present at the shooting of an ad, a behind-the-scenes sneak-peak might just make more of a splash than a photo which they’ll soon be seeing on billboards everywhere anyway. Major events are getting on board with this idea, even going so far as to employ teams of people to snap away behind-the-scenes, creating an instant avenue for users to talk about the attendees.
Creating user-generated content is easily done with Instagram too. Tiffany’s used the hashtag capability in a recent promotional campaign, asking users to tag photos ‘trueloveinpictures’ and then creating a microsite showcasing the photos; a site which generates droves of traffic, daily. Tiffany’s has created a relationship with Instagram users, while receiving free content and a whole heap of publicity. It’s a perfect example of the possibilities which Instagram provides for businesses.
Do you think that Instagram is a good way to promote your brand? How would you use it?
Are Your Social Media Efforts Under-performing?
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing on May 30, 2012
Something which marketors and businesses often forget about social media, and fail to incorporate into their social media strategies, is that social media marketing is not advertising. With traditional advertising, a business rents a space which is already in view of a potential audience – the side of a bus, a billboard, popular television channels – and are assured that their product will be viewed by hundreds of millions, daily.
When it comes to social media, the audience is out there, and the business must draw them in. Simply having a Twitter account or a Facebook page is not enough, your potential audience must know you’re there, and also, they have to want to come and see what you’re saying. Even then, social media marketing is a two-step process.
Once you have gathered an audience, you need to earn their trust. Social media is social! People use it to chat with their friends and keep up with celebrities daily doings. They aren’t necessarily there to be sold to.
This is where content marketing comes in. In the ideal world of online marketing, the Venn diagram of content marketing and social media marketing would overlap each other completely. Businesses need to offer their online audience something interesting to keep them engaged, and this doesn’t always have to be discount codes.
At RoryMartin.com, we know the difference, and we use content marketing as part of our social media strategy to draw in an engaged and relevant audience for your business and product – the kind of audience more likely to convert into customers, and satisfied ones at that.
Buffer Your Tweets for Round the Clock Social Media Branding
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing on May 29, 2012
If there’s one thing which puts companies off using Twitter, it’s the perceived need to be present absolutely all the time. Should businesses be employing people to staff their tweetstreams twenty four hours a day, seven days a week? Even with the incredible popularity of Twitter, and the expectation that any company worth their salt will be present there, this doesn’t seem like the best use of staff power, or resources.
So what can you do to appear present on Twitter at all hours? There are quite a few Twitter scheduling apps currently in creation, and we’re going to talk about these today.
Buffer is a scheduling tool which automatically tweets the content you give it at a time calculated to have the best probability for a retweet or click-through. This is definitely a tool to use when tweeting information you want the most possible users to see; such as links back to your new product, or competition information. You can also see the analytics of each tweet: how many people potentially viewed it, and how many people clicked through. The free version allows you to add one Twitter account and have ten tweets scheduled at one time, then there are two paid options with appropriate increases in the amount of social accounts you can add, and technical support which you receive.
Timely is very similar to Buffer, with one advantage – the free option is unlimited. Unlimited accounts and unlimited tweets. Again, the times for the tweets are pre-chosen for the highest probability of a click-through or retweet, and you can view the analytics for each tweet. There isn’t an option to change the times of the tweets, and the schedule sets for three tweets a day; early morning, lunchtime, and late evening. Both Timely and Buffer do offer a ‘post now’ option, as well as a browser plug-in, so if you find an article which you just can’t wait to post then you can click on the browser button and create your tweet, and either post it straight away or load it into your queue.
Twuffer is still in Beta at the moment, which makes it slightly unreliable, but it does have a huge advantage over Buffer or Timely, and that is the ability to choose the times of your tweets yourself. You can literally schedule a tweet for every five minutes of the day. One thing to be aware of is that it doesn’t always allow you to post the exact same tweet, so even if it appears to be scheduled, it may not tweet. As it is in Beta, there are occasionally problems with the site not tweeting any of your scheduled tweets all day, and then suddenly posting them all in one go, but this is rare. The tool is completely free, with no limit to the amount of tweets which you can schedule. While you can’t add accounts as you can with Timely, you can sign in and out with different accounts.
This tool looks more complicated than the others, but its functionality is much the same. You can use it to simply schedule unlimited tweets over five accounts, or you can take advantage of its advanced features to create reports and join organisations. If you’re monitoring a particular campaign, then the analytical reports which it provides are more in-depth than Buffer or Timely’s, so if you’re looking for a great all-rounder, then this would be it.
Taking just a few minutes each morning to schedule important tweets for the rest of the day will have a huge impact on the social media branding of any company or business. Using Timely and Buffer, you can discover the most effective times to tweet. Using Twuffer or Hootsuite you can schedule more tweets around these times to really boost your on-line visibilty.
At RoryMartin.com we stay on top of the latest developments in social media branding in order to bring you the highest quality advice in promoting your brand online. We didn’t discuss the importance of engagement in this post and while we’d love to auto-tweet and never have to look back, the truth is Twitter is about CONVERSATION. You have to take time to check your Mentions and Interactions and directly engage with customers and prospects.
Optimize Your Mobile Site for SEO and Reach a Wider Audience
Posted by Rory Martin in Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing on May 18, 2012
With 1.2 billion mobile web users using their smartphones to search the internet every day, you need to make sure that your mobile site is grasping and keeping the attention of your audience. Here at RoryMartin.com, we strive to bring you the latest news and information on SEO and Social Media strategy, and we have advice for you on how to correctly optimize your mobile web site for the best user experience.
First off, think about why a user would come to your mobile site. What information are they looking for while on the move? Brands like Walgreens understand that most mobile users are looking for their nearest store, so location search is firmly at the top of their mobile site. Develop a searcher persona of a mobile user based on keyword, demographic and psychographic research. Motivations of this user ought to be the basis of your mobile site.
Once you have a site filled with content appropriate for mobile users, it’s time to think about SEO. Late last year, Google introduced a smartphone bot which access mobile sites in a similar way to iPhones, but they have been rather reticent on how the bot likes mobile sites to be optimized. Luckily, SEO experts out there have been working on figuring this out. Much of what is true for desktop SEO is true for mobile SEO: avoid duplicate content, avoid black hat techniques, and make sure your pages have tags relevant to the content.
However, there is one issue with mobile sites which might find your site ranking a little too low for your liking and that is 404 errors and misdirects. There is a risk that Google’s new smartphone crawler may be overly literal at first, and rely exclusively on the redirects that are in place, but not evaluate other signals or algorithmic elements. 404 errors on the mobile web can occur from something as typical as trailing slashes, or a misplaced capital in the url. Having lots of these errors on your site hinders crawling and indexing, and can cast your mobile site in a bad light. Check your content frequently for indexed 404 errors in Webmaster Tools to catch these issues as they arise, especially when adding more pages and redirects.
Finally: splash screens. There are a lot of people who think it’s a great idea to have a splash screen when someone first accesses their mobile site. We definitely want people to see something amazing when they come to our mobile site but from an SEO point of view, splash pages are a terrible idea, and their main effect is to cause visitors to leave your site!
If all of this seems a little too complicated, rest assured that we at RoryMartin.com are just waiting to work with you to improve the search engine optimization of your mobile site, and give you and your audience the benefit of our experience in social media marketing.
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