Posts Tagged seattle social media marketing
Social Media Strategies Made Simple with TweetReach.com
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing on May 1, 2012
Have you ever wanted to know how far one of your tweets travelled? Or how many people are exposed to your twitter account on any given day? Maybe your company regularly throws hashtag parties, where lots of people join in, but you’re never sure who else is listening. With TweetReach.com, you can know all of this in seconds! Just head on over to their user-friendly search interface, type in your twitter handle, a marketing phrase, or recent hashtag, and get a snapshot report which displays all the important analytic information up front. You can search for free as many times as you like, but each search will only return data for the last fifty tweets. There is a paid option, but it’s still a fantastic free resource for monitoring real-time events.
Let’s look at the ‘Reach’ first. This is how many accounts your tweet, or hashtag, reached. You are able to see everyone who actively retweeted or participated in your event, but all of their followers too. Say you have a reasonably small following on your personal twitter account, around two hundred and fifty followers. Search your twitter handle and you may be pleasantly surprised to discover that a couple of judicious retweets by followers means that you have reached up to eight thousand accounts!
Numbers like this are great, but engagement is what Twitter is all about. So, secondly, TweetReach shows you the top contributors – accounts with the highest number of followers to have retweeted you – and the most retweeted tweets.
If a hashtag promotion is a part of your social media strategy, this information is more valuable than gold dust. You can immediately discover the major influencers in your conversation, alongside which tweets in the conversation are getting the most play. In a nutshell, you can find out who is engaging, and why.
Why is this information useful? If you know which users are the most engaged with your product or most vocal about your promotion during a social media campaign, then you can use that data to concentrate your efforts on a more targeted market next time. Instead of spreading out a net and catching empty tin cans, you can bait your hook appropriately to lure the clients you really want to your site.
If your aim is to bring clients back to your website, then a follow-up to TweetReach use is to monitor the click-throughs coming in from Twitter during the promotional time. If you then compare conversion rates to the engagement data, you’ll have a wealth of information on the kind of Twitter campaign which draws in paying customers against the kind which just gets people chatting.
RoryMartin.com specializes in social media strategies, so if you’re as excited by this as we are, get in touch to have social media marketing made simple for you.
Twitter and Facebook Build Customer Loyalty
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing, Social Networking on October 24, 2011
As a company that specializes in Seattle Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing, the RoryMartin.com team likes to keep you informed about new studies regarding social media. A recent study, generated by Chadwick Martin Bailey, states that Twitter users who follow brands on Twitter are more likely to buy from and recommend that brand. The group also produced a previous study correlating Facebook users’ purchases with the brands they “like” on Facebook.
This is good news for businesses who are using social media networks to improve their marketing efforts, especially because Twitter and Facebook users are some of the most frequent internet users in general. The study showed just how Twitter users were interacting with brands, reporting that 84% of Twitter users who follow brands do actually read brand tweets, making Twitter an effective form of presenting your company and products. Even better, approximately 1/4 of users who follow brands on Twitter do tweet about the brand. 1 out of every 4 users in your Twitter audience are likely to be talking about your brand right now.
Twitter is proving itself a very useful forum for customer loyalty. It’s important to know your audience and to make sure you’re tweeting authentic content, though. 67% of users expect unique content from the brands they follow. In the decision to follow brands on Twitter, customers cite exclusivity and promotions as some of the top reasons they follow brands. Here are the top five reasons users follow brands:
- 64%: I am a customer of the company
- 61%: To be the first to know information about the brand
- 48%: To receive discounts and promotions
- 36%: To gain access to exclusive content
- 28%: To receive content/information to retweet and share with others
If your business is not using Twitter right now, you are missing out on a very valuable marketing method. The report shows that businesses shoud be tweeting to their customers as a means of building brand loyalty. Don’t know where to start? At RoryMartin.com, we help businesses customize their social media marketing plans, provide customized facebook pages, overall website overhauls, web design, and perfectly timed tweets.
We can help you build a Social Media Strategy that reflects your unique brand and meets your business goals. From a one-time site analysis to full search engine optimization strategy and execution, RoryMartin.com makes social media simple.
Why Should I Customize my Facebook Business Page?
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing, Web Design and Development on October 10, 2011
With the popularity of Facebook fan pages and the releases of new timelines, it’s becoming increasingly important for businesses to implement a customized Facebook page for your business. Since the new Facebook Timeline feature shows your posts to your fans and your fans friends, in a ticker at the top right-hand side of the page. Your posts now reach a much wider audience – and you need to stand out from the crowd.
Offering interesting updates with a well-designed Facebook Page is often the deciding factor in whether or not your fans will choose to interact or share your page with their friends. Building interaction with your fans is an important factor – you need to have relevant information that isn’t always self-promotional. However, we like to stress the importance of having a well designed Facebook page, that offers incentives for prospective fans to click “like”.
Do you "like" the RoryMartin.com reveal tab?
Consider this: The first thing users see is your business’s wall – and while that may have relevant information, it may lack the branding your company needs to make an impact. We’re finding that businesses are increasingly aware of the visual impact their Facebook page has, and trends point to the increased use of “splash pages” or reveal tabs for facebook pages. It’s the equivalent of having an active ad built directly into your page that’s clickable. You can set these Facebook reveal tabs to be clickabe so that users can click to like, which would reveal discounts, for example.
When it comes to the internet, looks are everything. The design is as important as the implementation. Having a well-designed landing tab will help you stand out from the crowd. Keep it simple, and neat. Don’t go overboard with apps. Be consistent with your branding, and display different pages for fans and non-fans. You can even engage your current fans to take another action via links or reveal tabs. RoryMartin.com builds these welcome tabs and customizes facebook pages for a variety of clients.
And while you’re customizing your Facebook fanpage, it’s a good idea to consider implementing a custom URL. If you have 25 or more fans, implementing a custom URL on your facebook page will increase your search engine rankings and will be easier to promote. Consider your custom URL another step towards branding your business.
Here are a few simple ideas for implementing customizations on your Facebook Page
- Display the services or products you offer
- Be sure to include a specific call to action, along with a link so your fans can actively participate
- Host a contest
- Make sure to post about your blog, and share your blog posts with fans
- Let people know who you are and what you’re about
- If you do any charity work or special events, make sure to share those
- Give fans a reason to like your page by using reveal tabs, or by letting users know what to look forward to
- For your fans, let them know how they can contribute
- Share your twitter posts
Now, more than ever, it’s increasingly important to make sure your social network business profiles are integrated into your marketing and branding. If you’re not sure how to implement social media into your marketing strategy, come see us at www.rorymartin.com.
Building a Better Keyword Strategy
Posted by Rory Martin in Search Engine Optimization on August 22, 2011
We were reading SEOmoz’s 6 Keyword Research Mistakes post this morning, and since we love visual cues when it comes to Search Engine Optimization, we thought we should show off this Keyword Matrix from Skyrocket.
SEOmoz identifies the keyword categories in their post:
- Question marks – these are keywords in areas where growth is likely but at present you’re not getting the performance you’d expect. These are very often untapped keyword opportunities and you should plan how you are going to improve performance on these kinds of keywords.
- Stars – high-performance keywords and loads of room for growth – find ways to capitalise on growth. My advice is to focus your resources of gaining results in these areas for maximum ROI in a short period of time.
- Dogs – the poor performing keywords with little or no chance of growth – bin these in favour of other keywords, reallocate any resources to other areas.
- Cash cows – the high performing keywords that show little opportunity for growth – look for ways to enhance and maintain performance whilst identifying patterns and translating this learning to other areas or verticals
We found this little matrix helpful in determining which keywords to optimize, pairing it with Google’s Keyword Research tool. For more on how to generate great keywords, check out our post on choosing better keywords. Keywords play a large role in search engine optimization, and are a key factor in social media marketing. Having the right combination of keywords will generate hits, increase traffic and drive sales.
As a Seattle Web Design company that specializes in Seattle Search Engine Optimization and Seattle Social Media Marketing, RoryMartin.com can help you build a Social Media Strategy that reflects your unique brand and meets your business goals. From a one-time site analysis to full search engine optimization strategy and execution, RoryMartin.com can help match your keywords to your SEO needs
The New Landscape of Social Media Marketing
Posted by Rory Martin in Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking on June 20, 2011
Navigating the new marketing landscape means knowing which marketing tactics are effective, and which tactics are outdated. Improving the visibility of your website has become a marketing priority, yet it can be frustrating since competition for rankings is intense. As many businesses lack the time or cashflow to continuously monitor, report and adjust their strategy, the results of many social media marketing campaigns are often poor. If you’re struggling to boost your page rank, you may need to adapt your SEO and social media strategy to reflect the new trends in social media marketing and search engine optimization.
If you’re not embracing social media as a business, you’re missing out on one of the biggest marketing tools available. Using tools like Facebook and Twitter actually boost your search engine rankings, making your website more visible to search engines like Google. Consider how much content is shared on Facebook each day – users spend approximately 22% of their Internet time in social media, making social media a priority for any company that wants to be visible.
Of course, just hiring an intern may not do the trick. While social media can be a valuable marketing campaign tool, it’s often a commitment. Hiring a professional will ensure that you get the best results from your brand’s digital communications. You want someone who can represent your brand and company, not just the message behind your brand. Social media has become an avenue for customer service, sales inquiries and ongoing questions – you want someone who understands your audience, and can think out of the box in a way that is both specific and familiar to your client base.
Hiring a professional will ensure that your message, and your core product do not get lost in a sea of irrelevant information. Anyone who’s been on the web knows just how much junk the web holds – having a true professional on your team will ensure that your relevant keywords and terms drive traffic to your page. A professional can tell you which information to include and which information is irrelevant. They can help you streamline your content, showing off your product’s benefits in a straightforward way. A social media professional can also help you determine terms that are broad and wide reaching, and help you optimize key words and phrases so that your site gets a good SEO ranking.
Content is still key on the web, and having someone who knows your brand, your clients and your company will ensure that users come to your website because you are an authority. Social media is all about providing something of value to your customers. You need interesting and relevant content, you need high-quality inbound and outbound links. You need customer interaction that is fun and info-rich. Monitoring industry key words and phrases will continually provide feedback on what your customer or audience is interested in, making a tailored social media strategy easier to attain.
RoryMartin.com is that secret weapon that will revolutionize the way you engage with your clients and end-users. We offer a comprehensive set of services from website design and web development to search engine optimization and search engine marketing and social media marketing. If you need creative ideas, easy implementation, and a limited investment into your social media campaign, RoryMartin.com has experts available to assess your needs, provide excellent customer service and innovative marketing tactics before you’ve even signed a contract.
Create the Best Copy for Your Website
Posted by Rory Martin in Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing on June 17, 2011
There are a lot of tips out there on how to create effective copy for your website – especially for businesses who maintain a blog, regarding their services. Of course, these guides may be incomplete and often overly general. Fortunately, we’ve written down our favorite tips for generating effective copy that will drive traffic to your site, showing your business’s authority in your industry.
– Make sure your content is easy to read.
Keyword stuffing, technical jargon, and long-winded posts are often indicators of poor copy. These problems will make your website’s copy hard to read, especially since most web users scan web pages rather than read them word for word. To make your content easy to read, try using fewer words, simple terms, highlighted keywords, and bulleted lists. Another tip – try writing in inverted pyramid style, like you’d find in a newspaper. Try writing your conclusion first, then back it up with the details.
– Your copy should reflect your audience.
Be familiar with your audience – is there a common tone or style of writing that your audience expects to see? Think about how you’d tell someone about your product in a conversational way – you’re giving your reader tips (tips from Me to YOU). Highlight the benefits (not the features) of using your product. Include answers about what the product does. Write for how people will search for your page, using words your target audience would use to look for your services. Offer solutions, be entertaining and informative, grab your readers’ attention, use bold (but not cheesy) headings and brief explanations. And don’t just rely on keywords – use words that elicit emotion and action from potential customers.
– Avoid dense copy with no breaks.
Smaller chunks surrounded by white space are visually easier to digest. The use of effective headings is one great way to break content into chunks, using boldface type for emphasis. When using headings remember a few things: keep them to eight words or less; include important keywords; avoid the use of adjectives and prepositions (and, a, the, of); be clear and concise, avoiding wordy, wishy-washy phrases. Headings are great because you can place them on your homepage as a link to content, or use them in title tags around your links.
– Don’t let your website become a dead end.
Offer links to other information in your industry, and build relationships so that other sites link to you. Often, search engines like Google are based on their ability to find you from links on other sites. The web is all about being inter-linked.
– If you’re stuck, hire a professional.
RoryMartin.com has a team of Seattle Search Engine Optimization and keyword experts who can help you draft engaging copy that reaches out to your audience. We help clients educate their markets and build brand awareness while winning and retaining customers with engaging and impactful websites and web marketing.
RoryMartin.com, a Seattle Web Design company that specializes in Search Engine Optimization and Seattle Social Media Marketing, can help you build a strategy that speaks to your audience and puts your business on the map.
Make an Impact on Facebook
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing, Social Networking on June 15, 2011
One of our focuses at Rorymartin.com is helping customers create and execute their social media campaigns. An effective social media campaign should be married with your marketing campaign, and should use a wide variety of social media tools – including Facebook. Facebook is one of the most useful social media marketing tools out today; yet many businesses don’t quite know how to implement Facebook into their social media strategy. One key point to Facebook as a social media tool for business is building interactions.
Initially, Facebook didn’t offer pages, and so businesses created profiles as a way to reach out to users, especially since messaging users has continued to remain a feature reserved for profiles. Yet, one of the most common mistakes businesses make on Facebook is creating a profile instead of a Facebook fan page. What these businesses may not know, is that profiles have not been as visible and don’t necessarily get the visits that pages do. While Facebook updates may seem like a way to alert fans to events and news – showing up like messages in users’ inboxes – a very small percentage of updates are actually visible to fans, because of an algorithm called EdgeRank.
EdgeRank gives every post a quality score – measuring the number of comments, likes, and shares per post against the number of fans a page has. Businesses who want to be seen need to build up their EdgeRank, by making their posts interaction friendly – which means businesses need to spend more time building community with their fans. Fans don’t interact with self-promotion nearly as much as they interact with conversation. Your page needs to have a conversational, community feel – a give and take that makes your brand appealing to your fans and their friends. To really optimize your Facebook experience, mix up the types of posts to include blogs, videos and engaging questions.
Building the interactions your Facebook page is just one part of a good social media strategy. Seattle Social Media Marketing company, Rorymartin.com focuses on helping our customers build their EdgeRank. This helps our clients educate their markets and build brand awareness while winning and retaining customers with engaging and impactful websites and web marketing. We offer a comprehensive set of services from website design and web development to search engine optimization and search engine marketing and social media marketing.
The Periodic Table of SEO
Posted by Rory Martin in Search Engine Optimization on June 10, 2011
We found something cool today – from the folks over at SearchEngineLand, who say:
Search engine optimization — SEO — may seem like alchemy to the uninitiated. But there is a science to it. Search engines reward pages with the right combination of ranking factors, or “signals.” SEO is about ensuring your content generates the right type of signals.
They put together the Periodic Table of SEO to help readers get a visual idea of what goes into producing the right ranking factors that make your website shine. At Rory Martin, we take all the factors into consideration when we’re building a strategy for SEO, online marketing and social media management. Since we often talk about how important SEO and Keywords are to your website’s value, we figured you (our readers) would be interested in this graphic too! (Click the image for a larger view)
As a Seattle Web Design company that specializes in Seattle Search Engine Optimization and Seattle Social Media Marketing, RoryMartin.com is dedicated to helping you find the right tools to optimize your website, and bring you the most exposure to help your business succeed.
Trend Forecast: Social Media’s Immediate Future
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing on June 7, 2011
There are big trends happening in Social Media right now, from the use of scanned location check-in points, to social commerce. It can be hard to navigate the trends but we’ve compiled a few of the most common themes into 3 predictions on where social media is headed in second half of 2011.
Social, Mobile Entertainment –
Games have moved onto mobile devices, now that smartphones are relatively inexpensive, prevalent and readily available. Social media is giving users a way to take their entertainment on the go. Now instead of filling out a crossword while commuting, you may use Words With Friends. Or you might make a game out of being in the right place at the right time through Foursquare – ousting your friends, and letting people know where to find you. It’s a way to stay connected with other users while managing a busy lifestyle, from Facebook gaming to sharing last night’s football or Mad Men highlights over Twitter, even watching YouTube videos via an Android application. It’s entertainment to go, and integrating more social technology into your business and website will make it much more appealing to social media users.
Scanning, Scanning, Scanning –
When you’re using check-in services like FourSquare and the Facebook places application, you may be able to scan a barcode or QR code, checking you into your location on relevant social sites. With the emergence of social scanning, it’ll only be a matter of time until you can scan a barcode, which adds a “Like” to the business’s Facebook Page, or pulls up the latest Yelp Reviews and Groupon coupons for the location you’re at. It’s a business strategy – integrating social media and marketing in an easy-to-use way.
Mobile Workplace –
As smartphones become better and faster, we’re seeing users move from laptop to mobile (as desktops have been pushed out of the way for smaller, lighter ways to work-on-the-go). This means websites need to plan for mobile content that will load quickly on a mobile network. Businesses should start looking for ways to accept mobile payment, and will have to consider dynamic pricing to keep up with supply and demand. And since smartphones often double as media storage devices, it won’t be hard to keep your PowerPoint presentations handy for your next business meeting.
These are a few of our predictions for the coming year – companies will want to work these trends into their social media marketing strategy. At RoryMartin.com we do the research on tips, tricks and tools of the trade when it comes to SEO, online marketing and social media management. As a Seattle Web Design company that specializes in Seattle Search Engine Optimization and Seattle Social Media Marketing, RoryMartin.com can help you build a Social Media Strategy that reflects your unique brand and meets your business goals.
Tips to a Stellar Social Media Strategy
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing, Social Networking on May 20, 2011
As social media becomes a key component in online marketing, businesses who aren’t creating and implementing stellar strategy may be left in the dark. Social media creates buzz around your business; and as your company becomes more visible, social media drives traffic to your business or website. With a solid strategy, you’ll have a chance to talk to new and interested audiences, while ultimately becoming more user-friendly. We’ve curated a few key tips to make your social media plan succeed:
Listen: Social media is a communicative tool. As with any form of communication the best thing you can do is listen. Listen to your audience, your competitors, and people you want to work with. Listen, or look for conversations that you want to be a part of. Listen to, and watch social media influencers and keep track of ways that you can contribute to become an authority. There are tools that you can use to monitor these conversations, and track keywords, once you determine which users and conversations are relevant to your business. But above all things it’s best to determine who your target audience is, and why they want to be a part of your sphere.
Once you have a clear line of sight it’s time to…
Plan: Social media influence *can* happen organically, but for a business it’s best to take the bull by the horns. Listening to the buzz happening in the social media world will help your business determine your social media goals and objectives (these should tie in to your businesses goals and objectives). Plot out which social media sites you’d like to use and the contacts you’d like to gain. Define your strategy, the people who will implement that strategy, and how they/you will engage with your audience. Plan out the time it will take to implement this strategy, so you don’t waste time splashing around in the metaphorical social media pool. Create a social media calendar that coincides with that strategy, so you’ll know what kind of content to create and when. As Margaret Thatcher once said, “Plan your work for today and every day, then work your plan.”
And while you’re doing all this planning, remember that the best connections are personal, human connections so you’ll need to…
Engage: Be a part of the conversation – the HUMAN conversation. Creating relationships in the social media world is important to creating trust between your brand and the world. Develop a deeply human relationship with your audience, and your audience will reward that relationship. Show them that your business is a team of actual, relatable people, not just a big logo run by a bunch of robots. For example, a set of auto-tweets won’t be nearly as effective as coming up with relevant content that varies from day to day. That’s not to say your auto tweets aren’t important, but that you should also respond to the influencers, audience and industry relevant to your business. If it’s relevant to both your contacts and to your businesses goals, it’s a conversation your business needs to be a part of.
And if all else fails, you can check back to RoryMartin.com where we’ll continue to write about tips, tricks and tools of the trade when it comes to SEO, online marketing and social media management. As a Seattle Web Design company that specializes in Seattle Search Engine Optimization and Seattle Social Media Marketing, RoryMartin.com can help you build a Social Media Strategy that reflects your unique brand and meets your business goals
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