So you’re a new mom, and of course you want to share every adorable baby photo and every precious anecdote about your little bundle of joy with all of your friends. But wait! Before you hit Facebook, there are a few simple rules that every parent should follow. Seriously, it will make the virtual world a much better place for the rest of us. Here are five common new mom Facebook fails: 1. Creating an account for your baby Not only does it violate Facebook’s terms of service – it’s super weird to see first person posts from a tiny human who is not yet old enough to talk, let alone type. 2. Graphic photos and status updates Please, please, spare us the gory details. We do not want to know what you did with your placenta and we are not interested in reading about your child’s bowel movements. Also, let’s talk about delivery room photos. By all means, show us an adorably swaddled photo of your newborn in your arms. But do not, DO NOT, show us a photo of you in the process of giving birth. Remember, keep your private parts private. 3. Paging Dr. Facebook It’s one thing to ask if anyone in your friend circle has experience dealing with croup, or to survey some opinions on how to handle teething. It’s quite another to treat your friend list like it’s the American Academy of Pediatrics. (Unless, of course, your friend list actually is The American Academy of Pediatrics.) Let’s repeat: Facebook doesn’t wear a white lab coat. Quite simply, if your baby has symptoms you’re concerned about, refer to a physician, not a wall post. 4. Too many posts Baby photos are almost always a hit, but no one wants their feed cluttered up with a thousand pictures of little Cameron sitting in her car seat. Think quality over quantity and save the extras to your “Baby’s First Year” external hard drive. 5. Privacy settings This last one is actually pretty serious – don’t forget to check your privacy settings. So many people are unaware of how much information they are sharing with the world. It’s one thing to let co-workers or strangers or strange co-workers creep on your life. But when your kids are involved, it becomes a safety issue. It’s not just you anymore– and what’s more important than keeping your little one safe? What are some of your pet peeves when it comes to Facebook? Source: http://www.modernmom.com/2b420888-3b4b-11e3-b6a4-bc764e04a41e.html
Not getting the traction you'd like to see on your LinkedIn page? Try these 15 tips for a powerful profile. 1. Segment Your Connections. This simple tip can save you a mountain of work later. Let's say you're on LinkedIn to meet:
Customers
JV partners
Media contacts
If you don't segment your connections, they're all going to be lumped into a folder LinkedIn calls "Untagged." Then when you want to contact potential JV partners, you'll have no idea which ones those are. So you'll want to segment all of your connections - new and old - into appropriate folders to take maximum advantage of LinkedIn's ability to hook you up with the right people. 2. Certain Keyword Placement has a Bigger Effect Than Others. Keywords in your name, your headline, your company name, your job title and your skills rank higher in the search results than keywords in other sections. Be sure to use a variety of keywords and terms in describing what you do, and also offer to show up in a variety of search results. 3. Don't Annoy Your Contacts. When you're updating your LinkedIn profile, your contacts are alerted to every little change as you make them unless you do the following: Open your privacy controls and turn off activity broadcasts, and change the setting for "select who can see your activity feed" to "only you." 4. Widen Your Scope. Join groups so you can connect with people who are in your target audience but are not contacts. Then reach out to these people and ask them to join your network. 5. If You're Ambitious... Join 50 LinkedIn groups which can boost your ranking. 6. Highlight Your Best Info. You can add, remove and rearrange entire sections of your profile any way you prefer to lead with your strengths. When in edit mode, hover your mouse over the double sided arrow that's next to the edit link for each section and you'll see a 4 arrowed icon. Click, drag and drop it to another position in your profile. Or customize your profile with personalized sections of your own making. 7. Hit The Magic Number. Your goal is to get at least 500 connections, for two reasons. First, it widens your audience. Second, that magic number 500 has a psychological impact on people viewing your profile. Once you hit 500, aim for 1,000 for the same reasons. 8. Use Your Aliases. Maybe you've changed your name or people commonly misspell your name. Or maybe you've got nicknames or more than one version for your first name, such as Dave and David. Include all of these names in your summary to make it easier for people to find you. 9. Accept Messages From Anyone. It used to be that LinkedIn members could only contact you if they were connected to you or if they purchased InMail messages. But now Premium Users are automatically opted into an Open Profile setting, which will let anyone message you for free. And as a Premium member, you can always select to switch this off at any time. 10. Track Who Is Viewing Your Profile. Premium users can now access a list of who's viewed their profile for the last 90 days. You might want to contact some of these members back and start a conversation. 11. Distinguish Yourself From Competitors. Where appropriate, integrate your personal point of view into your summary and possibly your experience. Then join groups where you can share your point of view as it relates to your expertise. You'll stand apart from the crowd and attract your own tribe of like-thinkers. 12. Use Premium As Needed. If you want to reach out to people but you can only contact them through Premium, then sign up by the month. Do all the reaching out you need to do and then cancel your premium subscription. 13. Wait. Don't reach out to potential contacts until your profile is sparkling. You only get one chance to make a first LinkedIn impression, so make it a good one. But don't let this be a reason to procrastinate, either. Set a deadline to get your profile together and then immediately start reaching out to others. 14. Create a Company Page. If you have a company, you need a company page. 15. Publish Company Status Updates. This gives LinkedIn users more reason to follow your company page. Plus, you can use segmentation to tailor your updates to specific audiences as well Source: http://EzineArticles.com/8584260
How do you feel about your current social media marketing plan? Like many, you may focus most of your time on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. While these three services put you in position to drive a lot of traffic, there is another you may be overlooking: Pinterest. Social Media Examiner shared their top tips for marketing your company on Pinterest. Here are a few of our favorites: 1. INCLUDE PRICE TAGS Pinterest users aren’t just looking for creative inspiration on the network. They’re also ready to buy. Make sure you include a price tag in the pins you create or repin. 2. USE PIN IT FOR LATER LINKS Publish a blog post, then pin an image from the article to a board. Copy the url of the pin. Use that same image for a post on your Google+ page. 3. SHOW PINS TO NEWSLETTER READERS Turn Your Customer’s email inbox into a “Pinbox” by including a few of your best Pinterest pins in your weekly newsletter or your regular email. Include a screenshot of your Pinterest Pin(s) in your newsletter. Place a clickable link on the image that links to the Pinterest Pin. When newsletter readers click on the image they’re taken to that pin on Pinterest where they also browse your pinboards to see what else you have. It’s a win-win. 4. PROMOTE YOUR PRESENCE Many marketers are surprised to learn that even if the brand Pinterest account they manage has a great profile, fans aren’t likely to seek it out or ‘stumble’ upon it on Pinterest, even if the brand is one of their favorites. Here are some ideas you can use to let fans or subscribers know your brand has Pinterest profile: Tweet about Pinterest 2-3 times a week. Post on Facebook once a week to once every two weeks. Send an email mentioning Pinterest and feature a Pinterest profile widget at least once a month. Add a (free) Pinterest app to your Facebook account. In addition to social media promotion, optimize your website with a profile widget, ‘follow us’ buttons, and ‘pin it’ buttons on your images. 5. DRIVE TRAFFIC WITH BLOG BOARDS By creating a blog board, you provide a place for your followers to find all your blog posts. Followers also automatically see any new blogs you pin on their homepage. After you publish a blog post on your site, pin it onto your board. Make sure to include a brief summary of the article, a relevant high-quality image and a link back to the blog post itself. Source: http://socialmediaweek.org/blog/2014/08/7-pinterest-marketing-tips-improve-visibility/
Could your marketing campaign use a little flair in social media marketing? If so, here are five helpful tips to enhance your marketing via social media: 1. Share at the best times. There may not an exact best time to post, but data analytics firm SumAll found the optimum times to post on various platforms as follows: 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. EST for Google +, 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. for Twitter, 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. for Facebook, 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. for Tumblr, 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. for Instagram, and 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. for Pinterest. I’ve personally found that women tend to be online late on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. I typically wait until around 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. to post. When I'm working with an ecommerce site, the best time for me to post is Thursday night. My previous company Organize could sell almost three times the amount of products online on Thursday night as compared with any other night of the week. 2. Grow your email list. Yes, email is still popular. In 2012, 91 percent of consumers reported checked their email everyday, according to a survey by Exact Target, now part of Salesforce. Furthermore, it found that email is the preferred channel for customers. What does this have to do with social media? Since email can be a major asset in a marketing campaign, try to gain more email subscribers. Provide a sign-up form on your website or on Facebook through one of many apps, offer incentives for customers to join an email subscription list or run a contest. 3. Conduct A/B tests. How can a company owner learn if a social-media campaign is reaching the intended audience or figure out which components customers liked? Run a simple A/B test, also known as split testing. GetResponse can help a business test what works when contacting customers through email. Optimizely can aid a company with A/B testing of its website-landing pages and other pages. 4. Send the right message to the right platform. Every social media platform serves a different purpose and draws a distinctive audience. Understanding this can make your marketing efforts go more smoothly. For example, you wouldn't want to promote a law firm on Instagram or Pinterest. Evan LePage, a writer for HootSuite, explains that Twitter users enjoy an image that has been attached, Facebook users like pictures and can’t stand asking for likes and Google+ followers are passionate brand advocates. Test each platform to see how your audience responds. I’ve found that women tend to be on Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook, and men turn to Twitter and Google+ more. Here is additional data from Alex Hillsberg on how men and women use social media. 5. Don’t just rely on organic strategies. In a perfect world, organic search-engine optimatization efforts would be enough for all your marketing needs. And best of all, it’s free. But the world isn’t perfect. Sometimes you have to pay for a spike in traffic. A pay-per-click strategy is a great way to get immediate results. Use Google Adwords to advertise near specific searches of keywords and you'll only pay if someone clicks on your ad. And all the major social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, offer opportunities to purchase ads. Advertising is available on YouTube and Reddit. Consult Larry Kim's guide on this topic. When you pay for placements, you expand your outreach outside of your current community of contacts in a rapid and effective way. While organic strategies are great, it doesn't hurt to shell out money for ad placements on social media networks. Source: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/235906
Every business owner wants Google to love their website. While search engine optimisation is a complex topic, the starting point is a well designed website that helps Google understand what your business is all about. By incorporating these 5 features into your website design, you’ll build a great foundation for gaining Google’s love.
1. Create a clean website structure and easy navigation Google’s robots are smart, but they can get confused! A clean website structure and easy navigation will not only benefit the robots, but your human visitors too. Your website structure should follow a clear hierarchy, e.g. with sub pages for your various product categories or services. If possible, each main product category or service should have its own page on your website, and should be easy to find through your navigation menu. Google also likes you to create a sitemap to make it even easier for the robots to crawl your website. 2. Include the right keywords, in the right places Keywords help Google understand what your website pages are about. Think about the keywords a potential customer may be using to look for your type of business or product. Then incorporate these keywords into your website, ideally one main keyword per page. For example, you might create a page for the keyword “flower delivery melbourne”, and a separate page for the keyword “wedding flowers melbourne”. On your target page, include the keyword in the page title, meta description, main heading, page text, URL and in image alt tags. 3. Write a blog to keep content fresh If you haven’t updated your website for 5 years, you may be in trouble! Google is always hungry for fresh content and will prioritise websites that have been updated recently. A blog is a great way of keeping your website updated and feeding Google the fresh content it craves. Posting new articles at least twice a month is recommended. Another benefit of your blog is that it creates new pages with long-tail keywords related to your business, e.g. “how to pick your wedding bouquet colours”. While there may not be as many searches for this keyword as for “wedding flowers melbourne”, the smaller amounts of traffic you can capture with each blog post will add up. 4. Be sociable Incorporating social media into your website has many benefits. While it is still unclear how much weight Google really gives to social shares and likes, it does crawl social media websites and will take social chatter into account when evaluating your brand’s online footprint. If you are talked about on social media, and people share links to your website, Google will take note! 5. Make your website responsive Google likes us to create websites that are useful and relevant to its human visitors. Usability on mobile phones and tablets can be an issue, and Google clearly recommends making websites responsive so that they adjust for mobiles and tablets. That way, you can have one website that serves all devices and is easy for Google to crawl and index. While there are a lot more factors involved in SEO, these 5 tips will hopefully get you a head start on your way to a loving relationship with Google. Source: http://www.motivatingmum.com/blog/5-website-features-google-loves/ By Alli This post brought to you by Frederike Ramm, Ondetto Web Design
You’ve heard that social media marketing can lead to more loyal customers, more brand recognition, more repeat business, more… well, everything. But successes like these aren’t instant or automatic. Effective social media marketing requires a great deal of effort. It isn’t easy for small business owners—or anyone—to come up with a steady stream of pithy statements in 140 characters or less. That said, there are some simple solutions that can make a difference in reaching and connecting with your audience. Here are three strategies you can add immediately to your social media marketing arsenal. 1. It’s all about timing Schedule your emails, tweets, status updates and blog posts at the right time—when you have a captive audience. You want to catch your audience not only when they’re checking their messages and news feed, but when they might have a few minutes to click through a link and check something out. When’s that? It depends, of course. For marketing consultant Jay Baer, the best time to reach his audience of busy professionals tends to be during a “micro-opportunity window.” These may be as short as just a few minutes, but they’re critical for reaching a busy audience. Baer times his messages to hit before or after the top of the hour, when many time-starved professionals are sneaking a peek at their phone on the way back to their desk. Late in the day is another good time to post. Author and social media expert Dan Zarrella’s Twitter analysis found that tweets in the late afternoon and early evening—during commute hours and around dinner time—led to higher click-through rates than those published in the morning. Zarrella also found that tweets posted on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays drew more click-throughs. A report by Buddy Media saw a similar phenomenon on Facebook. Brand interaction rates were 14.5 percent higher on weekends than on weekdays. The report also recommends posting between 8 pm and 7 am, when interaction is 14 percent higher than the rest of the day. The reason is simple: catch your audience during their downtime. Don’t want to work on the weekends or after hours? Tools like Buffer and HootSuite can help by letting you compose your thoughts in advance and publish them at an appointed time. 2. Issue calls to action If you want to engage with your customers on social media, you have to ask for it (in moderation, of course). Facebook posts with questions generate 92 percent higher comment rates than posts without questions, according to the Buddy Media report. Be sure to ask your question at the end of your post—that draws a higher comment rate than if the question is placed higher up. If you post a cool or amusing picture, don’t just ask your audience to “check it out!” Increase interaction rates by encouraging your audience to caption it, too. Or you can ask your fans to “fill in the blank,” a tactic that leads to four times as many comments as other posts. If you plan to run a promotion, note that some keywords work better than others. The words that drew the most interactions were “winner,” “win” and “giveaway.” Not so popular? “Sweepstakes,” “coupon,” “clearance,” and discount phrases “% off” or “$ off.” Twitter looked at about 20,000 random promoted tweets and found four effective ways for businesses to engage their followers. Including a link and asking their audience to download something, its number-one suggestion, drew an average of 13 percent more clicks. Twitter also recommends that brands ask their followers to retweet a message, keeping it short and simple, and spelling out the word “retweet,” rather than just the abbreviation “RT.” If you’re looking to build your following, you may simply want to ask people to follow your brand while offering them a compelling reason to do so, such as free prizes or behind-the-scenes access. Twitter found brands that paid for a promoted tweet and asked for a follow increased their audience by an average of 258 percent. 3. Use images often Research shows that photos perform better than videos, links and text alone on Facebook. According to digital marketing blog Kissmetrics, photos attract 53 percent more “Likes,” 104 percent more comments and 84 percent more click-throughs. Here’s the caveat, though: The best pictures are self-explanatory, like infographics and charts. Just posting a stock image doesn’t do much. Social media publishing app Buffer compared the responses to two different photos—one that didn’t need a caption to explain it and one that did. The infographic, which didn’t require a caption, drew 78 “Likes” and 20 comments while the other only attracted 11 “Likes” and three comments. All in all, social media marketing can help your business win new customers and engage with a broader audience. Making it work requires time, effort and some strategic thinking. By knowing your audience, interacting with them on their terms, and making engagement easy and attractive, you can elevate your brand and even drive revenue. Not bad for 140 characters or less. Source:http://www.forbes.com/sites/sage/2014/03/31/three-easy-tips-for-effective-social-media-marketing/
