We have been running a campaign on Twitter for the last couple of months for a client of ours. While I cannot go into specifics about the campaign, I can share some of our learning’s:
Build Credibility
There is nothing worse than a Twitter account that only tweets sales offers. Unless your name is Dell you cannot build a following that way.
What we have found is that the Twitter account has to tweet useful information. To do this we set up accounts on a program called EasyTweets. EasyTweets allows us to add some RSS feeds to our Twitter account. These RSS feeds pull in news from the niches that we are targeting. So anyone who follows our account, will get news that they are interested in.
What does that look like?
Well if I was a restaurant in Nashua NH, I would add RSS feeds of Nashua news to my feed as may target audience is people who live in, and around, Nashua.
What we found was that if we added local and industry news to our Twitter feeds, we were able to increase the number of followers that we had. And since the feeds we added were of interest to our target audience, we were able to add followers who were interested in what we were selling.
Don’t Oversell
We have found that if for our client that the optimal number of “sales tweets” was one to two a day. And since the Twitter accounts were sending out 10-15 tweets a day from the RSS feeds, our “sales tweets” blended into the overall stream and did not look like all we were doing is selling on Twitter.
Test Content
Just like testing Ad copy for PPC, test and retest your sales tweet content. It is amazing what a difference changing one word can do for your CTR. Also, test the time of day of your offers. Do they convert better in the morning or afternoon?
Use Hashtags
Hashtags (#mets for example) is an massively underused Twitter feature. There are a lot of portal type web sites now that run continuous twitter steams. For example Metsblog.com is aimed at New York Mets fans and averages 2.5 million page views every month in traffic, and is read by roughly 35,000 unique people every day. Metsblog.com has a twitter feed page on its site that pulls in Tweets that use the tag #mets.
So if your target audience is Mets fans, and you use the #mets tag in your tweets, then suddenly your tweet is getting exposed to 35,000 mets fans. Multiple that by the hundreds of Mets web sites that are online and suddenly your reach is much greater than the 1,000 followers that you have. Your tweets are now being seen and read by tens of thousands of people.
source: http://social-media-optimization.com/2010/07/twitter-campaign-learning%E2%80%99s/
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Social Networks and Recruiting
According to a survey by recruiting platform Jobvite nearly three-quarters of companies surveyed are using social networks for recruiting, and 58.1% said they had successfully hired a candidate found through a social network.
LinkedIn was the top social network looked to for hiring, used by nearly 80% of companies recruiting through social media. It also provided the most success, with about 90% of companies who had hired through a social network reporting they found the candidate on LinkedIn. While Facebook and Twitter were used for recruiting by about 55% and 45% of companies, respectively, they led to far fewer hires: 27.5% for Facebook and 14.2% for Twitter.
Success in this area is leading almost half of employers to increase recruiting program spending on social media. At the same time, more than a third of companies were lowering spending on job boards and search firms.
source:http://social-media-optimization.com/2010/08/social-networks-and-recruiting/
LinkedIn was the top social network looked to for hiring, used by nearly 80% of companies recruiting through social media. It also provided the most success, with about 90% of companies who had hired through a social network reporting they found the candidate on LinkedIn. While Facebook and Twitter were used for recruiting by about 55% and 45% of companies, respectively, they led to far fewer hires: 27.5% for Facebook and 14.2% for Twitter.
Success in this area is leading almost half of employers to increase recruiting program spending on social media. At the same time, more than a third of companies were lowering spending on job boards and search firms.
“While the economy begins to recover, companies looking to make new hires are seeking the most cost-effective, efficient ways to find new talent. As our third annual survey shows, social network recruiting has become a mainstream channel for employers who need access to talent,“ said Dan Finnigan, President and Chief Executive Officer of Jobvite. “Job boards launched a revolution in recruiting more than 15 years ago. And now, social networks are doing the same – but in a targeted way. Through social recruiting, companies are learning they can find the best talent efficiently, without making a major investment.“
source:http://social-media-optimization.com/2010/08/social-networks-and-recruiting/
Top Methods to Improve Your Blog Rank
Improve blog ranking and marketing is no longer kids stuff. It’s beyond the sappy diary entries and torment fueled rants. Its serious business, especially if your goal is to make money blogging for your business. Blog marketing is more dominant than static site marketing mainly because of all the options Web 2.0 offers. Below are some things you can do to take advantage of what web 2.0 has to offer to boost blog traffic, links and engine ranking.
1. Get exposed
Do you wonder how some large news and content sites deliver their headlines. Syndicate with RSS. While using the feed that comes with your blog may seem like an ok option, using a custom feed, that particularly separates keyword groups for content you develop often, is a far better option. Syndicating with RSS increases your exposure. Pheedpress, accessible from Content Desk is a great tool for this.
2. Tag you’re it!
Tags make it easier for people to find your blog post, and video and photos that are related. You can write the most informative blog in your niche but if it can not be found it can not get read. Tag your posts.
3. Social Bookmarking
Social Bookmarking allows users to save and categorize a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others. Users may also take bookmarks saved by others and add them to their own collection, as well as to subscribe to the lists of others.
Bookmarking is an easy way to improve blog ranking and get traffic; the more you do it the more youll be noticed. Ideally, your site should be bookmarked somewhere in all the major bookmarking engines. For more details you can visit us at www.profit-pulling-tollbars.com. But having your entire site booked in just a few can greatly increase blog traffic.
4. Get involved
much like the tip above, adding comments is a great way to sprinkle your links around. Note however, your comment must be informative and relate to the original post. Bloggers will grant your trackbacks when your comments are on topic and useful.
5. Get connected
Social networks like Myspace can be found in nearly everywhere corner of the web. They are great places to meet like minded people and above all receive important links from.
Article syndication is still one of the most popular ways to get links. Well-written content that serves the reader first then your business will receive rewards. This is the type of content that is read, passed on, and linked to. Writing content gives you links as well as branding you as an authority figure in your niche.
6. Digging for treasure
some sites take stories from users and post them on the site. Users then vote on them and decide which get dugg and which are buried. If you are dugg it can result in a flood of traffic.
Use the above tips to take full advantage of all the rewards blogging can have on your business and to be able to make money blogging.
Publishing on a blog platform gives you the chance to reach a greater quantity of people faster than a static site.
source: http://www.seoseonews.com
1. Get exposed
Do you wonder how some large news and content sites deliver their headlines. Syndicate with RSS. While using the feed that comes with your blog may seem like an ok option, using a custom feed, that particularly separates keyword groups for content you develop often, is a far better option. Syndicating with RSS increases your exposure. Pheedpress, accessible from Content Desk is a great tool for this.
2. Tag you’re it!
Tags make it easier for people to find your blog post, and video and photos that are related. You can write the most informative blog in your niche but if it can not be found it can not get read. Tag your posts.
3. Social Bookmarking
Social Bookmarking allows users to save and categorize a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others. Users may also take bookmarks saved by others and add them to their own collection, as well as to subscribe to the lists of others.
Bookmarking is an easy way to improve blog ranking and get traffic; the more you do it the more youll be noticed. Ideally, your site should be bookmarked somewhere in all the major bookmarking engines. For more details you can visit us at www.profit-pulling-tollbars.com. But having your entire site booked in just a few can greatly increase blog traffic.
4. Get involved
much like the tip above, adding comments is a great way to sprinkle your links around. Note however, your comment must be informative and relate to the original post. Bloggers will grant your trackbacks when your comments are on topic and useful.
5. Get connected
Social networks like Myspace can be found in nearly everywhere corner of the web. They are great places to meet like minded people and above all receive important links from.
Article syndication is still one of the most popular ways to get links. Well-written content that serves the reader first then your business will receive rewards. This is the type of content that is read, passed on, and linked to. Writing content gives you links as well as branding you as an authority figure in your niche.
6. Digging for treasure
some sites take stories from users and post them on the site. Users then vote on them and decide which get dugg and which are buried. If you are dugg it can result in a flood of traffic.
Use the above tips to take full advantage of all the rewards blogging can have on your business and to be able to make money blogging.
Publishing on a blog platform gives you the chance to reach a greater quantity of people faster than a static site.
source: http://www.seoseonews.com
Meta Title Tags are Gold
How to Write Compelling Page Titles
From an SEO perspective, the title of the webpage is very important. These are the words that describe what your page is about and are the first words that a search engine sees when it crawls your webpage looking for content to add to its index.
The page title is also what the searcher sees in a search result - so the page title is very important in describing what the page is about and if the title meets the searcher's criteria, then it is more likely to be clicked on and your page opened.
It is safe to assume that the majority of searchers these days will be tempted to either click or ignore based on the content of the title. This is like your ad in the natural search section of the search engine results page.
Now that the impact of the title of the webpage is obvious, let me explain how to write an effective and powerful title.
First the basics! The webpage title aka the title tag is the synopsis of the content of the web page. So, as no two pages on your website are the same, hence why should their title tags be? Therefore, as a general rule, title tags for each page on your website should be unique. This is an added bonus from an SEO perspective, because now you can target many more keywords and spread your reach across search engine indexes.
The second thing to consider is whether you want to add your company name in the title tag? The answer is that it depends on your branding strategy. If your company name is a known brand, or if you want to promote your firm name as a brand or if your company name consists of keyword(s) that you want to target such as ABC Family Solicitors targeting the keyword "Family Solicitors", then by all means add your company name in the title tag. If not, then use the limited but valuable space to add your targeted keywords. If you do decide to add your company name, make sure that it is at the end of the title. This is because you want search engines and your visitors to first read the targeted keyword(s) for that page and then the company name.
It is important to remember that since the title tag is the synopsis of the content of the web page, you need to make sure that the title tag is relevant. For example, the title tag for an about us page is "About Website Design Company - ECommerce Partners". Hence, the title tag does its job of informing what the page is about. Now, you might have noticed that instead of "About Us - ECommerce Partners", we added "About Website Design Company - ECommerce Partners".
The reason is because "Website Design Company" is one of the key phrases we want to target and so, we replaced "About Us" with "About Website Design Company". This brings out an important point. We need to do a keyword analysis before we write an effective and powerful title tag.
The next step after keyword analysis will be to write down title tags for each and every web page on your website.
Please be careful when writing title tags and never, never over stuff keywords in the title. Doing so will undermine the power of the title tag and defeat the purpose of better ranking in the search engines. The title tag is the title of your web page and so it must be relevant and meaningful. Remember, this is the title in your AD in the natural search listings of the search engine.
General Suggestion: You cannot promote all of your keywords in one page. Normally, you should promote 3 to 5 keyword phrases per page. The 'Title tag' should contain up to 3 important keywords that match to the body of the page content. If the keyword you are trying to promote is highly competitive, you can consider repeating the important keyword twice in the first 100 words of the page content.
Limit the length of the title keywords to 65 characters or less, including spaces. There's no reason to have the engines cut off the last word and have it replaced with a "..." Note that some search engines are now accepting longer titles and Google, in particular, is now supporting up to 70 characters.
Use a divider when splitting up the keywords. We generally recommend the use of the "|" symbol aka the pipe bar. Others choose the arrow ">" or hyphen "-" and both work well.
Re-using the title tag of each page as the H1 heading tag can be valuable from both a SEO keyword targeting standpoint and a user experience improvement. Users who go to the page from the search result listing will have the expectation of finding the title they clicked on. Users will be more likely to stay on a page they're reasonably certain fits their intended search query.
source: http://www.seo-news.com/
From an SEO perspective, the title of the webpage is very important. These are the words that describe what your page is about and are the first words that a search engine sees when it crawls your webpage looking for content to add to its index.
The page title is also what the searcher sees in a search result - so the page title is very important in describing what the page is about and if the title meets the searcher's criteria, then it is more likely to be clicked on and your page opened.
It is safe to assume that the majority of searchers these days will be tempted to either click or ignore based on the content of the title. This is like your ad in the natural search section of the search engine results page.
Now that the impact of the title of the webpage is obvious, let me explain how to write an effective and powerful title.
First the basics! The webpage title aka the title tag is the synopsis of the content of the web page. So, as no two pages on your website are the same, hence why should their title tags be? Therefore, as a general rule, title tags for each page on your website should be unique. This is an added bonus from an SEO perspective, because now you can target many more keywords and spread your reach across search engine indexes.
The second thing to consider is whether you want to add your company name in the title tag? The answer is that it depends on your branding strategy. If your company name is a known brand, or if you want to promote your firm name as a brand or if your company name consists of keyword(s) that you want to target such as ABC Family Solicitors targeting the keyword "Family Solicitors", then by all means add your company name in the title tag. If not, then use the limited but valuable space to add your targeted keywords. If you do decide to add your company name, make sure that it is at the end of the title. This is because you want search engines and your visitors to first read the targeted keyword(s) for that page and then the company name.
It is important to remember that since the title tag is the synopsis of the content of the web page, you need to make sure that the title tag is relevant. For example, the title tag for an about us page is "About Website Design Company - ECommerce Partners". Hence, the title tag does its job of informing what the page is about. Now, you might have noticed that instead of "About Us - ECommerce Partners", we added "About Website Design Company - ECommerce Partners".
The reason is because "Website Design Company" is one of the key phrases we want to target and so, we replaced "About Us" with "About Website Design Company". This brings out an important point. We need to do a keyword analysis before we write an effective and powerful title tag.
The next step after keyword analysis will be to write down title tags for each and every web page on your website.
Please be careful when writing title tags and never, never over stuff keywords in the title. Doing so will undermine the power of the title tag and defeat the purpose of better ranking in the search engines. The title tag is the title of your web page and so it must be relevant and meaningful. Remember, this is the title in your AD in the natural search listings of the search engine.
General Suggestion: You cannot promote all of your keywords in one page. Normally, you should promote 3 to 5 keyword phrases per page. The 'Title tag' should contain up to 3 important keywords that match to the body of the page content. If the keyword you are trying to promote is highly competitive, you can consider repeating the important keyword twice in the first 100 words of the page content.
Limit the length of the title keywords to 65 characters or less, including spaces. There's no reason to have the engines cut off the last word and have it replaced with a "..." Note that some search engines are now accepting longer titles and Google, in particular, is now supporting up to 70 characters.
Use a divider when splitting up the keywords. We generally recommend the use of the "|" symbol aka the pipe bar. Others choose the arrow ">" or hyphen "-" and both work well.
Re-using the title tag of each page as the H1 heading tag can be valuable from both a SEO keyword targeting standpoint and a user experience improvement. Users who go to the page from the search result listing will have the expectation of finding the title they clicked on. Users will be more likely to stay on a page they're reasonably certain fits their intended search query.
source: http://www.seo-news.com/
Friday, August 13, 2010
Facebook Ads versus Google Adwords
Google Adwords has dominated the online advertising space for the last three or four years but Facebook I believe is positioned to really challenge Google for some of those advertising dollars.
We recently ran a series of campaigns for local events on Facebook and I was really impressed with the ROI that we got. It was much higher than anything that we have gotten using Adwords. So how did we do it?
Demographic Targeting
Unlike Adwords, Facebook users are not actively searching for your product or service. But by using Facebook’s demographics and location data we were able to really focus on our target audience.
Since our campaign was specific to a location we were able to target just the people who liked the brand we were promoting and who lived within 50 miles of the event.
This ended up being a really small group, but that was ok because the conversion event and CPC was really good.
Use Pictures
We tested ads with pictures and ads without. The ads with pictures all performed substantially better than those without.
Test Multiple Ads
When we run a paid campaign we always use multiple ad text, but it really is useful on Facebook. We tested new ad content every day until we were sure we had the most optimized copy. Then we let that as run until the end of the campaign.
source: http://social-media-optimization.com
We recently ran a series of campaigns for local events on Facebook and I was really impressed with the ROI that we got. It was much higher than anything that we have gotten using Adwords. So how did we do it?
Demographic Targeting
Unlike Adwords, Facebook users are not actively searching for your product or service. But by using Facebook’s demographics and location data we were able to really focus on our target audience.
Since our campaign was specific to a location we were able to target just the people who liked the brand we were promoting and who lived within 50 miles of the event.
This ended up being a really small group, but that was ok because the conversion event and CPC was really good.
Use Pictures
We tested ads with pictures and ads without. The ads with pictures all performed substantially better than those without.
Test Multiple Ads
When we run a paid campaign we always use multiple ad text, but it really is useful on Facebook. We tested new ad content every day until we were sure we had the most optimized copy. Then we let that as run until the end of the campaign.
source: http://social-media-optimization.com
Online Surveys & Social Media
One of the many ways companies have engaged their customers, gained insight into a marketplace and conducted research for a variety of purposes has been through surveys. If you think that list of activities almost sounds like the reasons many companies engage in social media monitoring, you’d be right.
About 2 weeks ago I did a webinar with our client, Zoomerang, purveyor of online survey software on the intersection of surveys and social media. In that presentation I focused on why social media can play an important part of an online marketing strategy.
Companies incorporate social media into their marketing mix for a variety of reasons:
For example here is how a company leveraging a survey for marketing purposes might incorporate their social networks with online surveys:
Put a listening program in place using social media monitoring software to get a handle on topics of interest to your community. There could be a variety of reasons to use a survey, from product research to identifying trends or for profiling customers.
Grow your network, grow your survey panel. In the context of online surveys, growing a strong social network across different channels is a bit like developing your own survey panel. As you grow your networks through participation and interaction, trust is earned.
Crowdsource ideas like survey questions. Ping your network with different topics of questions to see what people respond to. Leverage that feedback to construct the flow of your online survey and even some of the questions.
Ask for help. Those same, topically relevant communities can be tapped to help promote the survey at large, in situations where respondents don’t need to be a specifically defined list.
Recognize those in your network that helped come up with question ideas as well as those that help promote taking the survey. That public recognition is priceless, especially when it’s a genuine reflection of their contribution to a successful survey.
Promote. Being invested through participation and recognition, there’s a great chance many of those same network connections will help promote the survey results. Offer a first look at the survey report, an incentive for promotion and communicate the outcome of everyone’s efforts. Give feedback on what’s working and if you can, offer tools to make it easier to promote.
You can listen to the entire recorded webinar here along with links to other articles and howtos for incorporating social media into your surveys and surveys into your social media.
Have you successfully incorporated social media into some aspect of your online surveys? Did you find some uses more effective than others?
source: toprankblog
About 2 weeks ago I did a webinar with our client, Zoomerang, purveyor of online survey software on the intersection of surveys and social media. In that presentation I focused on why social media can play an important part of an online marketing strategy.
Companies incorporate social media into their marketing mix for a variety of reasons:
- Website Traffic
- Brand Awareness
- Engagement with Prospects
- Engagement with Customers
- Brand Reputation
- Prospect Lead Quality
- Revenue
- Prospect Lead Volume
- Useful Product Feedback
For example here is how a company leveraging a survey for marketing purposes might incorporate their social networks with online surveys:
Put a listening program in place using social media monitoring software to get a handle on topics of interest to your community. There could be a variety of reasons to use a survey, from product research to identifying trends or for profiling customers.
Grow your network, grow your survey panel. In the context of online surveys, growing a strong social network across different channels is a bit like developing your own survey panel. As you grow your networks through participation and interaction, trust is earned.
Crowdsource ideas like survey questions. Ping your network with different topics of questions to see what people respond to. Leverage that feedback to construct the flow of your online survey and even some of the questions.
Ask for help. Those same, topically relevant communities can be tapped to help promote the survey at large, in situations where respondents don’t need to be a specifically defined list.
Recognize those in your network that helped come up with question ideas as well as those that help promote taking the survey. That public recognition is priceless, especially when it’s a genuine reflection of their contribution to a successful survey.Promote. Being invested through participation and recognition, there’s a great chance many of those same network connections will help promote the survey results. Offer a first look at the survey report, an incentive for promotion and communicate the outcome of everyone’s efforts. Give feedback on what’s working and if you can, offer tools to make it easier to promote.
You can listen to the entire recorded webinar here along with links to other articles and howtos for incorporating social media into your surveys and surveys into your social media.
Have you successfully incorporated social media into some aspect of your online surveys? Did you find some uses more effective than others?
source: toprankblog
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