Social media has become a necessary tool to connect and engage with your audience—and in today’s marketing landscape, that’s how brands are built.
Social media marketing is simply using social sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, to market your business—and, when possible, to create a community of people excited about your brand. This new marketing medium is more demanding on businesses because to promote and build a brand, you must engage in conversations with your target market.
The 2014 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, by social media researcher Michael Stelzner at socialmediaexaminer.com, confirms that 92 percent of businesses using social media marketing indicated that their efforts have generated significant exposure for their brand. Improving traffic and growing lists was the second major benefit listed—with 80 percent having success, followed by developing loyal fans, at 72 percent.
The number-one benefit of social media marketing was gaining those all-important eyeballs and an increase in sales (reported by more than 60 percent of respondents); an unexpected benefit was a rise in search engine rankings reported by more than half the participants in the study.
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Google Alerts are a great way to keep track of buzz and conversations happening about you and your company. Go to google.com/alerts and enter your company name and any keywords that might come up in a conversation about your brand. Whenever something is posted on the internet with those keywords, Google will send you an email with the link. You can set this up to keep an eye on your competitors, too.
Engaging Online Tools
There are hundreds of engagement tools on the internet that can help you not only start and conduct conversations with your brand’s audience but also monitor and deepen them. One of the most powerful is blogging. Blogging is derived from the word “web log,” and it’s a type of website that’s usually maintained by an individual who regularly enters commentary, descriptions of events, or other material, such as graphics or video.
Websites can become static and dated, in addition to not being interactive, which means you’re not engaging or talking with your customers or clients. Putting a blog on your website allows you to engage in a two-way conversation with your market. To start the conversation, you can post valuable tips, content, discussions, resources, thoughts, and reviews on your blog.
Blogging, which dates to the early ’90s, gained popularity in the beginning of 2000 and today is one of the most powerful interactive tools on the net. Whether you already have a blog or you need to set one up, there’s one thing you need to do . . . become active on it. Some 69 percent of respondents in the Social Media Marketing Industry report who blogged for at least one year cited a loyal fan base as the biggest benefit to doing so. The key to building readers and followers for your blog is to be active and post valuable and compelling information on a regular basis. Serious bloggers post and market their blogs on social sites daily. Although this is a powerful and effective way to build readers and followers, daily posting isn’t necessary to grow your blog. All you need to do is allocate posting time that fits within your marketing schedule—and stick to it. Consistency is key when you launch and operate a blog. Your readers will begin to expect and look forward to your posts. Be sure to optimize your blog for mobile, as more and more people view the internet from smartphones and tablets.
The first thing you need to do is find a blog platform. A blog platform is a site that allows you to set up, design, and even host your blog. Most are free, although some offer upgrade capabilities and options.
A few top blog platforms include:
WordPress: wordpress.com
Tumblr: tumblr.com
Blogger: blogger.com/start, a Google platform
TypePad: typepad.com
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More than half the respondents in the Social Media Marketing Industry report said Facebook (54 percent) was their most important platform, followed by LinkedIn, at 17 percent, and Twitter, at 12 percent. And those who spend six hours a week or more concentrating on their social media efforts cited the biggest return for their investment in terms of sales and exposure.
Video Marketing
Just as marketing has evolved, so has the internet. What started as static, text-heavy sites are now evolving into interactive and informative video pages. “Videos are by far the best lead-generation tool on the net,” according to founder and CEO Mike Koenigs of TrafficGeyser.com, a website traffic generator. “Videos are often misunderstood: Most people think that they need to invest in a big production of storyboards and high-end video equipment to make quality viral videos; however, the opposite is true. The more fun, humorous, and engaging they are, the more likely they will become viral.”
Some 86 percent of internet traffic is expected to be video by 2016, according to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, and according to YouTube, the average video viewed on the site was 4 minutes and 20 seconds in 2014, but typically ranges between 3 minutes and 50 seconds and 5 minutes, which is surprising when the general marketing rule has been no more than two-minute clips, or you’ll lose them. Furthermore, YouTube reports that more than six billion hours of videos are watched in the United States every month. Some 40 percent of that traffic comes from mobile device users. Another reason why videos are so powerful in marketing is the fact that they connect with the consumer’s three vital learning gateways—the auditory, visual, and kinesthetic.
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Check out TubeMogul.com. You can use this company to upload and post videos to the top 30 to 40 video sites, depending on what the content of your video is.
One of the quickest, most affordable ways to create a video is to use a Flipcam and record short videos for your target market. They don’t have to be fancy; they just have to be fun and informative. A quick and easy way to launch a video campaign and make it viral is to do short video clips two to three minutes in length that are frequently asked and answered questions from your customers. The complete video marketing formula can be found on TrafficGeyser’s blog at trafficgeyser.com/blog.
Overview of Social Bookmarking Sites
Traffic from social bookmarking sites can give your site a huge boost in traffic, delivering thousands of visitors in just a few hours. While the initial effects can be temporary, if you give people a reason to come back to your website, you’ll certainly notice a positive cumulative effect. We’ll cover how to do this in the “Content Marketing Online” section starting on page 575.
What is social bookmarking, how does it work, how can you get people to bookmark you, and what can you expect? A social bookmarking service is a website that allows members to add page links as bookmarks, categorize those links, and provide added commentary. These bookmarks are then made available to the other community members, who are also generally allowed to make their own comments on the bookmarked page.
The service that kicked off the social bookmarking craze in 2003 was Del.icio.us. Since that time, hundreds of other social bookmarking services have been launched, with the most popular being Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. All these services have the ability to deliver hundreds or thousands of targeted visitors to your site within a very short time; sometimes within hours of your page having been bookmarked if the wider community finds the entry of interest.
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Check out services like onlywire.com or social-maximizer.com for automated (or manually curated) social bookmarking options.
Make it easy for site visitors to bookmark you by using a service called AddThis, which offers a free one-step click-and-add button for bookmarking sites. Site visitors simply click on the “Bookmark” icon on your site, and choose which of their social networks to post your content to, from Twitter and Facebook to LinkedIn and StumbleUpon.
AddThis keeps the list of bookmarking options current; plus, the service provides you with stats, such as tracking how your users are sharing your content. When you install AddThis, you’ll begin to receive analytics once your visitors start sharing your content. After you begin to receive analytics information, you can use filters to refine your data by domain, time period, and other options. AddThis offers several different analytics reports to help you understand how visitors are sharing your content. These reports include information about popular content, services usage (such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.), and geographic summaries. Your analytics data can even be integrated into your Google Analytics reports.
Another must-have on your site is ShareThis, a little green button found at ShareThis.com. This is another icon that makes it easy to share ideas, articles, and content online. It’s a great tool to increase traffic and engagement, and with one click of this green button, visitors can share your content with all their online networks.
Content Marketing Online
Article marketing is a type of content marketing in which businesses write short articles related to their respective industries. These articles are made available for distribution and publication in the marketplace. Each article contains a bio box and byline that includes references and contact information for the author’s business. Well-written content articles released for free distribution have the potential of increasing the business’s credibility within its market as well as attracting new clients.
If writing is not your forte and you’re worried about creating powerful articles or content, there are hundreds of sites that offer writing services, such as WritersForHire.com, Guru.com, or ODesk.com, where you can set a budget for a project and post the job for hire. Another great resource for writers is right in your hometown at the local university or college. Interns are starving for more experience and would jump at the opportunity to write articles for credit. You can post writing jobs in the college career center, or call on the intern division in the marketing department.
Before you submit your articles online, make sure you read submission guidelines to ensure timely approval and posting. There are hundreds of article marketing sites on the net. Here are a few top sites:
Businessknowhow.com. If your content can help businesses grow, then this is a great site to submit articles and tips to. Business Know-How is known for providing practical information, tools, and resources for starting, growing, and managing small and homebased businesses. The Business Know-How website reaches about three million individuals each year.
Ezinearticles.com. This is a matching service that brings real-world experts and ezine publishers together. Experts, authors, and writers are able to post their articles on this member site. The site’s searchable database of hundreds of thousands of quality original articles allows email newsletter publishers that need fresh content to find articles that they can use for inclusion in their next newsletter or blog post.
Goarticles.com. With a membership exceeding 135,000 authors, this article search engine and directory boasts more than 1.5 million indexed articles. Their goal is to provide authors, publishers, and visitors with the best and largest free content article database on the web.
Articlealley.com. This free article directory was started to help authors promote and syndicate their content. This site allows authors and promoters to get their articles out with the potential of being read by millions. They now have a loyal author base of more than 500,000 active authors and more than half a million pages of content.
Once you’ve posted your content on the article publishing sites, you’ll want to track their success. If you posted your content on EzineArticles.com, you can get a fairly good idea how many people are republishing your articles in newsletters or other nonwebsite sources. On each article, there’s a quick-publish button that spits out an HTML-formatted version of the article, allowing publishers to copy and paste the content into a website or email. Authors are provided with statistics on how many times the button is clicked as well as how many times the article has been viewed, forwarded by email, and a few other neat statistics. Total views (page views) are also included in the statistic. Top authors report figures in the hundreds of thousands; however, they’re publishing more than 100 articles per month. You get back multiples of what you put in, and depending on keywords, titles, and subject matter, you can expect varying results.
Another great analytics tool you can use to track where visitors are coming from, what article pages they visit on your site, and how long they stay is Google Analytics. It’s a free service and fairly simple to set up. Go to google.com/analytics to set up an account. The analytics site offers a complete tutorial; however, if you’re still unsure how to use it, you can ask a web programmer to set it up for you in a matter of minutes.
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Post articles to chosen sites and link back to your blog, client, or marketing campaign site. Make sure to include tags and keywords relevant to your content topic when posting. Develop a list of relevant industry blogs, e-newsletters, and Twitter feeds and send your link to those, too.
Words Heard Round the World
Here are a few quick tips on how to take an article and make it viral on the net:
Post on discussion boards and forums. Post snippets of your article or the article title in forums and on discussion boards that are related to your target market or topic focus. Don’t forget to include your full name and website or blog URL where the article is located.
Tweet it—and include influential Twitter handles in your posts. Make a 100-character, pithy summary and use the @ handles of people with many followers (that could be a few thousand in a smaller industry or tens of thousands in a big one) in your industry or reviewers in your product or service space.
Compile articles into an ebook. Compile the articles into an ebook. For example, if you own a gym and want to get more people in to work out, offer an ebook on the top ten ways to motivate yourself to get to the gym. Take these ebooks and distribute them either through your website, to your email list, or via safelists. Give your readers the right to distribute them as well. This is viral marketing at work. If your ebook is for sale, offer to share revenue if readers distribute it to their list and sell it. This is called an affiliate marketing program.
Write a variety of articles. The trick to reaching a massive amount of people is to create a variety of articles. For example, if you want to promote your public relations service, you could post content on how to write an article, how to come up with attractive article titles, what’s the right format and ideal word count, how and where to distribute the articles, how to submit to hundreds of article directories within the shortest time, etc.
Add a disclosure in each article at the end or bottom of the article. Your disclosure statement should say something like this: “This article may be freely reprinted or distributed in its entirety in any ezine, newsletter, blog, or website. The author’s name, bio, and website links must remain intact and be included with every reproduction.”
Social Marketing Automation
With all the social site tools available, often the best way to be effective with your social marketing is to automate the process. First, you need to decide whether automation is right for you and, if so, which automation you should set up. Automation can be key in turning your contacts into profits because you can post less, but at the same time, you get more exposure. Social automation, however, can be considered spamming, so be careful with how you set it up.
How does social network automation work? There are tools like Hootsuite (hootsuite.com) and SocialFlow (socialflow.com) where you can automate your social networking sites or TubeMogul.com to automate your video posting. These sites can submit a link or post to not just one or two sites but, in some cases, up to 60. Sometimes, though, the link posted isn’t relevant for the site it goes out to. In other words, the links aren’t even relevant for the members of the network, and sometimes they’re not properly tagged or categorized. This eventually leads to negative votes on the article or post submitted, so make sure you set up your automation properly.
There are many automation capabilities and options available. Here are some automation suggestions to get you started:
Twitter to Facebook. Every time you post on Twitter, it will automatically post to your personal Facebook newsfeed. While some media professionals have gotten away from this since the @ Twitter handles are “dead links” when they move to Facebook, it can still be a fast and efficient way to automate. However, if Facebook is your primary source of engagement, consider the other way around for automation (see next bullet).
Facebook Fan Page to Twitter. Every time you post to your Facebook fan page, it can post to Twitter, which will, in turn, post to your personal Facebook newsfeed.
Link your blog to Facebook. Click on the NetworkedBlogs application in Facebook (facebook.com/games/blognetworks), and add your blog information as prompted. There’s a verification process that Facebook will walk you through to make sure you’re the author of the blog.
Link your blog to LinkedIn. Go to Applications and click on WordPress if you have a WordPress blog, or go to Applications then Blog Link if you have a TypePad blog. LinkedIn will walk you through the process step by step.
Link your blog to Twitter. Twitterfeed (twitterfeed.com) is a handy, free website and application that will “feed your blog to Twitter.” Go to Twitterfeed, sign up for an account, verify and log in, then click “Create New Feed” button, and add your blog. It might take a couple of hours to start working. Once going, it’s fairly reliable unless Twitter goes down or has API issues. Check the stream once a week.
Use a service like Hootsuite, where you can schedule posts months in advance. You can also use the service to link to all of your social media accounts, from Twitter to Facebook, to LinkedIn, Google+, and even Pinterest. Your most popular articles or blog posts can be “socialed” months into the future to give them new life. Just be sure to make clear that they’re older posts (add the phrase “In case you missed it,” or ICYMI in Twitterspeak, or are evergreen).
Another way to automate your blog so it posts to the social sites you’re active on is to set up widgets and add plugins. You can do this for sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Squidoo, Delicious, Digg, and many more. The way a widget works is every time you post on one social site it will go out to your blog as an update. First, you need to make sure your blog allows widgets. Some blogs won’t allow widgets unless you host the blog on your own site. Once you determine whether you can add these widgets, log in to each of the sites you want to add a widget to and go to the search box, type in widget, and that will take you to the most current directions on how to upload or generate the HTML code needed to post widgets to your blog.
Plugins are applications that can enhance the capabilities of your blog, such as the All in One SEO plugins available on WordPress, which helps you optimize your blog for search engines, or the WPtouch iPhone Theme on WordPress that transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-style theme. There are thousands of plugins available, and they’re usually found on your blog platform under “plugin.”