Entries Tagged 'social media marketing' ↓

Social media marketing is something that most businesses are using to promote their brand and raise awareness.

I say most because there are still some that shy away because they either don’t know how use it effectively, believe their results can’t be monitored or have dabbled but been disappointed with the results.

The ability to measure your social media performance is the only way you can hone what you’re doing to achieve the results you want.

A recent post on Social Media Examiner caught my eye as it talks about 3 analytic tools you can use to help improve your performance in the social media arena.

Mention

This is the first of the tools that they talk about.

Through it you can set up alerts based on keywords, then content related to those keywords is shown through the Mention application or sent to you by email or social media.

This helps you find potential business, build and enhance relationships and respond quickly to situations that could potentially damage your brand.

The Social Media Examiner post goes into more details about how it works and how to set it up (link at the end of this post).

LikeAlyzer

This simple, free tool will help you assess your Facebook Page and give suggestions about how you can improve it. Unlike the analytics provided by Facebook, LikeAlyzer is not complicated is use and can give you some very valuable insights.

In a nut shell, it looks at your Page and assesses how well it performs in relation to other Pages, grading it from 0 – 100 (higher is better).

Then it makes suggestions about how you can improve your Page based on this analysis.

Again, further details about how you can set this tool up are given by Social Media Examiner.

Social Crawlytics

Another free tool, this one analyses how popular or unpopular content is on a website and can be very handy when you want to check out the performance of your or your competitor’s blog.

By analysing the content, it gives you a detailed report on where content is shared and how often.

Once you find out the most popular type of content you can generate more of the same, but it’s a good idea to do this regularly as your audience’s tastes may change over time.

These 3 tools will help you improve your social media performance, so for more information about how to set them up and use them, head over to Social Media Examiner today.

When you first start using Twitter to market your business you’ll face quite a steep learning curve. You have to learn what to tweet, when to tweet, how to follow people, how to find people – the list is endless.

Then you’ll be faced with working out how best to engage with your followers.

Split testing is something that marketers use a lot. If you’re not familiar with the concept, it involves placing two messages (emails, subject lines, web pages etc.) out into your market place and measuring the performance of each. It is a process that can be repeated a number of times to refine your message to receive the optimum results.

So what does that have to do with Twitter?

Well, to improve your engagement on Twitter why not split test your tweets?

To give you a run down on how that can be achieved, check out this post on Social Media Examiner. In How to Split Test Your Twitter Marketing they take you through:

• Ways of creating your split test
• Analysing your results
• Expanding your testing

It’s well worth a read and could help turbo charge your Twitter activities for 2013.

Over the past few months, we’ve looked at different ways of using social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, to market your business.

But how about Foursquare?

You’ve probably seen updates from other people through Twitter and Facebook checking in using Foursquare – so what is it?

Well, it’s a way of helping you and your friends make the most of where you are. You can share details about where you visit and leave recommendations for your followers.

But more than that, it can also help you manage your brand and attract new visitors. Plus, with over 1,000,000 businesses on Foursquare isn’t it about time you started using it to?

Foursquare marketing tips

To help you get the most out of this platform, socialmediaexaminer.com have compiled a list to 10 ways you can market your business using Foursquare.

So if this particular platform has left you scratching your head, now’s the time to pop over there and have a read.

Grab a coffee and take a few minutes out of your day to find out how to marketing your business using Foursquare.

Ask any professional copywriter and they’ll tell you it’s much harder to write short copy than long.

It’s much more difficult to get your message across when you only have a few characters to play with. That’s why social media copywriting is so tough and why so many people get it wrong.

How many times have you seen a random Tweet that’s full of abbreviations that makes no sense whatsoever? What about Facebook updates that ramble on and on?

In this post, I want to look at how to write effective social media updates that have meaning.

Twitter

Twitter is probably one of the hardest platforms to write for, purely because you only have 140 characters to play with.

As I mentioned above, the temptation is to squeeze as many abbreviations in as possible to ‘cheat’ the character limit.

But that usually ends up in a bizarre tweet that few people will bother looking at.

Writing short copy is difficult, but also a great way of honing your writing skills. After all, with only 140 characters to play with it’s essential that every word you use counts.

You can tighten your message by cutting out unnecessary adjectives (something that will also help your general sales writing) and by getting to the point straightaway.

Keep your tweet to one topic and remember to add a link if you want to direct people to an article or web page that backs up your tweet.

Keeping your updates short like this will also help your followers. If they like what you say and want to retweet it, by keeping your character count down they should be able to do so without having to go in and edit it down.

Facebook

Although Facebook gives you far more room for your updates, it is still good practice to keep them punchy and to the point.

If you post rambling updates no one is going to want to read them, so keep them short, relevant and interesting.

Also, if you want to raise your reach on Facebook ask for comments and reactions. The more reactions your post gets, the more newsworthy it becomes, which will increase its appearance in news feeds.

By adding video, polls and images you can increase your level of engagement, but what’s also important is to remember to post when your followers are likely to be online. The scheduling tool is perfect for this.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is more about business and less about personal interaction. It is a platform from which you can show your expert status within your field. That means comments about needing a coffee, what you had for lunch etc., are not really going to be all that effective.

For LinkedIn look at posting news stories that are relevant to your industry and add your comments and opinions. This will encourage others to do the same and get a conversation started.

It’s also a great place to share news about your company, whether you’re hiring new people, starting a new exciting project or diversifying.

This social media platform opens up the opportunity for longer updates, but again they must be relevant and interesting.

As you can see, social media copywriting can be a complex animal, but it is also a great way to practice your short copy skills.

We all love Twitter – go on admit it, even you’ve fallen in love with it.

It’s such a great way to meet new people, chat with customers, colleagues and friends and get your business name out there, recognised and loved. Engagement is the name of the game, but are you managing your Twitter relationships effectively, or are you letting them slide?

When you first set up  your account and only have a few followers, it’s relatively easy to keep on top of things. But as time marches on and your following increases, the time you have to spend monitoring your account reduces. This is especially true if you are a solopreneur or manage numerous Twitter accounts.

So how can you make sure you’re engaging with the right people?

Thankfully, help is at hand through a very interesting post I discovered on Social Media Examiner.

In it, they bring our attention to an application called Commun.it, which is designed to:

• Help you manage your Twitter relationships
• Focus on your top influencers supporters and potential leads
• Offer stress-free social productivity to help you focus on the right people

For an in depth look at how it works and how to get set up, pop over to Social Media Examiner and take a look.

And don’t forget to come back and let us know how you got on with it; we’d love to hear your reviews about it.