Seo Social Media

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

social 9:36 AM

How are people using blogs?

Every blog has its own set of objectives. Some are run by individuals, some by companies, and others by some combination of the two. While you can find a blog covering just about anything, there are several overarching buckets they usually fall into:

Corporate: These blogs are written by a company for its consumers or stakeholders. They are often found on the main company website or a dedicated subdirectory/subdomain therein. (Side note: there's good evidence that says a subdirectory is a better choice than a subdomain.) Topics can vary from news and announcements to product launch info and even community relations efforts.

Personal/diary: Bloggers who keep a personal journal online may have aspirations to develop them into other types of blogs, but their primary function is sharing their lives and experiences and generally target existing friends and family.

Hobby or interest: These blogs are focused around a theme. It could be professional in nature (tech blogs often fall under this banner) or completely personal (involving something like fashion, beauty, sports, etc).

Professional: These folks are in it to make a profit. They may base their income on ads or even affiliate sales, or they may have other means of income; the key is that these blogs earn them a paycheck.

Community/communal: This category often looks like what is often called hyper-local news. A local Seattle blog, the West Seattle Blog, is a great example of this working quite well. The blog covers news related to its particular neighborhood and has rich user forums that often generate a great deal of the content.

Strategies and tactics for success

Successful blogging is a lot of work. Depending on what success means to you and your company, it can involve any number of people—marketers and product managers are just the beginning. A blog is your opportunity to showcase your company's culture and personality while shedding some light on the products you offer.

Authority: Your blog should be used to help establish authority through content that adds value to your industry as a whole. That said, how you set your blog up can impact the authority in some niches. A self-hosted blog is going to be the safest bet for everyone. It is an extension of your website and should be treated just as professionally.

Content: Depending on your industry and the frequency with which you'd like to publish, content creation can be a challenging task. The key is to stay creative and think like your users. What kind of information would they like to see? What kind of information would help them use your products more effectively, or would make their lives easier? What would entertain them? You can get to the bottom of many of these questions by looking into your site analytics. It's a bit more trickier with Google now masking people's search keywords with "(not provided)" in your GA dashboards, but there are plenty of other sources of valuable information about your users. If you're using AdWords, you'll still have access to some keyword data.

You can also look to your competitors' sites, social conversations, your inbound Q&A, customer service requests, and any other feedback channels you have. Just look around you, and you're bound to come up with other ideas. Another idea is to open the conversation to your colleagues, and even the customers themselves, to make it a group effort. Creating a content calendar where you can organize these ideas will work to keep you on track and prevent you from losing any of those great ideas.

Timing: Timing isn't actually everything, but it sure is an important part of the puzzle. It is especially important today, when we receive a constant flood of information from social channels. The perfect timing will depend on your audience. Ideally, you want to find the time and day when your community is most available and willing to receive and share your content. This is going to be a time when they're very active, but not so active that the your message is lost among the noise. Try experimenting with different times of day until you get a feel for what that "optimal" time is for you. Tools like Followerwonk can help. You'll also want to keep an eye out for industry happenings, news, and other major events that may impact the attention span and appetite of your community.

Style: Blogs afford you an opportunity to step outside the bounds of the heavily vetted copy on the rest of your site and really develop your company's brand voice. Take advantage of that opportunity, and don't be afraid to show the world who you are. Raise that brand flag with pride!

At the same time, make sure your choices are intentional. Have a good sense for what your voice sounds like before you use it, and stick to it. That's not to say that individual authors or even individual posts can't have different tones, but they should all pivot from one primary brand voice. While this may sound limiting, it actually makes content easier to create, because you have a good sense for how your brand persona would approach a particular topic or situation. There's only the writing to figure out from there. That's the easy part, right? :-)

Frequency: The only thing worse than never blogging at all is starting to and not maintaining the effort. As a visitor to a company's blog, it is disheartening to see that the most recent post is from several months ago. This gives the visitor no reason to subscribe or participate. You certainly don't need to blog every day, or even every week for that matter. Find an attainable cadence, set expectations with your audience, and stick to it. Perhaps you only do a monthly industry roundup. That's cool. Just tell people in advance so they know what to expect.

Engagement: As we've mentioned before, engagement is where the real magic happens. Posts really come alive when they start to see comments and conversations from the audience. Engagement is also where a community starts to take shape. The biggest key is how you moderate it. Comments left unchecked are a golden ticket for spammers, who are crawling the Internet for opportunities to drop links. Not to mention the trolls. There are a several good ways to moderate the comments on your blog, depending on your goals. Some people choose to have an approval process, but the more popular a blog becomes, the more labor intensive that strategy becomes. Some choose to have a site-specific log-on and profile, but this can cut down on engagement for those unwilling to take the time to create one. It's up to you and your own workflow to determine what the right strategy is for you.

Beyond the comment moderation, there is a lot of work that can go in to actually responding to comments and engaging with the audience on your blog. The same fundamental truths we outlined for social networks apply on your blog, as well. Be respectful, prompt, honest, and personable. Oh, and don't feed the trolls.

Consider creating a "reader's bill of rights" for your blog as your community grows. This document should outline what the standards for your community engagement are, including what the behavioral expectations are for both your community members and for your employees. It can help to not only keep you honest, but instill a sense of fairness and faith in your audience. At the highest level, it can be the "True North" you get to point to in times of conflict.

ben parkis 0

social 9:22 AM

How are people using Facebook?

How are people using Facebook?

Since its inception, Facebook has become an integral component of people's online social presence. For many, Facebook is the only online social network in which they participate, though the level of engagement varies across the user spectrum. From those that check the network periodically throughout the week to those who are almost compulsively active, the core driving force to participation is connection: connecting with colleagues, friends old and new, alumni networks, and for an increasing percentage of users, even professional connections.

The network itself has transformed into one with highly customizable privacy and visibility settings. Users can dial down their visibility to the point where they are nearly invisible on the platform. They can choose which posts or updates are visible and to whom. Conversely, those users who have chosen a more all-in approach can leave everything completely public, from the images they're tagged in to their active stream on Spotify.

Features go beyond the individual user's page to brand pages, events, groups, and now a pseudo-standalone messenger service.

Groups are user-created and have varying levels of privacy and security, much like individual profiles. Users can organize groups around any topic or event they like. From professionally relevant groups to those organized around special interests, such as nutrition, the variety is limited only by interest of the users. These groups have undoubtedly been a welcome and sticky addition to the platform over time.

Events allow users to organize around a point in time. Security here is fairly customizable, allowing for public, private, and somewhere-in-between events. A key feature here is the baked-in ability to export your Facebook events to other calendars, no doubt increasing usage and reliance on this feature that blends users' personal and professional lives.

Business pages have been an evolutionary product for Facebook. Over the years, they have taken several different shapes, though they are fairly stable today. Like other types of pages, the feature set is ever-evolving as they add more to meet the needs of the marketers behind the brand's efforts. Facebook has recently added more features in terms of analytics, reporting, security, and access, as well as increased the richness available to those wishing to dive into Facebook advertising.

Facebook Messenger is a new way to combine email, instant messenger, and Facebook messages. As new stand-alone group message services popped up throughout 2010 and 2011, Facebook clearly saw an opportunity and acquired one of the more popular group-messaging apps known as Beluga. They have since re-branded this app as Facebook Messenger. On iOS, Blackberry, and Android devices, this is a stand-alone app, but it also integrates across the Facebook app and web experiences.

As users increasingly rely on social platforms, these social networks will grow and respond as Facebook has. While there's still a great deal of opportunity in this space, Facebook offers users the most choice for the many facets of their lives while enabling flexibility for privacy and visibility. As users continue to adopt new behaviors and ultimately expectations, Facebook will need to continue to adapt to stay at the top of the social pile, so expect continued change and evolution. This change is necessary and beneficial, but can be frustrating from a marketing perspective.

Strategies and tactics for success

As more and more people and brands jump onto Facebook, the noise level for individual users increases. While Facebook's News Feed algorithm helps the noise level by showing users what it deems the most relevant content, in order to really stand out from the crowd, brands must be remarkable, interesting, and add value.

In order to ensure your content is seen, you'll need to optimize and take Facebook-specific functionality into account.

Content: Everything you post on Facebook is content. As we now know from the News Feed algorithm, how users interact with that content is important. Consider every piece of content you post an opportunity for increased and specific engagement, and don't be afraid to have a little fun. Take a look at these examples from Delta and GE. While completely on-brand, you can see they're a bit unexpected and show they're not afraid to show their human side. Also, images are incredibly effective on Facebook—posts with photos get, on average, 39% more engagement.

Post timing: Also related to the ingredients of your content is when and how you post it. Be sure you're tracking what time of day your fans are most active. Focusing your engagements during these times will help you grow your community. Also be sure to pay attention to things like sentence structure, phrasing, and types of posts that are particularly engaging to your audience. Many Facebook users check the site on their lunch breaks and after dinner, and while the latter is outside of normal business hours, it's worth testing to see if that's a time when your audience is looking for content.

Moderation: Brands have increasing levels of responsibility for user-generated content posted on their walls or in comments. You'll want to proactively think through your stance on inappropriate content on your Facebook page, and your best practice would be to make this stance publicly available. This lets your community know what you will and will not allow, lessens the chance of a surprise, and builds a sense of safety and sets expectations.

Facebook is an open and public space, so you can't control everything people say. Instances in which it is appropriate to remove user content would include: advertorial content, harassment and abuse, derogatory or offensive language, threatening posts, and posts that contain sensitive information (credit card numbers, addresses, etc.). Instances in which you should address the comments instead of removing them include: customer complaints, negative commentary, and critical statements. You may not like what people always have to say, but in social, you always have to listen.

Engagement: Because we are building something rooted in relationships, you can take full advantage by joining in the conversation with your customers. They want to interact with your brand, and are going out of their way to do so. Honor that. The type of conversation will dictate the cadence and rhythm of your response. This is largely dependent on your product as well; for example, an airline's response rates to customer service issues ought to be rather quick, as their customers' needs are likely far more time sensitive than those in another industry. Only you can determine what is right for your organization and product, but at least in the initial stages of building a community, it's better to err on the side of faster responses.

Community: Make your audience's experience on Facebook about their experience and their connections rather than your CTR and conversion rates. Concentrate on them, and you'll succeed. Your audience will turn into a community that thrives, grows, and supports one another. By enabling engagement within the audience, you can help increase the level of stickiness and affinity they will have to the brand, moving toward customer advocacy.

User flow: While the page environment Facebook gives brands is mostly set, you want to make sure you're directing your users where you want them to go. If I am a user looking for support or help, will I know where to go? Just as you do when designing landing pages for your website, consider the goals of your Facebook page. What do you want users to do when they land on your page? What information do they need to be able to access easily? Make sure these elements are front and center. You can easily change the order of the apps and even optimize the icons used to display those apps for visibility. JetBlue is a great example of a clear and obvious user flow.

Credibility: A huge part of your brand is built on trust, and the foundation of that trust is your credibility. Grammar and spelling are universally important, and all efforts for their correct uses should be made. Fact-check sources and news before sharing them on your networks. Ensure the safety of your users by not sharing links to malicious sites. Essentially, make sure you don't give your community a reason to believe you are anything other than what you are: awesome.

ben parkis 0

social 9:02 AM

Finding the Right Social Network for You

Finding the Right Social Network
for You

Deciding where to focus your social media energy can be a confusing process, as time is short and resources are limited. It's easy to get distracted by the buzz and articles touting the next big thing that brands "must do." As with any marketing channel, though, the more thought and strategy you put into your implementation plans, the greater your chance of success. You can avoid being overwhelmed by stepping back and starting with your own business objectives, product offerings, and target consumers.

What are the different types of social channels?

Not all social media sites and platforms are created equal, and each social channel won't always work the same way in helping users reach their goals. In looking across the online environment, it helps to organize your social options into categories. By looking at groups of channels with common themes, it is easier to frame your decisions about when, where, who, and how best to engage with your community online.

The easiest way to break up the categories is to think of them as owned, rented, and occupied. Here's how each of those categories breaks down:

Owned properties

Owned properties may include blogs, forums, or homegrown social networks, and they can be internal or external. The main difference with this category is that you literally own the channel rather than occupying a page on a platform that is owned by someone else. It may be on your primary site or on another domain, but it is fully under your control.

Rented properties

Much like renting an apartment, a user occupies a portion of a channel with the permission of the owner. Sometimes there is a cost involved, but in the world of social media, that doesn't happen often. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr fall into this category. Facebook owns its site, and you're simply managing a presence on it. You may have official claim to the page, but you have no claim to the platform itself or a say in how it may change.

Occupied properties

This category is the most removed from your control. Your company might have an official representative who interacts and engages in an occupied property, but there is no ownership of any kind, and these channels can be changed at any time. Reddit is probably the most popular example. Employees of a company will frequently participate in forums or community sites in either an official or unofficial capacity, but always on behalf of the company.

Consumer conversations take place across all three of these social channel categories, but before you dive into any of them, it's important to take some time and think through your channel management plans and participation strategies. For example, smaller brands with limited resources might select one site based on the high mileage they can get from their consumer base before needing to branch out into multiple channels. As a representative of your brand, you have the opportunity to add unique perspective and value to whatever channel will work best for your organization.

Which network should I sign up for first?

There is no one answer to this question. For each and every business, this question will be answered differently. A good first step for any organization is to visit KnowEm.com. This site allows you to register your brand name across more than 500 social networks. This will help to ensure that your name will be registered where you need it to be, regardless of which platform you end up deciding is right for your brand. And for those that you may not need to use right away, your brand name remains protected from squatters. Consequently, Knowem also has one of the most comprehensive lists of all of the social networks on the web, so it is also a good place to look for networks beyond the obvious Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.

That said, it's a pretty safe bet to say that nearly everyone should have a Facebook page. With over 1.19 billion active monthly users (as of Sep. 2013), it’s quite likely you will find a healthy number of your customers here. You may find the same thing in Twitter.

Another tool to help you narrow down the "where" of your social strategy is to go on a bit of a listening journey. Use one of the many social listening tools to find out where your customers and greater industry are having relevant conversations. This insight should help uncover where it makes the most sense to set up your presence.

Single vs. multiple accounts

Whether or not to attempt multiple accounts on one social network is a big question. The answer: It depends. Some large companies, like Nordstrom, have a corporate Twitter account, while many of their stores have their own accounts. This allows them to communicate rather specific and relevant information to regional followers, while maintaining their corporate account for overarching news, promotions, and announcements. Other companies have found it helpful to segment their accounts by product, such as Google, GoogleAPIs, Blogger, and so on. In this case, it makes sense based on their offerings to divide the conversations up by audience and product rather than geography. Nike, Comcast, and Delta Airlines are good examples of brands that have successfully implemented multiple accounts for multiple purposes.

The most important thing to consider when deciding if it makes sense to segment your profiles on these networks is whether or not you're better able to add value to the customer and the conversation. Are you better able to address your customer needs on one account, or are there regional considerations that may make that more difficult?

Additionally, you should carefully consider your ability to manage multiple accounts. Tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and SocialEngage make it easier than ever to manage multiple accounts from one dashboard, but remember—there's nothing sadder than an abandoned social account. It doesn't send a good message about your brand and its ability to follow through.

How to get started

First things first.
Ask yourself a few questions:

· What behavior am I trying to drive, and to what business end?

· Of the social channels out there, which types lend themselves to the specific products and/or services I offer?

· Who are my target customers, and what do I know about their online behavior?

Identifying your own goals will help you decide which type of social media channel makes the most sense for your efforts, and clarifying the desired behavior of your community members will help define how you go about engaging with them. For example, are you trying to increase brand awareness? If so, consider marketing activities that include the collection and sharing of customer testimonials, highly-shareable content, and buzz-worthy interactions. Are you shooting for increased traffic and conversions? Look for opportunities to engage with relevant, interested customers who are ready to pull the "buy" trigger. The point is to match your engagement efforts with the outcomes you want to see.

Let's look at an example. Imagine you're running a growing beauty products company with large national and global aspirations. Here's a step-by-step roadmap to choosing the right social platform for that business:

Don’t limit your thinking to vertical. Go horizontal too.

Sure, your customers are interested in your products' niche, but what about their other interests and topics—the ones indirectly aligned to your niche? For example, say you’re a retailer of sailing boats and gear. There are surely some amazing sailing-related communities that make perfect sense for you to approach, but there’s a high likelihood that your customers also have a strong degree of interest in travel, other outdoor activities, and perhaps even food and wine. Think about how can you participate in those horizontal communities, and say hello to a vastly expanded audience!

Focus on what is most important to your community rather than what is most popular

Once you get going in social, it's easy to get distracted. There are new apps, tools, and networks that pop up on an almost-daily basis, and you could easily spend your entire day just checking them all out. The idea, though, is to strike a balance between tools-obsessed marketing and being an ostrich with its head in the sand. It's better to do fewer things effectively than many things ineffectively. But you should also keep your eyes and ears open for the up-and-coming social trends; there will be a time when it makes sense for you to jump in. Here are some things to consider:

· Look for platform functionalities that work with your product offering or market space. For example, clothing retailers are well positioned for the image sharing social networks that have become popular, like Instagram and Pinterest.

· Emerging technologies and/or functionality that allow you to communicate and share with your community in new ways.

· Additionally, keep an eye out for technologies and sites that have the potential to reach new demographics that fall within your target audience or their influencers.

When all else fails, keep your eye on your goals, but don’t be afraid to dip your toes in the water and test, test, test. Invest enough energy so you can get a meaningful response, and use this as your guiding light on whether or not you should go deeper.

As new networks emerge, how do you launch a new presence?

In social media, there are certain truths and norms. Once you've applied those to your business in launching a presence on one network, you will quickly see that they are portable across nearly all other networks. The rules of engagement may differ slightly from site to site, as will the semantics, perhaps, but the fundamentals will remain unchanged regardless of the platform and are always the best place to start when branching out.

Goals and measurement: Determining your new channel's goals should be something you think about from the very beginning. Why are you engaging on this new channel? What are you trying to get out of it? After you have identified your goals, you have to decide how to measure your success. For emerging platforms, this may take a while, depending on what analytics tools are available in the marketplace and how the platform’s API is set up. (You could always build your own if it’s open enough and you have the resources.)

Branding: Your social authority is vital, and effective branding can go a long way to establishing your authority as a brand. Social channels also provide you with exciting possibilities to express your brand and increase brand impressions. Make sure your avatars are on point and your bios are dialed in, and make your first impression count!

Content seeding: There is nothing quite as sad as visiting the page of a social profile you’re interested in and finding absolutely nothing there. Before you start following people or actively directing traffic to your new profile, make sure you post some content over the course of several days. This helps reassure visitors that there is something there worth following.

Influencer connection: After you get your branding t's crossed and your content i’s dotted, it’s time to start looking for people with whom you can engage. Start by seeking out those individuals you’ve identified as influencers from other platforms. You have likely already established a relationship with them, and relationships are portable across platforms. Leverage that. As you interact with them, seek out more individuals who are relevant to your space in their followers. Before long, you should have the basis for a nice little network.

Discovery: Once you have established that this new network is a place where you plan on investing time and energy, add links from relevant places to help your customers discover your new presence. Write up content about what you’re doing that is interesting, and highlight it on your blog. Cross-post from your other social channels to drive awareness.

Content calendar/publishing: As with all of the other channels you have established, it’s important to keep a content or publishing calendar. You can do some content scheduling through available tools like HootSuite, Spout Social, and SocialEngage. When planning a content calendar, you can be as sophisticated as having a plug-in baked right into your content management system or as simple as using an Excel spreadsheet. It's really about whatever works for you, and planning ahead helps to ensure you’re fully optimizing events, promotions, and interests relevant to your audience.

When you're ready to get started, there can be so much to do that it seems overwhelming. The great thing about social, though, is that once you get the basics settled, most of them are transferable to whatever new site comes along that you want to try. These best practices will help you set yourself up for success in social regardless of your size or what the platform is.

ben parkis 0

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Wednesday, February 15, 2017

How are people using blogs?

How are people using blogs?

Strategies and tactics for success

How are people using Facebook?

Finding the Right Social Network for You

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