As with most success stories, tales of a meteoric social media campaign gone viral can make you believe that the same kind of success is right around the corner for you, too. You might imagine sitting back while the visitors roll in on your Twitter and Facebook pages, and while you wonder why you didn't get into social media marketing earlier.
The labyrinth of ever-evolving Facebook changes can be difficult to keep up with, but there are always a few tips and tricks out there to help make your life easier on the world's largest social network. Here are a few recent tips that can help you navigate the site more efficiently, and get more out of your efforts.
Sometimes in the world of social media, it's easy to get caught up in the idea that a greater following equals greater success for your business. So many people focus on "getting the numbers up" - increasing Twitter follower numbers, Facebook fans, YouTube channel subscribers, and so forth. However, there may be a sobering wake-up call if you manage to get your following to snowball somewhat, but aren't managing to convert those followers into customers. As so many social media marketers can tell you, just getting the following isn't enough - those numbers don't mean anything unless you can also engage with your audience in an effective way.
It happens even to the best of us from time to time - something thoughtless, inappropriate, or downright dumb gets said on a social network, people react, and next thing you know you've got a big scandal on your hands. In the context of a small or medium-sized business, even a minor uproar on a social network can spell big problems for you in terms of unhappy customers and a dip in sales. Just like in every other aspect of business, mistakes will be made from time to time on social media. Even if you're extremely diligent with your social media policy, there's not really anything you can do about the fact that people are human, and sometimes they say damaging or offensive things.
Over the past few years, online marketing, and especially social media, has developed into a situation where there is less "businessy" talk, and more real human interaction between businesses and customers. Spouting slogans and pasting logos everywhere is no longer the best way to get customers - you have to have actual conversations with the people you are marketing to, and let them know that they're dealing with real humans, not some corporate machine.
If there's one thing this year's Google updates have taught us, it's that we can no longer rely on raw numbers to tell us how well we're doing when it comes to social media and SEO marketing. The Google Panda update back in February was a pretty big wake-up call that simply having a lot of content and attracting a lot of links wasn't enough to stay high up on the first page of search results. Counting fans, followers, and incoming links used to give us a good idea about how our campaigns were going, but as Google and other search engines move toward more engagement-based algorithms, it's up to us as marketers to respond appropriately.
What are Google’s requirements that all websites need in order to be mobile friendly? Did you know that if you don’t follow these requirements, then your search engine optimization (SEO) or Google ranking will suffer?
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On April 21, 2015 Google changed its ranking algorithms for searches conducted on mobile devices to factor in whether or not a website is mobile friendly. This change in the ranking algorithms affect:
When we talk about SEO and search engine ranking, the automatic assumption is that we're talking about Google. While it's certainly true that Google is the most important and influential search engine at the moment, and possibly for the foreseeable future, it's also important to remember that Google has other things besides search in its sights. As Google integrates other features under the umbrella of its brand name, other search engines with more of a single-minded focus may be stepping into the spotlight, and if you're thinking about the future of your SEO strategy, you might want to keep other search engines in mind.
