Trying to keep up with the latest social networks and social media marketing opportunities is a never-ending battle. As soon as you get to grips with your Twitter and Facebook strategy, up pops Google+. Some businesses also found significant marketing milage on Tumblr. More recently, photo-curation site Pinterest has gotten the attention of businesses who have discovered how to leverage its features for marketing purposes.
It's happened to most of us at one time or another - you get something on your Facebook page all set up just how you want it, and then boom, Facebook goes and changes everything and your hard work goes down the drain. While most of Facebook's changes actually benefit page owners in the long run, it can be hard to remember that when you've just spent hours on a feature that suddenly gets disabled or removed. It can also leave you wondering if you'll ever be able to stay ahead of the curve when things on Facebook seem to change almost monthly.
If you were a business owner before Twitter was around, chances are most of your marketing messages (aside from maybe your company slogan) were at least somewhat longer than 140 characters. With the explosion of Twitter both as a marketing tool and a social media platform, you may feel like the medium places difficult restrictions on the types of messages you can reasonably fit into the space provided. However, this may work to your advantage - here are some tips on how to use Twitter more effectively for spreading the word about your business.
We saw a hint of the future last year when Facebook introduced the Timeline format for personal accounts. Some loved it, some complained, but eventually everyone was moved over to the new design.
One of the great things about YouTube is that the site can be used for so many purposes - entertainment, education, promotion, or a combination of the three. The sheer amount of visibility that your company can get by just having a few well-constructed promotional videos is staggering, and it's something you shouldn't ignore if you want to get the absolute most out of your marketing strategy.
If you were ever in any doubt about the effectiveness of social media and online marketing, looking at the successes of other businesses can really help turn you into a believer. Seeing what these companies have done with their campaigns may inspire you to do some forward thinking of your own!
Facebook keeps expanding the ways in which page admins can customize their business pages, but a lot of what you can do is limited by how much you understand about the developer side of Facebook. However, you don't need to be a programmer to make a great looking custom tab if you use one of the free apps out there that can help you turn your creative ideas into actual pages for your Facebook presence. One of the most popular free apps is the iFrame App by Wildfire, and it really couldn't be easier to use.
As we head into February, hopefully you're starting to see how the changes you've made to your marketing strategy for this year are manifesting. However, trends are hardly static, and as soon as you start implementing one set of tactics, new developments emerge that can help you decide how to fine-tune your efforts.
There's a lot of talk about growing a strong social media presence for your business, but in the end there's no point if you can't convert your reading audience into a buying one. To make 2012 your biggest year ever, here are seven tips for turning followers into customers.
2012 is finally here, which means you have a clean slate to build an improved social media strategy that will better benefit your business in the coming months. Here are some things to keep in mind when constructing your strategy for this year:
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.