When it comes to online marketing, social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter are the perfect platforms to attract new traffic to your website. We all know that Facebook is the most preferred site for businesses for carrying out their marketing campaigns, but the 140-character text messaging site Twitter is not far behind as it is now helping businesses by offering them services such as Twitter marketing and Promoted Tweets. Recently, Twitter has launched an interactive guide for enterprises especially in the small business sector for better utilization of their social network. Those who want to divert considerable amounts of Twitter traffic to their site can use this guide for developing cost effective marketing campaigns.
Familiarize With it
The interactive guide covers everything from creating an account to how to boost up sales and measuring the results. Also, the guide is designed to let its users to choose their own path based on their level of experience and here is the detailed explanation of what you can find in the guide when you open it. First, when you open the guide, you are provided with 3 statements and they are:
- I don’t use Twitter – This section is for beginners, where you can learn the basics such as what a Tweet means, @Mention, Hashtag and Follower. Also, you can learn how to use the micro-blogging site for finding new customers and how to connect with the existing customers by importing all the email contacts. Twitter will help in setting up a profile and you are provided with a free checklist for starting your Twitter marketing campaign.
- I get Twitter but Need to Create a Strategy – In this section, those who are familiar with Twitter can get the necessary information to build their own marketing strategy. Here, you are provided with a template so that you can follow for structuring your Tweets throughout the week. For getting more engagement for your Tweets, you are provided with tips for how to attract followers for interacting with your Tweets. Also, you can design engaging Tweets on few templates provided by the social networking site.
- I Know Twitter basics but want to take my marketing to the next level – This section is for experienced users, here they can learn advanced tactics such as how to compose Tweets to get followers to take a specific action. Here you can get necessary tips for composing Tweets that will provide incentives to shoppers that will in turn drive more sales. Also, here you can get information about how to measure results of your Twitter marketing campaigns. Finally, there is a downloadable guide available for you that specifically talk about Twitter ads.
It’s Time to Start Your Twitter marketing Campaign
With the help of Twitter’s interactive guide small businesses can develop strategies based on their business objectives and the category customers they are specifically targeting. As you know, Twitter has about more than 500 million registered users and handles more than 340 million tweets per day. So, for targeting considerable amounts of Twitter traffic to your site you must have adequate know-how about Twitter marketing otherwise you must get help from a professional who is good in this area of specialization.
For eCommerce websites, it is all about sales conversions and they have to try their best to attract targeted search traffic to their website. Google has recently opened a service called Google Shopping Campaigns to help online retailers to connect with their customers and to promote their products online without much effort. There is another and alternate way of attracting large chunks of search traffic and it is by developing an effective content optimization strategy. Even though you can promote products by posting images and videos in social media sites, you need some great quality content that will help customers in taking call of action without any hesitation.
- Focus on the person shopping for your product and also the end user – When we promote our products/services, we may doesn’t care whether same person who purchased the product is using it or not. For example, it is the parents or grandparents make the purchase for kids and when it comes to toys, kids have their own suggestions about the toys they want to play with. But the parents generally don’t take their kid’s suggestions and they make the purchase in a hurry. Here we write content for the person who is buying the product and use appropriate adjectives to gain their trust while adding considerable wording for the end user to get them excited enough to share with the person who make the purchase.
- Optimizing Your Keyword Density – If your competitors have better rankings, more keyword density and properly formatted code based on Schema.org then you have to do some research by looking at their copy, checking their backlink profiles and keyword densities so that you may find the reasons why they are way ahead of you. To gain an upper hand over your competitors, build a stronger onsite copy that utilizes modifiers and also ensure to have keyword limit up to 400 words on the page. According to many SEO experts, a good keyword density is said to be in between 1.8 and 2.6 percent.
- Try to Avoid the Use of ‘Me’ in Your Onsite Copy – Check your onsite copy to know whether the content is about you or about your visitor/customer. Instead of thinking about your company, your products/services and yourself, focus on how your product/service benefit the visitor and that doesn’t always mean the end-user of the product/service. When developing the content, you need to relate it to the shopper or customer and in this way, you can build a bond that can potentially add trust which in turn helps in driving more conversions.
- Include Additional Details that will Boost Conversions – To boost conversions, add more details such as money back guarantee wording or images for free shipping at $ABC. You can even include SSL certificates and you can use necessary icons to show where they are featured and where visitors can find good reviews that will help in building trust.
Make Sure Your Content is Genuine and Informative
As Panda is roaming in the Google search network, you need to make sure that your ecommerce content is completely genuine and is useful to its readers. When it comes to optimizing onsite web-copy, you must have the adequate knowledge in SEO content writing or hire some experts so that your onsite copy will drive more traffic and thereby more sales.
We know that getting backlinks i.e. links from other sites to your website is an effective SEO strategy to provide a boost to your search result rankings. Not all backlinks provide that kind of boost; some may negatively affect your site rankings. As Google has started a war against links that are said to be inorganic and spammy, you need to focus on obtaining high quality backlinks for fulfilling your SEO goals. When it comes to link building, most businesses give more importance to gaining more search traffic to their website. But most experts in the SEO industry are of the view that quality backlinks have a bigger role than just providing SEO traffic. Here when we speak about backlinks, we know that Google is serious about the quality of the link building tactics we use, but they are so serious about it as to filter out spammy links from the organic ones.
What are Benefits that has Got more value than SEO
- Attain more brand value – You know that people or consumers trust established brands and if these brands make some negative reputation people still believes in them. In order to make your brand believable and trustworthy, your links must be visible to the viewers and not just for search engines alone. When it comes to anchor text diversity, we are aware of its importance in the search marketing world. Also, you may that search engine giant Google is not in favor of those sites which use the same keyword-rich anchor text over and over. You can enhance your link building profile by including branded anchors along with keyword and anchor text strategies. By using your brand name as an anchor, you can get enough brand visibility in anywhere you like. For example, if a user doesn’t click the link first time seeing your brand name, the user will be compelled to click when he/she see your name repeatedly.
- You cannot Build Quality Links without Relationships – According to many SEO experts, developing effective link building tactics can made easier, if you have relationships within your niche. We know that the usual digital marketing strategy of building relationships is by gathering enough followers through social media sites but there is another way of building relationships without the help of social media and it is through link building campaigns. Through gaining quality links, you can attract followers who are outside of your social media community. By building such relationships you can obtain benefits other than SEO, which include advertising or partnership opportunities.
- Can attract Large Chunck of Referral Traffic – Based on a recent market research study conducted by a leading online marketing service provider, about 47% of the online traffic is directed by Google and other search engines. According to the study, Google and its counterparts represent a large number of directed traffic compared to all other sources. It also means that the major of chunk of traffic is independent of SEO rankings. Out of all the internet traffic, 15% is the referral traffic and it is said to be non-social. From all these findings, we can see that building links doesn’t mean just attracting search traffic but can direct a major share of referral traffic if you place quality link on an authoritative site. When you plan a link building strategy for getting organic search traffic don’t forget about the referral traffic as it also plays an important role in your brand promotion.
- Brand Promotion as a Long Term Solution – When we speak about brand promotion campaigns, first thing comes to our mind is social media. We know that social media sites have abundance of active traffic compared to other sites. You can get many likes and shares of your content in social media channels which help in improving your SEO rankings. But if the social media shares are not repeating continuously, your social signals will become weaker by time. Another effective method of brand promotion is to having a quality link on a curated list of sites that has the potential sending search traffic for years. For example, if you are readying for a new product/service launch or change in personnel/policy and you want to publicize to the world, then you have to submit it in a press release site. When you submit it, not only can get link from PR sites but from other sites that pick up your press release.
Link Building is Still Important for SEO
Whatever the case, you should keep in mind that building links is still important for gaining SEO benefits but you should know the above things so that it will be useful if you are planning link building strategy as a long term solution and may provide advantages to your business other than just SEO value.
If you want to attract considerable social media traffic to your website, first you need to establish your online presence in any of the social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or Google+. When it comes to social media sites, people look for information that is informative and eye-catchy, so the ideal solution is to post images or videos related to your business in sites such as Youtube and Pinterest. There is another site called Instagram which is an online photo-sharing and video-sharing social networking site that enables its registered users to take photos and videos and you can share them in other social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. In the last few years, Instagram is getting popular among marketers and advertisers as it got millions of active users. Instagram has become the effective marketing platform for businesses to post photos with quick messages to their targeted audiences.
Creating Perfect Instagram Marketing Strategy
According to many marketing experts, small businesses can benefit from promotional campaigns done on Instagram as it is free of cost and can expect high in returns. Also it is the effective way to promote your site by posting relevant images and short messages in Instagram. Here are some suggestions which can help you in building better Instagram marketing strategy for site promotion.
- As you know, Instagram was first introduced in Android and iPhone devices as a mobile app but there are people who like to access it on desktop platform. So, Instagram introduced desktop profiles in November 2012 and marketers utilize this opportunity to target their customers more effectively. Create an Instagram profile for your business and post images from products/services to images surrounding your company.
- When you are interacting with customers, you must not forget that you have to give something like a reward to your customers/followers so that they will come for more. There are some companies which conduct contests for their followers and others offer promo codes or discounts to their loyal customers. To keep them engaged in your profile, you first you need find out what your customers really want. You can use their demographic information to know what gets their attention and try to put together your editorial calendar for maintaining consistent content.
- Another way of gaining attention of your audience is conduct an event related to product/service promotion through your Instagram profile. Add hashtags to your conferences so that attendees can follow you on Twitter and Instagram and they can show it to others about what’s going on through tweets or images. By doing this, you can able reach more people and can increase engagement with your followers/audience.
Rectifying Spelling Mistakes or Errors in Your Messages
Sometimes when we post messages in Instagram, grammatical error or spelling mistake can happen. It is very frustrating for you to rectify the mistake as Instagram doesn’t have built-in text editing function just like in Facebook. Normally, when there is mistake in an Instagram post, marketers will try to delete it, edit and then re-post the message. If you follow this procedure, you may lose precious amounts of ‘likes’ and comments that occurred prior to its deletion. There is another way in rectifying the mistake and it done by pulling up the photo with spelling mistake and click on the comment and swipe over the original psot copy. If you do that, a red trashcan will appear on the right and you can click to delete the copy. Now add new comment, send it and go back to see the updated version of the post copy.
You can Get Professional Assistance
If you want to increase your social media visibility, you need to approach professionals who are very good at social media marketing. There are skilled and experienced specialists who provided marketing solutions via various social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Pinterest and Instagram. It is up to you to choose which social platform is suited to fulfill your marketing goals effectively. You can consult with SEO firms which are well established and they have a team of experts who are willing to help you in any way they can. The solutions offered by these specialists are well below your budget expectations and are long lasting.
The most popular social networking site Pinterest has announced that it had made some improvements to enhance user experience and with the aim of reaping ad revenue as its competitors like Facebook and Twitter is doing right now. As you know, Pinterest is basically a visual discovery tool which people can gather ideas or information for their different projects and interests.
By registering into Pinterest, users can create and share collections of visual bookmarks which are known as Pins that users use to do things such as organizing events, planning trips or saving recipes and articles. According to comScore and Reuters, the image sharing site had about 49 million users worldwide in February 2013 and got expanded to 70 million in July 2013. In 2014, Pinterest announced that will start generating revenue by charging advertisers for promoting their products/services to the site’s millions of active users. According to Wedbush Securities, the social networking site may churn revenue of about $500 million by 2016 and will become a major marketing platform as Facebook and Google+. In the past Facebook and Twitter introduced new features that helped advertisers to target social traffic to their ads. Now Pinterest is also in the same league by introducing new features designed especially for advertisers.
What are the New Improvements
- Guided Search – According to their official blog site, Pinterest has expanded its user base by 50% in the past 6 months and currently it consists of 750 million boards over 30 billion images. For marketers, that’s a huge amounts of data and this where Pinterest’s Guided Search feature going to help. If you are looking for something and you are not quite sure what it is then the only thing you have to do is to start typing what it is you are thinking of and the social media site will return categories and keywords that not only start with same letters but also relevant to the keywords you may be looking for.
- Custom Categories – Initially, Pinterest was launched with almost 32 categories and after the site been rolled out, users have been searching for interests that expand beyond the available 32 categories. Now, Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann has announced that the site has plans to add more narrowly focused categories in the near future.
- Related Pins – Related Pins feature exploit your Pinterest activity by providing you suggestions based on your interests on other pins. It is been reported that these three new features were influenced by the recent acquisition of VisualGraph which is a start-up firm that specializes on visual search.
Pinterest Marketing on the Rise
Since people love visuals rather than plain text content, marketers are now focusing their advertising strategies on platforms such as Pinterest and Youtube since images and videos have proved to attract targeted audience in the past few years. As Pinterest basically deals with gathering and sharing images, online retailers are utilizing the maximum out of this popular site for promoting their items with more visibility. If you want to attract a considerable amount of Pinterest user traffic to your business, you need professional help from service providers who have made their mark in this field. By approach a professional, you can get all the help you need to boost both search engine presence and social presence for your business and you can gain benefits such as high ROI.
As per recent surveys, marketers and advertisers have started realizing the importance using Google+ which is second largest social networking site after Facebook for their marketing campaigns. With over 540 million active users, it has now become more than a simple social networking site to a major social marketing platform for businesses to carry out their brand awareness campaigns. Most of its active users use Google+ as an identity service site by interacting socially with its enhanced properties such as Gmail, +1 button and Youtube comments. According to Forrester Research, out of 60,000 adult users who use social media sites, about 22% of them visit their Google+ account each month. Also, businesses including some of the multinational brands have gathered almost 90% as many followers/fans from Google+ when compared to Twitter. When it comes to user engagement, brands’ Google+ posts create as much engagement per follower as their Facebook posts and it is almost twice as their Tweets in Twitter.
Why Marketers can’t Ignore this Social Media Platform
We know that Facebook is the effective and primary marketing platform for many businesses as it got the highest active user traffic compared to other sites. For those who used Facebook and Twitter, Google+ might seem complicated due to its overall design which is entirely from Facebook. Here are the main reasons why you should rethink on your social media marketing strategy and using Google+ as your primary social marketing tool.
- For gaining upper edge over your competitors, you can use Google+ as the internet search giant is now taking steps to incorporate social signals especially from Google+ to their search results ranking algorithm. This means in future in future your Google+ profile, links, posts and ‘+1’s will be considered for your search result rankings.
- As you are aware, Google+ is now an authorship tool that associates website content with its author/website owner. In other words, authorship allows you or your business to establish authority on Google+ and across the entire search network. Also, when you possess higher authority, your profile and your posts will be ranked higher in Google’s search result pages.
- When it comes to content marketing, consistency is a significant factor and it depends on sharing content. It is very effective when you share content, images, videos and infographics on a daily basis and you can witness in your popularity surge. An important feature you can see in Google+ is that you can use text formatting options- bold, italicized, and strikethrough which are not seen other social media websites.
- Communities are the best places to find your targeted audience and Google+ possess active communities similar to its counterparts. To follow you and to share your content, find large active communities and follow them daily. Engage with your communities by answering their queries, share useful & informative content and encourage them to share your content to their friends/colleagues who are interested in your business sector.
- Within your consumer base, try to create as many niche communities for different audiences. For posting both general and industry-related topics, create one branded “home” community for your business. You can increase your follower base by following new people daily and following people from the communities that you are actively engaged in.
Google+ is the New Miracle
In a survey conducted in 2013, about 30% of the smartphone users survey have said that they used Google+ at least once a month and in the US, about 92% of the surveyed smartphone users had visited a Google site or app in August last year. This means you have to develop effective marketing strategies for targeting audience in both desktop and mobile platforms who are using Google+ or other Google sites. According to many online marketing experts, Google+ is highly intuitive and immensely powerful tool for targeting Google search traffic to your site. To help you in carrying out your marketing goals, you can get assistance from professionals who have adequate experience in this field and may come up with solutions tailored to your needs. There are service providers which offer marketing solutions at budget-friendly rates and are complaint to Google’s Webmaster guidelines.
Improving Your Online Presence through LinkedIn
Businesses cannot think of marketing strategies without social media as they contain active user traffic all the time. As we all know the top social media sites used as major marketing platforms include Facebook, Twitter and Google+. These sites have been helpful especially for small business enterprises in achieving their marketing goals. We also know that there is another social media site known as LinkedIn which is mainly used for professional networking. As of June 2013, LinkedIn has reported more than 250 million users having registered accounts in more than 200 countries and territories. With a registered LinkedIn account, you can search for a new job, employees or clients and you can share or exchange ideas with your followers thereby building strong connections. When it comes to marketing campaigns, LinkedIn is far behind of its other counterparts and these days it has been encouraging marketers to utilize its marketing oriented features such as sponsored updates to carry out their promotional activities.
Ways for Making Better SEO Presence in LinkedIn
- Creating a Complete Profile – To create a first impression, you need to create a complete LinkedIn profile which will acts like an online business card. If your followers/contacts are considering in working with you then they will refer back to your LinkedIn profile. To complete your profile, you can include all sorts of different information and according to LinkedIn, users with complete profiles are forty times more likely to receive opportunities through the website and there is a built-in ‘completeness’ guide to help users to complete their profile. You need to insert professional looking photo as your profile picture and optimize your job titles slightly for including few keywords related to your field or business.
- Increasing the Size of Your LinkedIn Network – You need expand your contact base that will increase your SEO chances. When reaching out for new connections, try to personalize your messages by giving a brief explanation or reason as why you are sending it. As you know, LinkedIn prefers to show results that have at least some kind of connection with the search user. Thereby you can improve your profile’s online presence in the search results by increasing the size of your network. Also, you can further expand your LinkedIn visibility by reaching out to new contacts especially those who are interest in your business or professional field.
- SEO Techniques to Boost Your Presence – When you are building links within your profile, use those keywords that related to your business field and try not to create keyword congestion. Being a social media platform, you can put fresh and informative content in your LinkedIn profile via quality links.
- Always stay engaged – Just like engaging in conversations with your Facebook friends or Twitter followers, be active in your profile by sharing news on developments happening within your company or events you are conducting, but just tell about yourself only. Update your profile with industry related news and provide links to your contacts who may find it useful. As most LinkedIn users like to see who has been viewing or visiting their profile, you must leave an everlasting footprint so that you increase the chances of getting new connections.
- Utilize the maximum – To realize your SEO efforts and for searching specific opportunities, you use advanced search options provided by the professional networking site. Utilize its features to look for specific enterprises, industries, organizations and prospects. Make connections with relevant groups related to your business sector and provide your own LinkedIn profile information available to various search engines to index.
Let Professionals to Do Your Job
If you want to boost your social presence in LinkedIn or in any other networking site, there are professionals to assist in achieving your goals. There are established online marketing firms which have years of experience in offering solutions customized to their clients’ requirements. They possess latest tools and tactics that will help them in come up with a solution for your SEO needs. All their budget-friendly services are fully complaint to quality guidelines of various search engines including Google.
