Posted by
Will McNae on Thu, Mar 22, 2012 @ 06:47 PM
Stories, and how we share them, are foundational to our relationships. We all want to tell interesting stories and we certainly enjoy listening to a great story. But it can be difficult when you have to scale your message to thousands of people around the world. This is the challenge Facebook is hoping to solve for businesses with their launch of Timeline. According to Mike Hoefflinger, Director of Marketing at Facebook, your Facebook Business Page will serve as mission control, launching your stories and ads into the ever-growing Facebook community.
Pictures, Pictures, Pictures
Brands can now be more interesting. Think of Timeline as your chance to visually tell the world about your company's history, core values and personality. We "learn and remember best through pictures, not through written or spoken words” says Dr. John Medina in his book, Brain Rules. Timeline creates new possibilities for you to raise awareness of your brand and creatively engage your fans.
So how do you think about sharing your brand's personality?
First, businesses should creatively leverage their Cover Photo image spanning the top of your profile. The 851x315 pixel image can be changed at any time and is important real estate for a brand — ideal for a product shot or promotional push that can be changed frequently. Just be careful to avoid Calls-to-Action, references to "Like" or "Share", or instructions such as "Download it at our website". Brands can also call out important photos on their Timeline by clicking a star on the post which expands the photo to widescreen. Three examples to check out are Starbucks, Sweetgreen and The New York Times.
In addition, let people know how your business began and talk about how you got to where you are today by creating Milestones (which can precede Facebook's founding date).
Fans like to see businesses add a personal touch on Facebook, and everyone loves a good startup story. Go through your company’s history and look for important events, such as the date you were founded, your first customers, when you moved to a new location, changed names, when you added new services, or increased staff. A great example of a creative milestone is the first sale of Ford's Model A.
What's the essence of your customer interaction?
Are your customers staying up to date with your products and services? Do you know how they might be using them in their lives? Social Media is an increasingly important tool that goes beyond building your brand by serving as a platform to connect with customers, boost
customer loyalty and engage them in an entertaining manner. A great opportunity for you, as a Marketer, is to make it easy for your customers to share their own stories about your products with their friends in a single "click". With Timeline's new functionality to Pin Posts to
the top of your page, you can anchor the most important stories for 7 days and keep your message top of mind. It can be whatever you’d like it to be – a big announcement, photo of the week, even an industry spotlight. You can also use this pinned post to promote your custom apps. So create posts like, “Have you entered our sweepstakes? One lucky winner receives a new iPad3!” Then link directly to the app itself. Remember, pinned posts will need to be refreshed weekly, so be thinking of fresh, engaging ways to communicate with your customers or direct traffic to your apps. Macy's is a good example of creating unique posts often.
So what are your next steps to prepare for March 30th?
-
Create a Cover Photo (851x315 pixels) that embraces your brand's identity.
-
Assess your current Profile Picture (180x180 pixels) with the new Cover Photo.
-
Update your About Us.
-
Create Milestones along your storyline that can engage and entertain your fans.
-
Arrange your views and apps.
-
Create engaging Posts which can be Pinned to the top of your page weekly.
And finally, have fun with this social experience!
We'd love to hear your thoughts and fun ideas you've had telling your story - please talk back.
ZY5E264BGYUA
Econsultancy published an interesting look at the results of a study conducted by Intelligent Positioning that examined why Wikipedia commands such powerful search marketing equity and, as a result, has such a dominant position on page one of Google for just about every search term.
I love the summary that Econsultancy pulled together as to WHY Wikipedia dominates Google results across so many competitive keyphrases:
- Unique and in-depth content
- Targeted webpages for key terms
- Very strong domain authority
- Great internal linking structure
- Excellent page authority
After reviewing the list, I'd like to offer up a few more:
6. Trust and credibility
7. High text-to-HTML ratio (similar to #1 above); the site relies on content, not flash, images or flashing GIFs to carry its message
8. Fresh content: There is a consistent new publishing going on each day, each hour, each minute easy
9. Lack of banner advertising; Wikipedia has resisted the lure of easy ad money in favor of maintaining an editorial leadership position
Talk Back
Please have a read of both the Econsutlancy review and the original study, if you'd like, and tell us what you think.
Connection Model clients often ask about how to build compelling Infographics. When done well, they can be a seemingly limitless source of quality inbound links. The challenge until now is the cost: One excellent "Infographic Agency" I spoke with charges in excess of $25,000 per Infographic. WOW. You had BETTER get a lot of link value from an investment like that.
A compelling demonstration of the power of software
So, without further delay, we unveil below an experiment into the future of Infographics, made possible by a really intriguing company called Visual.ly (see Visual.ly in Mashable), compelling data from Twitter, and the not-too-serious notion of comparing one of my Twitter profiles to that of one of my absolute heroes (in life and in the world of social media), Author and Visionary, Guy Kawasaki.
It seems that on the development road to what Visual.ly is calling "YOUR DATA, VISUALIZED", they've launched a tool that will compare two Twitter accounts and compile an Infographic... for free.
So if I'm reading the data correctly, Guy is a bigger retweeter, more interesting and exponentially more social. He also has 50Xs the followers and his tweets are seen 30X more each day. Hardly a comparison... but what a graphic!
Talk Back
Let us know what you think by leaving a comment below. Can the creation of Infographics be automated in the very near future by leveraging software and unique data sources (like Twitter) available online?
As I talk with business people all over the country on the benefits of blogging, organic search engine optimization and social media growth and engagement, I hear the same objections time and time again relative to creating and maintaining a business blog:
- "I don't understand why a business would blog. Isn't it personal?"
- "How would blogging possibly help us reach our business goals?"
- "Blogging is fine for others, but we're focused on our business don't have time to waste on idle chit chat."
- "Who has time to blog unless they're in college or unemployed?"
- And about a year ago I heard my all-time favorite objection yet:
- "Don't people often blog when just a simple tweet would do?" (a reference to Twitter and its 140-character limit and a shot at long-winded bloggers, all rolled into one)
All of these are legitimate questions and objections, which I'll hopefully address in this post.
Bottom Line: Businesses that don't invest in blogging are losing out on a huge opportunity.
Here are the top five reasons Why Business Blogging Matters, in order of importance:
1. Blogs Increase Search Equity.
Search Engines crawlers (affectionately known as "spiders") scour the internet for food daily; their favorite meals consist of text, headlines (H1 tags), page titles and links with descriptive anchor text. Well-crafted blogs are a virtual spider feast. The search engines behind these spiders don't really care if a newly discovered page is a blog or a regular web page; what they're particularly interested in is new, unique, well-crafted content. Blog posts between 400-600 words with good use of keywords in headlines, descriptive anchor text and relevant keywords purposely used throughout the post are like an all-you-can-eat buffet to the search engine spiders in a sea of soup kitchens. So the domains these Blogs reside on are rewarded with deposits in their search equity account. If your blog is on your company site (i.e. blog.yourcompany.com) then your site benefits and accrues the search equity; if you use a "free" blog site (i.e. yourcompany.blogspot.com) then Google or some other webhost gets the benefit.
2. Blogs Increase Website Traffic.
The clients who we have worked with to setup and properly promote integrated blogs (blog.yourcompany.com) have seen their traffic increase between 300% and 2,000%. The effect of these traffic gains - although by itself quite dramatic - is that the number of inbound links multiplies and additional search equity is applied.
A recent study conducted by HubSpot showed that businesses that blog generate an average of 55% more website traffic and nearly double the inbound links (the currency of the Internet) compared to businesses that do not blog.
3. Sharing Blog Content Creates Inbound Links.
Have you noticed that people typically don't share product information on Facebook? And not too many people tweet company information sheets, right? I know its disheartening to realize, but most of the online population resists the temptation to share the "About Us" page on your site.
People like to share things that are of interest to them on a personal level, and things they think their peers and friends would be interested in.
This is true for B-to-B as well. Blogs make it easy for people to share with others. They give site visitors a reason to connect on an emotional level. In our research we have data that proves that referred visitors are between 2X to 4X more likely to convert into a qualified lead or new customer than general website traffic, so the financial/rational argument for sharing can easily be made. When we setup client blogs we include the most popular business sharing tools as buttons to make tweeting, liking and stumbling upon as easy as emailing a friend.
4. Blogs Enable You to Sell Faster.
Blogs help qualify leads before they ever make contact with sales, meaning more people who do make contact are qualified to buy. I recently experienced this myself. A prospect for our business read a comment that I wrote on someone else's blog, liked the line of thinking of my comment as much if not more than the original author, followed the link I provided back to a blog post I wrote, read several additional posts, agreed with our approach and philosophy, then contacted me -- already "warm" as a highly-informed, qualified prospect. That is happening more and more, and would not have been occured before we started blogging.
5. Blogs Increase Search Engine Crawl Frequency.
The question of "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it fall" has an application in the world of search: if a website gets updated and no search engine indexes the new page, did your update do your business any good? I've seen clients increase their crawl frequency from monthly to several times a week to daily; I have to attribute this primarily to the addition of an integrated blog, and the results are that changes to the site (i.e. page title testing, new content pages, news updates, etc.) get indexed nearly immediately, so we get a read on which changes had a positive impact right away. The whole process of test, read and refine is greatly accelerated.
A Word on Blogging Best Practices
The Best Practices of Blogging recommend that you spend equal portions of your time reading the blogs of others, commenting on those other blogs, and crafting your own. I recommend a time allocation of 1/3-1/3-1/3rd in these three areas.
So if you can only invest, say, 90 minutes/week to this valuable new pursuit of blogging, be sure you start with a half hour finding/reading other people's blogs of interest to you and your business goals, a half hour or more leaving comments and asking questions on those blogs, and an equal amount of time planning and writing your own posts.
Leaving Blog Bread Crumbs
Taking a cue from would-be social media pioneers Hansel & Gretel... One of the best ways to build a community and create relevant inbound links in the early days of blogging is to include a bread crumb - a link to your blog - every time you read and comment on someone else's relevant post or blog.
One example: "You wrote an interesting and provocative post about the greening of marketing, Michael. I thought you were absolutely right on your assessment of the topic of how direct mail impacts our environment, but I invite you to consider one idea you may have overlooked: Search is the new direct mail. I've written about this topic at http://blog.connectionmodel.com/blog/?Tag=inbound%20marketing and invite you to have a look..."
That way when interested readers see your comment and agree with your point of view or unique insight, they'll follow your link and discover your blog.
Talk Back
What are your most compelling reasons for creating and pubslihing on a business blog? Or if you think we got it wrong, tell us why.
Posted by
Will McNae on Wed, Nov 23, 2011 @ 06:30 PM
Doesn't it seem like online marketing, social media, search optimization, and blogging are in the news daily with just about everyone trying to figure out how to make it work for their business? Most of the available content provided by trusted sources is really good – but how are you to make sense of it with limited time and industry knowledge? When you look internally, who has the depth of knowledge and experience within your organization to create the comprehensive plan, engage the appropriate internal stakeholders and measure results to prove value of your investments of money and time?
I invested a month trying to answer those questions diving full-time into learning as much as I could about the business of online marketing and whether or not all the search engine optimization (SEO) hype was real. I studied articles from the leading SEO websites, read the tech-savvy magazines, invested hours watching webcasts and consumed articles printed only yesterday talking about the latest advancements in Google search analytics that every business “needs-to-know”. There is so much information available it made my head spin!
With this in mind, here's my list of 10 questions to answer when evaluating your online strategy:
- What is your plan to capture website traffic in search results?
- What keywords are best to invest in for paid search versus organic (non-paid)?
- Do you have an on-page SEO strategy in place?
- Is Social media relevant in the business world?
- What's the business value with Facebook or Twitter accounts?
- Where does your company’s blog fit into the plan?
- Who is selecting the topics, keywords and consistently writing your blog?
- Is your blog adding PageRank value to your company's website?
- Who manages the optimization of your online links that are oh-so-valuable in the search algorithms?
- How are you going to measure those results to continue investing next month?
What I found is the business of increasing web traffic, converting traffic into leads and measuring those results with accuracy is huge and seems to innovate on a weekly, if not daily, pace. It’s not only important to have an active and well planned strategy, it’s critical to winning your share of the web.
The tough question: as a business whose core competencies are not SEO or online marketing related, how are you to stay competitive? And is it OK to ask for outside help answering the above questions? Yes – and I would argue it’s critical to ensuring your company’s success by partnering with experts who will help you create a strategy that’s tailored to your needs and execute with measurable results.
What do you think?
I welcome your feedback and suggestions on additional questions to consider when evaluating a strategy.
Connection Model Digital Agency President David Carpenter was asked to answer the question "How Marketing can Help Convert More Leads to Sales". In this two-minute video blog response, David outlines four key steps within Inbound Marketing that will help you attract more visitors, engage them on your site longer, and increase your conversion rate from anonymous visitor to engaged, intrigued prospect, which will in turn grow revenue.
David's four steps to connecting marketing and sales:
1. Learn to Engage Visitors and allow for feedback, comments, voting, polling, infographics, images, video... "we've got to think more like a magazine and less like a static brochure" (on websites)
2. Create remarkable content... as Seth Godin says, "content that people want to remark about"... content that is uniquely yours and relevant to your audience
3. Establish a value exchange... a compelling reason for your site visitor to exchange contact information with you, and in return, they get somehting of value... a white paper, access to a video, entry into a contest, a calculator
4. Replicate success... "put in place the strategy and technology to understand your best customers, your best leads, your highest value shopping carts" (customers)... you have to apply that knowledge to every lead in your sales funnel to accelerate the sales (buying) process.
Talk Back
What do you think? What steps or answers would you add to this list? Please leave your comment below on http://blog.connectionmodel.com
Effectively capitalizing on social media should be an integral part of your marketing strategy, whether your objective is increased sales, lead generation, brand awareness, customer satisfaction and retention, or any combination of these or other goals. Use social media for marketing to develop long-term relationships built on trust and ongoing "conversations" with potential customers with the goal of increasing Search Marketing Equity.
Social Media Requires Investment to Return Equity
In order to learn how to use social media for marketing, you must begin with an understanding of one basic premise: Results develop over time, and you must be prepared to commit the resources required and have the patience and perseverance to nurture a process that can have a dramatic and positive effect on growing your business.
Participating in sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and your own blogs can put your message in front of millions of users at little or no cost. Additionally, these and other similar sites, such as industry forums and online communities, are excellent resources for researching your markets, customers and competitors.
Why Commit to Social Media?
Among the many benefits of using social media for marketing are:
- Virtually anyone you want to do business with can be found online
- You can easily research markets, competitors and customer interests
- You save time and money if you learn to use social media for marketing effectively
- You learn what customers are saying about your company and products as well as those of your competitors
- Engaging in meaningful conversations will put your in touch with your market more effectively than traditional advertising
- You build an ever-increasing audience that can be readily converted to leads and, ultimately, sales
Engagement is the Key to Social Media for Businesses
The key to using social media for marketing is to continually engage your audience through conversations and by providing meaningful content that is valuable in solving problems or demonstrating ways to save time, money or operate more efficiently. You do not want to be overly promotional in your efforts. Rather, you are building long-term relationships with potential customers who over time trust you to regularly provide valuable information, which will eventually "pull" them into your website as customers.
Begin your program of social media for marketing by identifying the sites most appropriate for your market and the most active users on those sites. Monitor the posts, discussions, comments and questions to determine the key topics of interest. Add your comments or suggestions or ask questions as appropriate, always maintaining a conversational tone — again without blatant self promotion.
Once your have established yourself as an active participant, you can offer substantive content, such as professionally produced white papers, that have the potential to substantially increase your following. A white paper posted on your site, for example, can be excerpted or linked on your social media sites to reach a broad audience and promote inbound traffic. Your blogs can be leveraged in the same manner. Moreover, the built-in sharing and commenting tools on social media sites will not only further expand your audience reach, the resulting inbound links to your site will catch the attention of search engines and gradually improve your ranking.
It is critical, however, that you continually monitor your sites, using their built-in search functions or services such as Google Alerts. Respond quickly to any posts directed at you as well as any to which you can add meaningful information in order to maintain your position as a reliable source and thought leader.
Give your social media for marketing program a good six months to generate a substantial audience and a steady flow of traffic. If you have properly engage your readers and carefully nurtured your relationships, you'll likely find social media to be your primary source for inbound marketing.
Talk Back
What is your favorite idea for using social media as a component of online marketing strategy?
A properly designed and executed social media strategy is one of the most powerful tools in the marketing arsenal.
Not only do sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have the potential for generating substantial inbound marketing on their own, the reader interaction features of those sites can dramatically enhance your own site's search engine ranking.
Learning how to use social media for marketing requires patience and perseverance.
It's a gradual trust-building process in which, over time, you establish yourself as a thought leader in your field. You want to position yourself as a reliable source for valuable information that solves problems, answers questions, saves time and money or just generally makes readers' lives a little easier.
A social media program is like any other marketing effort — it requires planning and commitment. Here are key steps in using social media for marketing:
- Develop a strategic plan — build management consensus to identify your target audience, your goals, the tactics you'll employ and how you'll measure success. This should also outline the message(s) you want to convey so you remain consistent in your communications.
- Commit to success — a winning social media program requires frequent contributions and responses and continually monitoring your sites for input from participants. Develop a social media calendar that specifies when and what you plan to post.
- Listen, listen, listen — probably the most important part of becoming an insider on your chosen sites is to be in tune with what the most active participants are discussing and their style of communicating. Until you know your audience thoroughly, you run the risk of alienating rather than engaging.
- Build you participation level gradually — start by answering questions, offering comments or asking questions of your own. You don't want to barge in on a conversation or be perceived as trying to take it over.
- Produce strong content — powerful content is the ultimate tool once you become established on your social media sites. A professionally written and objective white paper, devoid of overt sales pitches, is a good example. A white paper posted on your site or a social media platform can be the source for much of your interaction on social media sites. Use excerpts from your white paper or provide links to it. Links to and from the white paper as well as built-in sharing and commenting features will catch the attention of the search engines and gradually move your home site up in the rankings.
- Promote interaction — encourage comments, sharing, voting or audience sourcing on all your content. Reader engagement is not only the key to capturing your audience's interest, it will enhance your search ranking.
- Leverage your content — once you've invested in your primary content, recycle it for multiple uses to save time and money. The information in a white paper, for example, is easily adapted to other venues such blogs or posts to LinkedIn groups or industry forums.
Using social media for marketing can be highly rewarding in terms of lead generation, increasing brand awareness or whatever your goal is. With the proper understanding of how to use social media for marketing and sound execution of your strategic plan, you will reap the benefits. Always remember, however, that building relationships and gaining the trust or your audience is an ongoing process that requires constant nurturing.
Be sure your expectations are realistic. Although your ultimate goal may be increased sales, they may not be generated directly through social media. Rather, consider increases in the number of likes, friends, links or comments as indicators of success — and track them regularly.
Talk Back
What has your experience with social media and marketing been like? What successes and setbacks have you encountered? We'd like to hear from you in the COMMENTS section below.
In this screencast, Connection Model President David Carpenter walks us through a 1-minute tour of the new real-time Traffic & Leads reporting inside the HubSpot Dashboard. This functionality was rolled out in the Summer of 2011, and allows Connection Model clients on HubSpot to measure their progress in terms of traffic, leads and conversion rate on a daily basis throughout the month, comparing to the same day in the previous month.
This can be very helpful if you've implemented incremental changes on your site (i.e. added a Google +1 sharing button to the site) and want to get a quick read on overall performance for the month.
The one caveat about the current version of this Dashboard, David points out, is that in seasonal businesses, consumer-focused businesses and the like, a month over month view can turn negative, even if overall Inbound Marketing objectives are being met. A good example is the Thanksgiving-Christmas season, which is a natural slow down for businesses not directly involved in selling Christmas merchandise.
Check out the video and let us know what you think in the comments section below.
As social media websites such as Twitter, 
Facebook, and LinkedIn increasingly dominate the internet landscape, marketing in these (and other) online venues takes on added significance. Inbound marketing has become the buzzword for nearly every company and enterprise, both large and small. Social media marketing has become a critical tool when it comes to enabling inbound marketing, and introducing a product or service to potential customers.
How does a business benefit from social media?
The value proposition of social media is that it allows you to have almost complete control of your company’s branding, development of networking opportunities, and the ability to establish yourself as a subject matter expert in a relatively short amount of time. There are multiple strategies that can be used for accessing social media marketing, but it’s important to know the landscape of the medium before you jump in.
As a general rule, it pays great dividends to research the market, and find the niches that your target audience is already using. Take the time to build virtual “street cred” in any such effort - in other words, participate in the conversation – in online forums and venues that fit your niche. Spend some time learning about SEO tactics so when you are actively participating, you’re not only demonstrating your (and by extension, your company’s) expertise in a topic, but you’re using keywords and key phrases in your online communication. Want to know what people are talking about in your niche, and keywords that work? Start with Google Trends.
What else can I do to get involved in social media for my business?
At this point in internet history, setting up an online group to promote your brand or product is vitally important – and it’s almost a necessity from a standpoint of launching an inbound advertising campaign. Perhaps even more importantly, though, is the networking with other niche groups that must be an integral component of such an effort.
For instance, VA Mortgage Center is a private organization that brokers home financing for military veterans. But their Facebook presence is wisely missioned as an ongoing conversation about accessing all benefits for military veterans, rather than focused on just the services they offer in finding mortgages for veterans. As a result, the VA Benefit Blog on Facebook has nearly 50,000 members. How powerful a marketing tool is that for their company?
So, here are some basic rules for marketing and advertising in social media space:
- Develop a game plan, and stick to the basics. Understand that you are becoming a member of a virtual community, and that your membership reflects your brand.
- Measure what you do – most social media sites have a very robust system that allows you to monitor the success (or needs) of your advertising campaigns.
- With the exception of direct paid advertisements, don’t overtly market your products or services to members of the community; rather, establish your subject matter expertise. Virtual “street cred” is your most important marketing asset.
- Be personally involved in the process. It’s a mistake to trust your brand and company integrity to your most recent intern, or the high school kid down the block.
- Partner with an online marketing company or digital marketing agency that has experience in dealing with this new world of social media marketing and advertising.
On the surface, it sounds so simple. It’s easy to make the case that you need to be involved in social media and online networking in order to promote your business. But recognizing the need and taking the first step to get there are two different things. How you handle taking that first step can make the difference between frustration and success.
Talk Back
What social media sites have you tried for marketing, and what successes or failures have you experienced? You are encouraged to leave your comments on this blog.