Does your Facebook Page have Rules or is it a free-for-all?

A Facebook Page is an excellent venue for a variety of current and potential customer engagement and activity, and most people who ‘Like’ a Page use it accordingly.  However, every Facebook Page is a potential target for the irrational or angry person who ‘Likes’ the Facebook Page for the purpose of leaving a barrage of negative or abusive comments. (more…)

Using Twitter for marketing your business or brand is an excellent idea for most. Whether your business is on Twitter for brand awareness, customer service or an increase in sales (perhaps all three), Twitter can provide abundant exposure and branding opportunities that are hard to beat.

As a Social Media Strategist, I’ve noticed that the majority of businesses, brands and entrepreneurs that have Twitter accounts that are fledgling or plodding slowly along is because the business or brand isn’t quite sure how best to utilize this powerful micro-blogging platform.

With the goals of achieving the best click through-rates, exposure and retweets, I’ve pulled together a “Top 10″ list of  Twitter tips that should be committed to memory and employed on a daily basis.

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#hashtag
As anyone who uses Twitter knows, the ‘#’ symbol, called a hashtag, is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. Interestingly enough, it was created organically by Twitter users as a way to categorize messages. Hashtags are simply a way to “tag” your tweet with subject matter to make it easy to be found. Anyone can create a hashtag simply by placing the ‘#’ sign in front of a word. (more…)

Social Media is a tactic for SEO. They are complementary like peanut butter and jelly. At the very least, social media provides a great opportunity for additional inbound links and traffic. Social media, in all of its forms, creates an increase in brand exposure and exponential link-backs to your content (website, blog, etc.) resulting in higher search engine rankings, and additional rankings for your site since Google and Bing display Facebook and Twitter results. (more…)

LinkedIn Company Page

Tens of millions of professionals are following more than a million companies on LinkedIn. Having a fully optimized and professional LinkedIn company page will showcase your business in the most professional light to job seekers, employees, potential customers, purchasing managers, current clients, and interested observers. A LinkedIn Company Page is your brands interface to the professional social world and presents an opportunity to engage, grow and reveal the human side of your company…all while providing a peek at the individuals behind your brand and products. (more…)

Social Media Goal: Brand Awareness

Brand Awareness is always at or near the top of our client’s list when we discuss social media marketing goals. Even for large brands, Brand Awareness continues to appear as one of the top 3 goals…typically in the form of “enhanced” Brand Awareness or “top of mind” Awareness. And the question usually comes down to… what should we measure (and how) to determine awareness and our success in achieving such? (more…)

The New Rules of Social Engagement

With social media now mainstream, we’re experiencing a surge of consumer influence from “social shopping”, consumer reviews and online word-of mouth-marketing.   53% of those on Twitter have recommended companies and/or products in their tweets and almost as many voice an intent to buy those products or services. (more…)

Backing up your social media information is helpful for personal use and a no brainer for any business with an active social presence! Not only is backing up your information simple, and many times free…it will save you time when trying to locate information you’ve previously shared or better yet – let you restore your entire network if your information were to be lost. (more…)

When BP was confronted with the daunting challenge of managing the PR crisis after the oil-spill they didn’t just buy expensive TV spots and full page newspaper ads. Like any company with marketing-savvy,  they put in place an aggressive, integrated SEO and social media marketing plan in order to saturate the search engines with “their” side of the story. They bought negative keywords for paid-search, quickly created micro-sites and devoted Facebook & Twitter pages for their message, all this to negotiate the narrative. They topped it all with a series of electronic press releases. The objective was to dominate Google in order to combat the negative buzz! (more…)

If you have a Facebook Page for your business, you should strongly consider running a social, interactive promotion on your Page. According to Jupiter Research: 80% of all internet users have entered at least one sweepstakes or contest within the past year, and 50% enter them at least once a month. And, companies that run contests or sweepstakes have twice as many fans on their sponsored social network pages as those who don’t.  Pretty powerful metrics for any type of business. Running a social promotion on Facebook is easier than you might think.

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