To increase your blog’s readership, you need to share your blog posts to a number of feeds every day.
While there are some writers that own a blog simply for the joy or writing, those of us with a business blog are looking for one thing above all else: readers. In order to increase your blog’s audience, you need to share your blog posts on a regular basis, and these five channels need to be on your daily list.
1. Your Business Pages
If you own a social business, then you undoubtedly have business pages on networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ and others.
Your audiences on these pages are inherently your most loyal. They have decided to follow your brand and be notified of the content you are sharing, so why not give them what they are asking for?
Share your content to these pages for your highest CTRs as soon as it is published. Your audience is waiting for it.
2. Your Personal Accounts
It might seem obvious, but people often forget to share their content to their personal accounts. The mentality is that if it is for business, it should be shared to a business page. Yes, but also no.
First, you never know who might be interested in what you have to say. If you write an article and post it to your personal Twitter account, one of your followers might click on it because of the captivating title, read the article and subscribe to your blog. Right there, you might have found a new lead that you would have otherwise missed.
Second, as an employee or owner of a social business, you are your brand. People follow your company as they would follow you. The article was not written by ‘Brand X’, it was written by John Doe of ‘Brand X’. Employees are the best brand advocates out there. Take advantage of that.
3. Social Bookmarking Sites
This is good for both the short- and long-terms. Sharing your articles to bookmarking sites like Digg and StumbleUpon mean that they will be archived for a long time to come. You never know when someone might find it, bookmark it or even share it themselves.
Keep in mind that while your content might be most popular shortly after it is shared, it can still be discovered down the road. You’ll want it to be discoverable in places where longevity exists in much greater fashion than on some of the larger social networks (i.e. Facebook and Twitter).
4. Groups and Communities
If you are a member in industry-specific LinkedIn Groups, or Google+ Communities, then you are sharing and reading content that everyone in that group might potentially find interesting. When t2 employees first started sharing articles to LinkedIn Groups (particularly those in the social media realm) we saw our traffic more than double in the first month.
People join social groups and communities to find content relevant to the work they do. If you share it with them, they will be all the more likely to read it.
5. CommentLuv-Enabled Blogs
For those of you that are not familiar with CommentLuv, it is a WordPress plugin that welcomes all comments and links to be shared. Now be careful, this is not encouraging you to post spam. Spam is spam no matter what fashion it appears in.
Familiarize yourself with your industry’s blogs that have enabled CommentLuv and, when you find an article that is relevant to your most recent post, share a comment and provide a link to your relevant material. This is not going to come up as often as the other means of sharing your content. You are really going to have to do some work in order to find these blogs. However, when you do, be sure to leave a relevant comment (do not simply post a link – that’s spam) and share a backlink to your article. This is good for increasing readership and SEO.
Try out some of these tips and watch your readership and subscription rate increase. It is all a question of finding your most engaged audiences!
Where do you share your blog posts every day? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!
Email Marketing Myths [INFOGRAPHIC]
/by Corey PadveenEmail marketing is still alive and well, and there are plenty of email marketing myths that still scare marketers.
There is no shortage of email marketing myths out there that tend to scare some people away from the very successful platform. Email was the first form of social marketing, and it is still a viable option that should be considered in any strategy.
You want to reach your audience. That’s a goal for any social business. While billions have taken to the socialsphere, not everyone has adopted the platform yet. Despite seeing a mention of social media at every turn, it is still a new platform. Even marketers that have embraced social as the next big step in communications are still trying to figure out exactly how to sell on social platforms. With email, that trial and error period has been going on for much longer, and there are several ways to get your message across and sell your product or service via email.
In the infographic below, seven email marketing myths are laid out and dispelled. Take a look at them and ease your concerns about email. It should definitely be a consideration with any strategy!
How do you integrate email in your social business? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!
Legal Implications of Social Media: Where is the Line?
/by Corey PadveenThe legal implications of social media might not be written in stone (just yet) but they do exist and you, as a business or individual, need to know about them.
It is no secret that employers are using social media when researching prospective employees, or business partners. In fact, 1 in 5 recent graduates has reportedly been denied a job because of something a prospective employer found on social media. That relates to the social implications of these new media. But what about the legal implications of social media? Surely, with something as clearly defined (for the most part) as the law, they cannot be nearly as severe, right?
Wrong.
There are plenty of legal implications of social media, and your social business needs to be aware of them.
Your Workplace is Now Online
In 2009, a Philadelphia police station was sued by a group of individuals who felt that a discussion online between coworkers was creating a hostile work environment.
As noted above, your personal online activity can cost you a job, but you need to realize that if you are not paying attention to your employees’ habits online, you are as at fault as they are. It might sound like an extra workload, but ignoring social media is not an option – neither internally nor externally.
As a social business, you need to inform your employees of your expected best practices. The reputation and credibility of your firm might rest on it.
Know Your Limits
It is no secret that your best brand advocates can be your employees. You know they are loyal to your brand, and there is nothing legally or ethically wrong with asking them to share your company’s content in an effort to increase your reach. But you need to know just how far you can take that.
You are not allowed to require your employees to provide you with access to their social channels. The law might not have caught up to technology entirely, but the right to privacy is still alive and well. It might seem obvious for most business owners and managers, but for some, that is not the case. Understand your limitations when it comes to your internal process.
Words Matter
For a social business, anything written online is representative of your brand’s culture. For better or worse, people formulate opinions based on what they see. Now, objective comments and status updates are (usually) harmless, but it is in your best interest to stay away from touchy or potentially harmful subjects.
From an internal perspective, you do not want to create that hostile work environment mentioned above. You also do not want to use employees’ social channels as a means of blackmailing them. This can lead to a discrimination suit.
From an external perspective, the laws of libel and slander are still in effect. Not only is it bad form to criticize competitors on open forums – your best way to get past them is by providing a better product or service – but if you are not careful, you could wind up saying something that is not true. When that is in writing, you open yourself up to a world of unpleasantness.
The law is still catching up to social business. There is quite a ways to go, and each industry is going to have different standards when it comes to the medium. There exist, however, certain elements that we already know about, and these should be considered when you are putting together your social business strategy.
What stories can you think of that relate to the legal implications of social media? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!
How to Create a Twitter Ad Campaign [VIDEO]
/by Corey PadveenIt is easy to create a Twitter ad campaign, and you can do it for your brand by following these simple steps!
Why You Need to Focus on Facebook Mobile
/by Corey PadveenFacebook mobile is now more important than ever, and your strategy needs to incorporate Facebook mobile in a number of ways.
It is no surprise that Facebook mobile is now among the most important focal points of a successful social business strategy. Over 70% of Facebook’s users are accessing the network through a mobile device, and an increasing proportion of Facebook users are now only accessing the network via their mobile devices.
In order to capture the attention of this large and continually growing audience, you need to incorporate Facebook mobile into your strategy in a big way.
Some Interesting Facts About Facebook Mobile
A recent study by Shareaholic has revealed some very impressive data with regards to the importance of Facebook mobile.
In the last year, the referrals generated from Facebook (for businesses) have grown by 58.81% (year-over-year). How did they do this? Mobile.
As the chart below shows, referrals from mobile devices have increase a whopping 253.25% in the past year! What’s more the study finds that more than half of Facebook’s referral traffic growth has been the direct result of mobile activity.
As more and more people rely on their smartphones for everything from phone calls to everyday business and social use, the importance of a mobile component to your social strategy increases.
Below are a few ways you can take advantage of this growing trend and capitalize on the value of Facebook mobile referral power.
Create Mobile-Specific Ads
There exist some incredible features on the Facebook advertising platform that so few businesses are taking advantage of.
When you create a Facebook ad, you have the ability to target your ads to mobile devices. What’s more, you can specify the type of mobile device being used. Now, if you pay attention to your Google Analytics, and see that a large proportion of your mobile audience is coming from iOS, you know that you can create an ad on Facebook that targets only users with an iPhone! (Yes, this is actually something you can do.)
All it takes is a little tweaking and you will be able to really boost your success with Facebook ads click-through rates.
Create Mobile-Friendly Content
This is really more about creating content that is Facebook-friendly. Writing a long-winded story as a post is going to be annoying enough as it is for your fans on their desktop. Imagine how much more frustrated they would be if they had to scroll past in on their mobile devices as well. And do you expect anyone to click on images and see the full thing if it does not simply show up on their mobile News Feed? Probably not.
People want something fast and easy – that goes double for mobile users. Your content should have a clear message delivered fast and in an easy-to-view way. This way, you can encourage your mobile fans to click on links and read more if they are interested.
Share From Your Device
If you are using Facebook as a business – or even as a professional – then you should be using it to share content from your device. Post to your page from your mobile phone and check in at different locations. Generally, this increases engagement with your mobile audience, and should certainly be tried. This tactic also helps humanize your brand, and helps users relate to your company on a more personal level.
Try out some of these pointers and see if you can start capitalizing on the huge surge in mobile referral traffic from Facebook!
Do you access Facebook on your mobile device? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!
5 Places to Share Your Blog Posts Every Day
/by Corey PadveenTo increase your blog’s readership, you need to share your blog posts to a number of feeds every day.
While there are some writers that own a blog simply for the joy or writing, those of us with a business blog are looking for one thing above all else: readers. In order to increase your blog’s audience, you need to share your blog posts on a regular basis, and these five channels need to be on your daily list.
1. Your Business Pages
If you own a social business, then you undoubtedly have business pages on networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ and others.
Your audiences on these pages are inherently your most loyal. They have decided to follow your brand and be notified of the content you are sharing, so why not give them what they are asking for?
Share your content to these pages for your highest CTRs as soon as it is published. Your audience is waiting for it.
2. Your Personal Accounts
It might seem obvious, but people often forget to share their content to their personal accounts. The mentality is that if it is for business, it should be shared to a business page. Yes, but also no.
First, you never know who might be interested in what you have to say. If you write an article and post it to your personal Twitter account, one of your followers might click on it because of the captivating title, read the article and subscribe to your blog. Right there, you might have found a new lead that you would have otherwise missed.
Second, as an employee or owner of a social business, you are your brand. People follow your company as they would follow you. The article was not written by ‘Brand X’, it was written by John Doe of ‘Brand X’. Employees are the best brand advocates out there. Take advantage of that.
3. Social Bookmarking Sites
This is good for both the short- and long-terms. Sharing your articles to bookmarking sites like Digg and StumbleUpon mean that they will be archived for a long time to come. You never know when someone might find it, bookmark it or even share it themselves.
Keep in mind that while your content might be most popular shortly after it is shared, it can still be discovered down the road. You’ll want it to be discoverable in places where longevity exists in much greater fashion than on some of the larger social networks (i.e. Facebook and Twitter).
4. Groups and Communities
If you are a member in industry-specific LinkedIn Groups, or Google+ Communities, then you are sharing and reading content that everyone in that group might potentially find interesting. When t2 employees first started sharing articles to LinkedIn Groups (particularly those in the social media realm) we saw our traffic more than double in the first month.
People join social groups and communities to find content relevant to the work they do. If you share it with them, they will be all the more likely to read it.
5. CommentLuv-Enabled Blogs
For those of you that are not familiar with CommentLuv, it is a WordPress plugin that welcomes all comments and links to be shared. Now be careful, this is not encouraging you to post spam. Spam is spam no matter what fashion it appears in.
Familiarize yourself with your industry’s blogs that have enabled CommentLuv and, when you find an article that is relevant to your most recent post, share a comment and provide a link to your relevant material. This is not going to come up as often as the other means of sharing your content. You are really going to have to do some work in order to find these blogs. However, when you do, be sure to leave a relevant comment (do not simply post a link – that’s spam) and share a backlink to your article. This is good for increasing readership and SEO.
Try out some of these tips and watch your readership and subscription rate increase. It is all a question of finding your most engaged audiences!
Where do you share your blog posts every day? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!
How to Create LinkedIn Ads that Generate Results
/by Corey PadveenLinkedIn Ads are a great way to reach large audiences of professionals and generate new exposure for your brand.
As with any platform that offers an advertising model, LinkedIn Ads can really give your brand a boost when it comes to reaching new audiences. However, considering the detailed nature of the professional network, LinkedIn Ads allow you to target audiences in a far more specific way than any other social ad platform.
Consider your Facebook profile, then compare it to your LinkedIn profile. On Facebook, you might leave out your work details, education, and keep your interests private. That can make it pretty hard for an advertiser to include you in their targeted campaign. However, on LinkedIn, we go out of our way to tell people where we went to school, what our work history looks like, every detail about what we do now, and by showcasing groups in which we are members, we tell everyone what we are interested in professionally. When it comes to LinkedIn Ads, that’s a gold mine of information.
Next time your decide to run a LinkedIn Ads campaign to promote your Company Page, take some of these tips into account to generate great results.
Study Your Audience
In the ‘Analytics’ tab on your LinkedIn Company Page, you can learn a lot about the people that have looked at your brand.
If you scroll down, you can see exactly what the ratios are for your brand’s fans in terms of the industries in which they work, their level of seniority, their company size, industry and more. Figure out what your most active audience looks like and create ads targeted to those demographics. Clearly, your message resonates with people who fit that criteria.
Leverage Competitor Insights
In the ‘Insights’ tab on your company page, you can see what other Company Pages your fans have followed or visited. Do a little research and see what your competitors are doing. Not only can this give you some idea of what the competitive landscape looks like, it can also provide useful reminders to include information you might have forgotten.
If you are sharing an audience with someone, you want to ensure that you are sharing as much information as possible and then some.
Use Your Targeting
As noted above, targeting your LinkedIn Ads is far more extensive than most networks out there. Take advantage of every section that exists. Even if you do not have your Company Page insights at your disposal, use the targeting options for A-B testing.
Target different industries, skills, locations, ages and more in order to ensure that the most specific audience is seeing your ads. When it comes to testing, this is a great way to determine what types of ads resonate with different demographics, and which audiences are most engaged with your content.
Sponsor Your Most Popular Content
As with Facebook and Twitter ads, you can promote different posts to broad audiences on LinkedIn.
When looking at your Company Page stats, find the articles that reached the largest audience and had the highest engagement rates. Then, promote that content to your targeted audience and grow your follower base. This is a great way to not only increase your audience size, but showcase your excellent content.
Follow these simple steps next time you are running a LinkedIn Ads campaign and you will be sure to see some great results!
Have you created a LinkedIn Ads campaign? How did it go? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!
Ideation and the Secrets of Content Marketing
/by Corey PadveenContent marketing is all the buzz in social business, and the secrets of content marketing start with ideation.
What is ideation? Well, it is quite simple. Ideation is the formation of concepts or ideas. Easy, right? Much easier said than done. One of the great secrets of content marketing comes down to that simple task. In order to find success, you are going to need to have a great idea. Those aren’t always the easiest to come by. Luckily, there are ways to give your ideation a boost.
The strategies below are a few ways to go about finding inspiration for your next great content marketing campaign.
Use Tools at Your Disposal
There are plenty of tools out there that can give your ideation process a major boost. Trendsmap tells you what is trending on Twitter in different areas. Creating content around a popular event is always a great way to generate buzz, and Trendsmap is a good start.
There is also Ubersuggest, which describes itself as ‘suggest on steroids’. Type in a keyword, location and medium and watch the results populate with suggestions for other keywords and phrases with every letter of the alphabet!
Soovle is an incredible tool that provides you with the most searched terms based on your typed keyword – as it is being typed! See what popular searches look like and begin working with those terms to create highly sought after content.
Monitor Industry Chatter
Something as simple as watching your Twitter feed can give you the inspiration you need to create a great content marketing strategy. There is no greater inspiration than your industry’s conversation. Social channels offer us an opportunity to see what people are thinking, and what interests them at this moment.
Opening your eyes and ears to trends in conversations – either by simply monitoring your social feeds or with the use of a higher end listening tool – will help you better understand what people want to see. You can then use this insight to create a multi-channel campaign that generates significant engagement.
Incorporate Every Channel
The 2013 content marketing study by Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs shows that the most successful content marketing campaigns are using upwards of 14 social channels to share their content. You can’t ignore any channels when it comes to creating a successful content marketing campaign.
When searching for an idea, consider one that can expand onto every one of your social channels (and then some). Your story should be capable of being told on any platform, with a variety of media types (e.g. text, video, photo, etc.).
These are just a few of the ways in which you can create a successful content marketing strategy starting with ideation. The secrets of content marketing are pretty simple; success is going to start with an idea.
What does your ideation process entail? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!
3 Great Features on the New Facebook Insights [VIDEO]
/by Corey PadveenTake a look at these 3 great features on the new Facebook Insights!
Social Shopping on #BlackFriday
/by Corey PadveenIt’s #BlackFriday and the numbers show that social shopping is bigger than ever.
We hope everyone had a wonderful, relaxing Thanksgiving. It makes sense that the day following one of the biggest feasts of the year we are forced to exercise the whole thing off by running through malls and department stores offering the biggest savings of the year. But this year, something is different; social shopping is a major factor in this year’s Black Friday shopping. Below are five truly impressive stats about social shopping this year.
91% of e-commerce retailers saw a boost in the SEO rankings due to social referral traffic.
It is no longer speculation that social plays a major role in SEO, but these numbers are unprecedented. Social sites like Pinterest and Facebook are driving tremendous traffic to online retailers offering up some big deals this holiday season. So the results of being socially active? Your search rankings get a well-deserved boost as buying season gets into full swing.
There has been a 357% year-over-year increase in sales from social traffic.
No, we did not forget to add a period anywhere – that is three-hundred-and-fifty-seven percent. Social activity is driving more and more buyers to online stores to do their holiday shopping this year. That’s good news for the retailers with the foresight to have been aggressive with the their holiday promotions on social media in 2013.
65% of consumers research gifts using social media.
Using social media for research and recommendations is nothing new. But it is hard to imagine why anyone would not take advantage of such a vast majority of online users looking to social media for advice. Imagine being able to talk directly to a prospective customer without ever having to get them in the store. The sales process is changing, and numbers like this prove it.
Buyers originating on Pinterest average almost $200 per sale.
Simply put, that’s a big number. Of course we expect consumers to be spending more around the holidays, but we would expect the numbers to even out when we aggregate the data. On Pinterest, it is all high purchases. Pinterest’s most prominent demographic is women from high-income households. It is no wonder that smart businesses turned to that network to drive higher social-driven sales.
Social drives as much online traffic as in-store.
For retailers that discount the importance of social media because they are brick-and-mortar only, think again. Statistics show that social media is driving as much traffic to physical stores as it drives to online stores. Remember, social is a research tool. So no matter what your business structure is, a large part of your audience is starting on social.
Good luck with your holiday shopping this year!
Fun Thanksgiving Social Media Stats [INFOGRAPHIC]
/by Corey PadveenHappy Thanksgiving!
It’s one of the calmest (and most filling) holidays of the year, so we thought we would add to the feast with some great stats! Take a look at these great Thanksgiving social media stats and have yourself a great Thanksgiving!
And, a fun fact for your day, this year, Thanksgiving and Hannukah fall on the same day. That won’t happen again for another 79,000 years!