Tag Archives: blogging

How to Optimize Your Blog for Social Media

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Social media’s possible impact on your blog traffic is something you ignore at your expense. A big driving factor for your blog’s strategy should be how posts will be disseminated and shared on social media sites. Distributing your blog posts on social media can gain your blog a larger readership, as well as, wider reach and exposure.

Optimizing your blog posts for social media is not only good for your exposure and reach but can benefit you when it comes to search ranking. Search engine algorithms factor in social indicators, favoring content that receives a lot of attention on social profiles. Plus, the more your content is shared, the more traffic is driven back to your blog, which may contribute to boosting your site’s ranking, and provide a gateway to your reader’s turning into leads.

Tips for Writing Social-Friendly Blog Posts:

Think social with your content – Before you even start writing your blog post, think about how it will look, and be received on social media. What do you like seeing on your Facebook Newsfeed? What are you more likely to share? Think of a social audience when composing your posts and how you can start a conversation around your topic.

While you’re writing, it also doesn’t hurt to think of a particularly catchy phrase or angle that you can use as the teaser or status for promoting the post on social media.

Thumbnails, Meta Descriptions & More - There’s nothing worse than the sinking feeling social media managers get when they find amazing content, go to post the link on a social network, only to discover that the thumbnail doesn’t match the content, or worse yet, there’s no thumbnail at all, making it a very aesthetically unappealing post.

A general rule of blogging is to that you should always add some sort of visual in the post to keep people’s interest. Now there’s the added advantage of having a relevant thumbnail in link previews for Facebook, Google+, Linkedin etc. that will be more enticing than if you simply had the Blogger or WordPress logo as the default thumbnail on the post.

Remember that on social networks you’re essentially fighting against many different factors to get people to actually see your post, let alone pause their scrolling and take in what you have to say and share or interact. A compelling thumbnail, nicely worded meta description and title are all simple tactics that can have an impact on people stopping to take in your content and will show that you take care in what you’re sharing, making people more likely to pass it along.

Pinterest adds another incentive to feature strong visuals in your blog posts,since Pinterest posts are all about photos and graphics. If you don’t have a photo or video in your blog, then Pinterest won’t pick up anything that it can use to ‘pin’ the link to, rendering the post unusable for the site.

Social Outreach - When it’s appropriate, to further the conversation your blog has started, promote a Twitter hashtag at the end of your post. Make it concise, the shorter the better, to allow for more characters in the user’s post. People are going to share your blog on Twitter anyways, wouldn’t you like to be able to put forth your own hashtag for people to use, so you can search for it and monitor what people are saying? This also allows you to join in on the Twitter conversation, start discussions, thank people for sharing your blog, and retweet their own Tweets mentioning your blog post.

In general your blog should feature a social media call-to-action, icons and/or follow widgets to promote your social sites. You should also have a plugin that facilitates social sharing for your blog posts, such as WordPress’s ShareThis to easily allow your readers to post your content.

Tips for Sharing Your Blog on Social Media:

Don’t be an auto-posting robot! - People don’t like automated messages, whether it’s an election-time robo-call or a plug-in pushed post from your blog to your Twitter or Facebook. It looks lazy, unoriginal and will likely decrease the amount of people who interact with the post or even click-through to your content, which is the whole point of sharing your posts on social media!

Test it out – Before hitting ‘post’ take a look at the link preview that pops up when you copy and paste the link into a Facebook, Google+, Linkedin status field. This allows you to see how your link will look once it’s posted, so you can doublecheck important aspects like meta description, thumbnail and title errors (html code replacing punctuation).

Be a tease – A common mistake is bogging your social post down with all the important information featured in the blog. You want to give people an incentive for clicking through to your post, not gain everything they needed to know just by scanning your post in their Newsfeed.

In the same vein, avoid simply rehashing the title of your blog in the status promoting the blog. People will see the title in the link preview; writing it in the status content is redundant. Twitter is the exception to this rule, since you should be shrinking the link to make more room for the written part of your post that should be enticing your followers to click through to the link.

social media friendly bloggingPrioritize for the most compelling post - Sometimes you may want to let your actual blog link take a backseat in a social media post. If an image or video that you feature in the blog is more compelling and more likely to draw in people to the post, then you should have that be the main part of the post. Shorten the blog link using a tool like bit.ly and insert it at the end of your written status with a call-to-action to gain maximum click-throughs, i.e. “Learn more: [shortened link].” Check out the image for a good example of this method of social posting.

Social media should be a crucial part of your blogging strategy: Writing interesting content with a social audience in mind, content that people will want to socially endorse by sharing. Doing this and leveraging your own social networks for content distribution can grow your blog’s readership, boost exposure and give posts a longer shelf-life.

Coming To Grips With Your Websites Content Strategy

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I’d like to take some time and focus on the content strategy for your companies website.  Why does website content seem to be an after thought for a lot of businesses?  It seems like a lot of businesses brush over the fact that their website actually needs to have a strong message and a valuable content strategy.  The content for your website needs to be able to drive a visitor to take some kind of desired action.  Whether that’s making a purchase, becoming a lead or coming into your business you want your visitors to feel like they can take that next action.  Websites can serve a variety of purposes, but for the most part businesses want to take their website visitors and turn them into customers.  So how do we do this?

Describe Your Products Or Services In Depth

I’m sure you have more to say about your business than you think.  No matter if you are a local business or a Fortune 500 company.  I would bet that you could expand the content on your website or make it better.  If your website is on the smaller side then you need to think of each product or service that you offer as a unique page on your website that is completely dedicated to that product or service. A lot of times I’ve spoken with companies who think a single page on their website labeled “Services” is going to list out and describe all the different things their company offers.  You should really push yourself to consider more than 1 services page as a general role of thumb.

If your website is on the larger side then you should have more resources and offer more, which means more pages and a larger site.  Don’t just think too that the answer is always adding more pages just to get your page count up.  You always want to approach content by adding value to your website visitors.  Larger websites can do much more with their content and add even more value by evaluating a larger content strategy.  If you need more ideas think about developing content then think about playing the recency card.  Develop something timely that is relevant to your audience.

Blogging For Your Business

Blogging is a great way for anyone to develop content on an ongoing basis very easily.  Blogs present unique opportunities to create interaction with your audience whenever someone comments on your post, and posts are often shared more often than other standard website pages.  Most of the time your blog posts are ordered by date, but you can also do things like assign categories and tags to your posts it often makes it easier for users to navigate to the content they are looking for.  Most people think that writing for a blog is either too much work, or that they aren’t going to be able to come up with new ideas for posts.  Here is just a small list of content ideas we’ve compiled over the years:

  • Changes or additions to your companies products or services.
  • Company or industry updates.
  • News that is relevant to your industry.
  • Discussing the most frequent problems that your customers bring up to your sales department or customer service department and develop answers to those questions.
  • Joining an internet community for your industry and blogging about topics that are presented often within that community.  Examples could be:
    • Social Media
    • Forums
    • Reddit

Developing Local Content

We work with a variety of local and regional clients that often come to us with this same problem about developing content relevant for their audience.  If you want to develop content or optimize content for a local audience think about how your business relates to those local consumers and integrate your web content with the interests of their local region.  Maybe you should start breaking out pages individually for each region you service and merge that content with how your company has serviced or been involved in that local community.  Work with a local journalist who reports on the area you service and help develop content that can be promoted on a local news outlet as well as your site.  Find local bloggers who live in your area that write content that supports your industry and present them with a guest blog post.

Ultimately Trying To Provide Value

At the end of the day whatever content you are producing with your website or for your company you need to be adding value to your visitors.  Also remember that you shouldn’t be running out of ideas.  Try to come up with creative pieces of web content that will help your audience and be pertinent to your business.

How To Build A Link Building Strategy To Fuel Your SEO

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Anyone who talks to you long enough about an SEO strategy will surely bring up inbound links and how important they are to your website’s organic rankings.  This is surely one of the most important aspects to your SEO strategy and something that a lot of people leave off or don’t put enough intentional effort into, because it’s usually the most time consuming and challenging part of doing SEO.  Something I believe that everyone needs to realize is that no two companies are going to successfully implement the same link building strategy and see the same results.  Your business and your website have very unique and great things about it, and those are the things you should really try to leverage when putting together a link building strategy.

What does your business do best?

The size of your business may be one of the first things you should realize and take into account.  A small regional company is not going to be able to build the same kinds of links as a large, national or global company with a very powerful brand.  When you’re putting together your link building strategy, think about what differentiates your company, or what assets you have that make you worth linking to.  Also think about what assets you can repurpose into a content strategy or another asset to attract links from other people on the web.  Try asking yourself these questions:

  • Do you have great content you can provide in a blog format that will draw links into your website?
  • Do you have any research data or statistics you can repurpose into an infographic?
  • Does your company have a great web based tool that you can give to users for free that they can embed on their website that links back to your website?
  • Are there any strong relationships you have with owners of other websites or writers in your industry that you can reach out to acquire additional links to your website?
  • What industry organizations or associations are you a part of?  It doesn’t matter if these are local or national.  A lot of businesses receive links from local chamber of commerce websites in their area.

Hopefully these questions have helped jog some ideas in your head and will help you start to put together the base elements of a strategy.  If your mind was blank when asked all of these questions, then you might have a little further to go before you can start to put together a useful link building strategy.

What’s working for your competitors?

Some other ideas to help you get started might be to look at your competitors.  A lot of initial tasks that I do when putting together link building strategies for companies is to start looking at their online competitors or resource sites in their industry to see what types of sites have been linking to their competitors.  This can give you a great sample of what has worked for them, and what you can leverage to work for you as well.  You can use a tool from SEOMoz called Open Site Explorer to do this competitive link profile research if you have never done this in the past.  Another tool to help track records over time is MajesticSEO’s backlink history tool.

majestic seo link building tool

There are also a number of other tools (most are paid) that can allow you to look at what websites link to your competitors.  If you have a favorite tool that isn’t OSE, feel free to leave a comment with that tool and what you like best about it.

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Social Media Strategy – trigger interaction & response

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You do not have to be consumer oriented company to be able to use social media to advance your Brand, thoughts, products, and engagement with your audience. There are plenty of people professionally that look for helpful information for their jobs and will share valuable information with their peers when they find it. It some cases, it is even “cool” to be the first to find a great deal or share relevant information for others.

In the B2B world, you can also help aggregate content for your customers, clients, and prospects, by being a filter for them. You can share relevant information with them that has already “passed” your approval or relevance rating. This becomes almost like a value added service for them. They turn to you, a trusted resource first, before they go hunting on the Internet. You want them to say – “if they haven’t said anything about it yet, then I probably don’t need to pay attention to it yet.” And any savvy Internet person can tell you that just because it comes up “first” on Google, doesn’t make it accurate or right.

If you can get your people to interact with you, you can get valuable information about their habits, wants, desires, and interests. If you can get them to follow you or be involved, you can help your message get in front of thousands with a single click or post because it will not only reach your direct followers, but also post to their network of people because they are following you.

You can choose to have different message via each social medium (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, etc), or choose to broadcast your message, which will allow your audience to follow you via the medium they like to use the most and you still get your message out to the masses without requiring them to visitor you website. That is power and potentially all from a single article or click.

If you don’t know where to start or what you should be doing we have several tools on our website to help and we have created an great tool for measuring social media success and value of social media efforts to your organization. This will help you determine which social media efforts should be continued by your organization and give you some ways to help measure return-on-investment.

Seven Steps for Social Media Strategy Integration for your Company

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I love this article from last summer about the 52 questions to ask when hiring a social media company. This article is spot on if you are serious about Social Media. It goes way in depth in some cases, especially for Small-to-Medium enterprises, but it does a good job in helping you determine what you should be asking a potential partner.

After talking to, working with and pitching dozens of companies and organizations on the principles of social media and why it works for more than just Business-to-Consumer Brands, I have realized that it is a much bigger commitment than just “another marketing or advertising campaign” of sorts.

Here is what you need to do to make sure your social media efforts get the Return-On-Investment (ROI) they could and also why playing around doesn’t really drive effective social media. All of these things really depend on who has what responsibilities within your organization and how it is structured but most are applicable in the larger, national and even global size companies. Even smaller organizations can take away some value as well.

First - Your various business units or divisions and partners should be all be looped in and asked if they participate in social media and how. They should all be informed somehow of what you are doing and why even potentially consulted on how they could improve their social media initiatives so you can have some Brand continuity across all of your channels.

Second - You need to look at your audience structure. Don’t be thinking that a “catch all” corporate Facebook page or blog is enough. People are smarter than that. Speak specifically to them, with content that is what they want – be specific in touching all your audience with content and experiences they can relate to. Don’t make it a “news” page. If you are updating them with content they don’t care about half of the time, they will start to ignore it ALL of the time and that is bad. If you have the resources and a large enough market share, you could consider “several” Blogs(or add filters when they follow so they can select what information they want) and multiple Facebook pages for segments that are big enough to warrant them and truly create a dialog/interaction with a specific customer base.

Third - You have to have some buy-in at the C-level. They should be involved in whats going on and even use them to help aggregate industry news, company news, white papers, blog postings, etc. It is important to help them buy into goals that established and measurement of success – in effect the ROI you want. This might also help you navigate any potential objections from “legal”. Speaking of legal, if you do use a third party source, make sure they can work with someone like Bevelwise to ensure no proverbial “lines” get crossed and they feel like you could get into any “trouble” resulting in ligitgation.

Fourth - offer out incentives of some sort to employees to touch customers (sales, customer service, customer care/support, etc) to help feed you good stories, testimonials, content, and things that make good social media posts. Anyone who touches a client could help generate content and drive the initiatives further – A customer service person that asks “are you following us on Facebook yet – we have specials we run for those fans on occasion” can go a long way to helping build your presence. These people can also get you content for posting MUCH faster and more often than most.

Fifth - all of your web resources, teams, should know what is going on and why. They don’t have to “agree” with it always, but aligning what is happening with the website (SEO/Content) resources, all of your marketing/advertising campaigns (email, online, offline, direct mail, etc) and initiatives and your PR team will help feed you more content and help the “big picture” work together. After all, if you are putting effort in, you want to maximize each effort.

Sixth - If you are big enough, try to find a champion from each internal department, especially those that touch customers, so they can farm for content, feedback and other things you can share through your social media channels. They can work with your social media agency or potentially be trained on making posts – You want to make sure you are feeding the content to touch all of your vertical markets, products, services, audiences etc-especially if you have the resources or need for content specific social media. Internal folks live and breathe your strategy 24/7 – they can be VERY beneficial to an outside resource because of that.

Finally - if you are choosing a partner to help, choose a partner that has understanding across all marketing mediums, but with a specialty in the online channels like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), website usability, online marketing – (banners/PPC, e-mail marketing, and especially analytics. That should mean they know how to set up goals and measure results across the many different channels and mediums that are being used for your overall advertising strategy.

We welcome your social media strategy questions.

Twitter to be Indexed on Google and Bing

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Both Google and Bing (with Yahoo SERP going to be powered by Bing they will really be one in the same) plan to begin indexing Twitter tweets in 2010. That will allow them to show the the tweets within the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). This will more than likely be the first test for real time, non-paid, content to be indexed and shown on SERPs. That means you should position your Brand for more in depth, relevant, and timely tweeting because you will be able to move the bar on the search engines more quickly.

This will also help move Twitter from the social space into the main stream for business purposes because this will make it relevant on so many levels. Effecting real time search results? That is power. I would see Blogs getting the real time priority next(especially those using Blogger if you are Google) as they already help immensely with index-able content on a site. One would have to think that Facebook posts would be on the short list as well to go real-time

Social Media Optimization: Business Marketing Mix

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Social media optimization is a set of methods for generating publicity & conversations through social media and online communities. Social media optimization is related to search engine marketing, but differs in several ways, primarily the focus on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit. Search Engines also “love” this type of content because it is updated often, and seen as new and fresh.

A social media campaign means developing a great message and then reaching out to people, while giving them an incentive/reason to pass it on to other people. Social media optimization is a kind of viral marketing, where word of mouth is created through the businesses and people connecting and having 2-way conversations online.

For Business Social Media to work well, you need constant updates and make them interesting!! Also, you need fans who care enough about your message to pass it on to their friends. This is how something (good or bad) can get spread extremely quickly. If people like something and find it useful, they will link to it and tell their friends. Like anything else online – understanding the motivations and culture of the audience is key to making social media work.

Social media software applications include:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Social media should be in your marketing mix, but it needs to be done right! Make it work for your specific target audience. Develop a great message and reach out to people…then hope they pass it on! Social Media is about connections, so make it a 2-way conversation.

Please contact Bevelwise if you would like to add Social Media to your company’s marketing mix and need some help.

Many other sources have assembled lists of social media sites. Relevant Social Media helpful spots:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/top-list-of-social-media-sites
http://nextmark.typepad.com/blog/2009/07/top-100-b2b-social-media-cheat-sheet.html
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/my-best-advice-about-social-media/

http://www.mintblogger.com/2008/02/definitive-list-of-30-popular-social.html