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Share of Social Sharing on the Web

Facebook is not a trend; not for casual users and not for marketing. It’s a fact. The post below comes from our friends at Social Media Examiner and is more proof that we all have to respect and utilize Facebook in our promotion efforts.

5 Studies Show Facebook #1 in Social Media

By Amy Porterfield

Published March 15, 2010

When you hear that Facebook is yanking Yahoo from its ranks and inching up on Google’s traffic throne, you can’t help but pay attention.

And if you work for a business or own one, it’s likely that social media marketing is on your radar.  More and more marketing dollars are beginning to shift toward social media marketing and this trend only continues to climb.

Here are 5 studies that show how Facebook is undoubtedly a leading online social contender…
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/5-new-studies-show-facebook-a-marketing-powerhouse/

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Myth by R. Hess

Author Michael Stelzner, has put together an interesting report based on a survey of 900 marketers. The report looks at the state of social media marketing. The link at the bottom of this post takes you to the source which includes a video by Stelzner about  his in-depth report, “Social Media Marketing Industry Report”

Interesting stats from the report include:

• 88% indicated they were employing social media for marketing purposes
• 72% have only been using social media marketing for a few months
• 64% of marketers are using social media for 5 hours or more each week
• 39% are using it for 10 hours a week
• 81% say the number-one benefit is generating exposure, followed by increasing traffic and building new business relationships
• Over half saw a rise in search engine rankings.
• Out of social media tools marketers most wanted to learn about, social bookmarking sites ranked highest followed by Twitter.

Read the whole article at: Social Media Examiner

The website should be the hub of your business and the social media pages should integrate and compliment the website.  I use the analogy of the tradeshow booth.  The social media profile is the tradeshow booth at other locations on the internet, while your website is the brick & mortar store.  Attending the booth and talking to your customers is important but you don’t necessarily want to spend all your time there.  You want to be at your store and make sure the cash register rings.

Last evening I was driving through my township and noticed one of the billboards for a new condominium. The sign read, “follow us on Twitter @newnjhousing.” There was a website listed, in very small print.

Social media is a very important method of marketing, sales and branding for many businesses. It does work, and is a communications medium that should not be ignored. However, many businesses are caught up in the euphoria of social media and neglecting two of the most important marketing vehicles of their business: their website and email marketing.

Sure, during the Super Bowl Honda gave it’s Facebook page instead of a traditional website. Yes, we hear many anecdotal stories of businesses using Twitter to drive sales and boost communication for their company’s products or services.

However, for most growing businesses who have a limited budget, focusing on a well designed website and email marketing are the essential elements they should focus on, before diving too deep into social media.

Why?

1. Search engines, which are still the most popular way by far to find information online, use website and blog traffic to determine your ranking.

2. Email, for many, is still the most popular and easiest method of communication (hence the power of email marketing).

3. Your well designed website can serve as a foundation for your social media and any other online marketing.

4. Websites provide the broadest and most flexible opportunity for serving the variety of needs to your customers (hosting video, offering free downloads, forms for receiving customer information, etc).

5. Email marketing enables you to see critical statistics about your audience and email message (how many opens, who opened, what was clicked on, etc).

6. Email messages can be highly targeted to specific groups within your email database and the individual message can be customized for each recipient.

7. Websites are owned by you—no need to worry about change in privacy settings, or who owns your data.

8. Your website can serve as a powerful and automated sales tool, that works 24/7/365.

9. Your website and email marketing contains only your message and not extraneous advertising or content from dozens of others on each page.

10. Competitors are not able to display their advertising around your messaging.

11. If third party social media networks go down, you’re not “out of business” while they are down.

12. Your customer’s data has less of a chance of being hacked.

13. People often want to receive regular email messages just to remind them to buy from you later on.

14. Website domain names are easier to market and for people to go to than Twitter handles.

15. Until social commerce matures, websites are the best way to sell online.

16. Great subject lines in email messages are still a very powerful way for recipients to prioritize what emails they open.

17. Websites can be as simple or as complex as needed.

18. You can create multiple websites for multiple audiences.

19. Websites don’t have a barrier of needing to enter a password and user name to visit them.

20. All of your audience can navigate a good website—everyone still can’t effective navigate Twitter and Facebook.

21. A great website can be created with no need for programming “apps” or special developers.

22. Some companies block social media sites.

23. Your photos and video can be placed precisely where and how you want them on your website.

24. “Social is great”, but building a direct relationship between you and a customer (without 267 of their friends) might be important.

25. A well designed website is like opening the door and sitting in a brand new car with leather seats.

26. An email marketing message lives forever, social media posts move along a time line and require regular attention.

27. Your website and email newsletter will never compete with you.

28. If your sales message requires lengthy copy, your website can tastefully accommodate.

29. Email marketing messages can automatically engage a customer, depending on their response to a preceding email message.

30. Websites can change as little or as much as you like. Whenever you like.

The “Apple-Fanboy” Opinion (The MAJORITY of people at this company):
Wait a minute. Apple makes everything they do more intuitive, better looking and easier. And then Microsoft tries to catch up and the rush to buy new and better gets turbo charged. Apple does the heavy lifting of actually inventing & producing well designed products and software, and MicroSpit reaps the benefits of being a so-so copycat.
If those bread sellers in old time Rome just added croissants and bagels and sticky buns to their offerings before anybody else, they would have cleaned up, too.

What do you think?

What if you didn’t have to invest a lot of time, what if, in the words of Ron Popeil, you could “set it and forget it”?

The answer is, you never know what kind of opportunities will come your way.  I met Alec Hess through LinkedIn, the founder of Full Voice Media. I get numerous calls a week from head hunters.

And now, as  a Power User, I meet potential clients, network, participate in discussions, and provide free advice.  Does everyone need to be a Power User?  Absolutely not.  Can anyone open the door to a new world of opportunities?  Absolutely.

Interested in any of the following?  2 Hours Initial Setup Time.  30 minutes a month after that.  Return on investment = infinite.

• Career opportunities
• Business deals
• Consulting offers
• Expertise & references
• Keeping in touch
• Job offers
• Partnerships

For a quick list of Tips to kickstart your LinkedIn profile, check out the article about Lewis Howes, author of LinkedWorking.  He was recently profiled on SmartBlog on Social Media and shared some tips on How to use LinkedIn with Business Savvy.

And call us if you need help. We can even handle the whole thing for you for a small fee.

The 8 Worst SEO Mistakes Companies Make When They Redesign

I am always surprised at companies that redesign their websites and then complain about traffic. It usually sounds like this: “You know, I hated our old website. It was ugly, and so 1999. Our redesign is gorgeous. But we get almost no traffic.”

If only companies would take the time to think about the search engines before redesigning they could retain most or all of their traffic. Here are eight mistakes that we see constantly. Of course, there are other mistakes, but these are expensive and hard to recover from.

1. The Domain Problem. Companies often decide that with the makeover, they need a new domain name. What they don’t realize is that the old domain name had earned a lot of trust with the search engines. It may take a year to just “convince” the search engines to love you again for who you now are.

2. The Redirection Problem. Webmasters sometimes create new pages (and new URLs) but don’t take the time to redirect the old ones. This is arguably the worst problem we see. An older site has built up a lot of link love, and without those redirects, the links are going to pages that don’t exist. That’s also bad for all your users who end up frequenting your error page.

3. The Duplicate Content Problem. Unfortunately, the implementation team sometimes doesn’t prevent the search engines from crawling and indexing their staging server. This creates duplicate content and a big mess to clean up after launch.

4. The Flash Problem. Designers frequently replace keyword-rich sites with gorgeous flash-based sites. Search engines are only now learning how to read links in Flash. Sadly, they have a long ways to go. Some flash-based sites also have the problem of only having a single URL — the homepage. When you click on a link to a different page of the site, it really just takes you to a different segment of the Flash movie. Too often these “pages” of your site are hidden to search engines and users can’t bookmark them, link to them, or share them on Facebook.

5. The “Crummy Old Articles” Problem. Web teams sometimes decide to “clean house” and get rid of a lot of old content, articles that have links to them and earn traffic for the site. Rankings for keywords associated with that content — along with search traffic in general — plummet. Oops.

6. Content Management System URL Problem. Techies are satisfied with new URLs produced by a Content Management System (CMS) that look like so: www.oursite.com?pid=123&cid=876&country=1&lang=en. However, they don’t understand that a keyword rich URL such as www.oursite.com/product/productname prescription drugs without a prescription produces higher keyword rankings. Those ugly URLs are also less informative when they appear in the search engine results pages (SERPs), which can lead to a lower click-through rate.

7. Content Management System Title Tag Problem. The e-team invests in a new CMS (to go with their new site). But the CMS makes it hard for them to change their most important “real estate” — i.e. their title tag. Make sure your CMS allows you to write your own title and description tags!

8. The “Haste Makes Waste” Problem: Companies don’t take the time to move some things slowly enough to preserve their old rankings. For example, if you’re moving to a new domain name along with the site redesign, you can make the change in two phases. First, move the old site to the new domain. Then, after things have settled down a bit, launch your redesign.

Yes, lots of companies can fall into these mistakes — including yours and mine. Our company is just about to launch our new website, and I know first-hand how incredibly hard it can be to just get it published, much less to get it done right from an SEO perspective. But it’s worth every bit of the effort you spend to preserve your good rankings. A little bit of planning goes a long way.

Robbin Steif is the owner and founder of LunaMetrics, a Google Analytics Certified Partner. Their next Google Analytics Training is in NYC, June 8, 9 and/or 10th, 2010.

Believe it or not, the good, old-fashioned press release still has a place in today’s marketing strategies — and not only that— press releases can still attract major attention on the Web. But there’s just one question remaining: how, exactly?

Quite simply, when you launch a press release, you are able to include a link back to your Web site. Submitting this press release to a number of outlets sends out that link across the Internet. When sites like Google and Yahoo! see that you have more inbound links pointed your way, they’re more inclined to trust what’s on your Web site and post your site higher in their search engine results.

So how can you submit an effective press release? Let’s break it down, step-by-step.

1. Send press releases to the right places. If you submit your press release to Press Releases ‘R’ Us, then there’s a good chance that your little chunk of promotional information won’t exactly attract a lot of intention. But if you can find more powerful distribution sites like i-Newswire.com, there’s a lot more opportunity for your words to find a wider audience.

2. Provide value. Let’s face it: not everyone is interested in what your press releases have to say about your company unless they actually provide some bit of value. If you have an interesting take on a popular trend like social media, or if you have new statistics to announce, your press release stands a much higher chance of garnering some attention.

3. Use inverted-pyramid format. Any student of journalism is well aware of inverted-pyramid: you give away your most valuable information up front because that’s where people pay the most attention. If you can attract more people with a powerful headline (more on that soon) and good information up front, you’ve written a successful press release.

4. The headline is probably the most important element. If the title of this article were “Press Releases,” there’s a good chance you wouldn’t have found the prospect of reading it very enticing. But since the headline tells you how you’ll boost your search engine rankings, there’s suddenly more incentive to click through and read what this press release thing is all about. Spend a lot of time crafting a solid headline for your press release.

Remember: your goal here is to generate some serious inbound links to your site. But you won’t get your press release published in as many outlets if it doesn’t at least have some value to readers. Focus on making and submitting a strong press release and you’ll have a good number of inbound links in no time.

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Mashable has put together some great tips about creating the perfect profile picture.

No matter how much quality information or witty repartee we send out into our social networks, first impressions are almost always visual. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that the first thing we see when checking out a new Twitter (Twitter) follower, Facebook (Facebook) friend, or LinkedIn (LinkedIn) connection is a profile photo. And in a world of quick clicks and divergent attention, if the photo you present isn’t eye-catching, or illustrative of your personal brand, you may miss your shot at making a positive first impression.

Check it out:

5 Tips for Creating the Perfect Profile Pic

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by ian lurie

If you know more than 5 people, chances are you now know someone who declares themselves a social media expert. How can you tell if someone’s claim of expertise is legit? Here’s my quick quiz. Ask each question and take the appropriate action:

1: Do you have a blog?

If the expert answers ‘no’, that may be OK. Follow up with something like ‘Oh, you’re using Posterous instead?’. If they look at you blankly, end the meeting there. No sense wasting your time.

If the expert answers ‘yes’, get the address and go look. If they’ve been blogging for less than 2-3 years, and there’s no explanation like “I had to move my blog”, again, end the meeting.

Any social media expert has been somehow participating in the conversation for a long time.

2: When did you start in social media?

“6 months ago”. Yeah. OK. Bye.

“2 years ago”. Hey, not bad. Worth a chat.

“In 1992″. Er. Um. They’d better be referencing BBSes and Usenet.

3: What is social media?

“Blogging and Twitter and stuff”. Excuse yourself for a bathroom break and don’t come back.

“All of the conversations going on between people and people and businesses and such online”. Not bad.

“A trendy term to describe a new kind of mass media”. Totally acceptable.

4: What’s a social media campaign?

“Voting something to the front page of Digg using my proxy server and 35 computers”. Flee the scene, and get to a minimum safe distance as soon as possible. The Digg brigade may be on its way. Whatever you do, don’t hire them. While this is a valid tactic (I guess), it’s not a campaign. Nor does it generate long term results in most cases.

“Developing a great message and then reaching out to people, while giving them an incentive to ‘pass it on’”. Yeah, OK, keep ‘em around.

“I have this great software that will put a link to your site on 21,000 forums and 10,000 blogs…”. Push them down the garbage chute. Don’t be seen with them in public.

5: How do you monitor social media for a client?

“Huh?” Hopefully your next step is obvious.

“Google alerts”. Not bad, but wait and see if they add in stuff like subscribing to Twitter searches and the like.

“I use a 3rd party tool”. Fine, but make sure they do more than plug in some keywords and wait for e-mails. A human being needs to review what the tool reports or its worthless.

6: How do you measure ROI?

“Oh, shut up”. Perfectly OK, especially if the expert turns purple for a moment first. They’re just sick of hearing this question, which means they’ve been around the block a few times.

“It’s complicated, but here’s a high-level view…”. Nice!!!

“I track clicks from Twitter”. Nope, sorry.

7: How do you build an audience?

“I auto-follow 20,000 people on Twitter”. If you’re OK with it, kick them in the groin for me. If not, nod politely and move on.

“I follow interesting, relevant people on Twitter, comment on relevant blog posts and try to get into the conversation”. Home run. Try not to weep with joy.

“We need to figure out the campaign first”. Good answer. Give them a hypothetical campaign to be sure, but clearly you’re on the right track.

8: Do you offer a guarantee?

“Yes, I’ll get you 1000 links and 20,000 clicks”. See number 7, first action.

“Yes, that I’ll work my butt off for you”. I like it.

“No, because we’re marketing to people, and it’s hard to say what they’ll like/not like, or what might happen in the world that will affect behavior”. Also good.

9: How did you learn all this stuff?

“Oh, I read this book I bought from Amazon.com”. Wargh. By the time that book went to print it was out of date. No go.

“I’m always learning”. Good answer.

“I read a lot of blogs, and try to use as many different tools as I can”. Also good.

“I go to conferences”. Yeahhhhhh. Might be OK. Answers to the other 9 questions should tell you.

10: How does social media impact SEO?

“It doesn’t”. Slap them and tell ‘em that’s from Ian.

“It builds links”. That’s half the answer.

“It builds relationships that turn into links later”. HIRE THEM NOW.

Bonus question: How often do you write?

“I hate writing”. Cough.

“Oh, I try to but I don’t have much time”. Cough. Cough.

“Every day”. DING DING DING. A winner!

There you go. An instant social media expert evaluator. Sort of like a Cylon Detector, but hopefully more effective.

The amazing people at Social Media Examiner (.com) have a new post about how to get more facebook fans.

The tips include:
#1: Embed Widgets on Your Website
#2: Invite Your Email and Ezine Subscribers
#3: Add to Your Email Signature Block
#4: Make a Compelling Welcome pills online Video
#5: Use Facebook Apps
#6: Integrate the Facebook Comment Feature
#7: Get Fans to Tag Photos
#8: Load Videos and Embed on Your Site
#9: Place Facebook Ads
#10: Run a Contest
#11: Link to Twitter
#12: Get Fans to Join Via SMS
#13: Use Print Media
#14: Display at Your Store/Business
#15. Add a Link on Your Personal Profile
#16: Add a Badge/Button to Your Profile
#17: Use the Share Button
#18: Use the @ Tag
#19: Autograph Posts on Other Walls
#20: Autograph Other Fan Pages
#21: Maybe Use “Suggest To Friends”

Check it out!