As the world’s largest social network, Facebook is a powerful tool for marketing your brand. With millions of members of your target audience spending hours a day surfing this social channel you cannot afford to miss out on any tips or advice that could potentially help you reach and engage with your audience.

To help you reach you goal of more efficient and effective Facebook marketing, we have included a few tips in this post to get you started!

Top Facebook tips for successfully marketing your brand

With Facebook, timing is essential for increased engagement

• Post during “off” hours or non-peak hours such as the time between 7pm and 7am.
• Post on Saturdays and Sundays

You’ll need to focus on your audience when you share

• Break things down into percentages. 50% of what you share should be industry news from relevant (and impartial) third party sources. 30% should then be news that showcases your brand’s personality; this news can be time-sensitive or simply fun relevant information. And the remaining 20% should be your business / marketing messages.
• Remember that people want to be informed and entertained more than they want to be marketed to, but if you can accomplish the first you may be able to achieve the latter.

You should focus more on Shares than Likes

• Shares get your content more exposure than Likes, so shoot for content that is easy and fun to share and will appeal to the widest variety of people within your target audience.

Master Facebook marketing like a pro

• Post as often as you can on a consistent schedule, but try to post at least 3 – 5 times per week.
• Write at a language level that is appropriate to your readers
• Relax your style and avoid writing stuffy or rigid-sounding posts
• Be positive and share as much positive content as you possible can.

Be yourself and prove there are real people behind your brand

• Build a community around your brand – Don’t just have a group of people who “like” your brand’s page
• Show your brand’s purpose and passion in every post you write
• Say “Thank you” and recognize the people who have supported you and helped you to achieve success.

While Facebook marketing isn’t easy, as you can see from the tips above it’s not very difficult either. You simply need to focus on the needs, like, and wants of your target audience and let them do the rest of your marketing for you!

People tend to trust the recommendations of their friends and family over those made by brands, even brands they like. By creating materials that are easy and fun to share, you are helping your social connections help you spread the word about your brand, influencing people who were not even “fans” of your page at the time.

Comments:

How does your brand approach Facebook marketing?

Making your passion work for you

Chances are your business once began as a dream backed by determination and startup capital. You were passionate about that dream and wanted to see it come true more than anything in the world.

This post is about the wisdom of social media master Gary Vaynerchuk. He doesn’t claim to be a guru or to know it all. Instead he simply speaks from the heart about his passions, and how social media helped take him from obscurity into the realm of notoriety and profits and how you may have the potential within you to do the same thing.

Top social tips to help you “crush it” no matter what your “it” is

Among those who follow Mr. Vaynerchuk and his wisdom, the phrase “crush it” is bandied about with ease. For those who aren’t familiar with the saying, it is part of Gary’s core philosophy, advocating a “seize the day” attitude which will then allow someone to accomplish everything they set out to do.

How can this help your social media activity?

We’ve gathered together a few of Gary’s best tips and added our thoughts on how / why these things are effective when it comes to social media.

• Be happy as you are. If you’re not happy, do something about it – This translates to social media by encouraging a positive self-loving can-do attitude that will inspire a connection and increased engagement with your fans and followers.
• Create content and connections first, and cash will follow – Socially this means that you should be more concerned with posting things people want to see and talking to them about your posts then exactly how much money all of this is going to make you. When you’re too focused on profits too early on it can get in the way of inspiring the kinds of connections that will earn you money in the future.
• Create connections and continue conversations – If you could only have one “job” when it came to social media, that job should be to create and nurture the connections between your brand and your target audience. Once a conversation has begun you will be able to get a feel for the lifespan of said conversation and learn when to continue a conversation and when to gently close the lid on it and move on.
• Pay attention to people – By simply taking note of who contacts you, responds to your social posts, etc you can get an idea of what kind of engagement you’re looking at. Don’t neglect the people behind these queries and make every effort to respond to them and answer their questions as best you can.
• Operate in branding mode – Every time you do something within the context of a social channel, try to make everything point back to your brand in some way. You won’t be able to manage this with every post, but the more you try the better you will be at branding your social activity, not just your images!

Comments:

Which of these tips do you think if the most helpful? Which one do you think will be the easiest to implement today?

Are you tired of seeing consistently low engagement rates on your tweets? Do your tweets seem like they always fall flat? Don’t lose hope just yet! Your tweets can be saved and your engagement rates sent soaring skyward once more.

It’s the little things that matter

Your tweets might not need to change all that much; it might seem like radical changes could produce the results you’re looking for, but in reality big changes aren’t likely to be necessary.

Instead why not try:

• Changing the day you tweet – Typically weekends (Saturday and Sunday) are better times to tweet as engagement rates are higher during this time. Wednesday and Thursday seem to have the lowest engagement rates of all.
• Monitoring the time of day your tweets go live – From 8am to 7pm seems to be the best time to tweet. There is a significant increase in engagement during this time than any other time during the day.
• Making your tweets shorter – Tweets with 100 characters or less are doing much better than those with over 100 characters. Shorter tweets allow space for other users to retweet and add their own hashtags or tag other users.
• Closely monitoring your hashtag use – Tweets that use at least one hashtag see over two times the engagement of those that do not use any hashtags. Don’t go overboard however – tweets with more than two hashtags do not do nearly as well as those two or less.
• Asking your followers to retweet – A great majority of brands are not actually asking their followers to retweet, something that can dramatically increase instances that a tweet is retweeted by your followers. Ask and you will receive!
• Taking the time to spell it out – While most Twitter users are aware of abbreviations and acronyms that are commonly used in tweets, engagement has been shown to markedly increase when a tweet contained the word “retweet” as opposed to the simple “RT”.

Give these things a try and see how your tweets perform for a few weeks after each change is made. By making these changes one at a time and closely monitoring your engagement rates after each change you can determine which changes will be best for enhancing your brand’s Twitter strategy and focusing your efforts on those areas in the future.

Your takeaway

Twitter is unique when compared to other big-time social channels. The character limit for tweets has given rise to URL shorteners, hashtags, and the use of abbreviations such as “RT” for retweet.

In order to engage with more of your followers it is essential to analyze your Twitter activity on a regular basis and make any of the changes mentioned above if you believe they will improve your numbers and help your brand reach its social engagement goals.

Comments:

Which of these changes do you believe would be most helpful to your brand?

When it comes to SEO, the best place to start is right at home, and by home we mean your website. Once you have performed your keyword research you need to begin to optimize your website in order to perform well in the search engine results. Optimizing your website won’t be a magic solution to better rankings, but when combined with other SEO elements and activities it can definitely help!

Accessibility is all about making the web easier for everyone to use, especially people with impairments or handicaps that might make browsing difficult for them. Individuals who are blind or visually impaired use screen readers to read the content of their browser to them so that they can navigate the website, read the content, and so on.  In this way accessibility is very important to helping everyone have an opportunity to enjoy their online experience.

Accessibility and on page optimization

Several things which are commonly associated with accessibility measures can also be used as on page optimization elements which can work towards optimizing your website for optimal search engine performance:

• Images – Images have enormous potential for optimization. The name of the image itself (the file) can have positive influences. So instead of leaving the image named after the default structure of your camera or stock photo agency, change it to something more SEO-friendly. An image of a pink flower could be named pink-flower.jpg. You can also add information about the images on your website in their “alt” and “description” tags within the HTML code. The first is a more reader friendly name for the file (“Pink Flower Image”) and the second is a way to describe the image in a short sentence.
• Formatting – You might not think that the headings and bullet lists and such on your website are very important, but they are! Not only do they help screen readers to accurately describe your content to someone, but they also help search engines to better process your content.
• Navigation – The more streamlined and simple your navigation is, the better. It is easier for everyone to use a website with logical, uncomplicated navigation than something on the opposite end of the spectrum. Search engines appreciate well-structured navigation as it helps them better crawl and index all of the pages of your website.
• Links – Not only does having links on your website make it more attractive to search engines, but did you know that you can describe your links too? Using the “title” tag in the HTML code of a link you can provide a brief description of the the link / what it points to / etc and this will also appear as rollover text when a user is hovering over the link.

Your takeaway

Neither accessibility nor on page optimization should be seen as an “all or nothing” sort of thing. It is important that you make any changes from this list to your website that you feel comfortable with as they can improve not only the range of people who can access and benefit from your website, but these measures can ensure better on page SEO and thus better web traffic from that quarter as well as increased rankings when combined with other SEO techniques.

Wait…humor can help my SEO? How?

It might seem a little strange, but hear us out.

There is so much stress and pressure in our lives today that the last thing we need is something else to add to the pile. So when we log onto our social networks or check our favorite blogs and see something that make us smile and laugh, we’ve just lightened our load a little bit. When we realize that we feel a little better, a little lighter, we see the source of our positive mood shift as something we might want to share with our friends…after all they could use a laugh too!

And this is how humor can help your SEO.

The power of a good laugh

When it comes to content, the goal is to engage our audience and make them want to come back again and again to see what we have to share. Humorous pictures are an excellent way to do this as they are prime viral marketing material. Viral marketing materials are things (text, media, etc) that are so attractive to people that they want to share the content without being prompted to do so.

Think about all of those hilarious cat videos or the variety of memes going around with grammatical errors aplenty, and yet they’re spreading like wildfire. Not only do people enjoy these things, but they enjoy sharing them with their friends. May it makes them feel better to brighten someone else’s day, or perhaps it’s just a way to look cool in the eyes of people they care about – whatever the motivation, this is something that your business can take advantage of to increase both traffic and engagement if you play your cards right.

Where & How to share humor for best effects

Social networks are by far the best places to use humorous pictures, jokes, and other media to engage with your target audience and get some conversations going. Blogs and forums are also good places to share your funny material; the most important things to remember are taste and relevancy. You’ll have to know your audience well for this to be an effective tool for your SEO campaign, but it’s important to know what your audience likes and how they like to see it.

Some audiences like crude or bawdy humor, while others prefer their laughter to be caused by things that are a little more clean-cut. This is something that you will need to figure out on your own. If nothing else, get together a group of people who represent your target audience and run your potential funnies by them before posting them live to your social channels.

Getting the most out of humor for SEO

The trick to getting traffic is to share plenty of funny things, but to make sure that people connect them to your brand in some way or another. Sometimes you can place a watermark, your logo, or some other sign of ownership on a funny picture you have created and this will serve as a reminder of where the image originated.

Other times you can include a link to your site underneath the images when you share it. Now this is not likely to encourage other people to share your link as well, but if possible you can always place your URL directly on the image (in an unobtrusive spot of course) so regardless of where it goes or how it gets shared, people know where they can come to get more of the same!

If you share your humorous content on your own blog or website, make sure that there are social sharing buttons nearby – if it is easy and quick to share your images you can bet that more people will do so and be happy to help you out even if they don’t realize they’re helping at the time.

Comments:

What value do you see in funny pictures / memes / humorous content for SEO?

What is the difference between engagement marketing and proximity marketing?

Where engagement marketing is active, proximity marketing is passive. Think of them as different styles of hunting; proximity marketing is the snare that is set and left to function on its own, and engagement marketing is the hunter actively on the prowl. The goal of each style is to catch the attention of consumers and hopefully convert them into customers, it is the approaches that are different.

Proximity marketing looks for the easiest, fastest way of getting the message in front of the consumer. It is the billboard on the side of the roadway and the vinyl covering on the city bus. It seeks to uncover the best angle, the greatest leverage, and use this to accomplish its goal.

Engagement marketing takes the initiative. Instead of sitting passively and waiting for the consumer to come to the message, it takes the message to the consumer. But it doesn’t stop there! Instead of waiting for the consumer to figure out what the marketing message is and what they should do in response to it, engagement marketing draws them into a conversation and introduces the message as a part of the conversation.

What kinds of risks are involved?

The answer to this question depends on how you define a risk and determine whether or not a risk is worth taking.

Proximity marketing offers predictability…but at a price. A proximity marketer can sit down with a captive audience (think of a visitor landing on a website for the first time) but if they lose the attention of the audience, they have lost everything and must wait for the next audience to come along.

Engagement marketing offers the opposite – instead of being rigid and predictable, it is more fluid and versatile, allowing for a marketer to engage with an audience by following them and their discussions across a variety of platforms and mediums. It allows for changes in position and approach at will because it can adapt to fit the situation at hand.

Which type of marketing is best?

Overall, engagement marketing has the most potential for success. It also has the most potential for failure. It makes for an interesting proposition because on one hand it is highly flexible and can be used to approach the target audience where they prefer to be as opposed to bringing them to where you want them and sitting them down to hear your presentation. But what if even after all of this work the audience still doesn’t want to hear what you have to say?

Then you start a new conversation and begin again. Because of the lack of predictability there is a degree of risk in engagement marketing, but it is that very lacking that allows for the major successes engagement marketing is capable of producing.

Your takeaway

At the end of the day engagement marketing is the better of the two choices. Not only is proximity marketing becoming less and less effective over time, engagement marketing also allows for a greater degree of flexibility which can help increase brand awareness even while focusing on consumers ripe for conversion.

Knowing is half the battle

Sometimes knowing what’s going on before you set out on any new marketing initiative can make all the difference in the early stages. Take a moment and ask your self if you have the answers to the following questions:

• What do you expect to achieve as a result of this particular social campaign?
• How do you plan on reaching your goal?
• What will you use to judge your success?

The answers will help you to have an idea of what you’re expecting to happen as a result of your social activity, how you plan on making that end result a reality, and how you’re going to judge whether or not you succeeded in accomplishing your goal. That’s a lot to figure out before moving forward, but trust us when we say it will be well worth the time and effort to do a little planning beforehand!

It’s all about connections

One of the most interesting things about social media campaigns is their potential for meaningful conversation. Conversation is what drives most social activity, though of course things like “likes” and “shares” are important too. For the most part, conversions stem from one-on-one interaction between brand and consumer, and this is why making a connection is very important.

Meaningful conversations

When is the last time you had a meaningful conversation with someone through your social channel activity? While the definition of “meaningful” can be a bit subjective, we can usually agree on it being something that is helpful, insightful, etc.

Have conversations with your audience been meaningful? Ask yourself if your conversations have:

• Helped someone learn something new about your brand / products / services?
• Helped someone resolve a problem / answer a question?
• Helped someone to share their feedback with you or receive feedback from you?
• Truly engaged someone and enabled them to share information with you, and you with them?
• Helped you to reward someone’s loyalty / participation (i.e. presenting Facebook fans with an exclusive coupon)?

Engagement and conversions come from having objectives

Ask yourself what you really need to happen as a result of your social media campaign. What do you really need to see in order to see the effort as worthwhile and successful? And how can you reach for this goal, knowing all the while that you’re on the right path?

Clear objectives help you answer these questions by:

• Providing information on what to post
• Giving you an idea of what to include in your posts
• Showing you which conversations to continue and which to gently end
• Helping you to better understand your audience and their reaction to a crisis (which helps you form a crisis management strategy)

The effectiveness of a social campaign can be determined by the level of engagement you have seen forming around each item you post, and your brand presence as a whole. As we said before, likes and shares do help by showing what sorts of content people want to see, but they are not the only engagement metrics you should be looking at. Instead see how many comments have been made to each Facebook post, and how many conversations have been started by a given tweet on Twitter. How many people have actively engaged your brand, or allowed your brand to engage with them?

Tying any social metrics directly to profits isn’t really possible, and if it can be done it is incredibly difficult and time-consuming. This is why social success should be measured in it’s own right, and its value as a consumer engagement tool should be considered instead of exactly how it fits into the sales strategy of your business.

Comments:

How do you handle your social media activity? Do you go for more “likes” and “shares” or do you head more for meaningful conversations and direct engagement?

Penguin: Google’s anti-link spam update

Beginning with the Panda update, Google began cracking down on things it considered to be spam. Panda dealt with content spam, poor-quality content, and websites that dealt in this sort of thing found their traffic vanishing almost overnight.

Then came the Penguin update which waged war on link spam. Links that had been built using automated scraping, commenting, or publishing tools were in serious trouble, as were the sites that housed them. Websites that were little more than link farms went the way of the sites hit hard by the Panda update…they all but disappeared.

Some said this was the end to link-building as we knew it. Why build links if there was a distinct possibility that the methods you were familiar with could very well get your site penalized or even banned?

Penguin doles out penalties to link-spam violators

In the eyes of Google, these kinds of links tend to send up red flags that lead them to investigate your site:

• Too many links in your content (press release, blog post, etc)
• Links from low-quality article directories
• links from low-quality blogs
• Irrelevant links (don’t make sense in context of content)
• Random forum links (think relevance)

In the first round of the Penguin update, sites that had 80% or more of their backlink profiles made up of low-quality spammy links were penalized. This sent the link farms and the sites that just tried too hard using their automated tools down the river, never to be seen again.

Lately that standard has changed – Now sites with 50% or more of their profile made up of spammy links are getting the same penalties originally given to the 80% and up crowd.

Google is tightening the belt…where do you stand?

Instead of spamming, build your links another way

Despite what many thought at first, the days of link building are far from over. Instead, we have had to take a few steps back and consider things like value, relevance, and location. Brands had to be more careful what kinds of links they included in their site’s footers and sidebars, and what kinds of links they built pointing back to their website from generic web 2.0 properties scattered across the web. Instead strategies such as guest posting and blogger outreach were implemented, bringing in stronger, more relevant links that Google approved of much more than the kinds of links built in the past.

Shunning automated tools, brands began building their links “by hand” and taking the time to make sure that each link was well worth the effort it took to create. Some brands turned to social media for additional link-building opportunities, and still others used their email lists to work towards this goal.

Many new techniques and strategies have emerged since the Penguin update debuted that are helping individuals and brands alike move towards a brighter future. The dream of a spam-free web experience are no longer simply dreams any longer – Google is working to make these dreams into reality. And while some disagree with their methods and believe things could have been or could be done differently, the fact remains that we are being forced to evolve and grow with the times.

Are you ready?

Comments:

The next installment of the Penguin update is scheduled for mid-2013, but could come at any time.

Is your business in a good place with back link quality? If no, what will you be doing to change that?

Does Google even care?

Yes, but not in the ways that you might think they do.

Google cares about your domain name because it is a part of your website.

Do you have to have it crammed full of keywords? No, not really, especially since the EMD (Exact Match Domain) update to their algorithm as it doesn’t do you any good from an SEO standpoint. Keywords in your domain name might help people find your website more quickly, but they don’t give much SEO value to domain names anymore.

Do you have to format your domain a certain way such as having hyphens between every word? Again, no. This is personal preference; how beneficial is it to you and your customers to have your domain name be all one word, or to be broken up with hyphens? Some people find having to type extra characters to be annoying and this could be bad for your business – others don’t mind them and you might believe that your URL looks better with them included.

Will changing your domain name affect your site’s SEO?

Of course! After all, links are built to your website’s URL. While the content might be the same, the domain name / URL is not, and since that’s what links are looking for, they’re not going to have any value when there is nothing for them to connect to.

Say you sell your domain name but keep your content. All of the links that you built to your content on your old domain are not worth anything any longer. You will need to focus on building new links because your content will be considered to be “new” because of your new domain name. This can play in your favor if you have any pieces of content that were popular under your old domain as you can republish these to your new domain at a measured pace and build new links to them. Let people know you’ve set up shop under a new domain name, but that the same content they’ve grown to love is still available.

If you still own your old domain and are just moving over to a new one, consider keeping the old domain for a few years and using 301 redirects to funnel the power and value of your old backlinks to your new domain. This only works if you’ve kept your content and are just migrating to a new domain. If you no longer own your old domain or your old content, it’s time to start from scratch.

If you do decide to change your domain name, don’t worry about having any trouble from Google. As long as you handle things properly Google doesn’t have any reason to care what domain name you use!

Comments:

Have you moved domains before, or are you still at your original domain name?

Social media: Essential or just another tool?

Actually, it’s a little bit of both. Social media is a tool, and as such is just as valuable as any other tool in your marketing and branding arsenal. It is however a very important and essential thing that can win you a great deal of business if approached correctly.

Consumer choices based on social media?

Consumer decisions are often influenced by the things they see on social media channels, though when this is cited it is most often in the context of the information consumers take in from their friends and family members; if Cousin Mary really enjoyed doing business with Company A, then maybe Consumer B will also enjoy it.

Something you might not be as aware of is the tendency consumers have to base their buying decisions on a brand’s social presence…or lack thereof. People are much more likely to do business with a brand that has some sort of social presence, no matter how small it might be. If there is no social activity of any kind, many consumers will choose to take their business elsewhere.

Why is that?

In simple terms, it’s a trust issue. A social presence is confirmation that not only does a business exist in relationship to your brand, but that business is active and available for customer service if needed. People like having a way to contact a business to give them feedback that can be seen by others; this is true for both positive and negative feedback.

The desire consumers have to see some sort of social presence is very logical. Many fly-by-night businesses can set up shop online and look very legitimate and professional, and then vanish just as quickly as they came. A social presence indicates not only an increased degree of legitimacy and professionalism, but also proves that a business cares about its customers and wants to have more contact with them – this is something a less legitimate or reputable business would be interested in because it would be one more avenue to contact and exposure.

Search meets social

While the vast majority of web searches are still performed using top search engines, more and more searches are being performed on top social channels. While it is highly unlikely that social will ever overtake traditional search, it is worth having some sort of presence on the top social channels to ensure that should someone search for your brand or the products / services you offer, you will have something there to draw them in and get them interested in what you have to offer.

Comments:

How essential do you believe social media is to a brand’s success?