On the heels of its first-quarter earnings report, Twitter seems to be struggling to keep its users active. The social-media service added 14 million active users, up about 6 percent from the previous quarter, but not as much as some analysts would have liked.
Twitter now counts 255 million active users; Facebook has over 1 billion active users. Keep in mind that an active user as someone who logs into their account once a month, not someone who’s necessarily tweeting regularly.
So what to do if you are one of many that set up a Twitter account and abandoned it? Dust off that handle, and give it another try. Your business needs it!
1. Be patient. Unless you’re Katy Perry or Starbucks, your brand probably doesn’t have a built-in following. Your first tweet isn’t going to get a lot of traction because no one knows you’re there. So start favoriting, retweeting and replying to content that interests you.
2. Follow more accounts. Find more accounts that are more relevant to your interests, but be selective. There are accounts that may have 100,000 followers, but they also follow 80,000. How in the world will that person ever see anything useful to them? At the same time, don’t feel bad for unfollowing. Remember, when it comes to Twitter, it's basically a high school game. Don't waste your time following someone if they aren't going to return the favor. Twitter upkeep can get horrible at times, esp when your in the 100k range. You almost need to have a 3rd party program to manage your follows/unfollows.
3. Be diligent. Make a point to spend even five to ten minutes a day reading, favoriting and replying to tweets. Don’t be discouraged if your replies and tweets go unnoticed. The more you tweet, the sooner you will learn what works and what doesn’t. As the days go on, increase your time but don't overdue it.
4. Say something. Try not to go days between tweets. Whether it’s a discount code, information on sales or something fun, be active. That said, don’t tweet for the sake of tweeting. Set up a schedule and follow it. Don't fade away from Twitter again!
Monday, June 15, 2015
Monday, June 8, 2015
You Can Kick-Start Your Own SEO Campaign
Search engine optimization can be a confusing and frustrating topic for an entrepreneur. He or she probably knows that SEO contributes to online success but may not always understand what it entails or how to best approach it.
Consumers turn to search engines when they look for products and services online, so positioning your website so it can land higher in search results can prove beneficial. Search engine optimization involves improving elements on your website's pages as well as increasing the number of inbound links (from other sites) to raise its ranking in nonpaid search results.
A new business can be inundated by offers from SEO agencies from every corner of the world, all promising the same outcome: top rankings in search results. Some digital agencies will quote five-figure monthly retainers. Or overseas companies will promise the world for a monthly stipend of a few hundred dollars a month.
But overpaying for a service that doesn’t deliver on its promises can quickly deplete a marketing budget; selecting a poor service can result in a website's penalization by Google. The worst thing an entrepreneur can do is contract for a low-quality SEO service in an effort to save money. The cost of cleaning up the mess created can surpass the steep fee for hiring a more experienced agency at the outset.
If your business doesn't have the budget to hire a SEO agency, then take a deep breath, grab the SEO reins and follow these tips to handle your search engine optimization process internally for a while.
Optimize on the page level first. Many businesses forget one of the most important elements of search engine optimization: focusing on the text within a page of a business website.
This involves making sure that website elements are properly optimized to make a given page worthy of a high ranking on a search engine's results for a desired keyword.
Create blog posts. Not only should your business website have a blog that's updated regularly, you can assign posts to staffers that hit the keywords you're trying to target for SEO. Have one employee manage the blog and delegate writing assignments throughout the company.
Curate a social media presence. A website that has its content shared across social media will attract social signals (tweets, "likes" and shares) and also receive visits from various social media channels, which will contribute to its ranking by search engines.
A business needs a social media footprint from its birth, and while you might not be able to afford a full-time social media manager or agency, that doesn’t mean the company's social presence should be neglected.
Look for guest blogging opportunities. Guest blogging on industry-related sites that receive a lot of traffic is great for brand exposure but can also result in other sites' taking notice of your company and linking back to your site. This is a type of natural link building that Google loves when ranking websites.
Seek out industry blogs with the potential to provide your business some exposure and traffic and then offer them guest posts. The tasks can be spread out throughout your company at first. Have a contest that rewards the employee who lands the most guest posts and reward the staffer who creates the guest post driving the most traffic to your site. This kind of competition can produce great results while building camaraderie, which is very important for a new business.
Later on, when your business becomes more successful, then you'll be able to bring on full-time content marketers or hire an agency to handle the creation and distribution of such content.
Consumers turn to search engines when they look for products and services online, so positioning your website so it can land higher in search results can prove beneficial. Search engine optimization involves improving elements on your website's pages as well as increasing the number of inbound links (from other sites) to raise its ranking in nonpaid search results.
A new business can be inundated by offers from SEO agencies from every corner of the world, all promising the same outcome: top rankings in search results. Some digital agencies will quote five-figure monthly retainers. Or overseas companies will promise the world for a monthly stipend of a few hundred dollars a month.
But overpaying for a service that doesn’t deliver on its promises can quickly deplete a marketing budget; selecting a poor service can result in a website's penalization by Google. The worst thing an entrepreneur can do is contract for a low-quality SEO service in an effort to save money. The cost of cleaning up the mess created can surpass the steep fee for hiring a more experienced agency at the outset.
If your business doesn't have the budget to hire a SEO agency, then take a deep breath, grab the SEO reins and follow these tips to handle your search engine optimization process internally for a while.
Optimize on the page level first. Many businesses forget one of the most important elements of search engine optimization: focusing on the text within a page of a business website.
This involves making sure that website elements are properly optimized to make a given page worthy of a high ranking on a search engine's results for a desired keyword.
Create blog posts. Not only should your business website have a blog that's updated regularly, you can assign posts to staffers that hit the keywords you're trying to target for SEO. Have one employee manage the blog and delegate writing assignments throughout the company.
Curate a social media presence. A website that has its content shared across social media will attract social signals (tweets, "likes" and shares) and also receive visits from various social media channels, which will contribute to its ranking by search engines.
A business needs a social media footprint from its birth, and while you might not be able to afford a full-time social media manager or agency, that doesn’t mean the company's social presence should be neglected.
Look for guest blogging opportunities. Guest blogging on industry-related sites that receive a lot of traffic is great for brand exposure but can also result in other sites' taking notice of your company and linking back to your site. This is a type of natural link building that Google loves when ranking websites.
Seek out industry blogs with the potential to provide your business some exposure and traffic and then offer them guest posts. The tasks can be spread out throughout your company at first. Have a contest that rewards the employee who lands the most guest posts and reward the staffer who creates the guest post driving the most traffic to your site. This kind of competition can produce great results while building camaraderie, which is very important for a new business.
Later on, when your business becomes more successful, then you'll be able to bring on full-time content marketers or hire an agency to handle the creation and distribution of such content.
Monday, June 1, 2015
5 Tools to Grow Your Online Presence
Growing your online presence is no easy job -- especially for small and midsize business that are often lacking the brand awareness and resources of their much larger counterparts. Fortunately, now, more than ever there are a plethora of tools to help newly-minted entrepreneurs build their brand quickly and cheaply.
Here are five to help jumpstart your online-community presence.
1. Buffer to post content. Content sharing is one of the easiest way to grow and nurture your community. Yet, with more and more social platforms popping up online, content sharing can be time consuming, as each has its own style and messaging. Enter Buffer. This tool is a great way to streamline your posting and schedule on multiple platforms, making sure you’re talking to everyone where it counts. Plus, it’s a great way to keep your communications going on the weekend, a time when many users are interested in sharing online content.
2. LaunchCrew to launch campaigns. When launch day comes, startups need to get the word out to as many people to have the most impact and increase the probability of being heard in crowded industries. Often this entails getting your current followers to share with their friends, family and connections. LaunchCrew will help you do just that. It lets you cast a much wider net, practically doubling or tripling your impact. But how? By asking your audience for their credentials to be able to post on their behalf on the day of your launch. Or for any major campaign. You’ll get that initial boost you’ve always dreamed of -- the one you really need these days to break out of the pack from the very start.
3. Unbounce to create landing pages. Landing pages are now a must-have design choice to boost your online special operations. By customizing these towards a targeted audience, along with specific and relatable calls to action, it makes them way more efficient at achieving higher click-through rates. Unbounce allows you to create landing pages incredibly fast, with no technical skills required, making it easy not only to build but also to A/B test and implement the best results.
4. Click to Tweet to foster sharing. It’s ok to ask people to share. But the simpler it is, the more people you’ll get to do so. By giving out a simple, pre-composed click-to-tweet URL for your audience to tweet in seconds, you’ll find that your potential for virality is drastically increased.
5. Mention to monitor and react. Once people start talking about you, the best way to continue growing is to detect these mentions and to reply to every one of them. By doing so, it fosters a lot of motivation for them to talk and mention even more about you, creating a network of trusted brand advocates. By having alerts based on keywords -- like the name of your company, your products or your competitors -- mention allows you to stay in the know and react in seconds by connecting your social accounts directly to the app.
With these five tools, you’ll find yourself developing and maintaining a clear brand voice in no time. And it’s then that you’ll start to see your online presence heating up.
Here are five to help jumpstart your online-community presence.
1. Buffer to post content. Content sharing is one of the easiest way to grow and nurture your community. Yet, with more and more social platforms popping up online, content sharing can be time consuming, as each has its own style and messaging. Enter Buffer. This tool is a great way to streamline your posting and schedule on multiple platforms, making sure you’re talking to everyone where it counts. Plus, it’s a great way to keep your communications going on the weekend, a time when many users are interested in sharing online content.
2. LaunchCrew to launch campaigns. When launch day comes, startups need to get the word out to as many people to have the most impact and increase the probability of being heard in crowded industries. Often this entails getting your current followers to share with their friends, family and connections. LaunchCrew will help you do just that. It lets you cast a much wider net, practically doubling or tripling your impact. But how? By asking your audience for their credentials to be able to post on their behalf on the day of your launch. Or for any major campaign. You’ll get that initial boost you’ve always dreamed of -- the one you really need these days to break out of the pack from the very start.
3. Unbounce to create landing pages. Landing pages are now a must-have design choice to boost your online special operations. By customizing these towards a targeted audience, along with specific and relatable calls to action, it makes them way more efficient at achieving higher click-through rates. Unbounce allows you to create landing pages incredibly fast, with no technical skills required, making it easy not only to build but also to A/B test and implement the best results.
4. Click to Tweet to foster sharing. It’s ok to ask people to share. But the simpler it is, the more people you’ll get to do so. By giving out a simple, pre-composed click-to-tweet URL for your audience to tweet in seconds, you’ll find that your potential for virality is drastically increased.
5. Mention to monitor and react. Once people start talking about you, the best way to continue growing is to detect these mentions and to reply to every one of them. By doing so, it fosters a lot of motivation for them to talk and mention even more about you, creating a network of trusted brand advocates. By having alerts based on keywords -- like the name of your company, your products or your competitors -- mention allows you to stay in the know and react in seconds by connecting your social accounts directly to the app.
With these five tools, you’ll find yourself developing and maintaining a clear brand voice in no time. And it’s then that you’ll start to see your online presence heating up.
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