My Top Social Media Marketing Tips

Today I thought I would write about my social media marketing tips.

Although social media marketing has become mainstream many people are still making big mistakes.

Tip one

The first thing to remember is you need to build credibility before you sell via social media. Think of it this way, you wouldn't walk into a room of people and start trying to sell your products without first introducing yourself or engaging with them in some way.

Tip two

Make sure you include a call to action in all of your social media messaging. Your social activity will have a much better success rate if it contains a call to action.

Tip three

Ensure that you create really exciting content that people want to share. Make sure your content is insightful, engaging and interesting. This will make it more likely that people will share it with their network. Don't just create written content, use all different types of media from videos to podcasts, as well as infographics and images.

image credit: http://www.intellistart.co.uk

Tip four

Now that you're creating great content that people want to share keep the content flowing, make sure that you regularly post to your channels.

Tip five

Make sure you connect your social media channels up to your website. Ensure that your social media icons are present on your website and make sure the content on your website is easy to share on the social networks you want to have a presence on.

Tip six

Be sure to engage with people who engage with you. If somebody mentions you or retweets something you say be sure to thank them. If you have an opinion on something respond to posts made by other users. This will give you greater visibility amongst your target audience and help to increase your followers.

Tip seven

Social media metrics are becoming increasingly important to SEO activity. The more followers, shares and retweets your activity has indicates to the search engines you are credible in the subject you are talking about. This can translate into higher search engine rankings. In order to take advantage of the full SEO benefit from social media be sure to optimise your social media channels including the keywords you would like to appear for in the search engines.

Tip eight

Be sure to measure everything. The beauty of online advertising is that you can measure up all activity. Make sure you track all of the links which you share so you can measure the reach this will allow you to work out your ROI from your social media activity. You can also use this information to work out what works best for you and how you can improve this and replicate success.

Happy 2013 - What is to come?

I wish everyone a Happy and Healthy New Year.

2012 was a great year with a lot of things changing in he world of online marketing.

I was so busy towards the end of the year I did not have time to keep up my blog writing. So my New Years resolution is to keep blogging.

So what happened in 2012 that was exciting in the world of online marketing?

We all became more social. Those of you not tweeting, Like-ing, Plus-ing and Linking are being well and truly left behind as people, brands and businesses continue to grow their networks.

For me the big thing which appears to be changing the way SEO works is Author Rank. It's still new for many people and some sectors are not utilising it at all, IMO it is something you should be participating in.

Another thing I like from 2012 is TwitterCards. With Twitter now at 200 million active users you need something to make your tweets stand out.

Mobile is big, its been big for a while but the sheer volume of smartphones and tablets on the market means you need to stand up and pay attention to the mobile web. This could be by making your site mobile friendly, creating an app or performing mobile SEO.  

Content, Content, Content. This has always been an important part of any digital marketing strategy, but with so many Google animals flying around this needs to become the epicentre of your strategy. Content is becoming more diverse too, it's not just the written word which is being shared. Infographics, slideshows, podcasts, videos, images, tag clouds and lists are all being used to increase online exposure and generate backlinks.

So I can't wait to see what 2013 will bring. It will surely involve more social media tactics and more innovative content ideas.

How to Use Social Monitoring Tools for Link Building

Link building is a very important part of SEO, links are how you let the world know about your site. Not all links are equal. Some links are very valuable others are mediocre and others are really bad news. Obviously you want as many of the good links as possible.

Now you probably want to know “How do I find good link building opportunities?”

Many link builders use a technique known as competitor back link analysis. This is where you use tools to identify links pointing to your competitors and aim to get links from places where they have achieved links.
Another way to find places you might be able to attain links from is by monitoring the web for your brand, or for people talking about your products and services offered and looking for opportunities to link.

One way you can do this is by using social media monitoring tools. Tools which monitor social media will present real time conversations which could provide an opening for you to join the conversation and add something to it.

A good place to begin is to see what people are talking about by using Twitter search. You can use the search to look for people who are talking about things related to your business. Often people tweet links to websites that have a particular subject matter, these websites could be the ideal places for you to release content or join the conversation.

There are also plenty of free social monitoring tools that will help you identify where people are discussing related topics. One good tool to find websites which are discussing the topics which relate to your business is Google Alerts.

Google Alerts lets you track web mentions of any word or phrase and is one of the fastest ways to discover new content that gets published on the web. You can get alerts to your inbox of via RSS and you can tailor this to filter results by media type (News, Blogs, Video, Discussion and Books).

There are quite a lot of free and paid tools to help you see what people are talking about online and these will help to identify places where links can be built. The beauty of this method is you are going to be discovering themed links. Building links from sites which are related to your subject matter have always been better than links from non-related websites. These links are very valuable and can offer greater SEO benefit over a link from a site which is based around a non-related subject.