5 Ways Your Business Should Use Twitter Hashtags
This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. Assuming you already have a Twitter account dedicated to your small business, you should also be investing in hashtags as part of your social media strategy. But let's back up a bit, in case you're unsure what a hashtag even is in the first place. Designated by a number sign (#), the hashtag is paired with a word or phrase to perform a variety of functions. In your business' case, you may choose to attach a hashtag, such as #smallbiz, or even your brand's name itself, as #nike might do. Now that you're familiar with the basic hashtag concept, let's apply principles specific to small businesses. 1. If you use Twitter for nothing else, use it to learn from others. If you seek a more specific conversation, narrow hashtags down by topic. 2. Secondly, don't weigh your tweets down with excessive hashtags. 3. 4. 5.
Ford Social Media Guidelines
The Ninja’s Guide to Google Alerts
Google Alerts is one of the most powerful free tools available, but it is often overlooked. It monitors the Web for words and phrases and even sends you an email or updates an RSS feed every time it finds a new result. Sounds pretty simple right? You will be amazed at how powerful a simple tool like Google Alerts can be. It has a huge range of uses which are only limited by your imagination. I’m going to reveal how I use Google Alerts to leverage brand, authority, traffic and sales, as well as share the exact alerts I have setup for my personal SEO blog. Monitoring Brand Just like John Chow, my name (Matthew Woodward) is my brand. You can then take action by addressing the feedback and getting links added. matthewwoodward.co.uk www.matthewwoodward.co.uk matthewwoodward matthew woodward Monitoring Competitors In addition to monitoring your brand, you should also be looking at what your competition is doing. Monitoring Questions in Your Niche Monitoring Content Distribution Monitoring Shoppers
17 Brilliant Sources of Content Hiding Right Under Your Nose
Creating content is a pain in the puppy. (I'm watching my potty mouth, you guys.) That's coming from someone whose entire job is to create content. But if you're a multi-tasking marketer -- creating email campaigns, building landing pages, managing a staff, tweaking your PPC budget, designing calls-to-action -- content creation has likely been elevated from a royal pain to a practical impossibility. I mean, maybe you'll get a blog post written in a couple weeks. If you're lucky, a new lead generation offer could get pumped out once a quarter. If you identify with that overburdened inbound marketer description and are constantly frustrated at your inability to create as much content as you'd like, this is the post for you. 1) Tap your sales and services teams. The best marketing content is the stuff that answers people's common questions. 2) Pull from your company collaboration tool. 3) Interview an internal expert. A few things I'm not an expert on: 4) Interview an external expert. Boom.
How to Use Photos on Facebook: Sizes, Dimensions, and Types
10 Steps for Successful Social Media Monitoring
Maria Ogneva is the Director of Social Media at Attensity, a social media engagement and voice-of-customer platform that helps the social enterprise serve and collaborate with the social customer. You can follow her on Twitter at @themaria or @attensity360, or find her musings on her personal blog and her company's blog. Recently I wrote about the differences in social media monitoring and measurement, as well as the importance of doing both. However, taking the first step to actually start monitoring can be daunting. And then what? How do you act on what you find when listening? How do you engage? I've developed these throughout my career and as part of my regular listening, participating and contributing to the space. 1. Why are you monitoring? Having an end goal in mind will help you target your resources correctly, select the right tool for the job and be more effective in the end. 2. Social media is relationship and conversation media. 3. 4. 5. 6. How does data flow? 7. 8. 9. 10.
How To Write Your Social Media Plan in 8 Steps
Maybe it’s because you’re in marketing. Maybe it’s because you’re from the younger generation assumed to be digital natives. Or maybe it’s because you’re already experimenting with social media and your success has been noticed. For whatever reason, The Powers That Be have chosen you to write your company’s social media plan. Or perhaps they haven’t asked, but you know social media is big and getting bigger, and so you want to write a plan to persuade your management to get involved. Where do you start? Here are some ideas on the main topics you need to cover in creating an impressive, yet realistic social media plan that garners executive buy-in and a clearer path to success. 1. Start your social media plan with some startling statistics and pithy quotes about the huge shift away from traditional publishing towards social media. If you wrote this plan two years ago, you would have leaned on the endorsement of old media with quotes like this: 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Social Media plan done?
5 Tips To Make Your Blog Posts More Social
This is a guest post by Andrew K Kirk from Face The Buzz. Social Media and Blogging have always played nicely together. Bloggers need platforms to distribute posts and Social Media thrives on material for users to consume – it’s a great match. 1. Twitter’s Embedded Tweet feature allows you to incorporate any tweet into your blog. Marketing Principles Learned from Volkswagen – @socialmouths ow.ly/ccBii— Francisco Rosales(@socialmouths) July 12, 2012 Of course you can see the tweet text, but you can do so much more. 2 . You just wrote a killer blog post and your readers are now much wiser. Shareaholic With over 1.6 million downloads, this social sharing tool is used on a lot of sites. Digg Digg Face The Buzz Blog used Shareaholic – that was until I found Digg Digg. 3. This is my favorite of the tips discussed because it really grabs your readers’ attention and drives them to take action. I really like this technique because it is beneficial for your reader and you. Choose your text. 4. 5.
The Social Media Publishing Schedule Every Marketer Needs [Template]
We have a 9 a.m. meeting? Yikes! Hold on -- let me just click around the internet like a maniac to find something for the morning tweet. Sound familiar? A few years ago, we created a social media content calendar template to help, which we recently updated to be better, faster, stronger, and just generally prettier. Download the free social media content calendar template here. This blog post will walk you through exactly how to use the template to stay on top of your social media content planning for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and Google+. (Note: HubSpot customers can also schedule content through Social Inbox, or use this spreadsheet to organize their content and subsequently upload it to Social Inbox. How to Use the Social Media Calendar to Plan Your Content Schedule When you open up the social media content calendar template, you'll notice the bottom of the Excel spreadsheet has several different tabs, most of which are dedicated to a specific social network.
