How to Create an Infographic That Boosts Social Shares and Leads Are you considering infographics for your marketing? Can you effectively communicate visually? Infographics are powerful ways to get attention. In this article, you’ll discover how to craft infographics that are widely shared. Why Infographics? Modern humans have been around for about 200,000 years and for almost all of that time (97%, to be precise), we’ve survived by reading just the visual imagery around us. We didn’t start using alphabets until about 5500 years ago. The fact is, our evolving brains continue to interpret images faster than text. Because of that, infographics, a hybrid of images and text, have become a great fit for social media marketing. Visual.ly shows why brands should use infographics. Examples of companies using infographics include Pepsi, Kraft, Pritikin, Coupon Chief, Marvel, and Venere.com. Infographics get noticed, invite engagement, are highly flexible and are popular on social networks. #1: Plan Your Story Around Your Objectives #2: Gather Your Data Conclusion
How to Increase Your Social Media Click-Through Rates Want more traffic to your website? What if you could double the click-through rates of your social media updates? Extra traffic from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter would be nice, right? In this article you’ll discover four steps for crafting a great call to action that improves click-throughs. Why Driving Traffic Matters Your website is the hub of your online marketing efforts. In an ideal world, you’d be funneling all of your social fans and followers to your website so you could do just that. When you share your latest blog post on Facebook, you want your fans to click through and read it on your website. Unfortunately, it’s been a time-honored struggle for businesses to get potential customers to take action. In most cases, you need to give them a little push. Read on to find out how to entice your social media fans and followers to click through to your website where you can create a deeper connection with them. #1: Tell Fans What You Want Them to Do #2: Give Fans a Reason to Click Through
3 Ways to Generate Leads With LinkedIn Groups Does your business need more leads? Are you participating in LinkedIn groups? LinkedIn groups are the easiest way to generate leads. In this article, you’ll discover how to maximize LinkedIn group networking to highlight your value and find and connect with important prospects. Why LinkedIn Groups? Since it launched back in 2003, LinkedIn has undergone a remarkable transformation. LinkedIn Groups is a valuable part of LinkedIn’s product features. LinkedIn is an indispensible social network when it comes to doing business online. Think about that for a minute: 64% of ALL of the traffic coming to your corporate or business website via social media channels is coming from LinkedIn! So how can you make the most of the fertile marketing ground that is LinkedIn? When you join a LinkedIn group, you have the wide-open opportunity to find, engage and do business with your ideal prospects. #1: Use Search Filters to Find Leads LinkedIn allows you to join up to 50 groups. Here’s what I like to do.
6 Ways to Use Pinterest to Promote Your Brand Is Pinterest part of your marketing strategy? Have you ignored Pinterest because you think your brand isn’t a fit? Every brand has a story to tell and visual content can help you tell it. Sharing your story with Pinterest’s engaged and active audience via compelling pictures is a great place to start. In this article you’ll see how six brands got creative with Pinterest and captured new followers and interest. Why Pinterest? Visual marketing is the current trend, so it’s no wonder brands see huge potential in Pinterest. Pinterest has over 70 million users and 25 billion pins. Pinterest launched in March 2010 and has over 70 million users; 500,000 of those are business accounts. While some brands have been quick to adopt Pinterest as a marketing tool to drive targeted engagement, there are a number of companies that can do more to harness the power of Pinterest and visual storytelling. Below are six innovative ways brands are using Pinterest. #1: Bring Pinterest to You #5: Humanize Your Brand
How to Make Your Facebook Marketing Work for B2B Do you target other businesses? Are you struggling to generate more Facebook engagement? Facebook marketing can work well for B2B companies, but you may have to rethink how you use your Facebook page. In this article you’ll discover four tips that can help you make Facebook work for your B2B company or client. #1: Understand Your Audience It’s important to recognize that your audience on Facebook may not be the same as your audience on LinkedIn. Knowing your audience—what resonates with them and what their expectations are—is always your first step to success. So how do you find out who your Facebook audience is? Facebook Insights tracks how your audience engages with your page. Facebook Insights offers a range of audience data. If you’re using Google Analytics, I recommend upgrading to Universal Analytics so you can use the affinity categories data. Inside Google Analytics click on Admin to upgrade to Universal Analytics. The best data of all, though, is the data you already have.
12 Types of Blog Posts to Drive More Traffic to Your Blog Need more blog post ideas? Have you ever stared at your screen, unable to figure out what to write? Are you wondering what type of content will best engage your audience? In this article, I’ll share 12 types of blog posts that can help you kick blogger’s block to the curb and keep your readers coming back for more. Why Create a Variety of Blogging Topics? You have writer’s block, so why am I giving you a list of types of posts instead of topics? Use a selection of tools to create valuable content for your audience. Choosing from a proven set of blog post types can actually free your creativity and allow you to deliver valuable, engaging content to your ideal reader or customer. When Batman needs to take out a threat to Gotham, he relies on a set number of bat-tools on his utility belt. Likewise, you can improve your writing and deliver high-quality posts in less time by leveraging some popular post archetypes and customizing them with your own content and perspective. Think about it.
A Beginner's Social Media Guide for Small Businesses Are you ready to connect with a wider audience? Want to know the best ways to leverage social media for your small business? If you haven’t used social media to market your products and services, you’re going to love how easy it is to get started. In this article, I’ll show you seven steps you can take to make social media marketing work for you. Why Social Media for Small Businesses? As a startup or small business owner, you know there’s a lot to accomplish with limited resources. Traditional marketing can be a drain on your funds. Social media offers small businesses a cost-effective way to reach their customers. It’s a trade-off though. This guide is for startup and small business owners with limited resources, but who want to learn how to establish and build their brand using social media. #1: Do Your Homework Behind every exceptional social media campaign is a great strategy. Social media is all about connecting with your audience on an authentic level. Start by defining your audience.
How to Create a Successful Business Blog Want to build a blog that benefits you and your business? Do you need help managing your blog? Whether you’re starting a new business blog or looking to revive an old one, there’s a lot to do. You may even feel overwhelmed by all that’s involved. But don’t worry. In this article you’ll find numerous resources and practical advice to help you through each stage of the blogging process. Why Write a Business Blog? A business blog helps you cement your position as an expert by giving you a platform to provide exceptional content (news, tips, trends) for your clients, potential clients and partners. “A business blog is important because it is the optimal choice for your content marketing hub. Here are 10 things you can do, along with a variety of resources you can use, to create and promote a successful business blog. #1: Establish Blog Goals A business blog is a long-term commitment—an investment of time, energy and effort. Why am I starting a blog? Blog Goals: Why Do You Need Them? #8: Write
5 Little-known YouTube Features for Marketers Are you using YouTube as part of your social media marketing strategy? Do you want to reach more viewers and optimize the quality of your videos? There are a whole host of lesser-known YouTube features that creators need to utilize to improve the quality of their content and expand their reach. In this article you’ll discover how to use these tools to increase watch time, attract subscribers and drive more traffic to your website. #1: YouTube Audio Library How many times have you watched a video online, only to exclaim afterwards that it was “the music that made it”? Music evokes a strong emotional response in an audience. It’s tough to find the right music for a video, especially if you’re on a budget. Choose background music via the YouTube Audio Library to improve your video’s impact. Access the YouTube Audio Library through the Creation Tools menu in the Video Manager section of your YouTube account. #2: YouTube Fan Finder Fan Finder ads will stay in the queue until approved. Success!
LinkedIn Publishing Platform: What Marketers Need to Know Do you publish long-form content? Are you wondering if the new LinkedIn publishing platform can help your business? To learn about the LinkedIn publishing platform and why you may want to consider it, I interview Stephanie Sammons for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing. The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting). In this episode, I interview Stephanie Sammons, who is a LinkedIn marketing expert and CEO of Wired Advisor, a digital marketing platform that helps financial advisors create and publish content. Stephanie shares how marketers can make the most out of the LinkedIn publishing platform. You’ll discover what type of content works best, when to schedule posts and how you can use the platform to grow a following. Listen Now LinkedIn Publishing Platform
4 Ways to Maximize Your Network With Social Media Do you want to quickly find and meet contacts related to your industry? Are you looking for ways to establish a long-term relationship with those connections? It can be tough to make first contact without coming on too strong. But if you engage with someone before you pitch and let them get to know you a little bit, you have a better chance of creating a solid relationship. In this article I’ll show you four ways you can use social media to meet market influencers and expand your network. Why Social Networking? Even if you live in the middle of nowhere (like me) you can build a network of influential colleagues. The usual networking methods still apply, of course: attending conferences, joining or starting mastermind groups and meeting friends of friends. But social media opens a larger sphere of opportunity. Below I show you how Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn—and a combination thereof—ensure your first interaction with a potential connection is a lasting one. #2: Add Value to LinkedIn Groups
How To Build a Content Strategy Using a Social Media Audit Do you want to create a strong social media content strategy? Are you looking for tools to help you analyze the content on your competitors’ social media profiles? To create a content strategy that engages and motivates your audience, you need to do a comprehensive social media audit. In this article I’ll share how to perform a social media audit to build a successful social media content strategy. #1: Identify Your Competitors Most businesses have already identified the main players in their industry by searching Google or social networks. If you don’t already have a list of competitors at hand, just search for your site on SEMrush to see a list of related providers. Identify your competitors using SEMrush. Once you’ve identified some potential competitors, the next step is to check out whether they’re active on social media. For this example, we’ll use Social Media Today and HubSpot as our target competitors, comparing them to Social Media Examiner‘s social presence. Twitter Facebook Google+
Twitter Real-Time Notifications: This Week in Social Media Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention. What’s New This Week? Twitter Introduces Real-Time Notifications: “When you’re logged in on twitter.com, you will receive notifications if someone has replied, favorited or retweeted one of your tweets.” “You can also receive notifications for direct messages and new followers.” Facebook Cleans Up News Feed Spam: A series of improvements has been made to the news feed to reduce stories that people believe are spammy and they don’t want to see. The “update targets three broad categories of this type of feed spam behavior.” Pinterest Redesigns Help Center: “You can quickly find whatever you need to know, whether you’re on the couch with your laptop or out and about on your phone.” Pinterest’s Help Center gets a fresh look. “These new language-based targeting segments allow marketers to tailor messages to people in the U.S.
Google Analytics: How to Make Smart Marketing Decisions Do you want to know if your content and social activities are supporting your business? Are you wondering how you can use Google Analytics to track your progress? To learn how to use Google Analytics to help make smart marketing decisions, I interview Andy Crestodina for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing. The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting). In this episode, I interview Andy Crestodina, author of Content Chemistry and co-founder of Orbit Media (a Chicago-based web design agency). Andy shares how to use Google Analytics to help you make informed marketing choices. You’ll discover why analytics are so important to your business success and step-by-step instructions on how to get started. Listen Now Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed Step 3.