Entries Tagged 'social media' ↓

Networking online through social media sites is a great way to reach a worldwide audience.

The only problem is, once you put something out onto the web it’s gone, but not forgotten as it will be there forever.

Therefore it is important to have a strategy in place before you start. After all, you don’t want to experience that sinking feeling – you know the one I mean. When was the last time you send a text to the wrong person and stood watching your phone helplessly because you couldn’t get it back?

To help you survive and thrive in the online world, here are 3 simple tips to help you avoid making too many bloopers along the way.

1. Strategy

Briefly touched on above, it is essential you have a strategy in place before you dabble in social media.

If you throw things out in to the ether willy-nilly it will have no effect whatsoever. So, before you get going make sure you:

• Know what the goal of your campaign is
• Who your campaign is aimed at
• What your audience want to know
• The actions you need to take to get results

2. No optimisation

 The idea about social media and social networking is to boost your online visibility. But in order to be found, you must optimise your profiles.

That involves including your keywords in your biography.

3. Ignore feedback

Feedback, good and bad, must be dealt with.

Ignoring comments and messages is rather like sitting in your office and ignoring all calls and customers that walk through your door.

Social media opens up new channels through which your customers can interact with you. They will make use of your Twitter account and Facebook fan page. They will openly tell you what they think of your products and services (both the good and the bad) so it is essential you monitor these channels and deal with their feedback in a timely manner.

This is where your strategy comes into play. You must gave guidelines in place so your staff understand how to deal with positive and negative feedback to make sure you don’t end up with a PR disaster on your hands.

Over to you

Social networking is a great way to promote your business online, but it is essential you have a strategy in place.

How did you go about putting your strategy together?

Did you start out with one, or were you forced into it?

Leave your comments below and see if we can put together some best practice tips.

Have you ever wondered how some people end up everywhere on the web?

If you Google their name, reams and reams of listings appear. How do they do it? How do they make themselves so visible?

The answer is good old fashioned search engine optimisation.

If you’re thinking I’ve finally lost it because surely, SEO is surely just for websites, let me put your mind at ease. No, I haven’t completely lost it. SEO is just as important for your social media profiles as it is for your website.

The whole point about filling in your profile on sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn and all the other social networking sites, is to make yourself visible to potential clients or business partners. So if you’re not making the most of them, why bother?

To illustrate my point, after Googling ‘Sally Ormond’ the first page of search results alone show 6 social media/networking profiles.

So not only does my website and blog appear, but anyone searching for information about me will also see my name splattered all over the web with numerous profiles (and blog posts and articles) detailing all the great work I do for my clients.

That’s pretty powerful stuff.

OK, I hear what you’re saying – Sally Ormond is my name as opposed to a search term that I would optimise for.

So what if I amended my search to ‘Sally Ormond Copywriter’ or ‘Sally Ormond freelance copywriter’?

Well….

As you can see, in both cases even more social media sites appear.

So there you go – this is why it’s essential to make your profiles stand out. That doesn’t mean you have to cram them with your keywords. But make sure your keyword (which is probably your primary business activity) appears near the beginning of your description.

Filling the web with great information about you and what you can do for your clients is essential if you want to position yourself as an expert in your field.

After all, it’s becoming more common for people to Google other people so they can find out a bit about them. If nothing shows up (or very little), what does that tell them?

Despite the number of blog posts and articles you see about Twitter, I was flabbergasted to read a recent post on The Drum.

Apparently 71% of companies are still ignoring consumer complaints on Twitter.

Social media has opened up communications between consumer and business. Now, someone can complain through Twitter about poor service or product quality and within seconds potentially thousands of people will know about it.

And yet, there appear to be an alarming number of companies who are not monitoring Twitter effectively.

According to the article, in a survey by Maritz Research, only 29% of those who tweeted a company with a complaint received a reply. This shows a worrying trend – namely, businesses are still not ‘getting’ Twitter.

The post goes on to say that…

The American research looked at 1,298 consumers over the age of 18 who frequently tweet and have used the micro-blogging site to complain about a specific product, service, brand or company.

• 49% of respondents had expected the company to read their tweet
• 64.9% of older tweeters (aged 55+)  expected a reply
• 38.4% of younger tweeters (18-24 year olds) expected a reply

Of those who received a response from a company, 34.7% were very satisfied and 39.7% were somewhat satisfied with the response.

While 86.4% said they would love/like it if the company had got back to them regarding their specific complaint, 63.3% said that they wouldn’t like or would hate it if the company contacted them about something other than their complaint.

The power of a tweet

Once upon a time, if a customer was unhappy about something they would pick up the phone and have a rant. But because they would be speaking with someone representing the company, in theory, their complaint wouldn’t go unnoticed.

But today, consumers have the ability to tweet their anger. Not only would this be directed at the company’s twitter name so (you would assume) they would get to hear about it and take action, it would also be seen by all their followers.

Whether companies like it or not, Twitter (and other social media channels) is the new ‘social telephone’.

The above research shows that most people (84%) liked it when companies got a response form their tweet.  Just by listening, a company could greatly improve its customer service satisfaction levels.

Monitoring the noise

If a company is going to use social media, it must ensure it has the resources to use it effectively.

A Twitter account must be monitored to offer timely responses to customer queries and complaints. If you quickly make contact and resolve the issue, you can turn a potentially bad situation into a positive. Your customer will see you as a company that cares about its customers and listens to them.

Make sure your company isn’t one of the 71%:

• Monitor Twitter for any mention of your brand
• Respond quickly to tweets you receive from customers
• Never get into a Twitter argument
• A quick response will turn a bad situation into a positive outcome

Over to you

Does your business use Twitter?

How are you making sure you monitor it?

If you have any tips to share to help other businesses get to grips with the ‘social media telephone’, leave a comment below.

 Sally Ormond – Freelance copywriter

Following from my recent request on Twitter for guest bloggers, Neil Stoneham of Voxtree kindly agreed to allow me to re-post his blog “Me-me-media” on Freelance Copywriter’s Blog.

It takes a look at the good, the bad and the ugly sides of social media and how it has permeated all our lives – enjoy…

The explosion of Social Media over recent years has thrown up all sorts of fascinating sociological paradigms. We have to thank Twitter for helping engineer the Arab Spring, Facebook for catching up with friends, and Youtube for making the secretive machinations of oppressive regimes all the more difficult to conceal. There are numerous examples of the good that Social Media has brought to our increasingly fragile world, and there will doubtless be more to come.

But among all the brilliance of Social Media, there are inevitably demons lurking within. Obviously nobody is trumpeting the rise of cyber-bullying, the open platforms for ranting extremists or the accessibility of a Daily Mail comments page. Actually, those last two are pretty much the same thing, but anyway…

Whatever the ying and yang of Social Media, something else seems to have pervaded our collective online consciousness – particularly for those of us who use social media regularly. Namely, we have all become narcissists. Even the most modest and placid among us seem to have a field day, telling all and sundry about the minutiae of their lives, when let loose on a Facebook status or a Tweet. This blog advertises my own guilt here; the fact that I’m typing away, voicing my opinions on this and that, assumes there are people out there who actually care what I think about such things.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not condemning people for announcing to their 1762 ‘friends’ matters of import or joy (or sometimes misery…often misery, in fact). It’s just that the Social Media world seems so, I don’t know, cluttered.

In the old days, if we had something to share with our friends we would call or meet them. And because we had to go to some physical lengths to do this, you could rest assured that the topic would be of relative importance. Today, we have Social Media, so we don’t have to get off our backsides and tell people our news any more. We can type it in less than 140 characters and know that most people in our social circle will learn of it within 24 hours max. So…what’s wrong with that? Nothing. It’s great. I love it.

But…

Would a friend call me up to tell me they had just eaten a nice pizza, been for a particularly satisfying run or bought a new pig for their virtual farm? Nope. Or if they did, they wouldn’t be friends for long! The point is that a lot of people now litter the Internet with matters of absolutely no interest whatsoever; things that very often don’t ‘bring anything to the party’ at all.  That’s not to say that every update or tweet has to be of particular interest to me. But I’ve had to hide some people from my Facebook ‘wall’ for bombarding it every five minutes with a litany of utter irrelevance.

I could go on. I’m not pretending to be whiter-than-white here – somebody could no doubt call hypocrisy somewhere – but I think that there needs to be debate about this. I’m not calling for bans or rules (you can go to the Daily Mail site for that). But if we go on creating so much unnecessary noise, we could end up drowning out the whole Social Media goodness that there is.

Thanks Neil for your take on the virtual world that is beginning to take over the real world – or at least it feels that way at times.

Over to you

What do you think?

How has social networking sites affected your life?

Have you embraced them with open arms or are you keeping them at bay with a very large stick?

Leave a comment below and lets get a virtual debate started.

The good news is that loads of businesses understand the importance of content generation. Whether it’s through blogging or article marketing, they appreciate that constantly producing great content boosts their online presence.

Yay!

The bad news is that unless people can find it, it won’t get read and won’t generate the constant stream of traffic to your website that you were hoping for.

Boo.

How do you make sure people can find your stuff?

There are several things you can do to make sure your hard work isn’t wasted.

1. Research

Before you start writing anything, take a good look at your target audience. What is it that they want? What interests them? What issues do they have that they might want help with?

Only when you can answer those questions can you be sure you’re writing focused, informative articles that they’ll want to read.

2. Call to action

If they do happen to find your articles and posts, but you fail to ask them to do anything once they’ve read it, they’ll just go away again.

The whole point of generating content is to drive people to your website, so make sure you tell them to visit your site, or place relevant links within your article to take them to the page on your site that holds all the answers to their questions.

3. Forget the search engines

OK, don’t write them off completely, but make sure you write for your reader. Make sure your information is interesting, well written in simple language (no jargon) and easy to read.

It is your readers who will (hopefully) be buying from you, not the search engines.

4. Keywords

Yes, I know I just said don’t write primarily for the search engines, but you still need to get your keywords in your headings and body copy if you want to be found. But that doesn’t mean stuffing it with keywords.

Keep your writing natural – the keywords will drop in automatically without you even realising it.

5. Social media

Make sure you promote your writing. Send out links through Twitter and Facebook, but make sure you add value and engage rather than just blatantly self-promote.

Social media sites (such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn) are a great way to spread the word and to get your article. Plus, promoting them will encourage people to share your content with others.

Over to you

Do you content market? What has your experience been? Leave a comment below and share your tips too.

Sally Ormond – freelance copywriter, blogger and social media addict

Briar Copywriting – T:@sallyormond – F: www.facebook.com/freelancecopywriting