How many times have you created a blog, thought it was great and felt people would be drawn to it only to find out that very few folks were even interested in it? You don’t understand why this is happening – why the traffic to your blog isn’t growing. Why you’re not getting the kinds of social shares that many other blogs seem to relish in. That's why you need a blog positioning strategy.
The reality is that professional marketers and bloggers know what’s important when it comes to content creation and developing products people love. And, if you want to be successful, you have to know it as well.
What’s The Secret That Every Successful Person Knows?
Think back to all the blogs you have read – what keeps you coming back to certain ones and ignore others? What motivates you to come back over and over again?
Popular blogs provide a good deal of content that have been geared toward their audience. They know the types of folks they’re talking to and develop material that resonates with them. The material they send sparks an emotional response – nothing happens accidentally. They’ve positioned their blog for their readers in just the right way.
Do you know if any readers that feel this way about your blog?
Blog Positioning: What Is It and How Does It Help Increase Readership To Yours?
In simple terms, blog positioning is a term used by marketers to learn the process of determining how your target audience is, what you can offer to them, how what you’re offering can affect them and how it’s different from your other products.
Think about your feelings for Starbucks, Target, Apple, brands of vehicles you’ve owned, etc. These companies work hard to connect with their customers on an emotional level. These brands, quite successful, have positioned themselves in a way that their messages and products/services spark an emotional response.
Blog positioning does not mean creating taglines or coming up with copy to be used. Instead, it reduces the audience to small slices, determines how your products/service are different from other companies and lets people know what the benefits are to using these things.
An Easy Positioning Formula You Can Follow
Now you understand why blog positioning is so important, but it’s time to figure out just how to do it. According to Crossing the Chasm author Geoffrey Moore, there is a positioning format that you should follow:
For – Target audience
Who – Audience with a problem
Product – What is the product/service to problem
Offers – What it can do for the audience
Unlike – Make mention of a competitor
Product/Service/Solution – Not the main point of difference
Amazon is one “prime” example of positioning. Back in 2001, Amazon was just a books-only online vendor. For Internet users who love reading books, Amazon.com is the best retail bookseller that offers immediate access to more than 1.1 million books. The difference between it and the traditional book retailers is that the website offers a mixture of low prices, superior convenience and an exhaustive selection.
Lexus’ positioning statement goes a little like this:
Affluent drivers who look for luxury vehicles that include reliability and superior quality can rest easy that Lexus only works with the best materials and technologies and provide vehicles with the quality control, so customers get a luxury vehicle experience.
How can you create a positioning statement that works for your business?
Learn Who Your Audience Is With Positioning
For
If you’re going to come up with a successful Blog Positioning Statement, you need to know one thing for sure: learn who your target customers or audience is. Are you gearing your material for middle-aged women, stay-at-home mothers, people looking for dates or bloggers?
From this point, go a little further by putting attention on their problems, hopes and concerns. You don’t have to get into the demographics of where your prospective audience is. What kinds of problems are they faced with? What can you address in your blog to help them “address” those problems?
Asking yourself these questions will help you to know who your sub-audience is – the people who really care about the things you have to say and offer.
In his blog post, Who Are Your Customers, Seth Godin said the following questions should be asked:
Who does your audience believe?
Who can they trust?
What is your audience scared of?
Who are they in love with?
What is the audience looking for?
Along with his questions, there are three more you should consider asking:
What keeps your audience up at night?
What kinds of things do they dream about?
What inspires your audience to take action?
When you answers the “For” questions, you can address the “Who” portion of the positioning statement.
Who
Now that you’ve gotten to the Who, you can write with a more clearly defined audience instead of a broad one. This is what turns a regular blog into a success – it establishes emotional connections.
Newbies stress about defining the niche process – worried that their blog won’t resonate with a bigger audience. But, you can explain who you are without excluding anyone. If you give your niche audience what they’re looking for, other readers will seek you out. They will share the elements you have.
Product Definition
After you’ve gotten your “for” and “who” blog positioning details out of the way, it’s time to explain the features of your product. This is rather easy. For instance, Dyson is a lightweight, easy-to-use vacuum cleaner that won’t lose its section.
Product Offerings
When it comes to a blog, this positioning will note what your readers take away from reading it. For example, Bizwebjournal may have something to the effect that it helps newbie Internet entrepreneurs and bloggers begin their careers and launch successful products and move past the traditional marketing obstacles standing in its way.
Differentiation
An effective positioning statement is one that separates your product from your competitors; ensuring you establish the product’s value. Dyson’s positioning statement is that the vacuum won’t lose the suction – setting itself apart from Bissell and Hoover.
When it comes to blogging, you need to understand your readers have an array of choices they can choose from. What blogs are you in competition with? Why should readers pick your blog over theirs?
The Internet and social media have ensured your message reaches your audience. Thus, your audience can find so many other blogs to get their news from.
This doesn’t need to be a daunting process. Although you face an array of competitors, your unique voice, take and connection to your readers’ challenge is what will set you apart from the competition.
Differentiation isn’t about credentials – people are not going to read or share posts based on your credentials. You want them to read and share it because it offers something different other blogs don’t offer.
Effective Positioning Statement Puts Attention On The Advantages
All effective positioning statements put attention on a product’s advantages – not just its features. Products, where the focus is on features, tend to have problems staying relevant. Why? Other companies will come out with something better – brighter screen, longer, battery life, bigger engine, etc.
If you lay out what the advantages are, it’ll be more appealing to your audience and their desire, sparking emotions. What are some of the benefits you could highlight? They include safety, more money, more time, etc. Or, the benefits could be perceived such as the cool factor of owning a product. Apple enthusiasts always wait in line for when the company is releasing an updated iPhone because owning one gives them the feeling of coolness.
Of course, if you’re a writer, you don’t have a tangible product, but the benefits are still there. You need to spark emotions with your readers – look to aspire them, to give them hope. You want them to benefit from your content. How can you assist them to act another way and solve their issues?
Jon Morrow, a blogger and blogging instructor, advises others to think of their possible readers as the walking dead. This means reaching into their dreams, desires, and fears. If you can address their issues, you have established some emotional connections. It makes the walking dead come alive.
It’s Time To Have Positioning Work For You
This is the moment to try positioning for your blog and/or products. If you use the above structure, you can establish a connection with your readers and lay out the advantages you’ll give them.
My blog has something like this:
For – People who are ready to take the step to become online entrepreneurs
Who – People who want to grow their business quickly
StartLaunchGrow – A regular amount of care, incentive, curation, entertainment and learning
Provides – A safe community of innovative learning as well as tangible tools and examples to assist with marketing, sales and product development
Unlike – Focuses on “What” to assist readers with the why, who and how
Our Tools and Blog – Inspire and help new business owners with business guidance and emotional support.
When you position your blog, you may have to do it several times. Be sure you read it several times and ask someone you trust to look through it as well.
And, if you’re not sure about things, here’s something to ask yourself, “What kind of emotions do I want my readers to have after they’ve read my posts?”
It’s All About Being Smart
Do you want to reach deep inside your readers and spark their emotions? Do you want to become the Starbucks they can’t do without? It’s not just taglines that make Apple, Starbucks, Amazon or Target successful; it’s knowing what makes their users feel something and make them feel how their companies want them to feel.
It’s time for you to use the blog positioning method for yourself; to generate a connection with your readers – make them become your biggest fans and refer others to your blog too.
Paraphrasing Charles de Lint, "nobody can see the world like you do, which means nobody can tell the stories you can tell".
Did you position your blog in the right way? Please let us know in the comments below.
I don't know about you but Twitter is my favourite social media channel and I love it. There are a lot of Twitter tools out there and I use a lot of them.
The last few years I tried as many Twitter tools and apps I could find. Some of them were just OK, others were great. Many of them I still use today and others have faded.
Still today new ones keep popping up and the market is so saturated with Twitter tools that it's really hard these days to find the good ones that are reliable.
That's why I have decided to put together a fresh list of top Twitter tools. There is something here for everyone.From dashboards to very specific tools for analytics and hashtags.
Click on the category below and it will take you straight to the tools of your choice
The dashboard is the most important Twitter tool we all use as this is where it usually starts. A good Twitter management tool will help you achieve a better strategy, get better results, and generally make your life easier by putting everything in one place. There are quite a few dashboards available, so I’ve put together a list of all the dashboards I know of:
This is my favorite Twitter tool. It let's you schedule your posts. Follow/unfollow based on hashtags or influencer following and many more things all within the same tool.
Agorapulse being a social media management tool that allows you to manage all social activity from one place, lets you publish and schedule updates, and allows you to run contests, quizzes and even promotions. This tool also has a social media inbox, and PowerPoint analytics reports that look great.
Pricing:Free Trial & paid plans start at $49/month
Sprout Social is a social media management tool to allows you to easily manage your Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn accounts from within one place. Monitor your social networks to find conversations, engage with other users, publish new updates, and also get analytics reports. All in one place.
Pricing:30 day Trial & paid plans start at $59/month
CoSchedule can be used to make your social media posting go faster and more efficiently. Share blog posts as well as other updates. You can also create an editorial calendar to become a more productive blogger and manage all your social accounts from one place.
Pricing:7 day Trial and paid plans start at $15/month
If you need an all-in-one dashboard for all your social media accounts Hootsuite is the tool for you. You can use Hootsuite to manage several accounts, engage with followers and friends, schedule your updates, monitor your conversations and keywords, and get analytics to see how you’re doing online.
Pricing:Free version available & paid plans start at $8/month
With Plugg.io you can manage both your Twitter and your Facebook accounts, find new friends, and you can also plug into your favourite news sources to find content to share on your social media channels. They also have a 24/7 automation tool that assures you never go silent online, and a scheduling feature is available.
Pricing:Free version available & paid plans start at $12.95/month
#Twitter Tools:The Complete List (180 Free and Paid Tools) via @bizwebjournal
TweetDeck can be used to manage multiple Twitter accounts from one dashboard, keep track of any lists, or searches and create searches to monitor whatever you are interested in. See your home page updates, notifications, DMs, and anything else you want, all in one screen. Great tool to monitor your brand and it's free.
You can monitor all of your engagement and mentions from one dashboard with MavSocial for many of the most popular social networks. What makes MavSocial stand out is their attention to the visual aspects. Check out their visual content library, find digital stock photos and edit them with their built-in editing software. MavSocial also offers analytics and they have a social inbox where you receive all your social media notifications.
Pricing:Free version available & paid plans start at $59/month
Sendible lets you manage your social media from one place, you can publish and schedule posts to multiple social accounts, engage with other people and generate leads with their Social CRM. Sendible also provides in-depth analytics, and you can track your results daily, weekly or monthly, whichever you want.
Pricing:30 day trial & paid plans start at $59/month
Find Twitter influencers in your niche and reach out to them to build a relationship. This tool will allow you to build brand exposure via influencer marketing and outreach.
Audiense is a nearly all-in-one platform for all things Twitter concerned. The free plan comes with analytics, best time to tweet, follow/unfollow tools, and community segmentation.
This Twitter dashoard allows you to schedule tweets, track keywords, track your clicks and send DM's.
Pricing:7 day trial & paid plans start at $36/month
Advertising
With a lifetime span of only 18 minutes per tweet getting organic results is not always the easiest thing – it takes a lot of work and effort and it can also take a long time to get to the stage you’re aspiring to be. But if you have something great you want to promote, or simply speed things up a bit, there’s always Twitter advertising. Here are some of my favourite Twitter advertising tools.
Wordstream offers PPC software for Googel Adwords, Facebook and Twitter. They also have managed services if you rather have a specialist handle your advertising needs.
If you want to easily run Twitter advertising campaigns, and get them published in just three easy steps then Meetsoda is your advertising tool. The Meetsoda analytics are available in real time, so you can adjust your campaign for maximum reach on the spot. You’ll also get a full campaign report when it’s over – huge time and money saver!
#Twitter Tools:The Complete List (180 Free and Paid Tools) via @bizwebjournal
Adstage is perfect for those running ads on different networks at the same time, as it’s an all-in-one ad management platform. Adstage lets you easily manage all of your ads, whether they’re on Google, Facebook or LinkedIn. A great feature is that you can create multiple ad variations in just seconds.
They also have software available to setup your advertising campaings on social media.The software will even give you suggestions on how to optimize for a better conversion with a lower CPC.
If you want a social and video advertising platform that works with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube, all manageable in one dashboard, you should use Adparlor. Their precision targeting is pretty impressive, as it goes beyond basic demographics.
Analytics
Keeping track of your results is extremely important. A good analytics tool will help you see what you’re doing wrong and what you’re doing right, so you can adjust your strategy accordingly. Here are the best Twitter tools to monitor your accounts 24/7.
If you want amazing analysis of all your social media channels then Simply Measured is a great tool. Not only are their reports beautiful, but they are also very comprehensive. You can listen in on conversations, observe competitors across all social networks, and get amazing reports directly on the website, even in Excel reports, or as PowerPoint presentations. They also offer a free trial, as well as a few free tools that you can try right now to see if this is the right tool for you.
If you are a statistics freak than TweetStats is a simple, free tool that allows you to graph your Twitter stats. Simply enter the Twitter handle you want, click the button and take a look at your past tweets.
You can monitor and measure tweets about anything you want with TweetReach, whether it be a hashtag or a particular brand, in real time. You can use TweetReach to get free snapshot reports, and for more detailed analytics they have a paid option available.
TwitterCounter will help you optimize your tweets so that you can get the most out of them. Twittercounter analytics will help you figure out when the best times to send tweets are and what types of content your followers respond to best. You can study your followers, and even unfollowers with this amazing tool.
The key to beating the competition is to know the competition you are up against – and Rivaliq is the perfect tool to assist you with this. You can use Rivaliq to not only analyse your social media performance, but also the performance of your competitors’, and how you stack up against them.
Twitonomy is another great free Twitter analytics tool that you can try out. Twitonomy provides detailed visual analytics on your Twitter activity as well as your competitors’.
Foller.me is another Twitter analytics tool, but with a different spin. Foller.me is a free tool to search for any public Twitter name and get an analysis on their profile and latest tweets, it displays in the form of ‘tag clouds’, so you can see the most popular used words. You will also be able to see when they’re most likely to be online, and even all about their friends, followers and lists.
#Twitter Tools:The Complete List (180 Free and Paid Tools) via @bizwebjournal
Crowdbooster works with both Twitter and Facebook to give real time analytics reports on your pages. One of the best parts of Crowdbooster is that they give you recommendations based on the data they gather – for example, if an influencer mentions you, you’ll get a notification so that you know that you should try to engage with them. They also offer scheduling, and team management, where each team member can have a different access level.
Tweetchup is a free Twitter analytics tool that allows you to monitor tweets, hashtags and keywords, as well as analyse your own Twitter activity and that of your competitors – or any other user.
If you’re running a campaign on Twitter and want to monitor an event or maybe simply your brand, TweetArchivist will monitor and archive it for you. The tool can also analyse the results for you in order to find the top users and influencers, the hashtags and links used, and much more.
Sumall is an analytics tool that you can use for as many Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google Analytics accounts as you want. They create amazing reports that are ready-to-go and you can even add your own branding to the reports if you want to.
When is the best time to send out your tweets in order to get the most out of your updates? Tweriod looks at both your tweets as well as your followers to give you the best times to tweet – and hopefully increase your engagement.
This browser plugin reveals vast insights into any Twitter user you choose. Discover statistics, popular hashtags, most shared links, connected profiles, and much more.
Get your best followers, most influential followers and most engaged followers delivered to you in a list.Very useful if you want to track the important people on twitter to enegage with.
This is a Twitter search tool. It will let you search keywords, usernames, locations, interests. With all this info you can analyze your tweets and following and find new ones.
Automated
Twitter automated scheduling is a very debated subject. Does it take all humanity out of tweeting or can it be done in such a way that followers will respond to you positively, and bring in results? But let’s not get into all that now and go through some of the best tools – some are for manually scheduling tweets, others for automated updates, all for helping you save a lot of valuable time.
If you need a smart automation tool that monitors all of your news feeds and automatically shares relevant content to your social networks Dlvr.it is it. You can also use their browser extension to add content as you find it on the net. It also shares your blog posts, adds relevant hashtags to your updates, and allows you to integrate Google Analytics, among many other useful features.
With Social Oomph you can boost your productivity online by allowing you to schedule all types of content updates across different social networks, such as Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Facebook. The Social Oomph tool can be a huge time-saver for those who have numerous accounts to manage.
The Bufferapp is arguably one of the most popular scheduling tools on the market right now. Use Buffer to easily schedule posts across multiple accounts and social networks, as well as to analyse your posts.
PostPlanner is a tool that aims to help you increase your engagement by assisting you in finding great content to share. All you have to do is select what you want to share, decide on a time and you’re done. PostPlanner also lets you get the analytics on anything you posted so that you can see what works and what doesn’t work.
If you have a blog that is updated regularly , you can use TwitterFeed to easily share your blog feed to all of your social networks, helping you save a lot of valuable time.You can also automate the sharing of posts from other blogs and add a suffix to let the other blog know you shared their content.
#Twitter Tools:The Complete List (180 Free and Paid Tools) via @bizwebjournal
MeetEdgar is a tool that allows you to easily schedule posts to your social media accounts in a very organized manner. MeedEdgar lets you create the updates you want to, publish and organize them into categories, easily add them to a calendar and let MeetEdgar queue them up for you to be shared.
IFTTT (If This, Then That) is a very cool tool that aims to make your life easier. When it comes to social media, it allows you to do share content between your networks, such as automatically tweeting your Instagram photos, or posting Facebook updates to Twitter, and even pin Instagrams to your Pinterest boards.
If you have a blog, then you’re probably also using social media to promote each new posting. Missinlett_r helps you speed up the process, by automatically creating social media updates with quotes from your article, every time you publish something new. Not only does it create cool tweets using your own words, but it also helps you save time, and increase your exposure and hopefully your traffic.
Automated retweets and favorites based on preselected tweets and your rules.
Chat/Events
There are some great tools out there that can help you start conversations with people all over the world, help you boost your engagement, and also help you find some great people on Twitter. There are a few great tools that allow you to start Twitter chats, and I’ve also included one that allows you to live blog events as a team.
Twchat is similar to Twubs, it also allows you to create real time chat rooms, as well as search for chats to participate in. You can also add people to help you moderate your chat.
Using TweetChat is very easy – simply login with your Twitter account, enter a hashtag, and join the conversation! You can also favourite tweets and see what others have favourited. They are also currently working on adding more features.
With BeatStrap you can cover any event and live-blog it as a team, while also promoting your own brand. Simply add the people you want, give them a hashtag, and start live-blogging! You can even display it on any web page, and increase your reach.
#Twitter Tools:The Complete List (180 Free and Paid Tools) via @bizwebjournal
Twubs Twitter Chat is a pretty straightforward tool that allows you to schedule and start Twitter chats. You can also search for hashtags to see what people are saying.
Here you can find a list of all the upcoming chats and their hashtags so you can follow along.
Cool
This is a list of really cool Twitter tools that I’ve tried and tested – basically anything that doesn’t fit into any of the other categories you will find here .
If you can’t always stick to the 140 character limit on Twitter, try TwitLonger. It’s very easy to use, all you have to do is sign in with your Twitter account and start writing.
If you have a group Twitter account, such as a school, charity or a sports team, you can use GroupTweet to make sure everyone has a say. You can add as many contributors as you like, as well as remove them, without having to share your password. Grouptweet can also be used for private group conversations on Twitter – much faster than with email!
If you want make shares on clicks back to your website, ClickToTweet is a great option. Simply write the tweet that you want others to share, and your readers will be able to just click on the message to share it along with a custom link back to your website.
If you want to create surveys on multiple social platforms you should use Twtpoll. They offer several types of surveys that you can add filters too. I also like their skip-logic feature, which allows for personalized surveys, where users can get different questions based on previews answers.
TweetyMail is an email-based Twitter app that allows you to tweet, reply, direct message and follow other users, all via your email account. You can also get automatic, customized email alerts for mentions, Twitter searches and others, and respond to them directly from your email.
If you’re planning an event, you can use Vite to invite people, get them to RSVP with Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or Instagram and to send announcements about your event.
Vellum is a simple reading list with the links your friends are currently sharing in your Twitter feed. This puts a light on your content and makes it easy to find what you should read next. The links are ranked based on shared counts by those you follow. This way you can stay up to date wth the topics people are discussing.
If you like to give away coupons on social mediaTwtqpon allows you to create coupons on various social media platforms, and email. Easily create your coupons with your own branding, add QR codes and barcodes, and choose how the coupons will be redeemed – offline or online.
If you want to increase your Twitter engagement, you have to stay in the loop with what is trending at the moment. Use Trends24 to see what is trending, which hashtags are the most used, and start tweeting!
If you are looking for a really cool tool that allows you to mobilize your fans to help share your message on social media you should use Thunderclap. Anyone can use it, from authors to musicians, and from marketing agencies to event organizers.
#Twitter Tools:The Complete List (180 Free and Paid Tools) via @bizwebjournal
Find out when you’re friends (or competitors!) made any changes to their profile, such as a new bio or new profile picture. You can choose to get email alerts or see it directly in your timeline.
Are you replying fast enough on social media? Sprout Social’s Must Be Present tool gives you reports on your response rate on social media, and your average response time. It’s a simple thing, but very useful. If you’re not replying in real time, you stand to lose a lot of engagement.
Twibbon makes it very easy to manage your campaign, and it can even help you take it viral! Twibbon allows you to create campaigns where users can support you in various ways, such as by adding to their social media, changing their Twitter background or emailing their friends.
Twibes allows you to browse through the numerous Twitter group topics and lists and see who the members are, and any other relevant information for the specific group.
If you are a music artists who is using Twitter than Twitmusic is a tool for you. You can use it to create amazing, engaging campaigns, create photo and audio contests, get people to act in order to listen to your music or see your upcoming cover art, and many more cool features.
Use Tweetiebyte to get a thorough analysis of your tweet history. All you have to do is enter the username you want to study and the tool will generate a personalized infographic.
Whenever you’re away from the Internet, you can use Vacatweet to send out “out-of-office” messages on your behalf whenever someone wants to talk to you on Twitter. Simply write your auto-response and choose whether to reply to people or direct message them, and you can leave for your much-awaited vacation without worries.
#Twitter Tools:The Complete List (180 Free and Paid Tools) via @bizwebjournal
Are you a Last.fm user? You can now use Tweekly to automatically post your Last.fm stats to your Twitter and Facebook profiles. You can also find out who else shares your taste in music, and find new people to connect with online.
Tweepsmap helps you publish “intelligently” with the insight you gain from their follower location map that shows you trending topics and hashtags based on location. They also tell you when the best time to tweet is, specific to your followers and their activity.
Local Tweeps is a tool that helps you search for Twitter friends and followers that are close to you. It’s a great tool for anyone organizing an event.
FollowerFly is a social media content aggregator. Search Twitter users and find their best content on Twitter and beyond.Facebook, Instagram, Soundcloud Youtube and Reddit are currently supported.
Write a tweet longer then 140 characters and Little Pork Chop will cut it into pieces and send it out in a stream one after the other.
Hashtags
Hashtags are the bread and butter of Twitter. How do you know which ones to use? What do some of them even mean? Which hashtags are trending day-by-day, or even hour-by-hour? Thankfully there are plenty of tools that can help you:
Hashtagify is a great tool for discovering hashtags, and seeing which ones are the most popular. Find hashtags related to certain events, the top influencers, and access usage patterns data. They’ve also recently introduced an Instagram hashtag tracking tool that you can try out for free.
Keyhole allows you to search for hashtags, keywords or URLs and track them in real time on Twitter and/or Instagram. They also provide account tracking and reporting, and can find the top influencers that are engaging with your hashtag or keywords.
If you’re ever confused about what a hashtag might mean, use Tagdef and simply enter the hashtag you want to look up to find a definition. You can also add your own definitions.
RiteForge is a very useful and timesaving tool that helps you ‘beddazle’ your updates automatically with hashtags and visuals. You can integrate RiteForge with other tools, such as Buffer and Hootsuite, to make your life easier, and automate posts in order to save time.
#Twitter Tools:The Complete List (180 Free and Paid Tools) via @bizwebjournal
Use Hashtracking to quickly get reports on Twitter and Instagram hashtags, or try the paid version to monitor your social media activity in real time and stream your social media activity live, as a presentation, whether at the office or at an event.
The TweetBinder tool can be used to search for hashtags, mentions and keywords on Twitter and Instagram, get real time reports, and other, more in depth reports.
Tagboard allows you to search for public social media data within seconds after they were published, and then select the posts you want to feature on TV, on your website and on large displays.
Use Twubs to search for and follow hashtags so that you can discover conversations. You can also use it to create a branded hashtag page where you can engage with your followers.
Imagery
Images are very important on Twitter – or rather, on most popular social networks. Images are more likely to attract your followers’ attention, and statistics show that tweets with images get 313% more engagement. I’ve put together this list of tools that add images to your tweets, help you find images, and also allow you to create awesome designs:
Pablo is a very cool tool from Buffer that, best of all, is free to use! They have a library of over 50,000 royalty-free images and different fonts and colours to choose from for text.
Canva makes it very easy to create professional looking visual content. They have thousands of layouts to choose from, stock images, filters, icons and basically anything you might need to create great images for your social media, blog, or website. My go to tool for creating all my images.
You can easily add images to your tweets with Twitshot – all you have to do is enter your tweet with the link on the website, and Twitshot will automatically extract images from the webpage you’re posting so you can choose your favourite.
Stencil is a very easy to use tool for creating great images that you can then share on your social media. You can customize images, add icons and graphics, and they even let you do 10 free images a month.
#Twitter Tools:The Complete List (180 Free and Paid Tools) via @bizwebjournal
Use Relaythat to create beautiful designs for all your marketing purposes. Images are automatically resized for every platform, so you don’t need to bother with that. It’s also a great tool to use to make sure all of your marketing visuals have the same graphics.
Designfeed is a great new tool, currently in beta, that renders beautiful images that are personalized for each user. The more you use the tool, the more it will learn what you like and what you don’t, so that it can create images that are perfectly suited to your tastes.
With this tool you can search Twitter by keyword or location to find photos shared on Twitter
Relationship
Relationships on Twitter is what it's all about and managing your Twitter relationships can be a chore unless you have a good tool to assist you. Use these tools to find out who your friends and followers are, find new people to follow and find out who unfollowed you:
FollowerWonk is a tool from MOz that aims to tell you everything there is to know about your Twitter followers, whether it’s location, or the times they usually tweet. You can also use it search for users and browse through Twitter bios.
With Commun.it, you’ll be able to get a better understanding of your Twitter friends and followers. It will help you find relevant profiles for you to follow (as well as unfollow), and help you build relationships with influencers and customers – the ones who matter the most.
Get a better audience insight with the Audiense tool. Find out who forms your audience, what they are interested in and what they talk about. Then organize your audiences, and start building relationships with all the best users.
#Twitter Tools:The Complete List (180 Free and Paid Tools) via @bizwebjournal
This tool doesn’t need much of an explanation – the name really says it all. Would you like to knwo who unfollowed you? This tool helps you track those who unfollowed you and you can also use it to see who followed you, if you’re following back or who you’ve blocked or muted.
With Friend or Follow you can track who unfollowed you and who’s not following you back on Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest. You can manage multiple accounts with it, if you want as well as sort your followers.
Getting started on Twitter can be very difficult, and even as you start growing, it is still difficult to get enough followers. Thankfully, there are a few tools out there that can help you not only to better manage your existing followers, but also to grow your follower base.
ManageFlitter has a few different features, but my favourite thing about it is the ease with which you can manage your Twitter friends and followers. It’s also a good tool for finding people to connect with, and it has some pretty good analytics.
Check who is following you or not following you back. See your inactive followers or whitelist certain followers. You can also you Crowdfire to setup automated DM messages.
Refollow is an app that helps you find the people you want to have relationships with on social media. It’s also great for growing your follower base and managing your audience.
This is a Saas company that will build your following using an algorithm based on keywords you put in the system. They have a 2 week free trial available.
This actually does the same as SocialQuant but their trial only lasts one week. This company has Sujan Patel as one of the founders.
Influence
One of the ways to grow your Twitter presence, increase your credibility online, and even boost your engagement is to find influencers and build connections with them. Almost all communities and niches have their top influencers – all you have to do is find them, and start building a relationship with them.
BuzzSumo is a tool that allows you to search for the most relevant content and the top influencers for any topic you want. Simply enter a topic or domain in the search box, and look for key content and influencers.
Bluenod is primarily a tool for finding top influencers in your niche. The tool allows you to visualize Twitter communities that highlight influencers, and their networks. It’s a great tool for building a bigger, stronger community.
Triberr is a place for bloggers and influencers to meet and share great content. You can find great content to read, comment on, have discussions with other bloggers and influencers and post any content that you might find.
#Twitter Tools:The Complete List (180 Free and Paid Tools) via @bizwebjournal
Sign in with Klout to see what your Klout score is on Twitter or Facebook, if you’re an influencer, or still have a ways to go. Klout also suggests content that you could share with your audience, in order to increase your engagement, and Klout score.
Inkybee is a blogger outreach tool that helps you search and discover relevant blogs. You can also use it to analyse Twitter influencers among your followers, and find new users to connect with.
Klear has several great features – it allows you to monitor your social media and creates analytics reports, it allows you to find influencers and helps you build relationships with them, and allows you to take a look at the competition to find new ways to develop your social media strategy.
Measuring
While Twitter is definitely a lot about talking, it’s also important to listen and measure. There are a lot of tools that allow you to measure activity, whether it’s yours, or other users’.
Brand24 is a great tool for monitoring your online presence in real time, measuring responses by sentiment, and finding influencers to connect with. It also allows you to stay on top of any comment made about your brand, so you’re always fast to respond. Brand24 also helps you figure out where to find sales opportunities online.
If you don't have the time to check your Twiiter account several times a day then Warble Alerts is a great tool for you. Sign up, and then select what keywords or hashtags you want to track and you’ll get an email once a day with all the information you need.
Recent follows and favorites of 3 tweeps of your choosing.Find three folks on Twitter, and Daily 140 emails you once-a-day with all the new people they’ve followed and tweets they’ve favorited.
Sysomos is a tool that allows you to listen and monitor social conversations and find customers, trends and top influencers. It also helps you find great content to share, and lets you publish updates. They also offer an analysis tool to help measure your social media campaigns.
BrandChirp is a brand management tool exclusively for Twitter. You can add multiple Twitter accounts and manage them from one place, whether it’s to monitor or engage. They also offer target following and stats for the people you follow so that you can see their tweeting activity and act accordingly.
Meltwater lets you discover trending topics in your industry and then use that knowledge to engage and start new conversations. You can also use Meltwater to monitor your brand and the competition, and to stay up to date with the latest news. Their detailed analytics are also quite good, and will help you track all of your social campaigns.
Social Mention lets you search for real time mentions on several social platforms. You will see top users, keywords and hashtags for any search, sentiment and reach.
#Twitter Tools:The Complete List (180 Free and Paid Tools) via @bizwebjournal
With Social Motus you can manage all of your Facebook and Twitter accounts from one place, with the possibility to add other team members. It’s a good tool for monitoring your brand’s presence as well as for engaging, and measuring your online performance. You can also use Social Motus to find more prospects, increase your sales and start building relationships.
Keyhole will let you know whenever a particular keyword, hashtag or URL is mentioned. This tool works like setting up Google alerts. Great to monitor your company or blog.
With this listening tool you can keep up with all your mentions on Twitter. You can track, analyze and display all your mentions in your dashboard or via email.
Another tool to monitor based on keywords, hashtag or username. You get a nice results page with all the relevant tweets, influencers and user accounts.
Type in any URL and check the share numbers on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Stumbleupon, Pinterest and Google+ .
Mobile
There are also a lot of great apps available for your smartphone so you can manage your Twitter account while on the road.Here are some of the nicer ones.
Twitterrific is an iOS and Mac app that you can use to track all your Twitter notifications in real time, on your phone, tablet, and even on your Apple Watch. You can do everything you can do on Twitter, and more. You can muffle tweets and hashtags that you don’t want to see, save links for later and get push notifications.
MobyPicture helps you to easily share any visual content – photos, videos – and audio with your followers on several social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and more.
UberSocial formerly known as Twidroyd, is a Twitter app for Android users. They have a few cool extra features, like photo filters, the Inner Circle feature that helps you keep up with certain users, Facebook news feed and they let you write tweets over 140 characters.
This app shows if you are compatible with a Twitter user.This way you can make new friends and learn their secrets. Introduce tells you about the person you are curious about in detail.
Charm is a Twitter companion app for iOS.Organise tweets into collections, save articles for later, cue up your playlists of music you find and transcribe conversations.
With this app you can bookmark your favorite things on Twitter.
News
Many people nowadays use Twitter as a source for great content and relevant, breaking news. Here are some tools that will help you stay up to date with the top news of the day, as well as help you become a relevant content curator on Twitter.
Scoop.it helps you discover great content online that you can then easily share on your social accounts. Scoop.it makes it very easy to find content that your followers will be interested in and it only takes seconds to get it published.
Hash is an app that brings you the most important talking points of the day – those that get the most attention from people, the most tweets and hashtags. It has a great interface, and you get to see what the story is about and then a list of relevant tweets.
Paper.li helps you curate great content suitable for your audience that you can then share on social media. What makes them stand out is their web newspaper feature, that lets you create an online newspaper regularly with all the latest news and articles related to your business. They also have an email newsletter that gets sent out regularly with the content you’ve collected.
Nuzzel helps you discover the top news stories of the day. When you sign in with your Twitter account, you will be able to go even further, and see what stories your friends and followers are talking about.
Chirp City keeps you up to date with trending people, stories, and even cities and stocks. You can also use it to search for breaking stories, trending stories, influential people and more.
#Twitter Tools:The Complete List (180 Free and Paid Tools) via @bizwebjournal
This has an inbox style layout. Pick the friends you want to hear from and never miss their tweets again.
Plugins
Twitter plugins can come in handy to put on your blog. It will increase your website visitor engagement. That's why I wanted to add the best and most usefull plugins in this list with Twitter tools for you.
With this plugin it will rotate and only one tweet at a time will show on your website. You can decide whether to just display tweets, favorites or any other search results.
A handy plugin if you have a big archive of posts on your blog. It will send out your evergreen content, you set the time intverval and category and the plugin will do the rest.
This plugin lets you create a handy quote box with a link that visitors can use to easily tweet the quote shown to all of their followers. You can even add multiple click-to-tweet boxes to any WordPress post or page.
Twitter cards are content-rich tweets that go beyond 140 characters to include images, links, videos and product information. Simply put, users who tweet your content will have a Twitter card added to their feed that will then be seen by all their followers.
Extensions
If you bring a visit to your Twitter timeline it can be addictive, that's why it's sometimes better to just stay in your browser window and watch tweets come in. Extensions can come in handy for this. Here are a few nice ones to help you keep focused on your work.
With this extension you only have to type @ and Twitter handle in your search bar and it will take you directly to the Twitter profile page.
Conclusion
Phew, finally done! There are just so many different Twitter tools, but I hope I did a good job of highlighting some of the best ones on the market right now. Which Twitter tools do you use the most? Have you discovered any new tools you’d like to try? Let me know in the comments section (or on Twitter, of course) and if you have any other great suggestions, I would love to know!
We live in a busy world and as business owners have so much work to do.
But what if I told you that working online with social media doesn’t have to be so hard. It doesn’t have to suck your time and your soul and you might even have fun doing it if you use the right social media tool for the job.
There are so many moving parts when you are using social media to promote your business and there is a never-ending stream of new ways to do it. It’s important not to get distracted to what is important in your business.
Managing all these moving parts can be made so much easier by using a good social media management tool.
In 2016, Ian Anderson Gray of Seriously Social compiled this infographic based on G2Crowd rankings that asked users to rate 5 social media management tools so that they could advise people based on user experience.
Let’s take a look at how to choose the right one by answering some really important questions first.
1.What do users think of their social media management tool?
If people are raving fans of a tool, it is usually a good indication that you should at least take a look under the hood.
According to the infographic that we are about to examine the top 5 social media tools that people raved about were Agorapulse, Sprout Social, Hootsuite, Sendible, and Buffer. Agorapulse takes the lead with user satisfaction on this point.
2.Will the social media tool remain relevant?
The social media landscape is a fast moving one. Facebook changes daily, features on other platforms move and you need your chosen solution to move with them. As you can see from the screenshot below, each of the main players in the tool space perform well.
3.Is it user friendly?
Using a social media tool needs to reduce your workload, after all you want to make your life easier, right?
This said you need to make sure that the tool you choose is easy to set-up and easy to use on a daily basis.
If your social accounts are not synced properly you may suffer painful consequences. Getting the foundation right the first time will save you a ton of time.
Take a look at what users actually experienced with set-up and usability in the chart below:
4.How is the tool’s customer service?
Have you ever been sold something only to find it broken or didn’t work the way you were promised?
It happens. Things break or you get confused about how something should work.
This is why customer support is a top priority when investing in a marketing tool. When you are under pressure to get something working, good customer service will save your day!
All of the social media tools reviewed by users scored well here with Agorapulse and Sprout Social at the top of the list.
5.Does it increase my productivity?
Before you decide on which tool to use, you need to think about your needs, the size of your company and what solution will fit your challenges. Whichever solution you choose, it has to save you time, have great support and functionality.
Each of the main providers scores pretty well on usability.
6.How much will it cost your business?
There are many free tools on the market but if you want to bring your “A” Game to social media management, paying for a tool becomes essential.
Generally speaking, what you pay is what you get and choosing the right solution that will scale with your business is generally reflected in pricing.
Most tool providers have an entry-level package, but be warned they don’t come without their limitations.
To get an idea of cost you can try this cool free tool developed by social media tools expert Ian Anderson Gray.
There are many providers on the market and it is important that you research each of them before you make a purchase. To see a full list of the other options, refer to this blog post by Ian, where he gives some super alternatives and of course, review the full infographic below:
Which social media tool are you using for your business ? Please let us know in the comments below.
This is a guest post from Jenny Brennan, Director of Prospect Happiness at Agorapulse , a Paris and San Francisco based Social Media Management Software launched in 2011. Agorapulse is currently being used by more than 5,000 businesses across 180 countries. They have advised international brands such as Virgin Megastores, FIA, McDonald’s, Microsoft or Volkswagen
Thanks to machines, there are a plethora of tasks that no longer need human intervention. With the mundane tasks taken care of, people can turn their attention toward the mentally challenging ones. For example, when the first Ford Model T line was created, people stood along a conveyor belt to put the vehicle together.
However, the digital landscape has changed all this. It has allowed companies to use automation to carry out tasks. Technology is the biggest enabler in any industry. Well, most industries.
You see, technology is good for most tasks, but when it comes to writing an amazing blog post, there are still some problems. There is software on the market that can find content for you on the Internet. However, these software produce posts based on RSS feeds, leading to duplicate or poor content.
The biggest problem with them? You could be accused of copyright infringement.
The best way to do any blogging is to do it by your own hand. That’s right! You need to sit behind the screen and start typing on your keyboard and publish it after several sessions of editing.
Blogging really gained ground during the 1990s and, since that time, has grown tremendously. In times’ past and even today, anybody that had a connection to the Internet could use a personal blog to vent or showcase their creativity.
But, the word “blog” has changed. And, the purpose behind one has also changed. Instead of personal journals and daily updates about life, blogs have become an important business tool. In fact, blogs are regarded as one of the best ways to produce leads and help a business’ bottom line.
According to HubSpot, marketers who use blogs are 13 times more likely to see a higher return on investment (ROI).
Marketers who use a blog are 13 times more likely to see a higher return on investment @HubSpot
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5 Other Ways Your Business Can See Positive Results From Blogging
You Set Yourself Up As A Leader
When you regularly generate high-quality material, you’re establishing yourself as an industry leader. When you offer quality material, it lets people know that you know what you’re talking about. Be sure you educate the industry readers so that they’ll see you as the source they should turn to.
Neil Patel (@neilpatel) for example has set himself up as marketing industry leader by publishing epic blog posts 7 days a week on his website neilpatel.com and generating 1000 new leads every single day, which he stated in a webinar on the Listbuilding School Summit.
Create Trust and Authority
To establish yourself as the go-to authority leader, developing high-quality content is just the beginning. You need to make sure you do this consistently. It takes the time to garner one’s trust. And, you can’t take any shortcuts to get this done. You must prove to them that you are who you say you are.
Make sure you publish material steadily, so you show them that you offer a product or service that’s going to be around for a bit of time. You don’t want to look like you’re just trying to make money.
Believe it or not, mistakes will also help establish trust in the followers. Just admit them to your followers and offer solutions to it, and your authority won’t diminish in capacity. Showing them that you’re human gives you some authenticity. You’re letting your readers see how you address problems when they arise.
Increase Your SEO Efforts
Did you know that blogging can help boost your digital presence? It allows you to become seen more on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. And, if you have valuable pages for them to show, your ranking in their search results will be higher.
Blogging boosts your inbound links up to 97 percent, which also increases your search engine rankings. Do all this, and you garner the attention of more visitors to your blog through search engine.
Captivate Your Audience
In order for you to engage the audience, you need to show them that you’ve got content that they want. You want material that will pull your audience in, gets their attention and boost their chances of becoming a loyal customer. You can use the blog to answer questions your audience has. However, you need to be consistent if you’re going to get the best results.
Produce Quality Leads
After you have attained your audience’s attention, provide them with a reward for them providing you with their content information. This will lead to qualified leads. Your blog can be a lead magnet. How so? You offer your visitors something for free or of worthwhile value so they’ll provide you with their zip code, email address, and other information.
Quality leads are much better than cold leads because it ensures customer lifetime value. Use their contact data to target your advertisements and marketing campaigns.
10 Tips To Increase Lead Generation By Blog Optimization
Obviously, you want your blog to become a lead generation machine for you. How can you do this? How to generate leads from your blog ?
Provide Your Audience With Exclusive “Members-Only” Material
A way to garner leads is to give something “extra” to those folks who decide to follow you. This would be something you wouldn’t typically offer casual readers. Provide the “exclusive” content alongside the free content the followers see on your blog.
You don’t want to get rid of the public posts because you want the search engine spiders to find it. However, you want the followers to have a reason to follow you. You want to offer them something that free access doesn’t give them.
For instance, you can create a “members-only” section on the blog that gives them comprehensive information on ideas that were presented in the free blog posts. You can do webinars that offer in-depth feedback that’s been tailored to clients who give their personal and contact information.
Integrate The Blog Into Your Primary Website
While it’s tempting to have a blog away from your primary domain, this can actually hurt the business more than help it. A separate blog doesn’t benefit your main website if someone is searching for your material through a search engine (inbound blog links). Make sure your blog is listed on the main website, so there is brand identity.
Remember, the first time a visitor sees your brand may be through a blog post, which means they may not even go to your homepage. Be sure you offer them amazing customer service regardless of where they land – key website or blog.
Slide-In CTA Marketing Tool
If you want to lure your blog readers back to your page after they’ve scrolled to the bottom of the post, the slide-in call to action is a marketing must-have. It gives you an indication that the people want to read what you have to say.
With the Slide-in CTA, a box will appear in the lower right-hand corner that provides with an offer they can’t refuse. The CTA could be detailed information about the post, a white paper or other important content they’d get after they provide you with their content information.
People would rather see CTAs instead of pop-ups.
Hello Bar Marketing Tool
The Hello Bar is what shows up in the top section of a website. It’s situated in the area of the screen the visitor is going to see first after the page opens. These bars often have a call-to-action in them to bring traffic to squeeze or landing pages.
Many readers may not click on these right away, but they will read the post that follows after it. It’s a very effective tool in bringing traffic to the website and increase your email list.
Provide Links To Useful Inside Information and Resources When You Can
When you create your blog post, you want to focus on certain phrases and words that relate back to other posts you’ve created for the site. During your post, you want to link these words to other site resources.
Keywords are linkable to other pages such as your landing pages. They can relate to offers you have, or deals prospects can benefit from. They can be about an e-book, free trial or whatever.
Use The Real Estate Around Blog Posts
Everything on the website, the top, sides, and bottom of a post is real estate you need to be using. Don’t waste it. Use buttons, banners or CTAs to increase attention to the website.
The footer that comes after a blog post is ideal to present your readers with a supplementary offer. Use the space to link to landing pages that entice them to sign up. Or, you can use a CTA that suggests they sign up for more offers.
Offer Must-Have Incentives
You want to give your readers something they can’t say no to. Add discounts or free shipping on items when they provide you their email address for your newsletter. This will help in attaining more subscribers and possible customers.
Have a physical catalog as a way to attain email address. IKEA uses this method to provide prospects the choice to download the online catalog or to have printed mailed version. You want the form to include a physical address or an email address.
This will help you to stay in touch with prospects with an opt-in button, adding them to the email list for specials or updates.
Include Subscription Services
With a subscription service, you give visitors a way to easily sign up for regular blog posts through RSS feeds or email. Every time your blog or website is updated, they’ll get a notification about it.
The majority of blogging platforms have subscription plug-ins. Email marketing services like ConvertKit have a plug-in that lets you create and expand your subscription list.
Ensure Content Is Easily Sharable On Social Media
A real big way to garner more visitors is to make your blog posts shareable on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. This can be done by putting social media icons throughout the website and blog post.
When you make your content shareable on social media platforms, it ensures more traffic will come to your website and boost your lead generation campaign.
DeviseAn Editorial Calendar
Besides creating high-quality material your audience wants from you, you need to be consistent with the blogging. That cannot be stressed enough. In order to be consistent, you need to devise an editorial calendar, scheduling your material to be posted on that date. You can post manually or have a plug-in such as Coschedule that will publish your already written material based on how you set it up – every day, weekly, monthly or whatever.
You don’t want to become burned out by the task, but you don’t want to inundate your readers either. Come up with a calendar that is worthwhile for you and your readers. And, if you don’t want to handle the writing yourself, writing freelancers are available to take advantage of.
What You Should Keep In Mind
It would be nice if your content could fit in an algorithm and be fed effortlessly but life doesn’t work that way. When you devise a blog, you need to develop a strategy that will let you produce high-quality material regularly. There are several digital tools at your disposal – they will free those times and resources up. Use them so that you don’t feel bogged down by the task.
Remember, social media can be your best friend in driving more traffic to the landing page. Use the above idea to help set yourself up as the industry leader so more traffic becomes subscribers. Before you know it, your sales funnel will be overflowing.
Blogging really is just a means to an end, which is lead generation. It’s the best way for you to reach out and engage your customers – software or apps can’t do this. The only way you’ll do is to be active involved in the process. Be sure you blog for your business’ sake and your lead generation efforts. Do that, and your persistence and patience will eventually pay off.
Are you getting enough exposure from your blogging efforts? Is your blogging paying off? Please let us know in the comments below.
There is no denying the power that Pinterest marketing can have on a business’ marketing campaign. After all, it ranks just behind the number one social media website Facebook and can send a plethora amount of traffic to websites. To gain the benefit of more visitors and subscribers, you should add Pinterest to your marketing campaign today.
Ask yourself if this isn’t this something you should be taking advantage of.
What You May Not Know About Pinterest
More than 90 percent (93 percent) of Pinterest users have shopped via the Internet the last six months
25 percent of all retail referral traffic comes from Pinterest accounts.
47 percent of U.S. Internet shoppers have bought something due to a Pinterest recommendation.
Does Pinterest sound like something your business could use? If you’re not using it, then just think of all the opportunities you’re missing out on.
How Your Business Can Benefit from Pinterest Marketing
To gain any benefit from Pinterest marketing, you must understand what it is (purpose) and why users are there. Think of Pinterest like Instagram, it’s a visual platform, which means you must have visual inspiration to bring traffic to your website. You will need to showcase recipes, gift-giving guides and tutorials through Pinterest to have traffic come to your site.
If you’re going to use Pinterest for your marketing needs, you must ensure that your pictures are pleasing to the eye. You want to draw in your prospective audience’s attention. Before you say anything, you don’t need a degree in photography or a professional camera. You just need access to the Internet and smartphone.
And, best of all, with smartphone camera technology getting better and better every year, you just the right lighting – natural or artificial – and a smartphone to take amazing, breathtaking photos.
How To Boost Your #Bussines With #Pinterest #Marketing via @bizwebjournal
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How To Bring Your Photos To Life: Helpful Editing Tips For Taking Smartphone Pictures
To bring your pictures to life, you want to ensure your subject is taken in good light and has the best possible backdrop to make it happen. Make sure you put attention on the picture’s overall look. You want a picture that’s inspirational – one that makes your prospective audience go, “I want or need that”.
It would be a good idea to take more than one photo, using various ways to see the product – on a person, in action, in a room, etc. The idea to “show them” how your product/service is going to work for them, how it’ll look on them and how it could look in their home.
For instance, a clothing store has a new line of clothes that came in. They want to market these clothes to their prospective audience. For this to happen, they need to take some photos of the clothes, either on a hanger, on a mannequin or somebody wearing it. While you could lay it somewhere, it doesn’t give the best perspective of the outfit. The goal is to provide your customers with the notion that they should own what you have to sell.
After you’ve taken the picture, you’ll need to do a little editing. How you edit a photo can make or break your efforts. Details are important and the key to generating interest and making a sell. Spend time on the photo – edit it to make it look good – and then add it to your Pinterest account for your prospective audience to see.
Novice Photo Editors Can Create Amazing, Eye-Appealing Pictures
If you’ve never used Photoshop or any kind of editing software, Picmonkey.com may be your best bet. Why? All you need to do is upload the picture to the editing website (you can use it for free) and hit the “auto-adjust” button. That’s all there is to it. 30 seconds and the photo is done and rest for you to upload.
Once your picture is ready, you need to pin the images of your products up on Pinterest. When you do this, be sure you do the following things:
Link pins that correspond to pages on your website. Never link them to random pages. You want your visitors to find the exact page that lets them purchase your product.
There are key times in which you should pin your photos. According to Hubspot, you should pin between the hours of 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. and 11 p.m.
Develop a board for your pictures, but consider developing other boards your target audience may want to check out. Don’t just pin your own material. The last thing you want to appear as is a spammer. Instead, you want to integrate yourself into Pinterest’s community.
How To Boost Your #Bussines With #Pinterest #Marketing via @bizwebjournal
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Always pin something. Take 30 to 60 minutes a day to pin something. If you don’t, your “stuff” will be lost in the shuffle of other Pinterest users.
Many Pinterest users are eager to shop on the Internet, and if you want to use this to your advantage, you need to take breathtaking photos and pin them so that they’ll want to purchase from you. By doing this, you can increase the amount of traffic coming to your website and, potentially, increase the sales.
When used properly, Pinterest marketing can be extremely effective. If you’re going to be successful, you must be patient, put forth the effort and be consistent in those efforts.
Are you marketing your bussines on Pinterest ? Do you have any ideas ? Please let us know in the comments below.
Businesses that want to use social media to connect with potential clients/customers have many social media websites they can turn to. They have their choice of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and so much more. However, many businesses have decided that Instagram is the way to go. And, it’s not hard to see why.
Forrester Research has called Instagram, “King of Social Engagement”, and many well-known brands have a 2.3 percent per-follower interaction rate. This is significantly higher than Facebook, which has an interaction rate of 0.2 percent, and Twitter, which has a 0.02 percent interaction rate.
Since Instagram has more than 500 million active monthly users as well as high engagement rates, companies see it as a must for their success.
7 Ways Your Business Can Increase Instagram Following
If your Instagram following isn’t what you’d like it to be, we’re going to provide you with some methods that will help you to attain more Instagram followers.
1 - Come Up With A Detailed Instagram Approach
The worst thing you can do is post something and hope for the best. Do this, and you’re just wasting time and money. You don’t get any type of return on your investment. Therefore, it’s best to come up with a strategy that lays out what you’re looking for from your Instagram account. What will help you to attain more followers for your business?
It doesn’t matter if you’re just starting out on Instagram or altering the efforts you’ve put forth, there are three things that will help you to establish a successful Instagram strategy.
Do Some Homework On The Competition
You need to look at what the competition is doing on Instagram, which will show you four things:
· Provide you with a realistic look at what your actually following could be for your business within the industry
· The content other businesses have used, and if it’s working for them
· How often your audience expects you to post material
· How other companies are handling the audience you want
Come Up With Your Story
It really doesn’t matter what industry you’re in; you’ve got a story to share with your followers on social networks such as Instagram. Enthrall your followers with content that offer some purpose and inspire them to spread the word about your business. The idea to get more followers your Instagram account.
Quench your followers’ curiosity about how you make your product, share a story that defines your brand or ensures the brand is inspirational in some way – showcase your customers’ achievements or lifestyle.
There’s no reason to limit the Instagram strategy to one or two groups. And, the successful brands will tell their stories all at one time and use various social media channels.
Come Up With Goals
Your strategy is only going to be successful if you have goals laid out. After all, you must know what you’re going after. Consider setting goals for the Instagram strategy that can be combined with your business and marketing strategies. It doesn’t matter if the goal is to boost website traffic, increase brand awareness or support a large marketing campaign. You want goals that can be fulfilled.
2 – Have A Visible Instagram Account To Attract More Followers
If you’re having a hard time getting new Instagram followers, an easy solution (although it’s typically overlooked) is to make it easy for folks to find you. Boost the amount of ways these followers can find your account. How can you do this?
Take to Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter or any social media network where you have an established following and announce that you now have an Instagram account as well. Use paid advertising to boost the posts so that more of the followers will come to the Instagram account.
Link your website to the Instagram account. Add the account to your email signature and add it to a newsletter. This lets more folks who know of your brand to find you on Instagram.
Increase visibility by following people and liking/commenting on pictures they post.
Make sure of hashtags, ensuring the content shows up in searches.
Embed the photos into blog posts.
3 - Develop Highly-Relevant, Super-Quality Content To Boost Your Instagram Follower Base
Here’s what you need to remember: the better the content quality, the more Instagram followers you’re going to end up with. If you post fuzzy, out of focus pictures or if you don’t post pictures that inspire people, you don’t give them a reason to follow your account. What can you do to better the content strategy for your Instagram account?
Find The Right Time Of Day To Post
Use the information you know about your customers to find out when the best time to post on the social media site. If your customers have full-time jobs, they’re not going to be checking their Instagram account between 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. Instead, they’ll check their accounts in the early morning hours, at lunch and when they get home from work.
If you want to attract stay-at-home parents, the timeframe to post will change.
How can you figure out when you should post and not post? You’ll need to test the different posting times out. If you notice posts in the morning garner more attention than during the evening hours, then you need to start posting your material during the morning time.
Be Sure You Post Regularly
How often should you post to the account? There’s no specific number, but according to a Simple Measured report, 75 percent of well-known brands make at least one post a week. The biggest point to remember is that you want your pictures to show up in your followers’ feeds. You want to interact with them.
The activity you do, will become visible to them, boosting the chance for you to attain new followers. You want them to see your content – isn’t that why they began following you? If you post irregularly, they’ll become disengaged with the brand.
If you don’t have time to post regular, invest in a program like Buffer or Hootsuite that lets you schedule when the Instagram photos should post as well as their captions.
Utilize Hashtags Effectively
Be sure your captions have pertinent hashtags so that posts will appear to people who have yet to follow you, but search for pictures that relate to the industry and brand. If you’re new to the whole hashtag thing, there are some things you need to understand about how to use them.
What You Should Do When Using Hashtags
Determine What Is Popular – Consider finding a tool such as Picodash that can search for the popular service, product or industry-related hashtags
Come Up With Your Own Hashtag – You can always create your own hashtag to interest the audience. For instance, Herschel Supply uses the #WellTravelled hashtag, which the audience uses to mention their travels. This offers a sense of closeness to the community while also revealing the brand to potential followers.
What You Shouldn’t Do When Using Hashtags
Don’t Excessively Use Hashtags – While hashtags are useful in garnering attention from new followers, it can be distracting to your audience. And, it causes the message you’re trying to convey to be lost.
Avoid Any Hashtag Tricks – Sure, you may see a sudden influx of followers with tags like #follow me or #likeforlike, but they’re only temporary. And, they may also be spammers and folks who want you to follow them back. These don’t help you to create a worthwhile and engaging Instagram community. The best thing you can do is focus on hashtags that relate to your business, product/service, and photo.
Use Captions Properly - Instagram is a visual platform, which means your captions will have a big part in you garnering followers. Besides using hashtags, you need to know how and when to add photo captions
Ask Questions Of Followers – This will encourage your followers to leave an answer on the picture. The kind of engagement helps to increase the visibility of your Instagram account
Use The Tagging Feature – If you have Instagram users in your pictures, tag them in it or use the tagging feature Instagram offers. According to Simply Measured, posts mentioning other users have a 37 percent higher engagement. Ask your followers to tag other people they think will enjoy the content. This increases the awareness of your account to more folks.
Location Tags – If your company has a physical location, tag it into your photos, and ask customers to do it as well. People can click on the location and find other pictures that relate to your business, increasing the follower base for your account.
Come Up With Creative Videos
Instagram is great to use videos, which is seen as a trend that will continue to dominate the market. What kinds of videos should you consider adding to your Instagram? Anything that piques your audience’s curiosity will do just fine – do-it-yourself tips, videos that highlight your product/service, tutorials, etc.
4 – Hold Campaigns and Contests To Increase Your Follower Base
Contest
If you run a contest through Instagram, it brings more traffic to the website, helps to increase the audience you already have and potentially sell your services/products. For people to enter the contest, ask them to follow you, comment on a photo or like a photo, repost a photo or use a particular hashtag. If people don’t follow your account yet, it will help if people post user-generated material on their own account so their friends see it.
Campaigns
Be sure to include Instagram as part of your marketing campaign to increase your follower base, connecting both online and offline. For instance, you can have a teaser campaign going that’s solely on Instagram and slowly mention a new service or product. You can also use Instagram to offer live events coverage like in-store promotions, conferences or community gatherings.
5 – Assist Others To Increase Their Follower Base
Instagram is like any social media network – it’s got communities. In order to have new followers for yourself, consider following others first. Share their material, like their stuff and make comments on their post. In turn, they’ll do the same for you.
Create Instagram search streams to locate, keep an eye on and participate in communications with users. If you see somebody that’s posting content that’s relevant to you, leave a comment and ask them if you share the picture on your account. If they say yes, you need to give them credit for it.
When you reach out to the successful industry Instagram users, it can assist you to find a new audience to target and boost the following base of your account. One such tool to offer you insights about who is the influencer in your niche is called Ninjaoutreach. It will also help you to know what content they’re sharing is popular.
6 – Make Use Of Instagram’s Advertising To Attract More Followers
Do you have a social media advertising budget? If you don’t, you should. After all, a way to attract more followers to your account is to use the Instagram sponsored ads. Instagram will let most folks to buy a sponsored posts, using its ad-buying tools that official Instagram partners offer. You can log into any of these third-party sites to produce and place these ads on Instagram.
According to a Nielson Brand Effect study, sponsored posts ad recalls were seen nearly three times more than other forms of online advertising. For instance, A&W Restaurants ran an Instagram ad campaign and saw a 39 point life in their ad recall with a four-point lift in their message association.
7 – Gauge and Examine The Results Of Your Instagram Account
If you’re not seeing the followers you want for your Instagram account, you need to look at the analytics to find out where you’re going wrong – and what should be adjusted in your strategy.
For instance, you may see a link between when and what you post as well as the kind of hashtags you use and the spike in followers. Make sure to focus on these moments to attain the same results repeatedly.
Do you know of any great ways to increase your Instagram following. Please tell us your ideas in the comments below.
Have you ever felt you have gotten ahead of yourself on something and failed? Don’t feel too bad! That’s a part of human nature. And, it’s something that marketers often do without even realizing it. It’s no big surprise as to why it happens. The market is constantly moving forward. What works today may not work tomorrow or shortly. This also holds up for a succesful social media marketing campaign.
Worst of all, many social media marketers fail to develop a strong strategy that will help them to attain their goals.
Here’s what you need to understand: social media marketing has its own language. You cannot succeed in it until you learn and master the basics. That’s just the honest truth! If you fail to learn about social media marketing, then the only person you can blame for not meeting your goals is yourself.
If you’re new to social media marketing or need a refresher course, you don’t have to look any further for the information you need to be successful.
What You Need To Understand About Social Media Marketing
Over the last 10 years, social media has gone from “maybe I can use it” to “I have to use it” for all marketing strategies. A 2015 Social Media Marketing Industry Report highlighted that 96 percent of all marketers had incorporated at least one social media website into their marketing campaign.
What is social media marketing then? It’s essentially the key part of your job.
The 2015 Social Media Glossary from Hootsuite says social media marketing is marketers using social media to boost their brand awareness, produce leads, recognize their primary audience, and establish an important connection with their customers.
What does this mean? Social media marketing must facilitate
· Community management
· Social customer service
· Social selling activities
And, it must do this to produce a unified relationship with the company’s customers.
It’s important to note that a sucessfull social media market campaign is combined with numerous strategies.
What Is So Important About Social Media Marketing
Company management often has to be convinced that a social media marketing campaign is the way to increase brand awareness and sales. However, it’s important to note that being social, regardless of the strategy, is necessary these days.
Don’t think so?
Well, then, just think of the ways social media works in your personal life – connecting with loved ones and friends, another way to attain information and more. Now, think of how it can be useful to your business. Obviously, social media marketing can be extremely beneficial. Some advantages to using social media in your marketing campaign include:
· Identifying and learning about your target audience, marketing to them using extremely valuable social media communications.
· Getting in touch with the community and customers, which saves you a plethora of time – no cold-calling or face-to-face conversation.
· Stay in competition with your competitors (who are using social media as well for their marketing campaign).
· Establish and increase your customer base.
· Boost sales and the company’s bottom line
· Can talk about the company’s background
· Reduce the costs associated with marketing (seen with traditional advertisements)
What Are The Statistics Surrounding Social Media
To fully understand how important a social media marketing campaign can be to your company, here are a few statistics to consider:
· 92 percent of social media marketers claim social media is an important part of their company
· 84 percent of marketers have combined their social media marketing campaign with their traditional marketing campaigns
· 64 percent of markets spend six or more hours on social media websites; 41 percent spend 11 or more hours a week and 19 percent spend more than 20 hours a week
· 90 percent of companies claim using social media has helped to boost brand awareness for their company
· 77 percent claim using social media has led to more website traffic
· More than 50 percent of marketers said social media has led to a significant rise in sales
· 69 percent of marketers claim social media has helped to establish a reliable fan base according to Entrepreneur.
· 66 percent of social media marketers notice their lead generation with social media happens with six or fewer hours a week
· FastCompany reports 70 percent of senior professionals find the workplace better when CEOs make a social media post
· According to Forbes, three out of four consumers claim social media makes an impact on what they buy
What Should Your Succesful Social Media Marketing Campaign Consist Of
Now you see the importance behind a social media marketing campaign and why you should create your own. So do it! Come up with a solid social media strategy that will help you navigate the plethora of social media websites to attain your goals.
Bear in mind that a social media marketing plan lays out what you want to do and how you’ll attain your company’s goals using the different social networks. Make sure the plan includes an audit of what the accounts are like right now, what the goals are for them in the distant future and the tools you’ll use to attain them.
· Come up with your social media goals
· Carry out an audit of your social media plan
· Set up or improve social media accounts
· Check out competitors, clients, and industry leaders’ social media accounts
· Test, review and make adjustments to the strategy
How Can You Create Your Social Media Goals
It’s not a bad idea to learn how to come up with goals that help your business to succeed. All too often people think goal setting isn’t important or that it puts undue pressure on the business. The reality is that having goals encourages you to strive harder for success.
The S.M.A.R.T goal setting system can help you establish goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, related and time-bound. When your company has no goals laid out, the company has no direction to go.
The S.M.A.R.T framework helps so that you can attain goals before the work has even been put forth. You want goals to that are more about generated leads and website traffic, not likes and retweets.
The Difference In Social Media Strategy and Social Media Plan
Too many people, perhaps even yourself, think social media strategy and social media plan is the same thing. Here’s something to understand: a social media plan will include your strategy as well as the timelines, techniques, budget, steps, responsibilities, roles, etc. These work in conjunction with each other to successfully implement your plan.
Here’s a better way to understand this: a social media strategy closes the gap between where you’re at right now and where you’d like to be. The strategy needs to address the general questions you have before the plan can be put into action. The purpose of your strategy is to do the following:
· Explain what your business goals for social media are
· Examine your present status on social media
· Come up with or better your existing social media profiles
· Create content strategy
· Use tools that monitor your progress and alter the strategy when called for
What Social Media Marketing Tools Can You Use?
Like any job you do, the right tools are the difference between success and failure. And, social media marketing has its fair share of tools that will help you to succeed in your marketing campaign. What kinds of tools can you use to improve your chances of success?
· Hootsuite – This helps with automation of your social media posts.
· Rankspeed– This will help you to find topics that relate to your industry.
· Audiense– This will discover traits in the audience network.
· Klear – This assists you in finding high-ranking Twitter users based on their popularity, activity, and communications. It also helps to better your own status for these areas.
· Zendesk – This site will help to combine and manage help requests and customer service in one area, producing tickets that a support team member will get.
· Manageflitter – This is ideal for following and unfollowing Twitter accounts
· Coschedule– This will help you to create a schedule for all your social media content and posts.
· YouTube Analytics – This offers you an in-depth look at your brand’s video content shared on YouTube – demographics, subscriber activity, channel statistics, etc.
Where You Can Find A Social Media Template
When you decide to become a social media marketer, you may be confused to successfully begin your campaign. After all, social media marketing is in a constant state of motion – always changing, always improving. This is why Coschedule has come up with social media templates that you can alter to work for you.
7 Tips To Ensure You Have A Successful Social Media Marketing Campaign
You may be concerned with the fundamentals of social media marketing and management, but for details to make any sense, you need to have a solid foundation. Consider using the following strategies to increase the chance of success.
· Hashtags for a virtual filing system, and look at the hashtags competitors are using to inspire yours.
· Ask questions that will engage your audience
· Listen to what your audience has to say, keeping track of their conversations
· Offer valuable items to your audience that they’re not able to see elsewhere
· Use Twitter to create relationships to get conversations going about your brand and establish connections with your audience
· Be mindful of the engagement, timing, brand voice and frequency
· Use eye-appealing images, which can garner far more views than just text content
There’s a plethora of information available on the topic of social media marketing, but with the information above, you should have a fairly good idea about the direction you need to take to ensure your campaign is a success.
Do you have a succesful social media marketing campaign going on? Please let us know in the comments below.
Consider this: Your business' new email marketing campaign was just sent out. The content is amazing, the call to action is irresistible and the subject headline can't miss... or so you believe. You eagerly check your analytics, but it is evident that your email campaign is falling way short of your expectations.
What happened?
You might have low open rates or click-through rates - there are many reasons why email marketing campaigns fail, even with seasoned marketers. The upside is that the user engagement is easy to correct.
1. The mistake: Overly self-promotional content.
Why should anyone care about your email regarding your new upgrade to your software? However, if a benefit of your new software update is to slash video upload time by 50%, now you have their attention. You need to highlight the benefits of your service while you are promoting it at the same time.
Can you really do both at the same time?
The solution: Begin by pinpointing the biggest issues facing your audience. For example, you are employed at a recruiting agency. Getting a great resume that gets results is one of their biggest concerns; therefore you should give them a checklist to fix common resume problems. Really think about the real problems your clients are facing and then show them how they can benefit from using your services. Next, you will want to set up email campaign using an editorial calendar which will keep you focused and help to provide valuable email content.
2. The mistake: Impersonal email campaign.
Who is your email From in the address bar? Does it say a business name, your own name or something completely different? If you have low open rates, try making your emails more personal. The content of your email is also critical. Are you using industry related jargon that is impersonal or are you talking directly to your potential customers?
The solution: You can make your email more human by making the From address more personal. Do you really want to talk to a [email protected]? Write in a conversational manner to sound more human and less like a robot. For instance, if someone is unemployed don't say that they are economically marginalized. Eliminate pretentious buzzwords and use straightforward, simple to follow language.
3. The mistake: A weak call to action.
Check out this Studio Fitness email below:
They introduce us to a nutritionist and personal trainer but no way of contacting either. They want you to sign up for their plan, but again no way of doing so. You can't even get to the Studio Fitness main site from anywhere in the email. Studio Fitness could be a popular gym name and have the potential customers hunt down your website is definitely not a good business idea.
The solution: When people read your email, what should they be doing? Should they sign-up, go to your website, complete a survey? You must have a powerful and convincing call to action - you have to tell your visitors what to do next! Be very clear with your call to action.
4. The mistake: You’re not consistent.
You signed up for a weekly newsletter and then suddenly you start getting 10 emails daily, how would you feel? You would be very unhappy, right? Although this sounds outlandish, it happens fairly often. If you don't deliver on what you promised when they signed up, your readers will ignore your emails and eventually unsubscribe.
The solution: Stick with whatever you promised on your signup form. Make use of an editorial calendar to keep focused.
5. The mistake: No follow-up series.
For instance, a potential customer begins your software service on a free trialbasis; however, they didn't follow through or bought your service. Not a good outcome. This will happen if you don't set up a follow-up series that is trigger based.
The solution: Your visitor's behavior is beyond your control; however, you are in control of your reaction to it. You have a better chance of keeping your customer engaged if you set up follow-up emails to go out right after their trial period. This will give them an opportunity to contact you if they need clarification about your service and you also get another chance to close the sale.
6. The mistake: Boring headlines.
Check out the subject line below. Did you learn anything about what is inside the email?
Not a single thing. No thought was given to this subject line. It tells you nothing and doesn't motivate you to open it at all. Also, look at the preview of the text following the subject line. It reads (“If you’re having trouble…”). This is space that could be used to get the user to open the email.
The solution: Make good use of the approximately 35 characters you have in the subject line! If you don't grab their attention, they won't read your email even if you have amazing content and offers.
7. The mistake: Not personalizing your email.
The best way to grab someone's attention is to use their name! Using it in an email has the exact same effect. You are missing an opportunity to connect with your customers if you are not personalizing your email.
The solution: Very similar to using your real name in the From address, you can make more of a human connection by personalizing your email opening. Look at the personalization example below and the way it effectively uses the preview text.
8. The mistake: Targeting the wrong audience.
Is there any point sending newsletters to vegetarians in Chicago for your New York burger joint? If you have a growing email list it is important to segment your visitors using list management techniques.
The solution: Let your visitors know exactly what they are getting once they sign up to your list and deliver exactly that. On your form, you can segment people into interests, locations or any other relevant segments. You can even segment people who opened a specific email and keep them on a separate list. When you have optimized your segmentation, get feedback from your subscribers and send them what they are interested in.
More than likely you have committed one or more of the above mistakes. The great news is you now have a working solution. Just put the above tips into action and give your readers more valuable and relevant content. We would love to hear the results of your email marketing efforts.
Do you have other tips for increasing engagement from your email list? Please share them in the comments area below!
There are typically two types of clients I encounter: the ones who know they need personal branding on behalf of their business, and the ones who barely understand branding in even a general perspective.
Of course a business (whether it’s a product or service) should have its own branding strategy – as you may know this includes an integrated marketing and PR approach compromised of traditional and digital promotional methods.
However, what business leaders tend to overlook is the need to also brand themselves on behalf of their brands. This humanizes and gives brands a face behind the logo, and it also allows business leaders to become a subject matter experts in their respective industries.
For those business leaders looking to get some quick branding wins in the digital space – or marketing leaders supporting business leaders – here are some personal branding tips that allow for a quick ramp up:
Establish a personal yet professional Twitter handle.
· Make it look pretty, but also get some foundational stuff in place like a Twitter list for established industry brands, subject matter experts and competitors.
· Retweet. Retweet. Retweet.
· Set-up Google alerts to schedule original tweets with the right hashtags.
· Schedule tweets using a free tool like Hootsuite (to start at least).
· Create original and crafty content. And, use video, a lot. Build some awareness and a timeline of creditability and then do some paid follower ads.
Become an author in the digital space.
· Of what you ask? Blogs, white papers, case studies, e-books and industry snapshots.
· You – or your marketing person or consultant – know your industry pretty well, so write some blogs a few times per month and post them on your website.
· Think big picture to save time. A group of 2-4 blogs can easily become a larger piece, like an e-book.
· Promote them on your social channels (Twitter and LinkedIn are most effective for business-ish content, the other social networks are for consumer content).
Get your name out there – fuel the Ferrari and hit the gas.
· Have your marketing person or consultant pull together a PR plan to secure you some guest blogging opportunities.
· Draft and distribute press releases with you as a subject matter expert for some of the content marketing you've written.
· Send emails to employees and customers/clients asking them to share your content (be selective, don’t do this for every piece of content you author).
· Self-publish on LinkedIn. Your connections will get a notification you wrote something.
· Get quoted by establishing relationships with local media.
Go for the whole enchilada.
· Put some paid promotion around the content pieces that have gotten the most response on Twitter, from bloggers and media.
· Test out both Twitter and Facebook. See where you get the most traction. (LinkedIn is very expensive with little return unless you have a large budget).
· You don't have to spend a lot of money on ads either. Test a few, and start with a nominal amount per ad ($25-$50).
· The one or two that get the best response should move to round two with more money ($75-$100) to see what happens.
Who’s doing it well?
That’s today’s homework assignment: Google to find out why the following individuals are killing it in the personal branding game.
· Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group.
· Jennifer Lopez, international media mogul.
· John Legere, CEO of T-Mobile.
· Laurence Bigio, former client and CEO of Caribbean Media/Challenges Magazine.
· Dr. Neda Vanden Bosch, current client and cosmetic physician.
As you can see personal branding isn't just for celebrities or media moguls, it's a key value-add to any business's brand, whether it's B2B or B2C.
Approximately 30 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs have an active presence on at least one social network, according to data compiled by AdWeek from Socialmediatoday.com and Brandfog.com.
Other business data that I found interesting:
· CEOs who participate on social media can build better connections with customers nearly 90 percent of the time, almost 85 percent of the time with employees and 66 percent of the time with potential investors.
· Consumers are more likely to trust (82 percent) and buy (77 percent) from a company whose CEO and leadership team engage on social media.
Are you ready to establish yourself as a personal brand, or maybe re-tool your current brand? Portray yourself as personable, relatable, qualified and well-researched individual to speak on the topics you choose.
By that, I mean source properly when it comes citing facts and figures that you are referencing. You don’t own those facts. They came from somewhere. Give credit where it’s due.
Think of yourself as a journalist now. You absolutely do not want to be pinged for plagiarism. It destroys a personal brand and fast.
The question you probably have – and that I get asked often – is: does what I've suggested work? Yes. Does it happen immediately? No.
A timeline of 3-6 months is about what it takes to get someone personally branded. In terms of budget, you are looking at spend of a few thousand dollars (sometimes more if there's budget for it), but the name recognition on the results page of a search engine is worth more than its weight in gold.
Let's face it, the first thing someone does before they do business with you or your company is Google you. You can control what is shown and seen if you put in a little bit of work.
Have you started building a personal brand of your own? Please let us know in the comments below.
Guest Author:Anthony Beven (A.K.A. Social Ant) is a marketing & PR consultant. Visit his websitewww.socialant83.com.
Webinars are an effective way to market content , especially static content like research papers or case studies. Think of an engaging perfect webinar like a great radio show that is well produced and includes images. You can break it down into a small theater show with 5 acts.
A perfect webinar that is well produced will take your visitors from "just looking" to "I want it right now". The most recent CMI research shows that 2 out of every 3 B2B marketers have made use of webinars and of that 66 % thought they were valuable.
Like with any kind of event that is well-produced, planning plays a key role. It usually takes 6 to 8 weeks from "let's do this" to "air time" in order to put together a demand-generation webinar. Below we will outline the 5 acts needed to produce a lucrative webinar.
Prologue
Although technology is an important part of the webinar, it has more to do with focusing on what you want your outcomes to be and making sure your business drivers are in alignment. On top of that, you also have to balance the dynamic scheduling, strategic planning, and human elements.
A project management approach with specific deadlines keeps your webinar focused and on schedule. Other important elements include effective best practices, email communications and a way to measure the overall success of a perfect webinar. Every act’s target and process checklist provide you with a solid foundation for a productive strategy.
Act 1 – Laying the foundation for a seamless production
Priority objectives:
Identify webinar goals and expected results.
Pinpoint technology resources as well as team expertise required.
Create a project strategy and launch effectively.
Tasks
Figure out webinar content: research results, how-to/instructional, or compliance and benchmarks.
Determine your target market.
Create a working title.
Pinpoint target market pain points this webinar tackles.
Examine if the subject matter is a “nice-to-have” or “must-have”.
Find sources for subject matter.
Outline the business goals.
Specify the call to action (before, throughout, and also after the webinar).
Breakdown success components and ideal results.
Figure out the time to take the webinar live.
Create a project schedule.
Categorize who is included in the project group.
Decide if in-house and/or third-party presenters are required.
Determine which webinar platform you are going to use.We recommend Webinarjam
Verify if the webinar platform adaptability/integration with online marketing automation software utilities.
Take a look at sound demands.
Set up a launch meeting to make sure all involved are on the same page.
Follow up with players after launch meeting iron out last minute details and get production started.
Create the email offer and email marketing campaign timetable.
Look for email list-sourcing alternatives outside of your in-house list.
Implement the email marketing campaign.
Tasks
Decide on an informative value added subject matter that is important to your prospective buyers (like getting rid of an annoyance, detailing the best way to achieve better results, or updating them on marketplace and sector changes).
Establish a viewer’s profile to match the subject matter and value proposal.
Information and facts about sectors, employment titles/characteristics, income thresholds as well as your target market geographical locations.
Measure and source your target market outside of your in-house email list to satisfy your enrollment objectives.
Pinpoint email list-sourcing alternatives (such as media contributors, trade groups, bought contact subscriber lists).
What will be the format of the email invitation? Text, HTML or both.
Make sure that the email invitation deals with the problems of your target audience and deliverables are clear on how they will solve them by attending your webinar.
Build a landing page specifically for the webinar registration using a webinar hosting service or marketing-automation system).
Set up the predefined schedule for the email campaign (the number and the start date).
Generate attention-grabbing headlines for every email
Setup measurement criteria for the email marketing campaign and daily tracking of registrants.
Implement the email promotion strategy and begin tracking registrants daily.
Make use of email and enrollment data to figure out if the sales message is attracting your target market and enrollment outcomes.
Act III – Interacting with your target market
Primary objectives:
Collect and transform enrollment details into a marketing strategy.
Have a table-read meeting to fine tune the webinar framework and flow.
Do a preliminary walk-through and dress rehearsal.
Tasks
Analyze the important email webinar request criteria (delivered, soft bounces, hard bounces, distributed, click rate, open rate, opt-outs/unsubscribes, and spam mail reports).
Assess the vital webinar results prior to going live. (The click-through ratio CTR is the measure of the number of registered people vs. unregistered people.)
Collect and evaluate extra enrollment info from the webinar squeeze page (e.g., the things you are able to find out about the company, marketplace, and work function; what they want to learn from the webinar; exactly how did they learn about the webinar?).
Develop a control panel to observe daily enrollment tracking (e.g., email promotion data by touchpoint, target market demographics, and daily enrollment by touchpoint such as CTR details).
Keep track of promotion data to make sure they are on target and fine-tune the marketing campaign, if required.
Think about getting the undecided (people who opened your email message but failed to go through with enrollment) to sign up by delivering follow up emails.
Set aside 1 hour for the webinar rehearsal.
Put together and forward the agenda of the rehearsal for important organizers and presenters.
Go forward with the rehearsal meeting (online or face to face):
Always make sure that the content of the webinar is aligned with the invite.
Talk about the framework, timing, and flow.
Make a production blueprint – pinpoint every section, timeframe, and presenter.
Create PowerPoint slides and design.
Be certain that presenters have proper audio tools, give them a USB headphone, if required.
Set aside one and a half hours for the initial walkthrough.
Make and forward the agenda for the initial walkthrough.
Go forward with the initial walkthrough:
Divulge information collected from daily enrollment.
Adjust and improve the subject material, where necessary.
Go through the slideshow.
Check speakers and sound equipment.
Start creation of issues for online surveys (icebreaker, conclusion, and next action steps).
Plan 1 hour 30 minutes for the 2nd walkthrough.
Make 6 slides as bookends – splash screen, an intro of the presenter, who's on the webinar, housekeeping tasks, strong call to action, Q&A with the pros.
Generate the concluding poll to determine approval along with additional qualitative observations.
Create thank-you emails for anyone who participated and no-shows with a hyperlink to see the webinar and also any further action steps to keep the conversation going.
Tests drive the webinar recording program.
Proceed with the 2nd walkthrough.
Perform a timed run through of the slides and polls (icebreaker, closing, and next steps).
Talk to your group 1 hour prior to the start of the webinar.
Do the last audio test.
Go over the slide show for the final time.
Be certain that surveys, polls, and seed queries are uploaded into the webinar system.
Establish a backup plan – standby sound and platform.
Record the webinar and give 2 different people the task to produce a backup saving.
Supply the group with a debriefing phone number to call right after the webinar.
Switch on the splash display a minimum of 15 minutes prior to the live webinar.
Turn off any ringers and everything that is able to make noise.
Turn off non-speakers.
Deliver a welcome statement to visitors a couple minutes before beginning the broadcast.
Begin punctually, welcome the viewers, and have a great time.
Keep track of live monitoring of operation info to determine participation.
Give a strong call to action and what happens next to your guest a few minutes before ending.
Finish on time, and show appreciation to the presenters and the visitors.
Go to a different webinar a 15-minute group debrief.
Revise the webinar recording to take out housekeeping details and also any sound errors.
Deliver thank-you email messages within 48 hours after the end of the webinar.
Act V – Converting your visitors
Main objectives:
Put together the last data and analytics.
Transform the analytics into action steps for sales staff.
Evaluate the success of the webinar.
Tasks
Collect the closing life-cycle details from the marketing automation system and webinar hosting service.
Evaluate the 6 fundamental webinar criteria: click-through percentage, attendee percentage, webinar surveys, viewer retention, exit evaluations, and live viewings.
Generate a write-up with a description of the concluding criteria (e.g., email and enrollment criteria, daily enrollment monitoring conclusion, surveys and polls, lead origins profiles, attendee info, and email marketing campaign outcomes).
Create an executable executive overview.
Decide which guest is sales-ready, which ones require encouraging, and which ones don't fit.
Pass the sales-ready potential customers to the sales force.
Formulate a post-webinar fostering strategy.
Evaluate if primary planning objectives were achieved.
Assess the effectiveness the webinar in achieving your business objectives.
Outline what you learned.
See whether there is sufficient enthusiasm for another webinar or perhaps a series of webinars.
Use this template together with your company's best practices and you will get positive results from your webinars and provide value to your target market.
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