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Rookie Mistakes You Might Be Making on LinkedIn

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There is no doubt that LinkedIn is a valuable tool for people who are looking to network with fellow professionals, generate more leads or boost their reputation. LinkedIn can be an even more powerful social media tool than Twitter and Facebook, if used properly. Unfortunately, a lot of people are not taking advantage of its networking features.

It’s time to take a look at your LinkedIn profile to make sure that you are not making any of these LinkedIn blunders. These mistakes could be limiting your success before you even start.

You have no profile picture

This is one of the biggest mistakes we see on LinkedIn. Typically, people do not connect or even click profiles that do not have a profile photo. A missing photo can easily lead to missed connections.

Adding a photo to your LinkedIn profile can make a big difference. In fact, studies suggest that you’re profile is seven times more likely to be viewed if you have one.

Using the wrong photo

As the saying goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words”. You want your profile photo to be professional and approachable.

While your LinkedIn photo doesn’t have to be a picture of you wearing a suit, it would be best to stay away from selfies of vacation photos.  When choosing your profile photo, go for pictures that convey professionalism or at least something that reflects the type of industry you belong in.

Not using LinkedIn groups

LinkedIn offers groups to help members connect with professionals within their areas of interests or industry. Occasionally, LinkedIn suggests group you may like. But you can also search for a specific group or browse the directory. These groups are a great way to connect with people who have the same interests as you, troubleshoot issues or share ideas.

Lacking a descriptive job title

If you are a job seeker, it is important to be as detailed as possible in this section. Instead of simply writing “Student at University of Colorado”, it would be better if you write “Advertising Major at University of Colorado”.

Keep in mind that a lot of people with similar qualifications and education are competing for the same job. Having a descriptive job title will give you an edge with a prospective employer.

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Best and Worst Times to Post on Social Media

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I know a lot of people who would log on to their social media accounts when they wake up in the morning. So, that’s probably one of the best times to post on social media, right?

But wait, I heard that most people also use it in the afternoon to mess around when they get bored at work. Or maybe they spend a few hours browsing through their newsfeeds after business hours. Okay, I’m officially confused.

Determining when to post on social media requires that you consider which platform your target audience is using. Remember, each social network has different users and their activities vary.

If you’re posting a status update when the majority of you audience are not online, then your time and effort goes to waste. Since you’re a busy person, you can’t afford to waste time.

Let’s get into the stats then.

Schedule tweets for lunch time

If your target market is on Twitter, be sure to tweet between 1-3 pm. During lunch break, a lot of people are checking in on Twitter. Traffic starts to build at 11 am, with peak posting days from Monday to Thursday. Avoid posting after 3pm on Friday.

Post Facebook status in the afternoon, when less people want to be at work

Engagement is one of the key considerations to a post’s visibility. An ideal time for engagement is between 1-4 pm.

Most people need some form of entertainment just to get through the afternoon slump, like around that 3:00 pm lull. For a lot of people, that means logging on to Facebook. These numbers hit rock bottom during the weekends, before 8 am and after 8 pm.

No one uses LinkedIn on a Friday

People are less interested in what’s happening on LinkedIn when they are winding up and winding down their work week. That means you shouldn’t bother posting on Monday and Friday. The best time for engagement is between Tuesday to Thursday, particularly before and after business hours.

 

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5 Ways to Improve Your Twitter Marketing Results

1: Turn a Pinned Tweet Into a Feature Box

The Feature Box is an email form you place at the top of your homepage, which offers your website visitors a freebie in exchange for signing up for your email list.You can add a similar feature to your Twitter profile page by combining two of Twitter’s native features: a lead generation card and a pinned tweet. Simply create a Lead Generation Card that includes an incentive for people to opt in. Offer regular email updates, a special freebie or a subscribers-only discount. Pin the tweet to the top of your Twitter profile and you’re all set.

2: Communicate Less and Tweet More Links

A recent study by Dan Zarrella looked at the “reply rates” of about 130,000 random Twitter users and discovered that highly followed accounts tend to converse less. Keep in mind, the study results don’t suggest that Twitter conversations have a negative effect on your following, just that conversations aren’t what motivate people to follow you on Twitter. According to another study by Dan Zarrella, the way to get more followers is to invest more time tweeting relevant links to your followers, rather than communicating directly with them.

3: Ask Twitter Influencers for Help

According to BuzzSumo who recently studied the share counts of more than 100 million articles, when influencers share your content, the reach increases substantially. If one influencer shares a piece of content, it will get 38.8% more social shares. Three influencers double the social shares and five influencers quadruple them. It’s crucial to network with influencers and develop relationships with them. Then, when you have an important piece of content you’d like to get seen, you can ask the influencers you know to share it.

4: Use Twitter’s Recommend Feature

Recommend is a new feature of Twitter’s tweet button that many people don’t pay attention to. After a visitor tweets an article from your blog, the window recommends they follow you on Twitter, if they don’t follow you already. This is an excellent way to grow your Twitter account, since people who just tweeted your article are likely to want to follow you. Look at the code of your tweet button and make sure the recommend field contains your Twitter username. To double-check you’ve set up the feature correctly, ask a friend to unfollow you on Twitter and then tweet an article from your blog. If the recommend field contains your Twitter username, you’re all set.

5: Repeat Article Tweets

According to a study by Wisemetrics, the second tweet of an article gets as much as 86% of the performance as the first tweet. Clearly the performance will fade with each new tweet, but considering your followers are probably in different time zones, you still need to tweet your most valuable content more than once. Your new followers will appreciate it, since the content will be new for them.

 

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Tips for Finding the Right Social Influencers for Your Brand

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With the powerful combination of social media and word-of-mouth, businesses from all over the world are changing how they market to consumers.

As marketers, our first instinct is to create contents or videos that would allow us engage with our target audience and persuade them to buy our products or avail our services. But today’s buyers are smart and savvy. They start losing interest the moment they realize that you are selling a product. One of the biggest keys to connecting with your target audience is leveraging influencers.

With thousands of bloggers and Youtube stars in your industry to choose from, finding the right influencer to partner with may seem like a daunting task. Find out how to choose the perfect influencers to inspire trust from your customers.

Content

This is the most important characteristic when targeting the right influencer for your brand. Read through the blogger’s posts and determine how aligned their contents are with your brand message.

In order to stay relevant, you need to determine the type of content your audience is interested in. Take a moment to browse through the influencer’s blog posts, infographics or videos. This will give you an idea if the influencer will be a good fit for your brand.

Engagement

Engagement indicates how active an influencer’s social community is. Do they share, respond or comment on his posts?

Just because someone talks about your product, doesn’t mean that you should get in touch with that persons and turn him into an advocate. Your goal is to find someone who talks about your products or services and are earning high levels of engagement.

Reach

Part of what makes a social influencer is the fact that they have a large following.

In order to determine whether or not this influencer will be a good representation for your brand, it would be best to define your target audience and compare them to your potential influencer’s audience. There’s no point in partnering with an influencer with 200,000 followers if their audience doesn’t align with yours.

 

 

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How Can I Market My Business Online?

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As a startup business, it is understandable that you don’t have a wad of cash to market your business. But that does not necessarily mean that you can’t get your brand out there.

The internet is teeming with marketing platforms that would not require you to spend a ridiculous amount of money. If you want to maximize your success, you need to take advantage of the power of the internet and learn how to promote your business online.

This week, we’ll give you some pointers on how to get the word out about your business and start driving sales.

Optimize your company’s website

In the world of constant Googling, search engine optimization cannot be underestimated. The idea here is to write your website’s content in such a way that it would appear in major search engines such as Bing and Google.

Embrace social media

Today, virtually every business, whether big or small, has accounts on different social media platforms.

Without social media, your inbound traffic is limited to people who are familiar with your business. Use social media to create more awareness for your company and to present a more personal side of your business. You can also post updates from time to time to keep your fans posted on your business happenings.

Start a blog

Blogging is a great way to boost your site’s ranking in search engines and drive traffic to your website. This is particularly important if you are running an online business.

For this to be effective, you have to write blog posts frequently and provide your audience with relevant information. As you continue to provide valuable information and solutions to your target market’s problems, you’ll soon become a trusted source of information. Once they see you as an industry expert, they are more likely to buy from you.

When you grow, hire a pro

When you’re starting out, it is natural that you want to oversee every single aspect of your business, including online marketing. But as your business grows, you might want to hire a professional to take over the marketing side of your business. After all, these people have the skills, knowledge and experience to help you reach and connect with your target audience and generate new leads.

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Tips For Your Mobile-Marketing Strategy

Did you know that half of all internet searches now take place on mobile devices? This calls for businesses to take action when it comes to updating their mobile strategy. The past two years have taken more of a simple approach to the design of mobile devices, but that is all changing in 2015. For businesses, having a site that renders across a wide variety of mobile devices is critical for doing business. untitled

Understanding your audience’s mobile habits is one of the most crucial steps in creating your own mobile strategy. Are they using tablets or smartphones? What activities are they doing on your site? What content are they accessing? Studying how your audience uses their mobile devices is the first step to bettering your mobile strategy. This will help you make content that is specifically focused on what your audience is looking for which will make them coming back to your site. Putting yourself in the shoes of your consumer will also help you to create headlines that will grasp their attention. When it comes to writing a headline for your mobile users, ask yourself whether it is highly relevant to your audience, whether it has a powerful hook, and whether it evokes an image or an emotional response to whoever is reading it.

After you’ve sparked your audience’s attention with the headline, now it’s time to lure them in with a good “lead-in”. The lead-in is what occurs in the first paragraph and is what keeps your reader eager to read on. This is your first paragraph and the most crucial. There is nothing wrong with delivering the most value early on because this is what will keep readers engaged. The readers with a screen that’s too small to read 2000 words on still get the value of a positive brand contact and are likely to come back for more.

Introducing video and visual content is another aspect of mobile strategy that is on the rise. Now is the time to make sure your mobile site has videos, infographics, images, and other visual content that reaches out to your audience. Video marketing is a great strategy when it comes to growing your business, and now with micro-video services like Vine, it is easy to compile your message in to 6 seconds. This may seem like a short amount of time to get your message across, but this can actually be more efficient for your users’ time.

In the past couple of years, we have seen tremendous growth for mobile devices. Our smart phones are becoming smarter than we have ever imagined. As the use of the internet on mobile devices continues to grow, this is giving businesses more opportunities in internet marketing. it is important to think more about our presence on mobile devices and developing a strategy that will help us become more efficient mobile marketers.

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4 Ways to Use Facebook Groups for Your Business

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Since business owners have discovered that they could make fans through their Facebook page and market through a broader group of consumers, many of them have slowly abandoned the Facebook groups and focused their time on managing their page.

With so many changes taking place on the said platform, business owners have assumed that groups are no longer effective. But as soon as they abandoned the groups, they seem to forget about the “social” in social media. They focused on paid advertisement, limiting the interaction between the company and it audience.

So how do you use Facebook groups for your business? Here are 4 ways.

Exchange ideas with group members

When thinking of creating a group, one of the main reasons should be to keep in touch with your audience.

While a business page allows a company to broadcast new products, services or content, Facebook groups is a good place to ask questions or start a conversation with actual customers without posting a sales pitch.

Gather people of like interest

We do like to converse with people with the same interest as ours, right?

Through Facebook groups, you can gather people of like interest together. Here, you can ask questions, tell stories and offer advice to others. As the conversation evolves and as you start building a relationship with the group members, they might consider inviting some of their friends to the group.

Provide customer support

For small businesses that are still not capable of hiring people and offer customer support round-the-clock, having an active Facebook group is advantageous as it gives customers a place to share, collaborate and connect with others. Here, people can offer support and advice to fellow customers, even if you’re not online.

Create a secret group

A secret group provides you the chance to interact with your loyal customers. Here, you can give them exclusive updates to your newest products or services. Plus, it gives an incentive to customers who have supported your company through the years.

 

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SEO Practices For 2015

SEO has been changing rapidly over the past couple of years and Google and other search engines are getting smarter. For 2015, it is important to stay on top of knowing what search engines want and how to optimize your quality of the content and overall experience of your site to better your business. Here are some of the SEO essentials for 2015:Search Engine Optimization - Magnifying Glass

Considering the goals of Search Engine companies is a good place to start when thinking about your SEO strategy. The two most important things to consider are making sure that your site has the best quality content for keywords relevant to your site and making sure that Google and other search engines are aware of this. Over the past few years, Google and other search engines have become smarter in understanding both website content and user experience.

Making sure your site is free of spam, malware, and other problems is crucial to making sure that your site is reputable. Excessive ads, pages filled with nothing but links, and any deceptive practices are signs that your site is not reputable. If you sign up for notifications in Google Webmaster tools they will tell you if they detect any issues on your site. The fastness of your site is also a huge factor in ensuring quality experience for your users. Studies have shown that just a one-second delay in page load time results in a 7% decline in sales. Alexa Site Audit is a tool that can help detect your sites slowest pages to make sure your performance is optimized. Alexa Site Audit also helps monitor your site for broken links.

It is also important to be aware of the “freshness factor” when it comes to the quality of your site. A site that hasn’t been updated in months or years is most likely lower quality. With out of date content, this also probably means the site hasn’t earned any new inbound links. Without fresh content on your site, search engines will most likely pass over your site for newer, more current content.

Quality content that is original, clearly written, and relevant is integral for your website and business overall. Making sure that your content is effective in making the connection between what people are searching for and the pages of your website is crucial. The pages of your site should be more focused on individual topics rather than individual keywords. But, choosing the right keywords for your content is one of the most important parts of SEO. When choosing keyword phrases for your content, it is important to keep track of which ones drive traffic to your site, which ones drive traffic to your competitors sites, and how often people search for certain keyword phrases. The Alexa keyword tool, which is part of the Alexa Advanced subscription, can help you find keywords driving traffic to your competitors’ sites.

SEO has grown tremendously over the past couple of years and Google and other search engines are getting smarter and smarter. Staying on top of the current changes and changes in SEO is crucial in deepening our understanding of how to use it to our advantage. I the world of internet marketing, SEO is the key to understanding our customers’ needs and making sure you’ve got it.

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