It’s important to think of Pinterest as a search engine, not just a social media platform. This means that people use Pinterest to find things they’re interested in, like your blog posts. Similar to a search on Google.
Pinterest is a great way to drive traffic back to your website and grow your blog’s brand.
Here are 5 reasons how using Pinterest as a blogger can help improve your blog’s SEO, bring in more traffic, and grow your audience.
Pinterest is a visual search engine –
People visit with the goal of reading and saving pins in mind. When you pin something from your blog, make sure to add keywords in the title and description so pinners can easily find it. For example, if you write about travel tips, you could use keywords like “travel tips” and “vacation ideas” when you pin. Also, remember to use hashtags, this helps tell Pinterest what that pin is about and allows pinners to find pins. Consistency is key. It’s important to be consistent with your pins. If you only pin a few times a month, people will lose interest and won’t follow you. Try to pin at least once or twice a day to see the best results. You can create templates in Canva where you can easily swap out the text and the images while staying consistent with your brand. This allows you to use those keywords and tips at the text overlay and have eye-grabbing images that make your audience want to click on your image and go to your website.
Utilizing Group Boards –
You may join groups where you can share comparable material. Group boards are a great way to increase blog traffic because they allow your pins to be seen by more people. When you join a group board, make sure that the topics of the pins on the board fit with your blog content. If you have a travel blog, for example, it wouldn’t make sense to pin recipes on a group board about fashion. Be sure to follow the rules for each group board, most of the time you will find those rules in the notes section.
Pinterest allows you to be creative with your pins –
You may use your SEO abilities and hashtags to target people who are interested in your pins on Pinterest. When you’re creating pins, make sure they are eye-catching and include text overlays that describe what the image is about. This will help the pinner understand what your pin is about without having to click on it. For example, if you have a blog post about how to pack for a trip, you could create an image with the title. Pinterest also allows different types of pins, you can create animated video pins, video pins of you giving quick tips, or even pin your Instagram square images. Rich Pins make it easier for users to get information from a website by displaying metadata right on the Pin itself. When a user saves content with metadata on your site, it will become a Rich Pin. There are four different types of Rich Pins: app, article, product, and recipe Pins.
Drives traffic to your website –
When someone pins one of your blog posts to their board, they’re essentially sending people to your website. This is a great way to increase traffic and grow your audience. Make sure the images you pin are high-quality so pinners will want to click on them. Going back to the consistency, this is where a tool like Tailwind comes into play, this allows you to pin up to 200 images per week to your boards and even Tailwind Communities. Each pin you put up should have an SEO-friendly title and description with a link directly back to the blog post. You can then monitor your Pinterest Analytics and your Google Analytics to see where the traffic is coming from. For each blog you post on your website, you should create 10-15 images per blog to pin to Pinterest.
Time Efficient Tools –
Tailwind is a service that works with Pinterest to help you manage your time and drive more visitors to your website. I was hesitant about this purchase for some time. I expected to just look into the free trial and then cancel, but once I started using it, I couldn’t stop. Tailwind is a social media scheduling software that delivers real results in less time. Boost the effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts! Decide when to post on social media and how much engagement you want. A few bonus tips, you can use Tailwind to schedule to Instagram as well, you can also link your Instagram to Tailwind and post your images from Instagram to different boards on Pinterest. Tailwind will also allow you to create loop pins, these are great for your evergreen content that will always serve value to your audience, you put those pins in a certain loop that pins to the boards you want and over time it will automatically pin those out for you at the best times and days! This is a life-saving and time-saving tool! A must-have!
If you are ready to work with a team to do the leg work for you, meaning, create the images, pin them, write the description, and more, we are your team! We just launched a new blogger marketing program to help take items off your plate to give you as a blogger more time to write and less time worrying about creating images and social media strategy. Schedule a FREE 30-minute consultation today and let’s start increasing your website traffic!
https://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Wondering-if-Pinterest-is-worth-your-time-as-a-blogger.png12602240Amber Irwinhttps://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialSpeak-Logo.pngAmber Irwin2022-01-26 06:00:232022-01-25 16:42:54Wondering if Pinterest is worth your time as a blogger?
Today, we will go through Pinterest, and we are going to do an audit on our account. So we have been working with Pinterest for a long time. We use Pinterest for many of our clients, driving traffic back to their website through a very strategic Pin strategy, posting to different boards, Tailwind communities, and different Pinterest groups, and also through promoted Pins. We were coming in to do this anyway to make sure we’re doing as we say to do. It’s one of those, “Do as we say, not as we do.” [chuckle] We want to make sure that what we’re doing with our clients, that we’re doing for ourselves as well. So as you’ll see, we are in our business Pinterest account. And when you come to your Pinterest account, you want to make sure that it is a business account. And you’ll see your home feed here. The reason why you want a business account is because of the analytics and the ads. So with a business account, there are also a few different Pins you can create. The analytics are very important because they will show you how many views you have each month on your Pinterest account. It will also show you what pins are being saved and have the most engagement, and your ads to promote those ads to drive more traffic back to your website.
Business Pinterest Account
We’re going to go to the business hub. And this is kind of the behind-the-scenes; this will tell you just a sneak peek of our analytics, which we’ll get to first. What our public profile looks like. So over here, on the right-hand side, you’ll see your logo. If this is a personal account you’ve been using, there should be an option that says “Switch to Business Account,” and that’s what you want to do. So a couple of things, you can change this header. You can have a specific header there as you have on your Facebook or your YouTube channel with your business name, what you do, your logo, things like that. We have it just set up to show our most recent Pins. So that’s more of a personal preference. This is a good space for that brand-building, we work with many different types of bloggers, so this may be a great area for your branded images with your mission or topics you cover. If you are a mom blog that works with kids ten and younger or just giving your audience a little insight into who you are, that’s a great place to have it.
Your logo or image here, your company name, and this all depends on your brand. Caitlin and I have branded Social Speak Network, so that’s our logo; that’s obviously what all of our social media is. But as a blogger, you may be branding your name, so this may be your name if you don’t have a business name for your blog. So it depends on what brand you’re using; that’s what would go here. And then your description, making sure it’s apparent what it is that you do. And then you’ll see we have only 635 followers, we’re following 129 people, but we have over 43,000 monthly views. That’s good for us. Pinterest is not a social media platform, It’s important to have followers, but you’re not banking on the number of followers you have on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. It comes down to your Pin strategy. That’s the most important piece.
So you’ll see that these are all the Pins that we have created and that we’ve put up on our account, and you’ll be able to see how many times they have been viewed, and these have just been posted this week, so there’s not a whole whole lot of views on them yet. You’ll see that the ones that we pinned a few months ago have many more views. So what I want to do is look at what the Saved button is, which will change our profile to show the boards that we have. Now, when you think you can click on All Pins, we’ve had 63,000 Pins. And there is a mixture here of what we want to do. We talk a lot about healthcare digital marketing tips. We have social media marketing for small businesses. We have SEO and blogging tips, social media management for bloggers, finding your target market, Instagram marketing tips, Facebook marketing tips.
Setting Up Pinterest Boards
Some of these boards like this one that only has 18 Pins, we have it pinned there for a while, so we can either move those Pins to another board or let that board go if we’re not utilizing it. With our SEO, you can see that we have 663 Pins there and 500 Pins in our healthcare digital marketing. So focus on the boards you’re going to be utilizing the most, and what’s important with those is that you have an SEO-friendly title, so search engine optimization. Remember, Pinterest is that search engine, so what is your audience looking for? Are they looking for how to find your target market? This is great because that is what this board says. And if you click onto the board again, we haven’t used that board a lot because we only had 16 Pins. Then the description. To describe what that board is about and what types of Pins people will be seeing on that board. And again, you want to utilize those keywords here as well.
You can add notes; if you post to a different group of Pinterest boards, they’ll have notes of those rules. That’s a great either way to utilize that Notes section. Doing your Pinterest audit, going through each of your boards, and ensuring that you have a keyword-friendly title, a description, if you click this Edit button, the pencil, this is… So here, I don’t have a description for email marketing, so email, maybe it should be, “Is email marketing dead? No. It is very much alive and works great. In this board, we will show you how to grow your email list and utilize email marketing for your business.” So email marketing tips, you can add a board cover. It’s going to pull up the Pins from that board, and you can pick which one you want, okay? Let’s see; we’ll do this one. Click done. And then if you don’t like that board cover, you can go back, click Edit, and then maybe find this one, and then that looks perfect.
You’ll have the name, the description, and then click Done, okay? So go through each of your boards and make sure that you are utilizing the space correctly. Here in our content marketing strategy, we have over 1700 Pins. But here on How to Build an authentic business brand, we only have 10 Pins. These tips can go into maybe our business tips, and we can get rid of that board. You can also have secret boards. We love using Pinterest to get ideas on what other people are pinning. So you can create a board here at the plus sign and click Board, and then this can just be Pinterest image ideas. Keep this board secret. So what this means is as you’re scrolling through Pinterest, you can save images to this board, but they will not show up on your profile, this is just for you to see as an admin, and then you can pull that board up and look at, “Oh, okay, this is what I liked about that image,” and… As you need. So, “Oh yes. Oh, I love how they did that. That’s perfect, I like that image. Oh, this is cute.”
Pinterest Images
Because you’re going to see, there are different styles to Pinterest images and different lengths, and the longer lengths work better. Here’s an infographic. This image here is slightly longer than this one, but it’s a little hard for me to read and seems a little cluttered. I may be more apt to click on this one because it’s cleaner. So look at what types of Pins you like, what images you like, and then save them to that private board so then you can get ideas when it comes time to create content, okay? So now you have these four Pins here in my super-secret board, and we are all set. So after you do the audit on your boards, you want to come over to your analytics. And I always just click on the overview. And now, with Pinterest, you also want to try different; Types of content. Images are number one. Try the square images. If you use Tailwind, you can link your Instagram to your Tailwind, and you can pin the exact images you’re putting onto Instagram on Pinterest. So that makes it easy to monitor those square images. Are they getting clicks?
If you pin them, you’ll need to change the link because they’re going to link back to your Instagram account automatically. If that’s where you want them to go, great, otherwise change the link back to your blog. As I said, the long images. And if you’re using Canva, Canva has a great tool to create Pinterest images at different sizes. So you can try different sizes, as I said but also get creative with your Pinterest templates of adding video into these templates. So that will help increase those user views because you can add your video to this image, customize the colors, add a different change of the content, and then be able to put that onto Pinterest. You would also just have animated images like this that say, “10 Great Places To Travel With Kids.” It stops the scroll on Pinterest. So as you use different types of content, you’ll want to monitor it in your analytics. Looking at your Pin’s impressions, you can look at engagements. And this is just going to be the last 30 days.
And then, and you can see okay, so on Wednesday, I had 85 engagements on our Pinterest account. That’s awesome. What about Pin clicks? We want to make sure we’re driving that website traffic to the right places. So we had 60 clicks on Monday, the 27th. Obviously, on Christmas, we still had 30 clicks, which it’s Christmas Day, and people are still on Pinterest, so Pinterest never sleeps. It keeps going and going. This is a great platform for you to be able to look at to say, “When is my audience on Pinterest, what days of the weeks?” And so that’s where you’re gonna wanna monitor your engagement, what are my top boards? Business tips and social media management for bloggers, we’ve had 5700 impressions, 56 outbound/inbound clicks, and this is no promotion, this is just organic, 31 saves, 111 pin clicks. So this is interesting to be able to see the difference between the boards, what’s working more, and what’s not. And then also here are…
Repinning Pins on Pinterest
Some of these are our original content, and many of them are curated content, meaning Repins from trusted sources, like pin, from CoSchedule, Social Media Today, Hootsuite, Buffer, etc. We look at Social Media Examiner Neil Patel, the people in our industry that we get our information from, and we’ll repin their boards, or their pins to our boards. And then many of them are, obviously, with our logo on it, this is our own. So it’s cool to see, okay, so this one here had 2500 views or impressions, but I can create an image similar to this with our branding and see if it gets even more views. So Pinterest gives you all of the data you need to be successful on Pinterest. Here we have 740, so 6.2% engagement on this pin, 2.2% engagement on that pin. So it’s good to know what people are clicking on, what images they’re finding attractive, to draw them to that, and so that’s really where we want to then focus on, okay, what about this post drew people to it, where it makes them wanna click, and keep going, because this pin was created August 27th, and this is the stats for December to this month, so it’s really cool to look at where… What’s working, and what’s not working.
Then the other part is, if you go back to your profile, you can promote some of the pins or as many pins as you want that you have put up, and this is where it helps drive that traffic to your website even more. So here’s why Pinterest is good at driving blog traffic, I clicked promote, and it’s going to bring me here: what is the destination URL you want, what is the daily budget, and how many days?
I think 84% of Pinterest is done mobile-y, so it’s important to see what it would look like computer view, but that mobile. So that’s what it would look like a computer, this is what it would look like mobile. Most people use Pinterest on their phones. So take time, go through your Pinterest account. If you need help figuring out what board names you should have, how you should be creating those pins, what that strategy looks like, let us know, we do have Pinterest management packages, and we are helping our clients with that creative process, but also more the time management process. If you’re using the right tools you can pin from anywhere from 25 times per week up to 200 times per week, if you’re utilizing the right tools, so… And that’s a mixture of organic content, pulling from your blog post, from your social media post, and then that’s also that repining, pulling from people that you know, and trust, that are like-hearted, and like-minded to your business, and being able to pin their pins to your boards as well.
If you need help, head on over to socialspeaknetwork.com today, schedule a free 30-minute consultation, let’s get you pinning correctly today. Thank you so much, have a great day.
https://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Pinterest-Audit.png7201280Amber Irwinhttps://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialSpeak-Logo.pngAmber Irwin2022-01-12 16:16:082022-01-12 16:16:08How do a Pinterest Audit
Most people use Pinterest to find delicious-looking dishes to try out, look up home decor ideas, or plan their dream vacation. But did you know that you can also use the platform to increase your blog traffic?
Pinterest isn’t a social networking platform, it’s a search engine where people search for images and then save them. That means Pinterest users are looking for new content, fresh ideas, and discovering new websites.
And since most business and content creators are focusing their marketing efforts on Facebook and Instagram, Pinterest can help set yourself apart from the competition.
Here are five easy ways for tapping the power of Pinterest to drive more traffic to your blog.
Optimize your Pinterest Profile
While it only takes about a minute to create a Pinterest profile, it doesn’t mean your work is done. To get the most out of this visual platform, it is essential to optimize your profile, so it reflects your personal brand.
Upload a photo of you, not your logo. Using your personal photo helps you connect with your audience.
Pinterest is a search engine. So don’t forget to optimize your bio description and incorporate keywords based on your blog niche. If you have a mom blog and write content about organizing, you can use keywords like parenting tips, organizing tips, or decluttering in your bio description.
Choose the best blogs to pin
While you want to drive more people to your website, pinning every blog on Pinterest is not necessary. To get better results, we recommend doing some quick research to find what topics people are searching for and are already pinning.
As you do your research, create a list of the search words and common words found in the title and description. It would be easier for you to drive traffic to your blog if you pin blog posts that already have an audience on Pinterest.
What’s great about Pinterest is that you can create multiple pins for the same blog. It would be a good idea to try out different titles to see which one would capture your audience’s attention and bring the most traffic to your site.
Make your pins standout
Since Pinterest is a visual platform, you must create pins that are visually appealing. Otherwise, yours will be lost in the sea of other content.
Use high-quality, vertical images on your Pinterest pins to really get people’s attention and stop them from scrolling. Also, make sure that it matches the recommended size for pins (2:3 aspect ratio or 1000 x 1500 pixels). You can create custom images with the size you want on Canva.
Another great way to make your pins stand out is to create curiosity with your pins. The goal is to provide just enough information to pique their interest but leave them wanting more. This way, they’ll have no choice but to click through to your blog to learn more. This strategy will not only help increase engagement but will also drive traffic to your blog.
Publish at the best times
Just like any other social network, timing is critical on Pinterest. Your pins are likely to get more clicks if you publish at a time when more people are online and ready to interact with you.
According to Oberlo, the best times to post are on Fridays and Saturdays, around 8:00 to 11:00 pm and 2:00 am to 4:00 am.
Tailwind, a scheduling tool for Pinterest, has a SmartSchedule feature that suggests the best time to post based on your industry and the activity on your pins.
Spread the word
Now that everything is set, it’s time to let your avid readers and loyal followers know that you also have an active presence on Pinterest.
Leverage all the social channels you’re already using and tell your followers about your Pinterest page. And don’t forget to link your website to your Pinterest page.
Final thoughts
Getting started with Pinterest can be quite confusing. But once you get the hang of it, you’ll realize how a social media platform most people ignore can have so much impact on your blog growth.
Establishing a Pinterest presence for your blog doesn’t have to be intimidating. Whether you’re an established blogger or you’re just getting started, we’re here to help.
https://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/How-to-Drive-More-Traffic-to-Your-Blog-With-Pinterest-1.png12602240Kathlyn Angeleshttps://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialSpeak-Logo.pngKathlyn Angeles2022-01-05 10:18:522022-01-04 14:10:36How to Drive More Traffic to Your Blog with Pinterest
Did you know that healthcare-related queries account for about 7% of all Google searches? According to David Feinberg, head of Google Health, they get approximately 70,000 healthcare queries every minute. This translates to about 1 billion searches a day.
With these statistics, it’s pretty clear that people need a trusted and reliable source of healthcare information. This is your chance to position your practice in front of potential patients.
Use these tips when creating a content marketing strategy for your healthcare practice.
Begin with the audience in mind
Content marketing is about attracting the right audience. To do that, you need to know your audience on a deeper level.
– Who is your ideal audience?
– What’s important to them?
– What are their most common concerns?
– How can you serve their needs?
Once you have a better understanding of your audience, it will be easier for you to craft messages that resonate with them. Plus, you’ll be able to speak their language. Remember, content marketing is about the reader, not your brand.
Set clear, measurable goals
Creating content for your practice can be overwhelming given the sheer volume of options you have. Blog posts, video content, social media posts, podcasts, and ebooks are just some of them.
But when creating content, it is essential to take the time and decide what you want to achieve from it. Simply writing and publishing blog posts is not enough. Getting views isn’t a clear goal either.
When creating content, ask yourself:
– Do you want to educate your audience and turn them into clients?
– Do you want to increase engagement and connect with potential clients?
– Do you want to build trust with your audience and position yourself as a thought leader?
Identify how your content can serve your audience and then create pieces that tie back to that.
Focus on your area of expertise
Some organizations focus on a specific niche. Similarly, every doctor has an area of expertise. Before you start working on your content marketing strategy, it is best to define your area of focus and the main problem areas in your niche.
Start by listing down some of the main concerns and pain points that people in your niche struggle with. You can easily list down some topic ideas based on these problems.
For instance, an ophthalmologist can educate their audience about the dangers of working on a computer for extended periods. On the other hand, dentists can talk about the importance of flossing every day or how to brush teeth with braces properly.
You want to become the person your audience relies on when they need information related to your area of expertise.
Go beyond written content
Content marketing isn’t just limited to written formats. Many businesses are fighting for people’s attention, so you need to figure out how to stand out. The key is to diversify your content strategy.
With the rising popularity of videos, it is good to include videos in your content marketing strategy. You can share short and informative videos on social media. Or do a live Q&A. This will not only help educate your audience but also increase engagement. Other content ideas include infographics, podcasts, webinars, and quizzes.
Humanize your healthcare brand
A patient is more than just a name on a medical chart. They’re someone’s son, daughter, parent, sibling, or spouse. You won’t win their loyalty unless you show them that you care.
People are more likely to engage and connect with you if they know a real person behind your practice. Post regularly on social media. Create some video content. Respond to comments. Make sure, though, that you have a clear policy to let people know that they should contact their physician or 911 in emergency cases.
We can help!
Content marketing has been proven to be highly effective. When done right, it can help you improve your online visibility, boost SEO, and even position yourself as an expert in your industry. Keep in mind, though, that results take time.
To reap all the benefits of content marketing, you need to do post content regularly. It usually takes about six to nine months for your content marketing efforts to bear fruit.
Feel free to reach out to us if you need help with your content marketing strategy. Whether you’re just starting or you’re hoping to double down on your content marketing efforts, we’re to help.
https://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/5-Tips-to-Level-Up-Your-Healthcare-Content-Marketing-Strategy.png12602240Kathlyn Angeleshttps://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialSpeak-Logo.pngKathlyn Angeles2021-09-15 10:00:562021-09-10 09:59:265 Tips to Level Up Your Healthcare Content Marketing Strategy
Video marketing is such an important piece of your digital marketing strategy. In today’s marketing world people want to be able to connect with their healthcare providers and know who they are.
Videos are such an easy way to be able to connect with your audience on a deeper level. Gone are the days of making extravagant videos, going WAY over budget, having a studio, etc. Let’s get back to the basics, being authentic in the videos, recording on smartphones or newer computers with good quality.
Should I be doing video?
Should I be doing video? Clients ask us this question all the time. And the answer is yes, it’s very simple, yes.
Video marketing is such an important piece of your online digital marketing strategy. Because digital marketing has grown so much, people really wanna be able to see who you are, to feel like they know you, and get a sense of how the office runs, especially in the healthcare industry. You have to think of that patient journey, what they are struggling with, what they’re going through, why they may be reaching out to you for your services, whether it’s chiropractic, acupuncture, ob/GYN, medical issues, lifethreatening diseases, cancer, all these different things, you have to think of what they’re going through.
And even though there’s a ton of content online to read, and they can call the office, if they can see videos, and they can see the doctors, and they can see the front desk and the staff at the front desk, and they can see the nurses.
Videos help build trust
Videos help build that gap when they are reaching out for a healthcare provider. And they feel like they know, like, and trust you, which are the three main factors in marketing. Remember, people need to know, like, and trust you in order to do business with you.
Studies suggest that 80% of online visitors will watch a video, while only 20% will completely read a piece of written content. So if getting your audience engaged and fully immersed in your healthcarerelated information is important to you, then so should video. As stats show, your audience is more likely to consume your content to its full capacity when there’s a video involved. This is also something, you have to think of the healthcare industry when you are explaining, maybe it’s symptoms, or a process, a procedure.
When they can hear it straight from the doctor’s mouth, that builds that trust. They’re able to really know what the doctor and the staff, that they know what they’re talking about.
Tools for creating videos
And there are so many different tools out there that make video marketing so easy. There’s a reason or a process to everything and having a professional videographer come in for a commercial shoot, maybe a video on the website, that’s really important. I am not discrediting that at all; that is something that’s really important to have. And it’s really easy to do your videos inhouse for your daily tips, your blogs, even your YouTube videos. So it’s not a huge cost item anymore either.
So I wanted to share with you some tools that we use for screen sharing. So this is really good if a doctor puts together maybe a PowerPoint, or has images they wanna share, diagrams. If you wanna walk through a process, you can have it just on your computer, and you can share your screen, and you can go through that presentation
Zoom
So the tool that we use a lot is called Zoom, ZOOM. And this allows you to do video recording such as this, and it gives us the video file and the audio file, which serves two purposes. Obviously, the video is great for the website, for YouTube, and your social media marketing.
The audio file is great for podcasts, and that’s exactly what we do. There’s no point in recreating that wheel when you can use one piece of information for multiple purposes.
Loom
The other one is Loom, and that works the same way as Zoom does.
I know, Zoom and Loom, it can get a little bit more confusing. But those are two great tools that you can if you wan to share your screen while recording a video.
Animoto and Ripl
And the other two that we like to use are Animoto and Riple. These are more for those cute, fun videos to throw into social media if you have a new staff member coming on. This is where you take pictures of them, maybe it’s them in the office, a couple of pictures of their personal life. And you can make a cute video, I use Animoto and Ripl.
There are free versions and paid versions. I would do the paid version, just so you don’t have their logo on it, and you can actually add your logo, and add text to it. They’re not expensive at all. So those are two videos that have fun little templates, holiday theme if you wanna have a little office video that says Happy Holidays. You can do little snippets of videos and images together and then they put it together into a video format.
So those are what we call more of the fluff posts for social media, but they’re videos that people like to see. You can do fun facts, so you can do facts around a certain topic in an Animoto video and share it, you can ask questions.
Tips for recording videos
So videos don’t need to be complicated. If you have a Mac, you can just use QuickTime Player and record yourself. Again, if you’re gonna do that, I would highly recommend using Zoom because you do get that audio file and the video file. And if you use your phone, you can use your iPhone or Android as well.
If I’m recording a video for social media and I also want it to go onto YouTube, I will have my Zoom screen up, and then I also would have my phone vertical recording as well, so I can use that for Instagram Stories and Facebook. I know it sounds complicated, and a lot of times it’s just getting used to being in front of the camera.
Having those bullet points of what you wanna talk about. I have my bullet points right here with some stats written down that I will go into. I have another screen pulled up so I know what those bullet points are that I wanna cover. And so it’s really figuring out that system for you. Some people write full-on strips and tape them up. So you have to find that system that works for you, you don’t have a choice anymore in digital marketing, you have to be doing videos. And the more videos you do, the better.
Getting started with video marketing
So if you’re thinking, “where I would start with this video marketing strategy?.” Start by asking yourself the following questions:
What are your clients or your patients asking you?
What questions are they coming to you with, and how can you address those?
What are those hot topics in your industry? Is it around vaping, opioids, vitamins? Is it working out, is it diet?
Are they asking you what they can do to improve the quality of their life? And so start paying attention to what are they asking you, and then start doing videos around that.
Start with small things, maybe it’s just one question. Keep it short, simple, and to the point. So less than three minutes is great.
If you’re doing a presentation, you’re explaining diagrams, or you’re teaching them something, then I will go up to 10 minutes. Keep in mind that if you’re posting it onto Instagram, it can’t be more than 10 minutes for Instagram TV. And you also have to think of, what are you talking about that you wanna be able to keep their attention. So their attention span is gonna be shorter, too, so you wanna make sure that that video is giving them a lot of details, a lot of valuable information that they wanna keep watching it.
Importance of video marketing
83% of marketers believe that video is growing in importance. Duh. It is so important. We have to be doing it. 53% of customers engage with a brand or a business after watching a video
Your audience is cyberstalking you, which sounds horrible, but they are doing their research. They are looking at multiple different healthcare practices, from who they are, where they’re at, what their expertise is, what are they talking about on social media, are being consistent with social media, do they have the videos? Is their website userfriendly? And we talked about that user experience, that digital experience for your patients, for your audience, is that an easy process?
So even if you do an intro video on your website, like welcome to our website, here’s where you need to go to book your appointment, here’s where our expertise is, it’s really important to make sure that you have these videos and you make that experience as simple as possible for your audience. So you just gotta get in there, you gotta get in front of the camera. You’re gonna have 10 takes before it’s perfect, and that’s okay, and keep going.
Editing your videos
So then my next question I get is, “Well, what about editing? Do you edit your videos? And if so, what software do you use to edit your videos”?
I’m usually the type of person that I wanna get it done in one take. I don’t wanna have to stop and splice it together. I like to have my points, get it done in one take, and that may take me three or four times, but I’m not editing a lot. So in your first couple of videos, you may have it at the beginning where there’s a pause and then you say, “Hi!” Or in the end, you pause and then you talk again.
So some simple editing, beginning and ending. If you have a Mac, you can use iMovie, if you have a PC you can use the Movie Maker, which does a good job. You can use Adobe Premiere Clip. And also YouTube does have some video editing tools in there, and they work great, so you can edit a beginning. So again, if there’s that pause at the beginning or a pause at the end, you can use that.
Sometimes you wanna add an intro. You can do that in Movie Maker or iMovie. There’s a ton of different video editing software out there. And again, we like to keep it as simple as possible, so find the one that works best for you. As I said, YouTube, iMovie, or Movie Maker for those beginning, pieces is a great idea just to get used to it and then if you wanna add more effects or different things to it, you can start doing some more research and looking at Adobe Premiere Clip and other video editing software.
Maximizing your video content
So start by, again, listening to your patients, what are they asking, what are those hot topics that people are talking about in your industry? Do some research on your competitors: Are they doing videos? What are they talking about? Looking at other videos, just YouTubing videos on those topics, those keywords that you’re thinking about, seeing how many views they have.
Once you take your video and you upload it to YouTube, think that SEO, think those keywords, what would they be typing in to find this video? In your description, make sure that you have a link back to your website, so if you’re talking about a treatment or a condition that… Or even a blog post, tie it back to a link on your website, so there’s that call to action.
So it’s really important, you’ve gotta think about this as another process in your marketing. So you find your bullet points for your video, you record your video, you upload it to YouTube, and you share it with social media. Once the video’s on YouTube, you can take that video and insert it into your blog posts as well.
Videos are a great addition to add to your blog posts. And so we usually will write a blog post and then do a video, so we’re touching both parts. People can watch a video and then they can read the blog. And so the blog is great for SEO, the video is great for our audience. So finding that balance, and start doing some videos, and just get it in the habit, whether you’re doing one per week to start, and then start moving it up to maybe two per week.
What is the point of that video? Again, is it an FAQ, is it a treatment condition, is it a blog post? And then what’s a call to action for each video? And our call to action for our podcasts is to be sure to go to Podbean or iTunes and subscribe to our podcast so you can listen to all these amazing tips that we’re sharing with you. And also if you are struggling with that video strategy, head on over to socialspeaknetwork.com and request a free 30minute consultation, and we can walk through this video strategy with you.
So I look forward to seeing your videos. Please drop a link below to your YouTube channel, we would love to take a look at them, and get a recording. Have a great day.
https://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Copy-of-Why-Video-Marketing-is-Such-an-Important-Piece-of-Your-Online-Strategy-1.png800800Amber Irwinhttps://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialSpeak-Logo.pngAmber Irwin2021-08-04 10:00:232021-07-30 16:11:21Why Video Marketing is Such an Important Piece of Your Online Strategy
When you manage several social media channels and create lots of content, it can be challenging to keep up.
A social media content calendar helps you plan your content and visualize your strategy over time. It allows plenty of time to fill the spaces with relevant content, preventing you from publishing poorly written posts. It will prevent you from going into a full panic mode since everything was planned and pre-scheduled.
Need help in creating social media content calendar? Follow the tips below.
Audit your social network
What’s great about digital marketing is that almost everything is measurable.
Take time to go through your social media accounts and posts to see how your content is received.
When auditing your social media profiles and your previous posts, you will begin to notice a trend. Identify what types of content are getting more engagements on each platform. Also, identify which posts sparked the most conversation. This will clue you in to where you should focus your efforts over the next month or two.
Define your goals
Before you start creating content, it is a good idea to ask yourself: what is the primary goal?
Do you wish to drive more traffic to your website? Are you hoping to get more leads? Or do you want to grow your following? By defining your goals early on, you’ll have a clear idea of the expected results.
Pushing out content without a clear purpose won’t benefit your business or your practice. Instead, it will only lead to wasted time, effort, and resources.
Plan your content
Once you’re clear on your goals for social media marketing, it’s time to plan your content.
When you hit a high-performing piece of content, it can be tempting to keep posting similar content week after week. While this might work initially, it will have diminishing returns over time. Come to think of it. Even the best dinner gets old if you serve it every night.
When creating content, make sure you’re not posting the same sort of content. If you do, your followers may find your posts boring and can lead to disengagement or unfollowing.
Decide on the publishing frequency
Now, it’s time to decide on the publishing frequency. You see, social media success isn’t something you can achieve overnight. It will require hard work and patience. Posting consistently on social media makes you more visible to your audience. But that doesn’t mean you should spam them with too many posts each day. Posting seldomly may cause your audience to forget you.
This is why it’s essential to choose a publishing frequency that works for you. Think about how often you can publish fresh content realistically. If you can only commit to posting three times a week, then that’s fine as long as you stick to your posting schedule.
Keep evergreen content at hand
Evergreen content is something that can provide value to your audience over long periods.
If you’ve been interviewed, you are free to share it again at a later date, so those who missed it will have the opportunity to watch it. You can also share blog posts that list out various tips and tricks. We bet most of these tips are timeless and can be shared with your audience again and again. Of course, you can also post evergreen content from other websites.
Don’t miss out on relevant moments
There are so many holidays and pseudo-holidays each year. Some marketers tend to consider social media holiday posts as “fluff’. But your audience doesn’t see it that way. As long as you keep your audience in mind, they’ll create emotional touchpoints in your marketing campaign and get the engagement you seek.
Holidays and special events are a great way to connect with your audience. You may find companies that use unusual holidays to sell their products and services. Don’t be left out – become one of them.
The year is full of special events. Do your due diligence and take note of local, national, and international holidays. Identify those holidays and somehow connect to the products or services you provide. A content calendar will reduce the risk of forgetting or missing out on these events.
Choose your publishing tool
Forget setting the alarm to remind yourself to post. Instead, choose a publishing tool that will help you make the most of your time.
Automation helps you save time, achieve consistency in your social media marketing efforts, and gives you greater control over the content.
Buffer, Hootsuite, and SproutSocial are just some of the best tools that can help you streamline and automate your social media content so that you can focus on more critical aspects of your business.
Final thoughts
A well-thought-out and organized social media calendar serves as a framework for what you plan to share and promote across all social platforms.
If you need help planning and creating a social media content calendar, please let us know. Book a 30-minute consultation call with us, and we’ll help you take your social media marketing game to the next level.
https://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/blog-banner.png12602240Kathlyn Angeleshttps://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialSpeak-Logo.pngKathlyn Angeles2021-07-21 10:55:192021-07-20 18:12:107 Tips for Creating a Social Media Content Calendar
Today, we are going to walk through how to upload a video correctly to YouTube. And it’s kind of one of those things, fill out all the blanks, but there are some things that people don’t understand that play a big piece in the SEO of your YouTube channel. When you login to your YouTube channel, you will have this create video here. Now, a tool that we use is called Tube Buddy, and this is a great add-on to really help add SEO, Search Engine Optimization to your YouTube videos. We’ll get to that within this tutorial, but it’s called Tube Buddy, and right here, you’re going click to upload your video. And after you upload your video, and it just takes a quick second since I’m doing a screen share. You’re going to have an option to select the files from your computer. I’m going go ahead and just do this Zoom recording I had done earlier with a client, it’s going upload the video. Based on the length of your video, it will determine how long it takes to upload it. Okay, once you have the video, it’s processing the video, YouTube does a great job on walking you through what you should be doing, okay, again, filling out those blanks.
Adding a Title and Description to Your YouTube Video
You are required to have a title, and again, the title you want to make sure is using those keywords of what the video is on and what people would be searching for. Here I’m going say, how to create custom images in Canva? Now, in your description, I like having a how to or step, something where people… What the title you should be thinking is what would people be typing into YouTube or Google to find that video? How to is a great way, healthy eating ideas, healthy snacks for kids, whatever that topic is your video is around, this is where that title comes in. Now with your description, you have 5000 characters you can use for your video description. And with that, you need to have at least 500 for each video. What I’d like to do is when you are recording a video. What we do is we record our video and then we transcribe our video on Scribie. And then I would take that first paragraph of that transcription from our blog and put it in here. Maybe it would say, in this video, you will learn how to create custom images in Canva, building a brand with your digital marketing, yada, yada yada, we want to keep on going.
Then you would say to learn more, visit our blog at, and then you could put the URL to your blog there. Okay, this is a great area in here, you want to make sure that you have your keyword and that you are describing what that video is about. It’s clear to the viewer that they understand what it is they are going to be learning. Now, the next thing is the thumbnail, you can create a custom thumbnail in Canva, and what we’ll do is they have… This moved me… If you have used Canva, you’ll know that they have a ton of designs on here, there’s a free version and a paid version. We have the paid version, and it’s running a little bit slow today, but you can actually create a custom YouTube thumbnail. We’ll let that load. But what you would do here is then click upload thumbnail and you would upload that thumbnail from your computer to here. YouTube tends to have, especially if it’s a video of you talking, they pick the worst thumbnails where your eyes are closed. It’s a horrible thumbnail, I always recommend creating a custom thumbnail in Canva, you can have that correct size and then you can upload that to here.
Additonal Features When Uploading Your YouTube Video
Once you have your custom thumbnail uploaded, then what you’re going to do is choose playlist. We have a ton of playlists, this helps keep our channel organized, and what you could do is, if this is, let’s say you are a pediatrician, this can be tips for parents, this can be eating healthy for kids, whatever those categories are, are what your playlists are going to be. I’m going click this to be… We’ll do social media tips, and it could be more than one category, you can choose two or three and then click done. Now, what you want to come down and do is, this is where if it’s made for kids or not. And what this does, if it says yes it’s made for kids, then kids that have access to YouTube Kids, and for whatever reasons they were to type in something similar to what your video is talking about, your video could show up in YouTube Kids. Even though this video there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s a great tutorial. I’m going say it’s not made for kids because they don’t need to know this. You could do an age restriction if you need to, but I just say no, not made for kids, and it’s fine. Here’s a piece you want to make sure you do not skip over, this show more. And this is where Tube Buddy comes in action, right here, your tag, these are keywords that people would type into YouTube to find a video.
This says tag to be useful if content in your video is commonly misspelled. Otherwise, tags play a minimal role in helping viewers find your video. You want to have things like how to, very broad and then very niche, I can type in Canva. And then this is where YouTube comes into play, I can do Canva tutorial for beginners. Now, if I scroll down a tad bit, you’ll see these tag tools, these recommended tags. This is Tube Buddy, helping me figure out what I should put into that tag area, you can do it by relevance or keyword score. I like keywords score ’cause I feel like that’s what people are searching more for, this is Canva templates, then we would come down to… And I would just pick the ones that I feel best fit my video that I was talking about. Okay. You can add up to 500 characters in here. I always like to have at least between five and 20, if you can tags in here. TubeBuddy is a great way to help. Obviously, these ones that are in orange and yellow are the best to choose from, and then as they go to red, they become a little bit less searched for. I’m going do one more. And then what I’m going do is I’m going click next.
This is where if you want to have subtitles, you can add subtitles to your video, you can also add an end screen. You can create a template and then add it to there, or you can create your own. And this is just helping people stay on your channel, and be able to find other videos that you have put on. Promote related content at the end of your video. And if you do this, it will tell you, and again, based on the popularity of your channel, how long you have had your channel, if you’re verified, all these things will allow you what you can and cannot have on here. This will say, subscribe to Social Speak, you can choose where you want this to show up. I like to have it towards the end it’s not blocking the content. At the end of your video, if you are just chit-chatting a little bit, that’s where then I would have this come up so people can subscribe to that video or to your channel. And then you could also add a card, and this is, if you’re talking about maybe a free PDF and in your video, you say, “Be sure to download my free PDF on my website about such and such.” This is where you can promote another video once you reach a certain… When you join the partner program with YouTube, that’s when you’re going have a link. But you can promote your channel, a certain playlist, another video.
This is where you would say, be sure to watch this other video that explains our freebie or how to download our freebie, whatever that is, that call to action. These cards are great for call to action, I may want to do a playlist and I’m going click into, let’s just do healthcare digital marketing tips. Then I can choose at what point in the video, I want this to show up right here. If you are watching a YouTube video and you see this little eye icon, that is an info card. And if you click onto it, it will take you to somewhere else, whether it is a playlist, a video, or if they are a partner of YouTube, take them to a link. Then you can click next and they’ll make sure if you have any music in the background, if you are talking about anything, YouTube just check to make sure that you’re following all of the copyright rules that YouTube set. No issues found, which is great, I can click next. Here, what we have, I get a check mark here. Video elements, I’m going go back to there to see, that’s where these are. I don’t have a check mark here because I didn’t add those to this video. You click next, next, this is where you can schedule a video to post, you can make it public, which means it’s going to be found in YouTube, you can use this link to promote it out, and it’s searchable within YouTube.
Unlisted means that anyone with the video link can watch that video. I like to use unlisted for our newsletters, we may just do a video just for our newsletter subscribers. And I don’t want to be found on YouTube. I’m just housing that video on YouTube, and using unlisted is a great idea because then I can still email that link out to people and they can watch it, but it’s not searchable within YouTube. The other one is private. Private is great, if you’re doing an online course or a private, like maybe telehealth or a coaching session where you recorded that session just for that person, and then you can share it just with them, it’s only viewable to the people that you invite. Okay? For this one, I’m just going do unlisted because this is a video that I am going to publish to the public, and then you will click save, and then what you’ll do is you can from here, share it to any of these. But if you go to the video and you right click on it, and you could copy the embedded code to put that into your blog post. If you’re using Mailchimp or Constant Contact and you want to put this video into your email, then you just need the link and then within there, they would show you how to add that video.
Final Steps to Upload Your YouTube Video
Those are just a few steps you want to take to make sure that your video is being uploaded correctly to YouTube, and you have all of the boxes checked, everything to just make sure that you are optimizing your YouTube videos the best you can. If you need help with creating that YouTube strategy and how to upload your videos to your channel, please let us know. You can schedule a free 30-minute consultation and we would love to walk through that with you. Thank you guys, have a great day.
https://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/How-to-upload-a-video-to-YouTube-correctly.png7201280Amber Irwinhttps://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialSpeak-Logo.pngAmber Irwin2021-07-14 07:00:422021-07-13 16:59:01How to upload a video to YouTube correctly
Digital marketing is becoming the new wave of healthcare marketing. With the growing competition in the healthcare industry, it is important to stay on top of digital marketing and keep your organization at the forefront of change.
Today, the competition is getting tougher and patients are getting smarter. Many of them even turn to Google for quick answers to health-related concerns. If you want to get more customers to your door, then you need to get in front of your audience and have a solid online presence. Otherwise, someone else will. This is why it’s important to have a healthcare marketing plan — so you can reach potential and existing patients at the best time.
Ever wonder what it takes to create a successful healthcare marketing campaign?
We listed down some tips that you can incorporate into your marketing plan right away.
Know your target audience
A successful healthcare marketing campaign starts with knowing who your audience is and what they value. To produce great results, you first need to create a well-defined persona profile.
Vividly picture who is it that you want to attract to your doorstep and what matters most to them. The more specifically you define your audience, the more likely you are to inspire a positive response.
Carefully and precisely defining your target audience will ensure that you’re not making the wrong assumption about what your audience values. Plus, it will improve your efficiency since you’ll have a good idea about what media to use and how to shape a compelling message that brings a response.
Combine healthcare and social media
Today, social media isn’t just a place for family and friends to stay in touch. People also use them to promote their business and reach their audience.
The power of social media extends to all industries, including healthcare. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn can help you reach a wider audience and connect with your followers. It can also help you drive traffic and leads to your website.
Now that you know who your target audience is, it will be easier for you to reach your key audience. Tapping into online communities and sharing health information can be a game-changer in your healthcare marketing plan. Keep in mind, though, that each platform has its own voice and audience. When you create social media content, make sure that the message is tailored to different audiences and channels.
You can also use paid advertising to increase brand awareness, improve visibility, and widen your reach. Don’t worry. You don’t need to spend a huge sum of money in order to get results. In fact, you can run a Facebook ad for a minimum budget of $5 a day. So go ahead and try it out, and adjust your budget later on.
Make wellness a lot more fun
Health and wellness is a serious topic, but that doesn’t mean that your campaign should be boring and uninspiring. Let’s take cues from UnitedHealthCare’s successful healthcare marketing campaign – We Dare You.
UnitedHealthcare created an interactive campaign that dares people to make one small change to live healthier lives and document it on social media. Each month, there are new challenges and quizzes aimed at inspiring people to live a healthier lifestyle. There are prizes involved too.
The multi-awarded “We Dare You” campaign not only led to healthier habits, but it also fostered an interactive online community of brand loyalists.
Establish an email marketing plan
Email marketing is an effective means of transmitting messages to your current and prospective audience. In fact, studies suggest that email marketing is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers as compared to Facebook and Twitter. When done right, it can help you grow your practice and reach a larger amount of patients.
With email marketing, the audience is openly receptive, and relative cost is low, and the rate of return can be exceptionally high. You can promote your services in a cost-effective way while building a relationship with your patients.
If you’re new to email marketing, you might want to start with growing your email list. To do that, you need to focus on reaching as many people as possible. Don’t worry. Getting your first 100 email subscribers isn’t as complicated as it seems. With an irresistible lead magnet, a killer landing page, and the power of social media, you’ll be able to grow your email list in no time.
Google yourself
Studies suggest that physicians and other medical practitioners receive up to 45% of new patients through referral. Though most patients would consider the referral of other doctors, family, and friends, the majority of them will run a Google search of your name and check out your reputation before booking an appointment.
The survey revealed that 60% of patients wouldn’t book an appointment with a medical practitioner that has bad reviews. This is why you should Google yourself now. It might seem silly, but it’s actually important.
By running a quick Google search of yourself, you’ll have a good idea of how your practice looks from a consumer’s perspective and know where to start when creating your digital strategy. You also want to make sure that all the information about you is correct and updated.
If you unearth some negative results when you Google yourself, try to have the post taken down. But if that doesn’t work, then the best thing you can do is suppress them with positive content.
Be a source of helpful information
In today’s digital world, most people’s inclination would be to open up a browser in Google and research about their own or their loved one’s condition. With so many people turning to the internet for answers, it is important that healthcare marketing is there to be a helpful and supportive guide.
Regularly post high-quality content that answers people’s questions. This will help them learn more about medical conditions they may be searching for or procedures they may have to undergo. It is also a good idea to share important and relevant medical information to help people improve their health. This will help build your credibility and position yourself as an authority in your field. People may not run off and make an appointment, but you will be in their minds the next time they get sick.
In today’s blog, we are going to cover LinkedIn, and LinkedIn is actually the oldest social media platform. It has been around since 2002 but it wasn’t considered a social media platform back then. As of now, there are over 660 active monthly users and in 200 countries and over 30 million companies on LinkedIn that are actively using it each and every month. This is huge, this is huge. LinkedIn, I feel, is a very overlooked platform. A lot of people still think of LinkedIn as just a recruitment tool, just to find jobs, and that is not the case whatsoever. LinkedIn has come such a far way and they have really implemented some really cool things to help you grow your business, and it is… I see a lot of B2B but I also do see a lot of B2C, business-to-business, and business-to-consumer.
I wanted to cover today the differences between your personal profile and a company page. LinkedIn works similarly to Facebook where you have one username and password and from that username and password, it brings you to your personal profile which then you can get into your different groups and your company pages. Once you log in, this is what you’re going to see. You’ll see your personal profile over here, you’ll see your news feed which is the people you’re connected with, the topics you follow, the company pages that you follow, this is where it’s coming into your personal news feed, okay. Then you have your pages on the left-hand side, you have different groups that you’re a part of here if you’re doing any events, also hashtags. Hashtags are huge on LinkedIn which is great because you can really find those niche hashtags and follow them similar to Instagram.
Personal LinkedIn Profile Tips
On your personal profile, there are a few things that you can do on your personal profile that you cannot do on a company page such as write an article. This is great if you are actively blogging, you can write a… You can take some of the content from your blog or your entire blog and put it into here. You can have a weekly thought, you can have… If you are a physician, you can have maybe a weekly FAQ article that just highlights the questions that your patients had asked you through the week that you’re just typing in here, answering, and maybe each week can have a theme. You can add an image here, and this is a great way to just really add value to your personal profile. Now, with the personal profile, you can also add your photo, a video, and a document. These two things are just for your personal profile.
Again, it’s similar to Facebook in a way that you… It’s easier to get connections on LinkedIn and when you post onto your personal profile and you’re building that personal brand, you’re going to get more engagement than you would on your company page. It’s important to use both of them ’cause they each have great features and they each serve a purpose. If you’re utilizing LinkedIn, make sure you’re utilizing this write an article feature and you’re posting to your personal profile as well as your company page. If maybe you’ve had LinkedIn for a long time, but you haven’t updated your profile, let’s start there. So making sure that your profile is filled out. This is space for advertising or your personal brand. To me, this image speaks of digital marketing. We’re always on the computer and this is something that I really… It just kind of resonated with me. You have a professional headshot or it’s you, it’s not you and your kids or you and your husband, this is more about you and your expertise than it is the personal side of things. You want to make sure that you have all of your information filled out and that…
One great thing about LinkedIn is it will tell you what else you need to add to your profile. It will give you a percentage of your profile as, like here, you can add… It’ll tell you what else you need to add. And they’re always adding new things it may not always be 100% filled out. You want to make sure that you have the about section filled out that this is talking about what it is you do use keywords in here: Healthcare, digital marketing, content marketing. Make sure that you’re utilizing those keywords of what it is you do. You can also have featured videos and this is something that you want to make sure you update and as you can see, I have not updated I’m going to come back in here and make sure that I update my featured videos as well. And maybe add that to your monthly list is as you’re creating different videos and blogs or infographics, you can add different things to this featured section, you want to make sure that this stays up-to-date or even if it is maybe a year old video, but content that’s super valuable and things that are able to provide that value to your audience even if they click on it and it’s a year old.
This is just your profile, this is your activity, this is what I’ve posted, things that I’ve liked, things I’ve commented on, things I’ve shared, this is what your activity is. And then it goes into your experience. You do want to make sure that your profile is 100% filled out before you start posting because people are going to view your profile and they want to know who you are and what you do. Once you have your profile updated and you start utilizing these different features on your personal profile in what’s called My Network, you can start adding connections, and, again, with LinkedIn I love how niche you can get. You can really look for those people that you want to connect with and as you can see, I have a ton of invitations. I’m very picky about who I want to connect with, sometimes, I will let them sit here. I’ll look at their profile, I’ll see if it’s really something that makes sense for me to connect with. If not, then I click ignore.
My connections on LinkedIn, I want to make sure that they are quality over quantity. I don’t care about this number but I want people that I’m connected with that are going to engage on my posts and make sure that we have things in common. Maybe they would be a great referral partner, maybe a potential client, and that’s the important thing about your connections. LinkedIn is going to give you suggestions on who to connect with based on your profile. This is going to say similar roles as me or in the location, I’m in. This is great because, again, it gives you that opportunity to connect with people that you may not have a chance to connect with and one of the great things is once you hit this connect button, you can also, you can click connect but then you can, if you’re searching for someone, let’s say… I’ll just say a family, let’s do a family physician. Okay. And I’m obviously wanting to search in people because I want to connect with these people and right here… Oh, great. Ken, I want to connect.
Once you click connect, I can add a note, “Hi, Ken. I was looking at your profile. I love what you’re doing.” So before you click that Connect, be sure to click on their profile, learn a little bit about them, see if they’re actually active. Right now, it says that he has commented on things. You can look at if he’s posted any articles, you can see when the last time he posted. And the reason why I say… he hasn’t posted anything for a year. The reason I say that you want to do your research on someone before you connect with them, again, is that quality. You don’t want to connect with people that aren’t active because then they’re not seeing your messages and they’re not going to be responding because they are not actively using LinkedIn. Make sure that before you click that Connect button and you add a note that you take a look at their profile and more importantly, their activity. What have they been posting?
Even if they haven’t posted anything but they have shared a lot of things or commented on things, that’s okay. A week ago, he liked this post that’s great. He may not be actively posting but he is actively using LinkedIn. That’s a great connection. So this is how you build the personal side of your LinkedIn account. Now, let’s go into the company page side of things. If you click here underneath your profile and you go down to, it will say, company and we have a few company pages but we’re going to go to Social Speak Network. And on here, this is your company page. Again, you have this header, utilize it to highlight what you do. Digital marketing management for healthcare professionals, that is what Social Speak does. I’m here and it is… I keep referring back to Facebook because when you have, especially now, if you just set up a Facebook business page, to increase those likes, it’s hard because you have to actively be inviting people or paying for ads, and that’s how LinkedIn is as well. It’s hard to increase this follower unless you are actively doing an ad campaign on LinkedIn to increase those followers or inviting people.
This is a great way to do this: As you’re adding connections, you can click here and invite more connections and you can look at… Again, I don’t want every single person I’m connected with to like my page, I want specific people that I am connected with that are in the healthcare and health and wellness industry to like my page because our content’s going to resonate with them the most. Again, each month as you’re adding that featured content to your personal profile and you’ve been adding new connections each month, invite them to like your company page. This helps increase the followers and it gives you your analytics, how many visitors you’ve had. We’ve had six new visitors in the past 30 days, which is down from last month, that lets me know. We have no new followers, hat lets me know, “Okay. Is my content not right or I’m just not getting people to the page?” Monitoring those analytics is a good idea to do, and you can really dive deeper into what does this means and it will let you know to share trending articles, invite your connections to follow.
Using LinkedIn for Business
LinkedIn does a great job of actively promoting you on what you need to do, or prompting you on what you need to do next. This is your company page, these are the hashtags that we follow, these are the posts that we put up every day. We do post daily on our LinkedIn platform and you need to create that content strategy of what works best for you. And so, you just need to know, is it going to be one time a week, is it going to be three times a week, five days a week, what does that look like for you and stick to that consistent schedule. One thing with LinkedIn, and you can see, you can add a document to your LinkedIn company page but you cannot do the article. You can, however, do a poll which is great to really dive into your audience and see, what are they thinking? How can you interact with them? And maybe doing different polls as a piece of your content strategy to help increase that engagement is a great idea try out that feature for your company page.
The other thing is, on your Facebook business page, you can go to your page and can click the little share button and post it directly to your personal profile. With LinkedIn, you cannot do that. What you would do is follow your own company and then as you post to your company page, it’s going to show up in your news feed and then from there, you can click share. And when you click share, it’s going to bring up exactly similar, again, to Facebook. You can type in, “This is a great blog that we just published.” Make a comment to the post that you put up, add hashtags, and then click post. These are just a few different ways to utilize LinkedIn to increase your network, grow your followers on your company page and start building your business.
Utilize LinkedIn just as you would Facebook. Take the time to engage yourself on here. Take the time to upload a video to your personal profile and to your company page and if you’re utilizing a scheduling tool such as Buffer or HootSuite, you can also schedule posts to your personal and your business account. If you’re utilizing HootSuite, you can upload a video to HootSuite for your company page but you cannot upload a video to HootSuite for your personal page. If you want to do those videos, I suggest just coming directly to LinkedIn and posting. You can also download the LinkedIn app and post directly from there, which is great. It’s very user-friendly, just jump on there. The mobile version’s great. You can upload your videos, your pictures, write an article from the app as well. Just figure out how you want to use LinkedIn, jot down some ideas, jot down who do you want to connect with. If you don’t have a company page, if you go under Work and at the bottom, it will say Create Company Page, that’s where you can create your page there.
Groups are great for LinkedIn and, again, you’re going to be posting in those groups as your own personal profile but groups are a great way to be able to share your blog posts, your videos, answer questions, ask questions and get involved with very niche groups. You can browse groups and make sure that they are a good group for you. And then, if you do have a job, you can also post a job on here utilizing LinkedIn Premium, or they have different options depending on what your needs are. Take time to go through your LinkedIn profile and see how you can have it work for you and implement this into your social media strategy. If you are needing help with LinkedIn and you just don’t know where to start or what that strategy should look like, let us know. Let’s schedule a free consultation and go over your LinkedIn strategy. Thank you.
https://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/How-to-use-LinkedIn-for-both-personal-and-business.png12602240Amber Irwinhttps://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialSpeak-Logo.pngAmber Irwin2021-04-28 10:00:322021-06-18 14:40:16How to use LinkedIn for both personal and business
Today, I wanted to talk about black hat versus white hat SEO.
Basically, black hat SEO is where you’re doing everything you can, you’re finding loopholes, and you’re just working the system in order to have your website ranked quickly for specific keywords. White hat SEO, on the other hand, is a much more long endgame. You’re not only creating content and doing strategies to please Google, but you also are thinking about that end user and how people are interacting with your website. You’re creating more authentic, is how I view it, content that’s really informative and educational and solving problems.
This then allows you to get those backlinks and really create partnerships with other websites so that they are also linking to you because they see what a valuable resource you’ve created.
With over 7.5 million blog posts published every single day, and 61% of the blogs that are out there publishing more than one blog post per week, SEO really is a long-term strategy that you have to really consistently nurture and build over time. It’s not something where in the first week you’re going to see results. It’s not something in the first month you’re going to see results. Depending on what industry you’re in, what niche you’re in, it could take years to really stand apart from your competition and make sure Google has found you.
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Always utilizing white hat SEO strategies is a great way to make sure that you consistently are staying on the radar of Google and that they’re not going to ding you for doing something incorrectly and trying to play the system. So let’s just go through a couple of typical black hat versus white hat strategies that we see.
Black Hat SEO Strategies
The first black hat strategy is creating duplicate content.
The second is having invisible text and stuffed keywords.
And let me actually talk a little bit about this invisible text and stuffed keywords.
Way back in the day, maybe seven years ago, we had a client who had hired us to work on their SEO on their website. And we did a review and they were missing a couple of header tags and a couple of keywords, and those mains or traces within the header tags. Their resolution to this was creating a white H1 tag and adding it to every page and listing off all the keywords that we had recommended. They were making sure the keywords were on the website because that’s what people were searching for, but they didn’t want readers to actually see the headers. That is considered a black hat SEO strategy. You should not be doing this. This client wanted to add the content but didn’t want people to see that he had the content on there. So he did it in a not very user friendly way, and it’s something that Google can very clearly see white text, white background. So don’t do this. When you’re writing content, think of variations of the words that people are using, variations of the phrases people are using, rather than, you know, putting that same phrase or keyword in your content multiple times.
The next one, the third one is cloaking or redirecting the user to another site or page.
This is kind of a more advanced strategy, but you want to make sure, again, that that user experience is really there. And then the other one is links from sites with non-relevant content. So this is when you’re going out, you’re getting all the links that you can into your site, but they have nothing to do with your business.
We have a client now who does a fantastic job with helping self-publishers get noticed and ranked on Amazon. If you do want an introduction to her, let’s say you’ve written a novel or a book and you are self-publishing it, feel free to reach out to me. I’ll put you in touch with her.
One of the things that she talks about is this exact same strategy but on Amazon. So if you have a Kindle book, for example, and you have all of your friends, all of your neighbors go on, buy the Kindle book on Amazon and leave a review.
The problem here is that all of these people in your network enjoy reading different things. So Amazon will have no idea of what category your book should be listed in, what type of people should actually be reading the book and enjoying it.
This is the same thing as having links from non-relevant content. You are basically telling Google, you have no idea what niche you’re in, what industry you’re in, and what your content is about.
Another client, a brewery, who’s in the gluten-free industry, he had a cannabis company reach out and the cannabis company was saying they’ve write a blog for him and all they wanted was a link back to their site. This really made no sense whatsoever because then his site would be telling Google they’re related to cannabis, and the cannabis site would be telling Google they were related to beer. Think about this as you’re going out and building these links with other websites.
White Hat SEO Strategies
Now, let’s talk about white hat strategies. These are those long-term strategies that really you’re thinking about your business, you’re thinking about Google, you’re not trying to find loopholes, and you’re thinking about that end user.
The first one is relevant content.
Make sure that you are writing content that is relevant to the needs of your consumer, of your patients, of your practice. You want to make sure that the content you’re putting out there isn’t fluff and that it really is relevant.
Number two, have well-labeled images.
Images should clearly describe what’s going on in the picture, and I often try and relate it to the page as well. Especially if you are taking your own photos and loading them to the website, you want to make sure that these clearly state what they are about. So this is very, very important and it’s very easy to implement, also making sure that you have those alt tags on the images as well.
The third is to build relevant links and references
The next, and this is what we just were talking about with the black hat strategies, it’s building relevant links and references. And so the relevant links and references really show Google what the content is about, and if it’s a high quality website that’s linking to you, that’s even better. The next is complete sentences with good spelling and grammar, I’m sure this will become more and more important. Websites like Grammarly or there are a few AI writing websites, that have done an incredible job making sure that automatically you can tell what’s written properly and what’s not. And so I’m sure, Google will continue to get better at telling what’s broken English or broken Spanish or whatever language you’re speaking, and where is grammar not good, because they want to show people the best content that’s out there.
If you’ve been writing for a long time and you know some of your blogs aren’t that great, you can either go back and edit them, create new versions of them, and redirect the old version to the new version, or even consider taking it down. That’s okay.
The next is making sure that you are following HTML best practices.
For this, if you’re using a website that’s built on Squarespace, WordPress, Shopify, even Wix, typically, you are in good hands. So websites like this, they follow best practices. So I wouldn’t be too worried. Make sure in your content, however, you’re using those header tags and things like that though. And then the last one is having unique and relevant page titles. So make sure each page title refers directly to what is on that page and what people will learn from reading that content.
SEO is one of those things that does take time. You want to make sure that you are trying to consistently get better and better at the content that you’re creating, at the websites that you’re attracting to link back into your site, and if you ever hear somebody talk about a strategy that’s going to work overnight, I would steer clear of it. Maybe it will work overnight this time, but the next Google update, you might see your rankings plummet.
If you have any questions about search engine optimization, white hat versus black hat strategies, even how to track how well you’re doing, head on over to our digital marketing consultation page. I’d be happy to chat, just fill out that request a consultation. Thanks so much and I’ll see you next time.
https://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/black-hat-vs-white-hat-seo.jpg7201280Caitlin McDonaldhttps://socialspeaknetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/SocialSpeak-Logo.pngCaitlin McDonald2021-04-21 09:43:312021-04-21 00:13:45White Hat vs Black Hat SEO
