As Search Shrinks, Social Grows

Man having an idea!
Mobile has shaken the world of search.

As a void is created in search by the changes that the mobile web has brought about, social media is filling the gap by becoming the “go to” location for reviews and personal recommendation.

Is Search (As We Know It) Dying” is an excellent point of view and a great read for today.  As the author notes, social media icons like Facebook are deep into development for the next generation of search and mobile use. One of the biggest pushes are for artificial intelligence and personalized assistants; keeping users tied in and connected.

Take into account activity on social networks, where queries like “I am visiting London, England next week, what have you done or loved that I should make sure to put on my to do list?” are commonplace and readily answered by friends, family and acquaintances.

Although users have loved, then hated, and now appear to love again social sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, I am seeing more businesses and consultants feel that it is now time to get serious about establishing and keeping a presence on these social media sites.

Courtney Danyel (the author of the aforementioned article) puts it all succinctly in this ending comment, “In the long run, brands and businesses focusing the majority of their energy on optimizing for search will face the inevitability of stunted reach and growth.” I could not agree more.

Images in Social Media Using HootSuite – Lessons Learned

Learn From Our Mistakes How to Add Images Fast to Social Media
Learn From Our Experience How to Add Images Fast to Social Media.

Our clients are asking for images in their social media posts. Sounds easy right, but not so fast. Here’s what I’ve learned and wanted to share it with you.

For HootSuite users it is easy to add an image to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+. You just open the writing panel, click the paperclip and then browse to the image you want to save. But what about when you are doing bulk loading and scheduling using a spreadsheet or when you are wanting images in Twitter?

Bulk Loading
You cannot add an image using the bulk load spreadsheet method in HootSuite. So if you want images, you will have to bulk load your updates and then manually go to each social media account and edit your post manually and add your image. Not so simple, but not so hard either.

Twitter
For Twitter, your content will need to be only about 10 to 15 words and if you have a link to shrink, know that the link will take up character space and so will the image. We are trying to stick with about 10 words or so.

You still have to do the manual upload of images and may need to rewrite or edit your post to have it once the image is in to be within character count.

Notes
All images you add to Facebook have to be under 5 mb.  A good rule of thumb is that an image compressed for the web and no bigger than 600 pixels wide with a resolution of 175 dpi will meet this 5 mb criteria.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn – Social Media Nightmare, Where Should I Be?

Confused about how to effectively promote your business on the Web?
Confused about how to effectively promote your business on the Web?

You hate Facebook, but your customers are there. You just don’t get Twitter, isn’t that for teenagers? Too busy for LinkedIn? All these social media sites may seem like too much trouble for some business owners to get involved with, but did you know your competition is there and so are your future customers!

How do you demystify where you personally should spend your time and on what social media sites? It is easy, look at your demographics in Google Analytics.

If your customer/reader base is 18 to 29 to 30 years old or so, you’d better be on Twitter.

If your customer/reader base is 30 to 60 years old or so, you’d better be on Facebook.

If you are selling business to business, regardless of age, you’d better be on LinkedIn.

How do you find your own Google Analytics stats?

  1. Go to “Audience” in the left side navigation, then go to “Demographics” and then select “Age”.
  2. There you’ll be able to see your visitors from the last 30 days organized by age groups.
  3. Make sure that you check average session duration, pages per session, and bounce rate.
  4. Based on what you see for your own traffic then make a decision on where you should selectively be on social media.

Don’t feel that just because you may not be on social media that your business does not need to be there. Social media use is an excellent way to start building a community of readers loyal to your message.

Not sure where to start? At McCord Web Services, we make it easy for you. Check out our writing rates for social media with service options for frequency. You are sure to find something that fits your budget.

LinkedIn Business Pages Get a New Cover

Our LinkedIn Cover Image

For many businesses moving away from Facebook, LinkedIn is becoming the place to be. Not only can you have an personal executive profile at LinkedIn, but your business can have a LinkedIn page too.

Business pages just got upgraded to a new cover look and so if you have a Business Page, you’ll want to login to LinkedIn and add a large graphic as your cover shot. Here’s our page so you can see what the cover looks like.

It is important to know that the image you create for LinkedIn must be 646 pixels wide and 220 pixels tall or it won’t upload. The image can actually be larger and when loaded LinkedIn will allow you to crop it, but must meet these minimum requirements.

The finished cover look is very Twitter-ish/Facebook-ish. I took elements of our company website banner for branding purposes, but you can use just about any image you would like.

With businesses looking to be social but socially productive, LinkedIn and the activity you find there definitely warrants another look. We provide LinkedIn status updates to your personal executive page. Check with us for more information or visit our services page online.

LinkedIn and Twitter Broke Up But LinkedIn Moved On

Although the fact that Twitter cut LinkedIn loose, meaning that Twitter does not allow Twitter feeds to appear in a LinkedIn page widget anymore is not new news, but the fact that LinkedIn has leveraged this into its own success story is new news.

This article gives a very insightful view of the blunder that Twitter has made in breaking up with LinkedIn. By disavowing their relationship Twitter has encouraged LinkedIn to pursue its own course in direct competition with Twitter.

“Back in July Twitter announced that it was no longer going to allow users to post tweets automatically to LinkedIn. Twitter gave us the usual gumpf about wanting to “provide the core Twitter user experience through a consistent set of products and tools”. What Twitter really meant to say was, “We don’t want anyone reading tweets where we can’t put ads”.

What LinkedIn then did was to encourage use of their own newsfeed and nicely integrated it with HootSuite and easy sharing sites. Now for business people the LinkedIn newsfeed may actually be more meaningful for them than a Twitter feed.

This was a very foolish shortsighted decision on Twitter’s part. If they had stayed the course they could have expanded into the business market and created a very nice partnership with LinkedIn. My feeling is that in the long run, business people may leave Twitter totally to the spammers and ads and move full throttle over to LinkedIn now that they have a full social and interaction platform.

If you are not posting updates to LinkedIn, now’s the time to give that some consideration and review our LinkedIn update services.

LinkedIn Heat Map – What Are People Looking At in Your Profile

This interesting article was shared by Ken Lankin at Awesome Almonds. It is interesting reading about what readers look at in your LinkedIn profile. Thanks Ken!

Here’s what the article says in a nutshell:

  • Top priority and the most “looking” is done on your profile photo. Try to take the very best picture possible and even consider having a professional photo taken if you think that LinkedIn is the right place for your marketing endeavors. A great looking photo may get more people to check out your full profile. Here’s a great photo of one of my clients, Shawn Friesen. The photo is engaging and unusual.
  • The place that gets the second most views is your most recent Twitter update. Wow! Who knew? Make sure you are tweeting regularly and are using the app to connect your LinkedIn account to Twitter.
  • Comments on your status update. Wow, who knew how important on LinkedIn this was as well. Engagement is key. Taking time to interact with your updates and those of others is a great way to really get noticed on LinkedIn.

Even in today’s faced paced digital world that ability to connect with others in essence hinges on what you post on social media sites and the attention to detail you put in on creating personal profiles. Find out more about how we can help you with social media updates with our affordable services.