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What Social Media is NOT

My firm is actively involved in social media, not only for my own business, but as a content provider. From my experience I have found that clients typically misunderstand the purpose and have different expectations about using social media to promote their business.

Social Media is NOT:

  1. A platform for you to have every status update be a commercial about your services and products.
  2. One sided and all about you the business.
  3. Where you dominate and set the conversation.
  4. A sales lead generation platform.
  5. An after thought where you may post or update your profiles once a week or once a month.
  6. A self propelling site. Build it and they will join should not be your mantra.

Social Media IS:

  1. A great information exchange opportunity.
  2. Where you can soft-sell your services once you have established credibility.
  3. Enjoyable due to the richness of interaction with followers and fans.
  4. Can bring you business and networking opportunities.
  5. Consider it a public relations and branding tool.
  6. A marketing endeavor that should have a goal and purpose in your overall plan.
  7. Important as a part of your total online exposure.

If you are looking for well written and informative status updates and tweets for your Facebook page or Twitter account, make sure to check out our affordable service programs.

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Twitter Advertising Tips

Right now I am advertising on Twitter and for FREE thanks to American Express and Twitter! I’ve gotten $100 of Twitter advertising free in order to check out Twitter’s new small business pay per click program. This post will tell you a little more about the options you have in advertising on Twitter.

First off, you can’t link to a page on your website with Twitter pay per click like you can with Facebook pay per click. These are your options when you set up your advertising account:

  • You can choose to have your Twitter account placed in the promoted account section on Twitter profiles. That’s the spot where Twitter says “You may want to follow these people.”
  • You can choose to have one of your tweets be a promoted tweet, but the catch is you don’t necessarily pick a tweet, Twitter picks it for you based on click rates of your followers. Actually Twitter will select 5 of your top rated tweets and then rotate through five of them. You can select, once your account is running, which tweets NOT to promote, but not hand pick one to promote.

For people like me who don’t tweet about my own services constantly that may mean that the tweet that is promoted actually goes to a news site or blogpost on an interesting topic that is not about my own services. As Twitter advertising matures, I may be able to craft a tweet and select it specifically and so move people into the page on my site that I choose, but for now, you have to work with what Twitter selects.

So far in less than one week, I have spent $10.86 on advertising and gotten 12 new followers and had 13 clicks on my promoted tweets. I’ll keep you posted on the results once I’ve had more experience with the program.

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How to Add Photos to Facebook Using HootSuite

If you use HootSuite, you may have found out that since Facebook has made some sweeping changes you can no longer add photos to your Facebook updates by clicking the attach file icon to a scheduled status update. For some this has really impacted their use of HootSuite.

Unfortunately HootSuite has not come out and directly addressed this in their forum, but has posted a work around that is not linked to the forum questions but one of our clients found and shared with us. Thanks to Suzanne Patterson of Esprit de Corp for sharing this HootSuite resolution.

  • Click the attach paper clip icon just underneath the HootSuite entry field.
  • Select a TWITTER profile, then select your correct FACEBOOK profile where you want the photo to actually go.
  • Click the upload photo icon under the update entry field.

Note the image will not be posted to your Twitter profile, only used to upload the photo as a workaround due to Facebook’s API.

You can see the visual instructions to perform these actions at HootSuite.

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Google Statistically Documents AdWords and Organic Click Activity

This is a very interesting article and one worth a quick review if you are advertising on Google AdWords or thinking of advertising on Google AdWords. The title is “Impact of Organic Ranking on Ad Click Incrementality“. The study done by Google, in a nutshell, shows that when an advertiser with high organic placement stops advertising on Google AdWords, the high placement does not replace the click activity from AdWords.

“A meta-analysis of 390 Search Ads Pause studies highlighted the limited opportunity for clicks from organic search results to substitute for ad clicks when search ads are turned off. We found that on average, 81% of ad impressions and 66% of ad clicks occur in the absence of an associated organic result on the first page of search results. In addition, we found that on average, 50% of the ad clicks that occur with a top rank organic result are incremental. The estimate for average incrementality of the ad clicks increases when the rank is lower; 82% of the ad clicks are incremental when the associated organic search result is between ranks 2 and 4, and 96% of the ad clicks are incremental when the advertiser’s organic result ranked lower than 4.”

The bottom line is that even with high organic placement AdWords ads will bring more traffic and clicks in to your website. The lower your organic placement the higher percentage of click activity will be from AdWords. When you stop Google AdWords ads, the traffic from your organic placement will not rise, but rather your click activity will actually drop as much as 50% for top placed websites and as much as 82% for lower placed websites. The lower your organic position the more important AdWords is for click activity and the boost of exposure.

From these findings even top ranked website can benefit significantly from an AdWords campaign. If you are interested in trying AdWords, we invite you to visit our services page to review our AdWords account management program.