Social Media Marketing Archives -

Social Media Facts and Myths

June 14, 2011 by Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

Many people have asked me about social media myths and what are the real facts when adapting social media into your marketing strategy. The answer is pretty simple in that your need to be interacting with your customers. Social media myths have the ability to stop your taking the leap into implementing this necessary marketing strategy, but which myths are fact and which are fiction? The truth may surprise you. Here are some of the top myths:

Social media is not where my customers are:
False. This is the biggest myth out there as all online customers are online. Your customers are on social media but you have not tapped them yet. According to Socialmediaexaminer.com, roughly 80% of females surfing the internet say they have become fans of a product or brand on a social network site. At least 72% said they discovered a new product through social media. Social networking and media can greatly influence your customer base, if you’re out there making an effort to reach them.
Social media isn’t Measurable
Difficult? Yes, but not measurable is incorrect. Social media marketing and other Internet marketing strategies have different interaction mechanisms, so trying to evaluate and determine potential customers and purchase intent is a new skill for many marketing specialists. Things like shares, likes, mentions, and follows are extremely important to gauge your social media marketing and with recent updates by Google and Bing it will actually help you in your search engine optimization. It is possible to track the impact social media is having on your bottom line.
Social media marketing will take to much time
I say 1 hour a day. Custom content is the key and it takes just a little time to engage with your customers. Social networks are easy to be a part of as all you have to do is simply talk with users about interesting topics. You’ll quickly understand that interaction through social media is very similar to carrying on a conversation offline. There are a variety of tools that can make interaction much easier such as TweetDeck for Twitter interaction and Ping.fm to post updates to multiple profiles from a single place. It is important to remember to implement a social media policy within your business and to encourage employees to engage with customers as well.
Negative comments/reviews will kill my business
Don’t worry about negative comments on your social media sites. Matter of fact a few negative comments is not a bad things as there is nothing in the world that everybody likes. While nobody wants to see negative feedback about their company or product, bad reviews actually establish authenticity, help promote your customer service standards and act as a public platform to “wow” the masses through a rapid response. Social marketing instills transparency into business operations – if a customer chooses to post negative feedback, you’re given a big opportunity to make the situation right. Your efforts won’t go unnoticed; people observing the dialogue are more likely to admire your efforts to right the situation, rather take to heart the angry customer’s complaints.

Facebook Fan Page Design

April 28, 2011 by Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

As we all know social media has exploded in terms of it being a very crucial part of your search engine marketing strategy. I have asked Marco from MDO Studio who’s been very successful in customizing, branding, and designing Facebook Fan Pages to talk a little bit about how you can customize your own Facebook fan page very easily.

Why Create A Facebook Fan Page?

One quick glance at Facebook’s statistics and it’s easy to realize why your business needs to have its own Facebook fan page. With over 400 million active users, Facebook is the number 2 most visited website on the entire World Wide Web! There are more than 3 million active Pages on Facebook. More than 20 million people become fans of Facebook Fan pages each day. Moreover Fan pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans! Even more important, Facebook Fan pages offer businesses a way of interacting with their fans in a way that was unthought-of just a few years ago. Fan pages offer a place where you can listen to your fan-base, engage in a dialog, ask and answer questions, advertise special offers, drive traffic to your main site, promote your brand and so much more.

Facebook does a pretty good job of keeping all fan pages looking very consistent, effectively limiting the way business pages are laid out, their color palettes and overall design. One area where creativity and freedom can flow with some restraint is the profile picture.

Facebook Profile Picture Size – Customizing

The profile picture is an area located on the top left of all Facebook pages. The maximum Facebook profile picture size is 200 x 600 pixels. Bigger images are resized proportionally to fit these dimensions. While some people would find the constraint of these dimensions limiting, there are very imaginative web designers that have found truly creative solutions that integrate very well the profile picture size with the entire Facebook page layout. You can use this key piece of real estate to its full advantage by adding logos, slogans, descriptions, contact information, URLs, etc. Unfortunately you can’t add any hyperlinks to your Facebook profile picture, but you can definitely communicate your message in that space.

Working with thumbnails in Facebook is a little bit trickier and a lot more limiting than custom profile pictures. The dimensions for the Facebook thumbnail size are set at 50 x 50 pixels. When customizing your thumbnail, Facebook lets you move the selected area for the thumbnail up, down, right or left but always keeping the pre-selected width / height proportions the same. It’s almost like looking at a shrunk version of the profile picture through a window: only that boxed area will be shown as the thumbnail. There are logos that look perfect on the profile picture but don’t fit the thumbnail area, and designers have to get really creative in order to have a profile picture and thumbnail combination that looks good and makes sense. Sometimes a client’s logo will not be the best option for a thumbnail picture, because at a 50 x 50 pixel size, they may become unrecognizable.

Take a look at these custom profile pictures for Facebook fan pages. Some of these communicate a great deal at first glance about services provided, contact information, etc.; while others have integrated their profile picture with Facebook’s design very well.

Customizing your profile picture may not sound like much, but it definitely can make your business stand out, communicate what your company does, push your contact information and promote your brand. On the second part of this article I will discuss the FBML application, custom tabbed pages and wall tabs.

Filed Under: Social Media Marketing Tagged With: optimization, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, SEO

Optimizing Your LinkedIn Profile

February 2, 2011 by Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

LinkedIn has become a very powerful profile to have in your social media marketing. It is a great way for your business and yourself to communicate with other professionals, join groups, and drive traffic to your website. So, if you are thinking about social media in anyway, shape, or form LinkedIn needs to be at the top of your list to create and optimize. Let’s talk about how you do this:

Create A LinkedIn Action Plan

First thing you must do is create an action plan prior to signing up. Here are are the top action items your need to build out in your action plan:

Keywords to optimized your profile with
On page profile optimization
Apps
Tracking

Keyword Research and Decision Making

Use a keyword tool of your choice such as wordtracker.com or the Google keyword tool. Look for keywords that are highly descriptive of your products or services you offer. Your keywords should also lend to you being a expert in your industry. I use the keywords “Internet Marketing Specialist”.

On Page Profile Optimization

Just like your on page SEO, your LinkedIn profile has strategic areas within your profile that you can optimize for. Let’s take a look at the top areas and talk about them some:

Professional photo – We are not on Facebook or MySpace here. You are among professionals and nothing says “I am not a professional” than a non-professional photo. Do not us a good picture of you while you are out with your friends and you still have your buddies arm around you. People like faces and want to connect with each one of us. Do not use a logo or a full body shot.
Headline – Use your name and the keyword phrase you have chosen. For mine I have used “Frank Pipolo – Internet Marketing Specialist”.
Keywords throughout content – Use the keyword phrase that you have selected in your headline within the specialty and job description areas of your profile. Also use keywords that are related to your main keyword phrase. The key is to have these keywords flow within your copy without looking stuffed into it.
Sites area – In the drop down area make sure you use “other” as this will give you the opportunity to include your keywords when describing your sites. Use all of the three slots as they are valuable assets you have on your profile.
Recommendations – Of course these are a key to your profile as they show creditability but you can have them highly optimized by including your top keywords within them. Just ask the people you want to recommend you to use these keywords.

Applications

These are real jewels within your profile as they make your social media marketing on LinkedIn much easier and they maximize your profile potential. Use the apps that pull your blog and Twitter stream. One of my favorite is the Slideshare app that pulls all of your Slideshare presentations within your profile. You can also show a list of your favorite books. All of these things makes your profile fresh and will always allow your connections to see something has changed when LinkedIn sends its automated monthly email out.

Tracking Results

So like anything else, what does this optimization do for you? Here are some of the top key performance indicators (KPI) that you should look at:

Does your profile appear in the search results?
Have you received 100% score rating for your profile?
Increase in recommendations? By networking and building your profile you will hopefully be able to get unsolicited recommendations.
How many personal messages are you receiving in your LinkedIn inbox?
Is your profile being indexed and ranked within the search engines? You should at least have your profile show up when doing a search on Google for your first name. Good keyword selection will also allow you to rank for your chosen keywords.

Filed Under: Social Media Marketing Tagged With: description areas, google keyword tool, Headline Use, keyword phrase, Keyword Research, linkedin, optimization, professional photo, Tracking Results

Social Media is Part of SEO

January 9, 2011 by Frank Pipolo Leave a Comment

Few weeks ago it was “officially” claimed by both Google and Bing (Yahoo) that look at social media data to help determine the rank of a web site. So let’s all go out and go social media nuts right? No, but you will need to incorporate a social media strategy for 2011 and beyond if you want to succeed in the SEO world. Google claimed they use data such as how many times something was retweeted, followed on Twitter and liked or linked to within Facebook. With the focus on all things social, the fact that it’s beginning to effect organic search comes as no surprise. It just solidifies exactly how important and main stream social media has become. Face it – we live in a social world now.

This confirmation from Google needs to directly translate to your business and your marketing plan for 2011. So, as you’re laying out your plans be sure to include activating, maintaining and/or growing your Twitter followers, Facebook Friends lists, social bookmarking articles, LinkedIN profile and blog.

Social Media Marketing Grows Search Engine Optimization

The idea is that you and your company have a personality and you need to use it to reach out to the ever growing social media market. We could go on and on about the importance of social media on the growth of your company, but if you aren’t convinced by now you better be. I think most businesses know they need to has a social presents but have a hard time to find what it does for the business and the worth of it. At this point, I explain to my clients it does not matter what type of business you are you need to be doing it. It may not give you 100 new leads or sales but it keeps your current customers and potential customers close to you. Close is good and close means more future business.

If you were one of the social media believers, then this is a great boost for you and your business. However, if you haven’t set up your social media marketing plan, then now is time to catch up. As it stands now – the current impact that this social data will have on your organic search results is still small. Remember that the major search engines use hundreds of factors in determining how a web site ranks however, building your online brand is about much more than search engines rankings. It’s about connecting with your target market and growing your customer base. Social media is the perfect tool to accomplish that in 2011.

We will be talking more very soon on detailed social media strategies so stay tuned.

Filed Under: Social Media Marketing Tagged With: Facebook Friends, SEO, target market