Category: Tips

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Where Should You Spend You Money for Online Activities

You can recoveIf your business isn't in recovery yet, where can you trim money?r from a hack.
If your business isn’t in recovery yet, where can you trim money?

If your business is pulling back where can you realistically chop in your marketing plan and not get hurt?

Chop Away

Social Media – if you are paying to update Facebook, Twitter and Google+ you could easily take a break to save money.

Blogging – try not to kill all your writing as the SEO juice you get from well-written blog posts helps you in the long run, but maybe consider moving from three days a week to two or from two days a week to one.  Try to still keep the momentum up but maybe lower the word count or frequency.

Chop Not!

Google AdWords – don’t touch it unless you absolutely have to. AdWords is hands down the best way to generate new leads and start cash pumping back into your business.

e-newsletters – they build loyalty and repeat business. Newsletters are especially important to businesses that have annual renewals for service plans like pest control firms and HVAC firms.  If you chop this, your name is not kept in front of your customers and come time to renew, they may not see the value of renewing; which will hurt your sales even further.

Need some practical sense to make the most of the budget you do have or to get AdWords to work harder for you? We’re the firm to call and chat with first especially if you are looking for honest advice you can trust with no sales pressure.

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Our Kids Need to Know Not to Overshare Online

Nancy McCord
Nancy McCord – Point of View for Today.

In our new world of no-privacy, we as parents need to be vigilant to let our kids know how to live.

We recently had a family crisis with one of our children. The very first thing my husband and I did was to Google the kids’ names involved. Interestingly enough even teens will have things online about themselves and allow others to follow a media trail.

From something inappropriate shared publically on Twitter to social media networks that are not “locked down” from prying eyes, our kids run the risk of over-exposure in our digital world. And this trail lasts forever. Youthful indiscretions, something said in anger online may come back to hurt your children with others, in relationships, and even in a future job.

I routinely Google my own kids to assure that the social media sites that they “live” on are not totally public; even for my college age kids.  I want to make sure that phone numbers, addresses and even full names and personal information is not overshared online. For my older kids I look to make sure that the sites they used are locked down so images do not get picked up by Google and returned in search results.

It is particularly important for parents, when kids first start using social media, to make sure they discuss privacy and personally review sharing settings on their accounts. Just as equally parents should review with teens and college age kids the difficulties they may run into with pictures and party scenes when they go to get a job.

It’s a very different world now for our kids than when you and I were growing up. We need to work together to keep all the children we care about safe and protected online.

 

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Social Media and Images

Pros and Cons Sign
Should You Add Image to Social Media Updates?

For several of our key clients we are testing out if adding images to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ posts increases customer engagement. With a visual statement winning out over just pure text, we wanted to find out if adding images to tweets and Facebook posts enhanced engagement?

For Facebook, if you insert an image versus letting Facebook simply import an image from the page content that you link to, you get two things.

  1. A larger image will appear on your Facebook page.
  2. You get to select the image versus only being able to select an image that appears on a page you link to. So you get greater control.

For Twitter, if you insert an image, get ready to re-write your post to that by the time the link is shrunk and the image URL is shrunk as well you have about ten to twelve words of text. That means you’d better have something great to say or you are just making your page look pretty.

This is what I have found out so far:

  1. Having images in Facebook and Twitter updates does make your pages on Facebook.com and Twitter.com look nicer.
  2. But, do images translate into more engagement – so far the answer is no.
  3. What gets engagement is still what you write and not necessarily not even what you link to and not the image you insert.

So content is still king, but having images does make your page look more appealing visually. My recommendation is where meaningful add an image like twice a week on Facebook and every several tweets on Twitter, but I would not recommend putting images into every update. Instead make your updates interesting and you’ll get a higher level of engagement.

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Moving for the Last Time This Week

This week my family and office are having their final adventure in moving. Our moving truck with our possessions that have been in storage since July is finally arriving on the 22nd to deliver all the things we were sure we had lost while moving.

After living in an apartment for too many months now, my office and family is finally being moved to our final location and newly built home.

I’ll be taking a break from blogging this week due to the loss of internet connectivity, chaos moving all my office furniture and files, and the fact that nearly our entire extended family and remote office staff will be coming to visit for the holiday.

I’ll be back blogging after Christmas.