“Very few of your fans see your content in their news feed and even fewer people are seeking out your page. This is yet another reason you’re better off linking to your campaigns from everywhere.” Read the full article.
Today social media is much more than Facebook, it is about connecting on a variety of platforms, blogging, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, and your website. With our new social media programs for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn we work to create a strategy that is not Facebook-centric but rather works synergistically with your website and your social message.
Our social media specialists decide topics we will use for the week or month and focus on what hashtags and focus we will take across all the platforms we write for in your project. With cross-linking and cohesive hashtagging across properties, we strive to build more than just likes to a Facebook page, but rather a cohesive message across all platforms that helps to win you additional online exposure.
Grow prospects into customers with social media updates.
Social Media has now become an important part of every business’ overall marketing program. Search engines and site visitors consider social media activity important and are site visitors are using the ability to share content with others using these platforms; making participation in social networks more meaningful for businesses. As a result to keep up with current trends, our social media programs are being improved to serve your needs better.
We have hired special social media specialists to curate the content that is used for social media and have employed specialized content writers to write your updates. We think that you will find that over the last several weeks to month that the content for your social media networks has improved to be more meaningful and targeted for your own audience. For Facebook, our content is now standardized to show around 50 to 60 words in each update. We have already started to supply content with these new parameters.
Social Media Rates
Facebook Gold – $15 per day for two updates five days a week
Facebook Silver – $8 per day for one update five days a week
Twitter Gold – $22 per day for five updates five days a week
Twitter Silver – $14 per day for three updates five days a week
New – Twitter Bronze – $9 per day for two updates five days a week
Google+ Silver – $8 per day for one update five days a week
LinkedIn Silver – $9 per day for one update five days a week – specially curated by Nancy McCord
We even offer low budget services with our Minimalist Program.
The Minimalist – $260 Per Four Week Month
Just for clients who have existing Facebook and Twitter profiles and simply want to budget a small amount of money to maintain these platforms; so as to have up-to-date content when prospects click in from their website, we have created a program for these special needs. Please note, we do not recommend this program level for follower growth or for best practices, it is a simple maintenance only program.
We can provide Facebook and Twitter account updates. Updates will consist of status updates, links to articles, updates pointing to items on your website you sell as products or services, and interesting informational content that builds value for readers.
Included in our Minimalist Level is the following:
Three statuses per work week for your Facebook Business Page on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Updates are typically 50 to 55 words long.
Five tweets per work week for your Twitter account; one tweet a day Monday through Friday.
Please note at the Minimalist Level you will incur a onetime $50 set up fee to connect your existing Facebook and Twitter accounts to our writer’s control panel in our corporate HootSuite account.
What’s the perfect sized blog post? How about a tweet, is 140 characters too much? Who says that a longer Facebook status update is better, is it really? In an article found online at Buffer, I’ve found what one author says is the perfect length for everything. But are those tips and suggestions right?
Below are personal recommendations on what works best for each platform based on what our own customers and readers seem to like best.
Twitter – what’s the perfect tweet length?
Although Twitter only let’s you enter in 140 characters including spaces do you ever wish you had more room? Sure but less room? Kevan Lee says the perfect tweet is 100 characters and that these short tweets get 17% more engagement. I have to say that from my experience tweets that are this short typically are teasers for videos, spam, or sharable quotes. Does that mean that you should start shortening your tweets? I say no, but make your tweets work harder by linking or pointing to something meaningful to your audience.
Facebook – what’s the perfect length for a status update?
Customers do think that more is better when it comes to paid writing on Facebook, but does more necessarily translate into more engagement? Buffer says the perfect Facebook status update is 40 characters long. Wow, that seems pretty short and hard to really even express what a link in your updates is all about. From my personal experience about 150 to 160 characters seems about best for Facebook. Facebook updates with an image or linking to a page with an image (so Facebook will show a thumbnail) seem to get the most response.
Blogging – what’s the perfect length for a blog post?
Buffer says the ideal blog post is 1,600 words. 1,600 words translates into more than three pages of a Word document. When was the last time you read this much content on one website? Unless the article was enriched with data, statistics and unique research from a highly authoritative writer and on a topic that was really important to me or about something I wanted to learn about, I have to say that the chance of having a real audience be engaged from introduction to conclusion would be pretty slim.
Recent studies have been done on how Internet and screen reading have cut the general publics attention span. Internet articles are not read like books or print articles but rather scanned. Have too much content, not enough white space, blocks of content that are more than two sentence long and you risk losing your reading audience.
My customers vote with their pocket books and our top selling blog writing levels are those at 200 to 250 words per blog post followed by 140 to 300 words per post long. I personally like blog posts that are 300 to 350 words long as this is just long enough to flesh out a topic and really have something interesting to say.
So what’s your perfect length? Just as a point of reference this post is a little over 500 words long. If it was the supposed “perfect blog post” it would be three times this long!
With recent changes Facebook has made, renegotiation of the Google-Twitter contract, and Google’s announcement that it does not include social signals in its ranking algorithm, business owners and SEO’s are struggling to find where social media fits into a strategy for web visibility.
Although I still feel that social media still has a place in a mature business’ overall marketing plan, how to go about using social media for visibility is now drastically changing.
It used to be that having social updates posted to Twitter and Facebook was a strategy that all businesses on the web needed to embrace, now our recommendations are different based on this changed landscape.
For new businesses the validity of starting a Facebook or Twitter account with no followers and paying a writer to post updates has lost value. It is by far better for this new business to invest in AdWords and blogging for a long range content and visibility plan than to be on social media platforms.
For established mature businesses whether to post to Facebook or Twitter really now depend on the business’ community. Some firms have a vital Facebook presence and to continue to post there makes perfect sense. Additionally for these businesses to use Facebook’s options to promote posts to a wider demographic is now becoming an attractive option. For right now Twitter continues to be a smart place to be, but this may change rapidly as Google and Twitter redefine their relationship in the months ahead.
What is becoming more and more attractive than a Twitter and Facebook as a marketing strategy is activity on a personal Google+ profile tied to a rel=”author” tag with high quality content pieces and Google+ Community creation and moderation.
This next year will be strategic for how businesses use social media. I am predicting that more activity will be in Facebook promoted updates than in regular content creation and that Twitter will need to continue to reinvent itself to stay relative in this new landscape.
