Tag: Twitter

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What’s Worth the Trouble for Social Media?

For every client and business it will be different. For some it is Google+, others Facebook, others yet Twitter, and for some it is definitely LinkedIn. Much of where you should invest your time for social media is about your target audience.

If you are:

  • Consumer oriented – Facebook and Twitter are best
  • Selling mainly to executives and decision makers – LinkedIn is best
  • Selling nationally business to business or business to consumer – I like Twitter

Where you post and invest your time is based on your target market. Where ever you decide to participate, make sure you are still blogging. Activity on social media networks is not a replacement for blogging, but should be considered a supplement to blogging.

Why blogging?

  1. Blog posts are considered as if they are new pages on content.
  2. Blog posts build web authority for your website.
  3. Blog posts create interesting and new content for readers and search engine robots.

Remember…

Blogging is best done when it is on-domain versus at Blogspot.com or WordPress.com. You can feed your blog posts to Twitter and your Facebook wall and use a widget to show your blog posts to readers on LinkedIn. Blogging is about building your domain’s content. Social Media is off-domain and is about connecting with the wider web and sharing links to point to your website, social sites, and drive traffic to your website.

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Is Social Media Worth the Time? How to Tell

When you are busy there is no easier and faster task you want to drop than to stop updating your social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, but is that wise? Before you drop updating social media sites, make sure you are not hurting your web presence first.

How can you tell if social media is not driving traffic and activity on your site? It all starts with analysis. If you don’t routinely watch your website statistics on Google Analytics, you should. For my site, I watch the Social Sources in the Traffic Sources button to check my referrals. If you don’t see referrals from Twitter or Facebook there, don’t stop updating those services yet until you look a bit further.

I use HootSuite for my social updates and I can run link click and follower share reports in the control panel. This gives me a  more clear view of what is happening specifically with Twitter. To check what is happening with Facebook, I login as an administrator and review my Insights report.

Based on what you see, you may decide to cut back activity to a lower level if the numbers are not measurable, but I would not stop either service altogether. Google and Bing do look for social updates and sharing activity as part of their organic rankings. If social media is taking up too much time, I would ramp back first to a comfortable level.  Specifically, I might recommend one update a day for Facebook and three updates a day for Twitter.

Should you stop social media updates all together? I would only recommend doing so if you really cannot support the activity level, you see zero link shares, and no referrals when you review a six month period. I would be very slow to stop updating your networks all together. I have found that once you lose readership, after you have actively worked to build it for quite a while, that to get back in the game again is almost like starting from scratch. It is better to slow your activity than to stop totally.

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Twitter Has a New Logo

Twitter released this past week its new preferred logo. You’ll see it to the right. There are several variations – bird on blue, bird on black, bird on clear, but the bird is the same; poised to fly up to the right with beak open. Oh notice the bird has no hair? Make sure you get the right icon as I have seen some out on the Web where the Twitter bird has a shock of hair. The logo on this page is Twitter’s own iconic image.

Seems kind of late in the game for Twitter, after several years, to strive to wipe out the use of the blue lowercase t which has become synonymous with Twitter, but it’s never too late to try to take back your brand. Especially if maybe you want to start thinking about a future IPO and are trying to sell ads on your platform.

I will be working to update my own website with the new icons in the weeks coming up, but have to say I do like a more cube shaped icon as it will look better in a line with Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn. I may try to put my own Twitter Bird in a square and then polish it and add a drop shadow. The essence is the bird not necessarily that the bird sits in a square or on a white ground. When I finish my icon, I’ll post it on my blog and website for you to check out.

 

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New Twitter Advertising Set Up Services

We are rolling out this week our new services on Twitter advertising set up. You can view all the details on our Twitter Advertising page.

For $100 here’s what we do:

  1. Consult briefly with you to identify your selected service or products you would like to promote.
  2. Create a series of ten 140 character tweets on your Twitter account that link to a variety of your services or products.
  3. Monitor your account over the next week and select these specially created marketing tweets to be shown as your sponsored tweets in the Twitter advertising control panel as they appear online.
  4. Send you an executive snap shot report of Twitter activity at the end of your first month of activity that will show your all time click activity and new followers.

Please note: We cap our time for all set up services at 1.2 hours. Additional time may be purchased at $80 per hour.

Additional Twitter Services

Additional services such as landing page creation, creation of special white papers and downloads to be used in sponsored tweets are available at an extra charge. Please contact us for details.

Account updates after set up are billed at our hourly rate of $80 and can be scheduled or done on demand.

Our Recommendations to Get The Most Out of Twitter Advertising

  • Periodically update your promoted tweets to show new services and products as old updates will get stale and generate less activity over time.
  • Consider trying local metro regional markets if you don’t sell nationally. You’ll only get one targeting selection in your advertising account so consider trying several over time to see which give you the best results.
  • Consider driving traffic to a special Twitter landing page that contains a special offer or download in order to evaluate the success of your Twitter program beyond new followers and clicks.

Why don’t you contact us today to see if your Twitter account is eligible to show sponsored tweets on Twitter right now. Not all accounts may have this option yet so let us help you to check.