Tag: digital marketing

In 2016 and beyond, search engine optimization will rely heavily on social signals, a metric that is derived from social activities of web users. Earlier, web administrators and search engines depended heavily on keywords and other such metadata. In recent years, the popularity of social media has resulted in more traffic generating from these tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. With this in mind, search engine optimization strategies now heavily depend on social media strategies. Moreover, managing a company’s or individual’s reputation online also depends on social media as people are more likely to go to social channels to vent their ire. With this being the case, it only makes sense to understand social media more thoroughly, as optimizing social strategies help to improve both SEO and ORM in the short and long terms. One of the most important ways to do this is to connect social media buttons to every page or post on a website, so that social signals are generated with the help of social engagement, leading to better ranking and search results. By adding social buttons, companies can ensure that users land on the correct page of the company and engage with the content on the web page or company’s social media accounts. Before we discuss why you must connect your social media buttons to your website, let us take a look at the two important kinds of social media buttons. [php snippet=1]  Social share buttons Social share buttons help users and visitors to share content they like (or sometimes dislike) on your website. They may use the buttons to actively promote your content on social media websites, which helps you to generate traffic and increase social conversations about your company, which ultimately lead to better search rankings. These social share buttons are usually made available as sticky social menus, that move along the screen as a reader reads through the website. In other situations, social share buttons may be displayed at the beginning or end of a post, or both. Along with social share buttons, it is common to add email and print options as well, though they help much less in SEO. Social media buttons Social media buttons, on the other hand, are completely different. In this case, these buttons link to your social profiles so that visitors can reach your company pages on various social networking websites. It is common for most companies to have active Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. Social media buttons should link to these profiles of yours so that visitors can reach your social profiles to contact you, be informed by you and also engage with you at a deeper level. Social media buttons are often confused with social share buttons, though both help in SEO and ORM. In this article, let us take a look at how social media buttons that connect your website to your social profiles help in SEO and ORM. Social media buttons increase traffic to your social profiles It is a well-known fact that social profiles lead to better engagement. If people first arrive at your website and you still have not connected social profiles to your website, you may lose out on a lot of traffic. With social buttons, people can easily find you in social media and arrive at your social profiles. This leads to increased online footfalls and a better traffic growth. Increased social signals lead to better SEO Search engine optimization now depends on social signals. If more people are talking about a topic, search engines assume that those topics must be important, and thus rank them higher. When you use social buttons on your website, people will begin to talk about you on social profiles and thus help you to increase your search rankings. This is not a clear cut pathway to social media success, though. You will need to have a great social strategy in place, which is, of course, a different story altogether. Visitors can raise issues and seek help on social profiles One of the best ways to boost your online image is to solve people’s problems. Tools like Twitter and Facebook are increasingly being used to offer customer support. When people come to your social profiles to seek help, they most probably leave all the comments out there in open for people to see. If you have been consistently providing great customer care on social profiles, you will gain a lot more followers, which in turn will help you to improve your online reputation. If negative comments are left, the way you deal with them will help you to boost your ORM. Your social engagement helps to boost your image It is a well-known fact that people often peer through a company’s social profiles before they make decisions related to purchasing. If you link your social buttons and people are able to find their way to your social pages, it becomes easier for them to understand the way you conduct your business. Of course, this goes with assuming that you provide great customer service which you would like to flaunt. Social buttons are expected These days, people expect to see links to your social profiles. If they do not find them, they may think you are outdated or worse, that you are not reliable. In this sense, your social buttons add to your reputation and also reliability. It is crucial to ensure that people do not start to wonder if your business is suspicious because it has no links to social profiles. Yield to customers’ expectation and you will be seen as someone who is in sync with the changes that are happening. A unique combination of SEO and ORM Social buttons help you to bring your social profiles to your audience, which is a great way to not only boost your search engine ranking, but also your online reputation. Thus, adding social buttons can be a great way to boost your online reputation and search engine rankings.

Social media marketing has a pivotal place among marketers. Consumers love to engage with marketers on social media because they are free to express their concerns and learn more about products amid entertaining and relaxed environment. However, managing all social media tools at once becomes a little difficult. There are many tools that empower a marketer to manage multiple social media handles. One among them and the most popular is Hootsuite. The following article will focus on features and usability of Hootsuite in detail and a few other tools, in short, to manage social media handles. Hootsuite Hootsuite is a comprehensive tool for managing all your social media accounts through a single dashboard.  With its ability to manage more than 80 social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, YouTube, LinkedIn and many more applications, it becomes one of the most powerful tools to address all your social media management needs. Integration Hootsuite integrates social media platforms of your choice and manages them through a single dashboard.  You can even group social media platforms of your choice and manage them through multiple dashboards. Hootsuite can integrate with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. This integration allows businesses to incorporate all social interactions of customers and track them through Hootsuite dashboard.  This facilitates user identification and lead generation. The social data collected can be added to Microsoft Dynamics CRM and get a refined view of each customer. [php snippet=1] Collaboration It swiftly operates shared social media accounts for collaboration of teams and organizations. It is proficient to assign conversation to team members. Collaboration can be enhanced through the integration of SharePoint in Hootsuite. This enables businesses to utilize social media content across teams and quickly resolve customer issues. Moreover, users can bring data from Sharepoint sites to Hootsuite dashboard & use it along social media data from Facebook, Twitter etc. Another handy tool for collaboration is Yammer.  Integration of Hootsuite with Yammer facilitates real-time collaboration among employees while engaging with customers on social media.  This enables employees from different departments to work collectively in real-time and quickly respond or act upon social interaction with their customers. Automate publishing Hootsuite dashboard has a powerful Compose Message tool that allows you to create a message and shares it with selected social media platforms. Autoschedule feature in Hootsuite allows you to publish content at a predefined time and platform.  This feature gives you more time to find and share relevant content rather than worry about time of posting. Bulk Scheduling allows you to keep your social media platforms active. It is useful when you have a lot of content to share on a regular basis.  However, this feature is more suitable for Twitter because this method only supports text and link posts. Campaigns Hootsuite is highly effective to create and launch social media campaigns like contests, user-generated galleries, sweepstakes etc across multiple platforms.  It enables you to create interactive promotions for the target audience, generate leads and engage them more with your business goings-on. This feature simplifies social media marketing and is suitable for businesses of all size. It can integrate with Facebook’s latest page features like shopping, service and call-to-action buttons.  Apart from that, users can select campaign type according to their need from its intuitive and easy-to-use interface. Analytics This feature gives you a fair idea about your social media actions and results of your social media campaigns.  Analytics act as an eye-opener and make it easier for you to do the follow-up on your efforts. It gives you deep insight about user engagement and social media activities so that you can realize and create what works best in the interest of consumers and your organization. Hootsuite Analytics enable extensive monitoring of data to generate printable reports for your business. Analytics reports compile and visualizes data from different social media platforms.  Depending upon the module selected, reports contain a specific set of data. Mobile application Hootsuite’s powerful mobile application has made it convenient for users to manage and control social media anytime and anywhere. Hootsuite app is available for both Apple and Android platforms.  It allows you to manage multiple networks, schedule posts, and track content performance. It further enables you to geo-locate your posts to share favorite places and engage with nearby followers. Social media listening  It is very important for a marketer to know what’s being said about his brand. This ability helps you to understand what customers and competitors are talking about your brand. It forms an integral part of online reputation management because you can only reform your reputation once you know where you are lacking. Furthermore, Hootsuite allows you to track key phrases and terms across teammates’ posts so that you can interfere when necessary and take stock of the situation.  This helps users to precisely respond to customers’ needs and bring in new customers. Hootlet plug-in There are multiple plug-ins for Hootsuite and one among them is Hootlet. This is a brilliant plug-in for Hootsuite that simplifies the process of sharing content with your followers.  Hootlet is easily accessible through a quick-launch button atop web browsers. The moment you come across interesting content on the web, clicking Hootlet shortens URL and inserts a small snippet of relevant text from that website into your social media message. Hootsuite securely manages your content syndication needs Hootsuite is an excellent tool to take care of your content syndication needs by publishing on multiple platforms apart from hoards of other benefits.  It is used by businesses of all sizes, agencies, and enterprises.  Security is of prime importance for Hootsuite users because reputation and assets are all at stake. Secured logins, profile protections and permission levels enable a strong security layer across the organization. Hootsuite minimizes the time you spend to manage multiple social media accounts. Post scheduling, conversation monitoring and rapid response to customer queries and comments make Hootsuite one of the most sought-after tools for social media management today. Few other noteworthy apps Buffer Buffer is another very useful tool for social

Instagram is aggressively used by digital marketers and businesses to achieve their marketing goals. The application, launched in 2010, garnered instant success that Facebook bought it in less than two years of its launch. It is Instagram’s structure that lends it simplicity; the simplicity of displaying only one photo or video on the screen at a time. There are photo filters and minimalistic use of buttons that adds to its simplicity. This ability helps Instagram to avoid cluttering of visual content and provides digital marketer an opportunity only imagined in the past. It is easy to spread your message and get follower’s attention here. An effective e-commerce platform Instagram is the most effective platform for e-commerce to generate orders. However, even if a business does not have a physical product to sell, the sheer strength of this social media network lies in its ability to connect with users. Moreover, Instagram’s sponsored posts and advertising features are doing extraordinary work for marketers. Instagram’s sponsored posts naturally blend with existing images without causing any annoyance to the user. [php snippet=1] According to a study conducted by Forrester Research, Instagram has a fan engagement rate 58 times higher than Facebook and 120 times higher than Twitter. The astounding statistics don’t need explanation and clearly, signify the importance of Instagram. The new functionality: Switch between different Instagram accounts Marketers create different Instagram accounts to manage different sectors of their business. And to access each account, they had to logout and login through a different account. This limitation led to the waste of time and hassle because marketers were not able to focus on every account seamlessly. Today, Instagram has enabled easy account switching without having to logout from an account. This feature will further bolster Instagram’s image in comparison to its counterparts. Instagram’s monthly active users have shot up from 200 million in 2014 to 400 million today. Marketers have long waited for this functionality so that they can easily switch between their business and personal accounts. Users can switch between different accounts while keeping an eye on every account.  A user can add up to five Instagram accounts. This functionality is currently available on iOS and Android platforms through its latest app version 7.15 Setting up and managing multiple accounts is a fairly simple process. Your profile settings allow you to add accounts. A tap on username at the top of your profile enables you to switch between accounts. The feature is carefully designed so that you are absolutely sure about posting to the right account. It ensures that you don’t post personal images mistakenly to your business account. How does switching between multiple accounts help digital marketers? Earlier, many marketers used to mix a lot of personal content on their business account. It used to tone down their business image which was not good from the marketing point of view.  It led to the muzzling of brand’s message. Though they had a choice to operate another account, it was not convenient to operate two different accounts through one device.  There are some third-party tools that allow for easy switching of Instagram accounts, however, they have not been very effective and Instagram is soon going to restrict them. Explore different user-bases Instant switching will enable them to reach different user-bases through different accounts. More exposure to brand Brands will get a push through a new wave of vigor and vitality. It will enhance brand’s exposure. Post more content and always stay active  Marketers can now post more content on their business account without having to log out from their personal account and always stay alive and more active among their followers. Follow a unique strategy for every account It will help them to draw a line between two different accounts and reform their social strategy. How to manage multiple Instagram accounts? Social media marketing strategy forms the basis for success on social media.  Having multiple Instagram accounts does not guarantee success unless and until you put that extra effort to frame social media strategy for every account. A social media marketer must identify the target audience for different accounts. It is equally crucial to set social media goals and attribute KPIs to understand whether creating multiple accounts adds to sales revenue and generate sufficient ROI.  Use multiple accounts to create interactive content on Instagram An interesting way in which Instagram is being used by brands is through hosting interactive games.  Marketers can link a series of Instagram accounts and direct users to click through to each. Adult Swim, a major cable network company, linked 80 Instagram accounts to create a story.  The game is linked by tags in each image which links users to other accounts. The fans could choose tags of their choice and were rewarded at the end of the game. This promotional campaign was a creative way to build awareness about their new series Rick and Morty. Though this campaign may not work for everyone, it definitely highlights the possibilities of using multiple accounts on Instagram in an innovative manner.  Easier account switching will make it convenient for marketers to create interactive and immersive content by creating different experiences for on-platform users. Use multiple accounts for A/B testing on Instagram Marketers who have already been using multiple accounts on Instagram to test an idea will find it easier to do so through this new feature. Digital marketers may employ different ideas and tactics to understand their target audience. For this, they don’t have to temper with their existing marketing strategy. Digital marketers can explore many new ideas with account switching A digital marketer operates multiple social media accounts depending upon his business requirements. Different platforms that form part of social media strategy may include Facebook page, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+ etc. Every platform offers a unique set of advantages and limitations. When a marketer decides to operate multiple Instagram accounts, it is adding to the list of active social media accounts.  So, marketers should be determined to put in