BlogPosts from August, 2011

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Top 10 Tips To Growing Your Social Media Audience

The size of your audience matters. This is true for many things – West End shows, stand-up comedians, the hot new band – but none more so than for social media. Tweets, status updates, blogs – they all need readers, and the more the merrier. The future of e-commerce stands on it.

When people follow and like your business, it’s good for you. It creates a loyal army of customers who push your products and talk about your brand all over their social media profiles –often to hundreds of people at a time. But firstly, you need to get those customers to follow you, like you and tweet about you. So, you need to ask yourself – why would they do that? What’s in it for them? What value do I bring to their lives?

Your social media audience is a changing entity, and you must be responsive and proactive in your activity to keep your consumers engaged and interested. Here are our top 10 tips for effective audience engagement and retention:

1. Create a Channel Strategy. Less isn’t necessarily more, and more isn’t necessarily less. You need to examine your brand and any sub-brands and ‘personalities’, and ask yourself, ‘Are these likeable? Is there a clear reason to follow them?’ Don’t keep channels that aren’t contributing to the strength of your brand, and equally don’t ignore potential channels that could add value for your customers – such as Group Buy sites. Every channel you choose to develop should be backed by a clear strategy.

2. Have a Mission and Purpose. If you create a channel without a clear idea of what you want it to do and why – and crucially without knowing what audience you’re trying to reach – then you’ll never develop it to its full potential. Ask existential questions of each – why does it exist? Who does it exist for? What do I want it to do?

3. KISS it: Keep It Significant and Shareable. Your content should be engaging, relevant and encourage people to share it. Try and think outside the box – what piques your audience’s curiosity? What do they expect to see, and what would they like to see? Consider their specific needs and interests and develop your content accordingly.

4. Build frameworks to support your online ecommerce store. Listening frameworks monitor conversations about the brand and can pick up trends and flag issues. Conversational workflows mean there is always someone on hand to respond at crucial engagement points, and that all your representatives know where and when they take place. Decision trees make sure that every situation is foreseen and planned for: ‘What happens if….? Do this if…’

5. Timing is everything. Are you tweeting to your customers when they’re fast asleep? Are you using 40 words when 4 would do? Make every update worth reading by optimising your language and timing.

6. Cutting edge skills require training – and reward. Keep your reps sharp and focused through training. Every engagement needs to be top notch as it can add to or detract from the the brand experience. Social media is at the cutting edge of technology too – you don’t want to look like your brand is behind the times! Excellent reps can be nurtures and retained through rewards and incentives.

7. Find your voice. Define your brand persona, your character, your personality, your essence and make sure all your reps follow the same guidelines. This ensures the consumer experience of your brand is consistent. If you don’t have a style guide for your reps to follow, creating one should be a priority. This is true across all channels – even when sending out a short text as part of your mobile marketing.

8. Do you know what you Do and Don’t in social media? Get a policy in place. Data protection and employee rights are just a couple of the legal aspects to be aware of when operating in the social media arena. Your guidelines should be flexible enough to ensure your employees can operate effectively, but are still aware what the boundaries are.

9. Offer solutions. Your consumers’ expectations include problem solving. One of the easiest ways to engender customer loyalty is through helping them. Perhaps offering tips on social shopping or how to access your mobile shop through your apps. Make sure your channels add value in this way.

10. Monitor and evaluate. One of the most important steps! Don’t assume everything is working fine – watch it, test it, assess it. Check your SEO rankings and see how you can increase your web traffic. The social media world – and your audience! – is constantly changing. What works Tuesday might not work Sunday. Use some of the social media tools out there to keep on top of your channel performance.

That’s our top tips – what about yours?

Turn Images into a Video with Animoto – Step by Step Guide

STAGE 1: SETTING UP A BASIC ANIMOTO ACCOUNT

Once you’ve played around with the free “Basic” account and you decide to sign up for a Basic account, it’s a relatively simple process. The rest of this write-up assumes that you have signed up for a basic account.

STAGE 2: CREATING YOUR ANIMOTO VIDEO

The interface is very user-friendly and they make things very simple for you. To create a new video, simply click “create video” on the top left corner. You’ll then be presented with this screen:

The directions on the right are self explanatory. You see that you can make a full-length video which basically means anything longer than 30 seconds. If you want to showcase anything more than 12-15 images, then a full-length video is the way to go. We did a short one, and that is what we sharing with you.

STAGE 3: GETTING YOUR IMAGES INTO ANIMOTO

After selecting a create video, you will be asked where your images are located. You can either upload these from your own computer or select from the animoto stock photos.

STAGE 4: SELECTING YOUR SOURCE

But as you can see, it’s just as easy to upload photos from your Flickr, Facebook, and Photobucket accounts, never mind if you not on these platforms.After your photos have been downloaded from the gallery you’ve selected, you can add more photos from other galleries.

STEP 5: ARRANGING YOUR PHOTOS

Once all the photos are downloaded into your window, your next task is to then re-arrange them in the order that you’d like them to be played in the video. Then click and drag your photos to where you want them to go. It’s also simple to delete or rotate photos with the menu below. I would recommend a really nice feature below “Spotlight” which assigns more attention to a particular photo. As you can see on the right panel, the info box shows you how many photos being used in this video as well as the estimated length of the video. One other nice thing you can do is to add your own text which you can place anywhere in the sequence. It just shows up as another little square box that you can drag around as if it were one of the photos.

Now click ‘continue’ and the next step is to select your music.

STEP 6: SELECTING YOUR MUSIC

You’ll be asked to select music from ANIMOTO music library, or from your own computer. Notice, especially when used for corporate purposes, you will obviously only be able to use music that you have the rights to use.  As you can see below the   genre of music you that you can choose from – the ones that aren’t visible in the picture are: Latin, Jazz, Classical, Country, and Romantic, Top 40 /Pop, Electronic, singer and Songwriter, Religious, Latin, Indie rock and Rodeo Houston. You can browse through their whole collection of music and preview the tracks as well as get more information about the track and the artist.

STEP 7: PRODUCING YOUR VIDEO

After you click on Create Video, the next step is to simply wait, which is the exciting part of your journey to your video production it may take few minutes. Once the video is complete, you can watch it through. It may be perfect, or you may want to make changes that you want, such as re-arranging the order of photos, adding or deleting photos, changing the spotlighted photos, the music, the text, or your info details.  In any case, you will get an email from Animoto to notify you that it’s ready.

Get profiled, get searchable, get results

There’s a new Google ranking signal out there – authorship markup. As we all know, Google put a lot of emphasis on the quality of their search results, and this new method of defining search rankings seems to fulfil two Google goals: to improve the trustworthiness of their content, and to give Google+ a boost.

Still in an ‘experimental’ phase, authorship markup deals with the credibility of authors, ultimately by displaying their photo alongside applicable Google search results. Here’s the catch – you need a Google+ profile. The profile supplies your photo to the search results, as well as link to your profile, and hey presto – you become visually recognisable, your articles have enhanced credibility, and your Google+ profile is promoted (along with Google+ itself).

Mischief-makers take note – sites have to be linked back to Google profiles, preventing ill behaviour, like writing a load of gobbledy-gook and attributing it to another author.

Want to use authorship markup?  It’s easy. First, add a link to your Google+ profile on every post or article. On the link, add an attribute rel=”author”. In the header, or the footer, wherever works. You can wrap it around an image too.

Multiple authors are hardly any more complex – just follow the above, linking each author post, or their author bio, to their Google+ profile. All it takes is takes a bit of coordination between authors and webmaster to give search rankings a real boost.

Did we make it too hard? Check out a step by step guide to setting authorship markers up. You can also check out this tutorial video with Google’s Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson.

We like it, and we do respect Google’s smart move of making a Google+ profile a key part of the new ranking signal. As the Facebook/Google+ supremacy battle heats up, we’ll be waiting for a countermove with baited breath…

Does your content have the X Factor?

People read, people get interested, people make decisions, people buy. Wherever you find it, be it on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, content is key to developing your brand and reeling in new customers. But is your content doing you justice? Follow our top tips for engaging and interesting content and find out.

To share is to care. But if people can’t share, they stop caring. Whether you want your readers to tweet it, like it, email it, make sure there’s a quick and obvious way they can do this. It’s good SEO, in that it creates a backlink, and the very act of sharing your content says to potential new customers, ‘Hey! Your friend likes this! Aren’t you two quite similar? You’ll like this too!’

Be part of the solution. When do you care most about U-bends? When a salesperson cold-calls you in the middle of Glee to chat about their super new brand? Or when yours has packed up completely and you’re stuck with a sink of dirty washing-up water? We thought so. Be part of the solution, not the problem – gear your product to what your buyer needs and wants, not what you need and want.

Analyse this. Google Analytics is a handy tool for pretty much everything. Run regular reports – what are your buyers reading? Where are they coming from? How did they find you? What did they share? What generated the most comments? And perhaps most importantly – did it actually match up with what you WANTED to achieve? That means having objectives folks – dust off that strategy!

Google Analytics

Be exclusive. Saturating the web with your brand just spreads yourself too thin. If you bother people who are never going to become your customers in a million years – pushing gourmet burgers at the Vegan Society for instance – you’ll just waste time, waste effort, and perhaps even generate bad feeling towards your brand. Research your buyers, find where they have out, and then get targeting.

Map out the benefits. Don’t leave all the hard work of sharing to your customers. You can tweet, like, and email with the best of them. Your followers and fans will appreciate updates and news rather than static content that quickly gets old.

Speak the lingo. Are your key buyers 60 year old retirees from Devon? Well, they’re unlikely to be engaged with ‘Check out our well sick cushion covers, dude!’ Make sure the language and the tone is relevant. Same goes for your keywords – are they the ones that your customers will be inputting? Remember your SEO!

It won’t happen overnight, but with some research, effort and –yes – some writing, your content can have the X Factor.

Profitable is the New Sociable

OK. So you’re on every social media platform going (well, almost). You tweet like a songbird, and you have more ‘Likes’ than a very likeable person on National Like Day. You blog about your new office décor, and the fancy espresso machine for clients. But is it making a difference where it really counts – your bottom line?

In the rush to capitalise on social media, many set sail only to find themselves adrift as others steamed ahead to markets new. If that’s you, time to get your social media sea legs with LPOSTM – the essential acronym for getting what you want out of your social media presence.

L is for listen. There are plenty of tools out there to help you listen in to your customers and find out what’s making them tick. Listen around your brand – where would you fit in to your customers’ activities? Where would your competitors?

P is for people. You might think your pre-school toys are aimed at pre-school kids, but let’s face it, they’re not doing their own Christmas shopping. Follow the money to find the spenders, and target them accordingly.

O is for objective. Why are you on social media? Because everyone else is? Sorry – but that’s not enough. If you sit down and think about what you really want to achieve – more sales, more reviews – then you’re halfway to achieving it, because you can focus your activities via a…

S is for strategy. A social media strategy, specifically. If you haven’t written one before, there are plenty of online resources to help you. Remember it’s all about defeating the enemy, so you can’t really go wrong with Sun Tzu’s Art of War. As long as you don’t take all of it literally.

T is for tools. There’s an abundance of social media tools out there to choose from, but don’t get carried away. The most important thing is what your customers want, and what your customers need – only then do you know which tools will work for you.

M is for measure. What’s the point of all your activity if you can’t say at the end of it, what it actually achieved for you? If you can’t say who, out of your followers, bought your products? If you can’t say whether weekends or evenings or weekdays were your most profitable times? Get analysing, and use the information to improve your activity.

We’ll add another S – get selling. Facebook commerce is becoming increasingly popular, and while some cast doubt on its effectiveness, surveys show that over a third of Twitter and Facebook users would buy from a retailer they trust directly from their social media sites. The key is to build trust – develop your reviews and recommends, and make it easier for fans to comment and Like through news feed.

Then, the social media sea is yours to control!