Archive for the ‘Online Marketing’ Category

14 tips to more tweets and retweets

Image via Wikipedia

If you’re reading this you know a couple of things:

1. It’s easy to start a Twitter page
2. It’s much harder to get people to follow you and spread the word

Here are a few ways to build your following (audience) on Twitter and to reach new people. I’ve broken it into the basic requirements, the more compelling and difficult, and promotions.

Bare minimum tweeting tips

• Use # hashtags – In the world of Twitter, hashtags (the # symbol) are used to indicate a subject or idea, like #tweeting or #happy or #awesomepost. They make it possible for anyone (if you have a public profile) to find and see your tweets as they search for subjects they’re interested in. The only rhyme or reason to what words you use immediately after the # is to be sure it will make sense and be helpful to others.
• Use @ at symbols -  @ symbols followed by a Twitter user name (like @WebMalama) is the best way to mention someone. Using the @ before their username automatically creates a link in your tweet to their Twitter page, thus passing on the aloha. It also makes it easier for the person you’re referencing to know that you mentioned them.
• Have a link to Twitter on your webpage/blog – This is basic, but sometimes overlooked. If I can’t find your Twitter page or name, I likely won’t tweet to you or about you. [Here's a great, brief social research piece on asking for people to take an action versus just dropping in a link to your Twitter page (thanks Dustin Curtis, @dcurtis). Bottom line? Directly asking for an action works best.] You should follow me on twitter here.
• Say thank you – If someone mentions you or retweets you, return the aloha by sending them a tweet mentioning them to say thanks.
• Be brief – You need to leave some room so people can retweet without having to edit your post. Editing a post means work, which means I’m a lot less likely to pass it on. Keep in mind you don’t want to go past about 140 characters.
• Use a url shortener – To help you be brief, several sites have created tools that replace a long link that you’d like to post with a post-friendly really short link. I prefer bit.ly or ping.fm, but there are a bunch out there.
• Ask for retweets – Sometimes we need some prompting to take action, like “Please RT”. The fact is, more people will do it if you ask.

The hard stuff

• Be interesting – Think of it as a great Discovery Channel special. Have a great title and catch people’s attention. Tweet things that are interesting to your followers: facts, news, events, stories, whatever. Don’t just post junk to have something there.
• Be entertaining – Think of it as a show. Tell about the funny things, dramatic things, shocking things, and encouraging things.
• Be relevant – Think of it as a one-on-one conversation with a friend. Only tweet things are relevant to your followers. This means you need to know about your followers, or at least about who you want your followers to be. Only post things out they’re going to care about. And only post as often as they’d like to hear–over-Tweeting causes people to ignore.
• Be helpful – Think of it as giving local insights to a friend visiting town. Give information that will help them have a better time than they would have otherwise.

Promos

• Give offers – Give offers, free stuff, coupons, and discounts that are valuable to your followers. You can even make them exclusive only to your Twitter followers. This can garner a lot of retweets as word spreads of a great deal.
• Host competitions – Run a posting competition of some sort. Let your imagination run wild, but make sure it gives your followers a reason to post about you or to you.
• Play games – Do an online scavenger hunt, quiz, or wordgame.

Small companies and businesses can sometimes feel overwhelmed at the idea of competing against big companies and their huge war chests of marketing monies. They wish there was a way to even the playing field a bit.

Enter social media.

Social media gives companies a way to reach customers cost-effectively. Instead of designing a mailer and paying postage to 10,000 customers at a cost of about $6,000, or printing a newspaper insert at a typical cost of $1000′s, a business can open a free Facebook or Twitter account, type a message and press the send button.

All you need is to know your audience, have some creativity, and make good offers.

A recent look at the number of Twitter followers and Facebook Fans of grocery stores by Pace Communications is a fun example. (see the chart at the bottom of this post)

In the grocery store battles, Walmart, Target, and Whole Foods have the most fans and followers by a large margin. We’d expect that, right? They’re big stores with big budgets able to hire the best and pay for the goods.

But I wondered about the number of fans or followers by grocer size. What if a smaller grocer is gathering a huge fan base while a much larger chain is not. If so, maybe the smaller chain is the one to watch for innovate, effective use of social media.

So, I took the liberty of tabulating Facebook fans per store and Twitter followers per store to get a feel for who is building an audience well. (see the full table below)

Per store, Wegmans (75 stores, 1,066 Facebook fans per store, 119 Twitter followers) is beating Walmart (2,906 stores) almost 2 to 1 in Facebook fans and 10 to 1 in Twitter followers.

Meanwhile, Whole Foods (279 stores) beats out every other grocer measured by more than 50 to 1 in Twitter followers per store. This includes beating out Walmart (2,906 stores), Safeway (1,486 stores), Kroger (2,470), everybody.

Whole Foods is attracting, on average, nearly 6,500 customers per store. That has got to help save on ad costs and bring in new business. Maybe there’s something we should pay attention to there.

So take heart smaller companies, social media may level the playing field. The continuing question is, how to use it well.

Simplicity of Design

While driving in the country the other day we passed several cattle guards.  I was struck by how they work. Basically it’s just a few piece of steel separated by a few inches each.

Like any good piece of engineering, the cattle guard is simple yet effective.

If I had been asked to design a way to keep cows out let cars through easily, I probably would’ve come up with something very complex involving gates, hinges, levers, pulleys, or some sort of electrical engine.  Just think about all the potential points of failure in my complex design. More complexity equals easier to break and more maintenance required.

A cattle guard, on the other hand, is not likely to fail.  It has no moving parts, no engine, and is made of steel.  All while accomplishing its main objectives.

Online Marketing Plans

This made me consider typical marketing plans.  I know I’ve created some that were extremely complex with hundreds of pieces.  You could argue that I was just trying to cover all the bases and that it’s smart to get leads from as many sources as possible.

But I recall the complex plans causing a lot of stress while trying to manage all the details.  I also recall the large majority of the leads coming from only one or two sources.  What if I had kept it simple and really focused on those one or two sources?

One brilliant advertising campaign that comes to mind on the national level, is Coca Cola’s Olympic polar bear campaign.  If you recall, the ad had very little music, some arctic creatures, and no voices whatsoever.  This meant that every country understood it and Coca-Cola only had to make one version.  Simple yet effective.

I think one reason we create complex online marketing plans it because it’s easier and it takes less time.  Mark Twain once wrote something to the effect of, “Sorry for the long letter, I didn’t have enough time to write a short one.” Oftentimes producing a simpler marketing plan means spending more time on it.

What does your online marketing plan look like?  Is it pages and pages of Excel spreadsheets?  Or, is it so simple and effective that you can put it down in just a couple lines?

Shoot your plans our way and show us how brilliant you were able to be.  We’d love to help consolidate, reduce points of failure, and take some of the work load off of your mind.

Image via Wikipedia

I recently had the pleasure of visiting the little book cliffs wild horse area.  We planned the trip for a couple of weeks ahead of time and looked forward to it with great anticipation. We had a great time driving around exploring and discovering several of the horses.

As we passed several easily viewable horses in pastures on our way home I wondered what made wild horses so different that I was willing to suffer car sickness, cold weather, and high winds to see them from a great distance when I can pull over almost anywhere and see the same animal up close and in comfort.

Wild horses are just horses, or are they?

What separates wild horses apart from ordinary horses is that they have a story behind them.  We don’t view them like a common horse in a field.  Instead, they get a special place in our hearts and minds because we think of them as courageous, mysterious, and untamed.  Their story is one of untold trials of instincts, survival, family, and life.

This gives us a romantic sense about them.  It allows my imagination to kick in and to wonder just how I’m going to encounter them.  Am I going to find life, death, action, or just simple eating?  Either way, I feel like I’m the one who discovered it.  That I’m taking part in something as unique and short-lived.

I don’t experience that with a common horse and a field.

This recent Sherman’s Lagoon illustrates the point well.

Stories Matter

What kind of story are your products telling?  Are they telling any story all?

Or, are they simply been common?  And in the end, do you think you could have more success if your products did tell stories?

So right now, pick the one product that you really want to sell and write a quick story about it.  Then share with us, we’d love to hear what you came up with and see how it can impact your online marketing.

What Google’s New System Means for Your Online Marketing

Today Google told the world about their new method for organizing and displaying the world’s information. In their announcement, Google said:

“Today, we’re announcing the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine. Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.”

So What?

When Google changes what they focus on to sort search results, it can dramatically affect your website’s position in the rankings. Let’s say before Google caffeine your website came up 1st for the past year when someone searched for “custom tile.” After caffeine your site might now come up 10th.

Google’s focus is always on giving you the best possible search result. That way you keep using Google and then they can keep selling ads, which is where they get the bulk of their revenue. This change in which search results you’ll see has the same intention of providing the best result. It has just added weight to the recency–the newness–of the information.

So, realistically your website’s ranking may not change at all. You might still come up 1st for “custom tile”–just as long as your website still has relevant, quality information. The one BIG CHANGE is that your site is now helped more than ever by RECENT CONTENT.

What To Do for SEO Now?

So, what do you do for search engine optimization to make sure you keep coming up high in search results? Here are a few suggestions:

• First, check your rankings for keywords you’ve been tracking and see how you’ve been affected.
• Continue creating relevant, helpful content on your website
• Start a blog to keep churning out new, keyword specific content
• Add more pages to your site each month–as long as it makes sense to
• Be found other places than your website, like on social media sites and social media bookmarking sites
• Continue getting more and more websites to link to yours using keywords you care about

Here’s an engaging video I found with a bunch of stats—a.k.a reasons—why you should care about social media for your business . The video itself is called Social Media Revolution 2 and is a promo, more or less, for the book “socialnomics.”

You will be astounded by some of these facts. They’re amazing even if you don’t use social media.

In the end, the points are:

1. Social media is an incredible tool most people are using
2. It has a chance to make or break your business
3. You should start using some mix of it

Web Malama has been on the social media bandwagon for a while now and we’ve had mixed success and learned along the way.

Give us a call if you’d like to hear some of our successes and failures, or if you’d like to tell us yours!