Website Promotion Strategy

How’s your social media savvy? Local business owners are learning the importance of maintaining a high profile on social media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram and Pinterest. If you’re not taking advantage of these platforms for social media promotion, you’re missing out on some incredible benefits. No matter what your business is, you can benefit from these top tips for each of the top social media sites.

Keep Your Facebook Page Busy

All too often, business owners think of their Facebook page as a static ad – something to set up once and leave. The beauty of Facebook is that you can turn it into an always-on publicity channel and use it to communicate with existing customers while connecting with new ones. The trick is to add new content regularly. One of the easiest ways to do this is to engage a blog writing service to post stories and tips about your business, then share those posts on your Facebook page. That will keep your business popping up on prospective customers’ newsfeeds and provide a steady stream of eyes for your ads.

Tweet Tips and Specials to Your Customers

Use your Twitter account wisely to attract new customers and keep existing customers in the loop. Share the love with other local businesses by tweeting about their events and specials – always using local hash tags so that your business shows up often in local Twitter searches. Mix local interest links in liberally with links to your own website and to blog posts on your marketing blog.

Fill Out Your Google+ Profile

Google has made it tough to keep up with its ever-changing Google+ for business offerings, but it’s definitely worth it to make sure your profile there is fully fleshed out. Don’t stop with just adding your contact information. Post photos of your business and products, add your menu to the pages and connect with other businesses and notable people in your city to increase the visibility of your business. Don’t forget to verify your official website – it’s a great way to boost its rank in regular Google results.

Get Visual on Instagram

Instagram is an often-overlooked social media promotion tool, but that’s changing rapidly as business owners discover new ways of using it. You don’t have to be a digital artiste to take full advantage of the photo-sharing social media platform. Share photos of your products or staff, and of happenings at your venue. Instagram is a superb platform for social media promotion if you’re a gardening shop, a pet store, a florist or just about anything else. Encourage customers to Instagram photos of their meals, Fido’s new haircut or the totally hawt new outfit they just bought in your store with a specific hash tag so you can compile and share their InstaLove.

Pin Your Business on Pinterest

Pinterest has done some amazing reorganization to emerge as a top social media promotion tool for business. It takes a little more work than other platforms, but the extra work pays off. Learn to create eye-catching infographics (there are some great free tools for this) and visual content to showcase blog posts from your marketing blog and organize your pins on themed boards. Sign up for their free business account and take advantage of the steady stream of tips on the best use of Pinterest.

A great blog writing service can serve as a linchpin around which all of your social media promotion revolves. Talk to us about blog posts that can be easily repurposed for posting to all the top social media platforms.

Small business owners have a wide range of marketing objectives. They might include raising visibility, cementing brand identity, increasing sales and engaging new customers. Whether your goal is holding onto existing customers, engaging new customers or re-energizing inactive customers, social media is a vital tool for your marketing toolbox. These tips will help small business owners make the most effective use of social media marketing in conjunction with blog writing services and social media promotion.

Build Your Audience

The most skillfully crafted posts and messages are useless if no one reads them. Building an audience for your Twitter feed, Facebook page or blog posts require a variety of techniques and tactics. One of the easiest is to simply Follow and Like the Facebook business pages and Twitter accounts of local business, organizations and users.  Many of them will automatically follow/like your business page back, building your audience naturally.

Vary Your Posts

Many businesses jump on the social media platform with a bullhorn in hand and never put it down. If your business does nothing but promote itself and your services, people will soon tune those messages out. Serve up a variety of content – some promotion, some information and, every once in a while, just to spice things up, a cute kitty picture or two.

Pay Attention to Your Audience

Don’t just send your posts out into the wild and hope for the best. Track them and pay attention to which posts and tweets attract the most attention, likes and shares – but don’t stop there. Note which types of engagement actually convert to action – clicks to your website, business leads or actual sales – so that you can replicate your successes.

Leverage Content

It’s no longer enough to use just one or two social media channels to get your message out. The most successful small businesses engage on multiple social media marketing platforms. That doesn’t mean you have to twist yourself into pretzels creating a never-ending stream of content. In fact, if you commission one well-written and researched piece of content, you can repurpose it in multiple ways. A good blog post, for example, can form the base for infographics, charts, slide shows and a series of Tweets emphasizing different points. Likewise, you can share the same blog post to Facebook multiple times with different titles and different pull quotes.

Call Out the Pros

No business owner has time to do everything necessary to leverage social media marketing and blog post promotion today. Whenever possible, call on professional blog writing services and social media marketing managers to take the weight off your shoulders, and leave you to manage the parts of your business you most enjoy.

This year will completely shake up the way business owners build traffic for their websites, says Majon International, one of the internet’s oldest and most distinguished online marketing companies. To stay current in the latest advances in the quickly changing internet marketing world, businesses will have to continually evolve the way they market their products and services. Successful Internet advertising will now require a thoughtful mix of new and old techniques, the company says, and more importantly, that mix will have to be tailored to meet the specific goals of the business.

In addition to the tactics currently used by most online businesses, such as an abundance of good content and a solid social media campaign in place, businesses that want to stay ahead of the internet marketing curve will have to engage in a technique that many thought was history: buying website traffic. This is a marketing tactic that has its detractors, but when it is done correctly, buying website traffic offers benefits that other types of marketing and promotion simply cannot provide. The most obvious benefit is speed. When site owners buy website traffic, they can expect to see an immediate increase in unique visitors to their online business. This can result in a domino effect; one that increases the search engine ranking of the site which then in turn, increases the amount of search engine traffic that is directed to their site. In other words, in 2015, creating a stream of traffic to client websites will be an important ingredient to the overall mix of a successful online business. This can be done by simply continuing to use other online marketing tactics, plus buying the specific targeted niche web traffic that is needed.

Targeted website traffic will offer even more benefits to the savvy website owner as 2015 progresses. Website visitors who are already interested in learning about products or a particular business are much more likely to convert from visitors into customers. But an increase in conversion rates is only one of the benefits of buying targeted niche traffic. Visitors who are genuinely interested in the material or products are much more likely to stick around and read more. Longer visits on a website reduce the website’s bounce rate, a metric used by major search engines to determine whether a website is delivering quality content. Additional visitors also make it easier for website owners to analyze traffic patterns and tweak their online marketing strategies. Finally, when visitors are genuinely interested in the material on the targeted website, they are more likely to share the link with their own social networks.

2015 will see a comeback for purchased website traffic, and savvy website owners should do all they can to take advantage of this uptrend now. Using a combined marketing approach that includes both content information blogging and social media promotion along with buying targeted niche customer traffic is a good one – two punch for online success.

Blog posts and social media work together to bring more traffic to your business website and more attention to your business. While you can – and certainly should – share more than just your blog marketing posts with your social media networks, you should also craft your tweets and FB posts carefully when you do share links to your blog marketing posts. Over the years, we’ve learned quite a bit about best practices when sharing blog posts to Twitter and Facebook. These tips can help you craft social media promotions that garner clicks and encourage people to share widely.

Twitter Social Media Promotion Tips

Keep It Short

Long titles and explanations eat up lots of valuable space, which can be deadly when you’ve only got 140 characters to work with. Use a link shortening app to keep link length to a minimum, and try to keep the title below 90 characters – both together should be 120-130 characters. That allows plenty of room for Twitter to add “RT @username” without cutting off your marketing message.

Use Hash Tags Wisely

Hash tags can get your tweets picked up and noticed – but you need to be careful about using them. Research shows that tweets with one or two hash tags get the most engagement, so keep them to a minimum, and choose them carefully.

Place Links in the Middle of Your Tweets

It takes a little more work, but data shows that people are more likely to click on a link that comes earlier in the tweet than they are to click on links at the end.

Pay Attention to Timing

The best time to tweet depends on your goal and your business. Early morning tweets seldom work – unless you’re tweeting daily specials to an engaged audience. In general, people are more likely to click on links between 1 and 3 p.m. Monday to Thursday, and are more likely to retweet messages on Fridays, from 4 to 5 p.m.

Facebook Social Media Marketing

Go Long for the Win

Facebook users tend to like a few words with the link to your blog marketing post, so give them something to think about. In fact, research shows that people are more likely to click on Facebook posts with 80 words or more.

Get Rid of the Link

When you share a link from your blog, Facebook attaches a thumbnail with some content and links it to your blog post. That thumbnail stays there even if you delete the written link – so get rid of the link. It just makes things look messy – and research shows people are more likely to click on the thumbnail the link isn’t there.

Keep the Title Short

Facebook truncates link titles at 100 characters, so keep the title of your blog post under 100 characters.

Publish Outside Work Hours

You’re most likely to engage with Facebook users if you post to your timeline outside regular work hours. The best time to post seems to be between 5 p.m. and 1 a.m. on weekdays, and any time of the day on Sunday.

Have Something Worth Sharing

Of course, whether you’re sharing on Twitter, Facebook or another social media network, it’s important to have something worth sharing. We understand that it takes time to research and write great blog posts that people want to share. We offer several different blog marketing and blog writing packages designed to provide your blog with a steady flow of interesting, shareable content you can use to drive traffic to your business website. Talk to us about our blog marketing and social media promotion packages and how they can help boost your business web traffic and drive customer engagement.

The Internet is littered with apologies from companies whose social media marketing managers tried and failed to use trending topics to promote their businesses. In nearly every case, it’s because someone at the company was not actually listening. Some weren’t listening to their own customers. Some weren’t listening to the news. Some weren’t paying attention to the larger world. Taking a look at some of those #socialmediafails makes it easy to illustrate the best ways to use social media and blog marketing to promote your business online.

Always Look Before You Leap

Trending hash tags often represent an opportunity to raise the visibility of your tweets and posts – but if you’re not careful, the attention you attract may be the wrong kind. Take, for example, the UK boutique that decided to take advantage of the trending #Aurora to promote one of their dresses – without, apparently, checking to find out that the tag was trending because of the mass shooting at a theater in Aurora, CO. Crafting tweets and posts around trending topics and tags is a good way to raise your business profile – just make sure you know why it’s trending before jumping or you may end up making a huge misstep.

Edgy Is Cool – But Know Where the Edge Is

Many companies – particularly those aimed at young folks – try to be hip by using edgy humor, which is fine, until you step over the edge into offensive and tasteless. That’s what happened when a London airport included a photo of a crashed plane in its tweet promising that planes don’t slide off their runways. The post crossed the line for many people, especially when it was revealed that the photo was from a crash that had cost the life of a 6-year-old boy. Humor and edginess can help craft your brand and get your posts shared and retweeted – just be sure your social media manager understands the difference between edgy and offensive.

Sometimes No Promotion is the Best Marketing

Sometimes the very best thing a company can do with a trending hash tag is to use it – with no promotional aim whatsoever. If you choose to acknowledge a local or national event using a trending hash tag, use good judgment. Offer sympathy, acknowledge loss or extend congratulations because it’s the right thing to do – and don’t foul it up with tone-deaf self-promotion. One Massachusetts restaurant got this exactly right when they used a trending hash tag to reach out to the local community. During widespread power outages following a blizzard, the popular eating spot tweeted out an offer of free hot meals to nearby shut-ins without power and attached a local trending hash tag to make sure their offer was seen.

Social media promotion is an important promotional tool for any local business. Check out our blog marketing and social media marketing packages to find out how we can help you maximize your business visibility without increasing your risk exposure.