I admit it! I confess that I have let my blog posting schedule get the best of me. What can I say? I broke the one cardinal rule that I preach never to break - never let you blog or your SM go cold and unattended.
Life happens and time just seems to slip away, and before you know it, it's a month since you've made an update. This is an embarrassment and true travesty, but I know that this resource I'm developing is not dead yet. There is always time to save it, I just know that all the effort I put into building it has now been lost. That is my true punishment and it will be ours too, if you follow my newly developed bad habit.
I preach that you should be promoting your social media pages online and offline, and adding your social addresses to your print ads is an excellent start. The only problem with this cross promotion is that many businesses and graphic designers are making a mess of it!
Here are 6 areas to consider before finalizing that print ad:
1)Not including your social address - Facebook, Twitter, and etc. buttons make sense online but including just the image of the button in your ads, does not. I can't click on it and now your tasking me with the duty of sifting through the search results in order to find you. Please, include your address with your social media icons next time.
2) Just tell me what you want - It's great to tell me you're on social media but that doesn't inspire me to take action and follow you. It sounds simple, but providing people with a call to action actually incites ACTION! Ask for a like, a like is what you will receive.
3) Too many choices - It's fantastic that you have dedicated enough time to your social media marketing that you can manage 8 different profiles, but it's a daunting task to track you down on each platform. Keep it simple and just list the 2 -3 platforms you are leading with and just display those in your ad. You can later promote the other profiles on these social media sites or in your next print ad. Yes, you can change it up, and remember this is not the first and last print ad you will ever have.
4) Why tell me about an inactive page? You wouldn't provide your email address and then never check or reply to emails, so why would you promote your inactive profiles? If you are going to be on social media, be active, be social!
5) Inactive QR codes - QR are quickly dying out since no one uses them correctly. If you still choose to use them, please make sure they actually work! It's always annoying when I take out my phone, try to scan a QR code, only to discover it doesn't work. Making me mad is not a great way to gain a fan.
6) You don't have any social media profiles - Many don't embrace social media, and that's a helpful strategy for their socially active competitor meeting new clients and gaining strong personal reviews. Not have any form of social media marketing is the equivalent of not having a website or business card. If this is an area our need help in, this girl can help you!
1) Call to Action - If you write anything online and don't include an actionable response, you are wasting your time. Please, make it a habit with all you do, to invite your fans and followers to respond or take action after reading your post.
2) Content Categories - The key to keeping people on your site and lowering bounce rates is to make sure your content is easy to find. Make sure your blog or website have clearly marked topic categories, this does not mean a listing of posts by each month.
3) Recent/Popular posts - Another way to entice people to consume more of their content is to let them know what other readers thought was great content.
4) Social Media - Facebook and Pinterest are the leading aggregates for content. If you are not promoting your new or past content on these platforms, your content has a minimal chance of being discovered beyond you and your best friend, whom you make read weekly!
5) Search - A search box on your site is often the one thing most don't think to add. Always think of ways to improve the ability to find content on your site, and more content will be consumed by others.
If you're new to Google Plus or just finally getting around to using your profile, this is a great guide to the basics of Google Plus. If you're still on the fence, G+ is a great place to start increasing your search rankings and way of getting discovered on Google, which is great for your business.
We have all received those dreaded recruiter messages that smell like desperation. These messages are annoying, and never inspires anyone to take up the action of reading or replying. Here is a small collection of tips on how to craft more successful direct messages, when reaching out on LinkedIn and other social networks.
Most successful people take every opportunity to talk about their road to success and really try to over indulge their abilities in the process. Scott Adams, is one successful person that has taken the high road and is openly speaking about his highs and his many many lows.
In most interviews there is really only one golden quote worth repeating, this interview is a true rarity because I had trouble limiting myself to two!
My 1st favourite quote is:
"The world is like a reverse casino. In a casino, if you gamble long enough, you’re certainly going to lose. But in the real world, where the only thing you’re gambling is, say, your time or your embarrassment, then the more stuff you do, the more you give luck a chance to find you. If you do one thing and stop, you didn’t give luck a chance to find you."
My 2nd fav quote is:
"He said he was just writing to me to make sure that I hadn’t given up. And I had. So I took out my art supplies, and I decided to raise my sites from being rejected by mere magazines to try to be rejected as a world-famous syndicated cartoonist. Even in that rejection, I’d feel I had made some progress."
Great leaders can be hard to find, and most just believe their job is limited to representing the company and motivating their employees. This fantastic list helps to identify key areas to think about when given the task to lead.
We all know Google Plus exists, but many are still unsure how to properly integrate it into their social media strategy.
G+ is not that different from other social media networks, posting frequently and connecting with others is always key. The biggest difference as, Socially Stephanie, has stated in this article is the keep your posts longer, so you can include more key words and hash tags. These are important as they help to increase your content’s ability to be found through google search.
If you learn nothing else from this article, remember to always have keywords and hash tags.
According to Ira Glass, the key to becoming a stronger creative person "is do a lot of work." In the beginning you will not be good, but to become great you have to go through the growing pains and work through your bad ideas to get to the great ones. It's frustrating, but worth it to push on, it's part of the path all creatives have to take.
Another great example of a fantastic Community Manager on hand and a brilliant use of Twitter. Honda recently took to Twitter to warn all major snack brands of their attack on the annoying car floor crumbs. An overall, terrific way to get people buzzing about the feature in a unique way. Bravo to Honda and for all the snack brands for playing along.
We are always committed to bettering ourselves and helping our clients find the highest form of success possible. Take a peek at these 11 habits and try to work them into your everyday.
I admit I was very skeptical about how accurate my music playlist would be at predicting my spending habits and intentions. After giving this a read, and comparing it to my own musical tastes and testing my friends, it turns out they may have some serious insight here.
What can they do with this information? Well, they can definitely line up the right musicians with the right brands and products. Looks like they have the power to persuade locked up pretty tight right now.
Social media platforms are the perfect place to introduce and inform potential supports of particular issues, yet many nonprofits misuse or under develop their social outreach strategy.
Investing in social media training for all nonprofit employees is the best way to increase awareness, grow your list of supporters, and gain support from celebrities and influential individuals. A good social media training program should explain the basics of each platform, while informing you of strategic tactics that work best with making lasting connections, and how to gain great engagement.
If you seeking an example of a nonprofit using social media to their greatest advantage, please follow Charity:water.
Whether looking for a job or an apartment or interestingness, it turns out our friends have 'informational deficit' -- which is why weak ties are better than social friendships.
My big brother constantly makes fun of my ever growing Twitter following, saying "yah, but what difference does it make that a couple hundred people follow you?" Apparently, this collection of fans I have gathered around my tweeting antics, is very important to modern day networking. Take that big brother!
My fav quote from the article:
"Our friends have an informational deficit. They’re too similar."
