This is a guestpost by Jim Belosic, CEO and co-founder of ShortStack.
If you’ve been keeping an eye on news regarding Facebook then you haven’t missed the multitude of articles discussing whether the change to Timeline has been a good or bad thing for business pages and fan engagement.
Numerous studies have been released saying that pages are seeing an increase in fan engagement since the switch and right behind those are studies revealing the exact opposite. So which is true? The answer is neither.
Read more…
Guest post by Susie Brown from FastUpFront.
For all of you folks that thought you left analogy sentences behind when you slammed your pencil on the desk after the SAT’s- here is a blast from the past for you…
“Search Marketing is to the left brain as social marketing is to the right brain.”
Got that? Now lets’ explain.
I know that 55% of the 33% of you that graduated college probably majored in psychology, so for many of you this will be a review of what you crammed into the short-term memory of your brains before exams.
Read more…
We can’t deny the growth in participation on social networks in the recent years. Today we use these platforms for a wide variety of reasons and we feel more comfortable than ever in them.
But are we ready for social commerce?
I remember an interview I did back in October with VenPop about Social Commerce. Since we were approaching the holidays one of the questions was about my thoughts on what we should expect. One of the things I said was that while Facebook clearly has the prospect, now it needed to establish itself as a solid retail platform.
If you think about it, 2011 was the first year we looked at the social web as a possibility to carry actual transactions, not just as traffic generators or promotional channels.
Read more…
This is a guestpost by Brad Shorr from Straight North.
Don’t get me wrong: I love SEO and we do a lot of SEO work. However some businesses turn SEO into an obsession, and that’s a big mistake.
The fatal flaw of an SEO fixation is that it takes your eye off the ball. SEO is about traffic. Traffic is important, but it’s not the goal. The fundamental purpose of Internet marketing, as I see it anyway, is conversion.
First CRO, Then SEO
A typical scenario, and one that makes no sense to me, is when a firm spends tons on SEO and pennies on conversion rate optimization (CRO). They’re driving more traffic to their site – but so what? If their lead generation site features ho-hum offers or no offers at all, people won’t inquire. If their e-commerce site has baffling navigation, people won’t buy.
Read more…
We can discuss how successful companies are using social media but it will be better to hear it from them, specially when it comes to small business.
I’m always concerned about small business because there is a huge difference in what it takes to be successful. When brands run online campaigns they’re usually backed up by a juicy number of ad impressions or other kind of support. Just a few days ago a friend asked me how we were able to get 100k Likes on a Facebook page so fast, I responded “they have a huge TV campaign”. His face filled with disappointment…
Point is, small business goes out there to fight with a stick. Guerrilla style. Most small businesses have pretty depressing stories when it comes to finding any success online. They don’t have the budget, the resources or the knowledge.
Read more…
Blogging and online marketing is hard work as it is. There is a combination of elements that need to work together such as design, technology, content, sales strategy and the list goes on and on.
But there is one thing that will determine if your online business is successful or not, it doesn’t matter if you have mad eye candy on your website, all the latest technology or a great sales strategy ready to ship products out the door. It’s a very simple concept and yet, probably one of the hardest to nail down…
You need to know your audience.
But in this case let’s assume you know who your audience or your target market is.
Read more…
This is a guest post by Srini Rao from The Skool of Life
A few days ago I was at work crafting a high level social strategy that will go beyond the Flightster blog and really enable us to take advantage of social media in a way that really allows us to understand our customers. I’ve come up with literally hundreds of ideas over the course of the last year, some of which have been implemented and others which have been put on hold.
Over the last week I’ve been able to condense my work into 3 core ideas for an effective social media strategy, both on a personal level and a corporate level.
Phase 1: Build
Let’s consider the social media presence of an individual or company as a blank canvas which we intend to turn into a masterpiece. Before any social media efforts will have an impact it’s essential to build your personal or company assets. Assets can be built across multiple social media platforms.
Read more…
Yes, it’s that time again. Time to give away stuff here at SocialMouths. Time to accumulate some good Karma credits.
If you have been reading SocialMouths for a while, you probably noticed that I like giving stuff away from time to time. Today I’ll take the opportunity to promote one of my new services, a Review Of Your Blog And Social Media. Even tough this was not listed as a service before, I’m often asked to review blogs, Facebook Pages and social media strategies in general so, I decided to officially offer it to my readers.
This is also a good way to thank you all because SocialMouths just finished October with an all-time high in traffic, double its subscriptions, had the lowest bounce rate in the history of humanity and for the first time in one year, the number one source of traffic was “Google Organic” (not sure what that means yet since I don’t pay much attention to SEO in this blog).
Anyways, back to you. Let’s go over what the prize includes, how the contest works and the requirements…
The point of this type of review is that we sometimes get stuck in one way of doing things, we put in the hard work over long hours trying to be successful in our social media and blogging efforts and we can’t seem to get ahead in the game. Those are the times when we need an outsider to come in and give us a good reality check, a constructive one of course. Getting somebody else’s perspective can help us unstuck and adjust our strategy. Even better if we get somebody with experience, with a share of success as well as failure under his belt to point out specifics.
Read more…
