Category: Social Media and Search

How word of mouth influences sales

How content marketing can help you sell more

Published on by Christopher WellbeloveLeave a comment

This infographic lays out some of the ways content marketing can help your business.

Sites that use content marketing via blogs get more pages indexed on search engines. This means potential customers are more likely to find their site.

Word of mouth plays a big part in how people decide where to buy. Many of these conversations are taking place on social media. To build a following you need interesting content which is a top 3 reason people give for why they follow.

Once you build your following 6 in 10 social users are more likely to recommend you.

Put simply: Content = following = sales

content marketing

Creating content that Google search will love

Published on by Christopher WellbeloveLeave a comment

So many people still believe with the web that build and they will come, they wont. Build with great quality content, they might. Build with great quality content promoted via an integrated search, social and email strategy then you are more sure of success.

This is a great infographic that shows that investing in original quality content is essential for SEO and how ‘social is SEO and content is social’.

It also includes a great quote from Google’s Matt Cutts ‘Try and make your site so fantastic you become an authority in your niche’. A goal that should become all of ours mantra if we want to be successful in this space.

Why content is so important for SEO

Christopher Wellbelove

No time to grieve – the death of Michael Jackson on Twitter

Published on by Christopher Wellbelove1 Comment

When the Princess of Wales died I discovered this as I woke to the morning news.  When John F.  Kennedy died many discovered via the morning newspaper. When Michael Jackson died I discovered it via my Twitter feed.

In a Twitter world can family and friends have any time to grieve? In pass years the pressure of 24 TV news has made it increasingly difficult to delay the making of deeply personal announcement of a death by family and friends. Previously news channels would have speculated and had the helicopter flying over the home or hospital but in the age where gossip can travel around the world and back again in seconds the momentum of the speculation is now unstoppable.

At the time of Michael Jacksons death 15% of Tweets on Twitter were relating to the speculation over his death. Such was the demand for information Twitter became overloaded. Facebook status updates were dominated by the news along with bookmarking sites being bombarded by links to news pages about his death. Within minutes of confirmation of his death Michael Jackson’s Wikipedia page was updated.

Now any hospital worker; doctor, nurse or cleaner could break the news via social networks and controlling this is almost impossible. Even close family cannot be protected as those at the bedside dealing with their loss may not have had time to get in contact with those who are close.

Hospitals, Police and other emergency services (if they have not already) will need to tighten polices regarding the sharing of information together with providing support to the bereaved families who have lost the control of how they break the news.

We all  need to question our own behaviour which seems similar to the traffic slowing at the scene of an accident.

In a world where everyone wants to be the first to break the news, could you be dead on Twitter before you actually stop breathing?

My IBM launched

Published on by Christopher WellbeloveLeave a comment

My IBM, a social network that adds to IBMs Developer Works community, http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/ has been launched

Described by them as ‘the place where you and your peers congregate to connect, share, and collaborate. Great content is just the beginning, and now it’s time for you to take the next step: Create your professional profile and your custom home page on My developerWorks. Then find and connect with like-minded peers, and invite them into your My developerWorks network to share expertise and build groups for further interaction and collaboration.’

The sign up to the service is open to anyone, though not exactly intuitive. The register button takes you to the sign in page when you then have to select the register button! If you make a mistake on any part of the form it lost most of your entries after the error was highlighted.

Similarly when selecting a screen name, which has to be unique, there is no way of checking if it is available prior to entering it together with the captcha field, so if it is not available you have to enter a new name and another captcha.

Once you have registered you can then edit your profile and they say ‘Search for contact information and organizational information about your colleagues. Locate expertise and build your own social network. Get access to the information your colleagues are collecting and publishing.’

On several occasions I got a ‘oops that didn’t work’ screen so clearly there are some glitches which have not been fixed prior to launch and I have yet to be able to either view my profile page or edit it.

You can search for people by keyword or by name.

In a users profile I found the following

Roles:

Skills:

Area of interest:

Goals:

Professional expertise:

Biography and interests:

With a large number of users already on this platform, IBM have already jumped the first hurdle of signing up users. Their challenge now is to get those already on the network to see a value of creating profiles. I will be also interested to see if the network grows to include the ability to add video and other features.

Follow to be followed on Twitter

Published on by Christopher Wellbelove1 Comment

A Hotspot report “State of the Twittersphere” (pdf) has revealed some interesting insight into the popular micro blogging site.

With massive growth in the last year (600% according to compete.com) 70% of users joined in the last year.

With 35% of Twitter users having 10 or fewer followers and 9% of Twitter users not following anyone at all, many of the new followers may not understand how social networking works.

Many attempting to access this rapidly growing network often seem to expect the masses come rushing to hear their messages, however this environment is not for one way discussion – to be successful you’ve got to either have some real hot property that twitter users are going to be eager to follow or actively engage with the community.

Some simple rules for starting with Twitter:

  • Post at least a message a day to show people who visit your page you’re twitter account is active
  • Find others who have similar interests and follow them (don’t follow just anyone)
  • Only follow those who are active users – active users are more likely to follow you
  • Follow others in small chunks, keeping the gap between followers and followed no more than 200
  • Use friendorfollow to discover who you follow who does not follow you back
  • Re-post messages of interest, giving credit to the originator
    • to do this precede message with RT or Retweet ‘@theirtwittername’
  • Reply to messages of interest
    • to do this precede message with ‘@theirtwittername’
  • Send messages to those who follow you thanking them for their follow*
  • Follow those who follow you*

* Auto follow and auto notes to new followers can be done via SocialToo.

And of course follow my twitter (I promise to follow you)

Social monitoring

Published on by Christopher WellbeloveLeave a comment

With an every increasing number of people going online to blog and engage in social networks there is an increasing number of on-line tools  available to enable individuals and organisations to monitor discussion about their brand.

These tools amalgamate results from several sources including technorati and google blog search.

Samepoint

Social Mention

Companies and organisations need to monitor these networks to measure the success of their social media campaigns together with working to minimise the impact of negative conversations about their brand.

You cannot, and should not attempt to, control what is said about your brand in social media, however by being aware of these conversations you can utilise what is said to help drive improvements in your organisation and through reasonable responses aim to mitigate their impact.

Keo Tag