Study Your Competitors' Twitter Bios

A Twitter bio reveals a lot to the world about your competition. Study the keywords your competitors use to describe their business and services on Twitter. Search those keywords in a Google search. Where does your primary competitor’s company rank in the search engine results for those keywords? Where do you rank? Is your rival sponsoring ads on Google for keywords relevant to your business? These are all important pieces of information to be used to determine how effective your search placement is working for you.

In addition, review the external links in your competitor’s bio. Do these links go to corporate websites or Facebook pages? By analyzing the links you can get a sense of the relative importance the company places on these links and the information they provide.  Compare your competitor’s links to your links and try to determine where you have advantages and disadvantages.

For a marketing strategy to be worthwhile it must take into account how other companies in your sector are attempting to do the same thing. With a little persistence you can get a clear picture of the keywords being used in your industry and how effective they are.

The nice thing about this technique is that your competitor’s bio will point you in the right direction to get started.

Written and produced in beautiful Naples, Florida by OnFast.com. Visit OnFast.com today to get your free trial subscription to our Social Media Marketing Service.

 

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Social Media News For The Week Of 7/26/13

6 Small Businesses That Are Doing Social Media Right

This excellent article offers six examples of companies properly leveraging social media for success. The examples, taken as a whole, support all the basic principles of social media marketing. Engaging your audience while providing them quality content, which is relevant, knowing your target market, and being personable, are all important facets for a social network marketing campaign to succeed. Full Story Here:

 

Don’t ignore customer service on social media

A powerful tool is available to any business to stand apart from their competitors on social media. The tool is customer service; simply make the effort to respond to customer issues, which may arise in a timely manner. According to Desk.com, only 44 percent of top online retailers respond to complaints on Facebook within a day, failing to meet the expectations of their customers. This article contains a useful infographic regarding customer service and social media. Full Story Here:

 

Does Your Social Media Drive Transactions?

This is the all-important question businesses must ask themselves. Vision Critical has produced a sample survey to help companies find the answers to their return on investment questions and how to stay ahead of an ever-changing social media marketing environment. Full Story Here:

 

How social media is transforming customer behavior

Social media is contributing to a change in customer behavior patterns. The fast-paced lifestyle brought about by technology and, by extension, social media has raised the bar significantly for customer expectations. Consumers expect answers to their questions and issues nearly instantly, certainly measured in hours or minutes and not days. Also the assumption is that customer service is always available 24/7. Full Story Here:

 

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Hashtags For Restaurants

#yourcity

When you add your city name as a hashtag to your tweets, you’re targeting people in your area.

#restaurant

When users are seeking out a restaurant in their city, many will not only search for the term restaurants, they’ll also combine their search with the aforementioned city name.

#TypeofCuisine

If a famished tweeter is searching for “Pizza in Chicago” they just might stumble upon your tweet.

#Vegan or #Vegetarian

If your menu includes dishes for vegans and vegetarians tweet about it.

#GlutenFree

This is a popular item these days. If you have gluten free dishes let it be known

 

Lastly, do some reconnaissance on your competitors. What hash tags are they using? If you want to compete effectively add these hashtags to your tweets.

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The Value of Hashtags

Hashtags are an incredible way to promote your brand, attract new customers, and engage in conversations around your niche. Hashtags moved into common usage on Twitter and recently Facebook added the feature.

Now that Facebook has hashtags, it won’t be long before they become ubiquitous.

Lots of people monitor hashtags. That means they are tracking everything that’s said on Twitter around the hashtag in which they’re interested. For example, they might track a hashtag for #Naples or #ACService or #boating. If you include any of these hashtags in your tweets, people who track those hashtags will see your tweets.

Creating a hashtag is simple. You just put a pound sign in from of a word or group of words. For example: #SalsPizza. You can do it with any word. There are no restrictions.

Searching for hashtags is equally simple. Just type the hashtag you’re looking for into the Twitter search bar. If you’re looking for the #Florida hashtag, enter #Florida into the search bar.

Written and produced in beautiful Naples, Florida by OnFast.com. Visit OnFast.com today to get your free trial subscription to our Social Media Marketing Service.

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A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words: Using Images In Social Media

The old saying holds some truth, a picture really is worth a thousand words, or can be. The rise of image-oriented social media sites like Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest is proof of such statements’ validity. In turn, these image-driven networks have influenced other social networks including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to make some changes. Facebook even went so far as to purchase Instagram outright. All of these social sites have increased the amount of space allotted to images, and brands have begun to embrace the power of the photograph.

This visual trend on social media has provided businesses with a beneficial boost to their posts. Here are some facts and figures from Boot Camp Digital: On Facebook, a photo gets seven times more likes and ten times more shares than a link. The links that receive the most retweets on Twitter are images. Every second there are 575 likes and 81 comments on Instagram. Between October 2012 and March 2013 the number of users on Pinterest grew 4000%. The data supporting this phenomenon goes on and on. For brands, social media marketing is being transformed into visual social media marketing. But how best to leverage images on social media? Here are a few tips:

 

Show them what you do

Using images in social media gives you the opportunity to show off your company and its products and services. It doesn’t have to become a product catalog, but you can showcase the best you have to offer, in circumstances that you control. Let the audience get a feel for your excitement when you launch new products. If your company provides services rather than products, feature shots or videos of your business in action.

 

Make it interesting

Boring, badly framed or dimly lit pictures will not grab anyone’s attention. Neither will shaky, poorly edited videos. Don’t be intimidated; there are many photo-editing tools that are designed to be easily used by everyone. Instagram can be particularly helpful in the area of photo enhancement. Focus on your main subject and make sure it is framed large enough in the picture. Remember that the photo needs to inspire people to click on the thumbnail. Also, if your budget allows, you can always hand off the job to a professional.

 

Let people see who you are

People forget names all the time, but usually remember a face. Show your audience that your company is made up of real people. This can go a long way toward developing a comfortable customer relationship for the long haul.

 

Written and produced in beautiful Naples, Florida by OnFast.com. Visit OnFast.com today to get your free trial subscription to our Social Media Marketing Service.

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Quiver Quest iOS Game Using OnFast

Quiver Quest, a game app recently released in the iTunes store, is using OnFast to manage its promotional efforts. With OnFast, game creators Ovilius Studios, can post promotional blogs and images across a range of platforms including Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, and to their website. The postings can be conveniently scheduled in advance with OnFast’s scheduling tool. This way, Ovilius Studios can concentrate on what they do best, creating awesome games that are uniquely demanding and visually appealing. 

 

Quiver Quest is a non-frantic, puzzle-based physics game that tests a player’s archery skills in fun and challenging ways. Available now in the iTunes store.

 

Quiver Quest Website 

Purchase Quiver Quest game on iTunes

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Social Media News For The Week Of 7/19/13

Twitter Leads Fortune 500 Social Media Surge

The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research has released the results of their study of social media use by Fortune 500 companies. The research found Twitter usage among the 500 has surged by over 70 percent since 2012, with 77 percent having an active Twitter account. Facebook use is up 4 percent to 70 percent usage, or 348 companies. Corporate blogs are on the rise with 171 companies, or 34 percent, actively blogging. Full Story Here:

 

In Business, Everybody Uses Social Media For Work; The Question Is How

Business use of social media is goal-oriented, according to Forrester’s B2B Social Technographics study of social media use. The research found that business decision-makers prefer LinkedIn for business purposes over Facebook. 48 percent use LinkedIn for both business and personal purposes, and 26 percent for strictly business. 42 percent use Facebook for primarily personal reasons and 37 percent for both business and personal usage. Full Story Here:

 

Social Media Automation: A Beginners Guide for Small Business Owners

Small business owners are confused about social media marketing. They see large companies successfully leveraging the medium and they wonder why it doesn’t measure up to their expectations. Social media marketing success cannot be measured in raw numbers, such as new leads for the month, in the small business environment. However, ignoring social is not the answer either for small companies. This article provides good advice about how to automate social media marketing without seeming “spammy”. Full Story Here:

 

It’s time for social media to grow up

Having a clearly established social media strategy for business is much more than having set up accounts on social networks, planned content for six months, and engaged with your audience. A social media strategy should have a sense of what the purposes are for the efforts and how they fit into the goals of the company as a whole. Full Story Here: 

 

 

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