News & Notes

In today’s social world, creating good, informative content is extremely important to standing out among competitors.  Not to mention that a sales-only approach is a complete turnoff for potential customers.  In this Q&A, Lee Odden explains why content marketing is important for small businesses, and how it works with social media and search engine optimization…

Content is where your stories get told and both SEO and social media are ways to amplify the reach and engagement of those stories. Insights from SEO keyword research can review topics in demand that you should probably write about to attract customers that are actively looking. At the same time, monitoring social media can reveal topics and trends that can drive your editorial plan by covering issues, topics and especially, answering questions that your customers and buyers are interested in. — Essential Q and A on SEO & Content Marketing for Small Businesses by Lee Odden

There is undoubtably a firehose of data in Twitter’s constantly updating stream of information.  When you connect to people in your target audience, you can learn a lot about their wants and needs, as well as build direct relationships with them.  But Twitter’s data can also be used to collect targeted information that then can be analyzed for actionable insights.  Actionable insights are key because without them, you just have interesting information.  In this slide deck, Richard Baxter walks us through how to use Twitter’s search function filtering into a Google spreadsheet for constantly updating, targeted information about your key audiences. Fascinating.

Social Media can be a very powerful marketing tool, and can be both measured and tied to business ROI.  It all starts with setting the proper expectations and objectives at the beginning.  Asking what you want to accomplish with social media will help you come up with tactics which execute those objectives.  Objectives also drive KPIs (key performance indicators), which will help you figure out how you can measure the success of your endeavors.

The first thing to do when establishing a social media strategy with real business outcomes is to set objectives.

These objectives go back to the question of why your business is turning to social media in the first place. Do you want to establish a cheaper customer service outlet? Increase sales on your website? Improve brand awareness by integrating yourself into your local community? All of these objectives can be achieved via social media – they just have to be articulated first. — How To Create A Social Media Strategy That Makes Sense For Your Bottom Line by Lauren Dugan