Why Promoted Posts Are Better Than Facebook Ads

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that promoted posts on Facebook are better than Facebook ads that appear on Facebook. There are a lot of pros and cons to both forms of advertising, yet promoted posts come out on top. Let’s explore why.

First and foremost, the reason that promoted posts are better than Facebook ads on Facebook is the number of people you can get to click on your post. The reality is, many people don’t even see the ads on the side of the Facebook page. They have become
almost numb to all of the ads that bombard them on web pages. They barely acknowledge that there are any types of ads on the page and they rarely even truly look at them to see if they’re relevant to their needs or wants. With a promoted page, you are sure to get a lot more interest in the information. People are more likely to click on a link that is promoted by a friend or a page that they like than to click on a random ad that they rarely notice. This means that you are raising more brand awareness if you are a business trying to garner attention. There is a great flow chart over at Socialmouths.com. The comparison chart shows that one of the best pros about promoted posts is that more people are likely to open them. The whole reason that someone is going to promote a post is that they want a wide audience to see it. So, promoting it is going to accomplish this very thing.

Won’t It Cost Too Much?A misconception is that you are going to spend a lot of money on a promoted post and not get the exposure that you want. This is not quite true. When you are promoting a post, you are controlling your budget. You can choose how much money to spend because you are choosing how many people will be able to access the post. It’s much better to spend money on a post that you know is going to be clicked on versus the Russian Roulette of sidebar advertising. Being cost effective is a sign of successful advertising and marketing.  Another reason to choose a promoted post over a Facebook ad is the flaw in the search system. Sometimes a person will search something because they are trying to gain information and not because there’s a true interest. A person searching puppy mills is often looking for information to shut down a puppy mill. Facebook sees this search and erroneously believes you want a puppy mill. Then you start to get targeted ads for puppy mills or store bought dogs. This can infuriate even the most laid back Facebook user. A person who has Liked your Facebook page will typically share the same opinions and outlooks. They are going to have a true interest in what you are advertising or promoting. Paying for a promoted post is a much better use of your budgeted money.

How Do I Choose?

If you have a lot of friends and followers, it’s an easy choice to make. You should choose the promoted posts. Over at CooperVision.com there is another good article that details the differences between promoted posts and Facebook ads on Facebook. The pros most definitely outweigh the cons due to price and the amount of interest that your promoted post is going to reach.

Original: Promoted Posts Better Than Facebook Ads

6 Successful Podcasting Tips To Embellish Your Social Media Efforts

We have always believed that content is the king. There have been constant efforts being made by everyone to ensure their websites have exceptional content. Well, content doesn’t necessarily mean text. It could also stretch up to the other ways we have been using to communicate to the audience, like videos, podcasts and graphical representations.

The most recent technique that is being used these days is to transcript videos to make articles. However, if you want some more artistic and creative input to bring more life to your text, you might want to consider using podcasting as a tool. So, what are podcasts? Well, these are nothing but digital multimedia files that are uploaded on the for the user to
download it. The user can download it on desktop, tablet or even his Smartphone. I consider this to be a much simple way to reach the audiences, where they can not listen to your content. However, it is exceptionally important to execute podcast properly.

Listed below are a few successful podcasting tips which can help embellish you social media efforts.

    Quality Information is a ‘Must’ – People usually prefer podcasts only because it doesn’t require you to put much energy reading and understanding it. Therefore, you need to ensure that your podcast provides quality information to the users. By quality information, I mean something that is relevant to the context the user is looking for. Moreover, you also need to ensure that your podcast is interesting, apart from being informative, so that the users don’t feel waste of time while listening to your podcast. For this, it is necessary that you ensure you have a high quality podcast on your site.

    Smart Devices Make it Easy to Reach the Target – We know that podcasts are audio representations, and it is necessary that you get maximum people listening to them. You know most of your users access Internet on Smartphones and thus, you may want to target them through mobile devices. For this, you will first need to see how many of your Facebook users use Smartphones or Tablets to access their Facebook account. If you think more than half, or at least half your users do so, you can add podcasting to your social media efforts. Podcasts can be heard anywhere, anytime, while in gym, buying grocery, traveling or even working.

    Develop Content Which is Easy to Share – You will have made a great podcast, which everyone likes, but make sure that your podcast is such, which is exceptionally easy to share. Only then will it be able to reach a large number of audience. This will also embellish your podcast to be share within your community and even in other communities or networks.

    Broadcast Issues Related to the Industry – You must always determine the content you are going to include in your podcast. Nobody wants to listen to promotions. Make sure you do not make it look like a sales call. It can create a negative impact. Rather, you must include important interviews and discussions related to the industry. Make it look informative than promotional. This will give your audience some really valuable information and enable you to build your credibility.

    Don’t Unnecessarily Stretch the Podcast – Remember, podcast12 is not some upcoming song which users are waiting to be up in the market. For the same reason, make sure that you keep your podcast to the point. People are genuinely not interested in listening to lengthy stuffs. So, keep it to a 30 minute episode with relevant content. It is important to understand that all your users are extremely busy people. They may feel distracted very soon and therefore, you must ensure that you bombard all the important information in the beginning of the podcast.

    Record Your Podcast as Videos – After you have successfully made your podcast, make a video copy of it as well. People like watching videos of such interactive and informative stuffs. It is not necessary that you make a video of the entire audio recording you have. Rather, use different segments of the podcast to make an entire video. Keep it short, almost up to 3 minutes and post it on YouTube, the second most popular search engine. Ensure that you have all the related keywords tagged to the video, to make it come high on search.

Conclusion

You will notice a large number of podcast usage these days. Several large corporations and medium sized businesses are using podcasting to embellish their social media efforts. You can too be one of them. However, it is important that you follow the tips mentioned above to have a perfectly flawless strategy, altogether.

Original post: SociableBlog

How Google+ Makes an Impact on Search Engine Optimization

Google+ is actually one of quite a few of Google’s attempts to break into the social media circuit. After a few failed attempts, they have finally found a winner. It stands no chance of competing with Facebook (at least not in the foreseeable future), but is still popular enough to enable you to grab a few SEO benefits from it. It is possible to use Google+ to help you get a little bit higher in the search engine results pages.

Google will follow some of your profile links

If you add a bunch of links onto your Google+ pages then Google may pay them a passing interest, but if you can connect a link to your Google+ profile, then the more popular your profile becomes then the more attention Google will pay to your connected
links. You can create connected links by putting them in your profile Bio. Your bio links can have the anchor text of your choice, and if you gain more influence on Google+, then Google will take more notice of your links and will rank up your website slightly.

Do not forget that social media is not the powerful and almighty tool that online “experts” are claiming it is. Google, Bing/Yahoo do pay attention to what goes on within the social media sites. But, just how much credit they give what happens on there is anybody’s guess. Suffice it to say that nobody has ever reached the number one spot on Google because of something that happened on social media.

You can embed links onto your posts

As mentioned above, you can add links to your pages on Google+ (or your posts, as they are also known). Again, as stated above, the links will only be paid a passing attention by Google and will affect your websites SEO (assuming the links point to your website). However, if your links are shared amongst a large number of people then Google will pay attention to them and rank your website up accordingly. This is because if a link is shared by a number of people, then Google assumes that the link (and therefore the page) is of importance, and will move it up the search engine results pages.

Learn a little bit about linking. The backlinks you receive from other websites are more valuable than the links you receive from social media. But that does not mean you should cast social media out to sea. If a few big hitters on social media start linking to your site and mentioning you online, then the Google algorithm is going to start paying very close attention to your website.

You can optimize G+ title tags

You may have noticed that when you post something on Google+ then the first part of the post becomes the posts title tag. The title tag can be optimized so that it ranks better and so that there is a higher chance of a click through rate increase. Just make sure to choose the keywords of your first line very carefully. If you do this then the link attached to your post will have a higher click through rate. If this is the case then Google will pay more attention to the link, and will increase the rank of the page it links to accordingly.

You should take time to learn a little more about G+ tags, as well as other tags on blogs and Meta tags on your website. They do act similarly to keywords within text, but do have a different function. This is because they are designed to speak directly to either the search engines or the social media engine. This means that there are lots of rules that apply to these tags that do not apply to web content. For example, it is okay to misspell words on tags, and it is okay to hyphenate words that would not usually be hyphenated.

People who are authors with Google+ gain SEO benefits

They have an authoring system where you can attach your Google+ profile to the content that you write off of the Google+ site. If you write a lot of good content then you gain a better reputation within Google+, and this comes with better SEO benefits and article popularity benefits. It may even help you to get your online articles indexed a little faster than they would be otherwise. This is because Google is able to find and index the articles a little faster than they would do via other routes. This is because they are following the link from your Google+ profile.

An online reputation is something that is hard to maintain. You need to be on the tip of people’s tongues, because otherwise they will forget you. The Internet is a big place and popularity jumps up and down like an ostrich on a hot bus roof. With Google+ and their authorship program you cannot really make a massive online-reputation splash, but you can leave a mark for people to research into. When a person normally hears you name then he or she may wait for your next publication in order to figure out if he or she likes you. But, with Google+ and its authorship program, he or she has access to lots of your old and already published works.

Original:  Google+ Impact on SEO

How To Use Infographics As A Useful SEO Tool

Infographics are the latest craze in the SEO community. They are a platform where you can demonstrate plenty of information through a graphic form. This means that they are an engaging way to communicate with your audience and ensure they want to come back for more.

If you post useful content through your infographics you’ll be much more likely to have an audience that appreciates your content and is willing to share. However the main problem is that many people don’t know how to use infographics or where to put them. Below is a series of places where you can place your infographics to get the most exposure.

Infographic Directories

The first place you should aim to get your Infographic into is the various Infographic
directories around. These infographics directories are there to expose your work and get it noticed by the people around. The good thing about Infographic directories is that if you complete a good piece of work it could be highlighted.

The best situation you want from an Infographic directory is for it to be featured on the homepage. From there you can hope for a large website to pick it up and use it on their website, both promoting your Infographic and your website.

Blogs

Another way to promote your Infographic is either through your own blog or through one of your partners. By exposing your Infographic on a blog you enabling you whole audience to be aware of it and have an opportunity to share or like it. This increases engagement and also increases the chances of more people finding it.

Besides this you could also get it featured on another relevant blog with the chance of gaining highly targeted traffic. As well as this if you manage to include the anchor text on the bottom you could also receive a good, authoritative link back from the site. This means you’ll be adding value to their audience but also gaining higher search engine rankings in the meantime.

Social Media

Social media is another fantastic tool to spread the word out about your new content. You can post it on your Twitter and Facebook page and ask your audience to share the content. Since it’s going out to an audience who is already interested in your content you’re more likely to actually get people to comply and get the word out.

Also as with related blogs you can also use social media to utilise partner relationships with affiliated brands. By doing this you have access to their audience and have an opportunity to share your Infographic with them.

In the end Infographics are a great communications tool, but a good SEO tool at that. If you contain your URL at the bottom you will see people come to the exact link and share your content, it can also be used to push social media presence. However way you use it, if you get it right then you have a fantastic opportunity to go viral and reach a large audience.

Original: Infographics As Useful SEO Tool

Staying Social: Social Media Updates

Social media technology is constantly evolving and it can certainly be challenging to stay up-to-date with the evolution of familiar products. The business world has reached a point where social media participation is not only expected, but required in order to stay relevant among competitors. Here are a few updates from around the social media world to help you stay tuned into what’s going on within this infinite space.

•    In April, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced Facebook Home , a new platform for the social network available on certain Android devices. At the announcement, Zuckerberg said, “Our phones today are designed around apps, not people. We want to flip that around.” Features include a live news feed of “friend” updates
as soon as you turn your phone on and reach the home screen. There is also something called “chat heads;” If you are having an ongoing Facebook Messenger chat with someone, their photo appears in a bubble in the margins of your phone so you can access the conversation at your convenience while you have another app open. In early May, Facebook announced that Home downloads had surpassed the 1 million mark. The company did not reveal how many of those who downloaded the software are active users. Monthly updates will begin on a regular basis in July.

•    In other Facebook news, if your small business has used Tweetdeck to manage both Twitter and Facebook accounts, you have realized Facebook is no longer available on this management service as of early May. (This inevitable change is a result of Twitter purchasing Tweetdeck two years ago.) The shuttering of the Facebook relationship has created an outcry from social media aficionados, many of whom are switching to HootSuite , which still supports Facebook.

•    LinkedIn  users now have the opportunity to add pictures and videos to their professional pages. This visual element provides a digital portfolio element of a candidate and helps users put summaries into actions. This feature is available in the summary, work experience, and education sections of the online resume and networking site.

•    In a study by Manta , small business owners flocked to social media outlets in the past year in a desperate attempt to increase sales. The report found, though, that their efforts have not shown a return investment. The survey questioned more than 1,200 small business owners, 50% of whom have increased time spent on social networks, and 55% said they utilized Twitter and Facebook to attract new customers and/or establish sales leads.

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of social media outreach is establishing one audience (or maybe several) and learning what each needs from your outreach efforts. Experts recommend having someone on staff that can devote time every day to listening to customer feedback and being available to offer more information and alternatives to current business practices. Social media outlets provide an opportunity for businesses to personalize their brand and products. It can be difficult to reach an audience through a website with so much information. Facebook and LinkedIn, for example, can break down information into more digestible bites of information. It takes time to develop relationships, though, which is when small businesses will see a return on the investment of their time, which is just as valuable as their money.

Angie Picardo is a staff writer for NerdWallet. Her mission is to help consumers stay financially savvy, and compare checking accounts.

6 Free Android Apps To Enhance Your Social Media Marketing

Apps are appliances made for devices based on android OS to expand the utility of the devices. As a manager for social media who is at all times on-the-run, you can be sure to depend on these important apps to stay engaged and connected with your social media. Android apps are available in large numbers in today’s large market. It is recommended you consider the 6 free chat apps to manage your social media marketing:

1 .Tweet Deck

With Tweet Deck, people can customize their experience with Twitter through groups, columns, saved searches and automatic updates to keep them updated concerning interesting topics and the public. This free app, Tweet Deck, allows users to follow what
other users ‘status updates are all about, and provide updates via links, sharing of photos, sharing of videos, and tweeting.

2. Hoot Suite

This app permits businesses to launch their marketing campaigns, send target messages to a number of channels, expand and identify their audiences using social media. Hoot Suite brings individuals together from a spectrum of social media websites, like Twitter and Facebook. Through Hoot Suite’s control panel, groups can collaboratively schedule updates to Word press, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, through mobile, desktop, or web platforms. Teams may additionally follow campaign outcome and business trends.

3. Gowalla

This free app, Gowalla, permits sharing of places users visit including contacts and friends, utilizing videos, pictures, and posts. Specialist of Social media can connect with the app through Twitter and also Facebook. This app currently offers iPad native apps, Palm, Blackberry, Android, and iPhone. Support for other phones may be given in the future times by 3rd-party developers.

4. Shareaholic

This free tool which is for Internet Explorer as well as safari and Firefox, consents to sharing all pages by its users, anytime, with more than 100 services for instance Google mail, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Word Press. The tool, Shareaholic permits the users to make their bookmarks simple and be able to find latest materials while they come on the Internet.

5. Zinzzchat

Share pictures, videos, and articles on different social networks with Zinzzchat. The free app lets you have new content to stay focused on marketing. You can use it on Facebook, twitter and LinkedIn.

6. Postling

Postling makes it simple for you to make content and thereafter post it straight to your blog in order to maintain new content on your blog even at times when you are not using your laptop. This is vital because your audience simply want new content.

The above 6 apps that will help you manage your social media marketing is ideal for your dealership to get more value and exposure from the social media, and get closer to your audience. Auto dealers who want to improve the effectiveness of their Social Media Marketing campaigns need to have these 6 apps to improve their social media marketing.

The chat apps will help marketers to engage their customers who are already mobile. Dealers can also monitor what is being said about them online at anytime and anywhere. They can promote positive mentions immediately and reach out for negative mentioned immediately. Remember if used correctly, free chat apps can be a driving force for your business.

Original: Android Apps for Social Media Marketing

Twitter Launches Keyword Targeting: Can Marketers Cash In?

It took a while, but Twitter has been regularly improving its ad platform since first rolling out advertising solutions back in 2010. The latest ad enhancement looks to present marketers with some of the most attractive opportunities they’ve had yet.

Twitter recently launched a keyword targeting feature that allows advertisers to target users based on the terms and phrases contained in their tweets. The new system is designed to help businesses produce better results by tailoring Promoted Tweets content around the dialogue their ideal customers use in their social posts. For Twitter’s ever expanding marketing community, the introduction of keyword targeting raises the importance of the almighty tweet, mainly because of the platform’s real-time communication capabilities.

Keyword Targeting in Action

Here is an example to give you an idea how the new keyword targeting feature works. Let’s say a Twitter user posts a tweet about a delicious sandwich they ate at a local
restaurant. In this case, that restaurant who faithfully monitors their stream sees the post, and uses it to run a location-based campaign featuring some of those keywords to advertise a new promotion. If the user who made the tweet see’s the ad, they may be tempted to stop back in and see what else is on the menu.

Twitter’s keyword targeting tool no doubt provides a more effective way for marketers to craft sponsored content based on audience interest in specific products, services, and topics. But what about the user? How are they impacted? According to Twitter, the new feature will have no notable affect on the user’s use of the platform. The company says that it is not ramping up the number of ads it will display, and users still have the power to block out Promoted Tweets they don’t find interesting.

Early Results

The keyword targeting feature Twitter recently unveiled is being warmly received by the internet journalism community. As for what type of results the new system is generating, Twitter says so far so good. In the initial announcement, the company touted results of tests it conducted with a small group of ad agencies and advertising partners.

One of those advertisers was GoPro, a leading manufacturer of innovative camera equipment. The company used the keyword targeting in the timeline across four different advertising campaigns. After using the tool, GoPro’s performance with Promoted Tweets improved to the tune of nearly two million impressions and engagement rates of up to 11 percent. Other brands reporting good engagement results in the early round of testing included Microsoft Japan, Walgreens, and Everything Everywhere.

Getting Started

Getting up running with new targeting keyword feature looks to be a relatively straightforward   process. According to Twitter, it is similar to performing a basic search across the site.  Marketers simply enter the words or phrases they wish to target in their Promoted Tweets, and then decide if they want to base the process on matching phrases or unordered keywords. From there, they can customize the ad by specifying location, gender, device and other targeting criteria.

Twitter’s keyword targeting tool is currently available in all the markets and languages that are supported by the platform. Marketers can access the feature in full by using either the Ads API or Ads UI. Twitter is hailing the enhancement as an important addition to its advertising system, particularly, for brands that are combing the incoming stream of tweets for dialogue that speaks to the intentions of the user. All in all, the nature of Twitter empowers marketers using this tool to engage audiences with the right content, in the right context, at the right time.

A Cut Above the Rest

The introduction of functionality that allows brands to target their premium marketing content by keywords gives Twitter a distinct edge over its competitors in the social advertising space. In a sense, it puts the company closer to Google, which lets marketers target content by the keywords users enter the search engine through AdWords, and creates a gap between Facebook. While Facebook trumps all in terms of size, the Twitter experience is very unique and something it has been able to preserve amid the experiments with ad integration.

Jason Stein, founder and president of social media agency Laundry Service, is among a growing number of spectators speaking highly of Twitter’s new keyword targeting capabilities. What are your thoughts about the new feature? Is it a game changer, or just another tool you’ll ignore in favor of organic methods?

original: SociablWeb