Social signals help your business build an online brand and identity which will increase its authority within the search engines, enabling the business to be ranked higher, and therefore more easily found by customers or clients. A social signal is an action made in one of the social networks such as Google+, Facebook, or Twitter. These may come in the form of a ‘share’, a ‘like’, or a ‘retweet’ for example. In addition, these signals are picked up on by the search engines who react by placing the business higher. The activity in the social networks means content is of value and could be helpful or useful to many others who are searching for related terms.

Interacting with authoritative social people can really help you!

In Matt Cutts’ latest webmaster video, he mentions how social signals will have a key role in organic SEO in the future, due to their latest algorithm changes. These signals will now act as a form of social link building, so it is vital you interact and engage with authoritative people to boost your presence and rankings also. Looking at the impact of social media from another angle, you could propose that in this modern era the generation of today seek out a website that has a heavy social influence on it such as the social buttons on a homepage. Furthermore, this is now a form of clarity and reassurance to the user that the business or website is a legitimate one, and one which is up to date with modern trends.

If you require someone to keep an eye on your social media marketing so that you don’t miss important messages, then we can offer you a bespoke social media management package to help you engage in the time that you have got to do this. The impact of this will be portrayed in your SEO efforts, as this will be much more likely to play a more successful part in helping your website gain more traffic, and climb the listings in the search engines!

We are also able to offer a specific SEO package for link building, manual link requests and content syndication if required. This would be a bespoke package and we would be happy to pull this together for you. For either service please use the form above or call the office and speak to the HodgesNet SEO Experts on 01793 608777 and lets use the power of social signals on the internet for more profit.

Image courtesy of Arvind Balaraman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

With over 800 million users now on Facebook and over 200 million on Twitter, it is hard to think of any reasons why businesses would neglect these social media sites to promote their business and keep their brand in the public eye.

These are arguably the two largest social media platforms, however other emerging communities such as Google+ and Pinterest are pivotal for success.

There are also many other communities and platforms online which could be quite niche for your business so don’t dismiss these just because they’re not as mainstream as the main powers at be above.

Our Social Media Strategy… in this order…

• Build your Brand
• Communicate & Engage
• Evoke Sales

The main consideration when first approaching social media is that people use it, first and foremost, to be social and not to buy and sell. Use this unique platform to build relationships with your existing customers and potentially new clients, as well as engaging with everyone as a whole.

The key principle of social media is to engage and interact with people (that’s why it’s ‘social’), and by doing this you will raise your profile and receive recognition through ‘shares’, ‘likes’, ‘retweets’. Etc. In addition, there is no harm in asking, whilst interacting, your ‘social friends’ to like or comment on certain posts if in Facebook for example.

The aspect that people with reservations have on social media is that it is difficult to measure success, and how success is defined. Social media is a major marketing tool that should be used to build the brand, communicate information, and thirdly evoke sales once a rapport has been built.

Use social platforms to answer questions and give information, so that if users decide they’re interested in a sale, they have all the necessary information at their disposal. This will build trust with users, to show a human emotive side, and not just a social selling machine aimed for nothing else statistics and results of converted customers. Moreover, traffic can be measured through Google Analytics in traffic sources so you can see where they’ve come from, and what part of your social page or profile they liked.

According to Hubspot 71% of users are more likely to purchase services or products after social media interaction, or through social media referrals. Selling should be included in your long term strategy after a relationship is built where you can elicit sales whilst communicating and talking to users.

This is why retention of current customers should be highly valued as you can engage with them over a longer period, building that trust once more.

Final thought…

One final point to adhere to, should be that make sure you don’t always respond and interact just when you have to – dont just react, but be seen at other times as well. This inevitably will bring out the human impact of social media and help drive sales up in the long run.

A few months ago we wrote about the new social media platform Pinterest, and we talked about how you could use the site’s virtual pinboards to promote your business. At the time there was only the option to set up a personal account, but you could use that for whatever you wanted. Now Pinterest have introduced business accounts as well, and while there’s little difference between the two at present it’s fairly certain that the company will be bringing in additional features for Pinterest business users in the coming months. And of course having separate accounts for business and personal use means you can separate your hobby boards from your business portfolio.

It’s really easy to start using Pinterest as a business. Simply visit business.pinterest.com and choose whether to convert an existing account or open a new one. You then get the chance to select your business type (and helpfully, the site lists some examples for each business “type”) and add some profile information. If you’re converting an account your existing profile will be imported automatically, but you may well want to change the text to give it more of a business focus. Then tick the box to agree with Pinterest’s terms and conditions, press the Convert/Join button and you’re done!

There’s been some controversy over Pinterest’s terms and conditions, because they were quite confusing, and the company has now simplified them. Basically the main conditions of using Pinterest as a business user are:

• you only open accounts for businesses if you are authorised to do so;
• any content you pin is legal and doesn’t infringe on third party users’ rights (in other words, you have permission to use it);
• you agree that any content you pin can be reused by other users, and that if they use it outside of Pinterest it’s your problem, not Pinterest’s.

Finally, Pinterest has added some really useful resources for business owners which are well worth a look. If you go to business.pinterest.com and scroll down you’ll see a section headed “See how others are using it”. Underneath are five companies and you can read case studies about how they use Pinterest as a business and how successful it is for them. There is also a section on “What works”, which is Pinterest’s own guide to using the site as a business. It has some useful tips on topics like keywords or pinning on the move, and is worth reading. Lastly there’s a “Buttons and Widgets” section where you can grab Pin It and Follow buttons for your website. There’s also an interesting Board Widget which lets you display up to thirty images from a specific board – very useful for embedding, say, a portfolio on your website.

For more help with using Pinterest as a business, give us a call on 01793 608777. We’d love to talk to you about using social media as part of your online marketing strategy!

While many businesses see Twitter, Facebook and Google+ as a vital part of their marketing mix, there are still many that haven’t discovered the power of social media. With recent changes from Google placing more importance than ever on the link between your website and social media platforms when it comes to ranking your web pages, there really is no time like the present to start using the tools available to leverage a better search engine ranking, a raised profile and more visitors.

Social media brings many benefits to business, including:

• Increased profile, both of your business and the products/services you provide
• A way to share your knowledge with a wider audience
• Ongoing communication with clients, suppliers and prospects
• Improved search engine optimisation (SEO)
• A stamp of “authority” on your business

However, while most business owners can appreciate the benefits of using social media, lack of time is usually stated as the main reason why they are not engaging in it themselves.

Social media does take time, of course, but once you’ve set up your social media profiles there are lots of tools around that help you use it more effectively, or that even automate the process for you. For example, tools like HootSuite and BufferApp let you schedule tweets so even when you’re busy you can have a presence on your social media accounts (though we’d never advocate you rely on scheduling tools completely, or people will soon realise you’re not as “present” as you seem to be!) And depending on your website structure there are other tools, such as Twitterfeed, that will automatically distribute your blog posts to social media sites, and once set up these work seamlessly with no further action needed from you.

As a bare minimum you should have a Twitter account, a Facebook Business Page and a Google+ account, an automated blog posting tool and  social media buttons on your website, so people can share your content. Once you have these set up you can then allocate time to using them or you can outsource the service to a third party, who can help keep your accounts active by finding relevant things to post.

If you would like to start engaging with social media but don’t know where to start, we can help. Give us a call on 01793 608777 and we can have a chat over coffee about how we can help you develop a social media strategy that works for you.

Alternatively, for more information about how your use of social media affects your search engine ranking you might be interested in our Search Engine Marketing Update white paper, updated to include the latest changes from Google.

Image courtesy of Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In a blog post last week, Twitter announced that it is going to start refining the way advertisers reach their market by including filters to target by gender.

Advertisers who use Twitter’s Promoted Tweets service pay to have promotional tweets displayed in users’ feeds. The tweets are only displayed once and while users can delete individual promoted tweets from their feed by clicking a “Dismiss” link they can’t opt out of seeing them altogether.

Up till now Twitter has allowed advertisers to filter Twitter users by location and interest but they have now added a gender filter to the equation. The odd thing is, when you open a Twitter account you don’t have to specify a gender – and of course the thousands of businesses using the social media site don’t have genders either – so how does this new filter work?

According to Twitter’s blog the company will be studying users’ names to identify whether they are likely to be male or female. Some names are obviously one gender or another but others, such as Chris and Pat, could be used by both men and women, and business names are likely to have no identifiable gender.

However, Twitter will also be looking for other markers, such as the language that people use in their tweets or the accounts they follow, to further determine the gender of members. And if they aren’t confident about a user’s gender that user will be exempt from receiving gender-targeted ads altogether.

Twitter’s view is that being able to define users by gender as well as location and interest benefits both advertisers and users, as Promoted Tweets will only be seen by people likely to be interested in the content, which is ultimately in everyone’s favour.

What do you think? Have you spotted any Promoted Tweets and did you find them useful or annoying? And would you consider changing your user name or the language you use to try to avoid being targeted?

Image courtesy of digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

So you’ve finally got round to adding a Facebook fan page for your business, but it’s looking a bit bare. Once you’ve added your company details, contact details and web address, what else can you put on the page to help you attract and engage with followers? Here are some ideas for fun updates for your Facebook business page.

Photos
The new Timeline layout focuses heavily on photos so try to include images with your updates wherever possible. Try to think outside the box a little – how about adding photos that show your offices, the day to day workings of your business, your staff, what you had for lunch? (“Food porn” is especially popular with Facebook fans, so it’s always worth adding some photos!)

Blog posts
Use an online tool such as Twitterfeed to automatically post your blog entries on your Facebook page. The benefit of using this particular service is that it will direct people straight to your website to read the blog post – meaning you get more web visitors. As before, images are important so make sure you include at least one in the blog posts for Twitterfeed to include.

Milestones
Milestones are a new Timeline feature. Add some for your business now – perhaps the day you started the business, any awards you were nominated for, key clients you picked up, exciting projects, any exhibitions you’re attending. It gives your Facebook fans an insight into the company’s history and future.

Polls
Polls give your fans a chance to interact with your page. Try to think of something topical or quirky to get people voting on – the more unusual the topic, the more votes it’s likely to get!

Competitions
You’ve probably noticed that more and more companies are using competitions to increase their Facebook followers. The best competitions offer a prize that’s worth winning in exchange for a like, comment and share of the competition status. Again, you may need some original thinking here – offering a discount off your services might not appeal to many people, but an iPod or bottle of bubbly will!

For more help with fun updates for your Facebook business page give us a call today on 01793 608777.

Image courtesy of Pixomar / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In our last post we talked about some changes Twitter has made recently, including the additional of a header image on your profile page. While the majority of your followers, who keep up with you via your updates in their stream, will not see this image, it’s a nice thing to add to your page to increase the customisation.

Here’s a step by step guide to how to add a header image in Twitter.

1. Log into your account and click the cog-like icon in the top right hand corner. Go to Settings  and then Design.

2. The top section shows the default backgrounds you can choose. Scroll past this section. (Don’t forget you can add your own customised background if you want.)

3. The next section is labelled Header. Click Change Header and select the image you want to use. Remember that landscape format images will work better than portrait.

4. When you see your chosen image use the slider to zoom in so it displays how you want it.

5. Scroll down to the bottom and click Save – and that’s it!

You might want to check your new profile page to see how it looks – remember that horizontal images work best, and your bio text will be overlaid in white so you need the header image to be dark enough for the text to show up. Your profile image will also sit on the header image, so make sure it’s not too busy.

Have a look at our Twitter profile page to see how effectively you can use the new header image! And for help with all things social media, give us a call on 01793 608777.

The social media platform Twitter has made a few changes recently that give greater priority to images on the site.

The first change is a minor one, but it will be of interest to anyone who posts a lot of photos in their tweets. A new section on your profile page will show the last six photos mentioned in tweets – useful to know as you might want to be more careful about what you tweet, otherwise that drunken photo from Saturday night could be visible on your profile for a lot longer than the tweet itself!

The other change is much bigger. Following in Facebook’s footsteps somewhat, Twitter are now rolling out the option for you to have a header image along the top of your profile. This image fills about two thirds of the top area of the screen and is overlaid with your bio and your profile picture. This means you can now visually customise your profile in three different places:

• Your profile picture – the small square image seen next to every tweet you post – normally a headshot or company logo
• A background image – either a pretty pattern or something customised to suit your branding
• The header image

You can use any image you want for your header image, but there are a few things to bear in mind to use it effectively.

Firstly, your profile picture and bio are overlaid centrally over the header image. If you use a very busy image and have a photo of you as your profile pic, it could end up looking very messy, so a simple header image will be more effective. Also, your bio is displayed in white text so you need to make sure the header image is dark enough for the text to show up.

The header image is horizontal, and while you can upload any photograph and crop it or reposition it as you wish, if you use small or portrait images you could end up with something displaying at a very low resolution.

Finally, while the header image will show on both the website and mobile applications, it displays slightly differently. The bio is on a separate page that you scroll across to, and the positioning of the profile picture within the header is different, too. If you can, check web and mobile views to make sure your combination of profile and header image works well in both.

Not many people have added the new header layout yet, but we have found a couple of really neat uses of it – have a look at @problogger and @breakingnews to see what we mean.

So there you have it – some interesting changes from Twitter. In the next post we’ll include a step by step guide to adding a header image, but if you’ve already done it we’d love to see your updated profile – leave us the link below. However, when all’s said and done how many people will actually see your profile page? In our experience most of our followers simply read our tweets through their own stream rather than visit our profile page – but what do you think?

One of the questions our clients often ask us is how they can measure the ROI on social media – and it’s one that is difficult to answer. The thing is, social media is not about sales – so there are no hits:revenue ratios to take into account. Instead it’s about building relationships with people, raising your profile and making contacts, and from there, you may well get sales – but the social media may only be one element of the marketing that results in a sale.

However, to get some idea of how effective your social media marketing is, you do need to set objectives. There’s no hard and fast rule about the goals you should set, and really it depends on the type of your business and the aims you have for your use of social media. For example, you might want to achieve any (or all!) of the following:

• To increase sales
• To increase traffic to your website
• To raise the profile of your business
• To spread news or information about your industry
• To gain new contacts
• To find suppliers
• To find partners or financial backers
• To improve your website’s SEO
• To have a bit of fun!

Before you start using social media to market your business do think about what you want to achieve, because then you can start to set some measureable targets. For instance, if your main objective is to increase your contact database then the most important thing to measure is the number of people you follow and the number of followers you have (or the number of “Likes” your Facebook page gets). On the other hand, if you’re looking for more sales then you’d be better off targeting a smaller number of more specific people and building a relationship with them – so follower numbers won’t be so important.

There are lots of factors you can measure to get some idea of how well your social media marketing is working. As well as followers and Facebook likes you can monitor shares, retweets and comments/replies to get a feel for how well your followers are engaging with your material. You also need to keep a close eye on your website metrics – you should be able to see where visitors come from and can tie that up with your social media data to give you a powerful picture of how effective your campaign is.

Once you’ve built up a strong following on social media networks – and that should always be your first objective – perhaps the easiest way to measure ROI on social media is to run a defined campaign to promote a special offer. Build a landing page that you use in all your social media mentions – or different pages for the different platforms – and use special offer codes too. That way you can directly measure traffic and sales and see where it originates, and that should give you a good idea of how well social media is working for you.

For more help with social media give the team at HodgesNet a call on 01793 608777 today.

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

One of the best ways to raise your profile and increase your customer base – and sales – is to position yourself as a person of influence, an expert in your field. When people know that you really know your stuff and are knowledgeable in your particular industry they are more likely to trust your opinion and advice and come to you when they need your product or service. But how do you go about positioning yourself as an expert? Writing a blog is one way – you can easily demonstrate your knowledge and experience – but you might also want to investigate the “social influence” tool Klout.

Once you sign up for a free Klout account it monitors your activity on the main social media networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and foursquare, and rates you according to how much you interact on the sites. For example, it takes into account the number of followers, mentions, updates and retweets you make, and it also registers topics that you post about. It places the emphasis on generating content rather than pure activity, so if all you do is retweet other people’s stories you’ll have less Klout than if you put out your own original material. Klout looks at around 400 factors before awarding you with a Klout score, between 1 and 100, with 100 being the highest amount of influence you can have.

So how could Klout position you as an expert? Because it monitors the topics you post about it knows if you say a lot about, for example, tax returns or blogging or flower arrangements, and defines you as having Klout in those areas. You can search the website for any topic you want and it’ll show you those people with Klout for that topic, who you can then follow. Wouldn’t it be great if it returned you as someone with Klout in your specialist area? You can also see the people who influence you – those who you are likely to reply to or retweet  -  and the people you influence, which is a great base for building a loyal relationship.

There’s lots more to Klout – for example, there are freebies and special offers you can apply for when you have a Klout score over, say, 50 (sadly very few are available in the UK but hopefully that will change). It’s well worth getting a free account and having a play around – increase your social media activity and see how it affects your Klout score – and hopefully you’ll soon be seen as an expert in your field.