Important Social Media Tools Need Now for site Analysis

News By SEOWEBMOUNT,

The social media space is as jammed as an LA freeway. From design and creativity tools to ad technologies and analytics, there’s a whole lot to consider, and a crowded field of tools vying for your attention. This infographic above was produced last year by research firm Gartner Group, and it does an outstanding job of showcasing how chaotic this world really is.

So what’s a marketer to do? To blast through all the clutter, a little research is a must. If you’re on the hunt for tools and services that truly help you get a leg up in social media, but don’t have time to take them all for a test drive, feast your eyes on the list below. These apps and teams have solved significant social challenges, and the tools are truly useful to your overall strategies.

Sysomos: Truly Powerful Social Monitoring

The heart of social media lies firmly in audience engagement. Yet monitoring the myriad of blogs, social networks, social media tools, and community forums is a meticulous and laborious task indeed. That’s where Sysomos comes in.

Sysomos aids small to medium companies in their quest to document all the details of their brand’s social presence. Features include comprehensive data collection (with excellent spam filtering), meticulous data analysis, and hyper-smart data processing. What makes Sysomos stand out is their intelligent algorithms that help make sense of the robust information. This is a tool that will help you fully understand your target market, giving you the power to craft social media campaigns that blast your brand into the stratosphere.

Sprout Social: Superior Feed and Team Management

For most of us, the biggest problem when adopting a new tech tool is the associated learning curve. Sprout Social is a welcome exception. The interface on this feature rich management tool possesses an outstanding intuitive, visual design. Considering the long list of functionalities, this is an impressive feat indeed. 

Sprout Social offers the ability for marketers to monitor mentions, feeds, shares, and all the various social signals. It also provides a single publishing platform to send blasts out to all the various sites. But what Sprout Social really does best is aggregation and team management. From one beautiful UI, you can access nearly every single feed you own and operate. Additionally, Sprout lets managers create teams and related assignments, granting the power to review posts before a team member shares it with the world.

SocialFlow: Because Timing is Everything

If you haven’t yet discovered the exact days and times that your audience is most likely to interact with your content, you absolutely need SocialFlow. This well designed tool has a built-in and optimized algorithm that connects to Facebook and Twitter feeds. SocialFlow analyses three critical factors regarding your social campaigns:

1. Messages – It determines which of your relevant messages are most likely to actually connect with your demographic.
2. Audience – SocialFlow can indicate which segment of your audience is currently online, giving you valuable insight into real-time posting.
3. Timing – Finally, the tool will help you determine the right time to send each and every blast.

Tweepi: Master the World of Twitter

For many social media experts, Twitter is the toughest platform to excel on. Consequently, there are dozens of Twitter-centric tools to help conquer the many challenges. If great Twitter management is your goal, it doesn’t get much better than Tweepi. Tweepi helps users take on tasks that are otherwise very time consuming, like flushing unfollowers, cleaning up inactive lists, reciprocating other followers, and keeping tabs on intriguing new tweets. With memberships for as little as $7.49 a month, Tweepi’s affordable to boot. If Twitter is a mainstay for your campaigns, then Tweepi will an invaluable tool for you.

Everypost: The Free, Must-Have App

If your marketing budget doesn’t hold a dime for additional tools, then Everypost should be your new favorite app. Free to use and download, Everypost helps social experts to post updates across various networks from the convenience of a phone or tablet. In addition to connectivity of platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+, Everypost lets you email your sends to your mailing list as well. There are other fun features, like a tweet tool that automatically shortens posts to 140 characters or less.

Crowdbooster: Know Your Audience

While Crowdbooster doesn’t cover every social platform, it gives you essential insight into the worlds of Facebook and Twitter. Since these are the two most popular social sites, this may be just the tool to solve your analytics issues.

resource: http://www.sitepronews.com/2014/03/19/social-media-tools-need-now/

To Pin or Not to Pin: Questions to Ask Before Adding to Your Boards

SEOWEBMOUNT

It is so easy today to add new images and videos to your Pinterest boards. Most pages on the Web now have the ‘Pin It!’ button so you can quickly share what you find. But if you want to maintain a certain image for your brand, you cannot be pinning everything you see.

Everything you add to your Pinterest boards should meet a certain set of criteria. When you ask yourself these six questions, you will make sure that you are pinning only those things that are going to benefit your board followers and your brand.

Does it send a brand-right message to your audience? 

If you are a home decorator, then you probably don’t need to feature a lot of images of funny cats. Your followers are looking for decorating tips, trends and ideas, so make sure that is just what they are getting from your boards. Whatever you pin needs to help create a better picture of what your brand is for your audience.

Is it appropriate? 

Pinterest has set guidelines on what is considered objectionable content. This includes nudity, porn, hateful speech and symbols, graphic violence or attacks on people and spam. You do not want to alienate members of your audience because of some questionable pins. Also, make sure that anything you pin does not violate your or another person’s privacy.

Is it something people will enjoy? 

Pictures that are funny, visually stunning, cute or interesting are more likely to draw in an audience. You want to reach out to people through your boards and show them what your brand is all about. If they like what they see, they are more likely to click on your bio and visit your website.

Does is tell a story? 

You can use your Pinterest boards to tell a story to your audience, to send a message. Some images can work as an emotional connection with your audience. Try finding images that match a word or idea or message that you want to express.

Do your boards have a good mix? 

You don’t want to have simple and boring boards that are full of your products or brand. There should be a good mix of content that will keep your audience visiting your boards. You want content that will inspire them and content that will educate them. Pin instructions on how to do something that relates to your business. If you are a florist, for instance, you could pin instructions for arranging a Thanksgiving centerpiece.

While you want to use Pinterest to grow your brand, you do not want to use it to shove your business and products in the faces of your followers.

Is it the right size? 

Make sure that the images you pin are the right size for Pinterest. The horizontal width is just 735 pixels. Anything over that will be resized automatically, which can leave you with only a partial image. That can mean a less powerful image for others to see and then your message gets lost. You also don’t want to have images that are too small because they won’t be as impactful.

resource: http://www.sitepronews.com/2013/11/26/pin-pin-questions-ask-adding-boards/

Advanced Twitter Tactics for Small Businesses

Getting an edge in any social media space is, to say the least, a very hard challenge. Rising above the sea of competitors and the ever-present social noise takes finesse, planning, pizzazz, and the latest technological tools. Twitter is perhaps the most challenging medium to make a big splash in, but it’s far from impossible. Get a hashtag up on your competition by using the following advanced Twitter tips!

1. Be Proactive About Gaining Followers

Obviously, you need to build a loyal, diverse following of Twitter fans to make this space work for you. If you’re thinking about buying “fake” followers, think again – you need engagement, not bulky numbers. False profiles don’t make for very viral supporters! To amass your dedicated crew, don’t just launch your profile and cross your fingers, get out there and connect with people! Follow like-minded industry leaders and fans, message up a storm, and post intriguing posts that get people talking. Whatever you do, be extremely active, and people will respond in kind.

2. Resist the Urge to Schedule Your Tweets

Yes, there are oodles of great tools like HootSuite that help you schedule tweets in advance, but remember that your follow-up conversations are far more important than your original correspondence. Why? Because you have that fan’s attention, in the moment, and if comments or retweets go unanswered for hours or days, you’ve missed the chance to not only deepen loyalty, but perhaps gain a viral supporter.

If you still insist on scheduling blasts, be on hand to respond to comments every hour during your workday. Better yet, have a social media management tasked to stay engaged with your follows as much as possible. Remember that it only takes a handful of fiercely loyal super-fans to spread the good word about you and send your numbers through the roof. Folks these days have a very small attention span though; don’t miss your window of engagement opportunity.

3. Watch for Your Company’s Mentions

You’re probably already tracking everyone that tweets your company using a hashtag or @ symbol; don’t forget to search for plain text mentions too. If your company has an easily misspelled name, search for those variations as well – it’s absolutely imperative that you connect with any fan posting positive or negative tweets about you, and, ideally, within minutes or hours of the mention.

4. Be Humble, Diverse, and Interesting

We already know that tweets need to have value to your audience, but don’t be afraid to infuse personality and spunk in your Twitter persona too. At the same time, no one loves an egocentric company that only blabbers on about itself. Make sure you’re conveying humility, and tweet not only about your company’s endeavors, but things happening in your industry as well. News bites that are relevant to your followers will be highly appreciated, and create a necessary break in all that talking you do about yourself.

By the way, humility always involves an awareness of balance. Please do not ever spam your audience with auto-responder tweets that spew stats all day long. Likewise, don’t schedule an excessive amount of announcements for any one day unless you have a hugely legitimate reason. It’s definitely critical to stay in touch, but when it comes to tweets, there is without a doubt propensity for too much of a good thing.

5. Stream Baby Stream

While I don’t advocate using third party software to pre-schedule a gaggle of tweets, it is super smart to use these tools for streams. Streams are tracking tools that allow you to stay in-the-know about mentions across Twitter on all manner of your industry topics. For example, if you run a cosmetics company, creating a stream for hashtags #makeup and #cosmetics will help you stay on trend regarding what Twitter users are talking about in the space. You can in turn make related comments, showing you’re on the pulse in your industry, responding to real-time topics. This kind of relevancy and engagement is priceless!

6. Be an Obsessive Analyzer

Guessing at the success rate of any social campaign is crazy talk, especially when there are scads of tools to help you determine how well your messaging is working. For Twitter, make friends with Bit.ly. Not only does this nifty site help shorten long URLs so they fit in the very conservative 140 character tweet limit, but it also lets you track click-throughs for each link so you have current metrics for all your efforts. Quantifying your investment in the social space is difficult, but tools like these demystify the process tremendously – if you take the time to use them!

7. Use Your Keywords

If you’ve done your homework and identified the core keywords for your business, use them in your Twitter posts when appropriate too. These terms are like neon signs that point folks to your business, so use them proudly! Make sure to be consistent across your site and social mentions.

resource: http://www.sitepronews.com/2013/10/04/advanced-twitter-tactics-small-businesses/

Video SEO: Getting Your Video Ranked on Page 1 of Google

You have finally figured out how big a boost video marketing can be to your overall Internet marketing efforts. Let’s face it; people would rather watch videos nowadays than read an article. And a lot of businesses are now leveraging that trend by posting tons of video content on their YouTube channel designed to create brand awareness, introduce and sell new products and services, promote upcoming events and generate new business.

Now, posting great video content on YouTube is one thing, making it easy for your target audience to find the video is another. Yes, posting a video on YouTube will generate traffic organically from YouTube searches and possibly from social media shares, especially if the content is of high value. However, imagine how wonderful it would be if your videos appeared on the first page of Google for your target keywords. That would be just amazing, right? But the real question is how do you do this.

Well, it’s not as difficult to get a YouTube video ranked on Google as you may think. All you need is a little video SEO and a bit of elbow grease and you should be able to get there.

Here are 3 key steps to help you along the way:

1. Optimize Your YouTube Video Page

The YouTube page where your video is posted is just like any landing page or website. It has the same on-page elements that Google uses to evaluate for search placement. So, like any landing page, you will want to optimize it for the keywords you are targeting. Here are the things you will need to do.

• Title: Write a compelling title that contains your target keyword. As much as possible, don’t exceed 70 characters, and make sure to have your target keyword within the first 5 words of the title.
• Description: Write a description of no less than 300 words. Insert your target keywords generously into the content. 4 to 5 exact match instances of the keywords you are targeting is a good rule to follow. The keyword should also appear in the first sentence of the description and in every paragraph thereafter. Including other relevant keywords in the description also helps. Finally, don’t forget to include links to your website and relevant links to other videos that can be found on your YouTube channel.
• Tags: This portion should contain all the keywords that matter. Your target keywords as well as other relevant tags. For instance, if you are targeting the keyword “Video SEO” for that particular video page, consider adding tags like “video”, “video marketing”, “SEO”, and “search engine optimization”.
• Transcript: If your video has voice-over or features someone talking, then it will be definitely worth your while to upload a transcript of the video script. Now, this only becomes beneficial if the keyword is mentioned at least 2 times in the video. This is an optional optimization technique since there have been cases where a video that didn’t have voice-over or a transcript still ranked on Google. In any case, having this element on your video page helps a lot, so consider getting it done.

Additionally, the audience retention rate of a video plays a factor in Google and YouTube search placement. In order to maximize this, you will want to not only produce great video content but keep the length of the video below 5 minutes. Shorter videos tend to generate better audience retention rates.

2. Get Immediate Traction for Your Video

Once your YouTube video has been published and the video page optimized for search, the next thing you will need to do is to get instant traction for it. This is because YouTube tends to rank videos that have a good deal of views, likes, comments, and social shares high on searches. Eventually, those same factors will increase the video’s visibility on Google.

So, how do we do that? Here are some actionable steps you can take:

• Embed the video on your website or blog. Doing this will not only create a high valued, relevant backlink to your YouTube video page, but will also provide the video with instant activity, especially if your website or blog gets a steady stream of web traffic.
• Share the video via your social media accounts. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+ are just some of the social networks you should share your video on. Ask your network of friends and followers to watch, comment on, like, and share the video. If you have a Facebook Fan Page or a Google+ business page, consider sharing or embedding the video there as well.
• Email the video to your friends, colleagues, clients.
• Try to ask everyone you know that has an active account on YouTube to create a video response to your video. Every video response your YouTube video gets increases the page’s trust factor and popularity, which will have a significant effect on search placement on both Google and YouTube.
• Submit the video to SMO like social bookmarking sites like Stumbleupon and Delicious.

3. Get Some Consistent Link Building Done

Again, Google treats a YouTube page like any other landing page. With that being said, link building will play a significant role in getting your video to the top of Google. This is especially true if the keywords you are targeting are highly competitive. A steady monthly link building campaign consisting of a variety of link types such as social bookmarks, blog articles, web 2.0 posts, article directory submissions, and video syndication, will greatly affect the video’s visibility on Google over time. Typically, with consistent link building, you can get a video ranking on page 1 of Google for your target search terms in less time than you think.

Resource: http://www.sitepronews.com/2013/08/22/video-seo-getting-your-video-ranked-on-page-1-of-google/