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3 Steps To Dig Out From Your Social Media Rut

Are you managing your company’s social media marketing? How are you performing? Are you making an impact or are you stuck?

Most professionals would like to think that they dig and find new ways when they hit a wall. However, in reality, many squirm around the problem and hope that somehow their efforts would yield results. It doesn’t work that way. When you are stuck, you have to dig.

How do you dig out of it? Let’s deal with this situation head on.

Situation
Your social media content is not creating the buzz and not engaging with your followers.

I have seen many businesses treat their social media channels as a gateway to share cute and hopefully enthralling news from around the world. They will throw in great stories of samaritans, animals acting funny on cameras and of course, how to beat the Monday blues and get excited about weekends!

We do this because who wouldn’t like those warm and fuzzy stories. But in this pursuit, we lose the focus of why fans are following our business on Facebook and Twitter. If they want those fuzzy stories, there are organizations that champion and promote such stories. They can always get it from them. More importantly, you are simply curating content that’s gone viral and very likely they have been viewed by everyone all over the web umpteen times. Where’s your creativity, what’s your contribution?

Solution
To conquer this challenge, you must first answer the big question.

1. The Big Question
What’s the motivation behind creating this social media channel? Do you want to help your clients learn more about your product? Do you want to engage with prospects? A mix of both? Do you want to establish yourself as the thought leader in your business space? Do you want to cater to a certain group of professionals by providing them with helpful tips? What’s the goal? You have to be absolutely clear about it. Keep the goal focussed. Having too many goals will only derail the impact.

Nike created their Facebook page with the goal to motivate people, athletes. They are not selling products, they are not providing customer support, simply encouraging followers to be active and out there.

Once you know your goal, start thinking about your audience.
2. Know your audience
Who are they? Knowing your audience will help you promote your Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin posts. What really helps is creating a persona of your followers. Who’s your typical follower, sketch the persona of that person and keep it in front of you when you write the content. Try to understand their pain points and align that with your goal.

3. Build a Strategy
Once you know your goal and the audience, now’s the time to strategize. Many marketers would start with the strategy straight away, Don’t. You’ll only be shooting in the dark and throwing everything around to see what sticks.

If you are looking to upsell to your clients, focus on upcoming products, give them discount coupons. Engage them through promotions and referrals. If you are trying to convince prospects, focus on case studies, testimonials, thought leadership articles. You have to strategize based on your goal and audience. Also, being aware of your brand identity and the kind of product or service that you offer and the budget that you have will all play into your strategy.

But if you are stuck, and want to dig out, you’ll have to roll your sleeves and strategize.

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What You Need To Know About SEO

SEO – Search Engine Optimization can encapsulate a lot of things  for a lot of us. There are many optimizations you can make to your web content that will help search engines find them easily and more importantly, display them on top of search results.

In this article, I am going to break down SEO in its simplest forms; Content and Linkbacks.

1. CONTENT
This is what tells the search engines what your website is all about. What do you sell? What’s your idea? What’s your expertise or opinion? Search engines do so by figuring out what’s the most used word on your website. In fact, it keeps a tab of all words and how many times each one of them is used on that page. Which is why, when you start SEO, the first question asked is, “what are your keywords?”

Keywords:
Simply put, this is what people are typing in when searching for what you provide. You may be a veteneranian, but your keyword will not just be a veteneranian or a pet doctor or an animal doctor, but also all the common diseases that pets deal with. Location of your office or offices is also an important keyword besides other things. This is critical, so choose your keywords wisely, There’s some relief as Google and Bing provide you with keyword search tools.

Keyword Search Tools:
a. https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner
b. http://www.bing.com/toolbox/keywords

There are other tools, like
c. http://www.moz.com and
d. https://www.compete.com

These tools will help you gain some competitive intelligence too and tell you what keywords your competitors are using to drive traffic to their websites.

Word of Caution:
Remember, just because your website has lots of keywords, it won’t mean that you’ll start to show up in search results. In fact, be wary of overusing keywords. Google does not like being tricked. If it figures out and it does very quickly that you have stuffed the page with keywords, it may penalize your website by completely deleting that page or the entire website from its search index. Bad place to be in. So, optimize, but don’t over optimize.

SEO Template

If you want to show up high in search results, you must have high quality content. There’s no substitute for it. One clear indicator of high quality content is how many people have referenced your website by linking to it from their websites, blogs, social media sites etc. This constitutes, linkbacks.

Before we get to linkbacks, take a look at the “SEO Keyword Template” image. I created this image to give a visual reference of where keywords can be used most effectively.

 

2. LINKBACKS
This is what tells the search engines, how popular your content is compared to other sites that deal with the same topic. More linkbacks mean higher popularity and higher position in the search result display.

Another, Word of Caution:
Do not buy linkbacks, there are many who will promise 100’s of linkbacks for a few bucks. Google will figure that out sooner than later. Also, sprinkling linkbacks by creating dummy sites won’t help either, nor would commenting on public blogs in hope of getting linkbacks.

Linkbacks have to be earned through high quality content. Make your content compelling and unique that its readers can’t help but share. It’s easier said than done and hence this method works. Only the best content will bubble up.

Now there are actions you can take to make the sharing of your content easier.

How To Increase Linkbacks?

a. Write compelling content
b. Create engaging infographics. People like to share images, providing interesting infographics increases the chances of sharing. “SEO Keyword Template”, hopefully is one such image! Go ahead, share it!!
c. Distribute your content through different social media channels and blogs where you have a chance of finding more readers.
d. Find the right audience to promote your content. A great veteneranian is great only for pet lovers and pet owners. Post links to professional groups on Linkedin, meetup and other similar sites.

Concluding Thoughts
These are simple and time tested ideas to get you started on the right track. Following these tips will help you boost your search engine ranking and drive more traffic to your webiste. There are many other actions you can take to improve SEO. Broadly, those actions can be classified either as “on page optimization” or “off page optimizations.” I’ll talk about other methods of improving SEO in subsequent blogs.

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What’s Your Social Media Content Strategy?

People can talk for hours on this topic and still leave you with little to no clue on what your social media content strategy should be.

social media icons

How about you answer these 2 questions about your content?

Q1. Is this content unique?
That is your readers can get this content only from you. If your readers can Google and find similar or better content online, then it’s a big NO.

Q2. Would they want more of it?

If the answer is yes to  both the questions, run with it, if the answer is yes for at least one question, it should still make it to your editorial calendar. You’ll be surprised at how very few companies can answer yes to both the questions.

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Don’t Lose a Customer

Many SaS based software companies lose their clients after the clients’ needs are fulfilled. They paid for your service; month to month or annually and then cancel accounts when done.

Is it possible to restrict their software usage to bare minimum and extend them the service in this minimum mode for free or almost free so they don’t have to cancel their subscriptions? If the answer is yes, you may have just cut down your customer attrition many folds.

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What’s Brewing In Your Mind?

Your best idea is ahead of you. However, you can only get to it after a failed 100 ideas… so, go ahead and execute that idea that’s brewing in your mind. If it doesn’t succeed, it will at least get you closer to success.

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Starbucks to Acquire Barnes and Noble?

What if Starbucks were to acquire Barnes and Noble?

First of all we wouldn’t be seeing notices like these. 

Starbucks-Barnes-and-Nobles
Starbucks-Barnes-and-Nobles

Second of all Barnes and Noble with a market cap of $ 788.91 Million is an easy acquisition for Starbucks with a market cap of $42.24 Billion.

And for Barnes and Noble with their stocks fluctuating between $13 and $16 for a long time is only slipping further. Nook sales are down and Amazon has beaten them in both; e-readers and print books.

Starbucks’s stocks have been rising steadily since 2009.

But these are not the reasons why I am recommending that Starbucks should acquire Barnes and Noble.

I am actually saying that Starbucks need a game changing act soon and acquiring Barnes and Noble is one such act.

Here are my reasons:

  1. Starbucks has serious competition in its core business. Caribou coffee can give Starbucks a run for its money any day. I personally prefer Caribou Coffee when I have the option between the two. Caribou Coffee has a better store layout and a more homey touch than Starbucks that resembles more like an old library. In other words, Caribou Coffee is more in tune with Gen Y.
  2. Amazon went from a book seller to a world’s leading tech company, why can’t a connoisseur coffee seller foray into technology? What better opportunity than to invest the money in Barnes and Noble e-readers to boost its appeal and sales. I can attest that Nook is a classy device, lost in the sea of competition that is willing to make no money out of them yet.
  3. Coffee and books are made for each other. Why can’t we add breakfast and pastries to that list. After all you would have so much real estate to play with. e-readers are the future. You’ll have more space than you actually need to host all the books of the world.
  4. Offer a Starbucks coupon with every book you sell. Come on Mr. Schultz, we know those coffees really don’t cost that much!
  5. And not to forget that an act of keeping Barnes and Noble open will make Starbucks an instant heart throb of millions of Americans, including yours truly.
  6.  Gen Z adore this section (see image below), you need them to come to you before they discover Caribou Coffee. Invest in the future.
Barnes and Nobles Store Closing
Barnes and Noble Store Closing
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Open Source Marketing

If you are confident in the stuff that you are selling – why would ya sell it at the hook end?…unless your intentions are different?

Producers need to show more confidence in their products before they expects consumers to do the same. One way companies showcase their expertise in a market segment is through white papers and case studies – establishing themselves as leaders in that segment. But when you decide to read that article, you have to provide your entire portfolio before you can do that. I loose faith at that time; in their product and in their company.  If what you have written is really that amazing, I’ll come to you again and again. Not the other way – where you are chasing me because I took a bite at your bait.

If companies were to follow the rule of showcasing their talent without bait and switching, I think they will be forced to put out something more substantial; their marketeers would thing longer and harder and maybe provide a more valuable asset than “a worm at the end of a hook”. If they can’t – then we know that what comes with a hook can’t be anything but a “worm”.

This is Open Source Marketing.