Marketing 2.0 in plain language
As we know, SERP 1 is the Holy Grail of marketing. It means that you are the number one result in Google for the terms you want to be found on.
I recently scored my first SERP 1 in Google on a very competitive keyword. Yaay! I thought it was a good idea to take this blog post and use it as an example to educate and inspire you – so you can start writing your own chart topping blog posts.
If you’ve ever been on Twitter for more than 2 minutes, you probably know what a hashtag is.
Just in case you don’t: a hashtag is a word with a # symbol in front of it and it’s used to categorise and group conversations that are happening on micro blogging services such as Twitter.
Using hashtags can help your tweet get more attention, retweets and clicks and even help you build followers.
But there is a problem.
According to this research from social media management software provider Argyle Social many marketing professionals use hashtags ineffectively.
In the research they analysed more than 37,000 total tweets from 103 Twitter business accounts. They found out that some companies got much more clicks from their tweets containing hashtags than others.
Using hashtags: what doesn’t work?
Hashtags do not work when the words you use are too generic. Too broad. For example, the research shows that hashtags like #socialmedia, #business, #sales or #crm are too generic. People are not following these because there is too much ‘noise’ to filter out.
The same goes for hashtags like #superbowl or hashtags from large conferences like #adtech or #sxsw, because these hashtags fly by quicker than anyone can read.
Using hashtags: what does work?
Hashtags need to be relevant, targeted and occur naturally in the conversation. Think for instance of:
Key insight for marketers, PRs and business communicators when using hashtags
On the social web you need to get much more targeted than you were used to in mass communications. It’s not about reaching many people. It’s about reaching the people who really want to hear what you have to say and will share it with their peers.
To do that you have to think specifically about what exactly people are interested in. What are the most relevant hashtags about the topic you have to offer. Then create the right hashtag or combinations of hashtags, that will get the right message to the right audience.
Happy #hashtagging!
This morning I was having a cup of coffee with a marketing strategist who had just started a WordPress website and blog. His site looked great. But it wasn’t optimised for search engines in the slightest.
This happens a lot, because many business people think SEO is scary and difficult. But it ain’t. In my view it’s actually a core business skill. Also, basic SEO for WordPress is not too difficult to implement.
Here are 5 quick SEO wins you can implement today through your WordPress CMS:
While I was searching in Google for the term ‘social media marketing’ Google Suggest gave me the term ‘social media marketing for dummies’. And that means people are appearantly searching for that.
Google Suggest is a really handy tool to get a grip on long tail searches and it is also a source of inspiration for blog topics. And that’s why I am now writing this post for ‘social media marketing for dummies’.
This Friday and Saturday I’ve been invited to be part of the Design Award Jury for the Hall 1 exhibits for the 2011 annual International Broadcasting Convention at the RAI Amsterdam. Together, we will be looking for the exhibits with a strong, stylish and confident visual presence that makes for an accomplished and differentiated brand.
The IBC expects around 48,000 attendees from more than 140 countries and includes major industry speakers such as filmmaker James Cameron, Virgin Media COO Andrew Barron, Christian Hernandez, head of international business development EMEA Facebook through to pretty much everyone who is anyone in the global media and broadcast industry.
To get in the mood, I decided to check out more than 100 websites of the Hall 1 exhibitors. As marketing director of our strategy and communications 2.0 company I couldn’t resist doing a quick analysis of how these companies represent themselves online. Here’s what I found:
Here’s a classic social media marketing cartoon, first published on Eloqua’s blog (a company for demand creation software) in a guest submission from Valeria Maltoni, business strategist. Check it out:
At the moment about 20 million people are on Google Plus, Google’s newly launched social network. Many of those are tech innovators, social media marketing experts and online early adapters.
This is the traditional way of growing a user base. First pioneers and innovators, then early majority, late majorty and finally laggards. This is how Facebook grew for instance.
Google Plus has the opportunity to do this differently. They need to deploy the pincer movement. The pincer movement is a military maneuver, where both flanks of the opponent are simultaneously attacked.
Wow. Shocking.
As it turns out, Linkedin has sneakily changed it’s members account settings, so that their name and face can be used in advertsing messages on the Linkedin platform.
Ehrm… What?!
Last month I wrote a post about how to import your Facebook pictures into Google Plus.You can do this manually by first downloading your Facebook photos and then uploading them into your G+ Photo albums.
In the comment section of my post some people were kind enough to point out some alternate ways of importing your Facebook photos into Google Plus.
You can for instance use Photograbber, which also allows you to download your friends photos or any other photos that have you tagged for instance.
An interesting comment came from Christopher Russell who wrote a post about importing your Facebook photos into G+ using a recently released Chrome browser app.
Last Tuesday was my one year blogging anniversary! (Yah!)
Right now I’m in the middle of doing a full analysis of traffic and engagement per blog post. I will share this data with you soon.
As I was going over all my old posts, I ran into this one dated February 7th: “Step into my office – a post about blogging and numbers”.
Hi! I’ve been a B2C/B2B marketer for nearly 20 years: founder & consultant at Storywise, brand director at Commodore, marketing director at MonteVerdi.TV and head of marketing & promotion at EMI Music. Today, I’m a proud husband, father of two & content marketing specialist at ROBIN – the intelligent customer service assistant.
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