Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Five Ways to Make Your B2B Popular on Twitter from Karlie Justus at SocialMediaB2B.com

Chances are, you know that you’re supposed to be supporting your company’s B2B social media campaign with an active presence of Twitter. But what you might be thinking to yourself is, “How do we do that?” Check out this article by Karlie Justus at SocialMediaB2B.com, “5 Ways for B2B Companies to Engage on Twitter.” Justus says that building an online reputation, generating leads and company coverage through Twitter doesn’t happen overnight. You need to develop ongoing two-way communication with your followers. Her five ways to do this include:

  • Original content: Create tweets to alert people of the original content that you should be adding several times a week to your company web site. Rewrite eNewsletters, news releases and updates. If you don’t have any news of note, create 140-character facts and tips that you can fall back on when you tweet.
  • Retweet: Did you get some excellent information from a Tweet? Share it with your followers. It shows you care about your industry and the other players in it.
  • On-the-Ground Updates: Twitter’s mobility and brevity make if perfect for up-to-the-minute updates. “From the field” tweets about events at conferences for example (“just had a great conversation with manager of Smith in Atlanta,” e.g.)shows your company is busy and on top of things.
  • Determine the popular hash tags and keywords to your industry: Then use Twitter searches to find tweets with those terms. This allows you to follow users who tag their tweets.
  • Tweet with Personality: Your tweets don’t all have to be about business. Justus says, “Think of Twitter as a cocktail party.” Appoint one person to handle Tweets for your company and encourage them to let their personality come through. This means occasional Tweets that step outside the business realm. It makes your company look human and easier to identify with.

Friday, August 27, 2010

StayOnSearch.com: Save time on Social Media Research with Seven Social Bookmark Tools

One of the setbacks to staying up to date with your social media campaign is that it can take up a lot of time.


Any advantage you can get toward saving you time is welcome. Which is why Mark Thompson posted “7 Social Bookmarking Tools You Should Know About.” While he admits the list is hardly conclusive, Thompson says that all of these tools have helped him to stay active on numerous communities.

Sub Digger: Thompson calls Sub Digger “a real time saver” for anyone who is very active on Digg. Browse all of the Digg submissions of your friends and colleagues with a custom submission bar.

OnlyWire: This social bookmarking syndication tool can send your post to more than 20 popular social bookmarking sites with one click. Among the sites covered are DIgg, Mixx, Reddit, Twitter, Friend Feed and more.

Social Blade: Provides front page analytics for Digg, as well as a current list of the most frequent Digg users.

Su.Pr: Pronounced “Super,” This specialized URL shortening service caters specifically to submissions on Stumbleupon.

Social Bookmarking Demon: Think advanced OnlyWire. You can submit your articles to many more sites at once. Ideal for anyone looking to generate more traffic and links, Thompson says.

Social Marker: Adds social bookmarking buttons to your website or blog, so you can access any social site with a click.

Friend Statistics: Thompson says that Friend Statistics is “one of the best tools for anyone who is addicted to Digg analyzes your Digg connections.


(Photo courtesy petittscreations.com)

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Kristi Hines Offers 25 Ways to Search your Social Media Keywords

Like your website, your social media presence should have keywords that help to make new customers aware of your existence. There are many ways to determine which keywords are working best for you. Kristi Hines, writing for stayonsearch.com, compiled “The Top 25 Social Media Keyword Search Tools.” Among her favorites:

Technorati: Searches blogs and posts by topic. Has a lot of useful features, including checking the latest posts on topical subjects listed in the menu. Its “tag page” allows you to select a keyword and review common topics for the keyword.

BoardReader: Lets you search topics discussed in forums and message boards. It can give you some idea of how many forums are currently available that focus on your particular topic.

Advanced Twitter Search: As the name implies, you can use it to search keywords, locations, sentiment and more in Tweets on Twitter.

Twazzup: More detailed than Advanced Twitter Search, it provided real time updates for related tags, links, pictures, tweets and much more.

Kurrently: Collects all recent comments on any word or subject on Facebook and Twitter, and presents them conveniently.

YouTube: The top video search engine. Hines says it’s only going to be more powerful, now that it has extended the time limit for videos to 15 minutes.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

B2B Companies: Be more social now with these 11 tips from Hubspot.com

B2B businesses are traditionally slow to adapt to new changes. This is particularly true when it comes to social media. Many companies are still having trouble understanding that they need a social media program. Sure, there are a lot of technical things to worry about that are best left to the folks in your IT department. However, Kipp Bodnar, writing for Hubspot .com, says there are “11 Simple Ways B2B Companies Can Be More Social Today.” They are smaller steps that any B2B employee can not only implement easily, but also actually understand.


Socialize your documents: Chances are you’ve written white papers and speeches that contain valuable information that your potential customers can use. Post them on the web.

Social Media Icons: Make sure you have company logos that conform to the sizing requirements of various websites.

Set up social media accounts now, even if your company won’t be using them for a month or two.

Create a profile for your company at LinkedIn.com. It’s a good way to start connecting with other people in your business as well as potential customers.

Write blog posts. Even if you don’t have a live blog yet, create content that you can post when you go live.

Make sure your staff is equipped to go social. Make sure they have the right tools to create the media you’ll need to create when you go live.

Start to understand the tools of social media conversations such as Twitter Search, Alerts Grader and Boardreader. Use them to monitor the search terms of your business.

Determine who in your company will handle your social media content. Go over how they will represent the company in their posts and blogs.
Set up a Bit.ly account. This service shortens URLs to give you more room on limited-character sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Add social media browser extensions that can help make your browser more social-friendly.

Install Analytics. As you start getting new visitors from your social efforts, you’ll want to know exactly where they’re coming from Analytics tools can help you do just that.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Terry Van Horne: 3 SEO “Best Practices” That Nobody Understands

If you’ve been in SEO for more than five minutes, you know there are certain “rules” or best practices by which everyone takes as law. But Terry Van Horne, writing at the Fire Horse Trail blog, says there are at least 3 Misunderstood SEO Best Practices that are accepted as truth by even the most experienced SEO experts.

  • Accepted Practice #1: Pages should be built for Search Engines, not Users. Van Horne says this is not a good “best practice” for several reasons. First, search engines aren’t buying your products, people are. Second,algorithms change in search engines all the time. You don’t want to become a slave to the algorithm. Third, bowing to the will of a search engine now may eliminate future options that you may have had otherwise. For example, if you eliminate meta keyword tags to please Google because Google doesn’t use them, you may be eliminating the possibility of being seen on other search engines with a different algorithm.
  • Accepted Practice #2: Google only indexes 70 characters in Titles. We’ve all heard this one, but Van Horne says that we have it wrong. While it’s true that Google only displays up to 70 characters in your title, it indexes much more. Van Horne says that Google indexes the entire title, but “weights” the words in the title up to the tenth word or 70th character, whichever comes first. All words beyond that are indexed as part of the document.
  • Accepted Practice #3: There is little SEO value in headings. Van Horne says there’s no way to prove whether this is true or not. He says attempting to measure this belief to verify its truth would be too complicated. However, he falls on the side of using headings, simply because they stand out on the page and may influence other surrounding ranking signals. Van Horne sums up his article by saying that no SEO rules are set in stone. He suggests keeping track of what works for you and what doesn’t, and to take any “set rule” with a grain of salt.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Kristi Hines: Advice on how to Fix Six Common Social Media Gaffes

We’re all still feeling our way along with trying to figure out how to make social media work for our businesses. So any help at all is welcome, especially from internet marketing specialists like Kristi Hines. In an article for SocialMediaExaminer.com, she lists the “Top 6 Social Media Mistakes and How to Fix Them.” Briefly, they are:
1. Having the wrong connections: Is your social message reaching your target market? Quantity is not always as good as quality when it comes to communicating with your friends, followers or fellow tweeters. Hines advises looking for relevant connections in your industry, and provides a variety of ways to find those people using social directories and groups.
2. Hiding your social media presence: The only way people are going to know you’re out there is if you tell them. This includes adding links to your social sites on your home web site, mentioning them in your signature on e-mails, printing them on your business cards and including them in your signature on forums where you have a profile.
3. Sending the wrong message: Keep business and personal social presences separated. Hines says it’s one thing to be researching your credentials to find your last 20 Tweets were trivial nonsense, and quite another to find 20 business-related factors.
4. Using social media for link building: If the only reason you’re creating a social media profile is to hopefully gat a backlink to your website, then you’re not really using social media correctly. IN order to get links that will work for you through social media, you have to be “social.” Participate on relevant sites and let the links come to you.
5. Worrying about ROI: There’s no real proof one way or the other yet that Social Media does anything to improve your ROI. One thing for sure is that most of the benefits of social media are not really measurable from a profit standpoint. You can use it to increase your visibility, which in turn attracts more people to your business, which may result in more sales, but there are too many other factors to consider in order to say that social media clinched the sale.
6. Following too many “rules.” Everybody’s an expert. You’ve probably read a few who have what they feel are the unbreakable rules of social media. But the fact is, what works in one business may not work at all in another. Social Media is constantly evolving. Hines recommends following people in your business who have successfully sued social media to accomplish something.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Greg Elwell at Hubspot.com: News Releases and SEO make for good partners

Greg Elwell, Founder of B2B Inbound near San Francisco, published an article recently about “4 Ways News Releases Boost SEO.” Elwell says that news releases can serve as a search engine magnet for rankings. As a result, he recommends that all businesses include a “newsroom” feature on their website. This gives you a place to publish optimized press releases. He describes these as PR releases that contain your primary keywords. The goal, of course, is more attention from both your target audience and the search engine crawlers. Elwell then lists four things press releases do that help attract attention:
They increase the number of indexed pages on your site. The more pages you have on your site, the more looks you’re likely to attract.
Press releases diversify content strategy. By developing a news release marketing strategy, you can use a wider number of news releases on your site. “Don’t just think about publishing ‘Big News,” Elwell says, but come up with as many stories as you can about various internal happenings at your company.
A press release area allows you to blow your company horn. By publishing your PR releases online, you’re telling the world about your business or product.
Press release areas are easy to maintain. All you need is a blog and RSS Feed, both of which you probably have.

Friday, August 6, 2010

Van Iderstyne: How to Talk Stubborn Clients into Much-Needed Fresh Content

“Selling Clients on Content” may seem like an easy thing to do. But Jennifer van Iderstyne at SearchEngineWatch.com says that many clients simply don’t see the point. “Sometimes part of a link builder’s job is explaining to a client why it isn’t feasible to ‘just get links to the home page,’ or why their shipping guarantee doesn’t count as content.

To handle the hard-to-persuade customers, Van Iderstyne suggests hitting them where in hurts – in the ROI. Tell the customers that in order for them to increase their rankings, they’re going to have to get some one-way links feeding to their site. The only way to do this is for the site to offer more than what people expect to see when they get there. For example, if you sell electronics, merchandise doesn’t count as content, because merchandise is always there. You need to be adding blog content or commentary elsewhere on the site on a regular basis. More content usually leads to higher ranking in the SERPS. The higher you rank, of course, the more people will see you and click on your site. Van Iderstyne says that keeping those new visitors interested is vital in order to “pull” them deeper into the site. This is done by providing links to more information and articles about your company.

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

SearchEnginePeople.com: Another Analogy To Explain SEO to the Masses



James Duthie, in his column at SearchEnginePeople.com, explains why analogies are so popular when it comes to explaining SEO. In his words: “People just don’t get it.” He says SEO is still one of the "dark arts" to the average businessperson, so analogies help to ease the learning curve by likening SEO to something with which everyone can identify.
In his article “Yet another SEO Analogy,” Duthie says that SEO is like property investment:


    1. It needs a solid foundation: If the foundation on your house isn’t solid, everything else gets compromised. And so it is with SEO. You need a solid foundation for long-term success. Analyze customer search behavior. Study your competition. Lay your foundation for success before you build.

    2. You must use high-quality materials in your property structure; With a home, what you put on the solid foundation is equally as important. Think of your website as your online property. Use only the highest-quality website code and content in your “structure.” Custom-craft your SEO to help you stand out from all the others.

    3. Build in the right neighborhood: You don’t build a mansion in the slums; it will never see its true value that way. The same is true for SEO and your link building strategy. Links are your neighborhood. Seek out high-quality links. Avoid spammers and other link slumlords that won’t add any value to your property.