Tips for Getting More Facebook Shares

Filed Under Checklists, Community, Marketing /Sales / Social Media, Successful Blog, Tools | 1 Comment

By Charles Mburugu

Everyone would want to have their Facebook posts shared by as many people as possible. A share is somewhat like a vote of confidence, showing that someone values your content enough to share it with others. Therefore, getting many shares enhances your credibility and exposes your Facebook profile or page to a wider audience.

Here are some guidelines which will help you increase your Facebook shares.

1. Post at the right time

When you post on Facebook is as important as what you post. Therefore, you need to take time to study the Facebook habits of your audience. In most cases, people look at their updates first thing in the morning, during their lunch break, after work or on weekends. This means that anything posted during business hours might be missed by your target audience. However, not all audiences are the same. Study your audience and find out what would work best for them.

2. Be relevant

People like Facebook pages or follow profiles which cover topics of interest to them. Therefore, you cannot afford to just post anything on your Facebook profile. Make sure all the content published on your profile is relevant to your theme as well as your audience. For instance, if your page is for a gym, it would be inappropriate to post anything about home improvement.

3. Use videos and photos

Sharing visual content can be very powerful way of capturing the interest of your audience. When people are scanning through text-only updates, they could easily miss something. However, when updates are accompanied by videos and photos, your audience is more likely to pay attention and even share with others. Therefore, sharing relevant visual content on your Facebook profile is a very effective way of increasing the level of audience interaction.

4. Have a clear call to action

If you want people to follow your profile, like a page, share updates or simply comment, ask them to do so. This means that all your posts should be accompanied with an appropriate call to action. When you tell people what exactly you want them to do, they are likely to heed the call to action.

5. Post educational content

Most people would love to learn something new in their topics of interest. This is why it is important to occasionally share relevant educational material on your Facebook page or profile. Every time you publish a how-to post on your blog, remember to share the link as a Facebook update, as well as a brief summary of what the post is all about.

6. Share useful lists

People love lists. Take time to create a great list on a relevant topic and share it with your Facebook followers or fans. Where possible, you could present it in form of an infographic. If the content is great and presented in a professional way, it could easily go viral, thus ensuring more visibility for your page name or profile.

7. Inject some humor

Your Facebook page or profile does not have to be dull and boring. A sprinkling of humor can do wonders in getting the attention of your audience. When people come across something funny, they are likely to share it with others in their social network. Therefore, take time to look for humorous content which can be shared once in a while.

What are you doing to increase your Facebook engagement?

Author’s Bio: Charles Mburugu is a professional blogger who likes sharing tips for internet marketers and bloggers. Currently, he is writing for websitetemplates.org.

Simple Sentiment Analysis for Small Business

Filed Under Branding, Marketing /Sales / Social Media, SOB Business, Strategy/Analysis, Tools | Leave a Comment

Stop reading this post right now if you’re rolling in cash, have a team of more than 10 people involved in your marketing efforts, or if your social media headquarters looks anything like this:

Social listening command center

OK, now that those lucky folks are gone, let’s talk reality for most of us.

Are you relying solely on Google Alerts to find out what your customers are talking about? Maybe you took it one step further and set up a Hootsuite column to track Twitter mentions. What are you doing with that information as it accumulates?

Welcome to the club.

But we can all take it up several notches this week, by implementing a few simple routines.

Step One – Start Proactively Listening

Use the free tools at your disposal and start seeking out mentions of your brand, your company, and your industry. Both Topsy and Social Mention are great options, and will cover Google+ and Twitter, as well as blogs. I do this task weekly, gathering the resulting information into a spreadsheet.

What’s that you say? No-one’s talking about you? Not to worry.

Turn the tables, and evaluate sentiment about your big brand competitors. Find larger companies that are in your industry and see what people are saying about them. Is it positive or negative? You might uncover a great business opportunity, or a competitor weakness by doing this. Bonus: you might discover topic ideas for your blog!

Step Two – Self-Exams Are Useful Too

Particularly if you don’t have a lot of external social discussion going on yet (maybe you just launched, or you haven’t gotten traction yet), evaluate the contents of your email feedback or support questions. Analyze whether the questions and reactions you’re getting from your own customers are positive or negative. Talk to your colleagues and collect some anecdotal evidence if you don’t have a formal online feedback tool.

Step Three – Act on the Data

Now that you have some indicators of sentiment, get further value out of the exercise by engaging with those who mentioned you. For example, if Topsy revealed a Tweet that gave you a shout-out, you might reply to that person with a thanks. If you found that a certain person has been promoting your content consistently, you might want to reach out and look for some of their content that you can promote.

On the flip side, if you find someone who is unhappy with your services or who has mentioned your company in a negative light, evaluate whether you can address the issue and turn them around. This is one of the strong suits of social media—the ability to capture those negative reviews and the opportunity to respond to them.

Are you doing any sentiment analysis right now? How might you add this data to your marketing tool kit?

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee


5 Ways to Use Vine To Grow Your Business

Filed Under Content, Marketing /Sales / Social Media, Successful Blog, Tools | 1 Comment

By Marcela De Vivo

When it comes to social media, Vine is a relatively new tool, and many business owners aren’t even using it yet. If you’re already familiar with Vine, you’ve got a leg up on the competition.

However, just because you know about Vine doesn’t mean you know how to use it the right way.

Vine can be an incredible tool for helping you grow your business, but you have to know how to make and share videos that are effective.

Follow these five simple tips for using Vine to grow your business. You’ll probably be surprised how quick and effective they really are.

Vine videos boost business

1. Use Tags In Your Videos

When you make videos to share on Vine, it’s important that you use tags just like you would when making and sharing images for Twitter and Instagram. Before you pick which tags to use, search for relevant tags to apply so that users can find your videos.

Adding tags to your videos doesn’t take long at all, and it can really increase the amount of views that you get, which can in turn increase the amount of visitors you get to your website.

2. Be Social

One important but often overlooked aspect of Vine is the social media aspect. Making videos you can share is great, but you also need to make friends, find and comment on videos and generally get a dialogue going with consumers and other businesses. Once you start engaging people on Vine, they’ll start following you back, which will help to create exposure for your content and business.

3. Work to Humanize Your Brand

For very large brands, using Vine is a quick and easy to way to create behind-the-scenes videos that can make your company seem less like a faceless entity and more like the passion project of a few successful individuals. Make videos that tell a story about where you work, who you work with and why your company is special.

Videos that humanize a brand are generally very successful, and they can work wonders for the public image of your company.

4. Integrate Customers

If your business routinely interacts with its customers, putting some of them on film and then sharing those videos is a great way to build your brand. Of course, you’ll need to ask your customers ahead of time, but many will be happy to participate.

You can also announce a video contest for your customers, allowing them to share videos about using one of your products or your service. If you do this, make sure you include a prize for the best video to really entice people.

5. Have Fun With It

Not all of the videos that you create for Vine need to be totally focused on your business.

Creating humorous videos that you can share with humor sites is a great way to get huge numbers of visitors, which will certainly help attract new customers to your site. Your video might even go viral, which is always a good thing.

Vine is a unique tool that you need to start using in your business. It may not seem like six seconds is enough time to really say anything about your company, but you’ll be surprised how much Vine can really do for you if you embrace it.

Have you tried making a Vine yet?

Author’s Bio: Marcela De Vivo is a freelance writer from Los Angeles. Her background is in online marketing and in specializes in a variety of topics, from social networking, search marketing, web hosting and content development.
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