Overwhelmed By Social Media? How HootSuite Can Help You Get Organized And Save Time!

If as part of your small business marketing you’ve already decided your business could profit from social media, but the whole thing is frankly so overwhelming that you don’t know where to start, help is at hand. Perhaps you’re already signed up to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare, but other than that you’ve done nothing with your accounts. Maybe you also have a WordPress blog you make the odd posting to every month or so.


The reality is, dabbling in social media doesn’t work . . . particularly if you’re in business. For businesses, social media is a kind of ‘all or nothing’ experience. And it’s extremely time-consuming, right? Particularly if you’re a one-man or one-woman business when there just never seems enough hours in the day generally.

Well now there’s a programme that can help you automate all your social media activity. It’s called HootSuite – and it’s brilliant for updating all your social media platforms at the same time.

Here’s an overview of what you get when you sign up to HootSuite:

The Ability to Manage Multiple Social Networks

With HootSuite, you can integrate all your social networking sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook and update them easily via a single manageable location. HootSuite also lets you update a range of other social networks through Ping.fm.

Control Your Team’s Workflow

HootSuite allows you to add multiple remote users and permit them to update feeds and tweets on your behalf.

Manage Twitter Feeds

Once you start following more than a dozen Twitter accounts, keeping up with all the constant feeds can be an almost impossible task. With HootSuite, it’s a doddle. HootSuite enables you to create lists of Twitter followers easily and stay tuned to their updates.

Upload Files and Customize URLs

HootSuite uses its own shortening function “ow.ly” which enables you to customize URL parameters. And when you want to share updates or files with your followers, HootSuite converts your content into a shortened link and embeds it into the file.

Pre-write Your Content and Schedule It For Posting Later

Another great feature of HootSuite is that you can pre-write content in advance and schedule it to be posted on your Twitter site whenever you want. This facility makes it easier to keep up with the demand for fresh content. With HootSuite, if you want to post a tweet a 3am you won’t have to set your alarm to do it!

HootSuite is iPhone and Droid App compatible

Compatible with the latest iPhone and Droid App, your marketing team can perform their social media functions anytime, anywhere.

Tracking Statistics & Data

Want to know how many clicks your tweets are getting and where from? HootSuite’s tracking system provides you with comprehensive data on all this and much more.

HootSuite is the perfect tool for managing your brand’s social media activity. It allows you to track backlinks and retweets and find out what people are saying about your business. HootSuite encourages greater and more efficient productivity and better interaction with your social media team.

Web Marketing For Business

If you want to succeed in business on the internet, marketing is vital. There are many facets to internet marketing. Which ones are the most important?


There’s no right answer to that question. This is a subjective topic and because the internet is very open source, there is no right or wrong answer but here is some information from a web marketing company about several vital steps that could help you increase your chances of online success:


Do Your Research

Before you embark on an internet marketing campaign, doing a substantial amount of research is essential. You’ll want to research your market, your competition, your audience, and review information to help you define a search engine marketing and / or pay per click advertising strategy. If you can’t do the research yourself either due to lack of expertise in this area or lack of cycles you could hire an internet research or consultancy firm to help you.

What’s important from a research perspective? Whether you do it yourself or get some help, keyword analysis is important. Analysing your competition will help you as well. Looking at various social media strategies can provide a wealth of info and gathering general business intelligence will pay off in multiple ways --- helping you define, strategise, and execute a campaign that will work.
Analysis

After you’ve defined and executed your web marketing strategy, ongoing analysis will tell you what’s going well and what isn’t going so well. Info gathered for internet marketing campaigns can help you with improvements and can also help you fuel future campaigns as well.

Reputation and Relationship Development & Management

Work to develop a great reputation online. Establish yourself as a professional and establish your company’s presence as one that believes in customer experience, value, and service.

Online success needs more that just development of a reputation and / or a brand. It also requires that you nurture relationships. Social marketing is a two way street. So is blogging. Customers are looking for value and this can help to establish trust. Nurturing online reputation and relationships can equate to trust and success in gathering subscribers and followers to your website. Those subscribers and followers could become future clients and sources of word of mouth referrals.

Again, there are many facets to web marketing and taking a step at a time can help you success. Regardless of whether you’re embarking on a campaign on your own or getting help and whether you’re new to this or not, taking steps toward increasing your online presence is exciting and can pay off huge dividends.

Boost Your Search Engine Ranking

For any company operating in today’s increasingly digital age, taking steps to improve traffic to their websites is a must if they are going to remain competitive. But it’s not as easy as it may appear, and sometimes reading up on the subject yourself or taking one of the many quick-fix ‘courses’ on offer is not enough to get you the results you want. This is where it may be a good idea to look at bringing in one of the many online and search marketing companies out there to give your business an expert boost. Here are just some of the key services they can provide you with to take you to the next level:


Increasing traffic: You may have identified the keywords potential customers will need to type into the search engine to bring you to your site, but do you know how to convert these to newly generated traffic? Experienced internet marketing companies know exactly how to place these keywords to improve your search engine rankings. Rather than floundering in the sea of other websites all clamouring to rank highest for those particular terms, a paying for a professional, targeted approach will start getting you visitors quickly, and this will lead to...

Higher conversion levels: You have now got the visitors to your site, which is great – but that is only half the battle. Your site needs to be appealing and, above all, easy to use. If a customer is unsure whether to buy from you and the payment process is complicated or difficult to see, you may well lose that sale. Find yourself an expert to provide the full package, from search engine optimisation to a comprehensive website review and your new site traffic will soon start translating to bigger sales and profitability.

Research and analysis: Do you know how to thoroughly research your market and competitors, as well as providing a thorough analysis of your current website performance? Do you know how to find out the most common search enquiries people are making relating to your sector? Don’t worry if not – these are essential elements to any company’s business strategy but it is also part of what the best search marketing companies are there to do.

Paid online marketing: There are times – perhaps during peak sale times – when SEO methods are not enough. At these times it may be advisable to use online advertising methods such as paid placement and pay-per-click to further enhance your ratings. If employed correctly, these methods can provide a real boost, but handled inexpertly and you are spending money to no purpose. If you’re not sure, it’s best to get expert advice from somebody who can advise you on what is appropriate for your website and your market.

Hiring search marketing companies, then, can be a wise medium-term investment. Do choose wisely though, as the quality of service out there does vary. Most importantly, it is worth finding out whether the company you are considering is highly ranked for their keywords themselves, and whether they can provide evidence and testimonials from clients to back up their claims. If not, move on and look for someone else.

Hiring a search engine marketing company to improve your website’s search engine ranking can be looked on as a wise investment. If you hire the right one you can look forward to increased website traffic and much greater visitor conversion levels.

The Pros and Cons of Paid Search Marketing

Using search engine marketing (SEM) methods such as pay-per-click (PPC) or paid inclusion can be very effective in terms of increasing traffic to your website and widening your customer base. But you have to be aware of the best times to employ these strategies, and if you are considering going down this route it may be a good idea to hire a search engine marketing company to advise you on the latest methods – otherwise you may be spending money with very little reward. So when should you use SEM, and what should you avoid?

On the plus side, paid search marketing is a highly targeted method with corresponding low wastage. Because the traffic driven to your website will be those with the right match types in terms of keywords or Google Adwords, your ads only appear when potential customers are searching for products in your particular area, and therefore have a high purchase intent. Logically, then, if your website has a very specific or niche product to sell, pay-per-click may be the right marketing option for you. Traffic volumes with PPC are also more predictable and easier to manage than with search engine optimisation methods (SEO).

Pay-per-click listings can also give you the advantage of speed, since they can appear within a few hours. Contrast this with SEO, which has a much longer lead time. If you are selling a product within a particular time-frame (perhaps for Halloween, for example), then you will want to make the most of the time you have so in this case PPC could be appropriate in terms of overall cost benefits. On the other hand, if your product is more of a slow-burner then SEO may work just as well, if not better, in building up your brand. Basically, you need to decide which approach will be best for the product or service you have.

One of the major disadvantages of pay-per-click marketing is actually born from its strengths. Because it is such an efficient way for companies to achieve high rankings and drive customers to their websites, there is a correspondingly high level of competition. Pay-per-click is based on competitive bids and for some sectors this can lead to alarming levels of inflation. Basically, this can be a prohibitively expensive business if you don’t know when to employ it effectively, or when the placement costs will begin to outweigh the benefits. If you are at all unsure about this, consult a search marketing company who will be able to give you a realistic idea of your potential return on investment, and whether PPC is right for your company.

Because of the potential for inflated PPC prices, sadly this method can often favour larger brands which have a bigger budget and more effective infrastructure in place for managing competition or bigger campaigns, for example. If you are a start-up, it may be a good idea to build up your brand first before embarking on paid search marketing.

Pay-per-click marketing can be a very effective way of driving traffic to your website and improving your search engine rankings. However, it can also be costly and there is a great deal of competition in certain sectors so you need to think carefully about the right time for your company to employ this approach.