Facebook have done a recent about turn with regards to giving people the option to opt out of the new Timeline. In a blog posted yesterday they have stated that all profiles will be changed to the new Timeline over the next month. Originally Facebook said that they would give people the option of whether or not they wanted to change.

If you have a Facebook account and you do not actively opt into the new Timeline you will soon receive a message at the top of your Facebook home to let you know that your profile will be changed, you are then given a week to make any changes before the Timeline is published.

My advice will be not to ignore this, you will be given the chance to hide any posts or photos that you don’t necessarily want everyone to see, it’s easy to forget what you said in a moment of anger about someone years ago. So go check before it’s too late!

Whenever there has been a change to Facebook many users have complained but then soon quietened down once they got used to the new features or layout, is this the same? Many are saying that with the advent of Google+ they may well look to leaving Facebook for good and do their social networking with Google instead.

So what do you think? Have you seen the new Timeline and if so what do you make of it?

Often people rush straight into the design stage of website development without actually really working out their objectives for the site. You really need to start with an online marketing strategy before you do anything else. Once you have this in place design needs to start with your landing pages, these are those pages that people will ‘land’ on when they visit your website. Usually the most visited page will be your home page although if you have a PPC campaign running or are targeting specific keywords in your search marketing strategy then this may include other pages on your site.

These are the most important pages to design in the right way, if you don’t then people won’t hang around and you will have missed out on the opportunity of converting that visitor into a lead for your business. So where to start, well you need to consider the following:

1. What content needs to be on your landing page?

You want your most critical information to be on your landing page, the things that will help someone make a decision about whether they are in the right place and what they need to do next. It needs to be instantly recognisable that you do what the visitor is looking for. You must have your phone/email on your page and also your call to actions, any sign up opportunity whether it’s to download an e-book or subscribe to your newsletter. Anything else can be left for other pages, things like Company information and history just shouldn’t take centre stage.

2. Who is gooing to land on your page?

You may have different types of visitor come to your website, for example clients or prospects, people looking to work for you, the media and many more. Think about the types of people that are likely to visit, who are your most critical visitors and design your landing page with those people in mind. If you have more than one group that fall into this category then think about setting up different landing pages for each group.

3. What do you want people to do

What action do you want visitors to take when they visit your website? Your design should help them to be able to take that action easily and quickly, make sure these call to actions stand out and that you keep your page clean and simple to avoid the eye being distracted away from this more important action.

If you have thought about these things thoroughly then you are ready to start on your website landing page design.

Following on from my previous posts An Introduction to Google+ and Creating a Google+ Page for your business, this time we’ll take a look at some ways to leverage the + power of social media.

Those with their own website or online business can explore a whole new world of social media marketing with an efficient social profile Page using Google+. It’s fun and easy and can be profitable too.

• Google+ posts that are sent to “Public” rank quite well in Google search results By merging Google properties into Google+ and integrating it with the serach engines you can have a significant impact on where your company appears in the results pages.
• Something else you can do is manage circles by distributing clients into specific categories and then share different posts, news or offers with the various circles. This allows you to connect with fans and share information with clients easily.
• Use Hangouts to engage your customers and colleagues. This is high quality video chat that gives you the opportunity to interact with followers face to face, making it much easier to get to know them, answer questions and also get immediate feedback on products and services.
• Another use of Hangouts is for video conferencing and to push live events and seminars to customers.
• Make use of the Google+ badge to promote your site and your Google+ Page. It links your website and page and makes others aware you’re there. If a visitor likes your site and clicks the icon they are taken directly to your Google+ Page and can share and follow your posts.
• Google+ Direct enables people to just enter a “+” in front of your business name when searching on Google in order to get directly to your Google+ Page.
• The +1 button on Google+ is an excellent way for customers to spread the word about your business and let others know about your Google+ presence. You are also able to connect your website +1’s to your Google+ Page +1’s, which is great as people are more inclined to trust recommendations from people they already know.
• Another useful Google+ tool, Ripples, allows you to keep an eye on your posts and information as they move across social networks, so it’s easy to figure out who is sharing and who is paying attention to your content.
• Analytics provide information about your page’s followers and visitors as well as general traffic and social activity around your business.

What makes Google+ for business unique is that it has blurred the lines between personal social networks, e.g. Facebook, and business networks, e.g. LinkedIn. It really is a social media game changer.

As I mentioned in my last post, An introduction to Google +, businesses are starting to see the value of Google+ with its new Pages feature. This post will look at how to go about creating a Google+ Page for your business.

Google Plus Pages have a small square icon next to the business name to differentiate them from Profiles. Users can add your Page to their circles (which helps increas your follower count), take a look at your business information and check out your business’s photos.

Here’s how to create a Page for your business and take advantage of Google+:

• In order to create a Page for your business, you need a Google+ Profile. Clicking on the “+You” link at the top left of your Gmail dashboard or iGoogle page will take you to the Profile creation page.
• Click Create a Google+ page on the right of your stream and choose a category to begin. For a smaller, less well known business, Local businesses is a good choice. For companies and larger known businesses, Product or brand would work. Company, institution or organization is mostly for those businesses that don’t directly sell something, e.g. not-for-profits.
• Personalise your page by adding a photo or logo and a tagline, and continue with an introduction, information and contact information, then finish with a photo strip of 5 photos.

You’re now ready to start engaging with the Google+ community. A business Page can create Circles (networks) and post information and news on its feed. Don’t forget to add your Google+ Page details to your website or blog and to share it across your other networks.

In my next post I’ll discuss some of the ways you can leverage the + power of social media.

Google+ seems to be one of social media’s hottest new networks, with its popularity growing tremendously since it started in June 2011 as a test version. Its slogan is “real-life sharing—rethought for the web” and it features integration across a number of Google products, including Google Buzz and Google Profiles.

As Google+ notices are posted inside your Gmail inbox, you get 100% real-time Gmail deliverability. If your Circle friends Google a subject that you’ve written about on Google+, your comments and links are displayed automatically on page one of Google, giving you free traffic without any back-linking or on-site optimization. These are just some of the things that make us think it is a social media platform that will probably stick around and grow in popularity.

What makes Google+ special?

• It is focused on targeted sharing within social subgroups you’ve set up (your Circles)
• There is also a section within Google+ that is specifically for viewing, editing and managing multimedia, and which includes an image editor as well as privacy options and sharing features.
• It has introduced a new group chat feature called Hangouts. You can click ‘Start a hangout’ to immediately enter a video chat-room and a message will go out to your social circles to let them know that you are ‘hanging out’ and invite them to join you.

Many businesses are already beginning to see the value of building a Google Plus presence, especially with the new Pages feature. A Google+ Page looks similar to a Google+ Profile except that it has a small square icon next to the brand name to indicate that it is a page. Other users can add your brand to their circles, check out your information and browse your photos. Each time someone adds your brand to their circles, it helps to increase your follower count.

Your business needs to get ready to integrate Google+ into its social media marketing strategy, so in my next blog post I’ll look at how to build your Google Plus presence and build a Page for your brand.

I found the recent news about how a writer is being sued by his former employer for his 17,000 Twitter followers really interesting. What struck me most was how they’d put a value of $2.50 on each follower, which seems quite bizarre, and it got me thinking about the value of my own Twitter followers in the various accounts I have.

The thing is though, that not all followers are equal. Some follow you because they want to hear what you have to say, others because you share content that their followers would be interested in, but there are still a large majority that randomly follow shedloads of people in the hope that they’ll be followed back. Others follow you then lose interest in Twitter and stop visiting, so never see anything you tweet anyway.

I’m increasingly of the opinion that the quality of your followers is much more important than the quantity if you are using Twitter as a marketing tool. Particularly if you have a niche business, a few followers who are truly interested in your tweets are much more valuable than a lot who aren’t.

Obviously you don’t have an awful lot of control over who follows you, only who you follow, but being discerning about whom you follow will play a part in the type of followers you attract, as will the type of tweets you send out and whether you’re engaging with others.

A couple of tools I’ve found useful in cleaning out my Twitter account are:

• Twitcleaner works by showing you who you’re following that isn’t worth bothering with, e.g. because they never converse, they haven’t been active for a while, etc. You will lose a few followers as a result (those who only follow people to get followed back) but this isn’t a bad thing as they weren’t interested in what you have to say anyway.
• who.unfollowed.me is a useful little tool for tracking who has unfollowed you, who isn’t following you back and who you aren’t following back and there is a free version which is perfectly adequate. Initially I thought it was only useful for those who won’t follow anyone who doesn’t follow them back but I’ve found it makes checking through your followers and those you follow much more efficient.

So go on, don’t be afraid to have a bit of a clearout, as any followers you lose as a result weren’t worth having in the first place. You’ll enjoy Twitter more if you’re only following interesting people and you’ll gradually build a higher quality list of followers too.

I blogged recently about creating quality content. Once you’ve gone to the trouble of creating great content, that people actually want to read, it makes sense to get the most out of it, so here are some suggestions for how to do that.

Syndicate your content

It seems obvious, but it’s surprising how often it gets forgotten in the rush to move onto the next item on your to do list. Whether it’s a blog post or a new page on your website make sure you share it with as many different people as possible. Tools like NetworkedBlogs make this easier by automatically sending your blog posts out to your Twitter and Facebook feeds and save you having to remember.

Social bookmarking is another good way to get your content out there. Sites like Delicious, Digg and StumbleUpon are all useful, as well as niche bookmarking sites that relate to your industry. Just make sure you follow the guidelines and don’t only bookmark your own content.

If you write an email newsletter then you can also use this to point subscribers towards content that they might find useful too.

Make it easy for others to share

Getting others to share your content is even more effective than doing it yourself as it will then be read by people out of your network too. Hopefully you’ve already got social media buttons added to each of your web pages and blog posts to make it easy for others to share them on their favourite social networking sites. An occasional little nudge or reminder asking people to share a particular article if they find it useful won’t do any harm either.

Internal linking

If you’re referring to a topic already covered in a previous blog post or on another website page then link directly to it to make it easy for people to find other relevant content. Internal linking is important within your website and blog and helps both search engines and readers to find more of your content.

Recycle content

If you’ve written a good article or blog post it won’t take you long to rewrite it (to avoid duplicate content which the search engines frown on) so that it’s suitable for use on another website or blog. Writing guest posts on another blog or articles for another website is a great way to get more exposure for your own website as well as a link back. Using existing content and rewriting it saves you from having to come up with another idea or having do any additional research for a brand new article.

Do you know of any other great ways to get the most out of your content? Please add a comment to share your suggestions.

There was a time when creating plenty of content was enough to get you noticed, but this is no longer the case. Too many sites have been filled up with content that is low quality and the majority of articles submitted to article directories are even worse. Most of us have come across pages that make no sense and while they may give us a laugh or two, they usually just irritate us and we move on as quickly as we can.

The search engines have caught on to this and are developing algorithms to help weed out the rubbish. Google launched their “Farmer Update” early last year, which was an algorithm that focused on rewarding high quality content sites while low quality sites started to be devalued, and there have several more updates since.

If you’re still outsourcing your content to cheap article writing sites you probably need to rethink your strategy, and quickly. Your content should show that you are an expert in your field, so just think what churning out rubbish says to readers about you and your business!

Here are some tips for creating good quality content:

• Write about what you know but ensure it’s also something your visitors will be interested in reading about (and hopefully share with others).
• Think about writing content that solves a problem for customers, gives them useful advice or shows them how to do something and avoid just blowing your own trumpet.
• Spice up your content with images, video, etc and avoid overly lengthy pages of solid text.
• Encourage interaction by asking questions, creating polls or holding contests.
• Show that there is a human face behind your business by letting a bit of your personality show through.
• If you outsource any of your writing make sure that the writer understands your business and give them ideas of the sort of content your potential customers would be interested in. Don’t expect quality writing if you’re paying peanuts.

At the end of the day writing content takes time regardless, so you may as well spend that time productively by creating content worth reading!

Do you have any other tips for creating good quality content? I’d love it if you’d share them with us in the comments below.

Facebook advertising can be a very effective way to target a specific market, you can drill down so much more than any other form of paid advertising and it can work out fairly inexpensive too, simply because you are only targetting those people likely to be interested. For example if you are a retailer selling wedding dresses, then you may want to target women who are engaged that live in a certain geographical area. Or if you are a driving school, again you can target people within a certain age group in the area that you operate.

Facebook allows you to advertise using both images and words, allowing you to engage with your target audience in different ways. Here are some tips to help you get started.

1. Do your research first, find out who your target market really are.

2. Ensure your advert is simple and effective, I would always suggest using a marketing professional to put this together for you, this can be critical in the success of your campaign.

3. Set a realistic budget, Facebook advertising doesn’t have to cost the earth but you need have have enough impressions (number of times the ad displays) to get any real data and so make sure your budget allows this.

4. Make sure you send people to the right place, when people click on your advert they need to be taken through to a page on your website that is relevant to your advert, people won’t stick around.

5. Measure, improve and measure again. Facebook allows you to see the data behind the campaign which can help you tweak your campaign to make sure it is as successful as it can be.

One of the things you need to be aware of is that Facebook has a much lower click through rate than something like Adwords so you need to be prepared that your advert will need to be displayed a lot more to get those all important clicks. You have two different options in terms of the way you run the campaign, you can pay per click or you can pay per impressions, the one you choose will be dependent on your overall aims for the advertising in the first place. Are you looking to increase brand awareness or are you expecting sales leads?

If you have any questions or require any clarifications about how Facebook advertising can help you then please don’t hesitate to get in touch by leaving a comment below or giving us a call on 01279 647003.

I love New Year and how it makes you feel like you have a clean slate to start over with. Whether you kept the resolutions you made for 2011 or not, 2012 offers the opportunity for a fresh start.

If you are a small business owner, social media marketing is one of the areas you should definitely be making some resolutions about. We all have good intentions when it comes to social media but if we want to make sure they become more than just that we need to set some proper goals.

With social media you are much more likely to stick to your resolutions if you turn them into specific and measurable goals. For instance, instead of saying “I will blog/tweet/share more regularly” try setting yourself goals such as:

• I will write two blog posts every week
• I will share something interesting on Twitter/Facebook every day
• I will increase my followers to xxx by the end of January
• I will reply to every comment or @ tweet within xxx amount of time
• etc

and then decide how you are going to go about doing that, e.g. schedule time into your calendar, put a reminder on your phone, start work 15 minutes earlier, check tweets while getting your mid morning coffee, etc.

I do, however, still think that we need to remember that social media is about relationships and engagement and some facets of this are less measurable than others. When I look at the amount of self promotional noise that is posted on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, etc I think that there’s a good case for some of these less tangible resolutions:

• I will only share information that is useful to others
• I will chat to people without trying to sell to them or blow my own trumpet
• I will only follow people that I’m actually interested in on Twitter
• I will always be honest and transparent

Somehow I think these will be much harder for many of us to stick to!

Happy New Year!