NE.Media

social media accounts

Is it Time to Clean Up Your Social Media Accounts?

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Using social media is fundamental for reaching a large audience and gaining traction for your business. Here are four ways to spruce up your social media accounts.

“Spring Cleaning”

If you have old logos or pixelated pictures – get rid of them. Update them consistently for each of your social channels. This can have a huge impact on the impression your company gives. Better pictures, better quality and better content = a bigger audience and more followers.

Also, don’t forget to take a look through your social media bios and profile descriptions. Are they up to date? Do they have the right URL in them? Are they referencing something that happened in 2012? Make sure to stay on top of this so you don’t have to do another major “spring cleaning”

Rethink Your Goals

Sometimes we are so distracted with other things we put off what we originally intended to achieve with our social media accounts. Write down a list of goals and think about how close you are to achieving them. If you’re not on the right track, think about ways you can enhance your social media accounts to reach your goals. It could be just a little tweaking, or it can be a lot. It’s important to know your goals, whether it’s to gain more followers, gain a bigger presence in your niche or anything else you have in mind.

Multiple Social Media Channels

Do you notice one social media account doing better than the other? Is Facebook thriving with likes and comments compared to your Instagram? Take a look at each account and note which seems to be doing the best and what seems to be struggling to gain traction. Depending on your business or brand, not every channel will help you you reach your target audience. Twitter, for instance, can be a helpful customer service tool, but if you’re hoping to sell more products, maybe Instagram is best. Sometimes switching your time investment from one channel to the other will benefit you more.

Look at Competitors 

The best way to see if you’re on the right track to success is to look at what your fellow competitors are doing. You can learn from their successes and emulate them and you can notice what they might be struggling with and remember not to do that. So, take three main competitors and scroll through their social media. See what’s working for them and what you can implement within your own strategy. You can also use these insights as a benchmark when it comes to evaluating your own performance.

Wordpress

Differences Between WordPress vs Website Builders

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WordPress and Website Builders are vastly different from each other. Depending on what type of website you’re trying to build and your skills using different platforms will decide which is best for you to use. Here are some tips describing the differences between the two and which one will be best to use for you.

What is a Website Builder?

A website builder is typically a drag and drop website builder that lets you build a website without any coding experience. It’s really simple and easy to use and they usually take you through it step-by-step so you can make your website quickly and easily.

Most of these builder websites are cheap to pay for and they have some beautiful designs. You can customize the webpages to your liking, including the design, layout, content and images. It will look like it was designed by a professional.

Some of the most popular DIY builders today include Squarespace, Wix, and Weebly, although there are dozens of different tools available.

What is WordPress?

WordPress has been around for quite a while, typically used for a blogging platform. However, many major companies are starting to use WordPress for their websites. You can purchase themes and your URLs directly through WordPress or you can purchase your domain from a separate hosting site such as Host Gator. With WordPress, you have A LOT more options for customization, however it takes a degree of knowledge of web design and CMS to really get the website to how you want it to look and for it to be professional.

When to Use a Builder

A builder is great for those who want to build a website quickly, easily and without much effort. I’ve found that it’s great for portfolios and personal blogs. It’s not really that great for a larger scale website or if you plan to sell products. WordPress has a steeper learning curve and it can take more time to get the hang of how to use it. Within only a few hours you can have a good looking website using a DIY builder. 

When to Use WordPress

WordPress is a content-oriented site builder. It’s best to use WordPress if you’re looking to build a large-scale business website. However, there are many people who like to use it as a regular personal blogging platform too. The great part of is that it comes with endless options for plugins. You can purchase themes directly from WordPress, but you can also look at sites such as ThemeForest or ThemeZilla for various theme options and designs. Once you import the theme, it usually imports it’s demo content. This way, you already have a structure to work with, making it easier for you to customize to your tastes.

 

Overall, if you are looking to build a large scale type of website with endless customization tools and more control over the design, this is the platform you should use. 

Rich Snippets

Should You Use Rich Snippets?

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What is a Rich Snippet? Why Should I Care?

Rich snippets are search results that go beyond the basics. By definition rich snippets “is the term used to describe structured data markup that site operators can add to their existing HTML, which in turn allow search engines to better understand what information is contained on each web page.”

Using structured data markup  added to your site HTML, you provide the search engines more information to better understand the content and intent of each page of your website. Cool, right?

These rich snippets, rich cards, and enhanced snippets are becoming a popular tool to use when it comes to enhancing your websites rank on Google. In exchange for providing Google with your data, Google uses that data and provides the searcher with even more relevant information specific to their search. This could include additional information such as your hours, contact details, star-ratings, etc.

So how to you implement rich snippets for your website/content?

Schema.org

There are several different ways you can have rich snippets success, but the schema markup is the most popular.

According to the website itself, Schema.org “provides a collection of shared vocabularies webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways that can be understood by the major search engines: Google, Microsoft, Yandex and Yahoo!”

Basically, schema provides the words and code necessary to instruct search engines to highlight and feature the information you want to be highlighted and featured on the SERPs.

There are a number of convenient tools to help you create, implement, and test the schema markup, but my favorite is Google’s Search Console. Ever sine I’ve started using it for my personal website, I have seen a major difference, especially in organic search results. Before I started using rich snippets, most of my traffic was via social media / direct links. After about 3 months of using rich snippets and scheme markups, my organic searches have increased 3x. Why are organic searches important? Well, if you’re getting a lot of organic searches, it means your page is ranking on the first few pages on Google!

Many people don’t understand how do implement rich snippets and many others think it’s too hard to do. This is wrong! It’s quick and easy to do and has so many potential benefits to help you get more clicks to your website.

Instagram vs Snapchat

Instagram vs Snapchat: Which to Use to Improve Your Social Marketing Strategy?

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Instagram and Snapchat are very popular social media apps that attract 687 million daily active users. That’s a lot of people! So it’s super important to consider which one you should use to boost your social marketing campaign for your business.

If you’re working at a small company and can’t justify spending your resources on both, which one do you choose?

Since both platforms increasingly overlap in features, function, and advertising components, it can be hard to distinguish the unique elements that make one a better fit for your business.

Here are 4 categories within both apps – you can decide for yourself what will work better for you!

Audience

Winner: Instagram

Instagram has 500 million daily active users, which is 3x as large as Snapchat! Instagram’s audience tend to be on Instagram 2x as much as Snapchat per day as well. Snapchat is good for quick stories and it’s great for a younger demographic. Instagram on the other hand is geared more towards users between 19-30 years old. If your ideal audience is an older demographic, or if you haven’t fully established your brand and want to reach as many people as possible, Instagram might be a better long-term fit, especially since you can use hashtags which means your brand will become more noticeable, more quickly.

2. Filters

Winner: Snapchat

Although Instagram has tried to create nearly identical filters to Snapchat on Instagram Stories, Snapchat’s filters are still unbeatable. Snapchat is especially unique when it comes to filter animations: if you use the dog filter on Snapchat, you don’t just look like a dog, you also move like one. If you stick out your tongue, it wags like a dog’s tongue.

3. Stories

Winner: Instagram

Instagram not only has a better design, but once you begin viewing someone’s story on Instagram, it automatically continues to the next person’s story, which means that, unless you click out of it, you will view everyones story. I notice for myself that I get 2x as many story views on Instagram vs Snapchat.

Most of your Instagram followers will see your story simply because they were already in the feature, making it more ideal from a business perspective. With Snapchat, viewers are asked if they want to view the next person’s story. Your followers have the option to click past your story without opening it, which isn’t ideal for your business.

Also, Instagram now offers “story highlights” which can stay on your profile as long as you wish. This means that it gives your audience a longer time to view your story. Snapchat stories only lasts 24 hours.

4. Advertisements

Winner: Instagram

Snapchat doesn’t really offer many advertisement options. Instagram ads have prove to be quite effective: at least 30% of Instagram users have purchased a product they first saw on Instagram. Not only are the ads effective, but they don’t cost much! You can do as little as $1.00 for a day or $5.00 a day for a week. It’s up to you and what you’re looking for.

You can also run Instagram ads, and measure results, within Facebook’s Ad Manager,which is especially convenient if your business also uses Facebook as an advertising platform.

Emojis

Emojis Can Increase Your Click Rates on Social Media

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Did you know that using popular emojis in your posts can actually increase engagement from your audience and click-through rates?

A study found that participants who were sent messages with emojis scored higher on memory than those who were sent messages without emojis, indicating that emojis can make your message more memorable.

That same study also found that emojis can help portray your business as friendlier: participants who chatted online with an expert who used emojis rated the expert as both friendlier and more competent, compared to participants who chatted with an expert who did not use emojis.

Sounds crazy that a little use of emojis can help your business, but the studies above give an indication that its worth looking into.

From a marketing standpoint, emojis are undeniably useful. Emojis in a tweet can increase engagement by 25.4 percent, and emojis in a Facebook post can increase the number of likes by 57 percent and the number of comments and shares by 33 percent. If emojis can so drastically increase the likelihood of engagement, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be using them.

But with all that said, there are still 2,666 emojis to choose from. So which ones increase engagement the most? Which ones incentivize people to click your link? Which ones should you avoid?

Here are 10 emojis that seem to be the most popular among audience users:

The Top Ten Most Popular Emojis

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I would say that the “pointing finger” emoji is the most popular. Marketers use this when they are writing content to direct you somewhere else, so why not use it? Most of these emojis are useful year-round, but some, like the Christmas tree, are likely effective on a more seasonal basis. Some of them, like the winking emoji, are probably popular because they convey your sense of humor. It gives you and your business personality.

Hopefully, this data can help you humanize your brand and convey more meaning and emotion in your content. Emojis, even the octopi and horses … actually, especially the octopi and horses … encourage interaction from your audience, higher click-through rates, and better messaging from your brand.

But use them sparingly! You don’t want to use so many that your message gets lost in a heaping pile of emojis!

Organic Search

4 Tips to Increase Your Organic Search Rankings on Google

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Organic searches are essential for the success of your website. But, what exactly is an organic search you might ask? In a nutshell, as incredible as your branding may be or as innovative as your product or service no doubt is, if you’re not ranking on the first page of Google’s search engine results for relevant search queries, people may never know that your business exists.

In fact, the number one position on a Google search enjoys 33% of the traffic, so it’s important to focus on attracting organic searches.

Here are our top four tips for improving your organic traffic and page rankings.

Check Current Search Ranking

Before you boost your website’s search ranking, it’s important to know where you currently stand in Google’s search results.

By understanding this information, you’ll be able to see where you need to improve and provide yourself with a solid base from which to work. Tools like SERPs.com will check where a site page ranks for a certain keyword or term, but you might have to pay (get around this by using a free trial). You can also just type in your website name, or post titles in the search engine. If it ranks between the first and third page, then that’s a great start. The higher you rank, the more traffic you get to your website, and the more Google recognizes that you have a quality website.

Here is an example — when I type in “Women’s Golf Content” in the Google search bar (the name of my website) it pops up as the first ranking on Google, along with my Twitter account and my interview with G&E magazine. This gives my website more legitimacy.

Define a Keyword List

Write a list down of all the keywords that relate to your website. For my website, I use keywords such as, “Women’s Golf,” “Golf Fashion,” “Golf News,” etc. Doing this will allow you to be able to pick the most relevant keywords for your site to bring in related traffic that increases your page ranking.

If you target the right keywords for each page of your website based on what you’re trying to sell, the message you’re trying to communicate and where you expect to meet the customer on their buying journey, you’ll see a vast improvement in your organic search rankings.

To define the most successful list possible, you should use a targeted mix of both broad, exact and long tail keywords that are specific to what you’re selling and how your users search. You should also ask yourself the following questions…

  • What keywords will drive conversions?
  • What central topics can my keywords be grouped into?
  • What keywords could I generate content on that will result in rankings and traffic?

To go about analysing and selecting your keywords, you should use the following tools…

  • Google Trends
  • Type potential search queries relating to your page in Google’s search bar and see what popular relevant search queries popup
  • Use Google Adwords Keyword planner and when ready, follow this video guide on keyword research

Optimize For Your Audience First

By using buyer personas, a website is two – five times more effective and easier to use by targeted users.

Today’s consumer is savvier, and empowered than ever before, so to engage with their needs and in turn, build your organic search authority, you’ll need to produce high-quality content that is educational, insightful, and personal.

By using a buyer persona and creating your content with a human being in mind, rather than a search engine, you’ll stand a far greater chance of your content being consumed and shared, creating backlinks which will increase your search rankings. When you’re improving the copy and content on your site page, always consider if it’s digestible, conversational, and suitable for a human audience – if it’s no good for you, it’ll be no good for others, and it will not rank well.

Meta Descriptions

While your meta description isn’t a direct ranking factor regarding search crawling, it does have an impact and if written well, this small snippet of sales copy encourages people to click through to a webpage, boosting its authority and helping your page to rank better for certain keywords. Also, if you use your target keywords in the description, Google will bold them when your page appears on SERPS, making it more eye-catching to web searchers.

Again, each meta description should be unique, contain keywords and be no longer than 160 characters.

Here’s an example of a good meta description:

Organic Search

You can see that the meta description has a nice length and has a good focus keyword that relates to the content I’m writing about. Make sure to download an SEO plugin to help you rank in searches. Also consider using rich snippets to even further attract an organic search.

Although these are only four tips out of many, I found these to be the most important for your website to rank higher on search engines. In short: consistently check your current rankings, download and use an SEO plugin as shown above (include a good meta description, and a title with your focus keyword somewhere in it), and most importantly, make sure you put your audience above your concern for rankings. Quality content will increase traffic alone.

Modern Keyboard With Colored Social Network Buttons.

New Features to Try on Social Media in 2018

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Every year, new ways to engage in social media emerge. It’s important to review and implement these new features into your social media strategy. If you try new things on social media this year that other brands aren’t doing, you have a much better chance of surprising your audience and engaging them.

Here are some new features to try in 2018 on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook

  1. Create Stories in Groups and Events

Facebook’s Stories—which allow you to post content that disappears after 24 hours—is now available for groups and events. People can post Stories that are visible only to their groups or on any event page. These Stories will have a private hashtag and will be moderated by admins to make sure that content is appropriate and on-brand.

  1. Royalty Free Music

There’s now an easy, and free way, to to add soundtrack to your video. Facebook has introduced the video editing tool Sound Collection, which lets you add sound effects or music to your video clips. Audio files on Sound Collection are royalty-free so you don’t have to worry about copyright infringement or blowing your budget.

Instagram

  1. Story Highlights

Ready to showcase your best stories? Instagram Stories Highlights lets your brand make engaging stories and can be permanently posted on your Instagram profile. This feature is super valuable for brands because Stories Highlights can be saved, reposted, and measured for long-term performance. You can organize your own Stories Highlights however you want before you post, whether it’s by theme, campaign, or date.

Stories Highlights is also a good way for you to promote the content you want users to see first. They appear right below your bio for easy viewing.

  1. Broadcast Live with a Guest

Instagram now lets users and brands broadcast live with a guest in a split screen format. Broadcasts will appear in the Stories section of the platform with two circles (instead of the typical one circle). If your broadcast receives a lot of engagement, you could end up in Instagram’s Search and Explore tab.

When planning a collaborative broadcast, think about how two speakers can create unique content for this new format. You might choose to invite a guest from a strategic brand partnership for an announcement or ask an influencer to co-host an Instagram takeover.

Twitter

  1. Tell a story in 280 characters

Remember when Twitter had 140 word limit we had to work with in the past? Well, Twitter has finally increased the word count to 280-characters. Twitter said that the character increase would allow people to express more, while still encouraging the importance of brevity.

Play around with new storytelling concepts that would have been formerly impossible under the 140 character limit—but don’t write more just because you can. Being clear and succinct is still the way to go on Twitter.

  1. Send more creative, personalized direct messages

With Twitter’s Direct Message Cards, your brand can share engaging images and videos—with customizable call to action (CTA) buttons—all within your message conversations. DM cards give brands the freedom and flexibility to consider the customer experience and take a more visual approach to customer interactions.

Marketing trends

Marketing Trends in 2018

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4 Tips to get your Marketing on Track 2018

Staying ahead of marketing trends and mastering new techniques and technologies is a never-ending challenge for all of us. With so many options to engage followers, it can be overwhelming. Here are 4 trends to keep an eye on in 2018 that you can implement into your marketing strategy.

  1. Ephemeral Content

We’re all used to providing evergreen content – long-lasting content that can be repurposed for years to come. Sure, that always comes in handy, but with all the new social media stories, from Facebook to Twitter to Snapchat, there is now a demand for temporary content. The time-sensitive component makes it exciting and if done correctly, it can help you engage with your followers even more than ever before! Millennials are savvy with this new technology and they expect the brands they like to follow their footsteps. Using this kind of temporary content to highlight the human side of your brand is a great way to connect through social media and show off why your company is special.

  1. Videos

Video was already gaining in popularity throughout 2017, but heading into 2018 we now have even more stats to back up the effectiveness of this type of content.

  • 500 million hours of video content watched on YouTube per day
  • Facebook videos get 135% more organic views than photos
  • Video will represent up to 82% of all IP traffic by 2021

(statistics from business insider)

Videos don’t have to be hard. In fact, videos 2 minutes or less get the most engagement. No one wants to sit there and watch an hour video about what your company does. Hone in on the important points and make it into a visually appealing video.

  1. Live Streams

Similar to video content is live streaming. This type of content became wildly popular in 2017, with brands and influencers utilizing it across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Live streams are highly interactive and there are endless ways to use these tools. Here are just a few examples:

  • behind the scenes of an event
  • question and answer sessions
  • tutorials
  • sneak peeks of upcoming products or projects

The great part about live streams is that this content can last, especially if it’s successful.

  1. Artificial Intelligence 

Current AI is incredibly valuable, with “features such as chatbots, data analysis algorithms, and personalized recommendation systems [to] automatically direct audiences to content that’s relevant to their interests and circumstances.”

The one I like to use is Atomic Reach which gives me recommendations on type and level of language to use, when to post to social media for best engagement, how long my blog posts should be, and more. Embrace this useful technology, but never forget to use AI tools wisely—make sure to keep the human element in the equation. No matter how advanced the technology gets, creativity, empathy, tone, and interpretation are still something only humans can do.

Instagram

Step-up Your Game on Instagram

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You might know the basics of how to use Instagram, but that’s not enough to increase your profile visits and engagement with your content. There are some extra steps you can use to improve your discovery and popularity.

The below tips will help you ‘step up your game’:

  1. Use Polls to Increase Engagement

Polls are a smart way to engage people on social media because participation is easy. With a poll, you can survey your audience to see what they think of your content and you can crowdsource ideas from your followers – such as what your next social video topic should be about. It’s all about catering to your audience.

  1. Make Sure Your Brand Colors Stand Out

Be consistent with your brand colors and theme not only within your Instagram profile, but also with your Stories. Consistentcy is key so that your followers can instantly recognize who the content is coming from.

How to do it:

  • Tap the Aa icon in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.
  • Tap and hold any of the default color options and swipe the color slider to select custom colors.
  1. Use Location and Hashtag Stickers

Don’t you want to get discovered? Every company does! By using hashtag stickers and including your location in your Stories, you can make it easier for you to gain new followers. These stickers will show you company in more searches making it easier for new people to follow you.

  1. Include a Call to Action

For a call to action (CTA) to be effective, it must be clear, actionable, and easy for the user to follow. Keep CTAs in your Instagram Stories short and simple, but also attention-grabbing. Make your CTAs pop by writing them out in big, bold font.

How to do it:

  • Tap the Aa icon and type out your message.
  • Next, tap the Aa icon again and type out the same message using a different color.
  • Move the top layer of text so that it’s slightly off-center from the bottom text (the original message).
  1. Shoot Vertically 

This might seem obvious, but shooting vertically is the best thing to do because this is the way they are watching your stories on their phone. It makes it easier for them to consume the content without flipping their phone sideways or bending their neck to see what’s going on.

  1. Plan your content in advance

Scheduling your content in advance can make your life easier. Your goal should be to post one article/photo/video to your profile and Stories each day. The more you post and use hashtags, the easier it is to gain more followers and likes.

A/B Testing

How to Perform A/B Testing on Social Media

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What is A/B Testing?

In essence, A/B testing is a way to measure two versions of something to see which is more successful.

Think about it this way: When you and your friend are coming home from your favorite coffee shop, you might discuss what route is the fastest way to get home. You might take one route that day and the next time you go to that same spot, maybe you’ll decide to try the other route and find out which one is fastest. It’s essentially a way to compare two similar things and figure out what’s the best way.

When it comes to social media, A/B testing works in the same way. When you look at the comparison of two similar tweets, you would like to see that one of the posts has a significant edge in a particular stat. I did an A/B test on my twitter to show you an example of what I’m talking about.

1st Test
2nd Test

In the example above, the first tweet’s success with retweets, favorites, mentions, and potential indicated that it might be a better headline than the first.

Retweets and clicks are both useful metrics to observe, and we don’t necessarily like one more than another. Retweets are a great signal to us that people find the headline worth sharing with their own audience, and clicks are a helpful indicator that the headline drives curiosity enough to clickthrough and read. In some ways, retweets and clicks tell us a headline’s popularity or even an image’s popularity.

Of course, it might also be best to point out that A/B tests on social media are not perfect. The varying times of day, the hashtags we use and other significant variables can affect our tests as well. In order to keep it consistent, it would be wise to test your tweets at the same time of the day if possible. In the end, A/B testing gives us an insight into what works and what doesn’t to get engagement from our followers.

A few ways to vary your Tweets are with the following;

  • quotes
  • link tweets
  • questions for your followers
  • facts
  • include relevant photos

Images and links to the topic you’re talking about is SO important when it comes to marketing your products or blog posts. It’s a lot more visually appealing than a boring one sentence tweet with a bunch of hashtags. Also, including a link to either your product page or website will help drive more traffic and increase conversion rates. Social media scientist Dan Zarrella found in research prior to this change that Tweets using pic.twitter.com links were 94% more likely to be Retweeted. That’s a pretty high number, don’t you think?

Try it out and see how it works for you. It’s relatively easy to figure out and it just might help your company or blog in the long run.

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