Here are two fantastic videos that present some incredible statistics about social media and the Internet in general:
Social Media Revolution
Or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? This video details out social media facts and figures that are hard to ignore. This video is produced by the author of Socialnomics.
Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
% of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
JESS3 – The State of The Internet
JESS3 designed and animated this for the JESS3 lecture at AIGA Baltimore in Feb 2010
1.73 Billion Internet users worldwide
90 Trillion Emails Sent in 2009
81% of Emails were Spam
126 Million Blogs on the Internet
27.3 Million Tweets Per Day
Faceboook serves 6 million pages per minute
4 Billion photos hosted by Flickr
182 Videos watched on average per month (per user)
The last post discussed why online brand reputation management is important. This post will explain how you can monitor the web for mentions of your brand.
Reputation management used to be about scanning newspapers and magazines. However, the world is changing fast. It’s quite likely that your customers spend more time online than they do watching TV. Surfing the Internet, whether for business or pleasure is now the most common pastime in the Western world. People socialise online, shop online, do business online; everything. So its important that you track what people are saying about you online.
You might think that your business maybe too small and no one talks about you, or maybe you think that you already monitor your website, blog and Twitter and that’s good enough. Well that’s where you are wrong! People are constantly talking online – sometimes they’re talking to you, othertimes about you. You need to make sure you’re monitoring the whole of the world wide web for your keywords (namely your business name). Only then can you respond to people when they mention you. If someone makes a negative comment about your company in a forum shouldhave processes in place that would alerted you to it. Then you’ll be able to instantly respond to it, fix the situation and show them how good your customer service actually is.
So where are people making comments about your business?
Blogs
Twitter
Social Networks (such as Facebook, Mebo and MySpace)
Social Media Sites (such as the reviews within Amazon)
Wikipedia
Blog Comments
Message Boards
Forums
Consumer Websites
Article sites
Video Sites (such as YouTube, Moveo)
Photo Sites (such as Flickr, Google Picasa)
Monitoring your online brand reputation will allow you to gain further understanding of what people think of you and your products and services. You can view trends and find out what is and what isn’t popular, and be made aware of any potential issues.
Our next post on Monday will outline what tools you can use to monitor your online reputation – make sure you don’t miss it. You can be alerted to all our post updates by entering your email in the box to the right.
If created well, landing pages can be used to make a ‘hard sell’. Not in a hammy, used car salesman way, but in the sense that you have visitors where you want them. Show them what they need to see, present the information with a focused message and hit them with some strong call to actions – remember we talked about your goals in the previous post? Landing pages allow you to create a pre-planned funnel/path, pushing visitors to complete those goals.
How do you create good call to actions, and how do you get people to do what you want? Well there’s no secret recipe I’m afraid. It’s a case of trial and error – test your landing pages and constantly tweak and amend them based on the results you get.
Here are the main things you need to be aware of when creating landing pages:
Colourful, big and bold buttons: Hit them with a call to action in a visually appealling way with good quality buttons that tell them to ‘Buy Now’, ‘Sign up for our newsletter’, ‘Take a Free Trial Today’, ‘Download Now’ etc.. Make these buttons stand out from your page through the use of colour and good quality design
Limit the use of links and menu options on the landing page: The more links on your landing page, the more likely people will click off elsewhere, get distracted and never complete the action you want them to
Clever content layout: People scan webpages, they don’t read them (this goes back to the ‘lazy, demanding and impatient’ bit I mentioned in the previous post!). So make it easy for them to get the key information – use bullet points, short paragraphs, bold text and colour
Make it easy for visitors to complete the goal: If your goal is to have them contact you, make the contact form small and simple. Do you really need their full address, date of birth and favourite colour? Think about the minimum amount of information you need in order to follow up that lead and only request that. If you’re trying to get them to make a purchase, don’t make them go through hoops. Display your delivery details and return policy clearly to instill a feeling of trust, and make sure you let them know that your online payment process is secure. Don’t give them any reason to start clicking about off the path you’re directing them down
Make sure the key information is above the fold: This goes back to newspapers – when they’re delivered or displayed in newsagents, you can see the top half of the front page – this is where they put all their major stories and headlines. The same goes for landing pages – make sure your most important information is towards the top of your landing page – above the fold. Anything people have to scroll down to view is below the fold. Remember that people have different monitor sizes too, so what may be above the fold for you, may not be above the fold for all your visitors. Why is this important? Again, people are lazy, demanding and impatient and can’t be bothered to scroll down the page to find the information they want! If they view the content above the fold and it looks relevant to their query, then they may make the effort to scroll. But if not… bang goes the back button!
Remember that not everyone will convert: Not all visitors will be in the position to buy the item they’re searching for (or contact you for the service your offer). They could just be in the research stage of the purchase process. Do you have anything you can give them? If you can’t fulfil your primary goal of a sale, what secondary goals do you have. Can you get that visitor to sign up to your newsletter, or can they download a guide with advice on the purchasing process (possibly via a form to capture their details)? It’s important to try and make the most of each click, and understanding that not everyone will convert is important. Give people more than one option – so create more than one call to action on your landing page.
If you have any other landing page tips, leave them in the comments below. Have you tried something that had amazing results? Share it with us.
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is now one of the fastest growing forms of advertising. Most of you will be familar with Google AdWords – you bid on particular keywords, create adverts relating to those keywords, set a maximum amount you want to pay for each click on that ad for that keyword – and bingo! Lots of high quality traffic heading your way (as long as you’re bidding on the right terms and have a budget that allows for more than one click a day!).
PPC advertising, especially Google AdWords are a fantastic way of increasing the volume of traffic to your site. Many types of websites and businesses will benefit from PPC:
If you have a new site which is not yet ranking well in the search engines
If you’re in a very competitive market and don’t really stand a chance for ranking on your key terms
If you haven’t got any optimisation on your site, so probably won’t rank for your desired terms
PPC is a great way of getting traffic to your site, but that’s only half the battle. Once someone clicks on your advert and lands on your website, what happens then? You need to carefully think about what your goal is for that visitor:
Signing up for your newsletter
Making a purchase
Registering for an event
Making contact via your ‘Contact Us’ form
Once you know what your goal is, you then have to think about how you’ll achieve that goal. This is where landing pages come in. A landing page, simply put, is the page that visitors ‘land’ on when they first enter your site. With PPC you have control over this (whereas in natural search it’s most likely to be your homepage, however other pages will rank also, but unless you’ve optimised a particular page for a specific phrase, it’s unlikely you’ll have much control over this).
Anyway, back to PPC where you can specify the landing page you want your visitors to land on. So what is the best page on your site to direct them to? You may think that your homepage is the best page – let the visitor click about and go to the content they want to see. But that’s where you’re wrong. The Internet has made us all lazy, demanding and impatient! We don’t want to have to search your site for the information we’re looking for – we want it presented to us straight away!
For example, if you’re selling bikes and have an advert running for the keyphrase ‘Ladies red bike’, when a searcher enters that term into the search box, they’ll get a list of natural and paid results. If they click on your advert…
Ladies Red Bike
Wide Range Of Bikes For
Ladies Who Like To Ride www.yoursite.com
…where will they land? Do they land on your page featuring all your ladies red bikes, or do they land on your homepage? What makes more sense to you? If they can’t see immediately what they’re looking for, they’ll hit that dreaded ‘back’ button and click on another advert, and you’ve just been charged for a click with no result.
So it’s important that you direct people to landing pages that are relative to their search query.
Come back on Monday to find out what our top tips are for creating landing pages with conversions in mind; getting people to take the action you want. The more conversions you get, the better return on investment you’ll get from your PPC campaign.
In the meantime, if you’ve had any success using landing pages in your PPC campaign, leave a note in the comments telling us abou it! And remember, SMEketing are dab hands at creating high quality landing pages. If you’d like us to overhaul your PPC campaign and help you get more conversions, get in touch with us on 023 8083 7271 or email us on info@SMEketing.com.
If you’re using Twitter you will hopefully be starting to see the benefits. All businesses, large and small can benefit from using Twitter. Broadly speaking, the main benefits from using Twitter for business are:
Promotion
Market research
Networking
Lead generation
Education
So if we’re focusing on the first point of ‘Promotion’, we need to look at one of the key differentiators between you and your competitors – your Twittter background. When people are deciding who they want to follow, they only really have a few things they can use to help them decide – the content of your tweets, your bio and contact details and your wallpaper. If you’re using one of the generic Twitter backgrounds, you’re missing out on a trick! Your background is free advertising space, so use it well.
One of the best ways of using this space is to customise it using an image editor (such as Photoshop). Depending on your business and industry, you could create a radical, jazzy Twitter background, or maybe one with a more corporate, professional feel.
So what key information should you add to your Twitter background?
Synopsis (of your company, your role in the company, your interests – just who you are)
Company logo
Contact details
Email
Telephone
Website
Any other social media sites that are relevant – Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn etc
Other extras you could include are:
Photo of yourself
Interesting details – such as your interests, passions
Contact address
Special offers (you could update these on a regular basis)
Once you’ve got the content you want, you then have to decide on the style of background. Do you want it be be vibrant and colourful, match your corporate colours, be one plain block of colour… the options are really endless.
If you’d like us to create a customised Twitter background for your Twitter account, get in touch today on info@SMEketing.com. With prices starting from £40, there’s bound to be an affordable option for you and your business.
Have you already got a customised Twitter background that you love? Let us know in the comments by leaving your @ Twitter details, and remember to follow SMEketing on @SMEketing.
Reputation management used to be about scanning newspapers and magazines. However, the world is changing fast. It’s quite likely that your customers spend more time online than they do watching TV. Surfing the Internet, whether for business or pleasure is now the most common pastime in the Western world. People socialise online, shop online, do business online; everything. So its important that you track what people are saying about you online.
We’ve established in the last post (
If you’re using 
