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A Few Cool Social Media Website Tools

Tom Sullivan — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 23:40:21 +0000

If your business has started to see the potential with social media you might be looking for some cool social media tools to utilize on your website. In this article I’ll break down a few of the many tools that could potentially benefit your website:

1) Facebook Like Button- Now that you no longer become a “Fan” of a business, make sure you include the “like” button in all of your blog articles. You may even want to add it to every page of your website.

2) Facebook Activity Feed- The Activity Feed is a plugin displays Facebook profile pictures of your Friends who “like” the website you’re visiting. This a neat tool to use because it can persuade visitors to your website to “like” your business on Facebook, since they can see that their Friends already do.

3) ‘Tweet This’ button- Just like the Facebook “like” button, this Twitter button will allow you to tweet out a blog article or a page of a website with one click of your mouse. WordPress has a plug known as TweetMeMe that allows you to easily add this to any page of your website.

4) Wibiya Social Toolbar- This is a website enhancer that adds a little bar across the bottom of your website or blog. This toolbar encourages people to stay on your website will interacting with others. It also fully integrates with many different social networking websites, including Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz and YouTube.

These are just a few of the many social networking tools that your business can use on it’s website. Remember, it’s all about encouraging interaction. The more your audience engages the more information you can get from them, and the more quality information you can provide them. All this leads to more business down the road.

If you have any tools you’d like to add to this list please do so. We’d love to hear about it.

Best metrics for analyzing SEO and social media

Tom Sullivan — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 20:53:53 +0000

In a previous blog post I wrote about how to track ROI from social media. In the article I speak generally about being aware of the total value gained from utilizing social media, not just revenue earned. Things like customer feedback, testimonials, industry expertise and branding all provide value added for businesses investing in social media. So you know the value, but what are the best metrics for understanding this value?

There are quite a few different metrics which you need to be aware of, but let me start by saying the obvious. You need to have analytics installed on all pages of your website. Whether you’re investing in SEO or social media campaigns, you need metrics. Here are some of the best metrics for analyzing ROI:

1) Traffic: This metric is the basis for everything below. Without traffic none of the other metrics matter. If you’re generating traffic, and it’s increasing on a monthly basis, then you’re on the right track. The next step is analyzing this traffic.

2) Unique Visitors: While traffic is one of the first metrics people look at to judge the success of a website, unique traffic is arguably just as important. The reason is that unique visitors allow you to see if your reach is expanding. If your traffic is increasing, but your unique visitors is falling, then your marketing efforts need to be improved to expand beyond your existing network.

3) Referring urls: When analyzing social media, referring urls is one of the most important metrics to pay attention to. If your goal is to utilize social media to drive traffic to your website to capture leads, then you need to make sure that you are in fact getting traffic from these social media sites.

4) Average Time on site: Simply put, the longer people spend on your website the better. There’s no doubt you want to keep people interested, but you need to dig a little deeper. Analyze the average time on the site from each of the top referring sites. You might notice that the referring traffic from Twitter is spending an average of 2:45 minutes more on the site than referring traffic from StubleUpon or Digg. You need to understand which referring sites keep people interested the longest; these are the most valuable.

5) Conversions: My favorite metric. Conversions = leads, and typically warm leads. You can create conversions for many different actions on your website, not just a completed contact form or an opt-in. Consider adding other conversions, such as when a user spends more than 5 minutes on the site. Then you’ll be able to see the percentage of your traffic that spends 5 minutes or more on your website. Also keep track of RSS subscribers. These should also be considered conversions, albeit not quite as valuable as an opt-in, but valuable nonetheless.

Social media has proven to be a worthwhile investment for many businesses. If you are looking to invest in social media marketing make sure you do your research first, and then make sure you have the metrics in place to analyze your campaigns.

What’s better, a blog within your website or a standalone blogsite?

Tom Sullivan — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 16:30:40 +0000

Over the past 10 years blogging has grown tremendously in popularity. More and more businesses are investing in blogs to publish content, engage with prospects and customers, and generate leads. One question that I’ve encountered lately is whether or not a business should add a blog within their website or on a separate domain. This is a very good question that warrants further explanation, as there are advantages and drawbacks to both options.

Advantages to adding a blog within your website (yourwebsite.com/blog):
1) Creation of the blog: Adding a blog within your website is easy because you simply need to add a new page and copy the CSS from the rest of the site. The blog will then match your website’s look and feel.
2) Increased backlinks: If you optimize and syndicate your blog articles appropriately you will start to get backlinks from social networking, social bookmarking, and other external sites. These backlinks all point to an article within your website, thus increasing the total number of backlinks of your website. Over time, increased backlinks leads to higher search engine rankings.
3) Driving traffic to you website: Your website is likely the most expensive piece of real estate that you have online. If you have a well structured site with a good “call to action” then why wouldn’t you want to drive traffic to your site? Conversely, see #2 below…
4) Simplicity: Keeping a blog within your website means fewer things to keep track of on your part. You don’t need to buy a new domain or hosting for a separate blogsite, and you don’t have to worry about maintenance on multiple sites.

Advantages to creating a separate “blogsite” outside of your website (yourwebsiteblog.com):
1) Dominate for a specific keyword: If you’d like your business to dominate page 1 of Google for a specific keyword phrase you’ll need multiple websites. Sure, you can count on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn occupying 3 of the spots on page 1, but if you truly want to dominate you’ll need multiple websites. After your website (and your social networking accounts) you should create a separate blogsite.
2) Better for lead capture: The reason landing pages are so great for lead generation is that, if configured properly, they give the user 2 options: opt-in for the special offer or leave the page. If you’re driving traffic to your website you might lose people who get caught up in all the information on your website. However, if you create a standalone blog there there’s likely to be significantly fewer pages, making it less likely the potential customer gets lost in all the information and then leaves the site. This is not always the case, but studies have shown that less information is better for lead capture. Thus, people link to landing pages instead of websites when they set up paid advertisements online.
3) Dynamic home page: Creating a blogsite means that the home page serves as your blog. Therefore, the home page will constantly be updated as you add new posts. This is great for SEO because you are constantly adding new content to the home page, which is the first page search engines index.

As you can see both there are advantages to both options. Typically I would recommend adding a blog within your website because the fresh content will help with the site’s SEO and search engine rankings. Furthermore, having a blog within your website is simpler for both the business owner and visitor to the site. As a business owner it’s nice to keep all similar content together and not have to pay for additional domains and hosting. As a website visitor if I’m very interested in the business and I want to learn more, having a blog within the site provides me with a ton of more information; all within one click!

The only time I would recommend creating a standalone blog outside of your existing website is if you are either trying to dominate for a specific keyword (difficult to do unless the keyword is your business name) or if your blog focuses on a niche aspect of your business. If you really want to go all-out with your online presence then create a main blog within your website and then create additional blogsites that focus on niches of your main business. This way you’re reaping the rewards of all the benefits mentioned above.

If you have any questions about creating a blog contact Turbo Social Media to review your strategy and your options.

How to track ROI from social media marketing

Tom Sullivan — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:30:04 +0000

The first question many businesses have when considering the decision to invest in social media marketing is: what kind of ROI should I expect? Many people view ROI as revenue/cost equation. Under this presumption, if a business brings in more money than they spent on a marketing campaign then they have a positive ROI. If they bring less money than they spent they have a negative ROI. This revenue/cost model should be altered to compare total cost with total value gained, not total revenue.

It’s easy to keep track of your businesses costs associated with social media marketing. There are hourly/salary costs associated with employees who spend a certain amount of time maintaining and updating social media accounts. There are agency fees associated with any outsourced work done for your business on social media. There are direct costs for advertising. Finally, there are miscellaneous costs for additional time, money and resources allocated to social media. Calculating value is not as easy.

The first thing to look at when analyzing value is revenue and sales. Like costs, this is also pretty easy to track. Setting goals will help you measure your success. Consider creating different “calls to action” for your website or Facebook Fan page that track conversions, and then track these conversions to see if they become clients. Beyond revenue, there are additional ways to measure value:

• Measurable goals (other than revenue): Generating leads is typically a necessary step to achieve before you generate revenue. Having the proper follow up process in place, like email marketing and newsletters, make these leads extremely valuable. Also consider improvements in website bounce rates, average time on site, unique visitors, etc.
• Customer Feedback: Additional knowledge that you gain by interacting with individual clients and get feedback from them about your products or services
• Industry Expertise: Putting out a consistent message that is both unique and valuable to your following on social media
• Testimonials & Referrals: It’s great to have testimonials on your website. It’s even better when happy customers are raving about you on social media. Even better than a testimonial is a referral.
• Customer Satisfaction: Improvements in various metrics can often indicate that clients are more happy with you product, service or brand.
• Improvements in other marketing efforts: Social media can often improve the effectiveness of a business’s other marketing efforts. Email marketing, direct mail marketing and mobile marketing campaigns are typically more successful and well received if your prospects have already connected with you via social media.
• Branding: This is a hard thing to measure analytically, but long-term brand recognition is easier to achieve if you put out a consistent message and identity for your business via various outlets of social media.

The tough part about assessing ROI with social media is that many of these benefits cannot be measured with analytics and other tools. Often times companies get too caught up with statistics, like “number of Facebook Fans”, “number of opt-ins” or “number of click-throughs”. These things measure value, but that is not really value in itself. Real value is measured over time. One happy customer that tweets about their experience to their 5,000 Followers could potentially lead to dozens of new clients. If you can track each of these new clients back to this tweet then you can determine the monetary value of that one happy client. However, how do you attach a value to the collection of happy clients who collectively make your brand well received, potentially leading to more business down the road? More specifically, how do you measure the value of a survey that you conduct through social media that leads you to promote one service more heavily over another?

The answer to these questions is that businesses need to determine what these values are before getting started with social media. Determine what the most important benefits are to your company from using social media (other than direct revenue). Give each of these benefits a (rough) value and monitor them closely. ROI isn’t just about revenue.

If you want to learn more about measuring ROI or getting started in social media, contact Turbo Social Media today.

How to make your business stand out in Social Media

Tom Sullivan — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 19:01:17 +0000

Just like in the early 2000s when it became obvious that most businesses needed a website, we are getting to the point where most businesses need social media. But just like the Internet, it’s easy to be lost in the crowd and unnoticed. So how do you make your business stand out and convey the right image in the social media world?

At Turbo Social Media, we preach that an informative and well thought out blog is the “core” to any successful social media marketing program. That’s because it becomes a hub for social media traffic, a controlled content environment, and the perfect place to convert social media traffic into leads. A blog will allow you, the expert in your field, to publish articles that provide tips, answers or feedback to questions or concerns people might have about your services. It’s huge for building expertise and establishing yourself as a thought leader in your field. Just make sure your blog allows you to automatically syndicate blog posts to Facebook and Twitter so that all your efforts are connected and integrated.

So after you’ve got your “core” (website/blog) setup, what next? Setting up a Facebook and Twitter page is easy. Once you’ve created a Fan page it is important to recommend people to “like” your business. When you set up your Twitter profile make sure to create an auto responder that links to your Fan page, as well as your website. All of these steps will help with increasing your business’ visibility. By blogging and updating Facebook and Twitter with valuable information on a regular basis you will help to establish your expertise and credibility in your field.

The next important step to making sure your business stands out in the crowd is “branding”. By syndicating your blog posts to your Facebook and Twitter pages you’re putting out a consistent message in all of your networks. This is an important factor in branding your message. Another important thing to know is that both Facebook and Twitter allow you create a unique page with the same page name (for example, Facebook.com/yourbusinessname and Twitter.com/yourbusinessname). Don’t forget that all of these pages are indexed by Google (search engines will find them), all the more reason to make sure everything is consistently branded. But setting up those pages with generic templates is not enough, and may often put you in an unfavorable light if people think you haven’t quite mastered the social media space.

So the last critical step is to create CUSTOM pages on these social networks that match your branding. Both Facebook and Twitter allow you to create custom designs so that you can incorporate your colors, your logo and the same look and feel as your website. This is essential for branding, and it helps to make both your Facebook and Twitter pages look more professional. With Facebook you can even utilize this custom “Welcome” page to have an opt-in box where you can generate leads. You can also incorporate video, as well as links to your website and landing pages in this “Welcome” page. The best part is that creating custom pages for Facebook and Twitter is fairly inexpensive.

If you already have a Facebook and Twitter page, but you’re looking for help customizing both to match the look of your website and company branding, Turbo can help. Contact us today to learn more about our custom Facebook page and custom Twitter page development.

The Top 10 Social Media Marketing Questions

Joan Dailey — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 17:30:16 +0000

Just revealed: The Top 10 Social Media Questions Marketers Want Answered

In the newly released report by Michael A. Stelzner, “2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report”, we’ve discovered what marketers really want to know about Social Media Marketing. In last year’s report, the big question was “Does Social Media Marketing work”. Well that question has completely disappeared, and now the two big questions are “How do I do it” and “How do I prove it”.

Here are the Top 10 Social Media Marketing Questions that marketing professionals want to know from Michael Stelzner’s “2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report”:

#1: How do I measure social media return on investment? The number-one question marketers most want answered is how to track to social media return on investment.

#2: What are the social media marketing best practices? The next biggest question on people’s minds…”What works?” What is the most effective way to drive business without “spamming”? How do I make a message go viral?

#3: How do I best manage my time with social media? Many marketers recognize the enormous amount of time social media can consume. How much daily time do successful marketers spend on social media marketing?

#4: How do I reach my target markets with social media? It’s no surprise that marketers want to know how to narrow their social media efforts to an audience that matches their desired demographics.

#5: How do I generate traffic and leads using social media? Marketers want to understand how to drive traffic with social media and converting social media activities into sales leads. How do I obtain qualified subscribers to our blog, newsletter and/or Twitter feed? How do I convert my social media contacts into customers or clients?

#6: How do I implement social media tactics? Many marketers are seeking step-by-step social media guidance and tactical advice.

#7: What are the latest social media trends? It seems marketers are looking for a crystal ball regarding the future of social media. How do I stay current with all the changes? What’s the next “big thing” in social media marketing?

#8: How do I get started? How to get started is still a major question in the minds of many marketers. What are the steps to building a strong social media platform for my business?

#9: How do I integrate my social media activities? How do I make sure my social media activities are tied to my overall marketing goals? Do they work together? How do I develop a cohesive marketing strategy that includes social media?

#10: How do I evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of each platform? Given the choices available, marketers are looking for guidance before investing in specific social media networks.

So where are the answers? Those are a little harder to find. But our Turbo team has the answers, and we’ll start addressing all of these questions in our blog and upcoming video series.

ALSO, we’re about to announce an exciting new program called the “3 Month Turbo LAUNCH and LEARN”. In this program, we spend the first month getting you correctly setup across all of the Social Media platforms, in the second month we help build your social media subscribers and networks with targeted prospects, and in the last month, we train you how to do run your program all by yourself!

For more information on this program, call our team at 877-673-7096 x2.

The Importance of Social Media Buttons on Your Site

Zack — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 23:31:22 +0000

Social media is obviously a very important part of growing your business in the new millennium. Social media allows you to connect with other like minded folks who can help your business grow. In order to grow your social media lists, you need to make sure people can find you with ease, so the goal is to make it easy for them. Obviously when accepting friends on Facebook you can send them a quick message telling them to follow you on twitter, or become a fan of you on Facebook. But what about from your blog? It does not make a whole lot of sense to tell people to check you out on Facebook or on Twitter in EVERY post. That is where social media buttons come in.

If you are not too sure what I am talking about, by mentioning Social Media Buttons, scroll up to the top of this page and look in the upper right hand corner. These “buttons” link directly to Turbo’s social media accounts. Don’t believe me? Go ahead and click on them… seriously go ahead, I will wait…. Pretty cool huh?

I am sure you have probably seen these before on many other sites. We did not come up with this idea, but it is catching on quick with many websites and blogs across the Internet. These Social media buttons are actually quite important. Social media is all abotu being connected to others, so your goal and objective should be to make it as simple and as easy as possible for others to get in touch with you. Imagine if we did not have this. If you wanted to connect with us on Twitter, you would have to Search for Turbo Social Media within twitter, and may not find as as we are titled “TurboSMM.” Same with Facebook, if you wanted to check us out there, you would have to open a new window and go to facebook and search for us. These buttons at the top of the page, take all the work out of it, you can click on any of them and be immediately taken to the page and connect with us there. You can connect with us on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, LinkedIn or check out our RSS.

To learn more about Social Media Marketing, click the red button at the top of the page to watch our free video series or give us a call at 877-673-7096.

Thank You, and I encourage you to leave and comments or questions below. To learn more about the video series, Medical Professionals should click here and Entrepreneurs should click here.

Also be sure to connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn by going to the top of the… oh who am I kidding, you know how to connect with us!

Article by Zack Zucker, Director of Operations, Turbo Social Media

Should I Trust Yelp?

Tom Sullivan — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 16:03:37 +0000

If you haven’t yet heard the news, popular review website, Yelp, has recently been hit with a class action lawsuit. Two law firms, in San Diego and Miami, respectively, have filed a class action lawsuit in Los Angeles federal court. They claim that Yelp is running an “extortion scheme”. The plaintiff claims that she complained to Yelp about a negative review, and was later contacted by a sales representative demanding payments of roughly $300 per month in exchange for hiding or deleting the review.

Does this sound familiar? Well, if a similar situation has happened to you then you’re not alone. This isn’t the first time Yelp has been accused of such shady business practices. I have spoken to several business owners who have been propositioned by Yelp for their monthly advertising for roughly $300 a month. Upon declining the advertising offer these business owners mysteriously saw their “good” reviews disappear and their “not so good” reviews remain.

Yelp has vehemently denied all accusations. In fact, on their official blog they spell out various myths about Yelp to dispel any notion that there is extortion, or unethical business practices, going on. Now Yelp will have to defend itself in court, rather than their blog.

The fact is, Yelp has no clear cut policy on removing reviews. Many people see reviews disappear occasionally. Often times it is because the review is inappropriate, but Yelp claims that they can remove a review if the person who made the post is not “an active Yelp user”. The problem is that Yelp will not disclose the formula for “an active Yelp user”. They claim it is proprietary and confidential. This formula remains a mysterious algorithm.

At the very least Yelp is losing the trust of many of those who relied on them for reviews, especially small business owners. Given that Yelp devalues new or first-time reviewers, they are likely losing trust among these users as well. At most, Yelp is guilty of running an “extortion scheme”. We’ll have to wait and see what happens with the case, but we’ve seen this happen before among other large internet juggernauts…they need to be kept in check!

How To Get More Twitter Followers

Zack — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 00:04:48 +0000

Twitter is a great tool for Social Networking, especially if you are trying to build your business. Aside from Facebook and LinkedIn, there is really no other place where you can connect with so many like minded individuals and people who can help you build your business into a money making machine. The question is, is how do you find all of these people and what can you do to expand your network to help reach even more people? Well that questions is actually quite simple to answer.

I recently came across a great article on this very topic. This post outlines the top 10 things you can do to really grow your list. Overall this is a great list, as it goes over not just any way to grow the list but the best way (best way meaning you are not paying for a bunch of people that may or may not help your list. A few of these tips are items we have covered in our own blog posts, just as using a call to action and tweeting about blog posts.

The best tip on this site, in my opinion, is #2 “Tweet More Often.” There is no better way to get followers that to be constantly tweeting. But what this article does not mention is what you should be tweeting about. Sure you can tweet about ANYTHING and get followers, but you want to make sure your tweets have keywords that people will be searching for. The more keywords specific to what you are trying to do, the higher concentration of people following you, will be able to impact your company in a positive way.

To learn more about Social Media Marketing and the Importance of Networking, click the red button at the top of the page to watch our free video series or give us a call at 877-673-7096.

Thank You, and I encourage you to leave and comments, questions and your favorite Twitter Tips below. To learn more about the video series, Medical Professionals should click here and Entrepreneurs should click here.

Article by Zack Zucker, Director of Operations, Turbo Social Media

Spin Your Article 100 Ways with JetSpinner

Zack — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:54:37 +0000

Social Media has taken the internet by storm. Web 2.0 has become the biggest part of business and marketing in the 21st century. Obviously with the ever growing mediums of social media, we need new tools to help us keep up. We have talked about various ways to help you keep up with all the latest trends, and today we add a new social media aid to the mix: JetSpinner.

JetSpinner is a free web platform that allows you to upload an article and have it spun to create multiple articles that are similar yet unique. This allows you to submit the same content on the web without having Google mark it as duplicate content (which we all know by now, is not a good thing).

Most article spinners out there just use a thesaurus to mix in various words, and the final product often comes out so poor, you cannot submit it and be taken seriously. JetSpinner takes the most white hat approach that can be found out there. With JetSpinner you actually break your article into little pieces (from single words up to small sentences and paragraphs. You then provide JetSpinner with alternatives for your little snippets and this allows them to create hundreds of articles at the push of a button.

JetSpinner is a great way to submit your content out over multiple bookmarking and syndication sites without creating any duplicate content. As we know, the goal of Social Media Marketing is to get your content out to as many sites as possible, without submitting the same thing. JetSpinner allows this to happen, helping you get your content out to more people, without having to worry.

To learn more about Social Media Marketing and the importance of Article Submission, click the red button at the top of the page to watch our free video series or give us a call at 877-673-7096.

Thank You, and I encourage you to leave and comments or questions below. To learn more about the video series, Medical Professionals should click here and Entrepreneurs should click here.

Article by Zack Zucker, Director of Operations, Turbo Social Media