Tag Archives: business blog

Social Media Trends & News Q1 2016

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Social Media trends 2016

The first quarter of 2016 has been an interesting time for Social Media. Facebook has introduced ‘Reactions,’ Twitter has seen it’s stock on a sharp decline and there are now more advertisers on Instagram than there are on Twitter. On top of all this Social Ad Spend is increasing it’s upward trajectory despite many marketers not being able to prove any quantitative impact.

Facebook Reactions

It’s no secret that for years people using Faceboook have been asking for a ‘dislike’ button. The Facebook team were reluctant to implement a straight ‘dislike’ button for a variety of reasons. Instead what has been introduced is a range of ‘Reactions’ that a user can use to express more than the old ‘Like.’ Though the option to simply ‘Like’ a piece of content remains. Continue reading →

Should You Be Hiring a Copywriter?

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Content Marketing Copywriter

Content Marketing is a big part of most Digital Marketing strategies in 2015. That can cause a problem for some people, if you’re trying to implement you’re own Digital Marketing then that means you’ve got to be creating some of your own content.

Continue reading →

Content marketing: how big is your audience?

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the words content marketingYou’ve spent hours crafting your latest blog, Facebook post or Twitter campaign, but find yourself continually disappointed by the small number of people who seem to be reading and engaging with it. But how do you work out how many people are actually reading what you post? Are your content marketing efforts bringing returns?

The chances are, your audience is bigger than you think. A research project carried out by Facebook and Stanford University showed a large discrepancy between perceived audiences and actual audience size. It found that actual audience sizes tend to be four times greater per post than presumed. The reason for the discrepancy? Around 23% of people simply guess audience size, while 21% base their assumptions on the number of likes and comments they get for each post. Continue reading →

5 Ways to Boost Your Business Blog in 2013

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This video has tips on how to keep your business blog engaging.

Increasingly the most important currency on the web is great content coupled with a loyal community. Whether it’s to shop, stay up-dated or to be entertained; billions of people access the internet every day prepared to engage with their favourite brands.

To grow a community around your content, your marketing plan should encourage customer interaction via social media websites – and just as importantly, from your blog.

Here are five ways to achieve a more engaging blog for the coming year. Continue reading →

Dos and Don’ts for Successful Business Blogging

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Business blogging today is much more than a place for companies to share their news and an effective business blog can change the way people perceive your business. Blogs are popular with online audiences because they can offer fresh voices and opinions and can show the ‘human’ side to your business, giving readers a chance to engage with you. A blog can also increase SEO rankings and increase traffic to your website.

However, for a blog to be successful its content must be clear and relevant to its readers. Here are a few dos and don’ts for effective business blogging.

Do:

  • Make sure your content is clear, relevant to you audience and updated regularly to give your readers a reason to return
  • Engage with your readers. Use a good spam filter and moderate if necessary but encourage comments, views and opinions on your posts.
  • Include links in your posts that point back to other important pages on your site that will help your search rankings.
  • Optimise your articles. You can’t optimise for every long tail search term, but you can target niche keywords or phrases, and each one should feature early in your blog post.
  • Use your blog to complement your other social media. If you are running competitions or offers use your blog to highlight them.

Don’t:

  • Use acronyms and jargon that people won’t understand. Use terms that people will be familiar with and keep sentences short, grammatically simple and easy to read.
  • Just focus on your products or services. Give people useful information that they can use, for example, news about what’s on the horizon in your industry? Blog articles should be interesting, informative and not overly sales focused.
  • Put off posts and updates. It’s not just your readers that want new content. Search engines crawl sites looking for new and updated content, so blogging regularly will ensure fresh content on your site.
  • Use other people’s content without crediting them. Most people will be pleased if you are referring to or re-posting some of their content, but always credit the writer and if possible create a link to the original article – you may even find that they will start to refer to your posts and articles. Duplicating someone else’s content and passing it off as your own can result in disaster.

Offline and online businesses can use blogging to reach a wider audience, whether it’s to offer
products and services or provide industry information. If you want help to get your business blog
started contact us on 01454 261111.

If you’ve been using blogging for business, share your ideas with our readers in the comments area.
How do you use your blog?

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Business Blogging In 2011

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Often business owners come on our Social Media Strategy Workshops and don’t have a blog and quite rightly are curious and skeptical as to how they could ever be of any value.

The below very useful Infographic produced by BlogStar, is based on data derived from Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2011. For the full report, click here.

I think it sums up very nicely in an easy to digest format exactly how those businesses that DO blog, benefit from using a blog as a highly effective marketing tool.

It’s based on over 4,000 responses so is both comprehensive and statistically valid (that’s why we’ve brought it to your attention.

You’ll see that not only is it useful for direct lead generation, perhaps more significant and important for businesses of all sizes is it’s use in building reputation (Online Reputation Management) and vital information sharing.

This is a recent survey in Oct 2011 and is a good snap shot on how things stand now, and Twitter was clearly the top Social Media to help disseminate blog posts in 2011.  With the rise of Google+ it will be interesting to see what the position looks like at the end of 2012!

So, if you don’t already have a business blog or don’t know how to get started, give us a ring on 01454 261111 and we’ll see what we can do to help, or why not come along to one of our Social Media Strategy Workshops or LinkedIn & Blogging ‘Deep Dive’ events to see if one or more of these techniques is right for you to help you work out the next step if any.

2 Questions:
1) Are you using a blog already and if so why did you start or
2) If you’re not using a blog right now, do you plan to start in 2012?