by Miriam Hara | Jan 25, 2014 | Interactive, Latest, Social Media
Remember when all a website needed to do was to show up on the net? Gone are those days! The website growth cycle has gone through animations and music design all in the hopes of getting attention and to be entertaining… only to now being a part of the business’ sales lead generation and customer service first point of contact. But alas, change is well… ever changing, and now the website must morph again, to include its channel partner: social media. Social media was once synonymous with Facebook – but businesses were reluctant to jump on board, waiting for this to be a passing phase. Enter Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, the powerful mom bloggers and blogger networks, and now social media has evolved from being a one platform channel (Facebook), to a complex multi-platform channel, embraced by small and large businesses all over the world.
So now comes the latest frontier…where the established business website must, once again, re-purpose itself to include and be a supportive pillar of its social media counterpart.
Take the following 3 must-have tips for a website to support a social persona, assisting in the social media initiatives and maximizing on the SEO platform. Social media initiatives must be solidly supported by the business website to optimize on the efforts and contributions.
1) Ensure your social media efforts all feed on the home page of your website (Twitter feed, Facebook comments, forum article or updates). This alone will help in the SEO ranking efforts. It’s also an effective way to keep the home page renewed with fresh content.
2) Ensure your website features enrollment/subscription of all social media platforms that your business is involved in. This includes the icons for following on Twitter, subscribing to the business forum or blog, to engaging on Facebook, or LinkedIn. This demonstrates to anyone coming onto your website that your business is on the forefront of business.
3) Ensure share-ability. The home page of any website is important, but all pages should be optimized to be social. Pages that feature case studies or articles, or portfolio pieces… all should be made to be easily shared on the social media channels or via email.
If your current business website does not have any one of these, then the time has come to seriously think about making your website more social. For now, at least, it’s about being social.
by Belinda Lui | Jan 11, 2014 | Latest, Social Media
Business blogging, or what has now been coined as content marketing, has increasingly become a good source of networking for businesses. As I sit here, ready to write my first blog post of 2014, I am aware of how difficult it is to constantly provide valuable information that will be relevant for 3H’s target audience and potential business partners.
The 3Hhoopla Blog and content generation was our priority for the year 2013. We have achieved a visibility among peers and that was no easy task. Creating content was at the forefront of our initiatives as was leveraging that content on our Facebook Page and Twitter community…. and more specifically our LinkedIn group. This took time and effort, but well worth both.
Here are some good business blogging blockbusters that have enabled us to overcome the forever blinking cursor waiting for the start of a thought! Hope these help!
Be mindful:
Be ready to note ideas… anywhere… anytime. It used to be that you needed a pen and notepad by your bed, just in case you had a great idea. Not so today. Mobile devices and the ease of note-taking has never been easier. Be prepared and open to see anything from a conversation to a client question to an internal discussion with colleagues as material for blog content. Be prepared to also capture those thoughts somewhere…anywhere for future reference.
Develop a process:
It’s important to develop a process in which you prepare yourself to write. Writing isn’t easy for everyone… so why make it any harder? Create an environment which you will be able to get down and write with limited amount of interruption. Yes, this does sound like meditation and in fact, I do believe it is. Once you create a process and environment which you initiate a few times, your mind will be aware of the cues, making it easier for you to focus and write.
Create thought paragraphs:
When you do start writing, allow yourself to go off on tangents.I know this goes against many other recommendations: you definitely need to establish the premise of your content, however, sometimes by letting go and writing instinctively, a blog post will write itself. Create what I term to be “thought paragraphs”. Thanks to technology, it’s easy to copy and paste and juggle thought statements to develop a cohesive blog post.
Checklist your keywords:
Content creation for brands and businesses must be focused. It’s not just about writing. It’s about establishing your business, brand or product on the horizon of the internet. It’s about getting found. Establish your basic premise and focus on the keywords that speak to the basic premise of your business. List them and always go back to these words and create a list of secondary keywords that are relevant to the primary keywords. This will enable you to establish a checklist to evaluate each blog post to make sure that they build on your overall content marketing strategy.
Hopefully these tips will be handy for your business content in 2014!
by Belinda Lui | Dec 16, 2013 | Business Success, Latest
Productivity means making active steps towards accomplishing something — not thinking about what we have to accomplish. What are we “putting down” when we “put it down on paper”: a current of thought, a torrent of emotions, the first incisions of a decision Flannery O’Connor said that she writes in order to discover what she knows. And as research into writing shows, the act of tracing your thoughts across a page can make you more productive, more emotionally aware, and a less irrational decision maker.|
If we spend less time trying to remember what we have to do and spend more time figuring out how we are going to do them, this will result in increased productivity and efficiency.
Here’s why…
1. Writing clears the clutter from your mind
TED speaker David Allen emphasizes that your mind is for processing, not for storage. Storage of information, after all, can be outsourced in any number of ways, including writing down your to-do list on a pad of paper. The insight underlying this is that attention is a finite resource, one that gets depleted over the course of a day. So if you’re walking around thinking about what you need to do next–rather than thinking about how you’re getting to get it done–you’re misspending your neurotransmitters and letting your productivity suffer.
2. Writing assists in retaining a bank of knowledge
Productive people take better notes: if somebody is dropping knowledge on you, writing down what they say allows you to commit your attention to next insight–rather than trying to remember the last one. Like the Chinese proverb says, you can trust the faintest of ink more than the strongest of memories . As you take more and more notes on awesome things said and read, you can amass an awesome bank of knowledge.
3. Writing helps with realizing growth
Journaling in particular helps you see how you have grown. Harvard Business School research director Teresa Amabile has discovered that people feel more engaged, more productive, and have a greater sense of meaning in their work when they record even the most miniscule of accomplishments within their days. She calls this the Progress Principle: the more you’re aware of your progress, the more involved you’ll feel in making it continue to grow–productivity is making use of this learning.
4. Writing helps you understand your life
University of Texas psychologist James W. Pennebaker has found that writing about their lives helps people to organize their thoughts and find meaning in their traumatic experiences–from people diagnosed with HIV to Vietnam veterans. This is crucial, since the more meaning you find in your difficulties, research shows, the more resilient you’ll be in over-coming them, which reminds us of how the happiest people often have the hardest jobs.
5. Writing helps you become more wise
The last reason to write about life: it helps you study your emotions, which makes you wiser, faster.
“What we construct as wisdom over time is actually the result of cultivating that knowledge of how our emotions behaved,” says USC neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, “and what we learn from them.”
This reinforces Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman’s recommended first step for making better decisions: buy a notebook
(Information from: Fast Company)
How has writing helped you in terms of productivity? Tell us in the comments.
by Belinda Lui | Dec 10, 2013 | Latest, Social Media
Social media is an ever-changing world; keeping up with the trends and statistics can be a full-time job on its own. I’ve compiled a list of interesting facts that may help you design a more strategic marketing plan on Twitter: ten tips that will optimize engagement, reach, and your online presence. A lot of what we thought we knew about Twitter has very well changed in 2013. For example, the fastest growing demographic on Twitter is the 55-64 age bracket. That’s not all, though.
Here is a list of 7 statistics that will help you optimize engagement on Twitter:
1. Twitter engagement for brands is 17% higher on weekends
I guess not many people know about this one, because only 19% of brands tweet on the weekends. If you’re trying to encourage your followers to engage with you on Twitter but you don’t want to work over the weekend, you could use the Buffer app to schedule tweets to be sent while you’re having a sleep-in.
2. Tweets with image links get 2x the engagement rate of those without
Just like on Facebook, photos are more engaging for Twitter users.
3. Tweets with less than 100 characters get 17% more engagement
This is another stat that was similar for Facebook. Shorter posts tend to garner more engagement on both platforms. If you’re posting tweets with links, Dan Zarrella’s research shows that 120–130 characters will be your sweet spot.
4. Twitter’s fastest growing demographic is 55-64 year-olds
If you’re looking at growing your audience, you might want to look at new Twitter users, which are most likely in the older age brackets. As Twitter’s user base grows, you’ll have a wider variety of users to target, supposing they’re all part of your market.
5. Tweets with hashtags get 2x more engagement
Having said that, keep the hashtags to a minimum. 1 or 2 will get you 21% more engagement than if you add 3 or more. This could be because hashtags often connect a tweet to a particular topic or Twitter chat that others are following or interested in. Keep appropriate hashtags in mind when posting, especially if engagement is something you’re looking to improve.
6. Twitter users who mostly use a mobile device are 181% more likely to be on Twitter during their commute
When you’re tweeting, think about where your audience is, and what they might be doing. If it’s early in the morning, they might be commuting to the office–this is actually a great time to get them, as they’re probably bored and looking for something interesting to occupy them during this time.
7. Tweets that include links are 86% more likely to be retweeted
Like photos, links appeal to Twitter users. Links, however, are more likely to increase your number of retweets than engagement rate. This is helpful to keep in mind, as you might want to broaden your reach (get more retweets) rather than engage your current followers (increase engagement with photos).
(Information from Buffer)
What are some of your tips on optimizing engagement on Twitter?
by Miriam Hara | Nov 22, 2013 | Latest, Social Media
Content creation is used by businesses to showcase their expertise, know-how and provide useful information to their potential target. Many businesses have had to play catch up and in order to “get into social media” have hired an in-house content marketing specialist… and let them go at it…with a huge sigh of relief. Finally, their business is on the platform that so many are talking about, and more importantly, engaging with. But is that really the solution or only part of the solution?
This reactive strategy, I believe, stems from a lack of understanding about social media on a conceptual level.How can you actively participate and showcase your entire service offerings with just one head count allocation? Afterall, social media isn’t only part of the marketing equation, today it’s a big part of the sales equation too. Integrating social media in overall marketing initiatives is now pretty common practice…well, more so than just a year ago. Whether you run a small business, medium business, big business… today, you just can’t ignore the call of social media, especially for sales.
By now we all understand that the thrust to many social media initiatives is mostly about content creation. We’ve all been hearing about content marketing or what many refer to as blogging. Well, it is true and it does work.
Social media and content creation go hand in hand.
In truth, many businesses who have been slightly ahead of the curve also create content for SEO, but that’s a topic for another post. The need for generating compelling content with a wide scope is key to establishing your parameters within the social media environment. This should include as many facets of your business as possible. Customer service, sales, marketing, product development, design, etc…. This allows viewers to see the total perspective of your business. That is why content generation must be part of company culture. So how does one go about promoting and integrating social media in their business culture. Here’s a few tips:
- Define your goal of success in the social media context and develop a plan.
- Identify the qualities of your personnel and make sure to take advantage of their strengths. Not everyone has to write. Content creation largely includes visual content link videos (youtubes, webinars) and photos (Pinterest, Instagrams, info graphics). Embrace the differences.
- Build a team within your organization that will be the social media ambassadors… and be sure to integrate as many of your staff members as possible to provide a depth of content creation.
- Establish a measurement criteria that shows progress and aligns all the efforts. Social media isn’t about hoping for the best. Make sure key strategic players are at the table participating and contributing, if only directionally, to the content that will appear in social media.
- Celebrate the milestones… big and small. The first comment from a post, the number of subscribers on a business blog, the first contact from a potential customer coming from your social media initiatives. Yes it does happen!
It doesn’t matter if your business is b2b or consumer based…whether your business is local, regional, national or international…content creation is playing an increasingly important role in the sales context of any business. If your business hasn’t ventured in social media yet and want to get started, click here to access our ebook. At the speed of business, it’s best to start now. 😉
