If you are running a business, you know how important marketing is for your branding. This same rule applies in the world of Internet marketing. Social Media has become an essential part of online marking. Making an effective presence online consists of ensuring that Social Media is now an integral part of your overall online strategy.
✓Targeted Audience: With the help of social media you can now directly interact with your targeted audience. This will help you sell your products or services directly to someone who needs it.
✓Free Advertising: Social Media can provide new business and it costs nothing to setup. The reason is signing up and creating social accounts is totally free of cost. You can post photos, general info and more of your products or services through Social Media. Facebook pages and Twitter feeds are great examples.
✓Easily Build A Customer Base: There are billions of people using Facebook, Twitter and other social media networking websites. As a result it is easier for you to find customers and show them your services or products directly online.
✓Better Customer Service: You can improve your customer service with the help of Social networking websites as your customers can easily reach you directly on social media. They can also give you feedback/reviews of the services or products you are providing them. As a result the overall experience will be positive about your brand through better customer service.
✓Branding Yourself: A huge benefit of Social Media sites is the ability to quickly put yourself out there. All you have to do is join groups, communities, and interact with members that are related to your niche. It is important to create these relationships first before you start to market to your audience.
✓Boosts Your Search Engine Optimization: Social Media plays a vital role to boost your website’s Search Engine Optimization esults. By simply letting people talk about your company, this allows Google to see that your brand is growing positively therefore it benefits your overall SEO efforts.
There are plenty of benefits that companies can take advantage of within the world of . Today it is critical to ensure that your brand is being seen the way that you want it to be seen. If you need any help or assistance with your Social Media or just want some advice, then please feel free to reach out to us at Mind Digital Group. We would be more than happy to help you get Social!
Don’t have the time to go out for shopping? You can use your laptop, iPhone, iPad, or Android device instead. The trend of E-commerce websites across the world is increasing exponentially which reflects in the success of retail stores and online E-commerce companies reporting significant increases in online sales. For example, compared to last year brick and mortar stores such as Tesco, Sainsburys were reporting sales that were the same compared to last year in store, but they saw an increase of almost 10% online. This reflects the increasing affluence of the rising middle class and their willingness to shop from the comfort of their own homes and offices. Availability of consumer goods, books, computer peripherals or any item you can imagine are now available within a few mouse-clicks.
Most companies today are present on Facebook and Twitter and some are also present on defunct websites such as MySpace. On Social Media, however, it’s more about engaging customers through dialog, witty messages, contests and keeping in touch with customers even when they are not visiting the company’s website. What matters most, however, is how active the company is on Social Media, with the following they have on Twitter and how much engagement they have on Facebook with their fan base.
A good example of how to engage customers within Social Media is with contests. This is a great method in which most of the participants feel they have a chance to win something. This prize method or whichever your method is as an E-commerce company to engage your Social Media fans is important in your overall marketing strategy. Social Media engagement is all about providing value, giving something or just even helping out your brand advocates. Shopping is a popular pastime and people love the sight of products, and they love the idea of coming across the products they use frequently. Users love writing and speaking about these products on Facebook or Twitter and talking about whether they loved the product or hated it. For E-commerce companies this is having a huge effect on their business and it can no longer be ignored.
It’s a great idea for E-commerce companies to upload pictures of their latest products or most used products and even old products on Facebook and other Social Media sites. Consumers are able to therefore share the experiences they have had with these products and as a result they create awareness amongst social networks.If a certain type of product is rated highly by a friend or loved one, the likeliness of someone using this product will be much higher versus through direct ads on TV for example. Social Media as a result has had a tremendous impact on all E-commerce companies across the globe. E-commerce companies can capitalize on these social networks by engaging with the users of their products and giving them a personal experience. Every company weather that be E-commerce or retail brick and mortar needs to have a Social Media strategy but most importantly engage with their brand advocates otherwise someone else will.As always, if you need any help or guidance with your Social Media, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital.
Social Media is all the rage these days. Companies can benefit from viral social media campaigns — and sometimes get burned by Social Media as well. What companies hope for is to create something viral like the Ellen DeGeneres Oscar selfie but not every company can do that or have an ad budget equalling the GDP of a small country.
Social Media marketing has got to be a part of the overall brand building process for any company. This is a long term process and cannot be a one-time or a short term thing. The best Social Media marketing campaigns combine SEO, online marketing and above all, effective storytelling.
The Internet has levelled the playing field for businesses of all sizes. A viral YouTube video that can cost nothing that can be seen by millions on YouTube or shared by the billion plus users of Facebook or nearly half a billion users of Twitter can have a huge impact on your business. Social Media includes Google+, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram and more.
Social Media not only can help your business gain traction on Social Media platforms it also has an impact on your SEO rankings on Google. An important thing to remember is that you need to ensure that your business has a Google+ page so that users can rate, review, and share your business online. Besides gaining reviews, Google is now serving up these profiles in the search results to users as well as it has become a ranking factor within your SEO.
Businesses of all sizes small or large should hire a professional Social Media marketing services firms for the best Social Media marketing results or even consider doing it in-house themselves. The bottom line is Social Media can have a huge impact on your business and is something that needs to be taken seriously.
A good way for a company to create Social Media buzz is by running Facebook or Twitter contests and rewarding these participants through prizes or coupons. In return, they can get to see their hashtags trend on Twitter if there’s enough buzz and enough tweets. If you can create interesting content that Social Media users love, they’ll share it with their network on Facebook. If you create great content on the company blog, it will get shared on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and so on. Pinterest and Instagram are image-driven; hence, they are appropriate for businesses such as restaurants, bakeries, florists and so on whose products can be highlighted via great photos. YouTube videos can be great tools to provide product training or ‘how-to’ tutorials.
Creating great content is a key part of Social Media marketing. Content marketing and Social Media marketing therefore go hand in hand. Content marketing has become even more important considering the changes Google has made to its ranking algorithms. With changes such as Google Penguin, Google Panda and Google Hummingbird, Google has made it clear that it loves fresh content and discourages meaningless backlinks or duplicate content. Your Social Media marketing strategy has to take into account the fact that nearly half of the visitors to your website are likely doing so from mobile devices and this will only keep growing with the rapid adoption of smartphones. For online E-commerce businesses as an example, they need to ensure that customers are able to make purchases online from mobile devices.
If you choose to hire a Social Media company, make sure to opt for a company that has the experience and expertise you need to stay ahead of your competitors. Remember that SEO and Social Media marketing should be an integral part of any business’s marketing efforts. If you do it on your own or have a company do it, the choice is ultimately yours. All in all, Social Media marketing is a key weapon in the overall marketing battle that needs to be taken seriously. If you have any questions or need any help with your Social Media, please feel free to reach out to the team at Mind Digital Group.
Humans are inquisitive creatures. They are naturally attracted to mysteries and secrets almost like moths to a flame. Hence, one secret to creating viral content is to create articles with the right headlines — headlines with the word “secret” in it.
A few examples to illustrate this:
If you are a tour operator or travel agency, your blog could contain an article titled ‘Seven Secret Rafting Locations in Colorado.’ Variations on that theme such as “Hidden Places in Colorado” and so on will work as well. A Google search is useful as that will provide a measure of help to gauge the number of articles that already exist on the topic and what are the “related searches” to your article title. You may need to or choose to tweak your article headline based on insights from Google.
The other popular headline writing technique and article format is to have a ‘Top 10’ format list such as “10 Secret Healthy Lunch Ingredients” or “Top 10 Beaches in Florida/Southern California/Gold Coast” and so on.
Becoming an expert in some niche can ensure you have a good audience for your content. Of course, becoming someone like Suze Orman in financial planning or Phil Plait in astronomy takes a lot of effort and only a few people will have the skills and will be lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time to succeed.
You could produce deeply researched articles on some topics and attract significant traffic to your website — something like WaitButWhy.com comes to mind with its massive articles about The Fermi Paradox orSpaceX or Tesla Motors. Online publishers may republish your content/article and this can get greater traffic for your website as well as revenue for syndication.
Quora is one more popular social media where you can share your expertise and online publications such asSlate reproduce some Quora answers under a partnership. Quartz also publishes content from Quora.
Ideas and Examples of Viral YouTube Videos:
Creating popular YouTube videos is not as difficult as becoming a Nobel Laureate. You only have to be smart enough to find your own niche area of expertise that also has a popular appeal and can attract an audience.
Different domains will have different levels of competition and existing players who already have an established brand recognition, reputation, wide audience, large number of followers and possibly a deep pocket and global presence.
If you are in the travel business and plan or produce a blog or vlog or YouTube videos, you are up against the likes of Lonely Planet, TripAdvisor, National Geographic, Fox Travel, BBC Travel, et cetera et cetera.
So any content that you produce must be unique enough in some way and not available at the sites mentioned above. But food and travel are such popular and vast business verticals that there is always scope to try and create an identity of your own that lets you stand out from all the other existing businesses.
After all, food and travel constitute some of the core and perennial hobbies of many. And the habits, fashions, and preferences change. New travel destinations suddenly become popular. New holiday activities go viral. Food fashion changes based on taste as well as the latest fad diet.
Perhaps of more limited interest than a popular YouTube channel about food/recipes/cooking would be one devoted to explaining common scientific phenomena as well as the technology inside everyday appliances. Such a YouTube channel or blog can also provide helpful tips regarding the common faults or malfunctions in those appliances and DIY methods to repair the appliances.
The technological complexity of the world we live in growing and people are often at a loss about sundry gadgets and how they work.
Even if something similar already exists, there can always be a different — perhaps fun or quirky — way to talk about those things.
Think about the wild popularity of a show like Top Gear with its trio of hosts including the ever controversial Jeremy Clarkson. It was all about being fun, outlandish, outrageous, quirky, and being irreverent and rebels which apparently appealed to millions of people around the world.
Among examples of brands using viral YouTube marketing, there is this from GoPro, the action camera company. Its ad containing video footage of a fireman in Fresno rescuing an unconscious cat reached more than 30 million viewers.
Another ad titled “Girls Don’t Poop” from bathroom deo maker Poo-Pourri acquired viral status with its toilet humor and got more than 30 million viewers.
The #DancePonyDance campaign from Three Mobile in the UK enjoyed good social media success with its related video of a dancing, moon-walking Shetland pony.
Science as well as science communication spans the whole gamut from wildly expensive to super-cheap and from Nobel Prize winning level of nerdiness to the amateur enthusiast. If you ever wondered what would happen if you soaked a piece of cloth in water and then squeezed it in zero gravity, then there is a video of astronaut Chris Hadfield doing exactly that in the ISS.
If you wanted to ever check out the tracks made by the massive, Apollo-era crawler transporter as it ferried a space shuttle to the launch pad in the old days prior to the shuttles being retired, well there is astronaut Mike Massimino doing that and much more and having loads of fun.
But non-astronauts like us can develop some serious expertise about, say, the Apollo missions, and create YouTube videos explaining interesting stuff about those historic missions and technologies.
That would be something like what Amy Shira Teitel does in her YouTube channel.
You might be a Nobel Prize winner like Dr. Wolfgang Ketterle and then you could talk about stuff like Bose Einstein condensates.
But you don’t have to be a Nobelist to explain mirror reversal in a YouTube video.
So the point is that there are countless niches and you just have to find one that meets your needs or aligns with your business goals or area of expertise.
Use a brainstorming session in the office to decide your strategy. Or many sessions.
Use the hive mind of Twitter may be.
Take ‘citizen science’ projects like SETI@home. What can be a business equivalent of this where consumers and just lay persons somehow become enthusiasts and participate in some project that you create?
If you are a tour operator who organizes adventurous activities such as whitewater rafting or sky-diving et cetera, you could post articles to your blog or create YouTube videos where you talk about the basics and the dangers and safety precautions to be taken while performing various adventurous activities.
Your company’s YouTube channel can also share YouTube videos from your customers doing various thrilling things like some edgy whitewater rafting.
Different companies have different levels of engagement with social media. Some like Tesla Motors have a cult following among social media-savvy technology enthusiasts and naturally there are plenty of viral videos of people driving their Tesla Model S sedans in ‘insane’ mode or using the latest Autopilot features. Tesla CEO Elon Musk is himself a pro at using Twitter not only during product or feature launches but at other times as well such as when some crisis hits the company. No other CEO of a major auto company like Ford, Toyota, GM, Ferrari, Fiat, Mercedes and so on deploys Twitter or any other social media tool with comparable aplomb.
Tesla is a minnow in the global auto business. Whereas large auto companies sell millions of cars per year, Tesla sold about 50,000 of its Model S sedans last year for a turnover of about $5 billion. But using social media, Tesla has built a level of visibility for itself where it is seen as a global player as well and its name is taken as seriously as the other auto businesses some of whom have been around for longer than a century.
In fact, Apple’s cult following is such that enterprising individuals are harnessing it for their own commercial gain by creating YouTube videos that go viral.
Duncan Sinfield and others post monthly updates about the construction progress of Apple’s Campus 2 and these get hundreds of thousands of hits.
Then there are those who put an iPhone in boiling Coke and upload the resulting video to YouTube and get millions of viewers for that.
If individuals can create interesting drone videos, the takeaway for consumer facing businesses is that they too can do similar videos with relevance to their own businesses.
A travel agency who organizes whitewater rafting or hikes on the Appalachian Trail can surely create nice drone footage of the rivers and trail routes and these will make for engaging viewing.
