Category Archives: Social Media

What Not to Do on Facebook

Facebook is a great tool for marketing online. It’s an easy way to connect with others, expand your network and identify friends who may be interested in growing their own business. Facebook gives you a lot of freedom, but if you’re using it to market, you need to be careful with this freedom. Here’s what not to do when you use Facebook to market your business.

Don’t link blast

Links are important, but they lose all meaning when you share the same ones over and over without any content. You can use Facebook to direct people to your site, but you need to do it the right way. This can be accomplished by sharing great information or an inviting tease. Posting something like “This one tip will help you grow your business, see it on my blog www.janesblog.ws” is much more inviting than just blasting www.janesblog.ws in every status update.

Don’t talk about yourself all the time

You want to share your business, but that can’t be all you talk about. Try to engage people by sharing helpful articles relevant to your industry and your own tips often. Supplement this with information and links to your business. This well rounded approach to marketing will keep your network tuned in and not overwhelmed.

Don’t target the wrong market

Who are you friends with on Facebook? This can change how you market. If you know your Facebook friends aren’t interested in new business, then it’s time to reach out to groups on Facebook or add new people to your network. Even the best marketing will fall flat if it’s aimed at the wrong audience.

Our Favorite Social Tools Right Now

Social media is a powerful marketing tool, but it can be hard to keep up with the trends. It seems like a new social media tool goes live each day and it’s your job to figure out if it could benefit you or not. We’re sharing some of our most recent favorite tools to help keep you on trend.

Topsy

Topsy is a powerful tool for Twitter insights. While Facebook has a robust insights offering for its pages, Twitter leaves you mostly on your own. Enter tools like Topsy  that can track your tweets, popularity and engagement. Topsy says they provide “social insights” and “analyze billions of conversations in real time.” This is a great tool to help you grow and streamline your rebelmouseTwitter activity.

RebelMouse

If you’re thrown off by all of the social network pages you need to visit to keep up, you’re not alone. RebelMouse has created a social front page that can connect many of your accounts and updates the page as you update each account. You can see in the screen shot to the right that RebelMouse takes a attractive approach to sharing your updates. This is a great tool to attract followers from one network to another or to create a unique one page presence online.

bitly

Want to know what kind of clicks the links you share are getting? Enter bitly who invites you to “Do more with your links.” It’s one of my free link shortening sites that provides analytics with each link. According to their site, bitly is available via our website, browser extensions, mobile web, and numerous third-party tools integrated with our open public API.” Use this site for all your links to track click frequency, times, engagement and more.

 

Embed a Google+ Post on Your Blog or WebSite

Google+ is a social networking service offered by Google that allows for status updates, links, photos and more to be shared much like they are on Facebook, but with the added privacy of sharing this information only with certain circles that you set up. If you already have a Google account, setting up a Google+ profile can be seamless. To learn more on how to do this, see our post HERE.

Google+ offers a fun feature that can help you instantly create engagement for a blog post or your website. This feature is the embed post. Any time you share an update on Google+, you have the option to embed that update somewhere else. The embedded update will show up similar to post below.  It allows visitors to instantly comment and interact with your Google+ post right on your blog or website. This is a great option to encourage more interaction or just break up your content with something new.

To embed a Google+ post, go to your Google+ page and share what’s new. Once that new post is live on your page, click the down arrow that appears in the top right-hand corner of the post. Select embed post and HTML code will pop up in the window. Copy and paste that code into the HTML editor of your blog or website and save. Your embedded Google+ post is now live and ready for comments and new followers.