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Online Marketing and Social Networking
In this, the last of three articles, looking at the online tools available to help you work more efficiently, I’m going to take a look at social networking and online marketing.
Online networking seems to be growing at an incredible rate, there’s a real excitement out there about the possibilities, with marketing gurus such at Tamsin Fox-Davies giving out great free advice about how to improve your online marketing .
Now it’s all very well having all this great advice about online marketing & social networking sites but they do take up valuable time. Well that is where red desk can help, you can outsource those tasks to us, leaving your time free for your businesses core tasks, the tasks that directly make you money.
Once you have set up your Social Networking sites you can use clever online services to update them all at the same time, great!
Hootsuite which describes itself as a Social Media Dashboard, allows you to update multiple networks in one step, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress.com, and Ping.fm. There is an application for your mobile phone, so you can take care of your social networking on your commute. You could also add red desk as a team member & assign tasks via Hootsuite. Another valuable tool Hootsuite offers is ‘mention monitoring’ allowing you to gather information when any topic or brand is mentioned. The possibilities are endless, take a look.
Another online option is FriendFeed, this is a more simple interface, similar to Facebook in layout, but you can link it to your Blog, Twitter, Googletalk, Flicker & Facebook so that everytime to update it automatically updates your other social networking sites, if you up load a picture it will automatically be added to Flicker. This could be a great way to get started with your on-line networking.
Finally I will mention Plaxo, this is a fantastic on-line & secure address book, the great thing is you can import all your contacts from Outlook, Facebook, Linkedin & Twitter, then you’ve got all your contacts in one place which you can sync with Outlook. There is an application for your phone so you can always get to your contacts.
If you need any help with any of the online tools mentioned then give red desk a call & we can help set you up.
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Why blogs are good for business
When a web designer sets up your website these days, they will most likely advise you to write a blog but why is this?
It’s been noted that websites with blogs (and fresh content) rank higher up Google* than those that don’t and those companies who blog on a regular basis (we’re talking 6-8 times a month) are more likely to see their leads double compared to those who blog around 3 times a month^.
What should you write about?
Blogging doesn’t have to be a chore. Set yourself realistic goals about how many times you can blog a month. Start slowly and build up.
Write about subjects relating to your business but in a casual way (imagine you are having a chat with one of your customers) and therefore you are more likely to reach a wider audience.
Aim to be the go-to blog for your business area. Share your expertise with your audience, ask what they want you to write about.
Here are a few ways to generate ideas for blog articles:
1) What are people and companies talking about in Linked in groups?
2) Find an article that is of interest to you and write a response (remember to include the link to the original article).
3) A more in depth FAQ section – what do you get asked about most in your line of business?
Once you have your blog, you can use the content to tweet and post on facebook. You can even get other bloggers to write guest articles for you.
Once your blog is in place and you’ve written a few articles, you can repurpose the content. This means you can take the information or content in your post and break it down into x number of Tweets and x number of Facebook posts. The benefit of this is it saves you a lot of time as you write one article and can then produce anywhere from 3 – 5 updates (depending on how long the post is) that you can distribute on your social networks, with a link back to the original blog post. So not only does it save you time, but it’s a great way to get more exposure for your blog.
If you want to increase your online exposure then why not have a Virtual Assistant, like Red Desk comment on your blog. If you are stuck, we can even write articles for you.
Finally, Jacqueline from Red Desk recently attended a blogging event and this is what she had to say: “Make your blog easy to understand, unique and always have a search box.”
*Google has introduced a new algorithm called AuthorRank which places the emphasis on new content rather than search engine optimisation/keywords
^ Figures taken from a recent survey by Hubspot
mel@reddesk.co.uk
Find me on Twitter @reddeskVA
Find me on Facebook Red Desk VA
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