Sharpen Your Saw
Sharpen Your Saw
Facebook users can now tag a family member in a post by typing in how they are related, rather than their name. For example, typing in “Cousin” will open the typeahead and display any friend the user has confirmed as their cousin through the Family & Friends tab in the profile editor.
The new way to initiate a tag should lead to more tagging of family members, and be especially useful to those looking to quickly call attention of family members to a particular post, such as an announcement that they’re coming to visit. Facebook is testing the new tagging functionality with some portion of the user base, though it could be fully rolled out in the future.
Facebook has let users to tag friends in posts since September 2009. Recently, it has made several changes to tagging, allowing users to tag connections such as friends within comments, and shorten the displayed tags of friends to just their first or last name, It also removed the ability for Pages to tag users in posts, likely to prevent spam.
Tagging friends is a useful way to draw attention to a post. It delivers a notification to anyone tagged, basically assuring that they’ll see it. It also increases the news feed visibility, or EdgeRank, of the post to the friends of those tagged. Typically, only 15% of a user’s friend base sees each of their posts according to a comScore white paper, but tagging several friends in a post can generate more impressions for it.
Users can pull up the tagging typeahead by typing with a capital letter either the official family relation type, such as “Sister”, “Uncle” or “Father; or the slang term for the relation type such as “Dad” or “Mom”.
When users select the family member from the typeahead, it replaces the official or slang relation name. This can sometime require users to go back and edit their text, as the word “my” frequently precedes family relation names (“my cousin”), but is not grammatically correct when used before a name.
The addition of the tagging feature may seem insignificant, but it is representative of Facebook’s product update culture. By making many small changes to the interface over time, Facebook can test to see what features gain traction, implement those that work, and scrap those that don’t. It occasionally launches big new products and redesigns, but more subtle updates like this are a big reason why Facebook has stayed relevant, intuitive to use, and growing for seven years.
(From www.insidefacebook.com)
I like to think of Twitter as a live networking event where you can jump into a conversation at any time. It’s a great tool for communicating information to followers but also for engaging with them. However, I’ve learned that many people, even those who are on Twitter frequently, use it only for sharing information — not for starting a two-way dialogue. That’s a lot like walking into an event and shouting at people but not listening to their responses. It just doesn’t work.
Over the last few years using Twitter, I’ve uncovered a few features that help businesses make better connections and build brand exposure. Here are five things I’ve learned about Twitter that could help improve your marketing strategy:
1. Use advanced search options to locate opportunities. The advanced search opportunities at search.twitter.com allow you to insert keywords that people would use in conversations to find you or your product or service. For example, I search for people who are tweeting the phrase “looking for speaker.” It turns up a ton of tweets related to event or meeting planners. Once I find these keywords in posts, I reach out to the person who tweeted them to say hello, ask to connect and start building a relationship.
Additionally, the search function allows you to target tweets from a certain area so that you can stay within a community. This helps allow local businesses to reach out to tweeters in their area.
2. Tweet often to boost search-engine optimization. Tweeting often not only helps you to stay active on newsfeeds but improves your ranking in online searches. Be sure to use keyword-rich phrases in your tweets as often as possible. If you can’t get your company name or personal name as your Twitter handle then make sure to include it in your bio. Because your bio on Twitter is public and open to search, using keywords in it such as your company name can help Google index content that’s relevant to your business.
Then you can use Google Alerts to monitor your name and company. Check these alerts to stay informed about what people are saying about your company, as well as what your competition is up to.
3. Connect with media. Using tools such as Cision’s Journalist Tweets and Muckrack can help you locate journalists, editors and producers, and to find out how active they are on Twitter. These tools can help you decide which media outlets you would like your business to be featured in and enable you to connect with the journalists who work there.
Read the rest here…
This infographic takes a look at the Fortune Global 100 companies’ use of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and blogs to promote their brands.
(From: http://visual.ly/social-media-business)
We are so excited to welcome you to H7, the company that works hard to understand your business better than even you may know it. Our mission is to help businesses leverage all that they can to be better. Our marketing perspective is that you need to take a step back, sometimes many steps, in order to get an honest look at your business and core values before moving forward again. It is in our experience that we gain valuable insight into your business and can better map out a marketing strategy that will yield a higher return on your investment.
Your marketing dollars are more important than ever. When most companies are closely watching their bottom lines, in order to conserve, we ask our clients to just work smarter with their dollars. Most companies realize that another way to dramatically affect their year end goal is to be more productive by attracting more customers, retaining existing customers, and increasing their customers’ spend with their company. There is no way to increase exposure both in market share and customer share without marketing. And if you are not investing in your customers, your competitors are.
So, most companies turn to advertising. Spending a percentage of the operational budget on advertising, which it is traditionally taught to put 10% into your marketing budget. Our feeling is that buying ad space, media, or direct mail may have an impact, but most business owners are purchasing based on an emotional reaction to the sales rep’s presentation for that specific medium, and it usually turns into buying a few different mediums that aren’t integrated and are working independent of each other. Then when the response is low, dollars are shifted before any one thing got traction. Businesses jump from one thing to another, hoping for their big marketing break. We’d like to help streamline and sometimes consolidate marketing messages to show our clients that the whole really is greater than the sum of the individual parts.
Your dollars need to be spent wisely and efficiently, so you can have greater reach with minimal negative impact to your budget with maximum return on that investment. We don’t recommend what is trendy, because your business is different. You have different customers, a different target market, and a different goal. The first thing you need to accept is that you are in business to win, not just playing not to lose.
H7 will Sharpen Your Saw and will implement and integrate an incredible marketing engine, as well as offer whatever piece of the marketing puzzle you may need. From design and branding to website and social media development, from print and promotional products to signage, we’ve got it covered. And moving with technology we see mobile media as a misunderstood game changer to businesses. We then top it off with our division of creative advertising, where we help you cut through the white noise and reach your audience. We are so excited about what has just begun…..a breakthrough in marketing firms! Now, let’s Sharpen Your Saw!
