Social Media Monitoring

In this chapter I will discuss the practice of social media monitoring. Social media monitoring, which is also known as social media listening, is an important part of social media marketing.

The majority of social media marketing involves posting attractive and relevant content, and initiating conversation with followers; but another important part of social media marketing that many people may not think of is listening to what people are saying. For example, one great way to see how effective your social marketing has been is to see what people are saying about your posts or advertisements. These people are who you are targeting with your posts and advertisements, so their reactions to them is most important when measuring effectiveness. There are tools out here that can help you see how your social media marketing actions are going. An example of this is social analytics which will allow you to measure impact, such as number of likes, conversations, and performance of a web page or a social media account. This can also help you effectively allocate your time and resources.

What is social media monitoring and social listening?

Social media monitoring and social listening are terms for basically the same thing, and they can be divided somewhat into owned media and earned media. Owned media is the actual social media page that you can control such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. This is where you post content and have the ability to engage in conversations with followers. If you only have one social media page that you are operating, then you can simply log onto that account and look at what people are saying about your posts and content. But, if you have multiple social media accounts that you are operating, then you may want to find a tool that can help you monitor each account easier.  A tool like Hootsuite will allow you to do this and it will save you a lot of time.

"Earned" media is everything that does not fall under your owned media. People starting their own conversations or someone sharing a post of yours with someone else is described as earned media. You do not control this media but you'll definitely want to generate because it will help you generate more "buzz" about the content or advertisement that you created. This type of media is also often refereed to as "word of mouth" marketing which is  the type of marketing that people are most willing to trust and believe. This media is not going to be on the social media account page that you will be able to control. So again, there are tools out there that can help you with this and make your life easier!

For more information about Social Media Monitoring, I suggest taking a look at Chapter 8 of CASA Marketing: Intro to Social Media Marketing.

How Much Time to Spend on Social Media

In this blog post I am going to talk about how much time you should devote to social media. There are many time plans that you can choose from, those of which I will list below.

"Pardot's Rock Social Media in 30 Minutes a Day"
  According to Pardot, most social media marketers do not know how to monitor their social media presence. The people at Pardot developed an infographic that outlines how to monitor your social media marketing in 30 minutes per day. Below, I will briefly go over how much time to spend on each social media sites.

• Twitter: You should devote ten minutes to Twitter each day to respond to any tweets or messages your followers send to you. You should also promote any recent blog posts, content, or events, and you should scroll through your feed to retweet or share any content that your followers could be interested in.
• Facebook: Facebook should be allotted six minutes of your time per day. On Facebook you should respond to comments, and scroll through your news feed to see if there is any relevant content to share or comment on. Lastly, and most importantly, you will want to share and promote your own content that consumers will want to see.
•  LinkedIn: LinkedIn should also be allotted six minutes of your time per day. On LinkedIn you should share content and engage with your groups and company page
• Pinterest: You should devote four minutes to Pinterest.  The four minutes should be spent pinning new content of your own, and repinning others content that is relavant to your brand.
• Google: You should only spend two minutes on Google sharing content and posting questions.
• Instagram: Like Google, Instagram should also be allotted two minutes to post interesting photos. Also, as I mentioned with the other social media sites, you should scroll through your feed to comment on any images that are relevant.  

If You do not have a presence on some of the social media sites listed above, devote extra time to the profiles you do have. The most important thing is to engage with your followers, and create relevant content on a weekly basis.

"Chris Brogan's Social Media Time Management"
 Chris Brogan is the CEO of Owner Media Group. Brogan recommends that you break down your social media marketing into four chunks. Brogan believes that two hours per day is the minimum  marketers should spend on social media. Americans spend an average of three hours per day so spending two per day on marketing to the targeted consumers seems about right. Below I will show you in bullet points how Brogan divides up the social media time.

• 1/4 time= listening: You should start each day finding out what the world is saying about you, your competitors, and the market place. Scanning a few social media sites will allow to see what people are saying. This will help you see what is working or what is not working for your company and competitor companies.
• 1/2 time= commenting and communication: Commenting and communicating with your targeted audience is important.  People will appreciate you taking the time to engage with them and answering questions that they may have. Most if not all companies have someone commenting and communicating to targeted consumers.
• 1/4 time= creating: Again, creating relevant content is very, very important. Creating content may include blogging, posting photos or videos, or even creating email newsletters.

11 Ways Your Site's Server Can Kill Your Rankings

According to John Heard and Kristi Hagen (searchenginenews.com), servers are often the last thing that marketers think about when it comes to attaining a number one spot on Google. However, at SEN, one of the first questions that will ask a client is "who is hosting your site and what type of server is it on?'. According to SEN, a server is like an engine of a race car, meaning that you want power, speed, and reliability. When visitors are on a website, they expect "a fast ride" that will take them exactly where they want to go. So, if you are looking to help visitors have a great experience on a website, I recommend you take a look at the topics discussed below.

 Below are the 11 essential topics to consider when focusing on a server:

1. Platform
 The two choices for a web host server are Linux based or Windows based. Unix based is the the system of choice for small to medium business websites because of the lower cost. The Windows based platform is used by larger businesses because it takes more tech knowledge and also makes it almost impossible to run a WordPress site.

2. Hosting Package
 Examining the hosting package will be very important because you will be charged fees if you run over your allotted disk space, or limitations. The cost for a hosting package will very depending on how much disc space and bandwith you need.  The lowest cost per month for a hosting package will start at $.95/month.


3. Secure Certificate
A secure site will get definitely get more favoritism from Google when it comes to ranking boosts. The amount of support surrounding a secure certificate will vary dramatically. So, it is important to do research on what the costs and services are available to upgrade to a secure server with the host you choose.

 

4. Shared or Dedicated
 In most cases, you will want to use a shared server space that will run multiple domains in the same box. Dedicated servers cost a lot and are often overkill unless you have a high traffic website. However, dedicated servers do allow some more room for control and customization.


5. Security 
 Security should be one of the most important aspects of choosing a host. You will want to find a host that does a great job with security, but you also do not want one that will make your site a nightmare when trying to install new software. The best way to find a host with good security will be by talking to people who have used hosts with good security.

6. Support
You will want to find a support team that is staffed 24/7 and offers both email and phone support. It is also suggested that you call their tech line to see how long you have to wait on hold before you sign up with them.

7. Subdomains
 You can have your subdomain be hosted on the same server as your root domain or SEN also suggests that you can use an "A" record DNS entry to point the subdomain to another IP, which could be on another server. It would also be helpful to do some research on costs and what is required to add a subdomain.


8. Speed
Speed will always be near the top of a priority lists when selecting a server because speed effects conversion rates, bounce rates, and your search rankings. Google has even mentioned that speed of a website is part of their algorithm. Therefore, it should be at the top of the list for your site's SEO as well.


9. Canonical
If the www and the non www versions both serve your site's page you may be in trouble because that means you are serving two different sites to customers and search engines. To correct this, you can visit 301 permanent redirect when setting up your website and domain. If you plan on using a Windows Host you should make sure that they can address this issue for you.


10. Location
The actual physical location for your server is important. If you have a multi-national site you need to give the search engines as many possible indications tying your site to the correct country. For example, if you have an American site you will want a server hosted in the U.S. or as close as possible to the U.S. Having a closer physical location will help improve your load times and it may also avoid having to resort to Content Delivery Networks.

11. Uptime
 Last, but not least, is uptime, the measure of the time your site has been working. Uptime is perhaps the most important metric that you will want to measure. If your website is down, customers won't be able to gain access to it, and search indexes will not be able to index it. Many of the top web hosts that show their servers status at all times.  If they do not, be careful with working with them. If you visit www.pingdom.com you can find a package for $9.95/month, that will monitor your site's performance and uptime.


If you want more information on this topic please visit the following link: https://www.searchenginenews.com/se-news/content/11-ways-your-sites-server-can-kill-your-rankings

Connecting and Posting to Hootsuite

I promise, this will be  my last post about Hootsuite. I first gave you a background of Hootsuite and talked about how it can help you with social media marketing. I then talked about how Hootsuite works and how you can get started with it. In my last post I briefly covered the steps that would help you manage your social networks. Now, I will further describe how you can add, reconnect, or delete social networks, and I will also help you with publishing and scheduling messages.

Add, recconect, or delete social networks
So, now that you have created a Hootsuite account, you are most likely interested in adding, reconnecting, or deleting a social network. The social networks that you can add to Hootsuite are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. To add a social network, do the following steps: 1. tap the main menu, 2. tap settings, 3. tap social networks, 4. tap add+ and finally, select a social network and enter your credentials to authorize the account. To reconnect a network: 1. tap the main menu, 2. tap settings, 3. tap social networks, and 4. tap the social network profile. Finally, if you want to delete a social network: 1. tap the main menu, 2. tap settings, 3. tap social networks, 4. swipe left on the social network profile that you want to delete, and tap delete.

Publish messages
Once you have connected some social networks to Hootsuite, you will be ready to publish messages via your profile. You can pick whichever networks you want to post to from the "Social Profile Picker" to publish the same message to several profiles at once. It is important to note that LinkedIn posts have a character count maximum of 685 and Twitter  has a limit of 10,000 characters per message. To send an actual message, select a social profile from the "Social Profile Picker", and then click "Send Now"

Schedule messages
Now that you have a brief understanding of how to publish messages, it would be helpful to schedule your messages. You can manually schedule messages to publish on a specific date and time, or you can use Auto Schedule to schedule your messages. You can edit, reschedule, or delete scheduled content from the "Publisher" section of the Hootsuite dashboard. You can choose to manually schedule messages or use the Auto Scheduler that is offered on Hootsuite. If you want to manually schedule messages, do the following: 1. click scheduling, 2. select date and time to publish the message, 3. click schedule. If you want you can check a box to receive an email when a message is sent, and you can view the date in publisher to review other content scheduled for that day. If you would rather auto schedule your messages, do the following: 1. select a  profile from the Social Profile Picker, 2. click compose message and enter a message, 3. click scheduling, and 4. click the toggle button to turn Auto Schedule on, and then click Auto Schedule. If you are one that often times forgets things, I would definitely recommend using the Auto Scheduler so do you don't have to worry about remembering to post a message every day.

9 SEO Tasks

SEO can be a confusing for people who are not familiar with it. In this blog, I am going to list nine things that you should plan to do if you are working on SEO for a website.

1. Setup Google Analytics
The first step is setting up Google Analytics for your website. Web hosting pages often offer analytics, but they are usually unreliable. Google Analytics is a great choice because of everything it offers, and it is actually free! Once you have Google Analytics for your website, make sure you understand how to check your organic search traffic volume. The following screen shot show where organic search volume is shown.

2. Setup Google Webmaster Tools
Setting up Google Webmaster Tools will allow you to see things that Google has observed about your site. Some of the interesting things it provides are: backlink data, rankings data, most common keywords on your site, crawl data, and much more! You can view an example of a crawl report by clicking on the following screenshot.

3. Check Your Indexing Status
This is very basic and easy to do as it only requires two steps. The first step is to to estimate how many pages you think your site has. You don't need to know the exact number, but it is important to know if you have dozens, hundreds, or thousands of pages. The second step will then require you to go to Google and type in the following "(site:yourdomain.com)". When you click search, the results will show you how many pages Google has in their index for your site. If you think that the results are way to low or high, it is time to get some more SEO help.
4. Run a Crawler on Your Site
Xenu and Screaming Frog are two options you can use for this. Xenu is more of a general purpose crawler and Screaming Frog is more targeted at SEO. You can choose either one, but the most important thing is to make sure that you fix all of the "page not found" errors. If Google sees a lot of errors it will believe that your site is of poor quality, which you will definitely don't want!
5.Pull Keyword Volume Data
 It is important to find out which keywords most relate to your business and which are most searched by users. You can use Google's Keyword Planner (this does require you have a Google AdWords acount), or Wordtracker. It is very important to understand what users think about when they think of your product or products similar to yours. You will want to be speaking in the language of your customer because it will lead to good results.

6. Optimize the Title Tags of Your Site
 On your website, you should try to have a specific page that contains each major user need you help address. This is described to be an important because it is hard to close a customer if you don't bring them to a page that addresses their need. The last step (pull keyword volume data) will help you pick out title tags for your site. This will also help you understand how to structure the content on the page.

7. Eliminate Duplicate Content
 The Xenu crawler that I mentioned in step 4 will show if you have duplicate title tags or not. You should look at the title tag column and find pages that have the same title. Once you have found this pages, you will need to get a developer to help resolve the issue, but the good thing is that you will know what to tell them. This may sound grueling, but it will definitely help.

8. Create Remarkable Content
 To create remarkable content, you should focus on creating content that will differentiate you from the competition. In fact, this is what search engines will be looking for themselves. To do this, you need to study up so that you are able to write content that solves problems for others, in ways that others have not done yet, or you should hire someone to do this for you. Being able to create remarkable content is critical if you want your website to make it in today's world.

9. Tell the World About it
The last and final step is to let the world know about what you have done. People won't just magically come to your website because that is not the type of world we live in. You have to get out there and promote your brand, and most importantly the great content on your website. You can publish articles in journals or blogs in your industry, speak at conferences, and build a strong social media presence. If you complete the first eight steps, this step will be much easier than you may think.

These nine steps definitely requires a lot of hard work, but the upside to it will be well worth it. For more information on the nine steps, please visit the following link: https://www.plusyourbusiness.com/first-9-seo-tasks/

META descriptions

Today I am going to inform you about Meta descriptions. If you have a blog or website, this post should be of interest to you. For those of you who don’t know, a Meta description is defined as an HTML and XHTML element that describes your page to search engines. Meta descriptions provide and explanation of the contents of web pages and they are commonly used on search engine result pages to show a preview of the snippets for a given page. Meta descriptions are not important to search engine rankings, but they are very important if you want to increase user click-throughs from search engine result pages. The Meta description on your page is an opportunity to advertise your website or blog to searchers, and let them know if your blog/website is what they were searching for. It is important to use the site’s keywords strategically in the Meta description, and you should also create an interesting description that a searcher would want to click. Lastly, uniqueness and direct relevance to a page between each page’s Meta description is key.

SEO Best Practices

1. Write Compelling Ad Copy

When you are writing Meta description, you will want it to be a compelling description because it serves the function of an advertising copy. It is what attracts the searchers to a website, so it is a very important part of search marketing. To maximize click-through rates on search engine pages it is important to remember that Google and all other search engines bold keywords in Meta descriptions

2. Recommended Length-155 Characters

Your Meta description can be any length, but the suggested length is approximately 150 characters.

3. Avoid Duplicate Meta Description Tags

To avoid duplicated Meta description tags, it is important to make each Meta description for every page unique.

4. Not a Google Ranking Factor

“In September of 2009, Google announced that neither Meta descriptions nor Meta key words factor into Google’s ranking algorithms for web search. Google uses Meta descriptions to pull preview snippets of result pages as well as returning results when researches use advance search operators to match Meta tag content.

5. Quotes Cut Off Descriptions

If you have quotes in your met description, Google will always cut off the description. So, when you are writing a Meta description remember to never include quotes or non-alphanumeric characters in your description. If you feel that you need quotes, you should change them to single quotes instead of double quotes.

Source: https://moz.com/learn/seo/meta-descripton

Quick Start Guide for Hootsuite

In two of my previous "Social Media Marketing" blog posts I wrote about Hootsuite. I gave a background of what Hootsuite is and how it can make life easier for someone. I then briefly blogged about how to set up a Hootsuite account. In this blog post I am going to further write about Hootsuite, and I am going to give you steps that will help you successfully manage your social networks in the Hootsuite dashboard.

1. Create a Hootsuite account
To create a Hootsuite account, click the following link: https://hootsuite.com/ and then click Sign Up in the top right corner of the page. You should then click the "Get Started" button and  select the plan that best fits your needs. Lastly, you will be requested to enter your information and follow the prompts to connect social networks, add streams, and send messages.

2. Add social networks
Adding your social profiles will allow you to publish and schedule content, and monitor engagement all from your Hootsuite dashboard. Hootsuite allows you to add up to three social networks to manage on your account. To add social networks to your dashboard, click "Streams" from the launch menu, and then click "Add Social Network". When you click "Add Social Network" it will give you a list to select from to add your social networks. So, pick which your networks that you want to connect and you will be ready to manage your dashboard.

3. Set up tabs and streams
Now that you have finished adding your social networks to your dashboard, you can set up streams for each network so you can monitor content. Each social network has its own unique stream type. Tabs will help you organize your steams into groups.

4. Publish messages
If you want to engage your audience and gain more followers, you should definitely think about setting a schedule to post messages regularly. Hootsuite will save you time because you will be able to post a single message to multiple networks at once. To post a message, click "Compose Message", enter your message in the compose box, and then click "Send Now".

5. Install Apps
To install any apps you may want or need, select the App Directory from the launch menu. You will then need to click "Install App" next to the app, and then click "Finish" to install it.

6. Download Hootlet
Installing Hootlet will allows you to quickly share content to your social networks from anywhere on the web. Learn more about Hootlet by clicking the following link: https://help.hootsuite.com/hc/en-us/articles/204585060-Share-content-with-Hootlet 

7. Download Hootsuite mobile
If you want to manage social media on a smart phone, you can download the Hootsuite mobile apps for android and apple. These can be downloaded from your device's app store.