It ain't what you say, its how you say it!

Traffic analytics firm Parse.ly says its latest figures show the giant social network now accounts for more of the traffic to news sites than Google. Anyone who works for a major news website or publisher knows that social referrals—that is, links that are shared on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter—have become a crucial source of incoming traffic, and have been vying with search as a source of new readers for some time. Now, according to new numbers from the traffic-analytics service Parse.ly, Facebook is no longer just vying with Google but has overtaken it by a significant amount.

Parse.ly’s chief technical officer Andrew Montalenti said in an interview with Fortune that the company’s latest estimates show that social-media sources (of which Facebook is by far the largest) accounted for about 43% of the traffic to the Parse.ly network of media sites, while Google accounted for just 38%.

The company’s clients include more than 400 major news and media outlets, including traditional publishers such as Wired, The Atlantic, Reuters and The Daily Telegraph, as well as a large group of digital-only outlets such as Mashable, The Next Web, and Business Insider. Collectively, the network accounts for about 6 billion pageviews and more than one billion unique visitors per month.

This isn’t the first time that Facebook has edged past Google in the traffic-referral race, Montalenti said. The social network took the top spot by a small amount last October, but this month’s lead is far more dramatic—and the Parse.ly CTO said that from the company’s data, it’s clear that search has hit a kind of plateau and isn’t really growing any more as a referral source for media. Meanwhile, Facebook’s influence has “shown it’s on a continued growth trajectory.”

That trajectory has been fairly dramatic: According to Parse.ly, as recently as January of last year, Facebook accounted for just 20% of all the traffic from documented sources to the company’s network of media sites, and now it is more than double that. Montalenti said this doesn’t mean Facebook accounts for 43% of all traffic, but just the sources that Parse.ly is able to get data on.

Microsoft drop the customer service ball again!

I wonder if smart phone usage will go the way of the cigarette smoking?

Once you could smoke on planes, trains and buses, at your desk, in your workplace, even in the meeting rooms of your workplace, you could smoke inside restaurants sitting at your table, in the bar, at the bar and even in the dark of the picture house. Blinged up with accessories such as engraved lighter's, gold cigarette cases and flamboyant cigarette boxes clearly advertising their product.

We even had tobacco shops which sold tobacco openly in front of children. After-all back in those days if if you didn't smoke you were a minority that was deemed uncool and even scary.

Today smokers know that smoking kills. Just in case they forget it is clearly branded on the plain box which is now hidden from our eyesight behind a locked screen in our shops; the mere sight of cigarettes is now deemed to risky for today's younger generation. Our society has outcast the smoker to the great outdoors; outside huddled in the rain in a small badly heated box they are exposed for all of us to see. Soon it seems that even smoking within your own car and home will be revoked.

Benedict Cumberbatch To Snap or Not to Snap - the answer is not to :) 

Are you hack proof or are you vulnerable to attack? 

84% of consumers say they either completely or somewhat trust recommendations from family and friends about products - making these recommendations the information source ranked highest for trustworthiness.

So with this in mind you can understand the influence Facebook is having on company brands and services. A simple like and share can bring you straight into your consumers living room with a personal endorsement and with consumers spending up to 2 hours a day on social media platforms it is a platform that business can not afford to ignore. 

However to many business are not utilising Social Media with the respect that it deserves nor the online consumer. It is simply not enough to post and comment expecting a like and sale you need to treat Social Media as a fundamental element of your business. 

This blog post will focus on the 7 core steps for your business to actually get your business social media to provide a legitimate bottom line return.

1) Have a social strategy that aligns with a clear business objective

To often we are asked to provided a social media campaign for our clients that have just been bolted onto the marketing strategy with no clear goals or KPI’s. Even worse the campaign typically does not even reflect the actual business product or service. So integrated your social media into your overall marketing plan complete your traditional marketing with the real time customer engagement offered by social media platforms. 

2) Define a clear role for social with your traditional marketing. 

“TV is still king, then papers and magazines, then radio, but social media is right down there in terms of influence” says Joe Twyman at pollsters YouGov in relation to the great “Social Media” General Election of 2015. Again, to often, we have seen traditional marketing campaigns been discarded by our clients in lieu of the considerably cheaper and vastly popular option of Social Media. @InternautMedia we recommend that we initially work your social media marketing around your traditional marketing and balance both approaches. Then when you start to see the continual results of online engagement you should review your traditional marketing.

3) Your online activity reflects the scale of your business.

If your business objective is to drive penetration of a select product into a niche marketplace, why is your social media activity focusing on engaging the mass public?  Marketers should not loss sense of the demographic focus of there business and target only where their product will sell. 

4) Your content won’t go viral by itself alone - you have to work at it.

It is a rarity for content to be so good that it will go viral all by itself. Many a production agency has convinced a brand manager that their content will be so good it will go viral all on its own and yet it never happens.

So what is Viral - YouTube personality Kevin Nalty, aka Nalts, asks the question “How many views do you need to be viral?” In 2011 he said, “A few years ago, a video could be considered “viral” if it hit a million views.” But Nalts updated that definition. He said, “A video, I submit, is “viral” if it gets more than 5 million views in a 3-7 day period. 

So bearing this in mind prepare to put the work in online if you want to go viral. 

5) Remember Facebook is friends first; not business.

To often business forget that Facebook is used for social communication and interaction with friends and family. As we say at Internaut Media view Facebook as being a guest in someones home; so treat it accordingly and with the respect that it deserves. Make sure your campaign is one that engages your customer base. Your content must be relevant to your product and its customer. Do not champion your product or service - champion your customer instead.  

6) If you publish you need to respond sooner rather than later.

Remember that while you may schedule your posts for when their customer demographic is online you are not scheduled to respond. Make sure that you have a defined turn around time for all of your responses to your customer queries, comments and posts online. Share this time with your customers online and on your social media platforms and finally make sure you stick to it :-)  

7) You will have to pay to be seen on Facebook if you want sales.

With the decline of organic reach on Facebook no campaign will truly work for you and your business unless you use Facebook advertising. Facebook advertising is still the most inexpensive marketing option within bot traditional and online sectors. It also works as it allows you to post directly onto your targeted consumer audience. Not only that the data that it captures allows you to enhance your campaign to ensure a greater return in engagement and audience capture. 

As you can see all of the above is really common sense which is what business is. A customer will purchase your product and/or service for the simple element they need to or want to. Once you remember that, all of your posts online will be easier to create :-)  

Is Corporate Branding not the same as Corporate Reputation? 

Corporate branding refers to the practice of promoting the brand of a corporate entity, as opposed to specific products or services. The activities and thinking that go into corporate branding are different from product and service branding because the scope of a corporate brand is typically much broader.  thank you Wikipedia :-) 

The corporate brand is the overall umbrella for the corporations’ activities and encapsulates its vision, values, personality, positioning and image among many other dimensions. thank you brandchannel.com

To us we see it as the visual brand that encapsulates all that you and your company are, what you offer, what you stand for and what you do. It defines your perceived position within the marketplace and community by the public.

We see this is different from Corporate Reputation - which we would define as is the perceived summation of your business performance within the marketplace by your shareholders, stakeholders, investors, competition, suppliers and customers. To me this is more a judgement by your peers and influential customers on the perceived companies performance more so that the actual performance.

In essence our simple definition is:

If used correctly, video content can have a positive effect on your SEO efforts. For long-term SEO strategies, taking into account high quality video content and social shares as a result, it is a great way of building upon your natural links over a longer period of time.

By using YouTube video content to your advantage you could potentially build reputable links – but what else can you do to ensure that your video content is being fully optimised for search, and ranks highly within YouTube’s own search facility?

Follow our guidelines below to discover how you can optimise YouTube content to help your videos rank.

1. Ensure the video file name is relevant to the video content

Before anything else, ensure the raw file name of your video has been optimised. It should contain relevant information and be descriptive of the video content. Just as you would optimise an image with a relevant alt attribute, it’s important to clearly display to YouTube and Google exactly what your video content is about.

2. Optimise your video title

If your video content appears in SERPs you may want to optimise the title of your video as if you were writing a meta title. Using 56 to 60 characters, depending on pixel width, will give your video title a better chance of being displayed without truncation in SERPs. Try to include your brand name where possible because you want people to immediately identify your product and know who is responsible for the video content.

3. Don’t forget your video description

With your video descriptions, again, it’s possible they will appear in SERPs so keep your introduction to a limit of 156 characters where possible. Don’t forget to use valuable keywords and ensure your description isn’t duplicate content, scraped from anywhere else on your site. Your description is also a great opportunity to link back to a transactional page, to show the viewer your product or service.

4. Choose appropriate tags

Tags will help users find your video content, so it’s important to use keywords that you want your content to be associated with. Don’t forget to use your brand name too. You want your user to quickly identify who you are and where they can find your product or service.

5. Add annotations to your video

By adding annotations to your video you are inviting viewers to click through to your site, and potentially increase conversions. Make sure you link using a relevant keyword within the annotation text and link out to a relevant page. This is a great way of increasing those natural links that will build on your current linking strategy.

6. Choose an eye-catching thumbnail

Using an appropriate thumbnail will not directly lead to conversions; however, it will ensure that your video content is inviting enough to be clicked on. YouTube will give you the option of three thumbnails that it will automatically pull through from your content. These options aren’t always the most appropriate so you may want to take some still images at the time of filming to ensure you get the most appropriate thumbnail for your video content.

Call in the Producers

Optimising your YouTube video content is all well and good, but it’s important to make sure that you start out with video content that is of the highest quality 

Keeping it in line with your brand, grabbing your audience’s attention and building a relationship with them by telling a story, is a great way of building natural links that will potentially boost your rankings, and establish you as an expert within your industry. 

Marketing has got up close and personal in recent years. It’s about converting strangers into customers and then taking it a step further and turning them into product or brand ambassadors.

Put simply, the process is Attract – Convert – Close – Delight.

It’s about playing the long game, rather than using sales gimmicks and discounts. It costs time, and money, but it is well worth it.

I’ll let the figures speak for themselves:

Companies running inbound marketing, or marketing automation if you prefer, can expect to see organic traffic to their website increase by up to 200%. What’s more, companies with an inbound marketing plan in place can achieve a 14% higher lead close rate.

1. Attract

Inbound marketing is about quality over quantity. It’s about pre-qualifying leads so far in advance that they are already part-way down the sales path and in the conversion process before you even speak to them. It’s about attracting the right people who have a genuine interest in your products or service. But who are the right people?

The first step in your inbound marketing journey is to identify who your customer(s) are. Spend time creating your buyer personas. Build them so that you know them inside and out – only then can you hope to truly understand their wants and needs.

Tools to attract the right leads to your site include blogs (yes, just like this one!) and other on-page content that engages and educates, SEO to ensure your page shows up in web searches, web development to present the most dynamic shop front possible, and social – to build up your persona with them and keep the conversation going.

2. Convert

Once you have attracted visitors to your site you need to engage them and convert them into leads. You do this by getting data from them. It can be something as simple as getting an email address – just so long as communication can become a two-way street.

People don’t hand over their personal details easily. They need enticement. And this comes in the form of gated content – eBooks, How To Guides, Tip Sheets, Podcasts and Webinars. Here, you continue to offer a value add, and establish yourself as the ‘Go To’ point for whatever service or product you are offering. You are constantly endorsing yourself with your content, and now you have a way to make that communication even more personal to your lead.

3. Close

You have site visitors and now, thanks to your valuable gated content, you have leads. Now is the time to convert those leads into customers. However, your approach and timing has to be right.

Use a CRM platform to manage all your new data. Adopt a closed-loop reporting system to enable you to drill down and find out which marketing efforts are garnering the best leads. Are your eBooks flying off the virtual shelf while your podcasts go unlistened to? This is valuable data. It continues to build your buyer persona.

Use email to provide gentle reminders to those leads that have responded to a call-to-action (downloaded an eBook, for example) but still haven’t become a customer. Use focused, relevant content to continue to build trust and confidence.

Take this a step further and automate the process so that your emails are tailored to their download, for example. Again, you are tapping into their needs and desires.

4. Delight

The inbound marketing journey doesn’t stop with the sale. Some might argue that is only the beginning. Inbound companies continue to engage with and delight their customer base, and this in turn will produce up-sell opportunities along with satisfied clients happy to promote your organisation.

Keep the conversation going. Use customer surveys and social media to continue to engage, and make sure this is filled with smart copy that taps straight into their wants and needs again.

Remember – repeat customers spend more, are less price sensitive, and are brand loyal. Inbound marketing is about creating and sustaining these loyal brand ambassadors.

Who Should Consider Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing works for companies of all size and budget.

Marketing managers need to ask themselves three questions before considering an inbound campaign:

Do we have a complex product or service?

Do we have a long sales cycle?

Do we have the potential or capacity to grow?

If the answer is Yes to all three then inbound marketing should certainly be a consideration.

Companies with a complex product or service benefit because of the opportunities to educate clients through inbound marketing. Content such as eBooks, Whitepapers, Tip Sheets and the like are invaluable resources and, while they educate your customers, they are also presenting your expertise and, essentially, selling on your behalf.

Companies with long sales cycles benefit because inbound marketing offers a ‘softly softly’ approach. It does not aim to convert and sell a client in one hit. It is about building trust and developing a relationship. This is ideal for B2B clients, who typically enter into long-term sales or service agreements.

Do you have the potential to grow? Inbound marketing will drive traffic to your site. It will convert and give you a host of new leads. And in turn, these will buy your product or service. Do you have the capacity to handle this?