Tag Archive for: Mashable

Details can make or break a social media strategy. Little mistakes and small forgotten aspects can make your company look unprofessional and under-prepared. Listing all the ways I regularly see companies making small mistakes that still severely handicap their strategy would be practically endless, but Mashable had nine entrepreneurs share what they think is the one most important detail they see others routinely forgetting. You may have an otherwise strong social media strategy, but if you’re neglecting any of these, you are under performing.

  1. Link to Your Site – It is way to common to see small businesses creating great content and sharing them on their Facebook or other social pages, without any sort of link to the actual website anywhere readily available. Even if users like what you’re putting out, they can be turned off by searching for a link and simply give up. It should be easy for them to find out more about what you do.
  2. Retargeting – Many small businesses forget to retarget people based on their own social media campaigns using specific URLs in order to track specific leads around the web. If done right, this can be a highly effective marketing tactic, but it continues to go under-utilized. If you are retargeting, you can serve potential leads the ads that would make them most likely to convert, as well as collecting data to track exactly how effective your social media strategy actually is.
  3. Focus Your Social Media – Too many small businesses spread themselves thin across a barrage of social media sites. Focusing on a couple of the most popular sites like Facebook and Twitter makes a much larger impact than barely having a presence on all of them. You’ll find you’re better connecting with your audience and making more conversions without any more effort than you were already using on social media.
  4. Email is Still Important – Email may be the oldest “social” way to connect with customers one-on-one, but it is still the easiest method as well. Everyone checks their email, and statistics show that customers who receive emails are more likely to connect on other social sites.
  5. Don’t Forget About YouTube – If resources and skills allow, YouTube can be an incredible piece of your social media strategy. Videos that show your expertise cement your reputation and showcase your skills to potential customers, while entertaining videos draw a wide audience base that otherwise may not be interested in your service. YouTube content is one of the easiest to share across all platforms, but if you can’t invest in a quality video, you might consider putting your resources elsewhere.
  6. Keep the Original Content Coming – The big catchphrase now is “content is king” but for that content to do anything, it has to be valuable. If you create content that is worth viewer’s time, you can easily connect with a wide range of viewers and build your brand’s reputation.
  7. Run a Personal Blog – Running a personal blog humanizes your company and raises your value by highlighting the intelligent and skillful people working within your company. Everyone knows that companies are always trying to market their service, but they view personal blogs as a more honest way to assess the abilities of those actually running the company.
  8. Don’t Forget Facebook Targeting – Targeting software for Facebook admin pages allow select posts to only reach a specific demographic so that you can more narrowly market to their tastes without hurting the sensibilities of others. It’s easy to use (it’s one of the three icons beneath the text box), yet so many small businesses forget about it.
  9. Make Your Employees Into Advocates – Including your employees in your social media builds trust between your potential customers and your business and puts a face on your brand. If you use organic thoughts from your employees leveraged with your strategic direction, you can make your employees some of your biggest advocates.

While you won’t meet a web designer who doesn’t know about responsive design, its still relatively new. According to Webdesigner Depot, the term was only coined three years ago by web designer Ethan Marcotte who writes for A List Apart.

While some still treat responsive design as a passing trend, it appears that responsive design isn’t going anywhere until new technology requires a new design methodology or we find a better solution. Responsive design aims to make the user experience as enjoyable as possible, and while that pleases users Google has also made it clear that UX is going to be a major consideration in site rankings going forward.

The internet used to be confined to desktops, but we all know that time is long gone. We access the web from countless devices with constantly changing screen sizes and browsers, often from our phone or tablet while at work, on a bus, or watching tv at home. Responsive design strives to make the experience as gratifying and problem-free as possible no matter what platform you are using.

Mashable called this the year of responsive design, and in many ways they are right. It is clear that numerous hugely popular websites have implemented responsive design, and there are many signs it may be considered standard within just a few more years. If you’re still not caught up with this fairly new design method, Marc Schenker recently broke down the facts everyone needs to know about it.

“Social engineering” is a term for the hackers patrolling social media sites looking to steal your personal information. Think of the secruity questions sites like banks use in case you forget your password. Now think, are the answers to my security questions available to the public on Facebook or another social media profile?  More often than not, people allow their maiden name, pet’s name or birthday to be shared without ever considering the possible ramifications.

As Andrea Smith reports for Mashable, Trend Micro’s Titanium Internet Security 2013 is one anti-virus software that also protects you against hackers on social media.  Not only does it show you exactly what is being shared with the world on your account, but it also highlights suspicious links and advises you to avoid them.  You didn’t think all those ‘too good to be true’ deals and offers your friends were claiming were completely legitimate, did you?

There are also parental controls to keep children safe online.  No need to friend your kids, as if they’d let you.  Instead, it monitors posts for keywords to ensure that nothing fishy is happening on Junior’s account.

The included infograhpic includes the results of Trend Micro’s Annual Consumer Security survey and highlights the dangers of your social media activity.

Facebook has now announced a big change to the Facebook Groups component of the site: Read Receipts. This is something that allows anyone to see who exactly has looked at the post/update inside of the group, and works on both standard Facebook and the mobile versions.

This is causing a little bit of a stir and is making some people have concerns about privacy, since the “read receipts” are not optional. Some have gone so far as calling it “creepy”. Whether or not this is something that is taken by the community as a positive change we can only see.

To find out more details about this check this Mashable article by Lauren Indvik.