by Carla Alvarez | Jan 12, 2016 | Marketing Tips
If you took a little break over the holidays from publishing on your Joomla web site, you might have been a little surprised when you logged back in and saw multiple platform updates available. The current stable version of Joomla is now at 3.4.8, if you have anything less, it’s time to update your platform. Unsure what version you have? If you haven’t updated your platform since Christmas – it is out of date.
December Security Updates for Joomla
Joomla has been on a steady release of core platform updates throughout 2015 with [3.4}(https://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5586-joomla-3-4-is-here.html) released February 24th, 3.4.1 on March 21st, 3.4.2 on June 30th, 3.4.3 on July 2nd, 3.4.4 on September 8th, and 3.4.5 on October 22nd. However, the month of December saw the release of three updates in rapid succession due to security concerns that needed to be immediately addressed.
- December 14, 2015: Joomla! 3.4.6 Patched a vulnerability to remote execution as well as several other lower priority security issues.)
- December 21, 2015: After further research into the vulnerability patched the previous week, developers discovered a critical vulnerability in PHP itself. While the current version of PHP is secure, Joomla! Users on servers with older versions would still be open to attack. Joomla! 3.4.7 secured against this issue for users on servers with older versions of PHP (see quote on the update below.)
- December 24, 2015: Joomla! 3.4.8 was released to fix some minor bugs on the previous version. Any time you are pushing so hard, particularly to address a critical issue, there isn’t a lot of time for beta testing for every conflict. I appreciate that the committed core developers pushed right up to the Christmas holidays to release an update that fixed some of the issues users were experiencing.
The Joomla Security Strike team has been following up on the critical security vulnerability patched last week. Since the recent update it has become clear that the root cause is a bug in PHP itself. This was fixed by PHP in September of this year (2015) with the releases of PHP 5.4.45, 5.5.29, 5.6.13 (N.B. Fixed in all versions of PHP 7 and has been backported in some specific Linux LTS versions of PHP 5.3). The only Joomla sites affected by this bug are those which are hosted on vulnerable versions of PHP. We are aware that not all hosts keep their PHP installations up to date so we are releasing a Joomla Update later today which contains additional protection for those users. We do of course recommend that all users apply this update as soon as possible.
Joomla 3.5 Coming in February
The next major release for Joomla is scheduled to release on February 17, 2016 with support for PHP 7. As web sites have become more full featured and performing more and more functions, the amount of load on the server resources has also increased. PHP 7 is designed to handle a higher load of processes at a significantly higher speed. This infographic on benchmarks from Zend is impressive.
However, the platforms operating on the server will have to be compatible with the new version of PHP, which the Joomla 3.5 release will accommodate. Siteground has already made PHP 7 available on their servers for customers and a number of other platform specific hosting services have done so as well.
Need Help?
Need help with your Joomla site? We offer Joomla maintenance service plans. We will keep your platform up-to-date, take regular back-ups, and address any plugin conflicts that arise after a core update. Contact us today for more information for for help migrating your Joomla site from a previous version.
by Carla Alvarez | Jan 4, 2016 | Marketing Tips
The word “campaign” can be used in a variety of ways. When used in terms of warfare, it refers to a specific effort whose goal is to win a battle. The effort of many campaigns is coordinated to achieve a specific goal, which is to win the war. When a campaign is referred to in term of marketing, it refers to a “coordinated series of linked advertisements with a single idea or theme.” This message can be communicated through a variety of advertising channels, such as TV, print, radio, social media, press releases, events, or web. Regardless of “how” the message is communicated, the “what” and the end goal should all be the same for a particular campaign.
It is possible to expend a lot of effort and money towards a marketing goal without having an understanding of the return or whether or not a particular method is effective. This is very easy to do when it comes to online marketing as promotions, press release, and shared content can be accessed far beyond the time period of a particular campaign. It’s not like a newspaper ad when you know the specific launch date and the expected lifespan is of the ad is until the next issue comes out. There are exceptions to this. Someone may hold on to a magazine for months, or even years, and later respond to an ad, but most of the time there is a limited time period for exposure and reach, whereas online content can pop back up and be reshared at the oddest times.
Identifying Traffic Sources through Google Analytics
So looking at the total bucket of visitors to your web site, how do you know what prompted that visitor to come to your site at that particular time? Out of all the the online promotion efforts you have done over the time your domain has been active, which ones are pulling in visitors? If you are using Google Analytics to track web site usages, there are several metrics Google displays by default. Under the “Aquisition” section are listed:
- All Traffic: The options beneath this include: Channels, Treemaps, Source/Medium, and Referrals. Each of these can be further customized from the default. The referrals dashboards lists all external sites referring traffic to your domain. In the article on how to get rid of Google Analytics referral spam, I explained how to get rid of false referrals that artificially inflate your site statistics.
- Adwords: If you are running an Adwords campaign to promote your web site, this is a key section for testing and monitoring the effectiveness of your campaigns.
- Search Engine Optimization: The reports in this section tell you which search terms a visitor used to access your site. Keyword search terms will display here, unless the visitor is logged into their Google account while searching, then the search terms will be obscured and will be listed under (not set).
- Social: This area gives a number of metrics for assessing the engagement for your site on social media including what networks are sending you traffic, what other networks or “data hubs” are discussing content on your site, the most frequented landing pages from social media referrals, trackbacks, goal conversions from social media referrals, how visitors engage on your site, and where the users go once they get to your site.
- Campaigns: Finally, there is an option to track campaigns in Google Analytics. The most simple type of campaign is a default option in Analytics called “organic keywords.” This tracks the number of people who came to your site through organic keyword searches. If people are finding your site at all in search, there will be “campaigns” listed under organic search. If you are running Adwords campaigns, there will also be results listed under “paid keywords” in this section.
Using Campaigns to Track Marketing Effectiveness
Adwords campaigns and social media referrals are not the only place where campaigns can be tracked. By coding campaign data within a url for Google Analytics, any type of promotion can be tracked and measured as long as the url is triggered.
Specific Content: For example, let’s say you publish a press release and are allowed links within the publication. A custom url can be coded for a link to your site or a specific page on your web site. A visitor coming to your site through that url would register as a visitor gained through that campaign.
Links from email newsletters: One of the most common ways to use campaign data is for links within email newsletters. Commercial newsletter services such as Mailchimp and Constant Contact have built in options for encoding campaign data within each newsletter sent. One thing I have found regarding newsletters is that often the recipients will reopen the email numerous times after the initial sending. In newsletter that track opens, depending on the content, the newsletter can be referred back to months, and even years after it was first sent. If the urls within the newsletter are encoded with campaign data, you will be able to track exactly which newsletters the visitor is clicking through on regardless of when it was sent.
Other ideas: Other places to use campaign coded urls are:
- Links in guest blog posts
- Links given to share with friends
- Links used for QR codes
- Links for other offline promotions
Using Google’s URL Builder
In order to track this information, the url directing the visitor to your site must be coded with the campaign data you would like to track. Google provides a URL builder online as a companion tool to Google Analytics. Simply fill out the fields of the form and hit submit. A url will be generated with your campaign information encoded.
Below are the fields requested. The starred fields are required, the rest are optional. The URL builder will add UTM fields to the end of the url which will register with Google Analytics when the url is accessed.
- Web Site url:* This is the actual url from your site to link to. This can be your root domain or a specific page on your web site. Remember that you will only see the campaign data for your own domain urls. If you encode campaign data on a link to a domain you do not control, they will see the campaign data in their report, but you will not see it on yours.
- Campaign source:* This is where the visitor will be coming from. Are you creating the url to be used in a print campaign, a Facebook post, in a link from a Youtube video? Enter that here. This is a required field. The question this field should answer is where is this link going to be used?
- Campaign Medium:* If the campaign source answers the question “where,” the medium field should answer the question “how” is this link being used. Is it being used in an email, a QR code, a print ad? For an email newsletter, the “source” would be your newsletter list and the medium would be “email.”
- Campaign term: If you are running an Adwords campaign, this field is used to code the keyword that is being targeted in the campaign.
- Campaign content: This field is not required; however, it can be used to add more granular data to your campaign statistics. This is the field that should be used to provide more segmentation within the campaign and/or medium.
- Campaign Name:* This is the name of your actual campaign, the marketing effort that may span not only online promotion, but print, onsite, and a variety of other mediums.
Shortening Services to Us with Campaign Links
After entering these terms, the URL builder will construct a url coded with UTM variables and will look something like this:
http://www.yourdomain.com/?utmsource=newsletter-subscribers&utmmedium=email&utmcontent=discount-sale&utmcampaign=new-year-promo-2015
You could use this generated url as is; however, if you are trying to share it in a print ad obviously that is not even close to the type of url that someone would actually take the time to manually enter. You could encode it in a QR code for print, this assumes the person knows how and wants to use it. Even though smart phones are fairly standard, there are certain demographics that don’t really use QR code.
So how do you use these unwieldy urls effectively? One option is to convert the long urls into short urls that redirect to the target url along with the UTM variables. There are several ways of doing this:
- Manually creating redirects: If you host your own domain, you have the option to create redirects either through the control panel for your site or manually in the .htaccess file. I know of no one who does it this way, but you could do it.
- Custom URL shorteners: There are a number of custom url shorteners. There are even open source scripts available, such as Yourls which you can install on your server and operate your own shortening services.
- Plugins: There are several plugins for WordPress that allow you to create and manage redirect links. One of the most popular is a plugin called Pretty Link.
- Bit.ly: Bit.ly is a url shortening service that is integrated with a number of other third party services.
Keeping Track of Campaigns URL’s
If you don’t have a plan, it’s probably better not to mess with tagging at all. This is a guide on tagging that points out that campaign tagging is a powerful weapon in the fight for exposure and reach . . . One that can explode your own data if you’re not careful. When you are creating content and running campaigns through multiple mediums over a number of years, it’s very easy to forget what exactly your strategy was if you don’t write it down. For overall campaign information and short urls that part of ongoing promotions, I track the terms, the short links and the target links in a spreadsheet on Google Drive.
Whatever your strategy is write it down. Write down what you are doing and the reasoning behind it so that not only can you refresh your memory when you look back, but coworkers or consultants can see and understand the strategy of your marketing efforts.
Resources for Tracking Campaigns
by Carla Alvarez | Dec 14, 2015 | Marketing Tips
As I mentioned in the article on tracking traffic with Google Analytics, measuring and monitoring your blog performance is important. The goal is to do more of what does work and less of what doesn’t. However, the amount of blog traffic isn’t always about how your site ranks in search for certain keywords, people find your site and your business in different ways. There are also other factors beyond SEO efforts that influence rankings themselves.
So how do you know what exactly is bringing traffic to your site? Obviously, you can dig into Analytics extensive reporting and analyze what exactly is going on; however, sometimes we want to see the answer more quickly than that and very often, the answer should be obvious. For example, in the case of filtering blog referral spam out of Google Analytics reporting, if your site has been under attack by GA spammers, the drop in reported traffic will be very obvious if the filter is set up correctly. However, as I mentioned in the other article, the filter only applies to traffic reported after it is in place, not prior to. So you have to wait to see the true reports.
Let’s say you go back several months later and you see this drop and you start wondering, “What happened there?” You might wonder if you lost positions in search or if there was a functional problem with your web site. If you are keeping some sort of site journal tracking each change in your web site, you could go back through the history and see if you can tell what cause the fluctuation in traffic. However, there is an easier way to record this, annotations in Google Analytics
What Are Annotations
So what are annotations? An annotation in general is described as “a metadata (a comment, explanation, presentational markup) attached to text, image, or other data.” Put most simply, an annotation is a note that explains data. Google Analytics offers the ability to add an annotation, a note or comment, to any specific date in a reporting period. So, for example, if you add a filter to Google Analytics to block the referral spam, also add an annotation to the date it is done so that someone can quickly see what that change was at any future point in time.
How to Create Annotations in Google Analytics
Adding an annotation in Google Analytics is a simple and straightforward process.
Step 1 Log into your Google Analytics account and go to the Dashboard for the site you will be editing.
Step 2 Under the main traffic dashboard, click the arrowhead underneath the traffic graph.
Step 3 Click “create new annotation.”
Step 4 Click in the date field to select the date to annotation, enter the description of the event and click save.
The traffic graph will now be marked indication the annotation for that date. If you use multiple annotations and want to draw attention to one particular (or more) date, you can star the annotation and a star will display next to the comment indicator.
When to Use Annotations in Google Analytics
When should you use Google Annotations? Anytime you make a significant change to your site or there is a significant event related to your business that has the potention to impact traffic to your web site. This might not be something web related. Maybe you ran an ad with a link to your site. (This could also be tracking using custom urls and campaigns.) Maybe your business was mentioned on the news or another media channel with a wide reach. Maybe you had a piece of content that went viral. Anything that is outside of your regular business practice or normal site promotion efforts and growth. Here are a few suggestions for when to annotate in Google Analytics:
- Any changes that filter traffic or reporting on your site.
- Changes in url structure of your web site
- Launching a new site or a web site redesign.
- Any major change in site keywords and targeting.
- When your business has an event or a promotion that is outside of your standard operations.
- When a piece of content goes viral across any channel. Even if the content is being shared across a social media channel, there should be residual traffic to your site.
- When your business receives promotion that is out of your standard process, such as by a major news source or by an industry leader. This would be a good time if you aren’t do so already to set up a report tracking the average traffic and noting how much of that new traffic is retained after the major spike.
What other ways do you use annotations?
by Carla Alvarez | Dec 4, 2015 | Marketing Tips
If you have a blog or a web site that you’ve been working on for any amount of time, one of the first things you learn is how to measure the traffic on your site. Without measuring performance, all the money, time and effort can be a little discouraging if you don’t see results. There are few things more aggravating than seeing an increase in site traffic and then realizing that it is nothing more than spammers artificially increasing your site stats.
What is the Point of Referral Spam?
So what is the point of someone spamming your site statistics? I think a screenshot of some of the referrals makes it obvious. What is supposed to show in this field is a list of sites that have sent your site traffic. Unsuspecting webmasters, thinking that one of these sites is linking to them will click on the site, generating traffic for the spammer. Sometimes it is traffic only and the spammer benefits by CPM ad revenue. Sometimes the link is to a malicious site. Sometimes, it is a product or service provider hoping that someone will be interested in their service. And of course, sometimes it is the ultimate source of spam, it is a link to a porn site.
By the way, this happens to be a site that already has been filtered for spam referrals. These are new spam domains that have been added in the past couple of months. Obviously, the person with the black-friday.ga domain was hoping for click throughs to take advantage of the Black Friday specials. Will the majority of people visit the spam site? No, but through the sheer mass volume of spam referrals, the slight percentage that will make it worthwhile to the spammers.
Why is Referral Spam a Problem?
So someone is messing with your site statistics. Why is this a problem? For sites with a large amount of traffic, it may not be much of an issue as the the percentage of spam versus actual traffic may be miniscule. However, the referral spam has become such a nuisance, that I believe over time it can distort the picture of site traffic and growth even for large sites.
It is a problem particularly for sites that are new and sites without a large amount of traffic. I have seen referral spam that record 200 to 300 visits per month to a single domain for a site. For some small business sites, this completely obscures the true measure of actual site growth. The sites with low traffic volume are also more likely to be inexperienced webmasters that won’t realize that it is spam and will actually visit the potentially malicious site.
How Referral Spam Works
A few months ago, I spent quite a bit of time researching how to get rid of this nuisance. Referral spam has been an issue almost as long as the internet has been around; however, this particular type of spamming is fairly new. Before, spammers would ping your server with a referral, spoofing an actual visit. This would not only generate a bogus referral link (bogus in that an actual person did not visit your site from that referral) but it would also add to your site bandwidth. You would notice it through the bandwidth spike as well as the referral log. Once identified, the spam referral could be blocked through the .htaccess file of the site.
This referral spam is different. There is no actual interaction between the spammer and your site at all. Instead, the spammer interacts directly with Google Analytics, triggering a referral for your site. They do this by obtaining your Google Analytics ID by crawling the code of the web site. Once they have that ID, they use it to tell Google that there has been a visit to your site from theirs. Since there is no interaction with your site, the referral spam can’t be blocked on a site level at all.
How do you know if you are dealing with Google Analytics referral spam versus the old style that jacked up your bandwidth? The problem is so pervasive at this point that I think if any site is using Google Analytics and has any sort of web presence at all, you are probably getting hit. However, you can confirm this by looking at the referrals in Google Analytics and comparing it to the referral log in the stats for your hosting account.
How to Block Referral Spam in Google Analytics
As people came to grips with combating this issue, there was a lot of different advice for blocking it. Some of it was wrong. Some said to block it in the .htaccess file, which doesn’t work. Some methods simply kept the referring domain name from being viewed but still counted the spam referral as real traffic. Not only does it not help at all, but it makes the problem worse. Your traffic is still inflated but you aren’t seen the source of it, even if it is false.
What I have tried that actually works is creating a filter in Google Analytics to block campaigns referring from spam domains from showing as a referral source as well as being counting in the site traffic.
- On the admin tab of your domain account in Google Analytics:
- Click filters.
- Click Add Filter
- Enter a name for the filter
- Select “Custom” for filter type
- Select “Campaign Source” for filter field
- In the filter pattern, enter the domain names. Domain names should be separated by pipes (|) and periods escaped by “/”
- Add the views the filter should apply to. This is an account level filter and you may have multiple domains tracking under that account. Select all domains or unique views that you would like the filter applied to.
These are the filter patterns I have right now:
Filter #1
darodar\.|semalt\.|buttons-for.*?website|blackhatworth|ilovevitaly|prodvigator|cenokos\.|ranksonic\.|adcash\.|share.?buttons\.|social.?buttons\.|hulfingtonpost\.|best-seo-(solution|offer|service)|free.*traffic|buy-cheap-online|100dollars-seo
Filter #2
trafficmonetize\.|success-seo\.|videos-for-your-business.\|semaltmedia\.|adf\.ly|copyrightclaims\.org|snip\.to|hosting-tracker\.com|alibestsale\.com|black-friday\.ga|cyber-monday\.ga|free-floating-buttons\.com
Here’s the bummer, there is a character limit to the filter pattern so depending on how many domains that need to be blocked, you may need to create multiple filters. The other thing is that this filter will need to continue to be updated because spammers never sleep. Well they do, but they automate all this so it’s running, creating work for you, while they go off and have coffee.
Easy Way to Block Google Analytics Referral Spam
After all of this, here is the simplest way to block referral spam which I discovered when revisiting all the information to write this article. As I mentioned, this is a headache that continually has to be addressed. Stijlbreuk created a service that automatically updates your Google Analytics filter for you. The why from their site:
Referrer spam blocker started as a friday-afternoon project here at Stijlbreuk. We were tired of manually updating the spam filters and created a tool that did this automatically to make our lives easier. We showed some people in our network and because they were enthusiastic we decided to spend a “little bit more time” on it to make it more user friendly.
We thought about possible business models before making the app public, but we decided that making money of the spam issue just didn’t feel right. We see the tool as our “digitale visitekaartje” or “digital business card” in english. We hope that some companies will notice the quality of the tool and get in touch for similar projects. If you like what you see, please contact us here.
So rather than going back to constantly update your filters,
- Log into your Google Analytics account
- Visit the Referral Spam Blocker site
- Click Authenticate now
- Click “Allow” to give the Referral Spam Blocker app
- Select the accounts you would like the filters applied to
- Click the “Let’s Do This” button at the bottom
But wait, that sounds too easy and it’s free? Yes, it’s free, but here’s the downside. Currently their service has a limit of 2000 calls to Google’s API. To block referrers for one site, they have to make approximately 30 calls to the API, meaning only 66 sites can be added to the service a day. If you visit and their quota is exhausted, try back the next day or follow the instructions to add the filters manually yourself as noted above.
Where to Go From Here
Now that you’ve blocked all the spam referrers from showing up in your web site stats, now what do you do next? First, it doesn’t filter referrals previously recorded so if you view your statistics as most people do for the month, it will take a full month before you are looking at “clean” statistics. If you are in the process of growing your site, be prepared for a drop in traffic numbers. It might be a little discouraging, but remember, they were never actual visitors in the first place.
Further Resources on Blocking Google Analytics Referral Spam
- Definitive Guide to Removing Google Analytics Spam from Analytics Edge: This has a good overview of the history of the different spam tactics
- Guide to Removing Referrer Spam in Google Analytics from Analytics Toolkit: Screenshots of how to set up your filters in Google Analytics, but you have to scroll down to see the most recent solution.
- How to Stop Referrer Spam from Raven Tools: This is another play by play in the search for a solution; however, again scroll down to the bottom of the article for the most current solution.
- Filtering Domain Referrals from Google: (Added June 2016) Since writing this article, Google has added a resource to their knowledge base for eliminating Analytics spam that uses the method above.
- Guide to Removing Analytics Spam from O How Digital Marketing: (Added June 2016) In this guide from O How Digital Marketing, they provide steps for providing multiple data views for your site. They also outline four different steps for eliminating false traffic from your Google Analytics account by 1) eliminating ghost traffic using an include filter for valid hostnames, 2) filtering for crawler spam using the method I describe above, 3) enabling bot filtering in the view setting (I forget this sometimes,) and 4) excluding the IP addresses of web administrators and team members. The issue with #1 is that first your site has to have enough history to have a record of valid hostnames beyond your own domain name. The second is that with the proliferation of social media and accounts on other properties, with this method you must remember to add any new referrers to the view as only the hostnames within the filter will display. As they recommend creating unfiltered master views, the filtered views can be compared; however, I think it would be very easy to forget. Third, you can only have include one hostname filter for your account which, like all filters, is limited to 255 characters. If you have one web property on one Analytics account, this may not be an issue. If not, the 255 character limitation can quickly become an issue.
by Carla Alvarez | Jul 31, 2014 | Business Social Media, Marketing Tips
Several months ago, I started a new personal blog. Now when you start a new site, there are a few ways you can go to build traffic: do keyword research and write content targeted for search traffic and link building, network with other high traffic sites in your niche and link building, pay for traffic, or promote your site through social media.
Most people do a combination of all of the above, along with a focus on building their own email list.
I know how to do all that and I do that on other site, but on this sites, I just didn’t want to write with keywords in mind. I want to write what I want to write about. Also, some of the topics I write about on this site are things a lot of people would be interested in, but they aren’t searching for.
Since I nixed two legs of a standard traffic building strategy, I had to focus on building an audience through social media sites. There are a variety of ways I’ve been doing this, but the primary focus has been consistent updates using images.
And it’s worked.
You Only Have Their Attention for a Second
It’s a statement of fact in a culture where a large percentage of the population’s primary form of communication is texts full of abbreviations and hashtags that you only have a few seconds to catch their attention.
You can write awesome content, and you should, but people are probably just going to read the headline. How many times have you seen a friend share an article on Facebook and by their comment, it is very obvious that they didn’t even read it.
What percentage of shares on your newsfeeds are images? It may vary depending on the demographics of your friends and fans, but I would put a bet on it being a high percentage.
Show then Tell
Everyone likes show and tell time, even as adults we do. We want to see it, rather than just hear it and have to create a mental picture in our minds.
That translates into social media marketing.
If you have a message, you need to show them first and then tell. Have a visual image that conveys your message, and then tell them what it is.
Those snapshots are the posts and updates that are shared most frequently by your followers . . . and some of them may actually read them.
The Fickleness of Facebook
-A couple of years ago when Facebook implemented Edgerank, I wrote a post explaining why businesses can’t rely on Facebook for promotion. Edgerank throttles the number of page fans that actually see your status update in their news feed.
Since I wrote that article, it’s actually gotten worse. Worse for the business owner that is. It’s better for Facebook because it almost forces the average page owner to pay for post exposure.
If you want to be depressed, look at the page insights for each post and see how many people actually saw your update.
A Simple Explanation of Edgerank
The algorithm for Edgerank, like Google’s search engine algorithm, is constantly changing. However, the basic principle is, the more people engage with your update, the more of your fans Facebook will show it to.
For example, say your business Fan page has 2,000 fans. When your post is first post, it may only display in the newsfeeds of 100 of your fans. If people interact with it, either by liking, commenting, or sharing, Facebook will display it to more of your fans.
The next status you post will start out with a greater reach than the one before.
Consistency is Key
However, the opposite is also true. If you post sporadic or inconsistent updates, the number of fans your post is exposed to will drop dramatically.
It is important to be consistent.
Use Images to Build Engagement
One of the things that I’ve done on the fan page for the site I mentioned above is use creative quote graphics in daily updates. For that page, those types of updates get the best engagement, even above video.
The interaction from those updates builds up the overall engagement for the page so that when new updates from the blog are published on the Facebook page, the post gets a broader exposure than it would have normally.
Researchers at MIT have discovered the same thing:
Whatever type of image you use, it’s a fact that posts with images get more responses — more likes, comments and shares. Hatch recently tallied a month of posts on the MIT Facebook page, ranked from most- to least-talked about. Of the top 20 posts, 70 percent had photos. Similarly, on Facebook, the engagement rate is 37% higher for posts with images.
Social Media Creativity Made Easy
If you don’t currently have someone managing your social media campaign, you may be thinking, “I’m not creative.” That’s okay. There are options, and here is one of them. We’ve put together social media image sets that incorporate inspiring quotes to encourage interaction from your followers. When you purchase a set, each image is watermarked with your brand so that regardless of where it is shared, your business or website name is mentioned.
It is social media marketing made easier. We can’t make it any easier unless we do it for you (which we can do that too.)
Get Yours Today
by Carla Alvarez | Aug 1, 2012 | Marketing Tips
While the core goal of any small business marketing effort should be developing and deepening client relationships, how that is accomplished is constantly changing. New competitors move in, old customers move out, new markets develop, and new media emerges.
This is especially true when it comes to anything related to online marketing such as local listings, search engine rankings, social media, online video, etc. I can’t tell you how different my promotion routines are from just six months ago, let alone last year.
As the saying goes, “One thing you can always count on is change.”
Taking the Old and Blend with the New
Just because there are shiny new promotional toys in social media such as Pinterest, Google+, and Facebook, it doesn’t mean you have to completely abandon the tried and true methods of traditional publicity.
A perfect example of how to blend old with new media is combining social media exposure with press releases.
Before the control of news dissemination was wrenched out of the hands of the traditional media outlets such as newspapers, radio, and TV, press releases primarily served as a method to try to generate enough interest in reporters to publish a story in their publication. The decision to publish was in the hands of the publication itself.
However, after the explosion of online publishing and the maturation of search engines that could not only index massive amounts of pages and information, but also quantify and categorize it into (mostly) relevant results, the power in publication has shifted.
Now, not only can a business use a press release and be ensure that it will get exposure online, with careful strategy it can also ensure that it gets in front of the eyes of interested consumers. It is not dependent on a particular news outlet for exposure.
Using Social Media with Press Releases
Beyond the multitude of opportunities for online publication of press releases, social media networks can also serve as an additional source of exposure. There are two ways social media can bolster your business awareness.
The first is by exposing your information to different segments of your market. Each social network has fanatics that will use that platform as their primary source of information. Some people do their research on Pinterest, others on Facebook. If your news release is not circulating on that site, the odds are that segment of consumers won’t see it.
Social media marketing allows you to publish where your audience hangs out.
The second way integrating a press release with social media benefits your business and company web site is by providing social proof. Put more simply, in Google’s eyes, social proof confers authority.
Social as Links
One primary factor determining search engine rankings (beyond on-page content and on-site structure) has been links to the site or page. Those links from other web sites (also known as “backlinks”) are seen by search engines, and Google more so than others, as “votes” of authority for that site.
For the past year, there has been a lot of discussion and intimation by Google that social would begin to factor more heavily into the search algorithm. The impact of this has especially been seen in the past six months.
Change Continues
Yes, change continues, but you don’t have to let change completely upset your apple cart. Find ways to take the best of the old and strengthen it with the innovation of the new.
