NO SERVICE... WAIT What am I going to do....

What happens to society when your ever so Smartphone has NO SERVICE! I am currently in the full swing of training for an Ironman Triathlon in August of this year. While out on a 70 mile bike ride of the rural roads of Licking County Ohio. I stopped at about 36 miles in a small town in Knox County. Pulled out my ever so handy iPhone while munching on a snickers to check my Facebook profile, and NO SERVICE!!  Wait how am I supposed to check in with my friends and family? How can I find out who is doing what? How do I not have service! That feeling of panic and sense of urgency to get home came over me.

So while riding back home battling the hills and the head winds I thought to myself. What happens to social media when there is no service? How do we as social media marketers reach those in the rural areas of Ohio? Do they even have Facebook? This makes us rethink our approach to how we deliver our campaigns and who our target audiences really are. Because in all reality similar to designing a website and taking into consideration the audience that is still on DIAL-UP (Yes I said Dial-up).We have to remember that we do have an audience that still has no or limited connection to Social media. Limited… The beauty of Colleges, Universities and High Schools are they all have fast internet connections. Which opens up our market and our audience base bringing the limited connectivity into our pockets and allowing us to connect with them.

Although this is great we as marketers need to understand that we need to save portions of our campaign to still target the audiences that do not have access to internet daily or have slower connections. We need to be sure that as we sit down and hash out our campaigns with our clients that we make sure we ask what is your demographic. If our clients are target rural areas we need to focus our resources less on technology and maybe more on print media and advertising.

So next time you are out in rural Ohio and you grab for your trusty sidekick, and once the panic sits in take a deep breath and relax. You will get through this and you will get service once you hit the city limits. Take this time to reflect on the times when you didn’t have Google at your fingertips 24/7, take this time to reflect on when Facebook was merely a website for Harvard. Think about when you had to carry a 20 pound bag for a phone. We are moving so fast all day every day we forget we never had this 10 years ago and we survived.
 
I love technology and I love what it has to offer me, but being out on the open road with the sun shining and wind blowing made me realize the above. I need to step back and breathe.

Finding a Job on the Social Web...

Over 200 million users have flocked to LinkedIn, most are professionals trying to network with colleagues some are job hunters looking for their next career.  LinkedIn is one of the fastest growing social media sites for job hunters, with the majority of employers claiming that their most recent hires come straight from the Social Web.

                With more and more Job recruiters and hiring managers flocking to these sites to find their next talent they are routinely checking the site before making their decisions. This makes making sure your profile is current and is a trustworthy as your paper resume. Today we will discuss some tips to landing your next job and making sure that your LinkedIn profile is what your employers are looking for.

                Within LinkedIn you have the ability to customize your URL to make it easier to remember. Along with making the URL easier to remember this will also help drive traffic to your site via Google search results. Many employers will simply input your name into Google to see what results show up. Chance are the top sites will be your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles. Being sure that your URL has your name in it will help drive this traffic to your profile.

Although the most common would be your name, let’s say your name is a very common name such as “John Smith”. I would imagine there are thousand if not millions of John Smith’s in the world. Making sure your URL has either your middle initial or state you live in, to help differentiate you from all the other John Smith’s in the world will help people find you.

Next step is to make sure your intro paragraph is crisp clean and catchy. This is the first thing your employer sees when visiting your site and this will be similar to that of your Overview found on your resume. Keep this short and to the point but being as descriptive as possible will help keep the interest of the visitor. Similar to the practices used in SEO, utilizing Keywords in our Intro summary will help boost search rankings to our LinkedIn page.

Your experience section is your chance to build your online resume. Often time’s people fail in this section and fail to include past employers, most people only use their current role. Using this section to list relevant jobs that help sell you and not including jobs not of interest is key. Potential employers do not want to see that you were a lifeguard at 14, when your profession is Graphic Design. That job though is important, is not relevant to your future career.

Along with job experience it is important to list skills you may have. Like your resume using catchy keywords will help grab the reader. Unlike a paper copy of your resume, using keywords will also boost your search rankings as well. Skills you may have are important to an employer and can also be the selling point as to your next job.

We have listed a few tips to making sure your profile is better and more useful to potential employers. Although this list does not cover all, it only scratches the surface of LinkedIn. As the job market and job hunting become more and more digital the importance of making sure not only is your LinkedIn profile current but also making sure your Facebook, Twitter and others are free and clear of damaging material.   

Until Next Time…





http://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2013/04/25/7-ways-to-make-linkedin-help-you-find-a-job/

#twitter #advertising

Advertising on Twitter? How can we possibly do that? People often ask how do we promote our brand and how do we build a better brand. Well the days of paper advertising and the display board’s major advertisers used to “sell” a product to their client are over. Marketers are taking another approach to brand awareness. They are taking it to Social Media and Twitter is jumping on the wagon to help promote your brands awareness.

                Mobile growth and mobile usages grows daily, according to twitter over sixty percent of twitter users login via their mobile device. Because of this large number mobile advertising is growing at a rapid pace and ad revenues are growing as well. Advertisers are being forced to figure out clever ways to promote their brand in 140 characters or less yet still grow their business.

                Twitter offers the user a variety of different ways to engage with the ads they see. From @reply to the advertiser directly, re-tweeting the message to your followers to even making the ad your favorite in your public list. Twitter allows the advertiser different levels of freedom. To the advertiser and the searcher this is an added bonus in the relationship between the brand and their potential clients.

                Promoted accounts is twitters way of making your clients trust that your twitter account is valid and is who you say you are. Promoted accounts goals are to increase the amount of followers to your specific account. The ads your company displays are then added to the search results and labeled Promoted to verify that Twitter has approved your ad.

Recently twitter to add more depth to your feed they have started to add promoted tweets to your timeline. This is similar to SEO and Google Paid Ads. The more relevant an ad is to you and your search history the more likely an ad relevant to you will be displayed.

Ad Targeting has made leaps and bounds over the past few years. As mentioned above Twitter has added the feature that targets ads to your own personal interests. Depending on the content of those you follow, will change what ads are displayed on your timeline. Like Google Twitter has added the same functionality to their feeds allowing advertisers to ad keywords and search information to their ads to target a certain audience.  Giving advertisers another weapon in their toolbox to find potential clients.

Like everything in the world what may seem to be free usually is not. As a business owner and as a business wanting to build their brand using social media investing time and money is needed. Twitter allows the advertiser to set limits and budgets on their campaigns. Similar to that of Google and a PPC campaign. You have a daily budget that once is exceeded your ads are removed for the remainder of that day.  Also similar to that of keywords campaigns, twitter also has a bidding process where you can bid against other companies for the higher spot, meaning the higher the bid the higher your ad will be shown. 

Like anything SEO and social media advertising takes time and it take a little investment. Twitter recommends for promoted advertising and other features start small to determine how your campaign will work. If you see results then possibly make your campaign more aggressive. Once the investment is made the results will follow, just stick to the plan and your goals.

"Twitter Adds Promoted Accounts to Search Results." Search Engine Watch. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Apr. 2014. <http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2331181/Twitter-Adds-Promoted-Accounts-to-Search-Results>.

Technology... SEO... Brand Building...

Technology

Technology changes almost daily, changing the way we interact with our friends, employers and our favorite brands. The days of social media staying static and having no movement are long overdue, and being aware of these changes are important to understand.

Google is changing the way we will soon interact with social media. Combining both social media marketing and search engine marketing, they are combining the algorithms to better suit search rankings and SEO.  According to entrepreneur.com they claim that only about 6% of your followers actually see your posts daily. Experts are saying that in the very near future that number is expected to fall even more.  This is the driving force behind Facebook changing the way their algorithm, to accommodate these falling statistics.

SEO

In a recent article on entrepreneur.com they wrote about the ever changing world of social media. I do not know about you but the heavy hitters in Social media are: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Entrepreneur.com says the next wave of social media is Google+, they are claiming that SEO experts are utilizing Google+ to help with their organic search marketing.  They claim that the more followers you acquire on your Google+ account the better your search rankings can become. This is a win win for Marketers. Now you can focus on one technology and impact 2 sides of the spectrum.

                With the growing popularity of Google+, experts claim that Facebook and twitter has almost no impact on your search rankings. What better for Google to get more adoption of Google+, reward the users and business owners with higher rankings. Search marketers are now claiming that what was once and isolation of SEO and Content Creation is now becoming one in the same. They are implying that each one of these tools has an impact on each other’s search rankings.

Brand Building

Companies have and will always use images and photography to better their brand.  Visual platforms play a critical role in how these images are displayed. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others are adopting a better platform for businesses to upload and share beautiful images to their customers. Providing them a layer of depth for their brand awareness.  With the ability to create stunning images, catchy graphics and upload them and share with their followers. This allows businesses to build a deeper brand awareness in the Social community.

With every platform changing the way they delivery content, it changes almost every day. Not all campaigns will work the way you envision, but sticking with a plan and continuing to check in with your goals and strategies will help keep you and your team on the right track. The key to a successful campaign is to always be willing to change your approach and how you delivery your message.

"The Year Ahead: 5 Social Media Trends Every Entrepreneur Needs to Know."Entrepreneur. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Apr. 2014. <http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/23273