For 2012 we’re also blending some short and sweet video blogs into our mix. Check this latest one focusing on the Importance of Listening – a key component for social media success.

So the greatly anticipated ‘Timeline’ is here folks, get ready to see a barrage of negative status updates from your many Facebook friends complaining about the hefty change.

The Facebook Timeline will be featuring on your profile whether you would like it to or not and the social media gods are giving us 7 days to preview your profile before it goes live – giving you some very much needed time to clean up your profile. 

How the timeline works is like this – The new Facebook profile is divided into two main columns, with a line down the middle representing the passage of time. The passage of time throws up any saved status updates, friendships, photos, events or wall comments – going right back to the birth of your profile. Everything is there and everything can be viewed by your friends until you decide to ‘hide it from your timeline’. We, the Facebook public, are being encouraged to add life events which were not captured by Facebook, in particular those that occurred before users joined the social network.

Whatever you love and whatever story you want to tell, you can add that to your Timeline.

Your profile now also contains a large banner that Facebook are calling your ‘cover photo’ – this is a large image, of your choice, that remains public to everyone on Facebook, including non friends – so choose wisely.

If you’re like many of us at Carvill Creative and have been on Facebook for what seems like forever – I would suggest you put aside a good couple of hours to sift through your Facebook past and ensure you’re happy for it to be regurgitated to your present.

Get ready to click “Hide from Timeline” a fair amount in these hours  You can find this very important button under the “Edit or Remove” pencil icon that appears when you hover your mouse over the top right corner of every Timeline post. You can remove anything on your timeline that you would rather people didn’t see by simply using this button.

Remember, it’s not just  photos that Timeline digs out and highlights— it’s every inappropriate status update you’ve ever posted and every message your so called  university ‘friends’  may have written on your wall at some ungodly hour.

You can also remove or hide posts through your “Activity Log,” which presents everything posted on your profile in a more compact, easy to understand form.

In order to ensure that all your Facebook albums have the privacy settings still intact – visit your albums page and look at the tiny icon on the right hand side of each album. This is where you will have the option to change the privacy on your albums; Facebook explains what each symbol means and should ensure that pictures are only seen by the right people.

If you are concerned about what is appearing publicly on your profile then just opt to, ‘View As …’

On your Facebook Timeline, you should see a little gears icon with an arrow next to it on the far right. Click on it, and then choose the “View As” option. This will let you look at your profile as if you were a stranger or let you pick a specific person to see what is viewable to them on your profile.

If you want to get the timeline now, simply click here ‘ https://www.facebook.com/about/timeline

Or you can wait until you see an announcement at the top of your home page.

Enjoy the post… Vikki

Vikki Mills is Social Media and Marketing Executive at  Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design

After reading a brilliant article called ’12 Social Media stats that will rock your world’ – I’ve taken 10 of the most rocking figures and shown you what they could mean for your business.

1.      Over 70% of the internet population are using social networks

• This doesn’t just include Twitter and Facebook and it highlights that social media is now considered mainstream – so don’t ignore it

2.      In Europe 50% of people are a member of just one social network 

• Find out where your customers and clients tend to hang out – is it Facebook? Twitter? Youtube? Or is it all three? Find it and utilise it.     

• Don’t be cliquey in your social networking – incorporate newcomers to the group.  Just because they are new doesn’t mean they’re not good. Remember what Facebook did to MySpace – blew them out of the water!

 4.      Peak usage for Twitter is between 2pm and 6pm

• This is quite a small window so remember these times and ensure that you tweet within them.

 5.      The average Facebook session lasts 37 minutes.

• This is a relatively short time indicating that users have a short attention span when it comes to reading content online. Keep your content – short and interesting.

6.      36% of people have posted about a brand on social networking sites.

• This means that people don’t just talk about their cheese sandwiches and which movie they saw last night on social media. Large proportions are talking about brands – their products, services and customer service. If your customers are talking about your brand then make sure you’re listening.

7.      42% of social media users have actually had a conversation with a brand via social networks.

• This figure indicates that social media users are not afraid to contact brands over social networks. If your brand is on social media do you have the resources in place to ensure that 42% of people are being answered and not ignored?

8.      The average number of Facebook contacts per users is 133 (on Twitter it’s 59)

• While these figures look small remember that ‘people know people’ and that small numbers turns into frighteningly large numbers when the 6 degrees of separation rule demonstrates how friends of friends can balloon your reach. That’s why it’s important to get customer service spot on as bad news travels far and wide.

9.      Only 15% of social media users have been contacted by a company after posting a negative experience.

• This shocking statistic gives you a chance to stand out from the crowd – Listen to your customers and provide a level of customer service that others are failing to offer. 

10.   79% of consumers have passed on a negative experience and 82% will stop doing business with a company because         of a negative experience

• Getting it right clearly matters. Social media can help you turn these potential defectors into your most vocal supporters

There’s no doubt about it – 2012 looks like the year of the Tipping Point for businesses seriously looking to engage with social media in the UK.

I’m not saying that we are anywhere near mainstream adoption, but the ‘it’s just a fad’ response is fast becoming a distant memory for organisations of all sectors, shapes and sizes.

However, how organisations go about adoption is key.

If we view social media platforms as far reaching communication channels, then that poses the question to organisations as to how they can leverage these channels to deliver on business objectives.

Let’s face it – the remit of any marketing strategy is to deliver on the business objectives – to ultimately drive activity to achieve results that make sense for the business.

Therefore, social media isn’t something an organisation does just for the sake of doing social media, (because everyone else is!) but rather to deliver business on objectives – hopefully as part of a well defined marketing strategy.

Business owners, CEOs and marketing directors should be thinking ‘how’ can we plug social media into what we currently do to maximise reach and realise objectives etc. However, probably due to eagerness to get onto the channels, often what we see is businesses diving into social media without any real thinking or planning.

This simple model (adapted from the brilliant book by Olivier Blanchard, Social Media ROI)

Outlines how one should ideally be approaching social media.

Social Media Planning - Plan, Listen, Analyse - before you Engage

So to summarise and get back to the point I started with, plan, listen, analyse before you engage.

@Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

The art of retweeting a tweet seems simple enough. On most applications you can simply press the ‘retweet button’ and you’re away…or at least you think you’re away….

However it seems that hundreds of competent tweeters get this simple action very wrong.

In the midst of tweeting excitement, many people tend to forget that they need to tailor the tweet in order to include the entire tweet content plus your ‘RT @handle’.

If you fail to amend your tweet by condensing a few letters or emitting a word or two – you are in great danger of going over your 140 characters and therefore missing out your vital ingredient – your hyperlink.

If you are using Twitter on your android or iphone – it’s less easy to commit this crime. The Twitter app on smartphone really dumbs things down for us and we are given the option to simply retweet the tweet as it is – ‘no RT @handle’ needed. Twitter.com actually allows for us to do this as well.

However if you are a Hootsuite user, for example, things aren’t so simple. You just need to remember to amend the tweet and allow enough character space to write ‘RT @handle’ and then include all the tweet content. It’s also worth noting that most tweets will need some editing as the majority of tweets take up the required character space.

When you hit that retweet button in Hootsuite – it very kindly takes the tweet for you and adds the ‘RT @handle’ in front of your tweet  -  however, that doesn’t mean to say that the whole message will now fit into 140 characters. If you just then hit send – you’ve most probably chopped off the end of your tweet and therefore your link, which is a waste of time for everyone involved!

We hope this small complaint on our part will help to stop people getting over excited with their retweeting and delivering half messages. Please help to spread the word by sharing on this blog  – in the hope to eradicate retweeting errors.

Enjoy the post… Vikki

Vikki Mills is Social Media and Marketing Executive at  Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

As one that loves to blog to share my experiences and tips, then I thought I’d create a blog post that brings together my year of blogging in 2011. Social Media has really come to life for all businesses great and small during 2011 and no doubt 2012 will prove to be a very interesting year.

I’ll be blogging as usual throughout 2012 sharing my news, views, tips and advice – but for now, in case you missed any of them, I’ve handpicked some of my favourite posts. Not all of them made the cut (we really did do a lot of blogging last year) so I hope you enjoy the roundup from 2011.

Don’t forget the business basics… the product has to stand up

Key business basics – this blog post focuses on the fact that your product really should be great. You really can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

Social Media – 12 Questions Answered

I was approached by a business student who was writing her dissertation on how social media channels were impacting marketing.  This post is rather lengthy, but covers my answers to questions such as; What are the reasons behind social networking sites?,  Are social networking sites important and why do people use them? Do they increase business and engagement? Are social networking sites a cost effective way of advertising a business? And more.

Are you promoting your good points? Testimonials, videos, reviews…it all counts!

Many businesses miss out on promoting their great points. We have positive statements and gems waiting to be shared. This post looks at how you can be leveraging the ‘Recommendation Generation’.

5 Social Media Myths well and truly Busted

This was a popular post and resonated with many. I often meet people that say that social media is great because it’s all free. Oh yeah? This post looks at that myth and others.

Do you know the keywords for your business?

When I’m working with clients or running social media training workshops we always cover the importance of ‘keywords’. Effectively, they are your online dna for your business. The words people type into search engines to find your products or services. Know them and use them wisely. This post shows you why and how.

Twitter Stats and Trivia

We all love a bit of trivia and stats are usually pretty compelling reading. This post plays up to those curious needs we all have. Gems such as the lifetime of a tweet etc.

Creating a personalised Twitter background

This post does what is says in the title. It’s the facts and sizes about creating a personalised Twitter background. Some of the logistics for this may need to be reworked in line with Twitter’s new identity – but the ideas around what you can be sharing are still relevant.

Social Media Marketing – Take it seriously or leave it alone!

They are important and far reaching marketing channels – so in the wrong hands, things can get dangerous.  This post takes a look at how you can be leveraging them effectively.

A Practical Introduction to Google Adwords

At Carvill Creative, whilst we certainly don’t specialise in Adwords, it’s important that we understand how it all works. This post is exactly as it says, a practical intro – some do’s and don’ts for successful online advertising campaigns.

In the world of social media – don’t underestimate the power of your profile picture

First impressions count – so be sure you’re making the right impression.

Facebook for Business

In my humble opinion 2012 will be the year businesses (b2b and b2c) really start to leverage Facebook. This quick post offers a bit of a scene setter.

Facebook Statistics that will convert you for Life

Vikki, our lead social media exec, contributed a few posts to our blog last year – this is one of hers, sharing stats and facts about the mighty Facebook.

Blogging – a few fast tips and a definition to clear things up

Blogging is central to successful social media activity. It’s effectively a quick and effective way to share unique, compelling content. This post offers some tips for all to consider.

Content is King. So…what’s your content strategy?

Most businesses don’t have a content strategy in place. Do you? This post covers the importance of content in the social media age.

Cutting through the noise on Twitter – and capturing key conversations

With over 200 million tweets a day how do you find the conversations that are relevant to you? This post shares the why and how.

How to be a good Tweeter – some do’s and don’ts

There’s always something new to learn – and so we keep on sharing.

When did you last check your website’s performance? 5 Critical Checks

40% of websites get zero traffic – and of those that do, 70% of consumers don’t trust them due to poor design and user interface. How effective is your site?

How To Make the Most of your Facebook Business Page – get those ‘likes’ in

Getting people to ‘like’ your page is the first step, as once you’ve got them, you’ve then got to keep them engaged. This post looks at some marketing tactics to assist.

5 Key Elements for Success when Outsourcing Social Media Marketing Activity

It’s an important relationship so be sure you’re in for a successful partnership by heeding the advice in this post.

Creating Social Media Guidelines for your Business

How do you manage a crisis and who is responsible for what? As businesses become ‘social’ a whole new set of guidelines are required to safeguard and manage social engagement effectively.

Leveraging LinkedIn…very simply, it’s about harnessing the relationships you already have

Many people I meet say they have a LinkedIn profile. When I ask if it’s 100% complete it’s rare that they answer in the positive. This post offers tips for getting your profiles in tip top condition and leveraging LinkedIn as a business resource.

Are you down with the Twitter Lingo?

Bit of fun this one. There really is some creative language creation going on around Twitter.  This post was our most Tweeted in 2011 with 226 tweets via the blog.

Content, Creativity and Ingenuity 3 Key Drivers for Successful Social Media Engagement

One huge thing I love about social media is that fact that it drives organisations to be get more creative – this post looks at just that.

Social Media Fears:  But what if someone says something awful about us?

They’re going to be saying it whether your on social media or not – so my advice is start listening.

LinkedIn – Have you got your Products and Services in the Spotlight?

This post looks at the new spotlight feature for LinkedIn company profiles. Certainly worth doing.

Social Media Management – a Practical look at Daily Twitter Activity

We’re often asked ‘How can I fit social media into an already busy day’ – and this post looks at just how you can.

Measuring Social Media.  My Mantra is… ‘Measure What Matters’

Businesses are obsessed about measuring social media activity – more so with social than with any other form of marketing activity I’ve ever known. This post looks at ensuring you’re measuring the right things.

Ten reasons someone might unfollow you on Twitter

There are lots of reasons I’m sure, but this post focuses on some of the more obvious reasons.

And then finally, two blog posts for the Christmas week in December – a silly (yet hopefully) eye catching titled Twit(ch)hikers Guide to the Twitteralaxy Part 1 and Part 2. Effectively, a guide to surviving and leveraging Twitter – covering 20 tried and tested tips.

Here’s to a fun filled, happy, bloggingtastic and healthy 2012 .

From me and the team @carvillcreative

As promised in Part 1 of the TwitHikers Guide to the Twitteralaxy – here’s part two. Another 5 Must Know Twitter Tips – for newbies, seasoned Tweeters and everyone in between…

Twitter Tip 6 – Tune on when your audience is tuned in

The way people use social networks is changing all the time.

With the progression of mobile and smart phones – recent research from CommScore, Nielson and Forrestor – all reports that by 2014 mobile browsing will have taken over desktop browsing. (Good article here from @mashable ).

Research tells us that 48% of mobile usage is being used for social networking – and that level of momentum is having an impact on the time of day people interact with ‘social’.  There’s an increase in ‘commuter’ segments – 6.30 am til 8.30 am, lunchtimes and then post office 5.30 til 8 pm.

Do some analysis using tools like The Archivist or TwentyFeet to get an understanding of when your audience and influencers are tuned in, tweeting and sharing.

Schedule tweets to ensure they coincide with these key times – and of course, if you have an audience based overseas – be sure to take that into consideration too.

Twitter Tip 7 – Know your Keywords

Keywords are effectively like the DNA of your online visibility. What are the words people type into Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube when searching for your products or services? If you don’t know, you really should.

Do your keyword analysis and then be sure that you share those keywords in everything you do online.

Twitter Tip 8 – Use Hashtags Intelligently

If we stick with the premise that Tweets should be conversational – then creating a tweet which is 90% Hashtags is not great practice.  Yes, Hashtags can be brilliant anchors for focusing conversations around (particularly good for connecting people at conferences or events).

But ramming your 140 characters full of #marketing #strategy #socialmedia #snow #analytics – quite generic terms is going to achieve what exactly?

So ok, you may get on the radar of someone that is tracking #socialmedia – but what are they going to think about your conversational skills?

Over packing tweets with hashtags is a bit spammy. Used intelligently hashtags are purposeful – so use them when relevant.

Twitter Tip 9 – Decide Business or Pleasure

Having a relaxed conversational tone of voice works well when we’re conversing both offline and online. You should be tweeting as you talk (without expletives! ).

However, what determines the tone of voice you use, the style of tweeting and the content you share must be led by the ‘objectives’ of what you are using the Twitter thread for.

For example, if my objective is to grow awareness of being an expert cat groomer – and sharing my authority in that space, to broaden awareness and build share of mind as the expert that people naturally think of and refer to – then I’m going to ensure that the activity in my Twitter thread is ‘on message’ at all time.

Yes, I can be personable, friendly and communicate my personality. But are people bothered that I’ve just booked a holiday or that I’m having a cup of tea? Er…no.

If your Twitter thread is for business – then think objectively. Yes, be conversational – but make those conversations purposeful.  Sharing to 500 people that you’re bored and having a cup of tea is a waste of such a far reaching broadcast medium. It may turn off some key influencers or potential new customers. So decide your objective and retain focus.

In an online socially connected environment such as Twitter, you are what you tweet – so make yourself valuable.

Twitter Tip 10 – Just Say No to Autoresponders

There’s nothing more ‘non targeted’ and ‘non personal’ than receiving an automated ‘thank you for following me’ message.

And when it’s coupled with ‘Thanks for the follow – now check out my Facebook page and get 100 free tips on blah blah’ – that really isn’t using Twitter for the wonderful conversational channel that it is.

What we advise is that when you check out who’s following you – if you feel it relevant and purposeful to respond – then do so.

I may say something like: Just looked at your tweets – great to connect, I’m looking forward to sharing.

Or indeed – if I see something they’re sharing in the threads that I wish to comment on, I will. Eg: “Liked your tweet about social and mobile, where did you get those stats?”

This shows the person I’m connecting with that I’m engaged, interested – and it opens up a dialogue.

Now I may not get the opportunity and indeed it may not be relevant to personally connect with everyone that follows – but if I think I’ve got a potential highly relevant influencer on my hands, then I want to get that dialogue going asap.

What better way than to ‘turn off’ such a potentially valuable asset than to send them a droning autoresponder.

So that’s it. If you missed Part 1 of the Twit(ch)hikers Guide to the Twitteralaxy you can find it here.

Together with heaps of blog posts via our Carvill Creative blog.  There are over 200 posts in the blog – so be sure to search out your subject, and you’ll find masses of relevant posts.

Best wishes

Michelle

@Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

For me Twitter has always been an exciting place to look, listen, connect and share.

However, I am aware from the dozens of social media training workshops I’ve held over the past year with literally
hundreds of people both via Business Training Made Simpleand in-house – Twitter is the one social network that seems to fox everyone.

“I want to use Twitter but I ‘don’t get it’” – is a recurring theme.  As too is – “but, what do I say…”?

So here are just 5 of my top Twitter tips for getting to grips with Twitter in an effective way for 2012.  More Tips to follow in Part 2.

Twitter Tip 1 – Strike the 80/20 balance

Of the 200 million tweets a day – it’s evident that most Twitter users are behaving badly.

Pushing links to self promote is fine – and if part of your overall thinking and planning, perfectly acceptable. However, don’t make ‘link pushing’ the only thing you do on Twitter.  Twitter enables continuous conversation – but effective conversations have to be two way (or multi-dimensional). When starting out with Twitter consider yourself in a strange land. You’ve no idea who lives in the land, are they friendly?, what language do they speak?, who can help you find your way and point you in the right direction?, who can you make friends with? – you get the picture.

In this strange land you’ve entered, would you then stand in the middle of the market square and start shouting about who you are and what you do – randomly ranting, and without even knowing if anyone is listening?

Nope, firstly, you’d use your ears and eyes and listen and watch – suss out the space, listen in to what people are talking about, what are their issues, what are they looking for – can you perhaps help them out too?

We’re equipped with two eyes, two ears and one mouth for a reason – survival. Use them accordingly for your online survival too.

Respect the channels for what they are. They’re not ‘bill boards’.  Get the self promotion balance right – aim for 80% conversation and 20% promotion.

Twitter Tip 2 – Focused Listening rather than Unfocused Publishing

In keeping with Tip1, Twitter is a rich repository for research and listening-in to the sentiment and needs of people.

If you’re using Twitter effectively, as well as ‘conversing and sharing’, you need to be listening in for relevant conversations and needs.  After all, far better to respond to someone, perhaps sharing a link to a recent resource you’ve created or a landing page etc – rather than constantly pushing out noise that isn’t relevant to the audience at large.

Make sure you’re tracking keywords and sentiments that you could respond to in a more targeted and purposeful way.  (Hootsuite is great for this, but other apps are around too to help you track, even basic Google Alerts).

Listening in overcomes the question “but what should we tweet” – if you’re answering a question, or pointing someone in the right direction or connecting them to someone you think could be useful to them, or sharing a blog post, (yours or someone elses) – then what you publish won’t be some random rantings about a new product launch – but instead a purposeful answer to a genuine need.

Twitter Tip 3 – Grow the Trust

Following Tip 1 and 2, you’ll start to grow an understanding of who to follow and growing your followers by proving useful and having genuine conversations with others.

Building a good relationship takes time and nuture.  We’ve all got a ‘friend’ that every time we hear from them they want something from us – and how much do we just love hearing from them?

Don’t become the ‘friend’ that is constantly asking something of others – “please RT,  pls sign this now, take this survey, poll”. Again, it’s perfectly acceptable to do this occasionally – but don’t make it your mantra. Consider how you’d play it ‘offline’ and remember that Twitter is all about two way conversations.  You want to give your followers reasons to know you, like you, share your content – and ultimately generate new business.  But the new business generation may be sometime down the line.

What’s important is that you grow your ‘share of mind’ in a positive and purposeful way.  So when they need to find someone they can trust to deliver a service you provide – you’re top of their mind.

Twitter Tip 4 – Have an Objective

“Yeah, I’ve set up a Twitter account but I never use it – not sure what to do with it”.  I hear this all the time.  Often it’s branded – and out there for all to see – great PR, not!

Ask yourself – would you randomly send out a direct mail campaign without thinking about your audience, messaging, call to action – and importantly, objective?   All campaigns should be about delivering on the objectives of the business. We don’t just do them for doing’s sake. And the same goes for ‘social’.

Before you dive into setting up a Twitter account ask yourself what the purpose of the Twitter account is. Is it customer support, brand awareness,  a specific short-term campaign, garnering support, lead generation?

The objective of the Twitter thread determines everything you do with it, right from the name you use, the picture the bio, the people you target, your influencers – pretty much everything. So don’t start out blindly.

Think, plan and learn before you dive in.

Twitter Tip 5 – Quality over Quantity

At the beginning of every training working, I ask each delegate what they are looking to get out of the day. A recurring theme on the Twitter Strategy workshop is ‘to grow the number of followers’.

This is indeed a credible and relevant objective for Twitter. However, big warning here – focus more on the quality of your followers than the quantity.

What’s the point of having 10,000 followers if not one of them is engaged with you and listens to what you have to say.  They won’t be sharing, hearing or engaging with you.  Therefore, what you are sharing is totally ineffectual. It’s just noise.

Growing a targeted, engaged and purposeful audience takes time.  To own an engaged audience means they’ve got to grow trust in you – and have time to learn that what you’re sharing is 90% great stuff. Therefore, when you say something, they’re more likely to be tuning in.

These are the right type of audience to acquire – key influencers, who, when you share something of relevance – they share it with their audiences, extending the reach, leveraging their audiences and growing more awareness for you.

So, to summarise:

•  Remember the social platforms don’t behave like traditional platforms. It’s not about ‘pushing’ messages out one way – but rather, having a conversation, one to one or one to many.
•  Leverage the social channels to listen in to the needs of people. Social channels enable this like no other traditional media, so don’t waste the opportunity to listen and learn by only spouting forth.
•  Unless you’re Lady Gaga – it’s not about having huge followings – but more about finding the right following.

More to follow in The Twit(ch)hikers Guide to the Twitalaxy  – Part 2.

Meanwhile, do share your views and tips with me too – I’m all ears…

Best wishes for a happy Christmas and a fun filled and prosperous 2012.

Michelle

@Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  Covering all aspects of online visibility –  marketing strategy, social media marketing and management, social media consulting and training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice as it happens – subscribe to the Carvill Creative Blog

If you’ve noticed that your Twitter followers fluctuate in numbers, perhaps there’s something you’re doing wrong. You might be turning tweeters on and off without realising it.

Take a look at our top ten twitter sins and maybe you’ll discover why people don’t always stick around to see what you have to say…

1. We’ve said it before but we’ll say it again, don’t send automated direct messages– the majority of people dislike them and consider them spammy. They are very impersonal and lead people to believe your Twitter activity will follow the same pattern.

2. You’re giving your followers the silent treatment – if you go a month without tweeting, people will assume you are not reading or engaging with other tweeters either and therefore not worth following.

3. Self centred behaviour – If you only provide links to your own site, this is rather selfish and will put followers off from sharing your content. ‘Do as you would be done by’.

4. Cheekiness – You ask for RT’s all the time…many consider this bad Twitter form and rude, if your content is interesting enough you shouldn’t have to ask for Retweets

5. Being plain boring – ‘You snooze, you lose’ – If you only send links to articles and don’t engage with your followers you’ll put people off following you, we want to hear your own thoughts and views as well as those you agree with.

6. You are an emotionless cold hearted tweeter– this makes people think you’re a robot and stops them from falling in love with your timeline. If you give a little charisma to your tweets, people won’t unfollow. Simples.

7. You’re a celeb stalker – those tweeters who only tweet celebrities are very boring to follow, they probably won’t reply either so you are wasting your time!

8. Being an egg – if you keep your Twitter profile picture as that little egg then we’d be very surprised if anyone even followed you in the first place!

9. It goes without saying really but any offensive language, sexism, racism or swearing will wave farewell to the majority of your followers. Especially at this time of year, it’s not very Christmassy.

10. The biggest sin of all – you mention other tweeters in links that are not relevant to them or part of a conversation. This is just straightforward spamming and asking for an unfollow!

Stay tuned for more tips – follow us @CarvillCreative

Enjoy the post… Vikki

Vikki Mills is Social Media and Marketing Executive at  Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

Social media activity should focus on delivering the objectives of the business.

You have to ask yourself what those objectives are and have absolute clarity so that you can then measure impact from social media.

For example – if one of the business objectives is to improve lead generation – then there would be a mechanism created to deliver that.

Let’s say, that lead generation objective translates through to a campaign which is all about driving people to the website to fulfil a specific call to action to drive leads. In such a case, the website home page or specific landing page would have some call to action in place which entices users to engage with (eg: as we do via our free marketing plan or social media plan on the Carvill Creative home page) – and ultimately capture data.

To drive people to find the call to action, you are likely to embark on a number of activities: Adwords, SEO, Email, Newsletter promo, Email signatures and social media.  Not only sharing and promoting to those following you on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, but you could use social media to listen in and track keywords, capturing relevant conversations and directing those relevant people to your website to get the free whatever, they insert their details, you’ve captured data. Et voila, you can then measure how many ‘leads’ you’ve captured.

Providing there are some Analytics on your website, then you would be able to track exactly where traffic to your site is coming from, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc – and measure activity. Of course, you can also ask the user to tell you in the webform they complete to fulfil the call the action – ‘How did you hear about us.’

Many organisations get hooked on metrics such as the increase in Facebook likes or Twitter followers – but actually, if those metrics don’t matter to the end objective – then it’s futile measuring them.

Just as in good old fashioned marketing – a business should be measuring impact towards the business objective.

What you measure will totally depend on the objective you’ve set – and may differ from team to team.  For example – see diagram below.  You’ll see that the Online Reputation Team are concerned about ‘sentiment’ and measuring positive and negative statements about the brand / products or services. Whereby the Business Development Team are focused on measuring number of new fans / followers, competition signs ups, lead generation.

For our clients each month we do report on metrics such as:

• Number of followers
• Likes
• Klout score (online influence score – however, we’re looking at other metrics as we’re not convinced Klout is an indication of much actually).
• Website traffic / provenance
• Ranking
• Twitter grade
• Website grade

But if these metrics aren’t relevant to bottom line, then you’re not really measuring impact, but rather activity.

There’s an excellent book by @thebrandbuilder – aka Olivier Blanchard, ‘Social Media ROI’, which I highly recommend.

But to finish where I started… measure what matters.

@Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

Offering and delivering good customer service is fundamental business sense – they teach it in the kindergarten of business school, so there really isn’t any excuse when businesses fail to deliver a decent standard of customer service.

By nurturing your customers, attending to their needs and approaching any problems with care and reason, you should help to ensure that your brand builds a good reputation and legacy that will stand you in good stead for the future.

Word of mouth is still as powerful as ever, if people experience good things with your company, they will tell others. We must remember that ‘telling others’ in a social era – includes – tweeting, blogging, facebooking etc.

In this social era that we’re now in – where anything can be made viral and where the everyman is given a very loud voice (attached to a megaphone that can reach Australia) – keeping your customers happy couldn’t be more important. The Social Era has provided us with platforms that give customers the opportunity to have their say. However, it also gives brands the opportunity to fix any problems, respond to queries and generally offer a high standard of customer service.

Knowing all of this – I was shocked to a hear story this weekend about the internationally respected brand that is ‘Armani’ and their major downfall in Customer Service.

A friend of mine had bought a coat on Friday in the Armani Exchange store in Westfield Shopping centre for £300. After being assured that she could return the coat within 14 days she purchased it, got it home and to her surprise realised that her boyfriend had bought the exact same coat for her for Christmas, knowing that she wanted it. Touched by this unusual display of attentiveness from her partner she took one of the garments back to the Armani Exchange Store in order to get a refund.

Shock horror – Armani’s response was that they don’t offer refunds unless the item is faulty and she was only entitled to a £300 gift voucher or exchange! (Apparently the small print on the receipt explained this).

Tearful and distressed she had no choice but to leave the shop with the coat, in the hope that Armani’s higher powers would view this situation as very unfortunate and see it as an opportunity to offer a high standard of customer service out of good will.

Armani have done completely the opposite by not only denying any form of refund but by ignoring two emails to two separate people – very foolish on two accounts. Being ignored has not only angered her but further encouraged her to take further action in using social media to get heard. She tweeted about her very negative experience with Armani and asked for others to come forward and share their grievances.

Armani have not responded, which we can only assume means that they are not watching social media and therefore are in no way in control of what anyone says or reports about their brand. This is again – very foolish – any praise their brand receives will go unnoticed and any criticism will go unresolved. After reaching out to the masses of Twitter, tweeters came back to her to instruct her on various tactics that they had had to apply to fix the challenge – largely around ‘making a hole in the garment and reporting it faulty’.  Really.

Does anyone at Armani know that people on Twitter are giving out this kind of advice?

Does anyone at Armani know that this blog has been written about them?

If someone from their company was watching social media and listening to what their customers were saying perhaps they would understand that not only are they being bad mouthed across powerful social platforms but that disgruntled customers are encouraging each other to damage their stock in a desperate attempt to be refunded. If I was Giorgio Armani, I would certainly want to know about this.

With social media being so powerful we have made communication not only immediate but also global. Armani’s stock is most frequently purchased by young people, who are the best versed in the use of this media. Any negative experience that any customer has can be blogged about, tweeted about, facebooked about and made viral quicker than any refund can be put through a till.

Armani should be listening to their customers, offering an acceptable level of customer service and building on their brand.

Unfortunately for Armani, my friend is a social media consultant and will be using her expertise to ensure that other social media users are very aware of Armani’s very poor customer service.

Has anyone else out there experienced poor customer service of this kind? Does anyone have any examples of good customer service being utilised through social media? Feel free to share – we’d love to showcase them.

For more tips and advice on using social media follow us on Twitter - @CarvillCreative

Following the social media training that we provide, once teams know what they need to be doing – the next question is…” HOW do we get started?”

Here’s a very quick guide to how to go about effective daily Twitter management  for general  awareness.  This schedule is by no means prescriptive and you can work the timings around your requirements .

Clearly, your activity will focus around the objective of your Twitter account. For example – if your Twitter account was for Customer Support – then you’d refine in line with requirements. But this schedule largely relates to a ‘general’ awareness, daily PR focus.

For each Twitter account:

• 8.30 am til 9.00 am (You may be able to do this during your commute via your smartphone so it may be earlier).

Review account activity:  Check your Twitter streams for @mentions, direct messages and what your followers are talking and tweeting about – respond, thank, RT, engage and react accordingly.  Dependent on level of ‘engagement’ this can be speedy or lengthy – and of course, it depends on how many accounts you have. So you may have to revise your timescales here a little.

• 9.00 – 10.00 am

Scout all relevant trade press, review your Google Alerts, Twitter keywords tracking in Hootsuite (or other apps such as Twilert or SocialMention), Twitter search and relevant blogs and portals that you subscribe into – and review any up to date and relevant news. Speak to marketing / sales team – or if relevant, senior management team and ensure you’re up to date on any marketing activities, business news and promotions that can also be shared across your Twitter account(s).

• 9.00 – 11.00 am

At the same time as researching, be scheduling your day’s tweets into Hootsuite (or other preferred social media management dashboard – ie: Tweetdeck, Co Tweet etc). Don’t schedule all tweets to follow one another so that you block up your audiences feeds, spread them out,  usually with hourly intervals – and if it’s big news, don’t be afraid to ‘repeat the tweet’ but be sure to give it a different ‘spin’. Remember, apps like Hootsuite won’t let you simply cut and paste to repeat a tweet – so be sure you’re using a different context to introduce the link.

• 11.00 am – 11.15

At Carvill Creative, our team keeps their Hootsuite account open all day. So whatever method you’re using, check back into your accounts regularly to review any activity, mentions, RTs etc – and any engagement.

• 11.15– 1pm

Content creation.  This activity and timescale related to it will vary dependent upon how many blogs you’re writing – and what content (if any) you are creating.  At Carvill Creative we manage several blogs for clients – so we write at least one blog post a day for each client – so that we’re building an effective pipeline of compelling, relevant and keyword optimised content.

Set yourself a target to create a content pipeline to ensure that each blog is updated with relevant and keyword optimised content daily.  Keep your website / blog refreshed with new and relevant content. That way you have a place to send your Twitter audience that adds value to your business.

The shift in when we’re busiest on social networks…

Timings for when people are most active on social media are changing. At one point – it was very much that most activity happening in the PM. People were more likely to RT (retweet tweets) in the afternoon – and engagement levels were generally higher.

With the emergence of smart phones and social apps – activity is shifting. Early morning (commuter time) between 6.30 am and 8.30 am is now a busy hub of social activity – lunchtimes, and then another spike at the end of the day – 6.00 pm til 7.30 pm ish.  So be mindful of this when scheduling your tweets and looking at engagement.

Finally…

Remember – each account is an important communication channel – and you are acting as ‘brand custodian’ – it’s not just about pushing messages out – but about sharing the personality of the brand and engaging and communicating with your audiences.

If any challenges arise, then speed to response is absolutely key, so be sure to keep monitoring your accounts throughout the day.

@Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

It’s always interesting to see how different businesses approach social media. Everyone has their own way of using it and their own style – most obviously because everyone’s looking for different results.

That’s the beauty of social media; it’s flexible and able to deliver a variety of results that can be tailored by you, if you plan your activity strategically.

For example, if you wanted to use Facebook to nurture clients and build on relationships – your approach might be very different to a business that needed to really push their services. It doesn’t mean that one approach is wrong, there is no right answer – as long as you are achieving what you want to achieve from your activity.

This Twitter profile @LeonRestaurants – are using Twitter to build on their company’s success by listening very intently to their customers and their advice, complaints and praises. You can see from their tweets that they are really listening to what people have to say about their business, taking it on board and using it to steer their company in the right direction.

If a customer tweets them saying that they’ve experienced bad service or poor food – they are responding almost immediately with apologies, complimentary gifts and requests for explanations on how they can improve. What better way to achieve perfection than by listening to what you’re doing wrong and fixing it. They don’t seem to be using Twitter to push their restaurants or even their food – they are merely at the moment using it like a customer service tool. If you’re a new company, then this must be an extremely effective way for you to gauge how your business is being received – the results are straight from the horse’s mouth and come with the opportunity to go back and speak to the customer directly.

A business that wants to use their Facebook page to nurture their clients, keep them informed of activity within the company and generally engage and enjoy their customers interaction – might go about it in a similar way to an egg production business we found on Facebook called ‘Castel Farm Eggs’

Carvill Creative stumbled across a really great interview with ‘ Castel Farm Eggs’  who are based in Guernsey – you can see their Facebook page here . You should be able to see from their page that their approach is fun, imaginative and clearly working for them – using amusing photos and catchphrases to engage with their community and in turn build awareness of their brand. You can’t help but think that if an egg farm in Guernsey can make social media work for them, then anyone can!

Castel Farm is already very aware of the benefits of Facebook, arguing that:

‘The great thing with Facebook, for example, is that it is interactive, whereas a website only really tells you how many hits you have had, and a contact link etc…its very one dimensional.’

When asked later on in the interview – ‘How much business can you attribute to social media marketing in comparison to other forms of marketing? They responded by saying:

‘This is really difficult to quantify, but we have definitely had orders from these sort of platforms; we are also acutely aware that our end users are the people of the Island, so to stay in touch with them and let them now what we are all about is great, a sort of “electronic word of mouth”. But what you also achieve is a sense of fun that can really humanise your business.’

You can see the full interview with Castel farm eggs at this page  .

The interview really highlights how much can be done with these channels if they are utilised correctly, it’s not all about using them for direct sales – they can very much help to seal the deal but along the way they serve a lot of other purposes as well.

If you think your company can benefit from social media, think about what you want to achieve from your activity and give us a call. We will help you plan and implement a social media strategy that is right for your company. You can call us on 01628 634066 or email vikki@carvillcreative.co.uk for more information.

For more tips and advice on using social media follow us on Twitter - @CarvillCreative

You may have noticed – due to some regular and shameful Facebook stalking -that you can see pictures on other people’s profiles/business pages that you couldn’t see before.

It has been brought to our attention that many people are wondering why and how this can be controlled.

This is because the default privacy settings on Facebook have changed, giving you the choice to make your photos visible to everyone, friends of friends or just friends.

Do not be alarmed as this is completely in your control and can be managed through the following steps

To edit the privacy settings for photo albums you’ve posted:

1. Go to your profile and click on the Photos section
2. Click See All (next to photos and videos
3. Use the tiny right box underneath each album that has a small arrow in it
4. Choose whether you want the album to be:

• Public (the little globe)
• Visible to friends only (the shadow of a person)
• Customised (allowing you to select exactly who you want to see it – the cog)

When posting your own photo album with your photos in it – this is, of course, all down to you. However we thought we would shed some light on a few things you can’t control.

• The privacy setting for your Cover Photos album will always be public.
• If there’s a photo of you in an album that someone else posted, only the person who posted it can change the album privacy. If you don’t like the photo, you can remove the tag or report it if needs be.
•  If you share a high resolution photo or album with someone, that person will be able to download those photos.

However – do remember that:

• Unlike other photo albums you create, you can choose an audience for individual photos in your Wall Photos and Mobile Uploads albums. Each time you post a new photo, it’s up to you who sees that photo – you can control this using the same method as above.

I recently gave a talk to over 100 accountants discussing the merits of Leveraging LinkedIn.

Whilst most business professionals do have a LinkedIn profile – a high percentage haven’t completed their profile to the recommended 100% – and many aren’t ‘joining’ up the Company Profile.

Whilst Carvill Creative has had a LinkedIn company profile for a while, we’ve not really be doing that much with it.

From an employee perspective, we’re a small team and so we have our relevant team members associated to the profile – and we’ve completed the Products and Services section so that people are able to explore, the range of products and services we provide. However, as yet, we haven’t gone to our clients and asked for recommendations for our company products and services – so we’ll be doing that soon.

LinkedIn has a great opportunity as a professional network to help businesses leverage their online company profiles. Whilst Facebook seems to be enhancing, daily, the features and functionality of business pages – LinkedIn hadn’t introduced any new features for while.

Their recently launched ‘Product and Services Spotlight’ feature – is quite snazzy. It enables you to effectively create up to 3 ‘ads’ for your products and services – which showcase above the service and product descriptions and are clickable through to relevant landing pages.

Also – the information you can add to a product and service page is now far richer – you can add videos, customer recommendations, specific product or service promotions and  offers.

If you get this company profile right – you can see how it can become another effective online presence for people that find you via LinkedIn.

So here’s the quick step guide to creating an effective LinkedIn Company Profile:

• From your own personal LinkedIn profile – click Companies tab.  Scroll down that tab until you see ‘See all’ – hit ‘See all’ and then you will have a screen outlining all the companies you are associated with. In the right hand corner of that screen you will see ‘Add a Company’.  You then add your company name.  Please note that you have to have a relevant company email address when setting up a company profile.  Eg:michelle@carvillcreative.co.uk – was acceptable to set up a profile for Carvill Creative. It’s effectively the way LinkedIn verifies that you are an employee and therefore eligible to set up the profile.

• Once you’ve added your company – then it’s a case of completing the content.  As with all online content relating to your business, you want to ensure that you are utilising your ‘keywords’ when creating the content. If you are a social media consultancy – then be sure to say that throughout your content. Just as people search Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter using Keywords – so they too search LinkedIn – so be sure you have optimised your online content effectively, to give yourself a good chance of being found for relevant searches.

• The content tabs you need to create for your company profile are pretty simple:

•  Overview of the company – here you can provide an overview of what your company does – how long it’s been established, partners, clients etc. It’s your ‘About us’ section of your website effectively.
• Careers – you can showcase any placements that you may have – and details of what people have to do and who they need to speak with if interested in working with your company.
• Services -(more on this in number 4)
• Analytics – here you can review some basics insights into what’s happening with your company profile.  Who’s viewing, which sector, growth of follower trends, page views, followers, clicks through to your products and services page.

• Services Tab

This is where you can really segment and showcase each product / service you provide. For example on Carvill Creative’s page we’re currently promoting 4 key services:

• Marketing and Social Media Consultancy
• Design Services
• Social Media Marketing Training Courses
• Digital Marketing Strategy and Services

For each service we’re able to spell out what we offer – ensuring each service is leveraging the relevant keywords and showcasing what we do. Not only that but on each service page, you can run special promotions around that service – and showcase video relating to that product or service. So making the service page, a great resource

On this tab now – there’s also the opportunity to create 3 ads – so we have ads for

• Ultimate Website Package for Business –  (see ad example below, which clicks through to a relevant landing page).

•  Make Social Media Work for your business – which, again, clicks through to a relevant landing page.
• General Carvill Creative ad – which clicks through to our Home Page.

On this page too – you’ll see in the right hand column the opportunity to showcase promotions: See below the one we created which clicks through to a dedicated landing page.

So you can see – that LinkedIn are giving companies a much richer array of resources to tap into – and I can only see this continuing to improve.

I’ve noticed that for certain searches I’ve done in Google – it’s the LinkedIn products and services pages that are appearing. So I would suggest to all, that it’s time to create an effective Company Profile – which you can share, and indeed get all of your employees to link to and share too.

@Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

 Over the past couple of years being both a marketing consultant advising on social media and a social media trainer, training a range of people, different roles and organisations – a question that often pops up is…

“But what if someone says something awful about us…”

Well, with or without social media – those same people saying negative things about your product, service or experience, would be saying it anyway.  But instead of you being informed and being given the opportunity to ‘hear and recover the service’ – you wouldn’t know about it.

Admittedly, the ‘reach’ of social does mean that messages spread further, faster – whereby traditionally, perhaps that niggled person may tell 5 – 10 people,  now where average numbers of Facebook ‘friends and likes’ is around the 300 mark, then that social networking channel alone enables much more reach.  And of course, all the social networking channels are created to make it easy for people to share and communicate – so if one person shares to their 300 contacts, we don’t know how many of those 300 are also going to share with their 300 and so on and so on.

Conversely of course – good news travels fast too.

As a business, how you respond to negative feedback is absolutely fundamental to excellent service delivery, whether the feedback is received online or off.

If you’re not listening – then you’re not able to respond.

By listening you get the opportunity to recover the service – you can respond and engage the negative customer – with the intention of turning that negative into a positive.

For example:  I had an issue with my Norton Anti-Virus. It was a really simple query, all I needed was to expand the license to more machines (I wanted to buy more from them). On the Symantec  website the only ‘support’ contact give was a telephone number.  So, I called it. Having been on hold for over 40 mins – with a droning message of how important I was to them and that they were looking forward to helping me out as they value me (40 minutes on hold – yeah right).  Of course, I am sat at my desktop with Twitter open and so I fire off a Tweet along the lines of – “Grrr Symantec been on hold for 40 minutes – not great customer service!” 

Within seconds – and I mean literally seconds, @Symantec came back to me – they offered me a link to a live chat screen where the challenge was resolved within a few minutes.  So what do I then do?…I go back onto Twitter and say “Well done @Symantec excellent use of Twitter for customer service 5* to you.”

I then also advised them that they should share the fact that support can be managed via Twitter via their website – just adding a simple icon so users know that’s a viable way to connect. Which they did.  So for me, Symantec is a brand that are really listening, engaging and responding.

So yes, if your service isn’t up to scratch, people will tell you and they’ll tell others.

Yet, if your service is fabulous – then the same applies.

When I did my Master’s thesis back in 1996 it focused on service recovery and what it means when people complain. Those that complain are vocal – they have ‘buy in and commitment’ to your brand and they complain because they want to get involved to help you fix things.

For every one person that complains, there are 19 that don’t. So you really should be looking, listening, responding and learning if you want to get things right.

If enough people are complaining about the same thing, likelihood is you need to fix it.

The fact that social platforms enable people to get involved with your product, service or brand – to engage, to advise, to consult – then I believe this is a great opportunity for businesses to be learning about what they do right and what they do wrong.

Yes, you’re exposed if you’re out there on the social channels – but you’re also open to learning.

For what feels like decades business academics have been talking about ‘the learning organisation’ as the perfect model. And social really does enable a lot of learning, quickly and really rather inexpensively.

Response times are key on ‘social’ too. Had Symantec not bothered to respond to me for a few hours, or days, then the likelihood is that I would have continued to rant about their awful service delivery – and who knows how that could have escalated. However, they were listening, they responded, they nipped it in the bud very quickly.  So the time it takes to respond is a key factor.  So, if you’re tracking your brand, via Hootsuite, Twitter or indeed, simply via Google Alerts – then be sure you’ve got someone on the case monitoring.

The goal posts have changed when it comes to reputation management, as a business, you can learn what people are saying very quickly – and indeed, you can now respond very quickly.

My advice to all businesses is don’t put off getting involved with social because you are worried about people saying negative things about you.  What confidence have you got in your services and products if that’s the positioning? And if you’re delivering shoddy services or products, then the truth will out one way or the other.

That’s one key thing I love about social – it’s driving organisations to engage with the people they want to sell their products and services to – and ultimately, driving service and product quality.

Savvy organisations get that it’s better to learn about the negatives – listen, learn and respond. After all – not being able to hear what’s being said about you is a liability.

@Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

If you live in Europe or appeal to European markets and your business isn’t on the worldwide web – the following statistics should worry you.

The majority of people and business have an online presence these days but these stats. should urge people to ensure that they are making the most of this space. The numbers speak for themselves and are not very suprising but it’s good to see it in black and white sometimes, just to reinforce how powerful the internet really is. 

Population of Europe – 816,426,346

Population of the rest of the world -  6,113,628,808

Population of Europe – 11.8% of the world

476,278,755 of the population of Europe are internet users = 58.3% of Europe’s population

1,634,487,055 of the rest of the world’s population are internet users – 26.7%

Facebook Subscribers

Whole world – 710,728,720

Europe – 208,907,040

UK – 29,880,860

Top 10 Countries in Europe Using the Internet

 Germany – 65.1 million

Russia – 59.7 million

UK – 51.4 million

France – 45.2 million

Turkey – 35 million

Italy – 30 million

Spain- 29.1 million

Poland – 22.5 million

Ukraine – 15.3 million

Netherlands – 14.9 million

Top 5 Countries in Europe using Facebook

UK – 29,880,860 million

Turkey – 29,459,200 million

France – 22,713,240 million

Italy – 19,806,660 million

Germany – 19,459,280

So as you can see  - your audiences are listening and the opportunities to be heard are most certainly out there,

The question is – Are you getting the most out of the internet?

Does your website perform?

Are you leveraging social media correctly?

Are you even on Facebook?

Are you targeting your key audience?

Source - http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats4.htm

For marketing and social media advice or for information on how you could be using your online space better visit - www.carvillcreative.co.uk

Or for more social media marketing tips and advice – why not subscribe to our blog .

Enjoy the post… Vikki

Vikki Mills is Social Media and Marketing Executive at  Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

Customising your Facebook business page takes time and understanding – in order to give your fans the most value possible from your business page it’s important to keep your applications updated and functioning.

In case you don’t even know where your apps can be found– they run down the left hand side of your business page and usually have tabs for your wall, friend activity, photos and videos.

If you want to take an easy first step into customising your companies Facebook profile then adding the LinkedIn application to your company page is a good place to start – it’s easy to configure, looks great and encourages activity on LinkedIn.

Facebook have changed the app now so it is only available for business pages and not personal profiles – you can either have you LinkedIn personal profile running through – to encourage contacts, referrals/recommendations or have your company page connected.

You can view ours here https://www.facebook.com/CarvillCreative?sk=app_6394109615  -

We have chosen to feed through our LinkedIn company page as it provides detailed information about our business and is more relevant to our Carvill Creative Facebook business page than a personal profile would be.

In order to connect the LinkedIn app you must have admin privileges for the business page you wish to connect it to.

To get started in configuring your app go to – https://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=639410961

• Next –  Go the left hand side of the page  and underneath monthly active users you should see the option to ‘add to my page’

• Choose which page you wish to add it to and you should then see confirmation that it has been added to your page

• Next choose to use Face book as the business page you have just added the app to and then go to ‘edit my page’ and choose ‘Apps’

• You should see ‘My LinkedIn Profile’ in the list of applications, click ‘edit settings’ and under ‘Tab Available’ click add and then okay.

• Next click ‘go to app’ under ‘My LinkedIn profile’ – don’t worry if Facebook asks you to switch back to using it as your personal profile, it’s still configuring it to your business page

• You should now be on the application configuring page and have the option to enter your LinkedIn personal profile or company profile (depending on what you want the application to be linked up to) – just simply enter the URL and then click save.

• You should now see the app appear on your chosen Business page down the left hand side with all your other app tabs.

I attended the New Media Age’s “Social Media – Building a Strategy for your Business” (#nmalive) event last week – as I was intrigued to hear from  O2 and the BBC  - to see how they were managing and engaging from a large brand perspective – and indeed to hear the UK’s Group Head of Agency Sales from Facebook, to better understand their plans going forward.

The line up

• Chris Buckley, Head of Agency, Headstream (very good)
• David Parfect, Group Head of Agency Sales, Facebook (excellent but got a hard time)
• Sophie Brendel, Head of Digital Engagement, BBC (lucid and on point)
• Alex Pearmain, Head of Social Media, O2 (entertaining and clearly a bright young thing)
• Conor Ryan, Co-Founder and COO, Betapond. (would have like to have heard more)

It was a lively and purposeful event (just 3 hours) – and the focus was very much on ‘brand engagement’ and how agencies (those managing those brands) should be considering leveraging the platforms. I enjoyed it – and agreed with 98% of what they were talking about, therefore, I didn’t learn that much from a ‘how to’ perspective, but viewed some useful case studies, and I met some interesting people over coffee and connected with some new relevant folk via Twitter.

Of course – when reading Marketing Week or attending such an event – the entire focus is around ‘big brands’ – how the likes of O2, the BBC, Proctor & Gamble, BT, Kraft, Nike etc are engaging with consumers.

Such brands in many ways should find it easy to engage in the social platforms, as they and their products already have large ‘fan bases’ of loyal consumers just waiting to be engaged with on the social channels. Hence why the likes of Coca Cola  has a Facebook Page with around 35,000,000 people that like it.

Now, I’m not saying that the brand on its own will conjure up such followings – but it certainly helps. What also helps is the fact that such huge brands already have design teams and creative teams readily to hand – and usually large marketing budgets at the ready to create the all important ‘creative and compelling’ campaigns designed to engage consumers.

Compelling Content is Key

I’ve said this before and I will continue to say it – content is king. The content that you share on the social platforms is more important now than ever before. And for some businesses and brands, this is easier than for others.  For example: some of the compelling content out of the BBC is the programs they create, think of Strictly Come Dancing. There’s already a whole fan base at the ready to engage with. The program is the compelling content. So for brands such as the BBC or others that have ‘natural’ compelling content to share (just by the nature of what they do) – content creation is going to be simpler.  For small businesses, that don’t naturally have ‘compelling content’ to share – then they have to start thinking about what content they can create that is going to be newsworthy and compel others to share it and engage with it.  They need to be building a ‘content strategy’ into their planning.

Creativity and Ingenuity are key drivers

Of course, it’s not just about the ‘brand’ but also about the execution and this is where I believe most businesses, and indeed many brands fall down from a ‘skill set’ perspective.

Thinking creatively about how you can be engaging consumers is a tough call for most. Hence why creative agencies such as Saatchi’s, McCann, Mother, Grey, Leo Burnett, JWT (and others) are revered as superstars in the advertising and communications world – with leading brands seeing their partnership with them as a badge of honour.

And it’s these large agencies, and the thousands of less known, smaller and much smaller (yet still equally capable) agencies – that are striving to come to terms with how they leverage the social media channels.

The same basic marketing principles apply to social media marketing, as they do to any other form of marketing:

• Listening (doing research into the market)
• Relevancy (considering which message and mode is relevant for which audience)
• Targeting (creating targeted compelling content and messaging, campaigns for that specific audience)
• Engaging (ongoing conversations – developing loyalty, being creative in how you engage)
• Action (call to actions, getting the consumer ultimately to do what you want them to do)
• Measuring (understanding impact and continuous learning)

The overriding challenge with ‘social’ – is that the pace is such that reach and response levels are running faster than any other medium. People can respond in real time – and at any time – and so brands, businesses and agencies need to be equipped to manage such ‘networked’ and constant communications and responses in an engaging and purposeful way.

There’s no point having a Facebook Page and investing in a campaign to engage consumers if no one is then given responsibility to manage those responses and continuously work to engage those engaging.  Better to do nothing at all than do it badly.

So, for all brands and businesses great and small – the key message is, think about what you have that you can be sharing – what’s your compelling content, who, what, where and when and how will you encourage customers to engage with you and share with others to grow your reach.

 Think creatively about how you engage. You don’t have to have a huge marketing budget to get creative – try new things, create a think tank and get some ideas going, watch what others are doing that’s working and think about what you too can be doing. But get creative.

The social media channels  provide the chassis – and very sophisticated, exciting and far reaching ones at that. However, what they don’t do is ‘do all the hard work for you’ (which many brands, agencies and businesses seem to expect).

If you take one message from this article it’s – “What you do on the social media channels is totally up to you”.

@Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

A short but sweet post from Carvill Creative today informing you of something else you can optimise in your Facebook profile -

Another recent change that Facebook have made is that anybody can now have a personalised vanity url for their personal Facebook page or profile. The old rules stated that you had to have over 25 fans to change your facebook business page url to

www.facebook.com/(insertyourcompanyname)

Now Facebook have opened this privilege to the masses. It’s very simple and worth doing – it makes your business page easier to find and easier to direct people to with a link. All you need do is

Log into your Facebook account (not your page)

Type www.facebook.com/username in the url box at the top of the page

You should then be taken to a page where you can change either your personal profile or any business page url’s that you are admin to.

You can either type in a suggested one or type in your own, then click Availability

If the name you want is available then it’s yours! – simple as that

Do take note that once you have changed the name and it is registered with Facebook you can’t reverse or change the name back, it stays as it is permanently.

Enjoy the post…

The BBC news homepage today brought us the gripping news that Miss Universe contestant Vasuki Sunkavalli was recently charged with the offence of ‘twagiarism’.

Sunkavalli (aka Miss Universe) was found guilty of tweeting a series of tweets that resembled very closely the Wall Street Journal columnist ‘Sadanand Dhume’s political comments. Sunkavalli has been charged with the so called twagiarism because she seems to have attempted to pass the commentary off, as if it were her own.

Twagiarism

We might laugh at this amusing word combination of twitter and plagiarism, but it’s certainly not the first word to have had “tw-” placed on to its bonnet.

But why is it necessary? To create a twitter language that has its own meaning….. or to simply make us laugh?

Sadanand Dhume, says it’s useful to make the distinction.

“Twagiarism certainly sounds less serious than plagiarism, as it should,” he says. “It’s a reminder that the twitterverse is much smaller than the universe and that we should keep a sense of humour about it.”

There is certainly some sense in Dhumes response and so we thought we’d give you a Twictionary of other twitter words that will help you describe twitter musings without coming across too severe…

• tweeple: users of Twitter, or a user’s followers (also “tweeps”)
• tweetup: a real world gathering of Twitter users (pre-Twitter term “meatspace”)
• twisticuffs: a verbal argument conducted via tweets
• twitterrhoea: overuse of social media
• tweet cred: social standing on Twitter
• twelete: removing a previously-published tweet
• twirting: philandering in 140 characters or fewer
• tweme: a popular idea (meme) on Twitter
• twittiquette: the social norms of micro-blogging
• twebinar: a “web seminar” using Twitter

Which one is your favourite? Are these words ridiculous or are they necessary in order to refer activity in the context of Twitter?

Enjoy the post…

For more social media marketing tips and advice – why not subscribe to our blog .

Enjoy the post… Vikki

Vikki Mills is Social Media and Marketing Executive at  Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

There is a lot in the press at the moment about how Facebook are improving their security settings – complaints of spamming, identity theft and bullying via Facebook have forced the site to get stricter and savvier with their security settings.

We want to make sure that you are taking full advantage of the security settings that are available to you by simply ensuring that yours are switched on. Unless you have actually switched on the settings yourself then it is unlikely that you are browsing through the site safely as the default setting is non secure.

You should therefore follow these simple steps:

Take a look at your URL (top box on your screen.)

If you see “http” or just “www” instead of “https” you DO NOT HAVE ANY SECURITY ENABLED & can be hacked.

Go to Account Settings – Click Security on the left top corner -click Edit, Check box (secure browsing), click Save.

Do everyone a huge favour and pass this message on to anyone who has a facebook account.

Other things you can be doing to ensure that your identity is protected -

• Facebook Guide to Privacy

At the very bottom of every page on Facebook, there’s a link that reads “Privacy.” The linked page is “A guide to privacy on Facebook,” which contains the details of the latest privacy settings and what they mean. If you are worried, use the “Preview my profile” button on any privacy settings page to check how your profile appears to other facebook users/friends

• Think carefully about who you allow to become your friend

Once you have accepted someone as your friend, remember that they will be able to access any information about you (including photographs) that you have marked as viewable by your friends. If you are concerned about them gaining any information about you from your facebook profile, don’t accept them as a friend. You can remove friends at any time and report anyone to facebook who is abusing you by the click of a button

• Show “limited friends” less of your profile.

You can choose to make people ‘limited friends’ who can only have access to a limited version of your profile if you wish. This can be useful if you have associates who you do not wish to give full friend status to, or feel uncomfortable sharing personal information with.

Keep yourself secure and protected on social media sites – we have the option to do so now and should be making the most of it.

Enjoy the post…

For more social media marketing tips and advice – why not subscribe to our blog .

Enjoy the post… Vikki

Vikki Mills is Social Media and Marketing Executive at  Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

Are you unsure about setting up an account on Twitter? Maybe you feel like it’s not right for your brand and clientele, maybe you think that anything you would have to say might fall on deaf ears because your target audience isn’t using twitter. Maybe you’re wrong…

The following statistics will prove that Twitter is fast and furiously becoming the social media platform used by everyone. The stats should show that it doesn’t matter if you are female, male, have kids …if you are wealthy, broke, employed or looking for work – you still have an audience on Twitter. Take a look and see for yourself – the stats also show that even if you haven’t got a presence on Twitter, people could still be talking about you….so maybe you should be listening?

Over the last 5 years -

• There are 200,000,000 registered Twitter users
• Almost 88% of people have awareness of Twitter and its existence
• There are 450,000 new Twitter accounts created everyday
• Meaning there are 5.2 accounts created every second of everyday

So we can longer claim that’s it unknown – there is a huge audience out there, right at your fingertips. That is a lot of people in a short space of time that have been convinced by its power.

• There are one billion tweets posted every week
• 180,000,000 everyday
• 138,888 every minute
• Over 1,650 every second

• Just 5% of Twitter users create 75% of the content tweeted
• There are 1.6 billion search queries everyday
• Meaning that there are 18,000 search queries every second

Still worried that you’re too old to be using it or that your brand or company is the wrong sort to be using twitter? Take a look at the numbers then…

• 46% of Twitter users are female
• 54% are male – very equal demographics
• 53% don’t have children
• 47% do have children – time doesn’t seem to be an issue
• The majorty of twitter users are aged between 30 and 49  - perfect age group

• 43% of people follow a brand on Twitter for special deals/offers
• 75% of users are more likely to purchase from a brand they follow – good headstart
• 67% of users are likely to recommend a brand they follow to other users

Ok….but maybe you’re still worried about the freedom of speech that users have. The fact that anyone can write anything about you, your brand, your services or your skills…

• 1,000,000 people view tweets about customer service each week
• 80% of those tweets are negative and critical
• As much as 75% of traffic comes from sources outside Twitter

We’ll let you in on a secret – whether you have a twitter account or not people can write whatever they want, whenever they want – they will get heard and it will get commented on and it will get passed on. Surely it’s better to be listening in on those criticisms, dealing with them and changing things for the better. Let people know you’re listening.

Maybe you don’t have a brand or a company or even a job – we’ve got a stat that should get you tweeting nonetheless

• Up to 85% of companies are using social media as part of their recruitment

Or maybe you don’t have the time to be on twitter in the middle of the day and therefore think you would miss out on most activity anyway….

• 5pm is the best time to be retweeted

So no excuses then? Looks like Twitter has an answer for everything….

If you have anything you’d like to add to this blog post – please feel free to send comments our way

Enjoy the post…

For more social media marketing tips and advice – why not subscribe to our blog .

Enjoy the post… Vikki

Vikki Mills is Social Media and Marketing Executive at  Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

These stats were taken from ‘Twitter Facts and Figures‘

When talking to a new client about social media or indeed when training to a group of businesses on the subject, the one social network that I find most business people feel more comfortable with – and have therefore started to engage with (ie: created a profile) – is LinkedIn.

Often branded as ‘The Professionals’ Facebook’ – over the years LinkedIn has certainly had the reputation of being the business to business resource. And until recently, most research in the four main channels, Facebook, Twitter,YouTube and LinkedIn, identified this to be the case.

And of course, that makes perfect sense.

LinkedIn started out largely as a ‘recruitment resource’ – a place where professionals could share their expertise and pitch for new ‘contracts’ or be head-hunted for positions. In fact, to date, the premium ‘paid for’ subscriptions are still largely the domain of recruitment consultants and head hunters wanting to make contact with highly targeted candidates.

I know a number of my friends and colleagues that have secured new roles, be they full-time or contract via LinkedIn – and so it works for that purpose, quite beautifully.

Of course, as with all of the networks – LinkedIn has evolved, and continues to evolve. Businesses can now create ‘Company Profiles’ – to showcase products and services – and also connect all employees.  So, it’s no longer just about individuals showcasing their wares but instead, another space for businesses to promote their people and their products and services – with the itention to engage, to meet likeminded individuals via Groups and to grow authority via Answers.

How to use LinkedIn for Business

If I were to explain Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn very quickly – I would say this:

• Twitter is a perfect mouthpiece for sharing content and information and connecting and engaging with those that you have never met, nor would ever have had the opportunity to meet – due to location and time constraints. It’s perfect for capturing conversations and listening in and generating traction back to your website.
• Facebook is the perfect vehicle for creating a community – to engage current audiences and encourage them to market to new audiences via viral worthy campaigns and compelling content, providing the potential to grow audience and awareness. Creating a community of ‘fans or advocates’ – willing to share and engage with your brand or business.

And LinkedIn…

Well, LinkedIn is quite different, LinkedIn is much more about self promotion (something not wholly advocated on Twitter or Facebook) and leveraging the contacts you already have.  So, here are my

12 Tips for Leveraging LinkedIn for Business:

1. Change your LinkedIn URL to your name. This way you have a public URL which you can promote and share on email footers or business cards – to showcase you.   And be sure to add other URLs such as your Website, Blog or Twitter URL too. Consider this your ‘personal splashpage’ where people can find out everything about you that you wish them to know.
2. Optimise your profile with relevant ‘Keywords’ as much as possible. This will help your profile to appear as high as possible on Google and LinkedIn searches. Keep your profile as ‘full as possible too – LinkedIn provide you with a gauge of ‘completeness’.  Strive to be 100% complete.
3. Create a Company Profile. If relevant – create a company profile which enables you to link all relevant team to the profile and also enables you to showcase your Products and Services. Again, ensure that you keyword optimise this area to ensure that you are picked up on relevant searches.
4. Personalise all messages when inviting people to connect (don’t use the standard message).  Research has shown that people are more likely to accept and appreciate the connection if you provide some personal context – eg: Great meeting you at ABC the other day – I’d like to keep in touch by connecting on LinkedIn.
5. Endeavour to look at your Profile Page everyday or auto update your status via Twitter or Facebook.  Every time you update your profile and show activity – you are ‘visible’. In the off-line world of networking there is a saying: Visibility + Credibility = Profitability. In simple terms – the more you are visible in your contacts’ minds the more they know what you are up to the more likely they are to contact you or think of you for a relevant reason – which may lead to business referral, hence profitability. Participation is key.
6. Don’t attempt to spam or directly sell. People will disconnect with you faster than you know if they think you are just there to sell your wares. Think of offline networking, you wouldn’t start a partnership or conversation by trying to sell someone something – engage, listen and nurture your contacts – don’t spam them. If someone is specifically discussing something you have a solution for – then sure, engage – but listen in first – don’t spam. Relevancy is key. I often get spammed about social media training – or do I want a marketing plan! Er no thanks – have you even bothered to look at my profile!
7. Be targeted. You may want to promote a product or service directly into an audience. And the beauty of LinkedIn is that the demographic information is really very granular (more so on social networks than on any other medium). The Advanced Search feature gives you an idea of what you can drill down to beyond age and title. It may be that you consider running a LinkedIn Ad whereby you serve advertising to a highly targeted audience.
8. Grow your authority. Join relevant groups and get involved in relevant discussions and share your knowledge. With groups you can add a new topic to garner opinion or advice. If there isn’t a relevant group for what you do – then you can easily create a group and then search for relevant contacts and people and invite them to that group. If you’re not directly connected to a person – then you can always ask one of your contacts that is connected to invite them. The ‘get introduced’ referral process is very powerful for that purpose. See the Groups tab to create a Group – and search Groups to find relevant groups.
9. Review LinkedIn Answers (often overlooked in the More tab). This feature aggregates conversations and requests by other LinkedIn users. You can select questions based on sector and interest – and see relevant questions. If you participate and share your knowledge the ‘questioner’ may select you as ‘Best Answer’ – a badge which sits on your profile. Simple – and another thing for you to promote.
10. Get recommendations. Asking contacts, colleagues, peers, clients, delegates etc for recommendations couldn’t be easier on LinkedIn. It’s a very simple process. Click your Profile and Recommendations and then you can simply select which contacts you want to get Recommendations from. There is research to say that those users with recommendations grow credibility and are more likely to get requests for advice and to be found in searches – and of course, you can use the recommendations in other marketing materials and on your website etc.
11. Let your contacts know they can connect with you on LinkedIn. In Connections – you will see a link for Add Connections. On this page you have various options to connect with your contacts – including an option which is often missed – to invite your Outlook by uploaded a CSV list.
12. Manage your contacts via LinkedIn. Now when I meet anyone and I get their business card – rather than it scurry about in the bottom of my bag for days, weeks or even months (until I forget the context of the connection) – I now instead, check out LinkedIn – see if they are on there and connect (sending a nice targeted message as point 4. Doing this means that I keep a constant database of contacts, if they change roles etc, I haven’t lost them – as they remain on LinkedIn, it’s just their role that has changed. In LinkedIn Updates (an email you can opt to receive each week or month advising you as to what’s been happening with your contacts – who they’ve connected with, new roles, accolades etc), I could even email that contact to congratulate them on their new role. Nice!  Database management is often a headache – but via LinkedIn – time saving, life lasting and very low maintenance.

So – that’s it. My 12 tips for Leveraging LinkedIn – any other tips or tactics you may have, then please do share – always keen to hear more…

@Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

Many of the questions I get asked during the social media training I deliver relate directly to ‘safeguarding’ social marketing activity and the implications of employees participating in social media can have on a business or brand.

Rather than a business bury their head in the sand and create a policy of ‘no participation’ – I advocate a business getting involved andhaving a clear communication plan and social media guidelines which all within the organisation can clearly understand.

So – consider creating such guidelines for your business:

Template Guidelines…

These guidelines apply to [CompanyABC] employees or contractors who create or contribute to blogs, wikis, social networks, virtual worlds, or any other kind of Social Media.

Whether you log into Twitter, Google+, Yelp, Wikipedia, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube or Facebook, or comment on online media stories — these guidelines are for you.

While all [CompanyABC] employees are welcome to participate in Social Media, we expect everyone who participates in online commentary to understand and to follow these simple but important guidelines. These rules might sound strict and contain a bit of legal-sounding jargon but please keep in mind that our overall goal is simple: to participate online in a respectful, relevant way that protects our reputation and of course follows the letter and spirit of the law.

1.         Gain authorisation from the Marketing Manager at [CompanyABC] for any social media activity where [CompanyABC] is the brand / organisation you will be discussing.

2.         Always be mindful that there are some topics we won’t comment on such as information about financials, intellectual property, trade secrets, management changes, lawsuits, shareholder issues, layoffs, and contractual agreements with partners, customers, and suppliers.   When getting involved in any ‘online social’ conversations – then always consider the above.

3.         If you have permission to be ‘speaking online’ about [CompanyABC] (pre agreed with Marketing Manager) then always be transparent and state that you work at [CompanyABC]. If your objective is to be the communicator for [CompanyABC] on social networks, then ensure that the profile you create is fitting and on message and clearly states that you are an employee of [CompanyABC]. If you are writing about [CompanyABC] or a competitor, use your real name, identify that you work for [CompanyABC] and be clear about your role. If you have a vested interest in what you are discussing, be the first to say so.

4.         Never represent yourself or [CompanyABC] in a false or misleading way. All statements must be true and not misleading; all claims must be substantiated.

5.         Post meaningful, respectful comments — in other words, please, no spam and no remarks that are off-topic or offensive. Remember, once it’s out there, it’s out there.

6.         Use common sense and common courtesy: for example, it’s best to ask permission to publish or report on conversations/material/research etc that is meant to be private or internal to [CompanyABC]. Make sure your efforts to be transparent don’t violate [CompanyABC’s] privacy, confidentiality, and legal guidelines for external commercial speech.

7.         Stick to your area of expertise and do feel free to provide unique, individual perspectives on non-confidential activities at [CompanyABC].

8.         When disagreeing with others’ opinions, keep it appropriate and polite. If you find yourself in a situation online that looks as if it’s becoming antagonistic, do not get overly defensive and do not disengage from the conversation abruptly: feel free to ask the Marketing Manager for advice and/or to disengage from the dialogue in a polite manner that reflects well on [CompanyABC].

9.         If you want to write about the competition, make sure you behave diplomatically, have the facts straight and that you have the appropriate permissions.

10.       Please never comment on anything related to legal matters, litigation, or any parties [CompanyABC] may be in litigation with.

11.       Never participate in Social Media when the topic being discussed may be considered a crisis situation. Even anonymous comments may be traced back to your or [CompanyABC’s] IP address. Refer all Social Media activity around crisis topics to the Marketing Manager.

12.      Always provide working links to relevant material available on other blogs and web sites. Disclose any sources fully through credits, links and trackbacks unless the source has requested anonymity.

13.       Be smart about protecting yourself, your privacy, and [CompanyABC’s] confidential information. What you publish is widely accessible and will be around for a long time, so consider the content carefully. Google has a long memory.

14.       Ensure that any personal social media accounts that could be construed as associated to [CompanyABC] clearly state a disclaimer in the profile outline. Eg: The views in this thread are my own.

NOTE: Mainstream media inquiries must be referred to the Marketing Manager.

These guidelines are purely that – ‘guidelines’.  You will need to consider what’s right for you and blend with your own internal documentation. Create a set a guidelines that works for your organisation and clearly communicate them to all relevant team within the organisation.

@Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

Not everyone runs TV advertising – it’s simply not relevant for many businesses. With social media – the media planning is as relevant. The media you select will be determined by your objectives – hence why it’s important to clearly understand them.

For example; if you are recruiting – then Linkedin or Facebook may work better than YouTube.  If you are launching a new service – then YouTube and Twitter may garner more reach.

Then there’s the B2B and B2C element to consider. There’s evidence to show that Linkedin is currently the most effective B2B resource – and Facebook has more success in the B2C arena.

It may indeed be a case of adding all possible social marketing platforms into your marketing mix.  Testing what works and then pulling back on the least effective activities.

However, to be learning by your marketing activity (as we all should be) you have to be monitoring and measuring results.  Again, monitoring effectiveness helps you to plan strategically.

Rather than just diving in and mindlessly doing everything – (mousewheel style), expending lots of energy, but going nowhere – effective planning helps you to better understand what’s working and guides you in leveraging activity and ultimately practice intelligent marketing.

• Know which keywords are right for you…

Typically we associate keywords with putting together an online ad campaign, however,keywords are just as crucial when using your social media platforms. David Taylor @2010mediauk – describes keywords as the DNA of our online presence. Don’t overlook using your keywords in all your social media profiles.

• Make sure you are using your keywords on your:
• Profile pages (Twitter, Linked in, Facebook, About me, YouTube etc).
• Signature sign off in your blog .
• Twitter username (@keyword – rather than @name)
• In your tweets
• In your status updates
• When naming your photos
• Facebook Business Page

In order to find out what your businesses keywords are, you could:

Ask the audience – Ask your customers, friends and family what words / phrases they would put into Google if they were looking for your services

Google Analytics – Review the keywords that people are using to find your site

Look at what you’ve got – Go through your website content, marketing flyers etc – anything that you have that describes your products and services – and look for the ‘key words’ – the main words which can describe your services / products in a fewer words as possible.

• Track your keywords and listen in

By the term ‘keyword tracking’ we simply mean setting alerts against relevant keyphrases that are being ‘tweeted’ and shared in the socialmediaosphere.

Brands and businesses often use this approach to track mentions of their products and companies, and developers can use it to track mentions of their favourite languages, frameworks, and open source projects.

It’s a great resource for seeing what’s not only happening with your own brand or business – but also for engaging in relevant and hopefully productive conversations.

Tracking keywords need not be complicated, particularly if you are using a social media platform such as – www.hootsuite.com – a total social management resource where you can align your Facebook profiles, Twitter Accounts, Linked In and others. There are other platforms too eg: Tweetdeck, Tweetbeep etc – but Hootsuite is the one we’d recommend.

• Promote Yourself

If you are using these social media platforms and taking the time to leverage them – then you want to make sure that world and his wife knows they can find you out there. Let them know you’re out there and make it easy for them to find you with icons and links.

Promote your social media presence at any given opportunity. If you have a website – make sure you clearly have links to all your social media profiles. So many people miss a golden opportunity and leave off social media icons or shove them in a tiny corner of their website where no one can see them. You can have a giant ‘follow me’ at the top of your homepage if you so wish – make the most of it. You could have a ‘like’ or ‘tweet’ button next to every blog post article you post. One click and they’re yours to impress.

You can also encourage followers/likes/YouTube subscribers/ LinkedIn connections in many other places – All ‘communications’ and ‘touch points’ be they ‘online or offline’ – should also consider the social media channels.  Including follow me@ Twitter names on business cards, letterheads, invoices, promoting blogs on sites and in ads etc.  Email footers in Forums should include links to blogs, twitter and sites:  Follow us on Twitter @handle, Blog (www.blogname.com/blog), Link with us on LinkedIn, Become a fan on Facebook

Shout it from your online rooftops

• And finally….Follow the Ten Twitter Commandments at all times…

The following commandments, if followed, should give you a full and happy existence on Twitter.

• Thou shall not blabber
• Thou shall not follow random tweeters who are of no value, just to increase one’s number of followers
• Thou shall not neglect one’s Twitter account, becoming inactive and complacent
• Thou shall not talk too much about oneself and one’s achievements (or one’s cheese sandwich)
• Thou shall not expect to be retweeted if thou do not retweet in return
• Thou shall not take followers for granted
• Thou shall not spam
• Thou shall not use ‘eggs’ as one’s profile picture
• Thou shall not use Twitter to stalk or harm others
• Thou shall not send out automated messages to new followers

For more social media marketing tips and advice – why not subscribe to our blog .

Enjoy the post… Vikki

Vikki Mills is Social Media and Marketing Executive at  Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

At Carvill creative we actively manage social media activity for clients – and have been doing so for a few years now.

There’s no doubt about it that in the past year social media has grown in popularity. businesses of all shapes and sizes are learning how they can be leveraging the far reaching social channels to engage with customers, generate new business and promote their products and services (to name just a few of the ways the channels can be utilised).

As they explore the realities of social media engagement, business owners and marketers alike are understanding that there’s more to it than simply hiring an intern for the summer and letting them loose.

Only a year ago if you had put in the search terms ‘social media management’ into Google – the sponsored ads would have been pretty much non-existent, try it today and you’ll find a range of solutions on offer, from large advertising, pr and marketing agencies, right through to independent ‘gurus’ promising to change the way you market your business forever.

What those business owners and marketers that have researched the social media channels are comprehending is the fact that being ‘social‘ and active on the channels needs to be planned for, managed effectively and – to do so properly, is a pretty time consuming role.

So here are our 5 key things to consider when outsourcing your social media marketing:

1. Home from home  - By this sentiment, we mean, that the partnership you have with the people, person or agency you are working with really needs to be seamless. After all the beauty of social marketing is that it enables you to have ‘networked conversations’ and share your opinion, beliefs, expertise and brand values, therefore it’s absolutely integral that whoever you have outsourced this key marketing activity to really understands the heart and soul of your business and brand and can therefore communicate for you effectively.
2. Constant contact – Ensure that you are in constant contact with one another. It’s important that you are still very much the ‘custodian’ of your communications. What your social media partner shares must be ‘on message’ and so agree objectives, key messages and the process for getting ‘ sign off’ before anything is shared. There are resources agencies use which enable clients to see what’s pending to share. So, whilst your partners are doing the leg work – blogging, creating compelling content, listening in and sharing – your role is to check that you are happy with everything that is being shared.  It may be that they identify an opportunity for comment or to expose thought leadership, so be sure to have someone available for them to contact for such instantaneous opportunities.
3. Blend into your marketing mix – So, the social team are briefed and fully immersed in your brand values and ethos, what’s also important is that they fully understand your overall marketing objectives and have an opportunity to review all marketing activities you have lined up. For example, if you have an annual event scheduled, then how can you leverage the social channels too. If you are running a direct mail campaign, then consider how you can promote your social channels. Can those you are looking to garner response from via the campaign ask questions via Facebook or a Twitter thread? Perhaps it make more sense to create the direct response mechanism to drive traffic to your Facebook page to grow likes? The key thing is to ensure that the social channels are ‘blended’ into your marketing mix where possible – and your social marketing team should be working with you to ensure you leverage the channels effectively.  But of course, if you don’t let them know what you’re up to  – then how are they to know! So be sure you share.
4. Regular reporting – Retaining a close understanding of performance is key. Just as with any other marketing activity, you need to understand what’s working and what isn’t, so that you can practice what we call ‘intelligent marketing’ – continuously learning and therefore optimising your marketing activity. Ensure that you receive regular reports, at least monthly as to how your social marketing is progressing. Simple benchmarks such as growth in ‘relevant’ followers and fans, and reach, ie: how far your messages are being communicated are just two of the basics. And then, of course there are other key indicators such as a analysis of website traffic to see if the channels are delivering more, a general uplift in traffic to your site and bottom line activity such as new lead generation.
5. Joining up your activity – Closely aligned to lead generation in point 4, is ensuring that your website or desired landing page is fit for  purpose. How often we see campaigns whereby the objective is to drive new lead generation however, the place where all marketing activity is driving to falls short on the ‘call to action’ point. Your social marketing partners should be experienced in joined up marketing activity and able to advise you on mechanisms for capturing leads, giving you another key element to measure performance against and ultimately provide you with opportunity to capture interest and generate new leads.

Social marketing, just like any other form of marketing can indeed be time consuming – thinking strategically about your objectives and sharing them very clearly with the team you choose to manage your social marketing activity is absolutely key.

Outsourcing to experts makes sense for many businesses. However, do bear in mind that you will reap the greatest returns when that outsourced team is fully enabled to become an extension of your own business. It’s like taking on a new employee, they have to have an induction into your brand, products and services. Put that effort in at the beginning and then their knowledge will just continue to grow.

So, to summarise, brief them well, keep them close, communicate regularly and ensure they continually understand your objectives – follow these steps and and it should be the start of a beautiful relationship.

@Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

Some people underestimate how important it is to have the right profile picture representing your presence on any social media site. The little box that sits at the top left hand side of any Linked In/Twitter/Facebook or YouTube account is seen by your entire social media community, all the time. Not making the most out of this branding opportunity is not only foolish but could in fact be detrimental to your brand.

Make sure you have your logo or photo on your profile at all times. Seeing the little default egg on Twitter or the default shadow on Facebook as a profile picture – says not committed, not trustworthy and not bothered. When looking for people to follow on Twitter I assume that all the ‘egg’ profile users are not serious tweeters or haven’t been on their account since they set it up.

If you can be creative with your profile picture then go for it – with Twitter having over 300 million users, it really is a case of standing out from the crowd.

There are things you can do to put a quirky spin on a dull profile picture. The iphone has a lot of effects that can be used alongside the camera to jazz up any photo. ‘Toonpaint’, ‘Photoshop Express’ ‘Colour splash’ and ‘The juxtaposer’ create images would grab the attention of any dozy tweeter!

2. Content is King – make yours worth of sharing

Social Marketing channels such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Blogs, YouTube and Forums (and many more that I won’t mention just now) are perfect vehicles for sharing content. However, now more than ever, what we share has never been more important. These channels provide excellent opportunities to share compelling content, content that helps others to want to know us, like us, trust us, share our message and ultimately do business with us.

So… we certainly shouldn’t be wasting the opportunity these far reaching channels provide by talking about the latest cheese sandwich we just ate. (Unless of course you’re Pret and it’s a tactic you’ve employed!).

Ask yourself…

• Have you got a strategy for regularly creating fresh and acceptable content?
• Have you got a blog that you regularly update for your business?
• Are you regularly creating videos for your business – how to videos, sharing FAQs, customer testimonials, new product and service features?
• Have you got any research info that others would be interested in?
• Are you an authority in a specific area – can you create ‘whitepapers’, industry reports etc?

Content is all around us – and so it’s a case of ensuring that you employ a mechanism for collating it and using it effectively.

3. Keep on top of your Twitter followings  - keep them relevant

This is a quality over quantity message. It’s very easy to absently click that green follow button on tweeters – in the hope that they will follow you back and boost your ratings.

This is not a good strategy to follow, the term ‘quality over quantity’ could not be truer.

With most tweeters tweeting on average 15 times a day, that makes for a very busy Twitter feed if you follow the masses. It’s so easy to miss out on interesting conversations or good business leads if you’re following hundreds of people. Only follow tweeters that actually interest you or provide you with good content.

Cleaning out your Twitter account might feel like cleaning out your wardrobe – tiresome and time consuming. Fear not -

This is where Tweepi http://tweepi.com/ can seriously help you out. With this very easy and free (you can pay to upgrade) dashboard, amongst other things, you can view your followings/followers in a split second alongside some very helpful stats. Tweepi will tell you when that person last tweeted, if they are following you back, their klout score and how many followers they have. If you think they are worthy of your following then keep them, if not – flush them. Very simple!

4. Work out who your target audience is

Before diving in to social media you need to ask yourself a number of questions –One very important one being -  What do we want to achieve with social media?

Different audiences respond to different approaches. You should be targeted in  traditional marketing approaches – and this still stands online in the social platforms.

The beauty of social media platforms is that if you want to deliver online ads – then Linkedin and Facebook provide you with very granular demographics.  You can really drill down to very specific audience criteria.

You can also target specific ‘Groups’ or ‘keywords’ to review conversations and nurture in a relevant and targeted way.

Social marketing – just as with traditional marketing should be targeted. Understand your audience, talk to them in a way that’s relevant to them, provide them with relevant and authentic offers, news, content, ideas and conversations.

You need to be clear on who your audience is – so you can target them effectively.

Also – remember the little saying… like attracts like. The ‘message’ that you put out is attractive to your audience and so it get’s shared by your target audience – most people have ‘friends or associates’ that are ‘likeminded’ so you grow your targeted audience in social way.  (Hence why Groupon has been such a hit…for Groupon!).

5. Keep your ‘voice ‘ consistent across all your social media platforms

What you ‘say’ and the messages that you communicate need to be agreed as part of your planning.  After all – this is your business, your brand.  It’s irresponsible to just let communications run loose without any prior agreed planning.

As part of your social marketing planning you need to agree what should be talked about and shared, tone of voice used etc. These things are all key parts of communicating effectively.  Resources allocated effectively – eg, if you are going to blog daily about xyz – then who is going to do it, sign it off, ensure it’s on brand etc before its shared.

Of course, what’s great about social marketing platforms is their transparency and authenticity – and when something is overly ‘manufactured’ – it’s very obvious.  You can still have authentic and transparent conversations – but planning what the ‘theme’ of those conversations is – eradicates the ‘I’ve just had a cheese sandwich’ tweet, creeping into the corporate channel.

For any other vital tips – please comment below

For more social media marketing tips and advice – why not subscribe to our blog .

Enjoy the post… Vikki

Vikki Mills is Social Media and Marketing Executive at  Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

• Ask questions

Use your facebook statuses and wall posts to ask questions. So simple but very effective – provide your audience/prospective audience with an easy opportunity to enagage with your page. Facebook users are far more likely to notice you if you pose questions they want to get involved with. If you don’t ask…you don’t get.

• Post games and trivia

Keep things light – remember that you’re trying to sell your page, if you were at an exhibition or show you might have a bowl full of sweets to entice the crowds to your stand. It’s a bit harder to offer sweets online, for obvious reasons, so be creative and lure them with trivia and fun games. It also keeps your already existing fans entertained and reminded of your presence

• Interact with fan engagement

Make sure you answer queries, complaints and compliments on a daily basis. If people see that you’re really listening then they’ll engage more and more. They are far more likely to ‘like’ your page if it’s evident that they’ll be able to contact your business through it. If your page wall is full of unanswered fans it doesn’t look great either – you wouldn’t leave a customer waiting at your till for six days – so don’t leave them waiting on your wall either.

• Incorporate Promotions and sales (vouchers, competitions etc.)

I would say this is probably one of the most successful ways to get the ‘likes’ rolling in. Everybody loves a bargain, especially when times are tough. If you’re offering a promotion or discount solely through Facebook it’s remarkable how supportive people will suddenly become of your business page.

• Incorporate relevant photos

Visuals are evidently effective and this has been proved in many areas of business. Keep your page bright and interesting with photos that will encourage people to get ‘liking’. This is incredibly important if you don’t have a website as people will rely solely on your page for pictures of your products. I stumbled across this Facebook business page ‘Lilah’ – a small clothes business that uses the photo application to their best advantage. You could spend hours dreamily looking at their beautiful clothes and would be far more likely to purchase from ‘Lilah’ than if the page was just text.

• Relate to current events

If it’s Halloween or Valentine’s Day then make the most of it. There are a lot of events in the calendar that can be used to your advantage. Keep your designs, competitions, polls, blog posts in keeping with calendar events, seasons and current affairs. If your page is promoting something Valentinsey and it’s four days til Febuary 14^th then people will be inclined to check you out.

• Incorporate videos

We can’t tell you enough how powerful videos are for your business. For example – say you’re a painter/decorator that has a business page on Facebook and you’ve just finished a job. Ask your client if you can video them for one minute reviewing your service. You can record them on your smartphone and have it uploaded to your business page in seconds. That video will probably be the most transparent and trustworthy piece of information on your page, you can’t get more powerful than that.

• Include links in your status updates and wall posts

This is the perfect way to drive traffic to your website or blog and gives your readers something meaty to read or look at. There’s only so much that you can get across in a status update and updates shouldn’t be too long anyway– so save the in depth discussion for your links.

Any other tips out there? Please feel free to share anything that can help others make the most of their business page

For more social media marketing tips and advice – why not subscribe to our blog .

Enjoy the post… Vikki

Vikki Mills is Social Media and Marketing Executive at  Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

If you are using these social media platforms and taking the time to leverage them – then you want to make sure that world and his wife knows they can find you out there.

Let them know you’re out there and make it easy for them to find you with icons and links.

Promote your social media presence at any given opportunity. If you have a website – make sure you clearly have links to all your social media profiles. So many people miss a golden opportunity and leave off social media icons or shove them in a tiny corner of their website where no one can see them. You can have a giant ‘follow me’ at the top of your homepage if you so wish – make the most of it.

You could have a ‘like’ or ‘tweet’ button next to every blog post article you post. One click and they’re yours to impress.

You can also encourage followers/likes/YouTube subscribers/ LinkedIn connections in many other places.

All ‘communications’ and ‘touch points’ be they ‘online or offline’ – should also consider the social media channels.  Including follow me@ Twitter names on business cards, letterheads, invoices, promoting blogs on sites and in ads etc.  Email footers in Forums should include links to blogs, twitter and sites:

Follow us on Twitter @handle

Blog (www.blogname.com/blog)

Link with us on LinkedIn

Become a fan on Facebook

If your customers, potential clients, business leads, family, friends – don’t actively look for you then they’ll never know you exist. Humans are inheritly lazy – so don’t give people the excuse that ‘they didn’t know you tweeted’. Make it dead simple for them to follow/link/like with you. Provide them with a little bird to click on and then there aren’t any excuses…..Shout it from your online rooftops

For more social media marketing tips and advice – why not subscribe to our blog .

Enjoy the post… Vikki

Vikki Mills is Social Media and Marketing Executive at  Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

Are you 100% sure your website is working  as it should be?

When was the last time you sat at your website with a consumer’s hat on?

Website Performance Checklist

Often, we spend time getting great content together for our website, spend days, weeks and months getting the design right – then it’s over to the web developers to ensure everything is coded and made live to web.

If we’re really prudent, we will already have done consumer and competitor research so that we’re sure the site covers all bases. And those that are really savvy will have undertaken some usability testing (even very rudimentary testing using good old fashioned eyes and ears is better than nothing) with people totally unfamiliar with the site. (Sadly, the testing element is all too often left out of a site build – an element I would say, ignore at your peril).

The site is launched and that’s pretty much it – sit back and put your feet up and expect great magic to happen. After all – it’s got a fresh look and feel and a whole new suite of fresh content – job done.

It’s rare in the world of marketing that ‘one hit wonders’ occur. Effective marketing (be it offline or online) is something that is continuous, intelligent – an ongoing learning process, forever optimising, tweaking and testing.

Given that nowadays a website is a key marketing resource for any business – then the same marketing principals apply – we need to be regularly watching and learning.

So here are my 5 checks to ensure your website doesn’t let you down:

Check 1:

Interact with your website with fresh eyes. Consider yourself a newcomer to the site. Go through the site with a critical eye:

• • Does all the content make sense?
  • Does your homepage tell users very clearly and simply exactly what you do.
  • Is it clear how users can contact you / buy your services?
  • Is the site easy to navigate?
  • What’s your honest first impression?
  • Does it take forever to load?
  • What does it look like on a mobile?

If the site could be better – make notes. You may not be able to make all the changes quickly – but at least you are recording how you want to tweak and progress the site.

Check 2:

If you sell something online – make a purchase. Is it simple to buy from your site? Do all the messages you receive and signposting throughout the site make sense?

Check 3:

Check all your call to action processes are working smoothly. I say this because on one of our sites, a simple email responder wasn’t redirecting correctly resulting in a number of new requests not getting through.  (Reword that into lost business opportunity). All was working fine at launch – but a simple change we made a couple of weeks later clearly had an impact on a process that didn’t get checked again. So be sure to regularly review that your processes are working and that the messaging makes sense.  If I hadn’t have been checking the site (which I do regularly) then this could have got missed and we may have missed weeks, months or years worth of enquiries.

Check 4:

Ask someone you trust to give you an honest opinion of their experience of using the site. Often when you are close to a site and service you use jargon that others may not understand. I’ve witnessed many a ‘forehead slapping’ moment by simply undertaking this exercise.

Check 5:

Understand what’s happening on your site and a simple way to do this is embedding Google Analytics. research undertaken in October 2010 of 10,000 UK websites showed that over 40% of websites get zero, yes zero, traffic.  If we consider the wise statement ‘what you can measure you can manage’ – then any website owner really needs to be aware of what’s happening with their site.

Google Analytics is a free resource, but don’t confuse free with being worthless. It’s an incredible resource which provides insight into a wide range of valuable business information. You can see visits to your site, where they came from, how long they stayed on your site, where they exited, what they looked at, which keywords drove them to visit, whether they came from a mobile or web, which browser, which phone platform – and that’s just the basics. If your site doesn’t have Analytics installed – make it a priority to get this fixed. It’s a must.

Enjoy the post… if so – please share.

@Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – the online marketing and visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

If your Twitter feed is anything like mine – it’s probably drowning in tweets that contain precious links to articles that will give you the absolute do’s and don’ts of Twitter.

However, we think that Tweepi’s Ten Twitter Commandments are by far the best out there and should be taken as gospel. They are concise, easy to follow and above all – accurate.

The following commandments, if followed, should give you a full and happy existence on Twitter.

1. Thou shall not blabber
2. Thou shall not follow random tweeters who are of no value, just to increase one’s number of followers
3. Thou shall not neglect one’s Twitter account, becoming inactive and complacent
4. Thou shall not talk too much about oneself and one’s achievements (or one’s cheese sandwich)
5. Thou shall not expect to be retweeted if thou do not retweet in return
6. Thou shall not take followers for granted
7. Thou shall not spam
8. Thou shall not use ‘eggs’ as one’s profile picture
9. Thou shall not use Twitter to stalk or harm others
10. Thou shall not send out automated messages to new followers

Good luck sticking to the Ten Commandments and let us know if you would change any…

For more social media marketing tips and advice – why not subscribe to our blog .

Enjoy the post… Vikki

Vikki Mills is Social Media and Marketing Executive at  Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

The two magazines that we subscribe to in our office – Design Week and New Media Age, have arrived with rather intriguing letters this week.

Both publications have declared that this will be their last week of print as they make the bold move to the World Wide Web. We are to accept that Design Week and NMA will now only appear on our screens. Our monthly subscription fee will ensure that digital versions of the magazines land in our email inboxes, rather than a paperback publication through our letter boxes. Times are a changing – but for the better?

Good move /Bad Move?

The decision that New Media Age would go digital may have been spurred on by stats from other publishers wanting to take the plunge.

Guardian news and media are said to be adopting a ‘digital first’ strategy after seeing a huge rise in online audiences. Andrew Miller, Guardian Media CEO, said it will ‘direct resources from print to digital, in a strategy that could help digital revenues double to nearly 100 million by 2010’

A and N Media announced that The Mail Online will expand its app strategy after its mobile audience grew by 5.7 million in a year.

The evidence would suggest that NMA are not alone in thinking the digital switchover is a good move, suggesting there must be a reason for this shared thinking. NMA have put forward their argument in the following words:

‘Our readership research shows that New Media Age is most valued for its news and authoritative commentary. We believe that by concentrating on just digital we can improve our information service to you, ensuring we can provide better in-depth coverage of new media developments as they happen.

Over the coming months we’ll be introducing a number of digital services to subscribers, including a subscriber-only email service, a revamped mobile site and an iPad app.

New Media Age will continue to run a programme of events dedicated to helping you make sense of digital. We’ll also be drawing much more on our digital expertise for new regular features in sister title Marketing Week.

We believe the changes will make New Media Age even more of an essential read. But please tell us what you think as we develop, and watch out for your personal invitation to sample the new package at no cost.’

So they clearly seem to think that they’re making a good move – but what about their readers?

After researching some conversations on the web it seemed clear that not everybody thinks this digital switchover is a good idea.

‘Disappointed’ and ‘angry’ comments suggested that subscribers will miss receiving a published magazine every week.

Many seem to look forward to taking their NMA to the coffee shop with them and think it presumptuous to assume we can all afford iPads.

There seemed to be a lot of complaints about having to justify the cost of the magazine when no magazine is actually being delivered. As well as comments about having to stare at screens and the internet all day, reading a magazine in the arm chair brings some light relief from a nine to five digital existence.

All valid points that need to be taken into consideration – points that Design Week subscribers will be able to relate to as they received the news that Design Week was to go digital this week.

However, with the success of tablets such as the iPad, it’s no surprise really that there’s about to be a big move towards digital versions of publications.

Design Week has reportedly said that they already generate more advertising revenue through their website than they do their print magazine – suggesting that they are making the right move.

From a marketing point of view, leaving print behind seems like a no brainer.

Digital marketing gives marketers a lot more feedback and control in comparison with print. We can see in black and white what’s working and what’s not. We can tell exactly how effective an advert in Design Week is through how many impressions it’s got, how many clicks, how many hard enquiries and how much business was actually generated through that ad.

It also allows for articles and news to be far more up to date, therefore more reactive and current. Subscribers may often have found it frustrating to read articles in these magazines that were considered old news by the time the magazine was in print. They certainly won’t have this problem with digital publications.

As with any type of change, it’s inevitable that there will be conflicting opinions.

Many people will think that we’re killing off paper without considering the consequences, others will accuse protestors of digital publishing of being dated and narrow minded.

The most important test for these magazines will be in their subscription stats, is the move too bold for the majority? Or will they see a tidal wave of digital adorers who’ve been waiting for this very moment?

Will we ever see this change become fully accepted or will we always miss the smell and feel of paper in our hands?

For more social media marketing tips and advice – why not subscribe to our blog .

Enjoy the post… Vikki

Vikki Mills is Social Media and Marketing Executive at  Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

As a start up or busy business owner you might think that social media is last on your list of priorities. Each day you just about manage to cram in the necessities and often have to let other things slide, therefore updating a Twitter feed or Facebook page everyday isn’t a realistic goal.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that Social Media isn’t worthy of being on your priority list. It could actually turn out to be a real time saver, you can kill a lot of birds with just one stone by having a successful and targeted social media presence. Not only can you use these platforms to promote and advertise your business – you can engage with clients, customers and colleagues and ensure that everybody knows you’ve got eyes and ears out there all the time.

Ramon De Leon is a partner in Dominos restaurants – he argues that:

‘Even the busiest business owner should have time for social media’

De Leon says it allows him to connect with customers and let them know that he’s listening. Great promotions and customer service have a habit of a having a rippling effect, in the same way that bad promotions and bad customer service does!

If you are giving customers and clients an experience worthy of telling their friends about, De Leon calls it the ‘WOW effect’ , then they will share it.  Where is the most obvious place to share it?….On a social media site.

De Leon ensures that he is there to comment, re post, like, retweet and share in any way possible these reported WOW effects for any of his businesses.

De Leon says that a simple photo of someone enjoying their birthday in Domino’s can be taken, uploaded and shared within 5 minutes and he considers that to be very powerful. If you’re a small business starting up – it’s something that you can easily do yourself. Take a photo that shows your business in a good light and share it on a social media site.

You might be reading this and thinking you want to get involved, but really really don’t have the time. We can help you with this – we offer a range of social media management services that can be your social media eyes and ears for you. It doesn’t mean you have to be totally hands off but we can help to relieve a lot of the pressure with strategic planning, marketing and implementing of social media for your business.

If anyone has any other quick tips that they wish to share – please do!

For more social media marketing tips and advice – why not subscribe to our blog .

Enjoy the post… Vikki

Vikki Mills is Social Media and Marketing Executive at  Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

Another of Michelle Carvill’s favourite social media myths to bust is ‘Social Media is not for kids’. There’s this misguided opinion in those still not convinced by social media, Facebook in particular, that it’s a young person’s arena.

This is a rather dangerous myth. It suggests to businesses that a large proportion of their potential cliental are not using social media sites and therefore won’t be benefiting from any time they invest in social media.

Not only can we argue that this isn’t true but we can prove it with some very interesting stats-

A new study suggests that a fifth of all grandparents in the UK use social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn .

Of that fifth, almost three quarters said that they use Facebook, a third use Twitter and almost 10% were on LinkedIn.

Myvouchercodes.co.uk carried out a survey from its customer database, the results were reported in the Telegraph this week – 1,341 grandparents over the age of 60 responded on their use of social networks.

• 70% said they had joined a social network in the past year
• Over half of those said they had acted on encouragement given by younger people in their families.
• This indicates that 1 in 7 grandparents over 60 use Facebook in the UK
• The UK internet audience grew from 36.9m in May 2009 to 38.8m in May last year – more than half this growth was attributed to those in the over 50 age group.

Exciting numbers – a firm group of statistics that suggest older people are very much getting involved with social media and it’s now market place for all ages. Businesses can’t afford to be missing out and age is no longer an excuse!

If you want to get involved with social media but don’t have any idea where to start then take a look at our social media packages – we offer a range of services that vary from getting you or your business started, right through to managing your accounts for you.

For more social media marketing tips and advice – why not subscribe to our blog .

Enjoy the post… Vikki

Vikki Mills is Social Media and Marketing Executive at  Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

• Allow yourself to be found – Choose a Twitter name that people are likely to associate with you and therefore search for. If they can’t find you then they won’t follow you.

• Make the most of your profile – Write a clear and informative profile description that uses keywords that people might be searching for. Make sure you include a link to your website too.

• Don’t shout – If you use capital letters on the web, it’s often considered shouting. Using full capital letters on Twitter is considered impolite. Think about your grammar and spelling, too— it’s still important to remain professional in 140 characters.

• Provide juicy info - Twitter is a great place to let people know about special menu items, deals and discounts or one time offers. Everybody loves to get the inside gossip, so make your Twitter followers feel special by giving them a look behind the scenes with photos or exclusive tweets.

• Don’t repeat yourself too much – There’s no need to mention your Facebook page everyday —people can find that on their own. It’s good to send out your new blog post link a couple of times a day but don’t bore people or give them the impression that you are spamming them.

• Ask for advice and recommendations – Twitter is a great place for getting recommendations and getting a majority feel for what people like or want: Do they agree with Simon Cowell on the X Factor? Are they excited about Wimbledon? Do they think Andy Murray has a chance? Do they like Italian Restaurants? Which ones do they think are the best? By getting into conversation you could find out valuable information for your business and even recommend yourself or others. By following Carvill Creative’s @iamlookingfora – you’ll find a feed dedicated to all ‘requests’ – look at it, tweet it, respond to it and share.

• Don’t tweet anything you wouldn’t say – Remember that anyone can see your Twitter account and anybody can print anything you write. A tweet is a direct quote from you so be careful not to lash out or write anything you wouldn’t actually express in person.

• Avoid being too corporate – Twitter is supposed to act like a community, sharing articles and opinions, retweeting tweets by others and supporting each other. If you appear too anonymous or corporate you might turn people off. If you can – we’d suggest making about half of your tweets non-self promotional.

• Refrain from sending out auto-DM – This is a personal opinion but we’re really not fans of the auto direct message that people send out to new followers. It’s impersonal and appears too corporate.

Does anyone out there have any other big Twitter rules that they like to follow?

For more social media marketing tips and advice – why not subscribe to our blog .

Enjoy the post… Vikki

Vikki Mills is Social Media and Marketing Executive at  Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

It’s estimated that there are now over 160 million tweets posted each day on Twitter.

And of course, as a Tweeter, the more people you follow the more ‘noise’ you’re going to have entering your Twitter feed.

Even initially sceptical businesses are now beginning to open their eyes to the fact that, in the right hands, Twitter has the potential to be a far reaching and resource rich channel – so it’s ever likely that the number of Twitter users will continue to grow, at a pace, turning the volume even louder.

Therefore, savvy Tweeters want to cut through that noise right to the heart of key conversations.

Effective marketing works best when it’s targeted – and the beauty of some of the many Twitter resources now available, is that they allow you to do just that.

In our blog post ‘Tweeters are you Tracking your Keywords’ – we suggested some of the keywords you can be ‘tracking’ – and since that time we also created a Twitter feed aptly titled:

‘I am looking for a’ – see @iamlookingfora .

This feed is dedicated to capturing any conversations where the user is making ‘requests’ for information:

• I am looking for a (new website designer)
• Can anyone recommend (a wedding planning in Berkshire)
• Does anyone know a (great hotel in Brighton for families)

And other related keywords… you get the drift. The feed is dedicated to watching ‘request’ style keywords, which we at Carvill Creative

• Watch
• Filter

and then

• Share

Share with our clients and contacts where relevant – make recommendations, and then share generally by retweeting.

Why are we doing this?

As an agency managing Twitter feeds for clients, we’re already watching the platforms – which is indeed time consuming.  So we’re making the most of our ‘vigilance’ and sharing other request gems that come along.  We like the share – and totally advocate the power of Twitter, if used properly – and this feature is a great way to do that.

So, you can save yourself the ‘watching of many’ by simply following: @iamlookingfora

as it’s a dedicated feed to all ‘requests’.

Another element we now also build into our feed is the hashtag concept. #RFR is being used in some cases for the same purpose – however, not all Twitter users understand the concept of the hashtag – and so the @iamlookingfora feed not only pulls in the #RFR but also captures general ‘written’ requests too.

There are other feeds to watch too… There’s also now @msrfr and @socialmediarfr – again, watching request feeds.  So again, ones to follow.

Keep an eye on those conversations to ensure that you’re capturing leads. And if you don’t time, resources or inclination – and want to outsource your social marketing activity, then of course, check out our social media management packages.

@Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

Our last blog post spoke about the importance of keeping your content on social media sites relevant and interesting. We should be applying the same rule to our followers. Keep them relevant and interesting.

It’s very easy to absently click that green follow button on tweeters – in the hope that they will follow you back and boost your ratings.

This is not a good strategy to follow, the term ‘quality over quantity’ could not be truer.

Chris Moyles was speaking on his breakfast show last week about this exact principle. Moyles argues that he only follows 50 people on twitter because he doesn’t believe he can be attentive enough to any more than this.

He makes a very valid point – we’re not saying follow just 50 people – but take Chris’s advice and think about keeping your followings targeted.

With most tweeters tweeting on average 15 times a day, that makes for a very busy Twitter feed if you follow the masses. It’s so easy to miss out on interesting conversations or good business leads if you’re following hundreds of people. It’s very distressing to think that you might miss out on a targeted potential business leady type of tweet because your next door neighbour is tweeting the Andy Murray score every five seconds, clogging up your feed.

Maybe you’re reading this and thinking that it’s about time you had a clean up on Twitter – you’re sick of seeing certain tweets that annoy you or don’t bear any relevance to your interests or life – but you also don’t want to take the time to go through the mass crowd that you have ended up following.

This is where Tweepi http://tweepi.com/ can seriously help you out. With this very easy and free (you can pay to upgrade) dashboard, amongst other things, you can view your followings/followers in a split second alongside some very helpful stats. Tweepi will tell you when that person last tweeted, if they are following you back, their klout score and how many followers they have. If you think they are worthy of your following then keep them, if not – flush them. Very simple!

Remember – quality over quantity. Follow the tweeters that will give you good interesting content and you’ll actually be able to follow conversations.

Does anyone know of any other good platforms out there that will help you flush unwanted followers?

For more social media marketing tips and advice – why not subscribe to our blog .

Enjoy the post… Vikki

Vikki Mills is Social Media and Marketing Executive at  Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

Other related blog posts – Content is still King – http://www.carvillcreative.co.uk/blog/

Social Marketing channels such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Blogs, YouTube and Forums (and many more that I won’t mention just now) are perfect vehicles for sharing content.

However, now more than ever, what we share has never been more important.

These channels provide excellent opportunities to share compelling content, content that helps others to want to know us, like us, trust us, share our message and ultimately do business with us.

So… we certainly shouldn’t be wasting the opportunity these far reaching channels provide by talking about the latest cheese sandwich we just ate. (Unless of course you’re Pret and it’s a tactic you’ve employed!).

Businesses of all shapes and sizes now need to be getting their ‘content house’ in order.

Ask yourself…

• Have you got a strategy for regularly creating fresh and acceptable content?
• Have you got a blog that you regularly update for your business?
• Are you regularly creating videos for your business – how to videos, sharing FAQs, customer testimonials, new product and service features?
• Have you got any research info that others would be interested in?
• Are you an authority in a specific area – can you create ‘whitepapers’, industry reports etc?

Content is all around us – and so it’s a case of ensuring that you employ a mechanism for collating it and using it effectively.

Content is King for a number of reasons

Fresh and compelling content is key for a number of reasons:

• Helps you get found online - Really good for SEO – (search engine optimisation) purposes – as search spiders love coming to find regularly updated, keyword enabled content.
• Keeps your online presence fresh – Do you have any old news articles on your site? What’s the date of your latest blog post – January 2011 or even 2010! If so, how does that look to those reading your blog?  Keeping your content fresh shares a really positive message about your business.
• Grows trust and authority – The content you create gives you something credible to shout about. There’s an offline networking concept titled VCP – visibility grows credibility, which ultimately grows profitability…and this concept fits with how people get to know you online too.
• Grows brand awareness and reach – Social Marketing channels can be far reaching, you just don’t know where your content is going to end up and who is reading it. It may get picked up and shared in a very ‘viral’ way – growing awareness in ways that traditional media, simply can’t compete with.

Of course, if you have a content strategy in place, there’s also the opportunity of safeguarding what others are saying in your business. You can clearly set boundaries as to what is and what is not shared. Of course, content is best when it’s authentic and transparent – but you certainly don’t want to be sharing content that is potentially damaging to your brand.

No excuses… be sure what you ‘share’ is worthy of sharing and add a ‘content creation strategy and schedule’ into your marketing mix today.  And once it’s there… commit to it.

@Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website planning.

For marketing and social media advice – view or subscribe to the Carvill Creative Blog

Content is still King. So…what’s your content strategy?

Social Marketing channels such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Blogs, YouTube and Forums (and many more that I won’t mention just now) are perfect vehicles for sharing content.

However, now more than ever, what we share has never been more important.

These channels provide excellent opportunities to share compelling content, content that helps others to want to know us, like us, trust us, share our message and ultimately do business with us.

So… we certainly shouldn’t be wasting the opportunity these far reaching channels provide by talking about the latest cheese sandwich we just ate. (Unless of course you’re Pret and it’s a tactic you’ve employed!).

Businesses of all shapes and sizes now need to be getting their ‘content house’ in order.

Ask yourself…

• Have you got a strategy for regularly creating fresh content?

• Have you got a blog that you regularly update for your business?

• Are you regularly creating videos for your business – how to videos, sharing FAQs, customer testimonials, new product and service features?

Content is all around us – and so it’s a case of ensuring that you employ a mechanism for collating it and using it effectively.

Content is King for a number of reasons

Fresh and compelling content is key for a number of reasons:

• Helps you get found online - Really good for SEO – (search engine optimisation) purposes – as search spiders love coming to find regularly updated, keyword enabled content.

• Keeps your online presence fresh – Do you have any old news articles on your site? What’s the date of your latest blog post – January 2011 or even 2010! If so, how does that look to those reading your blog?  Keeping your content fresh shares a really positive message about your business.

• Grows trust and authority – The content you create gives you something credible to shout about. There’s an offline networking titled VCPC – visibility grows credibility, which ultimately grows profitability…

• Grows brand awareness and reach – Social Marketing channels can be far reaching, you just don’t know where your content is going to end up and who is reading it. It may get picked up and shared in a very ‘viral’ way – growing awareness in ways that traditional media, simply can’t compete with.

No excuses… be sure what you ‘share’ is worthy of sharing and add a ‘content creation strategy and schedule’ into your marketing mix today.  And once it’s there… commit to it.

@Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website planning.

For marketing and social media advice – view or subscribe to the Carvill Creative Blog

• If Facebook were a country It would be the world’s 3^rd largest
• A new member joins Linked In every second
• 505 of UK mobile internet traffic in the UK is Facebook
• Social Gamers will buy 6 billion in virtual goods by 2013
• You Tube is the second largest search engine in the world.

With those facts in front of you it’s hard not to believe that social media could do wonders for your business. The key is getting it right.

We’re avid followers of Hubspot here at Carvill Creative and keep on top of their advice and blogs on a daily basis. Yesterday they released a video belonging to their good friend Eric Qual, the Socialnomics author who is known for making great videos full of social media stats. Qual’s first video was called the ‘Social Media Revolution’ and had over 2.8 million views –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8

His newest video is even better and can be found at –  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SuNx0UrnEo

Do you have any impressive social media stats that you might have seen or heard about?

Check out our You Tube channel – we frequently share interesting marketing and social media videos on there, as well as our own ‘How To’ Videos.

For more social media marketing tips and advice – why not subscribe to our blog .

Enjoy the post… Vikki

Vikki Mills is Social Media and Marketing Executive at  Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

Other related blog posts – Facebook statistics that will convert you for life, Twitter Stats and Trivia ,

You may have noticed the #rfr hash tag being used around twitter in the past coming weeks.

#RFR  - Officially stands for Requests For Recommendations

This very simple idea came about because we are constantly finding requests all over Twitter – people looking for recommendations, assistance, opinions and reviews. The #rfr hastag is categorising all these Requests For Recommendations, making it just that bit easier for us to track them all. The #rfr hash tag is taking pull marketing to new levels – these are targeted business opportunities being put into your lap.

These leads could be seriously valuable to your business and should be watched by anybody who wants to recommend their services or business for nothing……. so that’s pretty much everyone then!!

Here as an example of how people are using #rfr on Twitter:

RT @msrfr @bluelightsphoto:

Question - anyone recommend a printer i need approx 1000 leaflets double sided by friday…#rfr

Response from another Tweeter watching #rfr –   I recommend @calverts

In one second @calverts have received probably the best testimonial they could ever achieve – A recommendation to somebody on the lookout for their services.

These requests for recommendations are happening right now, in real time, they are coming from people often with a genuine need or desire to buy something or be referred to someone that can help them. It’s like walking into a room of people that are all looking to be recommended your businesses services. Just put #rfr into the Twitter search bar to listen in on the conversations.

Remember to use #rfr after your tweets if you’re looking for a recommendation or review yourself – as it’s far more likely to get picked up and therefore answered.

If you are particularly looking for a recommendation that is do with social media – e.g. Twitter advice, then follow @socailmediarfr – this account will be releasing tweets everyday that are rich in social media recommendations or requests.

Does anyone out there have any #rfr success stories? If so – please share, let’s get some case studies going to prove how powerful #rfr can be.

For help with blogging or for more information on how we can set about helping you blog for your business – take a look at:

http://www.carvillcreative.co.uk/services/marketing-services-overview/business-blogging

For more social media marketing tips and advice – why not subscribe to our blog .

Enjoy the post… Vikki

Vikki Mills is Social Media and Marketing Executive at  Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

Other related blog posts you might enjoy – Twitter Stats and Trivia , Social Media Glossary, Using Twitter as customer service resource – Don’t just apologise, make your presence count

David Meerman Scott in a recent Hubspot blog has been quoted as saying –

‘The phrase ‘blogging’ is just semantics,’ says Scott. ‘It basically refers to a platform for someone to create content with passion and build a community around it.‘

People sometimes get confused about what the purpose of a blog actually is – our advice is, don’t stress about it! A blog is very simply an online space for you to write, post and express anything you want. It can be used as a personal space to post musings, pictures, diary entries or it can be used professionally in the same way you would use a website:

It allows you to communicate with an audience and spread a message. You could actually run an entire business on a blog, they rank well in search engines and leverage PR opportunities.

Can we class a blog as social media?

In a way yes – it can be shared socially through social media and it can encourage interaction through the posting of comments.

Some Basic Blog Tips

• Always use bullets when listing
• Don’t underline as users think it’s a link.
• Always insert an image
• Always include a question at the footer to try and engage the users to comment.
• Always include the sign off – yours if your posts.
• Always try and create a compelling headline to grab attention.

For help with blogging or for more information on how we can set about helping you blog for your business – take a look at:

http://www.carvillcreative.co.uk/services/marketing-services-overview/business-blogging

For more social media marketing tips and advice – why not subscribe to our blog .

Enjoy the post… Vikki

Vikki Mills is Social Media and Marketing Executive at  Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

Related blog posts that might interest you – Tried and tested tips from a relatively experienced blogger, Blogging the Seth Godin Way , Blogging the Seth Godin way – it’s Eastenders

Michelle Carvill’s favourite social media myth to bust is – social media is free (check out her video on busting social media myths )

It’s her favourite myth to disprove because it’s simply not true. It’s true that many of  the platforms are currently free, but social media takes a great deal of strategic planning and implementing – which we all know takes a great deal of time. We’d say that ‘time’ is pretty much the most precious thing that a small business owner has to play with – therefore ‘time’ is by no means free.

Bearing all this in mind – it may be that you find yourself wanting to be involved in social media but can’t afford the time out of a busy working day to blog, tweet, update pages, listen in on conversations, grow followers etc.

It may also be that you can’t afford the time to learn about all these different platforms – with social media you need to know what you’re doing or your efforts won’t amount to anything. And you have to keep up-to-date with the latest technologies and tools to assist you.

Or maybe you want to focus on what you do best – and are therefore want to outsource your social media needs – and let someone else manage your social media and bring results to your business.

That’s why, from our experience of getting started with Social Media, we’ve created the perfect ‘Social Marketing Package’ for you, a marketing package that will relieve you of your social media stresses and bring you the results you desire. Our expert social media team bring you the:

• Social Media Play> B2B
• Social Media Play> B2C

Both packages are designed to get your social media activity started quickly and effectively:

They both include –

• Phone session or meeting at our offices to discuss your business and your objectives.
• Desk research undertaken by team at Carvill Creative to ensure we fully understand your ‘space’.
• Audit any current profiles (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) and rework with relevant keywords. And if non in place, we’ll set them up for you.
• Your very own ‘social media account manager’ working alongside you to ensure we continually understand your business and objectives.
• Monthly feedback and reporting.

Social Media Play Service B2B :

• Blog for you 3 times a week – and upload to your blog with relevant image and keyword tagging.  (If you need a blog setting up then we can do this for you for additional cost).
• Create and schedule at least 15 info sharing relevant tweets per day (you get to review pending before they go live).
• Monitor relevant keywords and conversations happening in Twitter and use as traction to direct to your profile or blog, and track direct new business generation as much as possible.
• Monitor relevant Linked In Group / Answers conversations – and use as traction or direct new business generation as much as possible.
• Set up other relevant alerts and alert you directly to anything that we consider to be of specific interest.

Fixed set up fee of £300 and a monthly fee of £500.  Additional services such as; Facebook Business Page creation and management, setting up your Blog etc does not fall within these fees.  However, we’ll tailor a program that works specifically for you and your business.  Simply Get in Touch to discuss your needs.

Social Media Play Service B2C:

• Blog for you 3 times a week – and upload to your blog with relevant image and keyword tagging.  (If you need a blog setting up then we can do this for you for additional cost).
• Create and schedule at least 15 info sharing relevant tweets per day (you get to review pending before they go live).
• Monitor relevant keywords and conversations happening in Twitter and use as traction to direct to your profile or blog, and track direct new business generation as much as possible.
• Create a Facebook for Business page – and use as traction and to direct new business generation /awareness as much as possible.
• Set up other relevant alerts and alert you directly to anything that we consider of specific interest.

Fixed set up fee of £300 and a monthly fee of £500.  Additional services such as; LinkedIn business profile creation and management, creation of Blogs etc does not fall within these fees.  However, we’ll tailor a program that works specifically for you and your business.  Simply Get in Touch to discuss your needs.

Take a look at the package in full and all other social media services at – http://www.carvillcreative.co.uk/services/marketing-services-overview/

For more social media marketing tips and advice – why not subscribe to our blog .

Enjoy the post… Vikki

Vikki Mills is Social Media and Marketing Executive at  Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

Social Media – how long do we think it’s going to be before we drop the social and it just becomes known as media? Will social media marketing become known as plain old marketing? Will there be such a thing as traditional marketing, or will it have been phased about by social media therefore making this distinction between social media marketing and  traditional marketing rather redundant?

To some people this idea is perfectly plausible yet to others it may seem like madness.

Social Media is taking the world by storm, one platform at a time, and to ignore it would be foolish.

We are often posed the question  - ‘Will Twitter really exist in ten years time? Or will be it a laughable fad that everyone reminisces about?’

Our answer is usually this – ‘Yes, it may be become a thing of the past but this will only be because we’ve moved on to a more sophisticated or powerful version of Twitter/Facebook etc. If you don’t learn how to use and leverage these tools now then you won’t keep up and you’ll never catch up.

Take a look at the following facts from Hubspot and you may find yourself either converted or further confirmed about the merits of social media and in this case, particularly Facebook.

• One out of every eight minutes online is spent on Facebook

• The average Facebook user spends more than 11 hours per month on Facebook.

• Facebook is overtaking Yahoo and Google with the amount of time spent online

• Facebook has become the number one social media platform choice for social interaction

• Facebook has become the preferred way to share content online, second only to email

• The average number of likes per post on a brand’s Facebook page is 54. The average number of comments per post is 9

• More than half of B2B marketers agree that Facebook is a beneficial marketing tool

• More than half of small businesses agree that Facebook has helped their businesses in one way or another

• More than 1/3 of marketers say Facebook is ‘critical’ or ‘important’ to their business.

• 67% of B2C and 41% of B2B companies that use Facebook for marketing have acquired a customer through this channel.

• The number of marketers who say Facebook is critical or important to their business has increased 83% in two years.

With these stats in front of you it’s tempting to set up a Facebook page. Go and do it now at www.facebook.com and if you need any help or advice take a look at our social media services page on our website

For more social media marketing tips and advice – why not subscribe to our blog .

Enjoy the post… Vikki

Vikki Mills is Social Media and Marketing Executive at  Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

Some other related blog posts that might interest you – Plug in the Facebook Like Button , Facebook For Business , Social Media Planning – a step by step approach

Facebook is becoming responsible for a very special relationship that now exists between businesses and consumers. The social media site has become a valuable marketing tool and driver of website traffic through the invention of the famous ‘like’ button.

Are you using social plugins/like buttons on your website? If the answer is no…check out these stats straight from the horse’s mouth and perhaps you’ll reconsider the use of them on your site.  

• The average media site integrated with Facebook has seen a 300% increase in referral traffic.

• Users coming to websites from Facebook spend 85% more time, read 90% more articles and watch 85% more videos than a non-connected user.

• Levi’s saw a 40 times increase in referral traffic from Facebook after implementing the Like button in April 2010 and has maintained those levels since.

• American Eagle added the Like button next to every product on their site and found Facebook referred visitors spent an average of 57% more money than non-Facebook referred visitors

For a very simple guide on how to integrate the ‘like’ button on your website just follow this link - http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/

Now it’s all very well saying that you need to include social media plugins such as the ‘like’ button on your website. However, you need to build the following and ‘likers’ on your facebook page in the first place. Here are some suggestions for your business page that might get the likes rolling in and in return – traffic flowing to your website.

• Ask questions that encourage users to engage with you and ask for advice
• Incorporate gifts/freebies/news/competitions that are exclusive to your facebook fans (polls, coupons, etc.)
• Incorporate relevant photos and videos that will encourage viewers to comment/interact
• Beautify your page with some very basic html coding
• Be sure to include links in your posts that people will want to click on and read more about

Are there are any other tried and tested ideas out there that have proved successful with Facebook fans?

If you need any help with your Facebook page – contact us on 01628 634066

For more social media marketing tips and advice – why not subscribe to our blog .

Enjoy the post… Vikki

Vikki Mills is Social Media and Marketing Executive at  Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

Related blog posts - In the world of social media – don’t underestimate the power of the profile picture , Facebook for business,

I stumbled across this rather informative tweet from none other than the Twitter gods themselves and thought I would help spread the word –

Now we can get doubly excited by the prospect of an email from Twitter – it might be that you’ve gained an extra and very exciting follower or even more exciting – someone who isn’t following you is genuinely interested in what you have tweeted and has decide to broadcast your news to the whole of their following community.

Now this hypothetical retweet from your non follower is most certainly worthy of an email notification and as grateful as we are….what about receiving an email each time someone tweets you?

If you don’t use twitter for mobile and are simply using www.twitter.com to send and receive tweets then you are not presented with any type of obvious notification that somebody has mentioned or tweeted you. I suppose it isn’t exactly a chore to check your @mentions once in a while, but an email with the tweet in it would be a nice little touch ( just like when somebody writes on your Facebook wall).

I understand that twitter celebs like @StephenFry would probably want to smash their blackberry to pieces if they received an email each time somebody tweeted them – but this option, like all others, can be switched off.

Am I being fussy or does anyone agree with me?

Emails for tweets?

#TwitTip – While this request to the Twitter Gods is pending, you may want to check out TweetAlarm. It is a simple service that provides its users with alerts when someone tweets about them or anything related to them.

For more social media marketing tips and advice – why not subscribe to our blog .

Enjoy the post… Vikki

Vikki Mills is Social Media and Marketing Executive at  Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

Related blog posts that might interest you – What is #rfr and how should we be using it?, Creating a personalised Twitter background , How I am using Twitter – by a relatively new tweeter

Many of us have our own personal profiles on Facebook – we keep in touch with friends and relatives, upload, get tagged and tag people in pictures. These are all the basic functions of your average Facebook profile.

When speaking about Facebook for Business, we are often asked – What is the difference between Facebook profiles and Facebook Business Pages? Why can’t I promote my business by signing up to Facebook in the usual fashion – why can’t I just call my profile the name of my business rather than using my christian name and surname?

Here is a very simple and straightforward explanation :

• In order to have a business page you must be signed up to Facebook with a personal account. That’s just how Facebook want it, we assume it’s because they want to keep business and pleasure separate (understandable)

• Through your personal account you may then create a business page (head to the homepage of Facebook where you login and you will see the option to create a page for celebrity, brand or business)

• Anyone visiting your business page will not be able to tell that the page is linked to you personally unless you state so – yes you can only create the business page through a personal account but in no way will the page be publically linked to your account.

• You may make anyone you wish administration on the page, providing they have a personal Facebook account. Once you make another personal Facebook account admin on the business page, they can access the page through their own account to update it or make changes. This is very useful if you want your business page to be updated by a number of different people in your company, they won’t need to login through your personal profile in order to do things to the page.

• Facebook Business Pages are very easy to manage and work a lot like personal profiles – the main difference being that people can ‘like’ your page instead of adding you as a friend. You can run promotions and competitions through your business page and sell your brand to any fans that decide to ‘like’ your page.

• Facebook is giving you the option to use Facebook purely for social reasons, but to also keep a business profile (page) without bombarding your grandmother/neighbour/best friend with business information – quite nice of them really..

Are any of you finding the business/personal profile distinction confusing? Or do we in general think it works well?

Take a look at Carvill Creative’s facebook business page to see how it all works and get in touch for more advice

For more social media marketing tips and advice – why not subscribe to our blog .

Enjoy the post… Vikki

Vikki Mills is Social Media and Marketing Executive at  Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

Some people underestimate how important it is to have the right profile picture representing your presence on any social media site.

The little box that sits at the top left hand side of any Linked In/Twitter/Facebook or YouTube account is seen by your entire social media community, all the time. Not making the most out of this branding opportunity is not only foolish but could in fact be detrimental to your brand.

Web designer and illustrator Brad Colbow argues that:

‘Your Twitter profile is your personal brand and with any brand, consistency is the key. When you market yourself, your avatar becomes your logo. It will be seen on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Flickr, Youtube and in blog comments everywhere.’

Below you’ll find some top tips to ensure that you’re profile picture is spot on:

Don’t be default

Make sure you have your logo or photo on your profile in the first place. Seeing the little default egg on Twitter or the default shadow on Facebook as a profile picture – says not committed, not trustworthy and not bothered. When looking for people to follow on Twitter I assume that all the ‘egg’ profile users are not serious tweeters or haven’t been on their account since they set it up.

Also – do note that there are a number of Twitter apps that now enable users to auto remove all those followers that show the default Egg. After all – would you engage in a conversation with a paper bag on your head?

Don’t change the picture too often

Followers and friends will come to associate your account with your profile picture – people will look out for your face or logo first when scrolling down their feeds. Keep your picture consistent or you may get swept into the mass of faces that appear on the feeds of any popular user of social media. Our attention is short lived on these sites so you only have a second or two to make an impression, by keeping your profile picture the same you greater the chances of someone remembering a connection or history.

Get the right size

Ensure that your profile picture fits the dimensions specified by each social network – you may want to take the consistency rule across all your networks and have the same picture for all your profiles (not a bad idea) – however, your Twitter image will need to be cropped and scaled down in comparison with your Facebook profile. Having half your face or logo image on show, sort of defeats the object of having a picture at all (unless you’re objective is to be ‘artsy’) – so make sure it fits for each site.

• Twitter –   73 x 73 pixels
• Facebook – 80 x 540 pixels (smallest) 720 pixels – (largest)

Attention Seeking

If you can be creative with your profile picture then go for it – with Twitter having over 300 million users, it really is a case of standing out from the crowd.

There are things you can do to put a quirky spin on a dull profile picture.

There are numerous apps that can be downloaded for smartphones that instantly turn a mundane headshot into a pencil drawn masterpiece. The iphone has a lot of effects that can be used alongside the camera to jazz up any photo:

• ‘Toonpaint’ converts photographs into cartoons,

• ‘Photoshop Express’ has a range of filters and effects.

• ‘Colour splash’ highlights certain areas of an image in colour and leaves the rest in black and white.

• ‘The juxtaposer’ app merges two different photos together to create a rather wacky shot that would grab the attention of any dozy tweeter!

What are your tips for ensuring your profile picture says it like it is and get’s your or your brand’s personality across?  Do share…

For more social media marketing tips and advice – why not subscribe to our blog .

Enjoy the post… Vikki

Vikki Mills is Social Media and Marketing Executive at  Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

Other related blog posts -2012 Brand – graffiti to engage younger market or not? , Is your ringtone part of your personal brand? , What’s in a photo? Can you judge a book by its cover?

Advertising online has grown significantly over the past few years – and is now a multi-billion pound industry.

And with frightening stats around showing that 40% of all websites get ZERO traffic – it’s clearwhy businesses want to kickstart their online visibility by advertising online using Google Adwords.

Pay per click (PPC) advertising has grown in popularity due to its relatively low set up costs and high level of accountability. Unlike traditional advertising media, you only pay for your ad each time someone clicks on it.

And interestingly, this same successful PPC (pay per click) model has been embraced by both Facebook and LinkedIn advertising models.

It’s an all inclusive, ‘everyone welcome’ platform that has certainly flattened the advertising landscape entirely. It was only a few years ago that advertising campaigns were largely dominated by big brands – however, with online advertising via Google Adwords, even small and start up businesses can engage in online advertising – bringing their wares to targeted audiences, without any brand awareness or a huge marketing budget.

However, as with all marketing activity – it should ideally be targeted and therefore, you need to have a plan.

Too many people dive into Google Adwords without any clear strategic objective as to what they are looking to achieve. Remember, it’s all very good getting people to click on your ad – but then what? Have you got the right call to action in place? Are you leveraging the traffic you receive and converting it into sales? Ask yourself – what’s your objective.

And as with many marketing activities – a lot of effort gets put into the actual ‘driving interest’ but then the product (or in this case the website experiences) falls short of expectations.

You can burn a lot of money if you don’t know what you’re doing with Adwords – so here are our top 10 tips to help you along the way:

1 Keyword selection

Targeted marketing is always the most efficientl form of marketing – and therefore, the ‘words’ – or keywords you select for your advertising campaigns are critical. You want to attract users who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer. To put it simply – your product and service offerings and descriptions need to match what users are searching for.

When creating your keywords there are various tools you can use to assist you. However, word of caution, selecting too many keywords can be costly and detrimental to a targeted campaign. It’s not just about getting any old traffic to you site – you want quality traffic which has the potential to convert into sales at a cost that achieves a positive return on investment for you.

To help you find your keywords you can use keyword tools such as Google’s keyword tool – which coupled with Google’s Traffic estimator will help you see the scope of likely traffic for particular keywords.  Another simple tactic is to ask your current customers how they found you – what keywords did they use.  And of course, in your Analytics account – you can review the keywords that drove traffic to your site.  So that gives you some pointers to start with.  Plus check out Google’s Wonder Wheel – a very underestimated keyword resource.

To assist with campaign management you can create multiple AdGroups in which you house selected keywords – enabling you to create ‘text ads’ that relate to specific keywords – and track performance more accurately.

2 How to target your advertisements

There are various options to assist you with your ad message reaching a more targeted audience.

• Location: Via Adwords you can specify a geographical location – be it whole of UK, or 25 mile radius surrounding London – or whole of the world! You can specify languages for your ad and also at what time of day your ad is to be shown.

• Network: Most ads target the Google network meaning that your ad will appear on Google and its network of partner websites. There is also the option to advertise on Google’s ‘content’ network which includes all AdSense publishers. Clicks from the content network are usually attained at a lower CPC (cost per click) however, the quality of these clicks from a sales conversion perspective is likely to be far lower – and there is also risk of fraudulent clicks – as it’s a wide open space. However, if your objective is more about gaining traffic than converting sales (as in promotion / brand awareness) – then the content network does offer you more visibility.

3 Competitor activity

It’s always worth reviewing the keywords you are looking to use via simple Google searches and seeing what comes up. This is a simple way to assess competitor activity. For example – with one client, we noticed that none of their competitors were indicating the price of the service in their ads. Therefore, whilst the service was quite a generic one – we were able to differentiate our clients ads by including details of the price – which whilst just a bit more competitive than others – was a differentiator online purely because no one else was mentioning it. So it’s worth reviewing what’s happening in the landscape you want to advertise in – and seeing how your ad can stand out from the rest. If it’s different and engaging – it’s more likely to be clicked.   I read this book one evening picked up on a bookshelf of one of my pals I was babysitting for. Have to say – it includes some gems about competitor watch and competitor ads – and took only a couple of hours to read.

4 Using effective matching options

• Exact Match: For an optimised advertising campaign then using the ‘exact matching’ option on all keywords ensures that you are only bidding against that individual keyword search. Use of exact matching enables a more targeted and efficient approach as you are only bidding on the relevant keywords you have specified – and if your keyword research is accurate – then your CTR (click through rate) should improve. Click through rates (CTR) is an important factor in ensuring your ‘cost per click’ is efficient. You only want to attract clicks that matter – and so by using exact match – you narrow the margins of capturing non relevant search. However, conversely, using exact match does reduce the amount of traffic you are likely to receive. It’s worth testing campaigns using exact match and also broad match (which will include various permutations of the keyword search phrase). Analysis may show that these less specific searches are costing you too much and not achieving anything – however, you could end up stumbling across a keyword phrase which is highly successful!

• Broad Match: Using only the exact matching option can have the negative effect of only receiving a low amount of traffic as you are only targeting a specific audience. In addition, to attract a wider range of searches it may be worth adding the phrase and broad match versions of your exact match keywords. As these are less specific they are likely to achieve a lower CTR and conversion rate but will increase the amount of clicks.

• Negative Match: Including negative keywords as part of your list is best practice when creating targeted keywords. Not using negative keywords means that your ads may show to people who are not interested in your proposition, so including them, enables you to stay targeted. For example: If you don’t want your ad to show when people are searching ‘free trial’ – then you would include ‘free trial’ as a negative keyword. As above – you can include negative keywords on an exact match or broad match basis. Including negative keywords will reduce how many people see your ads – however, again, it’s the balance between traffic and a targeted audience.

5 Managing your budget

Setting a daily budget is a bit of a ‘suck it and see’ activity. Google will automatically recommend a daily budget for you – but I would suggest that the best tactic is to start low – and watch what is happening to both traffic, ads, positions and ultimately conversions. You may find you aren’t bidding on the right keywords – or that some keywords gain more traffic and traction than others – it’s a learning curve. Once you’re seeing the benefits – and a positive return on investment is occurring, then you can start to look at increasing your daily budget.

6 Good, no not good, absolutely great… advertising copy

In my view, advertising copy on Google Ads is the thing that is the most neglected, yet vitally important, element of an Adwords campaign. The ads you supply are limited in line space (text) – so you have to get your message across, clearly and succinctly and in a targeted way. And of course, when advertising with Google, you’ve also got to consider the ‘quality scoring’ elements of your advertising. If you include keywords within the ad title and use call to action keywords such as sign up, register, buy now – so that the user knows exactly what to expect when they click – then all the better – and further, you need to ensure that the page the user clicks through to from your ad is wholly relevant to the ad (see point 7 below). It’s common sense really – but then again, how common is common sense!  The other element of ‘Ad Copy’ is to really monitor which ads are performing and which are not.  My advice is to run with 3 ads initially for each campaign and see which one performs the best.  Then drop either one or two of them – focusing attention on the main converter.  Again, it’s about being targeted.  I also recommend reviewing your ad content on a weekly basis – see if your competitors have changed their proposition. Ensure that your messaging is up to speed with what’s going on within your business. If there’s a price change – or offer – then make sure it’s reflected in the ads.

7 Targeting your destination URL

You can target a specific landing page URL from your ad to ensure that the user will get to a page which is wholly relevant to your ad. For example – if you are advertising ‘red and white striped golf umbrellas’ – then take the user directly to that product page – rather than to your home page – or even your ‘umbrella page’. Be specific and targeted. You know yourself that there is nothing more frustrating than searching, finding a link that appears to offer exactly what you are looking for – and then when you click it, is it totally or partially irrelevant. It’s a total waste of a click – inefficient and bad for your campaign in every way – so be sure to match your ad text to a relevant landing page.

8 Tracking conversions

What you can measure you can manage – and therefore, it’s important that you manage the performance of your campaigns. Tracking actual conversions – be it sales, or sign up – will help you to measure your campaign activity. It’s a balance and good business practice to ensure that you know exactly how much it costs you to convert – and whether that cost is profitable / useful for your business.

9 Campaign Reports

Google Adwords provides you with pretty sophisticated reporting. The reports provide you with a clear and visual overview of activity on your campaigns. Statistics which show you where the clicks are coming from – which ads, what time, which position you were in – click through rates, conversions and costs per click – provide you with very comprehensive and detailed information. Therefore, you can regularly review these reports to make important decisions about your campaigns, and make changes to measure impact, as they are running.

10 Google Analytics

Whilst the Adwords campaign reports enable you to measure what’s actually happening with your ads – Google Analytics enables you to monitor how users are interacting with your website. You can choose which pages on your site you want to apply analytics to (all of them if relevant) – you can also integrate Adwords into Analytics so that you can track exactly what your click leads to. Analytics provides you with data on where your visitors come from; most popular pages on your site, which search engine they use, their locality – whether organic or sponsored traffic (ppc) and also provides you with valuable information on which search terms / keywords are driving traffic. Again, regular analysis of Analytics enables you to steer your online activity in an effective way.

Also for more info, check out Google’s video for getting started with Google Adwords http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFzoM59bIQ8

There’s no denying that the current marketing zeitgeist is described in two simple words – ‘social media’.

Whether people are engaging directly with social media or not – the likelihood is that most people at least now know about it.

The founding platforms that started with sharing information about our personal selves via Twitter, Linkedin andFacebook (three of the still most popular platforms, but there are many others and no doubt more targeted ones on the way…) – have now of course, tipped over into our professional lives.

Whilst some businesses and large brands are now focusing considerable energy in the social marketing platforms – for the majority, the social marketing space is still relatively fertile territory, with the majority of businesses either dabbling half heartedly or simply sitting it out on the sidelines to see whether the ‘hype’ is going to last.

I’ve seen initiatives like those by MySMB promoting the fact that ANYONE can do social media – and the new tranche of freshly sprung social media gurus with previous lives as SEO experts, web designers, PRs, life coaches to name but a few, promoting an array of social media services that promise to ignite new life into a business.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a total advocate of the social marketing platforms – engaging people has always been and will continue to be a powerful marketing tactic – and the beauty of the social marketing platforms is that the ever improving technologies enable;

• Immediacy
• Reach
• Sharing
• Connectivity
• Conversations
• Targeting

And, I’ve got plenty of case study material from businesses of all shapes and sizes that share their successes and have generated new business as a direct result of their involvement.

However, my bugbear is with execution.

As a professional marketer, in my view, social marketing – just like any other marketing activity, should be taken seriously and planned for.  Doing ‘social marketing’ in isolation of any other marketing is really quite odd.  After all – the social platforms simply provide new marketing channels.  However, many businesses don’t seem to grasp this.

Businesses and those tasked with managing social media marketing, should be experienced and conversant in strategic marketing planning.

Whilst these new marketing channels open up new ways to market – the discipline behind the fundamentals of effective marketing planning still stand:

Before diving in – think and plan strategically…

Businesses should be asking themselves some key questions

Q: What do we want to achieve with social media?

• Brand awareness
• Selling
• Recruiting
• Informing
• Innovating
• Gathering support

Objectives need to be defined in advance – whether for the brand generally or for a specific campaign.  That way you are clear on what you are aiming for.

Q: Which social media is right for us?

Not everyone runs TV advertising – it’s simply not relevant for many businesses. With social media – the media planning is as relevant. The media you select will be determined by your objectives – hence why it’s important to clearly understand them.

For example; if you are recruiting – then Linkedin or Facebook may work better than YouTube.  If you are launching a new service – then YouTube and Twitter may garner more reach.

Then there’s the B2B and B2C element to consider. There’s evidence to show that Linkedin is currently the most effective B2B resource – and Facebook has more success in the B2C arena.

It may indeed be a case of adding all possible social marketing platforms into your marketing mix.  Testing what works and then pulling back on the least effective activities.

However, to be learning by your marketing activity (as we all should be) you have to be monitoring and measuring results.  Again, monitoring effectiveness helps you to plan strategically.

Rather than just diving in and mindlessly doing everything – (mousewheel style), expending lots of energy, but going nowhere – effective planning helps you to better understand what’s working and guides you in leveraging activity and ultimately practice intelligent marketing.

Q: Who are our audience?

Different audiences respond to different approaches.  I always preach about being targeted in marketing approaches – and this still stands online in the social platforms.

The beauty of the platforms is that if you want to deliver online ads – then Linkedin and Facebook provide you with very granular demographics.  You can really drill down to very specific audience criteria.

You can also target specific ‘Groups’ or ‘keywords’ to review conversations and nurture in a relevant and targeted way.

Social marketing – just as with traditional marketing should be targeted. Understand your audience, talk to them in a way that’s relevant to them, provide them with relevant and authentic offers, news, content, ideas and conversations.

You need to be clear on who your audience is – so you can target them effectively.

Also – remember the little saying… like attracts like. The ‘message’ that you put out is attractive to your audience and so it get’s shared by your target audience – most people have ‘friends or associates’ that are ‘likeminded’ so you grow your targeted audience in  social way.  (Hence why Groupon has been such a hit…for Groupon!).

Q: What should we be saying?

What you ‘say’ and the messages that you communicate need to be agreed as part of your planning.  After all – this is your business, your brand.  It’s irresponsible to just let communications run loose without any prior agreed planning.

I know businesses that say they are ‘doing’ social media – but really, all they are doing is ‘tweeting’ sporadically and aimlessly and have put out a Facebook page that gets little or no attention..

I love the quote – ‘Those that aim for nothing – hit it with remarkable accuracy’.  Again – this is the danger of just diving in without thinking things through and without a plan of action.

Social marketing activity needs to be well executed and coordinated.  Those tasked with ‘doing’ social media should be trained to do so.  Communicating a consistent brand message is no easy task – hence why so many businesses in the past employed PR and MarComs agencies to do so.

Therefore, you either skill up your marketing team, bring in a professional either recruited in or to train your team or outsource to a marketing agency that understands strategic planning and social marketing.

If you do decide to outsource to an agency – beware if the agency you choose  just want to take your account and run – that’s risky.  Any marketing agency worth their salt will need to fully immerse themselves within your culture, brand and business.  A full marketing audit should be undertaken, gaining a comprehensive view of all current marketing activity and planning, a clear understanding of brand values garnered – and that’s before any social marketing planning can even commence.  And then of course, it needs to be ‘joined up’ with your overall marketing activity.

As part of your social marketing planning you need to agree what should be talked about and shared, tone of voice used etc.  All key parts of communicating effectively.  Resources allocated effectively – eg, if you are going to blog daily about xyz – then who is going to do it, sign it off, ensure it’s on brand etc before its shared.

Of course, what’s great about social marketing platforms is their transparency and authenticity – and when something is overly ‘manufactured’ – it’s very obvious.  You can still have authentic and transparent conversations – but planning what the ‘theme’ of those conversations is – eradicates the ‘I’ve just had a cheese sandwich’ tweet, creeping into the corporate channel.  Would you put such a video out on YouTube?

Q:  What should we expect?

Creating media which is ‘socially attractive’ is no easy task. You are effectively endeavouring to build a social network, a critical mass of people that regularly talk, share or engage with your products or services.

Always keep in mind that for the majority – this level of nurturing and relationship development is a long game.

Of course, it may be that you offer something to a highly relevant audience that flies – and you quickly grow a vast amount of followers or fans.  However, that may be a one hit wonder – and things may die down again.  So, like all forms of marketing, you’ve got to keep at it.

With social marketing – you really do get out what you put in. The level and quality of engagement generally seems to determine the success.  If you have qualified people that are constantly responding, watching, listening, monitoring  questions, comments, issues – then that’s a highly engaged level of conversation.  And if you have the CEO or MD involved too – then not only highly engaged but a ‘high involvement level’ of conversation.

Q:  How do we manage these fast and far reaching channels?

Beyond the day to day implementation – there’s a huge amount of knowledge generated via the social platforms. How businesses tie this all important knowledge and feedback into their operating systems is key to learning and growing.

Dell is probably one of the biggest success story by integrating public ideas about ‘innovating’ their products – (they reported that an estimated £3m in sales were done via social marketing platforms last year and this is likely to rocket significantly this year).

Another case is where Starbucks learned through social platforms that their customers didn’t like throwing away paper cups. So, Starbucks created a campaign focused on reusable containers – promoting a free cup of coffee in return for taking them up.

Whilst there are analytics and management features within platforms such as Hootsuite – (our preferred management resource) and there are a plethora of others out there, these platforms aren’t going to help you plan strategically. They’ll help with monitoring and implementation – but the strategic planning is key.

Q: Why bother with social marketing?

Social media platforms collectively have a massive user base. Over 50% of the UK alone have a Facebook account – and Generation Y and beyond will only continue to focus their communications in a seamlessly mobile way. There will be a cohort of people that won’t understand what it is to visit a webpage without automatically sharing it with someone.

It’s here to stay that’s for sure. But just because the platforms are currently free to sign up to don’t underestimate the strategic importance of them.

My advice to all businesses…

Take social marketing seriously

• Think strategically
• Plan efficiently
• Train effectively
• Learn intelligently
• Monitor vigilantly and continuously.

@Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – the online visibility experts. A digital marketing and design agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice and amusement – view the Carvill Creative Blog

Twitter Background Design Tips

What size should the new Twitter design background be?

The new Twitter layout is wider than the original one. So, if you want to design your background for all to be able to see every detail of your personalised design, then that would only give you  41 pixels of space on each side to personalise.

The majority of users (apparently 72%) will have their screen resolutions set to 1280 x 800. So that gives you a little bit more space each side (approx 107 pixels).  So you can pretty much double your personal branding if you design so that the 72% can see it).

See how we have done things at Carvill Creative and with my personal account – @michellecarvill, we’re playing it safe with just 41 pixels each side in our designs.

The backgrounds you insert are images and therefore, don’t offer ‘click throughs’ on promos and social marketing icons – however, at least they reference that certain elements are available.

Another element to consider is designing the content in a Vertical way – running your content vertically, so it reads ‘sideways’ . As we’ve done with our Carvill Creative logo down the right hand side.

However, that’s good for big words, logos and large statements as you can run it the length of the screen.  But if you want to get detail across, you may need to do use the traditional reading left to right way (as the left hand column of our background.

Hope that helps. If you want a Twitter background designing, one of our design team will happily create one for you – simply email design@carvillcreative.co.uk.

Happy Tweeting.

Related post(s):

Twitter Trivia and Stats

@Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – a graphic design and digital marketing services agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency  focuses on helping businesses with their online visibility – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused design and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

I always enjoy the posts from @hubspot – and so this evening was reading their latest post ‘10 Essential Twitter Tips‘ – it reminded me that I too have collected some interesting Twitter trivia – and so I thought I’d share that too…

• Between 2pm and 5pm is when most tweets are retweeted.  Here at Carvill Creative we’ve actually been doing some research into retweets and repeat tweets – and so far we pretty much agree that the afternoon slot is far better in terms of tweets getting shared.  Also – re repeat tweets – we’ve found that the optimum number of times to repeat a tweet (albeit you may need to change the wording a little if using Hootsuite) – is 3. It doesn’t turn people off and it gets good reach.

• There is no dip on click through rates on Twitter at the weekend – in fact they are higher at the weekend than on Mondays…so tweet at the weekend as usual.  Now of course, you may do most of your Tweeting from work (particularly if it’s for business purposes) – and even though a large number of us may use our smartphones to Tweet – we may be ‘switching off at the weekend’.  This is when Hootsuite comes in handy so that you can schedule purposeful and relevant tweets to run over the weekend.  (Is that twcheating?).

• The average tweet has a life span of 22 seconds – then it’s gone from the spotlight.  If this is true, this stat has changed dramatically in a year.  A year ago it was 12 minutes (or so I recall reading).  This is an interesting stat – and in some ways rather worrying. If the life span is so short – does that detract from the power of the message? I suppose this is where being targeting and having engaged and relevant followers (quality over quantity) comes into play.   If the life span keeps decreasing however, what will that mean for the platform?  Perhaps it’s not all doom and gloom  - I am querying the stat with the informers to see what they mean from ‘gone from the spotlight’ and whether this relates to retweet and how far reaching the tweet goes?

• Don’t be afraid of tweeting too much – average amount can be anything up to 21 times a day.  Of course, again, this comes down to how you tweet. If I see a whole stream of tweets one after the other, continuously, then it blocks up by feed (particularly when viewing on a smartphone) and that may turn me off the tweeter.  So break up your tweets – rather than bulk tweet.  Again, Hootsuite and other resources enable you to schedule the stuff you want to share.  Also check out bufferapp.com – I’m loving it.

• There are 155 million tweets posted per day – triple the number a year ago.  It’s growing that’s for sure.

• Twitter is rated the best social media platform for building traffic to your website.

Got any more Twitter trivia or stats to share?  Look forward to hearing from you.

Happy Tweeting…

@Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – a graphic design and digital marketing services agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of graphic design and marketing – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

Why you need to know them and how to find them…

Whilst that’s all been very interesting – one key thing that keeps cropping up is the importance of ‘key words’.

Keywords - the DNA of online visibility

Online… keywords are key

Typically we associate keywords with putting together an online ad campaign. Google Adwords has a keyword tool which suggests additional keywords – and the Google traffic estimator resource enables you to review how much traffic your prospective keywords are likely to get.

All very useful – however, online – keywords run through pretty much everything we do. If you like, they’re (as a training colleague of mine, David Taylor @2010mediauk – described it), the DNA of our online presence.

Where do we use keywords

Keywords aren’t just for ads, ideally, we need to be thinking and using our keywords in a tactical way via a number of mediums;

• Profile pages (Twitter, Linked in, Facebook, About me, YouTube etc).
• Signatures (emails, forums).
• Twitter username (@keyword – rather than @name)
• Websites
• Blog sign off
• Relevant content
• URLs (www.keyword.co.uk)
• Landing pages
• And of course… online ads

So, as we can see from the above – pretty much everywhere we want to be visible online, it makes sense to optimise our presence by using relevant keywords, which ultimately helps others to find us and filter through the noise.

How to find your keywords

There are a number of ways you can go about this.  And here are a few to consider:

• Ask the audience

Very simple, but so few of us do it. Ask your customers, friends and family what words / phrases they would put into Google if they were looking for your services. A quick phone call or email asking this question can prove most illuminating.

• Google Analytics

Review the keywords people are using to find your site. I’m still amazed that siteowners haven’t embedded this necessary resource into their sites.  It’s free, it’s simple to do – and it’s a must for understanding what’s happening with a site.

• Look at what you’ve got

To understand which keywords are valuable to you and your business – you really have to stand back and take a look at what you do – and, importantly, what problems you fix. Go through your website content, marketing flyers etc – anything that you have that describes your products and services – and look for the ‘key words’ – the main words which can describe your services / products in a fewer words as possible.

• Ask a stranger

Recently at one of the courses I presented I ran an exercise where we paired up delegates and gave them a minute each to do their ‘elevator pitch’ to one another. Each was then asked to write a list of keywords that they would use if they were searching for the other’s services.  It was interesting to see that the siteowners had very different views of their own keywords than that of the newly acquainted stranger.

Simple exercise, well worth doing.

• Wonder Wheel

This is another search tool which you’ll find in Google.  When in the main Google browser down the left hand side you’ll see a link stating ‘view more tools’ – and if you click that a link to Wonder Wheel will appear. This is a neat and relatively new Google search resource (launched late 2009 but not many know of it).  It’s effectively a search resource which shows you a ‘wheel’ of related search terms.  Very useful for keyword finding, particularly for developing optimised content.   Here’s a link to Wonder Wheel explained for those of you that are interested…http://www.googlewonderwheel.com/

Of course, as with anything, these activities whilst they will enable you to find relevant keywords – understanding which ones actually work for your business is another matter.

If you set conversion goals then you can start to monitor which keywords best perform for you.

As search and social converge (and this trend is only likely to continue with Google’s commitment to real-time search) – then it makes sense to ensure your online presence is as optimised as possible.

Of course, as always, it’s still fundamentally important that your product and service ‘stands up’, your website is user friendly and offers what those searching for you expect to see – and that you ultimately remember that you are talking to human beings not robots.  However, using the right and relevant keywords in a way that makes sense, will at least give you a better opportunity of being found.

@Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – a graphic design and digital marketing services agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of graphic design and marketing – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

Myth No. 1
Social Media is FREE!

Whilst the platforms such as; Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, FlickR, YouTube, About Me etc, are all indeed ‘free’ to join – ask anyone who’s doing ‘social media activity’ – and they’ll tell you it’s certainly not free.  If you’re time is free – then it’s free.  But if you’re time has a value – or you are paying someone who understands how to use the free platforms with purpose, skill and talent, or you’re taking the time to get to understand how to best leverage these platforms yourself, then that takes time – and time is most certainly not free.

If you want to get involved with social media, just as with any other marketing activity – then you need to ask yourself who is the best person for the job.  Are you going to ‘skill up’ yourself, or pay a marketing pro that better understands how to utilise the channels and weave social media into the marketing activity of your business.  Either way – it’s not free.

Myth No. 2
You have to sign up and engage with ‘every’ social media platform.

As with any marketing activity, do what works for you. If you don’t have the budget to run a national radio campaign, then you wouldn’t do it. Similarly, don’t feel that you have to engage with every social medium. Experiment and figure out which platform works for you.  For example – I have a client that set up a Facebook page and two Twitter accounts. We measured activity, feedback and some basic metrics to understand what was the more effective channel. We pretty quickly determined that the Twitter accounts were delivering far more than their Facebook activity – and so we pulled back on Facebook and now their primary social media activity is via Twitter.  Try and test – but don’t feel you have to be manically uploading video to YouTube and Tweeting if it’s not getting you any reach. Do what works for you.

Myth No. 3
Social Media Platforms is mainly for Kids

I’m aware that if you’re reading this on my blog, you’re already into social media (ish) – so you’re already likely to  be aware that social media is most certainly not just for kids. Quite the contrary. If we consider last year alone, Facebook grew 277% in the age category 34-55 year olds.

The business to business use of these platforms is still pretty much fertile territory – and over the coming months no doubt we’ll see more platforms and features within current platforms that really leverage this fruitful arena – assisting both the b2b arena and of course the platform owners.  And if you’re still sceptical – this great video by SocialNomics is a rather powerful way to put things into perspective.

Myth No. 4
I’ll set up social media accounts and as if by magic great things will happen.

I spoke with a chap the other day who advised me that he was doing really well on social media. “I’ve set up Twitter and have a few hundred followers’ – and have some Facebook fans’ – so we’re all sorted with social media.”

When I asked what they were using the platforms for – and how they were engaging with those fans and followers, what his plan was – he went blank.

It’s not just about setting the accounts up ‘and they will come’ – you have to engage and put the effort into using these channels for conversations and brand building, just as you would with any other marketing channel.  That usually involves thinking strategically and planning.

For many large brands – they can start out with great numbers of followers – because they have a large offline reputation which they can take online.  For example – Coca Cola has millions of Twitter followers, but they have millions of offline converts too.

It’s much tougher for the ‘little man’ that has to build a reputation online – and grow followers and fans through genuine exchange of authentic and useful content and conversations. Therefore, the ‘big splash’ stories tend to happen with big brands. (There are of course case studies where little guys have made a splash – which may not have ever happened in the offline arena) but the majority of us it’s a relatively long game.  It’s not ideal to stop and start your marketing activity – ideally you keep a constant trickle.  So effective planning is key.

Myth No. 5
It’s all about listening, you can’t directly sell on social platforms.

As the platforms become more developed I’m sure we’ll see more formal ways in which direct sales can be included.  Right now you can run very targeted pay per click advertising on both Facebook and Linked In – so that’s pretty direct – and Twitter is still playing with sponsored ads.

In the conversations I engage with, both for myself and for clients, I’ve definitely posted direct requests for expertise and am very happy for others in my networks to ‘sell’ their wares.

I agree it’s more about listening first and engaging in a more ‘consultative sell’ – (and no one likes a spammer) but selling is happening and new business is definitely being generated by the social platforms, which attractively, is highly measurable.

There was a very interesting report on @econsultancy this week relating to the ROI of their Twitter activity. And very clearly it’s having a significant impact on sales. Indirectly and directly.  Definitely worth checking out.  View here.

So that’s my social media mythbusting session completed (I could go on).  And no doubt I will in a future post…

Meanwhile – let me know of any other social media myths we can bust.

@MichelleCarvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – a graphic design and marketing services agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of graphic design and marketing – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

See Michelle in action – Business Training Course, Social Media for your Business 16^th March 2011, Farringdon.

I read the latest blog post this morning from Seth Godin titled:

No one plays the lottery if there are no winners…

Looking at the title, prior to actually clicking through and reading, I assumed the piece would encourage an underlying message of “in order to attract people to do something, you’ve got to give them a credible reason / or chance of believing they too could achieve it.”

In fact, the post didn’t focus on that – it talked about why most people actually play the lottery – and it’s more about the ‘rush of the opportunity’ that they MAY win.  Rather than really believing they can win.

I read the post – and whilst it had a little subliminal message there, and an angle to think about re the psychology of consumers form a marketing perspective – it wasn’t what I was expecting.

My angle would be more along the lines of why businesses must be ‘selling the dream’ aspect.

If no one ever won the lottery – and we didn’t read about their sometimes credible, incredible, unworthy and worthy stories, then we’d never believe it was feasible. If we didn’t believe it was feasible – we’d be complete idiots to buy a ticket.  We see the reality, we understand it’s a gamble, a long shot etc – but you just never know.

Similarly, in our marketing activities when selling our products and services – we’ve got to make what we do ‘credible’ – believable.  If you can’t show someone ‘winning’ and gaining from your products and services – who is ever going to believe that you can deliver what you say you can.

It’s all very well your features and benefits promotions spouting forth about what you do – and how great your services are.  However, that’s no where near as powerful as someone else, someone ‘who’s won the lottery with you’ – telling them.

This brings me to the importance – now more than ever before, of good old fashioned ‘word of mouth’ – and how social platforms enable that all important factor.

Not only by the viral element of people talking to one another online about your services, or collecting referrals and ratings for your services and products – but also getting your customers views right out there in front of people’s faces via video testimonials, or customer satisfaction dashboards.

If your business has a website – (and let’s face it, if it hasn’t, it needs to get one, and get one fast to catch up).  Then be sure to be publishing testimonials, case studies, videos etc whenever you can.

Here’s a quick 3 tips ‘word of mouth’ checklist to ensure that you’re making your service / product offerings ‘credible’:

1)         Create a system to regularly collect and record how you are doing. Customer satisfaction / customer reviews.  Collect them and publish them.  This adds to the ‘trust factor’ particularly online.

2)         Contact your customers and ask them to provide you with testimonials. Again, create a system where you regularly collect these so that you have fresh comments to post on your website and other marketing materials.

3)         Register with a review site so that customers can create online reviews which you can regularly publish. FreeIndex or Review Centre or you’ll find some business reviews here http://www.marketingzen.com/online-business-review-sites/ .

Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – a graphic design and marketing services agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of graphic design and marketing – covering social media marketing and social media training, user focused website planning and conversion focused website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

I was recently approached by Anwen Gardner, in her final year at Harper Adams University College in Shropshire, studying BSc (Hons) Business Management with Marketing. Her final year dissertation is the study into the feasibility of social networking sites for businesses. Having assisted her – I thought this was a useful post to share with others too.

Hopefully it will engender debate and comment – so please do join in and share…

Q1. In your opinion what are the main reasons businesses use social networking sites?

The objective of social media is to get people interested and engaged by providing authentic, transparent and relevant information. Hopefully, those that engage with what you are talking about – will tell others – and so they will ‘follow’ your musings, subscribe to your blog etc – ultimately, growing brand awareness, positive word of mouth and share of mind.

For a business  social media platforms can also be useful to -

• Increase awareness of a new service / brand
• Share authority / expert opinion
• Raise general brand / service awareness
• Pull people to your site / blog / landing page
• Is useful for running research / polls
• Can be used to rally support  eg: a client of ours ran a ‘Movember’ campaign via Twitter.
• Can be used as an inexpensive support device eg: @dellsupport
• Find relevant conversations / influencers

Q2. Why do you think social networking sites have become so important to people, and what are the main reasons people use these sites?

From a non commercial perspective, social networking sites have become important to people because they provide a space for people to share insight and connect. Users share their views, news, life info, photos, ideas and advice about something they are passionate about. It’s a way to communicate what’s happening, how you feel about things, provide advice and share – and a quick way for people to keep in touch with friends, family and peers.

People are using social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Linked-In, Bebo, Ning, Buzz (and a plethora of others) – as effectively ‘online social spaces’ to converse, share their profiles, news, photos, ideas, work projects etc.

From a commercial perspective, the key attraction for businesses and marketers is the immediacy and reach that these platforms enable.  What other marketing mediums enable businesses to ‘listen in’ to relevant conversations is such a cost effective way?  Enabling businesses to target individual marketing messages.

If you think of marketing activity from a ‘push and pull’ perspective – push being where businesses literally push messages on users eg: advertisements, direct mail, direct email, radio and even TV – then conversely ‘social media’ activity enables ‘pull’ activity – where users are literally attracted to you because of the conversations you are having via these channels.  Social media platforms enable ‘conversation marketing’ – whereby users don’t feel the ‘hard sell’ – it enables the all important getting to understand the customer, engaging with the customer without necessarily pushing advertising at them.

Q3. Do you think social networking sites help to increase business and consumer engagement?

Social networking sites can certainly help to increase business and consumer engagement – provided they are used properly.

A recent study reported that in the B2B and B2C sectors 38% of businesses stated that their biggest challenge to getting started with social media was ‘building a sufficient business case’.

The challenge in building that business case is the all important ‘return on investment’ factor – it’s not enough for many businesses to be out there in conversations merely as part of  brand building – it’s expected that such an immediate and consuming channel should provide a more immediate and direct response.

Social media platforms enable a ‘conversation’ with people you may not have been able to reach before.  It has an amazing power to enable communications to go viral – and engage audiences in conversations about services, products, issues, the company and brand – connecting a vast amount of likeminded people in an often targeted and purposeful way.

They’re also a great resource for seeing not only what’s happening with your own brand or business – but also for engaging in relevant and hopefully productive conversations. And keeping an eye on what competitors are doing.

However, the etiquette is different from traditional marketing – users don’t want to be inundated with sales messages, they simply switch off and see those types of conversations as ‘spam’.  Used wisely, customer engagement can certainly be increased.  Not only by nurturing and sharing relevant and useful information – but also via supporting customers and potential customers.

Q4. Do you think social networking sites help businesses increase sales or are they only beneficial for publicity reasons and providing consumers with new information?

In my view, whether you are using forums, blogs or social media sites – they are not a place to directly ‘sell’ – it’s a place to build your reputation and share opinion.   Whether setting out to achieve a position of authority or ‘expert’ in what you do – or to learn, share and generally participate – social media platforms are now firmly cemented into savvy marketing strategies.

Of course, people do try to use these platforms for direct sales purposes – but as mentioned above, that tends to ‘turn off’ the ‘social audience’.  So whilst it’s part of the end game, direct selling should never be your main objective for engaging.

Having said that, from my own experience of working with these platforms for both my own businesses and for clients that we manage social media activity for – there have been times where we’re tracking keywords and we see open requests from users to connect with someone who provides a service.  For example – we work with an Accountancy practice that has a specific expertise in working with ‘the Arts’ sector.  A thread on Twitter came about from an Artist looking to find an accountancy practice that particularly helped Artists. Within seconds we were able to connect the two – resulting in a new client for the practice – and a happy Artist!  And that’s just one example of many.  So yes, it can increase sales and generate new clients.

Q5. How feasible do you think social networking sites are for businesses?

They’re free, easily accessible and if managed correctly, can fit into the daily running of any business.

In my opinion, social media activity should be part of daily activity however, it needs to be managed in a focused way – as it can be all consuming if trying to do too much.

It’s a case of ‘suck it and see’ to gauge what’s right for your business:

• Twitter
• Blogs
• Forums
• Facebook
• Linked In Groups

It’s useful to schedule all activities into the week.  For example:

• Blog posts get posted daily / weekly
• Each morning relevant channels – Twitter thread, Trade press news sites, general news sites are reviewed and tweets scheduled for the day.
• Blogs you are subscribed to – when alerted to new post, review and comment if relevant.
• Forums you are participating in are scanned at least daily.
• Linked In Group participation (as required – but visit at least weekly to review contacts’ contacts and grow).
• Plus ….review all areas organic and active ‘expansion’.

This is where useful management resources such as Hootsuite come into their own.  Here you can feed all of your social media platforms into one central dashboard – watch, manage, tweet, post etc – particularly useful when managing a number of accounts.

Q6. Would you say social networking sites are a cost-effective form of advertising and do businesses see a good return on investment?

The wonderful world of digital marketing is attractive for businesses because it’s so measurable – businesses can see exactly how productive their marketing spend is.

Hence why online advertising such as Google Adwords has seen explosion in growth – it enables businesses of all shapes and sizes the opportunity to advertise, but only pay for the advertisement if someone actually interacts with it – clicks it.

Nowadays we expect the people we spend our marketing and advertising budgets with to be able to provide us with some outline stats of what we can expect to receive for our money.

I’ve worked on campaigns whereby we ran ads on Facebook – and whilst it didn’t necessarily generate any direct sales – traffic to sites increased and followers grew significantly – so growing reach.  I’ve also tested advertising on Linked In as this medium offers businesses a means of getting their ads in front of a very targeted audience.

That’s the beauty of the channels – the ability to target ads to specific audiences.  However, the product / advertisement and call to action still has to be attractive. Just because you’ve put an ad in front of the right audience, the offer still has to be compelling in order for them to interact.

Most social media sites don’t require any ‘advertising spend’ – businesses can do a lot with their Twitter conversations and audiences, blogs and forum activity that offers ‘conversational marketing’ – which can be very powerful.  They can get recommended via Linked In – which is far more powerful than merely seeing an ad.

Q7. Do you think social networking sites are the most cost-effective form of direct marketing?

Social networking sites offer a means of direct marketing – but as mentioned above, they’re not the right platforms for ‘direct selling’ – that can be a big switch off for social audiences.  Yes, you can run very targeted ads to audiences – and so that’s attractive, as is the immediacy, reach and viral opportunity. And because these channels offer activity at relatively low cost – then if a campaign is successful, from a cost to conversion perspective, they can be very cost effective.

However, whilst I’m a big advocate of a ‘digital future’ – I would never recommend to a business to doing just social media direct marketing – it’s more a case of building social media activities into your general marketing mix initially – and then as all marketing activity, learning what works and what’s the most effective means for your business – and then ploughing more energy into that channel.

I wrote a case study about @themeatwagon – a business that solely used social media channels (Facebook / Twitter) to communicate where their burger wagon was going to be each day. They built up a huge online following, had lots of viral opportunity – and are in the London press pretty much weekly at the moment. Demand has driven them to create a static restaurant site, which is bursting at the seams with interest.

However, they’ve also been doing the festival rounds for a number of years – and their audience is the prime audience for being on Twitter and Facebook.  So there are a number of elements all working for them.  This isn’t the case for all businesses – however, social media channels should be embraced by all – and as mentioned above – built into the general market mix as other channels to market.

Q8. How important do you think social networking sites are to the development of a business?

Social network sites, blogging and forums can bring a lot to business development. If it is focused on correctly it can help in a number of areas

• Customer support and service
• Brand reputation management
• Polling and product feedback mechanism
• Lead generation
• News distribution
• Brand awareness and establishment
• Product promotion and launch
• Humanising the brand
• Public relations

Audience participation has to be considered – if a business’s audience is ‘online’ and participating with these channels – then it would be a missed opportunity if businesses didn’t explore how they could leverage them to assist in the development of the business.  As the example above with @themeatwagon – they had the perfect audience – and that combined with great product and the immediacy of Twitter and the quirkyness of moving their van around and creating a kind of ‘online club’ for burger fans – led to immense success for them.

The key thing for businesses to consider is the continued growth and popularity of these channels – most people – of all age ranges and status are participating with some form of social media channel, and as they grow in popularity and population – then more businesses will be compelled to interact with their audiences via these channels.

Q9. How beneficial do you feel advertising through social networking sites are compared to traditional methods of advertising?

A recent study (SEMPO June 2010) reported that marketing budgets are shifting – reducing allocation on traditional media (exhibitions, offline advertising) and providing more to the social media pots.

As mentioned above, this is not only due to the rise in popularity for audiences that businesses want to connect  with, (making social media channels far more viable from a commercial perspective) but also the attractive element of being able to ‘measure’ return on investment.

Online advertising via social networking sites – adwords and other paid for online advertising, enables clear visibility of what is happening with your marketing budget.

Recently a client of mine ran a radio campaign – the difference was that the spend was much higher – and the effectiveness of the advertising from a ‘direct response’ perspective, was nowhere near as effective as the pay per click online advertising that was running in parallel.

Most traditional methods of marketing just aren’t equipped to offer direct  response mechanisms that are accurate – there are too many ‘intangibles’.  Social media offers direct response measurement resources – that are very accurate and clear – AND the opportunity to brand build at the same time.  From a marketers’ perspective, this is very attractive.

Q10. What is the main advantage and disadvantage you think businesses gain from using social networking sites?

I think the big challenge for businesses small, medium and large is the time management of it all – and getting over the transparency and fear of what to say.

For many, it’s still such fertile territory and people are worried about productivity and how time consuming it can be for everybody involved.

They’re also worried about the ‘wrong messages’ getting out – and how what they say could reflect badly on them, damage the brand reputation etc.

The immediacy and reach – whilst probably one of the most attractive elements of the channels – terrifies many – as there is the scope for a negative element to travel quickly and widely, causing wide scale mayhem.  Once it’s out there – you can’t take it back!

Therefore, there needs to be a clear social media strategy woven into the overall strategic marketing plan – to ensure that all communications are on brand and effective.

Transparency is key – and users like to feel that they are engaging in real conversations rather than manufactured ones, humans like to have conversations with humans – and so the challenge for businesses is finding the right people to manage their social media channels.  There’s a big trust factor – as the brand is really ‘out there’ and exposed.

Those that write about Social Media Marketing (and there are hundreds of good and often opposing articles out there) all seem to agree on one point.  It’s about conversation not direct selling.  Selling is secondary.

Social networking produces conversations – useful, interesting collaborations – sharing information, genuinely conversing – and facilitating information – directing people to resources, people, spaces, places – virtually or off line to where they can achieve their main objective.

Q11. What are your predictions for social networking sites and businesses over the next few years?

Social networking sites are certainly not a ‘fad’ – they’re here to say.  And I expect that in the near future, we’ll see more of them developing.

Vertical:

I suspect social media platforms will look ‘vertical’ – and really harness their ability to target audiences and bring link minded groups together.  Therefore, there’ll be specialist platforms for sectors such as: Legal, Finance, Fashion, Food, Retail, Small Business etc.

Search:

Whether vertical or open – then I suspect that there’ll be far savvier developments with the way people are ‘found’ online.  Currently, Google dominates. However, Twitter and Facebook are starting to chip away at the heels. I suspect there’ll be developments in Twitter whereby you can pay to be listed in a ‘vertical’ – almost a paid for Twitter Directory – and popularity scores / influence scores will be built into the search algorithm to produce searches.

Country Specific:

I believe they’ll offer breakdowns so that you can only converse with people in your own country. This is currently challenging, particularly on Twitter – and so I suspect this ‘vertical’ by country / region / geography – will become more user friendly – enabling users to be more targeted with who they connect with.

Monetised and Enterprise Versions:

I touched on this above with paid search in Twitter etc – but I think we’ll see successful platforms either migrating into an Enterprise version.  And in all cases – there’ll be opportunities to monetise via advertising, ranking etc.

Q12. Any further comments regarding social networking sites and businesses?

Keeping up with social media means that organisations often have to ‘run faster’ than is comfortable – however, just because it’s fast, effective planning, just as you would with any marketing activity, is absolutely necessary.

Businesses shouldn’t ignore social media as ‘irrelevant for their businesses’.  Something I hear all the time. In a digital world, where futurists predict that there’ll be no ‘offline’ media in as little as 5 years – then businesses that want to compete in the future, need to embrace the digital way of marketing and conversing with their audiences.

Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – a graphic design and marketing services agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of graphic design and marketing – covering social media marketing and website planning and website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

I was recently referred to a company who were looking to grow a strong online presence for their relatively new product.

They had a website and had spent some money promoting it online but to date, it hadn’t really worked – so now theywere looking for some professional steer to really assist them in getting more visitors and ultimately more sales – and overall growing their brand online.

Their brief focused on doing pay per click advertising and search engine optimisation.

When I reviewed their site it was clear that they had spent resources creating an effective website. The product wasn’t one I was familiar with and so to see what was currently out there, I naturally did some very top line research via Google. I wrote down a few keywords, looked at who else was advertising, who was appearing organically in the search listings and checked out competitor sites to review pricing to get a feel for the scope of the landscape.

That top line research must have taken me all of about 15 minutes to do – however, having done this very short exercise, it become very apparent that the owners of the site that had been referred to me must never have undertaken such a simple and very basic exercise.

Very quickly I had observed that:

• There were lots of similar products available – and one could argue, better quality than the ones they were offering – for a 10th (yes, that’s right I said a 10th) of the price this company were selling them at.
• There was absolutely nothing unique about the product offering – and I noticed that other sites had much clearer purchasing processes and visible customer testimonials already in place.

Without going into detail, it’s a difficult conversation to have with an enthusiastic business owner who has clearly spent money and resources building a site around a product they love.

All they were looking for was a plan of how we were going to help them strengthen their online presence – when in fact the conversation I had to have focused on addressing the issues around the product.

Doing business online changes the playing field from doing business at a tradefair or on the high street – even if this product were to be uber optimised for search and purchasing processes were made to be the simplest and most user friendly possible, even if you dominated the top results in Google and were all over the social media platforms leveraging traffic to your site – people online are always going to check out the competitor sites and compare products and prices – all within a matter of a few minutes.  It’s just too easy to do – so why wouldn’t you.

I queried the price positioning with the company – and their reason for being so much higher than the competition was because their production costs to create the product didn’t enable them to price the product in line with the competition.

So effectively they were offering a product that was expensive and widely available for much less from lots of other places which had lots of positive reviews. Er – that’s not great on or off line – but online, where users can quickly browse to another site, it’s a total no no.

Just because the Internet has flattened the competitive landscape and the barriers to entry have been minimised thus opening the doors for budding entrepreneurs to set up a website and market online – let’s not forget that the basic fundamentals of business still very much apply:

You still need to do your research and understand your market and competitors.

• Your cost of goods needs to be determined so that you can clearly identify whether the business is feasible and sustainable.

Doing business online has so many positives – but remember too that ‘online’ you are also very exposed – competitors and alternative information is just a click away.

So, if you have spent time and money creating a website and getting people to click on your site – then don’t lose them simply because your value proposition doesn’t stack up.  The product comes first – make sure that’s great, or has something great alongside it – then take advantage of the benefits of reach the online arena offers.

Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – a marketing consultancy and design services agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of strategic marketing, digital marketing and graphic design covering social media marketing and website planning and website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

I was very delighted to receive an Ipad as a gift this Christmas.  It was totally unexpected – and so being a traditional BlackBerry gal – (not an iphoner) so my journey with apps began.

Whenever I mention to anyone that ‘I’ve got an ipad’ – a common response is ‘wow – but what do you use it for?’.

It would seem that from an aesthetics viewpoint, people want an iPad – but there definitely seems to be some level of confusion as to what they are used for.

I have to say, this was my own view prior to owning one too.

I’ve tweeted to my followers ‘Please share great iPad apps – but as yet – the only responses have been from other iPad owners saying ‘Ooh yes – please let me know of any useful ones too’.

I am using my iPad in a number of ways – both for business and personal.  So I thought it would be useful to share some of the apps – and ways that I’m using the iPad for business.  And perhaps – this blog post will encourage others to share their apps and uses too.

1)  Reading web articles – offline

If you are anything like me – you subscribe to useful blogs and feeds and so receive a large number of article links each day.  I have an ever growing folder in my outlook titled ‘Articles to Read’ – where I store these articles with the intention of reviewing each week.  However, the more than come, the more that get added to this folder – where wise, inspiring and informative words sit and wait to be aired.

Of course, when I’m on a train or tube, this is the perfect time to be reviewing such articles – however, there’s no wireless connection and so viewing links is a bit scuppered.

That’s where App no 1 comes in – GoodReader.  Very simply – you copy the url of the article into Goodreader and it creates and stores the html page as text or pdf page (dependent how the page has been set up) – and so viewable to read offline wherever, and whenever.

There’s another App that I’m testing too – Isaveweb – which again, does the same job as Goodreader but ‘says’ you can store up to 3 links deep for each article.  Haven’t tested it yet – but will do and report back.

Goodreader is great – however, I get a lot of articles from Hubspot and for some reason their articles don’t translate into Goodreader – so I’ve emailed them to query – so again, will report back in a later post.

So Goodreader, by large, is proving to be very useful indeed.  Really helping me to keep on top of my reading.

2) Pages – Word for Ipads

So I’ve read the article and I’ve been inspired by a section – and I now want to create a new blog post.  Very simply – I can copy a section of the article I’m reading in Goodreader and copy – and then open my Pages app.  Pages is effectively a ‘wordpressor’ for Ipads – it’s got some great templates and the ‘How to use Pages’ guide is very neat indeed. The app is very simple to use – and you can create either a plain doc or use one of the predetermined templates.

It’s really helping me to keep on top of my blogging – and I have a number of blog posts now on the go that I can simply get to whilst I’m on the train or tube.

3)  Dragon dictation – simply speak and it dictates

Of course, another means for blogging and indeed tweeting is via a very neat little app – Dragon dictation.  The more you use it the more accurate it gets – and again, it’s very simple to use.  For those that find typing on touchscreen keypads a little annoying (have to say I’m becoming fonder of this the more I do it) – then talking into your iPad and getting this app to do most of the typing fingerwork is an ideal solution.  You can then edit any discrepencies – and voila – it’s all there.  You can email the finished doc, save it etc – and there’s even an option to tweet it.   Very clever – and as I said, the more the app gets used to your voice, the more accurate it becomes.

4) Penultimate – sketch, doodle, ideas on the go

When I’m in a meeting taking notes – I tend not to write but to draw pictures and my own versions of mind maps – boxes and squares linking different elements etc.  I understand what’s going on – and given that I’m often talking about website planning and usability – and hierarchy of messaging etc – then typing out notes doesn’t really work.  I need that pen and paper to draw and sketch and lay things out.  This is where the Penultimate app comes into play. It effectively enables you to use your iPad as a pen and paper so that you can do whatever you want to do.  You can save your sketches in folders – and email PDF versions to others – so that they too can share your layouts and doodles.  I’ve only recently started experimenting with this app – and so far so good. I can see that it’s going to make a big difference and save me having to scan in my notebook pages to share and communicate ideas and layouts with colleagues.  Instead, I’ve simply been emailing them a PDF of my sketches.

It’s only been a few weeks – and already the iPad is definitely making a difference. My children are hooked on Boggle and Pac Man, and I’ve also set them competitions with the Explore Maths App! (Don’t call me a pushy mother or anything!).  My husband spends far too many hours flying jets via X-Plane – and I’ve got my Simply Relax meditations fixed to bring some ‘quiet’ into my life.

I’m looking forward to learning about more Apps that assist with business productivity and generally make that part of my life simpler – so if you’re aware of any, do let me know.

So…what’s your favourite iPad App?  And why?  Do share…

Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – a graphic design and marketing services agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of graphic design and marketing – covering social media marketing and website planning and website design.

For marketing and social media advice – view the Carvill Creative Blog

8 quick actions to consider to assist with your inbound marketing activity in 2011 – and ensure you keep on top of your social media activity.

1)   Content Pipeline – Create a blog features list, scan all areas of your website; services, faqs, guides and write features around them, creating an extensive pipeline of blog posts to circulate.

2)  Forum Activity – Select 3 or 4  relevant forums. Visit them each day to review threads / conversations – and participate where relevant.

3)  Google Alerts – Set Google Alerts on your company name, competitor names and other relevant keywords to monitor.  Watch alerts and comment, share where relevant.

4)  Hootsuite – Ensure all relevant keywords are being tracked in Hootsuite (or similar eg: Co Tweet).  Track conversations brand name mentions – and respond to any requests. (Simple spreadsheet to track date and people will do).

5)  Monitor – Measure number of Twitter followers, Facebook fans, site visits from social media platforms (via analytics) – track growth and trends.  (Simple spreadsheet which you update weekly/monthly will do.

6)  Promotion – Include links to Twitter, Linked In, Facebook on all comms where relevant. Email footers, sign offs, newsletter, website pages, business cards, landing pages.

7)  Collaboration – Partner up with key influencers.  Select 4 or 5 bloggers that you click with and email them, ask if they want to create a ‘comment and sharing’ consortium – whereby you all help each other’s blogs and sites achieve greater reach.  Comment, tweet posts etc.

8 )  Schedule Activity – Don’t miss out on sharing information via Twitter / Facebook each day.  Set up your tweets via Hootsuite so that you’ve got a steady stream of activity.

Michelle Carvill is Partner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – a graphic design and marketing services agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  Carvill Creative covers all aspects of graphic design and marketing – covering digital and social media marketing and optimised website planning and user focused website design.

For more social media and marketing posts and advice visit the Carvill Creative Blog

If you’re anything like me – you’ve got 101 things on the go all at the same time.  Throw keeping up with social media into the bag – and effectively you’re glued to an electronic device (smart phone, laptop, PC, powerbook, iPad – to name just a few) for most of your day.

Having meetings with people (provided they’re not on skype!) offers the eyes some light relief.  But then it’s straight back to the fix of those devices for collaboration, communication and implementation.

Recently, I’ve read a number of blog posts and articles around the theme of ‘working effectively’ eg: is email a distraction, should we turn it off and only check for messages every hour and are social media platforms a help or a hindrance.

Some of you may already have keeled over at the hourly email check suggestion above – so take a breath and consider for a moment the implications of constantly being ‘interrupted’.

For example – this evening, as I write this, I’ve been to a fitness class (ouch) and really should be enjoying my just getting gripping book, The Historian (very good btw if you like history and vampires).  However, instead, I picked up my BlackBerry and saw a couple of interesting links – so then cracked open the laptop with the intention of finishing off setting up a blog for a friend.  Please note the word ‘intention’.

However, in reality here’s what have I done; I’ve read and answered some work related emails – organised my sent messages into relevant client / project folders, forwarded relevant info to some of my team for implementation tomorrow, stored some files into a shared online collaboration system, diarised some activity.  Now, what was I doing again…?  Certainly, didn’t intend to write a blog post this evening, that was for sure.

Even now, as I sit here writing this post – I’m watching the email alerts come up and nearly, yes, just very nearly, clicked to save this doc to my desktop so I could hop off and review my inbox. (Oh dear!).

Don’t get me wrong, I’m an excellent multi-tasker, if I do say so myself, however, I do get the feeling of being ‘swamped and overwhelmed’ and ‘frustrated at things dragging on’ quite a bit too.

However, who’s to blame – is it Twitter, Linked In or Facebook – NO.  Is it the peeps that email me – NO.  It’s, [drumroll]… moi – and my bad ‘online habits’ that I’m determined to break.

I think we’d all got pretty good at not taking a call if we were ‘busy’ – “kindly take a message and I’ll get back to them”.  I recall days back when I’d even advise my team – I can’t take any calls this am, can’t be disturbed – got to get abc project completed, and I didn’t feel guilty or as if I was ‘missing out’ about that – it was the sensible, professional and productive thing to do.  Leaving me true ‘head space’ to complete what I needed to.

Nowadays, I find that the only time I ‘allow’ that space is when I wake far too early in the morning and instead of going back to sleep for another couple of hours, think – well if I get started now, no one will be online to ‘interrupt’ me – and I’ll get so much done.   Bad, very bad.

So I’ve decided to ‘take back control’ and control my bad online habits.  I’m going to ease myself into the old, but now new, way of working by ensuring I stick firmly to the new rules I’m setting myself.

And so, to the rules:

1. On my general ‘to do’ list – ensure that I review and assess exactly which elements I am going to start/complete that day.
2. Ensure all the social media feeds I want to keep on top of are in my Hootsuite account and fix set times throughout the day to review (3 times should be enough – morning, lunch and late pm).
3. When I start out to work on a specific project – whilst I may quickly review emails, I will make a pact not to answer them until the project I’ve started working on is completed or as far as I wanted it to get.
4. Manage expectation – I don’t want to upset people by thinking I’m not responding to them, so I will send a quick email response acknowledging receipt and advising I’ll be back to them later that day, or by eop tomorrow (a quick 20 sec email) – rather than going ‘off track’ for an hour – and getting behind on what I really needed to complete that day.
5. Switch off email alerts and Twitter alerts.  I’m just far too inquisitive not to look and explore.  I just can’t be trusted.
6. Stick to ‘me time’ – I write each year about the importance of energy levels in business – as without energy, we pretty much don’t get anything done.  So when it’s chill out time – no laptops or BlackBerrys to hand. And be sure to make time to do stuff I love – long walks, having fun with the children, yoga and getting out for a run in the fields!
7. Stop saying to myself – ‘They’re just aren’t enough hours in the day’ – there are plenty of hours in the day – careful planning, and sticking to what I set out to achieve, will make my working hours more effective and efficient.

I think that’s all I can manage for now – already getting a bit twitchy about switching off the alerts… so let’s see how I get on.  I’ll keep you posted.

Meanwhile, if you’ve got any tips, hints, real life experience of activities you’ve put in place to combat the multi-message distraction syndrome – then do please share – comments and views greatly appreciated.  Surely, I can’t be the only person in this fast paced media rich world feeling just a little like they need to take back control…?

Over to you…

Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative a graphic design and marketing services agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of graphic design and marketing – covering social media marketing, user focused website planning and website design.

Social Platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Linked-In, Bebo, Ning, Buzz (and a plethora of others) – are effectively ‘online social spaces’ where people can converse, share their profiles, news, photos, ideas, work projects etc.

Then we have Blogs – online ‘diary style’ platforms where people can share their views, news, ideas and advice about something they are passionate about.  Businesses have blogs, people have blogs – it’s a way to communicate what’s happening, how you feel about things, provide advice and share.

The objective is to get people interested and engaged by providing authentic, transparent and relevant information.  And hopefully, those that engage with what you are talking about – will tell others – and so they will ‘follow’ your musings, subscribe to your blog – growing brand awareness, positive word of mouth – and share of mind.

Similarly, you may participate in ‘online forums’ – here you share your views and advice with others – and ask for help too.  Again, the forum is not a place to directly ‘sell’ – it’s a place to build your reputation and share opinion.   Whether setting out to achieve a position of authority or ‘expert’ in what you do – or to learn, share and generally participate – social media platforms are now firmly cemented into savvy marketing strategies.

Of course, people do try to use these platforms for direct sales purposes – but that tends to ‘turn off’ the ‘social audience’.  So whilst it’s part of the end game, direct selling should never be your main objective for engaging.

Twitter – one of the most successful social media platforms, is a natural ‘communication’ channel for ‘social media’ activity.

Social media platforms enable a ‘conversation’ with people you may not have been able to reach before.  It has an amazing power to enable communications to go viral – and engage audiences in conversations about services, products, issues, the company and brand – connecting a vast amount of likeminded people in an often targeted and purposeful way.  The immediacy of the platform is also attractive.  Take a look at the short recent case study – highlighting both targeting, and immediacy.

A firm of accountants has a specialism in working with artists and galleries – and have set up a Twitter account @WestburyArt showcasing their relevant clients and also commenting on latest exhibitions, news in the artworld, as well as providing links back to useful resources and articles on their website.  In their social media activity platform, they monitor the keyword ‘accountants’.  A tweet appears “Does anyone know any accountants that focus on helping artists and galleries”.  Literally seconds later – they are able to respond.  Not only do they get the opportunity to generate a new client – a number of other artists then start to follow them.

Creating a Social Media Strategy or including social media platforms as part of mainstream marketing activity is still relatively fertile territory for many.

Businesses of all shapes and sizes, as well as superbrands, are only just touching the surface when it comes to understanding where they are heading with their social media activity.  There’s significant ‘fear’ by many as to ‘opening the floodgates’ – they’re uncomfortable with the transparency and reach these channels enable (however, conversely – it’s these same factors which are actually the attractive features).

Keeping up with social media means that organisations often have to ‘run faster’ than is comfortable – however, just because it’s fast, effective planning, just as you would with any marketing activity, is absolutely necessary.

So let’s take a look at how to plan your social media activity:

1       Strategic stance

What are you looking to achieve via Social Media?

• Increase awareness the new service / brand
• Share authority / expert opinion
• Raise general brand / service awareness
• Pull people to your site / blog / landing page
• Research / poll
• Rally support

2          Researching and Understanding your Social Media Audience

With the ‘objective’ secured – then before up jump into ‘engaging’ we need to first ‘listen’ to the conversations happening within your target audience.

• Identify that target audience

3          Engaging

Once you have an understanding of the types of conversations that are happening with your ‘target audience’ or ‘relevant audience groups’ – eg: via Facebook or Linked In – then you need to start ‘engaging’ in an effective way.

3.1 What

For example:

Twitter posts would focus on:

• Relevant advice
• Answer q’s to user challenges

3.2      When

Social Media activity should be part of daily activity – but it needs to be managed in a focused way – as it can be all consuming if trying to do too much.

It’s a case of ‘suck it and see’ to gauge what’s right for your business:

• Twitter
• Blogs
• Forums
• Facebook
• Linked In Groups

It would be useful to schedule all activities into the week.  For example:

• Blog posts get posted daily.
• Each morning relevant channels – Twitter thread, Trade press news sites, general news sites are reviewed and tweets scheduled for the day.
• Blogs you are subscribed to – when alerted to new post, review and comment if relevant.
• Forums you are participating in are scanned at least daily.
• Linked In Group participation (as required – but visit at least weekly to review contacts’ contacts and grow.
• Plus ….all areas organic and active ‘expansion’.

This is where useful management resources such as Co Tweet or Hootsuite come into their own.  Here you can feed all of your social media platforms into one central dashboard – watch, manage, tweet, post etc – particularly useful when managing a number of accounts.

4          Twitter

I would suggest that some keyword ‘search’ is done on Twitter Search (using advanced search) and listening in to the types of things that the relevant audience is ‘tuning’ into.

Resources: Twitter Search, TweetBeep, Twellow directory and Hootsuite can be utilised.  Again, I tend to favour setting streams in Hootsuite to follow relevant ‘keywords’.

Talking of keywords – research also needs to be done into the best ‘keywords’ to search on.

This activity will help you to establish relevant keywords to use in the ‘tactic’ of ‘connecting’ with the right type of people.

• Follow them
• See who they are following and if relevant follow them too
• Watch what they are saying, understand key issues
• Join the conversation
• Start to engage

5          Forums

I would suggest that you select no more than 2 to 3 forums initially to engage with.  Any more becomes unmanageable for one person.  Test and gauge which ones you get the most out of.

Search the forum threads for relevant keywords

• Review the types of questions and levels of advice being put forward
• Join the conversation – not sell, sell, sell, but advice and advise
• Become a ‘trusted’ advisor / experts in service categories.

6          Blogs

Run searches in Google on relevant blogs :

Search blogs for relevancy – and find any that are relevant to the objective – creating a Blog A List.    Then participate:

• Subscribe to their blogs
• Read what they are talking about
• Join the conversation by commenting
• Become a ‘trusted’ advisor / experts in service categories.

Twitter is also useful for finding relevant blogs.  Many users are running blogs – and tweeting their posts – and so when we find relevant people – in their profiles check out the URL links and review their blogs – if relevant – subscribe, listen and comment.

7          Linked In / Groups

There are a number of relevant groups to join and participate in within Linked In.  To research and apply to join relevant groups – similarly, watch conversation threads and participate where relevant.  LinkedIn only works for active users – so be mindful to endeavour to participate.

Linked In is probably one of the most ‘granular’ social platforms – it really allows you to target – in both groups and individuals.

8          Facebook

Whilst Facebook predominantly started as a ‘personal’ connection platform, the growing use for business purposes is enhancing the features available.  Using Facebook’s FBML (similar to HTML) you can effectively replicate a landing page, campaign or web page on your Facebook page – enabling real interactivity.   As with all activity – you need to have campaigns on board to keep your Facebook page ‘alive’ and interesting.  Discussions, unique offers – consider the viral – what’s going to make someone ‘like’ you page and share it with others?

9          Integrate all Marketing Communications

To maximise exposure, integrate social media as part of the general marketing mix.

All ‘communications’ and ‘touch points’ be they ‘online or offline’ – should also consider the social media channels.  Including follow me@ Twitter names on businesscards, letterheads, invoices, promoting blogs on sites and in ads etc.  Email footers in Forums should include links to blogs, twitter and sites. Contact pages on websites to include.

Follow us on Twitter @handle

Blog www.blogname.com/blog

Follow us on LinkedIn
Become a fan on Facebook

10        Measure

As with all marketing activity, you need to be able to measure how your social media efforts are panning out.

Some typical and relatively simple metrics to consider:

• Traction / traffic to blogs
• Users signing up to petitions / surveys (Twtpoll.com)
• Perhap offers exclusive to Twitter with special Twitter code to track
• Retweets and Twitter analytics / Twittergrader improvement
• Google Alerts / picking up relevant activity
• Linked In Visits
• Facebook Fan Growth
• Twitter followers growth
• Google Analytics – sales/conversions coming from social media channels

11        Circle of Social Media

If anyone is still asking, “why focus on social media…”?  Highlight the uses below:

• Customer support and service
• Brand reputation management
• Polling and product feedback mechanism
• Lead generation
• News distribution
• Brand awareness and establishment
• Product promotion and launch
• Humanising the brand
• Public relations

Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – a graphic design and marketing services agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of graphic design and marketing – covering social media marketing and website planning and user focused website design.

The all important factors to consider to ensure your campaign doesn’t fail due to lack of ‘response activity’.

Working with a new client recently, it brought home to me the importance of ensuring that all your marketing activity is joined up.

For many, there’s still a key focus on ‘marketing’ being the promotional part of a brand or business – largely concentrating around the communications or campaigns that are either pushed out to audiences – push activities, or attract audiences – pull activities, (also referred to as outbound and inbound marketing, respectively).

And indeed, they would be right to ‘label’ these activities under the tab of ‘marketing’.  However, in order for marketing activity to be truly effective – there are other important faces of marketing to consider to ensure the entire ‘process’ of marketing is ‘slick’ and efficient.  Every marketing ‘touch point’ needs to be considered and planned for.  Ensuring all the operational boxes are also well and truly ticked.

I’ve experienced a number of scenarios where a  significant budget has been allocated to a campaign – promotional materials created, data lists purchased, online and offline advertising engaged – radio etc – however, regardless of how much has been ‘spent’ and how much ‘activity’ has been put out there, the campaign hasn’t generated the required results.

There are many reasons why a campaign could fail – bad planning, wrong message, poor targeting, poor execution etc however, the success factors behind these are far more commonplace.  Marketers and marketing planners and creatives get excited about the ‘communication’ side of a campaign – messaging, segmenting and targeting is usually well determined.

One key and fundamental element of a marketing campaign that, from my experience, often gets overlooked ,is the all critical  internal marketing part – the part I refer to as ‘response activity’.

So let’s take a quick look at  ‘response activity’ …

The campaign has been created, all the creative is in place, key messaging and call to actions agreed, materials scheduled, audience segmented and ready to target – radio campaigns planned, event(s) scheduled – everything is in place and ready to go.  By now – a significant amount of resources (budget, people, etc) have been deployed.  It’s the exciting time – the campaign is about to launch – the ball about to start rolling.

Your audience is now going to get the opportunity to meet, greet and embrace your message – so what happens next is the big deciding factor as to whether or not the campaign is a success…

To simplify things – let’s call the visible elements of the activity such as the planning, materials, communications, audiences, advertising etc – front end marketing.

Response activity therefore sits in the back end marketing – the all important internal delivery of what you are pushing out there.

For example:  You’ve revised your website, including a new landing page to focus on a new service /  product.  This promotion is supported by radio advertising, pay per click online advertising campaigns, as well as an offline direct mail piece to customers – together with response mechanism.  The landing page and mailing piece promote a ‘request a sample / brochure.

It’s all looking very positive.  The campaign launches… and the following happens:

• Requests for brochures are received via the landing page – however, there’s no ‘process’ in place for turning these requests around quickly and efficiently.  For the user the experience is negative – the brochure, after 7 days, still doesn’t arrive, the request for a call isn’t followed up effectively.
• The onsite confirmation message when a user requests a brochure has a typo.  (Not a great first impression – was this area thoroughly proof read just as the push materials were?).
• An automated email isn’t sent to the user’s inbox – advising them that their brochure is on its way – and signposting them to other resources eg: in the meantime, take a look at the following links for more information.
• Telephone calls are received, but front line team aren’t fully aware of the promotion – sorry, I don’t know anything about that, can I just put you on hold whilst I find out more about this for you…
• Data which is captured online for the brochure requests isn’t fed through into the prospect database, and tagged accordingly.  Therefore, no scheduled, automated follow up can be scheduled enabling the ongoing nurture of the prospect.
• l  No measurement resources have been put in place to monitor and measure activity / responses. Therefore, often poor reaching campaigns are repeated again and again – a waste of time, money and effort.

Some of the above examples may appear to be rather extreme – ‘of course we’ve got that covered’ – I hear you chant.  However, from personal experience over the years, I can advise you that many haven’t!

So the message here is simple – ensure that all your marketing activity is totally ‘joined up’.

5 Quick Checks to Take

1. Test, test and test again. If you have an online request or online call to action – ensure that all the processes to enable that request are in place – checked, proofed and working.
2. Internal team awareness – ensure everyone who needs to be aware of the campaign is aware of the campaign – don’t just launch externally – launch internally so that everyone knows where to direct enquiries to.
3. Understand what you need to measure – get measurement resources in place – analytics engaged for online, call responses – ensure mechanisms for monitoring are in place and ready to roll.
4. Capture information.  If you’ve gone to the effort of getting people to respond and provide details – make that information work.  Collect, extract and ensure that it’s added to your prospect database.
5. And the follow up? Plan how you are going to respond to those that are interacting with your campaign – not just immediately, but what’s the follow up plan – this is a marketing campaign in itself – so be sure it’s in place.

Michelle Carvill is owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – a graphic design and marketing services agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of graphic design and marketing – covering social media marketing and website planning and website design.

So, you’ve jumped on the social media bandwagon and set up a Twitter account, perhaps have a Facebook page and are active on Linked-In… however, are you really ‘getting’ social media?

Whilst we are all spending time tweeting and updating pages – there’s still considerable uncertainty about any ‘return on investment’.  However, that doesn’t seem to be deterring our ‘faith’ in social media activity.

A recent study (SEMPO June 2010) study reported that marketing budgets are shifting – reducing allocation on traditional media (exhibitions, offline advertising) and providing more to the social media pots.

However, the same study reported that in the B2B and B2C sectors organizations 38% of businesses stated that their biggest challenge to getting started with social media was ‘building a sufficient business case’

The challenge in building that business case is the all important ‘return on investment’ factor – it’s not enough to be out there in conversations as part of  brand building– it’s expected that such an immediate and consuming channel should provide a more immediate and direct response.

So, what can businesses be doing to ensure that they are leveraging their ‘Twitter’ activity?

It’s likely that tools to help you target and receive targeted traffic from social media platforms will improve over the coming months and years – however, for now – there’s a simple way to leverage your efforts on Twitter and other platforms.

Many Twitterers and brands are missing out on ‘keyword tracking’.

By the term ‘keyword tracking’ I simply mean setting alerts against relevant keyphrases that are being ‘tweeted’  and shared in the socialmediaosphere.

Brands and businesses often use this approach to track mentions of their products and companies, and developers can use it to track mentions of their favourite languages, frameworks, and open source projects.

It’s a great resource for seeing what’s not only happening with your own brand or business – but also for engaging in relevant and hopefully productive conversations.

Tracking keywords need not be complicated, particularly if you are using a social media platform such as – www.hootsuite.com – a total social management resource where you can align your Facebook profiles, Twitter Accounts, Linked In and others. There are other platforms too eg: Tweetdeck, Tweetbeep etc – but Hootsuite is the one I personally favour.

TweetBeep is useful too - sending email alerts based on the tracking of specific keywords in Twitter, and can track specific URLs, even if they have been shortened.

TweetLater, allows you to “schedule a tweet for posting at a later time” and it also provides a feature they describe as “Track keywords on Twitter”. The not so great features include

1. Automatic DM to new followers, which can be annoying
2. Automated following of people who follow you, which isn’t always necessary
3. Automatic un following of those who un follow you (jury is still out on this feature)

And there’s Twilert too – (I used this when Tweetbeep was being revamped – useful).

Another platform, which does include a paid for enterprise option is CoTweet – which seems to do everything that Hootsuite does.

Hootsuite, however is brilliant and I would highly recommend as you can track keywords, bring in your Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, set up pending tweets in a very neat and easy fashion and you are totally in control of who you follow/unfollow/DM etc.

There are a number of ways you can be tracking keyword and keyphrases – for example:

1. Tracking keywords which are relevant to finding new followers – for example, in my case, I want to follow people who are talking and sharing about social media, professional services marketing and user experience, usability.  Therefore, I track these keywords to help me tune into relevant conversations. In my efforts of doing this, I’ve been able to follow some really useful experts, been invited to guest blog and also been able to grow my blog subscription by sharing relevant and helpful posts, all thanks to tuning into relevant conversations.
2. Tracking keywords for clients – similarly, watching what’s happening in their ‘keyword’ space and alerting them to relevant followers, influencers and conversations.
3. Tracking your own brand / product names.
4. Tracking direct response keyphrases.  By this I mean keyphrases which not only house the keyword – but also include a direct response element such as ‘looking for help with’ – ‘can anyone help with’ – you can string these keyphrases together with keywords to assist with targeting on relevancy.

These are just a few ways that you can be starting to leverage the conversations that are taking place. So my advice is to get watching those keywords and keyphrases – and then start considering how you can leverage these highly relevant requests and conversations

So get tracking…

Michelle Carvill is a professional services marketing consultant and owner and Marketing Director at Carvill Creative – a graphic design and marketing services agency based in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  The agency covers all aspects of graphic design and marketing – assisting practices and businesses with marketing strategy, social media planning and implementation, online marketing – website planning and website design.

Wearing my ‘professional services’ marketing hat, I recently attended a meeting at an accountancy practice with a number of their partners.

To provide some context, I’d already met with the Partners responsible for marketing a couple of times and this was now my presentation to the entire partnership, sharing with them, my views and ideas on the development of amarketing strategy for their practice.

The presentation seemed to go very well, the audience appeared engaged and there were a number of really practical questions – and so I thought things had gone well – but often these ‘pitches’ tend not to generate too much discussion or feedback there and then, so you’re never quite sure.

At the close of the presentation – one of the Partners I’d now met a few times rose from his seat and, thanked me for the presentation – and said, most unusually – “that was great work, 10 stars to you” – to which there was laughter and giggling by pretty much everyone in the room. (Even more unusual).

Of course, whilst a little bewildered – I composed myself, joined in the laughter (unknowingly) and advised that I was pleased that they had enjoyed the presentation so much.

However, then it dawned on me – ‘Great Work – 10 Stars’ – weren’t these the very words printed on the oversized sticker that my 4 year old had received from nursery the day before and just that morning as I was frantically unplugging laptops and packing bags to make my train, was again, sharing with me as to how well she had done.

And yes, as I then looked about myself – I realised that stuck to my left shoulder – was the very said sticker.  Of course, the ‘do you want to wear my sticker mummy?’ question now made sense.

Aha – now I got it.

Having attended a number of presentations, instead of the usual post presentation formal mutterings and perhaps queries on some of the areas I’d discussed – the Partners were far more open and warm towards me.  My daughter’s sticker dominated the initial conversations – and it felt really quite good to be very transparent about my lifestyle – that as well as being dedicated to running my own business, I successfully juggle being a dedicated mother of two.

Of course, the ‘holiday snap’ icebreaker – is now terribly passé – (as well as terrible)!  But there’s definitely something to be said for sharing a bit of who you are with your audience.  I find that all too often we’re very guarded about who we are personally – as it’s not very ‘professional’ – however, we mustn’t forget that it’s people we build relationships with.  And after all – people do business with people they like.

I suppose social media platforms such as blogs, T