Features

Highly recommended reading here from Susan Solovic, contributing author, who illustrates the viral marketing campaign launched by the Disney-Star Wars franchise coupling. She explains how small business owners can use these techniques to their own advantage.

Susan touches on building anticipation and how it directly relates to live event sales, then goes on to elaborate on the subject of collaborating with local, global, and national talent to maximize the impact of your product(s).

Susan concludes by sharing some observations and information on advanced marketing techniques used by the mega-franchise, such as “leaked” product information, and how small businesses can use similar techniques to increase both their profitability and visibility.

Some excellent points and definite food for thought for all our small business clients.

Read the full article here:
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/252280

Did you know that YouTube is pretty much the second biggest search engine after Google? And guess who owns YouTube? Oh right it’s that don’t be evil corporation called Google.

Well if you want to get ahead of your competitors and find standard Google SEO a slow and unforgiving beast, then you should definitely spend sometime creating great content for YouTube.

Video is the most powerful content delivery system and if you’re looking to build an engaged following, there’s really nothing better. Users get to see you, connect with you and, if you help solve their problems with how to videos, ultimately trust and buy from you.

As such, some of the pointers in the following article are worth going through as they are good pointers to get you started.

Enjoy! http://www.razorsocial.com/youtube-seo/

So you’ve got your Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, yadda, yadda, yadda, accounts and you’re publishing loads of stuff and no one’s really paying attention, and your boss is getting antsy because the follower numbers aren’t ticking up, and you’re not making sales… what do you do?

Well the following article really let’s the cat out of the bag on strategies we’ve implemented for clients (nice one Andrea! grr):

http://www.andreavahl.com/facebook/7-surprising-ways-companies-are-winning-on-social-media.php

If you’re smart you’ll read this and get cracking on implementing, testing, refining and going again until you find the winning social media formula.

If you’re smarter still you’ll hire us to do it for you in order to save you time and leave you focusing on running your business.

And if you’re smarter still you’ll know the solution to P versus NP, the Hodge conjecture, the Riemann hypothesis and the other three outstanding millennium prize problems as explained here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Prize_Problems#Unsolved_problems.

But as no one is yet that smart I think you should revert to the “speak to us so we can help you solve problem” problem. Just saying.

So as we come to the end of another week that leads us inexorably closer to death and/or Christmas, it’s time to review how Facebook have been making the news this week (sure like they need any extra free publicity).

As marketers however, we need to keep a beady eye on them and so the following are a mere smattering of useful tidbits to take away, ruminate on and digest over the weekend.

Number 1: Ten Facts About the New Facebook Search.

An interesting read here about how Facebooks new search functionality works. Facebook are now looking beyond the silo-ed Facebook world and, shock horror, realising there’s a whole thing called the internet beyond its borders.

That’s right, they’re actually indexing content from the wider web so you don’t have to just look at cat meme’s anymore. Also included is info on their ranking factors, mobile search and a bunch of other stuff that you would be better off going and reading than me trying to regurgitate in under 100 words.

Number 2: How to Create Facebook Ads With Emails: 5 Creative Ideas.

This one comes highly recommended by moi. If you have an email list then this post guides you through how you can upload it to facebook to target those same people through Facebook.

Then how to clone your list for additional ad targeting options, how to target based on those who open vs don’t open your mailers, segment subscribers and retarget those who are basically ignoring your mailers.

A great bunch of tips here that, with a little thought on Facebook psychographic targeting mashups, are going to help you big time.

Number 3: 2 New Facebook Tools for Local Business Advertisers.

This is a good news story for all your social media managers who represent stores/restaurants with multiple local locations. You can now craft separate copy, links and calls to action per local store with far greater ease.

In addition the new insights tool will allow you to see greater trends and demographics on a local level leaving you in an all oh so powerful mind manipulation position “wa ha ha”.

Number 4: Facebook v YouTube: Fighting for views.

Finally this story from Auntie (the BBC for non UK folk) is all about how quickly Facebook has caught up with YouTube in view counts since the introduction of auto play functionality on people’s news feeds.

As those of us who use YouTube a lot know, however, its not all about random quick views, but the deeper level of engagement from users that’s often more important especially in audience building. Anyway a good read and as the saying goes, don’t put all your eggs in one basket, so keep on keeping on with videos in both channels.

And that’s it till next time. I’m off to sit on a beach in South Mexico for a couple of weeks so I’ll see you all again soon.

Cheers

Twitter have just announced the release of Twitter Polls, a new feature that let’s you get customer feedback in a far more straight forward way than previous options available on the service. You’ll be able to pose questions to your followers like “Do you think continued UK EU membership will be good or bad for your business?” and then have an A/B (yes/no) poll for users to vote on. The poll will remain live for 24 hours and those taking part will be able to do so privately.

It’s a good addition for anyone with an engaged Twitter following. A local cake shop, for example, could pose a new product idea and have regular customers vote on whether they think the new flavour combination would work.

So its perfect for anyone with a lab testing environment to test ideas with their userbase. We’ll be testing it out this week with our clients so stay tuned.

Read more here:
http://smallbiztrends.com/2015/10/get-customer-feedback-fast-new-twitter-polls.html

For all you SME’s based outside the US who have largely ignored the Pinterest platform, it might be time to start revising your usage. Whilst Pinterest has historically been very dominant in certain psychographic circles like soccer moms and flower collectors, home decor and art and design, the growing userbase outside of the US is starting to change social media managers thinking especially given the new localised pinning option.

The platform as its now topping 100 million monthly actives and standing on its own against the FB’s of this world. I’d recommend any clients who sell products in markets where photographic content curation is possible, to jump on board and start developing boards with a following.

Be the thought, taste and style maker in your niche and you can leverage the opportunities presented by Pinterest to your advantage.

You can read more on this release here:
http://smallbiztrends.com/2015/10/pinterest-users-localized-search.html