Offerpop; the social media campaign tool

There are various different marketing campaign tools on the market that allow you to run social media events, contests, giveaways, etc., but there aren’t many that allow you to customize your campaign to the extent that Offerpop does. Built in to the platform, Offerpop offers instant landing pages

This web-based marketing platform presents the opportunity to fully engage and interact with the consumer allowing brands to create effective marketing campaigns. Upon registering on their website, you will receive a fourteen day free trial to run the campaign of your choice. This includes; tug of war, sign up, referral, photo contest, fan faves, exclusive, and many more for Facebook and various other campaigns for Twitter. The best part about Offerpop, is it’s extremely easy to use!

After logging in, you will be brought to your dashboard, which lists all of the possible campaigns available for Facebook and Twitter. From there you simply choose the type of social media campaign you’re interested in running and enter in the necessary information, select fields for a sign up form, and bada-boom. Launch your social media campaign, engage with your consumers, and watch your statistics grow.

What sets Offerpop away from its competitors, is the wide variety of campaigns, extremely user-friendly dashboard, and their competitive pricing.

The New Facebook Timeline: If You Can’t Beat Em’, Join Em’

As I am sure you are already aware, Facebook has once again forced us into a new version of the reining social media network. Thanks Mark Zuckerberg for influencing me to spend more time updating my Facebook timeline than trying to promote world peace. Facebook’s profile has now been replaced with the new layout called Facebook Timeline. Frankly, I was not thrilled about this change because I did not feel like going through the mundane task of updating my Facebook, however I have come to embrace this new concept. This new layout provides its users with a timeline of their Facebook history, from photos, events, apps, etc. arranged in the order in which they happened. Essentially making Facebook “stalking” much easier to manage.

And so it goes that with any new change, there is always hesitancy and the big question “how will this impact our business?” Well other than the fact that social media companies now need to put in the extra effort to update these changes for their clients, this new timeline proves to be advantageous for business users.

With change, come new opportunities. The new Facebook timeline gives businesses the chance to capitalize on their marketing campaigns and customize their timeline accordingly. My major hang up of this new timeline concept was what the heck I was going to use as my “cover photo”. So I chose a picture I had taken of a flower (I know, I know, so cliché). However cliché my photo might be, this cover photo in conjunction with the profile photo provides the opportunity for businesses to really advertise their brand and logo. As a billboard would show off the main product and point of the advertisement, so should your businesses cover photo. Make sure the photo grabs your follower’s attention and showcases what you are all about!

Captain Morgan has melded their logo into their cover photo to make one cohesive piece that clearly represents the product they are marketing for.

Another advantage to this new layout is it enables businesses to highlight the milestones of their business in an easy to view timeline. Photos now appear larger on the timeline, essentially overshadowing the text info. This can yield huge reward for businesses with catchy photos, because lets face it, people would rather look at a picture to sum something up than read a paragraph.  So promote away via your most market worthy photos!

Designer, Kate Spade, has also capitalized on showcasing their brand in the cover photo along with their tail tale logo.

Now to touch on posting, status updates and more goodies. The timeline displays the top 4 most used apps front and center beside the “about me” section. So choose the apps most important and essential to your customers, however the photos app will always appear first. One of the new features of Facebook, is the ability to post a story to your timeline. This story can be “starred” and made to either stay at the top of your page or it can be displayed along the width of your page, essentially making it pretty darn hard to miss. This is something businesses should take advantage of if they want their followers to acknowledge a new event or product.

So now you can sleep at night knowing your business is not in jeopardy from the new Facebook timeline. It’s here to stay (well at least for the next 6 months until they figure out a new way to frustrate us all over again) so embrace it and use it to your businesses advantage!

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Links

As a newcomer not only to Web Talent, but also to the SEO world, I have been delving into the many facets of link building and search marketing. With all of its publicity, it was very hard not to be sucked into the social media world and how it is incorporated into the marketing realm. Social media proves to be the most persuasive of strategies when looking at how to reach your target audience. However, keeping up with the social media “flavor of the week” is never-ending.

One social media site in particular has been stealing headlines and traffic. Pinterest is a new form of social bookmarking modernizing how websites are bookmarked using pictures. Users can “pin” their favorite products, pictures, pets, etc. to different categories or thematic “boards” for others to follow. Photos can be “pinned” and “repined” and shared with all of your followers.

With all the hype surrounding Pinterest, it was only a matter of time before this social media platform was integrated into SEO strategies. As reported in a February article on Search Engine Watch, in January 2012, Pinterest accounted for more traffic than LinkedIn, Google+, Reddit and YouTube combined! So it is only natural that businesses should be looking into ways to utilize this site.

Pinterest has several advantages for businesses and their online presence. Since users only “repin” pictures of things that interest them, your target market finds you! Businesses can “pin” all of their favorite company infographics and pictures to this site with a link in the picture back to their site. The best part…these links are followable! Branch out and follow people and they are likely to follow you and look at the content you have pinned to your board.

Be forewarned, this new craze is highly addictive. I can testify first hand because I too, along with 11 million other users, have joined Pinterest and cannot seem to stop pinning my favorite things! As a social media marketing company, it is only natural that Web Talent recently jumped on the bandwagon and joined Pinterest and we are quickly exploring all it has to offer.

Followerwonk – The Social Analytics Tool for Twitter

I came across a really cool social tool the other day that I can’t believe more people are not using. It’s called Followerwonk and is a miracle tool for cultivating influential bloggers, guest blogging opportunities, and socially authoritative websites. The tool has both a free and paid version based on usage and can be accessed by using your twitter account. The tool has four main purposes and allows you to export your findings to a CSV file and saves your recent searches.

One of my very favorite parts of this tool is the ability to search for twitter users by keyword and compare them based on different metrics (influence, followers, following, age, etc). In practice, if you were looking to connect with authoritative social media bloggers to  promote your content, this tool will let your search, sort, and download them based on the keywords you selected. You can also follow them on Twitter right from the application. Followerwonk also shows you if your account is following the selected twitter profiles or if they are following you.

Once you have selected a short-list of highly authoritative and relevant bloggers, or websites, you can dive deeper into their twitter statistics and then start to analyze their followers (or whom they are following) to help narrow down cream of the crop. There are a ton of metrics to take into account such as the average age, language of their followers, and how active and authoritative they are.

Lastly, Followerwonk offers user twitter analytics to help monitor the progress (or struggles) of your growing, authoritative followers. Using this feature within the tool can provide a closer look at your twitter account’s followers. It can also identify your most influential followers which is a vital aspect to any social media campaign since they are your lowest hanging fruit. You can also identify followers that are recent additions or recent loses. My suggestion would be to periodically pull up your followers that have chosen to unfollow you, identify authoritative users, and then attempt to retain.

For a social media consultant like me, Followerwonk is a great addition to the social media tools we are currently usiong at Web Talent Marketing. Of course no tool has ever created a winning social media campaign. A custom stratagy and solid reporting metrics often work hand in hand to help acheive long term success within social media – but tools like this help out a whole lot!

Google Says, “Search is Simply Better with Your World in it”

As the world’s leading search engine, Google’s first priority has always been your experience as a user. Each day, several hundred million queries are performed and Google strives to bring forth the best results from the pubic web. However, Google is about to get to know you on a much more personal level.

Check out this video from Google

On Tuesday, Google announced an update called Search plus Your World, which will forever change the way the search engine functions. “We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships,” says Google in a blog post early Tuesday morning. “Rich personal content is currently missing from your search experience.” Search plus Your World allows you to find your own personal content, people you know, and others whom you may want to connect with (or hide from) in your search results. In order for this to happen, Google’s bots are now going to incorporate data from social networks as well as the public Internet when delivering search results. Google’s new system has three new features: Personal Results, Profiles in Search, and People & Pages.

Personal Results
Personal Results allows you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts. Your search results will consist of both your own content or photos as well as those shared specifically with you. This information in your search results will only be visible to you. Therefore, you will not get the same search results as I do, even though we may search for the same query. For example, say you want to plan a trip and are looking for a good vacation spot. You can still search the web for plenty of travel ideas or you may want to learn from the experiences your friends have had on their vacations. Everyone knows that your friend’s suggestions are going to mean more to you than what any impersonal web site recommends, just as they would in real life. When you perform your search, you’ll be presented with oodles of relevant content. You can check out Google+ posts from your friends talking about an awesome trip they just took while taking a look at their photos in their Picasa album. You can read their comments, captions and share links with each other.

Profiles in Search
Go to Google.com and type in the name of your best friend. You’ll quickly find out that there are thousands of “Ben Smiths” in this world, which can make it hard to find the person you know, let alone get in contact with them. This is Google’s solution. Now when you begin to type in the first few letters of your friend’s name, Google will bring up a personalized profile prediction in autocomplete and in the results pages. If you click on the profile, you’ll find information on their Google+ profile along with search results that may be relevant to them. Now you can add them to your Google+ circles and see what they’ve been up to lately!

People & Pages
Here’s another way to reach out to people you may know or want to follow. If you search for a topic of interest, say baseball for example, you may see prominent people who frequently discuss baseball on Google+ along side your search results. You can then choose to connect with them on Google+ by striking up a conversation- how about those Phillies? It’s a cool way to discover entire communities related to the topics that interest you.

Of course with any new system, there are concerns. Many people are questioning the security of Search plus Your World as well as expressing privacy issues. However, Google has claimed to have taken all necessary precautions. Search via SSL will be turned on by default for Google+ signed in users and for those of you who don’t like this new system, no worries. Google is providing a toggle switch that essentially allows you to “unpersonalize” your search results. This means Google won’t display any results from your friends or your private information as well as no personalization of results from your Web History. If that’s not enough for you, Google is giving you three privacy settings to choose from for displaying your content- Public, Limited, or Only You.

Since the release on Tuesday, there has been some talk about how Google is trying to give lots of exposure to its social network Google+ in order to beat out Facebook and push content from other sites down in rankings. “The change will expose Google+ profiles, as well as posts and photographs uploaded to the network to hundreds of millions of search users whether or not they have Google+ accounts,” says Miguel Helft, a senior writer at Fortune.com. As a result, competitors are already assuming that Google is going to give preferential treatment to content from its own creations such as Google+, YouTube, etc. As for social media marketing agencies, this new system may bring about significant change in the way Google evaluates SEO and social media efforts.

One thing is for sure, Google has gained a better understanding of how to incorporate socially relevant data. As mentioned before, we are Google’s first priority and if something is going to enhance our search experience, you bet they’re going to give it a whirl. Google is currently only offering Search plus Your World to Google+ users who are signed in and are searching on www.google.com in English. As a Google user, it’s up to you whether or not to jump on the bandwagon, but according to Google, “Search is simply better with your world in it.”

Infographics: If You Build It, Will They Come?

An Exploration of the Purpose and Value of an Infographic

By Lorianna Sprague, SEO Specialist

Information graphics have been around far longer than search engine optimization, or even the web. Maps, graphs, charts and histograms are all examples of information conveyed in a graphical format – and early maps first showed up around 7500 BCE. So, needless to say, this is not a new concept – it is simply an old concept re-purposed for current times.

On one hand, an information graphic (infographic for short) is just what the name implies – a graphical representation of information. Generally this information is highly complex, and the use of graphics to convey that information allows viewers to assimilate the data on multiple levels – making it easier to digest and understand.

On the other hand, infographics have become a newly touted way to engage people online, with goals like increasing site traffic, increasing inbound site links, and increasing discussion of a brand through viral link-bait.

Historically speaking, infographics were used to convey data in societies where reading and writing was the domain of the wealthy and the clergy. Today, while basic literacy is more common, especially for internet users, infographics still help people understand data by using visuals to represent things such as relationships, changes in size or quantity; by using colors to show changes in temperature, volume, weight, and to express good/bad or positive/negative values, etc.

But what kind of data are we talking about, and how do we know that people want to assimilate it? Research is a first and vital step in the creation of any infographic. If someone already made an infographic on your topic of choice, then chances are high that no one is going to care about any infographic that you create unless it can do something new, insightful, and do it in a way that gets your audience past the initial “I’ve seen this before” reaction. Say you do your research, and no one has made an infographic about your particular topic yet – awesome. Now it’s time to figure out how big your audience is. If there are only 10 people who care about what you want to create, then word is not going to travel very far. An infographic needs an audience, and it has to fill a need/serve a purpose. But what elements make one infographic more successful than another? And, assuming you can get your infographic to go viral – what does that mean and what are you really getting as a result?

Why Some Perform Better than Others

I tried to compare infographics of similar topics to illustrate that it is not just the aesthetic-aspect of the data that drives its share-ability. The infographics that performed the worst tried to make interesting graphics out of topics like piracy and life insurance. Why didn’t this work? Was it because no one cares about piracy or life insurance? No. The first life insurance infographic was created by a Flickr user who appears to be searching for research opportunities. The data was pulled from 321 surveyed people, a response-volume that surprised the artist/creator behind the infographic, and seemed to make that individual think the infographic was worth creating. It used legos and displayed the data in visually semi-interesting ways, but there is no hook, and too much text. It’s hard to figure out the point of the infographic at a glance, and no easier once you read it.

How did this Life Insurance infographic do with links and social sharing?

• 17 links
• 2 Facebook shares

If an agency created this for a client, the resultant links and social validation would be an epic fail.

The other life insurance infographic approached its rather dry topic from an amusing perspective – Can You Afford to Die? Apparently some people found this entertaining and decided to share it with others by linking to it, or by sharing it on social media sites:

• 112 links
• 17 Facebook shares
• 6 Facebook likes

I would call this a good return on a client’s investment. Not every topic will go viral. This point is well illustrated by Mark from Distilled SEO in a post where he explores how many links an infographic should get. The gist? Of the 953 infographics posted by Mint.com in 2010, only about 1% exceeded 50 links. So, really amazing viral results are the exception – not the rule, no matter how amazing an infographic might be.

What Infographics Can Do that Link Building Cannot

Software Piracy

When a client buys link building hours, the links acquired in that block of time are it. They don’t spontaneously create new links on their own after creation. Something infographics have in common with social content, is that they have the potential to generate ongoing links. One of the infographics I found was about the history of software piracy, it used pirate-themes to help convey the data, and made it helpful, funny and interesting. When Starmedia promoted this infographic, they targeted the appropriate audience, and delivered it in the right medium for that audience’s consumption. This infographic didn’t attempt to point fingers or place blame for software piracy – it just gave data.

The resultant sharing took the infographic from 244 links on Starmedia’s site to a total of:

• 1318 links
• 81 Facebook shares
• 124 Facebook likes
• 107 Tweets
• 104 G+

A Snapshot of the Effects of Social Sharing

This is the power of engaging real human beings and giving them something they want, need or will enjoy. Being able to deliver means understanding your audience.

A New Twist: The Infographic-Article Power Combo

Most infographics are part of a blog post that includes thoughts, or observations or the like in regard to the infographic. Some of them don’t even have this much. Interestingly enough, the two most successful infographics in the bunch were coupled with well-written articles – the articles explained, and further-fleshed-out aspects of the infographic that required more explanation. The sharing of these articles and infographics far surpassed any of the others. One of the things we keep hearing about content generation is that we need to give people something they want, something informative (and humorous) if we want it to matter. That is what these articles do. They have taken the infographics from being something you look at once to something that is of real value, that you will go back to again and again. If it’s that useful, don’t you think people will want to talk about it? I, personally, found this super helpful. Now I can hang the infographics up, and use them for at-a-glance reference. I. Love. It.

Infographic Social, SEO and Link Building Value

This blog post was spawned from an effort to answer the question, “What are the SEO/Social Media/Link Building values of infographics?” Based on the results, there are some commonalities among the ones that did well versus the ones that did poorly. Of the twenty infographics, one, the n00b Guide to Online Marketing, which was published by Unbounce.com in February of 2011, took the cake for the return-on-time-spent investment. That infographic alone generated upwards of 2000 links, 268 Facebook shares, 451 Facebook Likes, and 1311 Tweets. Those results are amazing!

But the infographic was not published alone, it was the icing to a very long online marketing guide-YouMoz post by Oli Gardner (of Unbounce.com), which generated:

• roughly 4000 links
• 421 Facebook shares
• 313 Facebook likes
• 1722 Tweets
  

  N00b Guide to Online Marketing

All of which pointed people back to the infographic itself and the Unbounce website. Genius. For me, personally, to generate 6000+ links it would take upwards of 600 hours. That does not include hours spent to increase social media interactions and engagement. Not to mention, the social validation aspect of this scenario and its impact on natural SEO (we already know that Google and Bing take social links into account in their algorithms):

• Brand Awareness – links created naturally by people who were engaged with your company = more value than links designed for Google’s spiders
• Customer Reach – these people know your name, your company, and respect what you have created enough to pass it on to their followers and to follow you
• Customer Acquisition – each of these people has now become a prospect, or an industry peer who respects your knowledge and shares it!
• Improved SEO – Social links improve search rankings
• Take away? Real Human Value

Is this what we can all expect when we sit down to think of the next amazing Chicken Production Equipment infographic for a client? Uh, probably not – but who knows! These are the averages for the infographics analyzed – the first group was analyzed without the data from the two infographics from Unbounce, which got a few thousand links a piece, and without the data for the “life” of the History of Software Piracy infographic, which accumulated over 1300 links through sharing and re-sharing:

Average w/o Unbounce and Piracy “History”

Infographic-Only Analysis

• 70 links
• 53 Facebook shares
• 8 Facebook likes
• 35 Tweets
• 3 G+

Analysis of All 20 Infographics

Average of all 20 Infographics

• 588 links
• 87 Facebook shares
• 53 Facebook likes
• 221 Tweets
• 8 G+

But these are averages – some of the infographics pulled in 100+ links or 1000+ links and some pulled in less than 20. Now, you should probably take into consideration that some of the infographics analyzed were created two or three years ago, and don’t appear to have been promoted at all following their creation.

What this means in terms of value: Considering a successful infographic can be worth hundreds of hours of link building AND social media, the links are generated by a highly-targeted audience of warm leads at worst, and the social validation is going to increase search rankings? Priceless.

How Albright College Failed Social Media 101!

Being a recent graduate of Albright college I was really excited to see that the college has decided to implement a social media strategy to help connect current, past and future students together. Albright Faces is a social network (powered by Ning) which carries all the same standard functionality that you’ll find in any store bought social networking software like phpfox, or the like. The social network has been up for a while with heavy promotion from the college but doesn’t seem to grow like you think it would. It was only after I added my profile that I found out why.

I signed up with my student name and information and quickly built a profile with my background, interests, academic track and employer. Under the blog section I linked to my webtalent blog. I also uploaded an introductory video that WebTalent produced introducing me and what I do at WebTalent. I even contributed to the blog community by writing about how my college degree from Albright has helped me grow my company. It wasn’t self serving and thought it to be more inspirational that anything else. With the profile completed (which took a couple hours to do) I logged out. Within 24 hours I received notice that I had been suspended from the community.

This is one of the basic premises for building a successful engaging community. You dont police, you let the community police themselves. Now obviously there are limits but mentioning a company name on the profile should be one of them. Social media censorship is common is countries like China, Iran where freedom of speech is restrictive. You wouldn’t think you’d find those types of restrictions on a university social networking site.

Overall, beyond me getting the boot from the Albright College social networking site there is the greater question here; When does censoring the social web become a danger to growth? Where is the line? Is it mentioning that you work for an employer, is it using profanity? Where does it end and what effect does it have on the ability to grow a vibrant social community? I believe you do need to have rules but my personal belief is that Albright has gone to far and has ruled their social network with an iron fist. New to social media, Albright still has a lot to learn!

Coca-Cola Creates Corporate Social Media Department

Coke is already a serious player in the Social Media Game. As of March 2009 Coke has the second most popular page on Facebook. The fan base of over 3,000,000 Facebook users is second only to that of Obama’s page. Coke has been recognized time and time again for choosing social media marketing (voice of the people) to corporate bureaucracy and outdated traditional marketing efforts. Today Coke has gone one step further and solidified its commitment to social engagement.

Coke has open an “Office of Digital Communications and Social Media” Department. This new division will be part of the PR department and utilize resources from Coke’s traditional marketing departments, as well as legal, IT and Consumer Behavior. A recent spokesperson for Coke commented on the importance of directly engaging their target market through social channels and attributes the brand’s success to its strong social marketing presence.

With all eyes on Coca-Cola and the effects of this new department, Coke will have an opportunity to change the way companies market their products. Being an international leading in marketing i’m sure were going to see a long effect of other companies having a demand to build their brand into the social landscape and cultivate similar brand evangelists like Coke had done.

Social Media Statistics: Fad Or Here To Stay?

About 6 years ago I was involved in a large scale social start-up which was focusing on developing social communities around very targeted niche markets. We were constantly facing opposition from both investors and potential advertisers who would tell us that social media is a fad that would leave just as quickly as it came. Half a decade later this so called “fad” is still around and growing at a tremendous rate. Companies both large and small are beginning to see the benefits of engaging with your market and becoming a part of their daily lives.

Although we know that social media marketing was here to stay and would become a integral part of a company’s marketing mix a recent report from equation research confirmed (yet again) the obvious; social media is here to stay.

This small survey targeted 1,450 marketers and asked them a variety of questions related to thier online and offline marketing methods. When asked about social media, the majority of companies (almost two thirds) were marketing their brands on Facebook and Twitter. They are also reaching customers their usage of videos and blogs.

Although traditional media was still the largest part of the advertising mix, digital media (specifically SEM and social media) now accounts for over 1/3 of all ad spend. The more shocking statistics is that this number is up almost 40% for smaller companies. Social media has leveled the playing field and million dollars ad campaigns have given way to creative social endeavors that have went viral.

Moving forward the report experts to see a greater shift in digital advertising. this includes social media (largest suspected increase), online advertising, search engine marketing and email marketing. Companies who are still skeptical need to realize that the train is leaving the station and they better jump on board.

What is Twitter?

Business owners in Reading, Pennsylvania are interested in Twitter. How do I know? Because it comes up in almost every conversation I have regarding internet marketing. People want to know what the hype is all about. More importantly, they want to know if they can use Twitter for their business.

So what is Twitter? Twitter is considered a micro-blogging platform. What’s the difference between a regular blog and a micro-blog? Regular blogs can include many words and pictures. The blog you are reading right now is an example of a regular blog. Micro-blogs (such as Twitter) only allow users to write 140 characters in a post.

Twitter in Plain English Video

At first glance it might appear that Twitter is a complete waste of time. I mean really… why would you care if someone is “picking up dry cleaning” or “forgot how much they loved pickles?” It’s the way people are using Twitter that is changing the landscape of social media marketing on the web. Here are a few ways that smart marketers are using Twitter to their advantage:

- Research: Find out what people are saying about your product or service. Businesses are asking for feedback getting quick responses through Twitter.

- Job Searching: Businesses are posting jobs on Twitter, people are responding.

- Announcing New Products or Services: Yet another way to let people know you have something new to offer.

- Posting Industry Related Articles or Links: Twitter is a great place to find interesting articles and links related to your industry. Posting articles and links helps solidify your role as an industry professional.

- Live Updates on Events or Conferences – If you run large events or conferences, you can use Twitter to post last minute updates and breaking news.

On a personal level, people are using Twitter to stay connected with friends and family. Parents use Twitter to keep updated when their kids are on vacation or a school trip. Press reporters in the Middle East are using Twitter to stay alive. There are stories of press reporters being taken hostage and their only form of contact to their friends and family was a twitter post! And it worked. Friends and family contacted government authorities to inform them their friend was taken hostage. Very cool!

Twitter Links

http://www.livingstonbuzz.com/2009/03/05/a-twitter-use-primer/ – Explanation of Twitter and how businesses are using it.

http://www.toprankblog.com/2007/11/twitter-guide/ – Different ways to use Twitter.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/164290/nine_twitter_tips_for_business.html – Tips for using Twitter