It’s that time of year again! New Year’s resolutions aren’t just for the home – they can be a great motivational tool in the office as well. The beginning of January is the perfect time to make a fresh start with your digital marketing campaign, so here are a few ideas to get you started.

Give your website a makeover

Your website is the online shop front for your business, so it’s important to keep it looking fresh, innovative and up to date. 2012 was the year that mobile search took off, so your first port of call should be to make sure your site is equally appealing on all platforms (check out our blog piece about responsive web design to find out more!) Even if you had your website redesigned recently, there are still ways that you can improve it – for instance, you could consider adding a blog or Twitter feed to keep the page active and interesting.

Revamp your social media

If your Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn profile has looked the same for months on end, why not make a change? Something as simple as a new cover photo or sparky new ‘About’ section could give you the edge over competitors who leave their pages static. Whilst you’re at it, why not try a new social media site? Relative newcomers such as Pinterest and Instagram could have a big impact on the visual aspect of your marketing strategy – just make sure you set aside enough time to update them frequently.

Make a schedule

Speaking of organising your time, there’s no better way to keep on top of your updates than with a clear cut content schedule. Plan when you’re going to post social media statuses, tweets, blog articles etc and find a way to make it happen alongside your daily workload. Social signals are becoming increasingly important for SEO as well as brand awareness, so investing a small amount of time in your planning could lead to big rewards as the year goes on.

Forget the days when it was simply a choice between Facebook and Twitter – there are now hundreds of social media platforms on this internet for your business to use and interact with.

Many companies have been using social media as part of their digital marketing strategy for quite some time, but if you’re new to the concept, you may need some advice in order to decide which platform is best suited to the needs of you and your business.

Ultimately, it is advisable to have a multitude of social media platforms underway to meet your customers’ numerous and diverse needs, but if you want to start small and focus on just one to begin with, this guide should help.

Facebook

Facebook is the biggest social network on the web, with more than 800 million active users worldwide. It’s a great all-rounder which allows you to share images, text and video content to fans of your page as often as you like.

Twitter

If you’re likely to want to post several updates a day, without a major focus on visual content, Twitter is the network for your company. Just bear in mind you’ll only have 140 characters to use to get your message across!

LinkedIn

LinkedIn provides a great opportunity to build up your business contacts. If you’re likely to be writing and posting articles or want to get involved in business forums and discussions, this could be the perfect network for you to use.

Pinterest

Pinterest is all about images, so if your company is likely to post a lot of visual content, this could be your ideal choice. It’s ideal for an e-commerce company with plenty of products to showcase!

Like it or not, social media marketing is becoming an increasingly important part of an overall digital strategy – but it’s not always easy to keep track of all of your channels simultaneously. Social media dashboards can help you to schedule your posts and tweets in advance, to manage your time more effectively. Here is our pick of some of the best.

SproutSocial

SproutSocial is simple, straightforward, and easy to use. It allows you to post from a number of popular social media platforms, and measure the effectiveness of your campaign in terms of engagement and growth. There’s even a mobile app to give you even greater flexibility.

Spredfast

Spredfast is a great choice for social marketing teams, as it allows multiple users to access channels and assign tasks to each other as necessary. They pride themselves on being the best choice for business users – in their own words, “we check all the boxes of what big brands need” – and with facilities ranging from analytics to daily engagement, it seems that they deliver.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite allows you to post from all of the regular platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but also includes more diverse sites like Japanese social network Mixi, from a sophisticated, streamlined centre. Their website’s ‘Hoo’s Using Hootsuite’ section boasts some big names, from McDonalds to Sony. With such high profile advocates already on board, it could be worth investigating Hootsuite for your social media needs too.

Technology is evolving rapidly and has changed the way that people interact. Nowadays many customers prefer to speak to businesses online than over the phone or in person. It is therefore important to build a strong online presence, so your customers know that you are available, likely to respond, and eager to hear their thoughts.

Establish the appropriate platform

Businesses today are expected to have a profile on almost every social media site. From Linkedin to Facebook, Twitter to Pinterest, customers are getting involved in social networks, and are likely to respond if you do too. However it is important to determine the appropriate platform for your audience – if it’s a brief, fun update, 140 characters on Twitter may be enough, but for more extended engagement you may want to consider platforms which allow you to express yourself more coherently.

Ask open ended questions

Don’t just tweet/blog/post at your followers – ask them for their opinion. This is one of the key ways to engage people in your online conversations, and great for customer service. Reply to as many people as you can and assure them that you have taken on board their feedback. This will help you to develop a positive reputation, and a repertoire with your consumers.

Include a call to action

Although being too ‘salesy’ in your social media posts can be somewhat off-putting, it doesn’t hurt to include a call to action at the end of a relevant piece. If you’re discussing an issue or topic in your particular industry, it’s important for the consumer to know that you can offer further insight and advice.

The common perception of LinkedIn’s website is that it is simply an online repository for people’s CVs that can help link job hunters with potential employers. However, companies who view the site merely as a tool for recruitment are definitely missing out. Over the past couple of years, it has vastly increased the available features, many of which provide excellent benefits for businesses.

The first essential for companies wanting to get the most out of using LinkedIn is to register a company profile. A company can use its profile to list all their services and products, providing the opportunity to promote itself within the LinkedIn network.

Profiles should be written with essential keywords in mind and always provide a link back to the company’s own website, which is valuable for SEO. It is possible to set up different pages for separate services to further increase visibility and the potential for more links. Company blogs can also be fed directly onto to a LinkedIn profile, thereby increasing the potential audience for content output.

Another excellent opportunity LinkedIn offers is the chance to network within groups. There are thousands of groups, many of which are extremely active in linking professionals within and across different industries. Groups offer the chance to discuss industry issues, find new suppliers and also to canvas for new customers. Caution needs to be exercised when looking to generate business through the group function as too bullish a sales approach is likely to have a negative impact; nevertheless correctly used LinkedIn can be a treasure trove of new business leads.

The LinkedIn Questions and Answers section is another feature that businesses can utilise. Not only can a company post a question on an issue on which they are looking for clarity, for example a legal or accounting query, they can also search questions to answer. Using this feature, a company can demonstrate specialist knowledge and potentially link up with new clients.

Whether your business be web design or washing LinkedIn can be a valuable resource.

Pinterest is a social media site that operates as an online pin board for organising and sharing image content. It is understandable that many will lift their eyes and groan about yet another social media network where companies should have a presence, after all social media is a time consuming task. However recent figures produced by Shareaholic suggest that Pinterest is rapidly growing as a means to effectively deliver website traffic.

In January, 3.6% of all referral traffic measured by Shareaholic came from Pinterest. This may seem  to be a fairly inconsequential amount, but in comparison to other better known social media networks it actually fares rather well.

Pinterest was only marginally behind Twitter (3.61%) and considerably ahead of YouTube, Google Plus, and LinkedIn for referral traffic generated. The significance of the figure is considerably enhanced when the number of active Pinterest users is taken into account; the site is dwarfed by those other networks in terms of size but has a comparable or better click through rate.

Pinterest is ideal for companies directly selling products to consumers. The company can ‘pin’ its products to boards to share with other users. It is also possible to create different boards to group similar types of products or to categorise boards by market; children, teens and so on.  It can also help a company’s search engine optimisation efforts by providing high quality links back to a website.

There are many social media options for companies to use for marketing and it is virtually impossible to maintain an effective presence over them all. However, Pinterest with its high referral rate may be worth taking a look at.

Last week Facebook, the giant of social media, announced an initial public offering  (IPO) in which the company hopes to raise a massive $5 billion.

It is not the first time a big social network has gone public; LinkedIn launched a share offering last May, but the $350 million that sale raised will look like pocket change compared to the cash that will pour into Facebook’s coffers.

This increase in Facebook’s financial resources is certain to underline the company’s dominance, not just as a social network for individuals, but also as a platform where businesses will have to be represented. This fact is underlined by the founder and CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerburg who, in an open letter to accompany the IPO, wrote that the company was giving people the power to ‘transform many of our core institutions and industries’.

Company pages are already well established on Facebook but they are likely to increasingly become a necessity in the future, particularly for companies offering consumer goods and services.  In an increasingly social world, it will no longer be possible for companies who want to succeed to hide behind an anonymous contact form on a website.

The public are likely to progressively demand direct interaction that occurs in the public arena. For many companies this may be a frightening prospect, but for the ones that place an emphasis on quality and good service it provides an opportunity to shine.

The social future of business offers both risks and rewards. The first step is for companies that want to avoid the pitfalls and take advantage of the opportunities that social media can deliver is to have a true understanding of how social media works, a subject that is comprehensively covered in our workshops.

Businesses in the UK are falling behind their international counterparts when it comes to making use of social media.

According to a new research report from KMPG, the global professional services firm, organisations in China, India and Brazil are 20 to 30% more likely to use social media than those in Europe and the other main developed countries.

The statistics are similarly different in terms of managers’ use of social media sites.

In the UK, a total of 80% of managers use social media sites such as LinkedIn several times a week. The countries generally acknowledged as emerging markets – China and Brazil – beat this figure hands down.  In China, a massive 98% of managers use social media sites, compared with a similar figure of 95% in Brazil.

Tudor Aw, KPMG’s head of technology for Europe, said: “The emerging markets seem to be quickly finding that social networks offer a relatively low cost opportunity to leapfrog the competition in developed markets.”

However, the survey did find that 70% of companies across the world see social media as a viable and effective mechanism for business.

The report also found that organisations that attempt to block their employees’ access to social networking sites will ultimately lose the fight.

Around a third of employees in companies with blocked access admitted to using social media sites at the office, sometimes tampering with their work devices in order to do so.

Although law firms are starting to use social media, many of them are reticent to engage further with it.

According to a new report from LexisNexis entitled Global Social Media Check-up: A Global Audit of Law Firm Engagement in Social Media Methods, many firms are signed up to sites like LinkedIn but do not engage further with them after setting up a page.

In total, 85 of the 110 global law firms surveyed by LexisNexis said that they favoured LinkedIn over any other social media site.

However, many of those firms have just registered a page for their company, rather than actively engaging with other users. The report says that this is a missed opportunity, as law firms could be using LinkedIn to connect with clients, recruit for staff and manage their reputation online.

The highest number of law firms using social media are in North America, whilst many law firms in Western Europe are also getting on board with it. However, there is a greater level of engagement in the UK and Holland than in Switzerland, France and Russia.

One of the report’s authors stated: “Social networking was once thought to be just for socialising – for sharing your social life with your friends and for making new ones — but it has gone far beyond that.

“With some notable exceptions, now is the time for law firms to adapt their business models and experiment with social media as part of their client acquisition and retention programmes, or risk being left behind.”

Facebook is the most popular social media site amongst SMEs wanting to promote themselves online.

According to a new survey of 500 SMEs, more than a quarter of SMEs use the site on a regular basis as part of their marketing campaigns.
YouGov’s SME Omnibus survey shows that LinkedIn, the professional social media website, and microblogging site Twitter, are also popular with the UK’s SMEs. Exactly a quarter (25%) of respondents use LinkedIn for promotional purposes, while just less than that (21%) use Twitter.

YouTube fared less well, with only 10% of those surveyed using it to help them promote their goods or services.

Somewhat alarmingly, more than half of respondents said that they never use social media to promote their company. Furthermore, the usage of social media seems to be split geographically. Just under 40% of businesses in the east of England never use social media, compared with a huge 64% of businesses in the north.

Meanwhile, blogging also seems to be a source of confusion. Although 80% of respondents said that they thought blogging was successful in terms of achieving publicity, only 10% of businesses use a blog to help them generate PR.

Just under 70% of SMEs who use social media say that they do so to promote their products and services, whilst 57% do so to promote their brand. Meanwhile, 21% of SMEs use social media to share discounts and promotional offers with their customers.