Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest – the number of social media networks continues to increase. While it may be a good idea to utilize these networks in your marketing campaign, it can be a daunting task to manage several social media accounts. This is especially true for smaller companies who are unable to find the time to do it themselves or the resources to hire an employee devoted to social media management.

However, there are ways to use your time and efforts more efficiently. Here are three tips that we have found useful in managing client social media campaigns as well as our own.

1.       Keep Track of Your Data

Excel is your friend. Utilize a simple spreadsheet to keep up with your account statistics, and set aside a couple of minutes to update the document. This allows you to keep up-to-date with trends in your accounts and make changes if you notice that the trends are heading downward.

 2.       Have a Place to Store Ideas

In addition to having an organized way to keep track of your account statistics, it is helpful to have an organized method of storing content for potential posts, as well as drafts of the posts themselves. Since you do not want to publish several posts at once (which risks annoying your audience), it helps to have a place that you can store items you want to share. Then, when you need content, you can reference this list.

Services such as Evernote or Delicious are free tools that you can integrate into your browser, allowing you to easily bookmark web content to store for later use. Buffer, another online service, allows you to keep a bank of tweets which the service automatically sends out throughout the day at times you specify.

Another simple way to store ideas is in a document in Word or Excel. By creating a simple table, such as the one below, you can easily draft several posts in advance and develop a schedule of when they will be sent. A useful tip is to use the “LEN=” function in Excel to count the number of characters in your drafted tweets. This ensures that you do not go over the 140 character limit (make sure that you leave room for the characters in your link).

3.       Give Yourself Time to Find New Content

With the vast amount of information available, it can seem overwhelming to try and find content relevant to your audience. Set aside a few minutes each day to browse applicable Twitter and Facebook feeds. These are great places to find content that you can use, and you can see any trending topics that may be relevant to your organization. Free services such as Hootsuite or Tweetdeck allows you to easily see multiple streams at once, while also allowing you to publish and schedule this content on your various networks.

Another easy way to find content is by subscribing to industry email newsletters or blog RSS feeds. Designating a folder in your inbox to keep them all allows you to quickly browse through when you need something to post about. A few of our favorite marketing e-newsletters and blogs here at Launch include MarketingProfs, Marketo and PPC Hero.

Social media management can become very time-consuming. However, utilizing these tips and finding a system that works best for you will enable you to make better use of your time (and money). This way, you can focus on more strategic marketing tasks.

Need help with your social media strategy? Contact Launch today, and be sure to follow us on Twitter or like us on Facebook for more B2B marketing best practices.

What is a Meme?

Memes are simple ideas that spread quickly through the internet. They typically take the form of videos or photos. Here are a couple of popular memes:

Grumpy Cat                                                              Success Kid
                    

 Double Rainbow

Memes and Marketing

While memes are typically thought of as a funny image to share with friends, they can also be utilized as part of a marketing plan to generate buzz and word of mouth. They are a great way to reach an audience, especially through social media. The light-heartedness and easy sharability of these images increase their likelihood of going viral. This is especially useful on Facebook, as this helps to improve your page’s Edgerank, increasing the organic reach of your posts.

Memes can also be a useful way to generate leads. One method for generating leads from memes is by using them to drive traffic to a landing page featuring a valuable and relevant resource, such as a white paper or an eBook, behind a simple, short form.

As with all other marketing tactics, it is a best practice to continuously test in order to derive the greatest results from a meme campaign. We have found that memes related to popular culture posted around lunchtime or after 5:00pm have the highest engagement. While this is true for our page, it may not be true for yours. Test different calls-to-actions, formats and posting times to find the best combination for your Facebook page.

Marketo does a great job of this on their Facebook page:

Launch’s B2B Marketing Memes

We recently created a series of memes focused on B2B marketing and lead generation. Here are a few examples:

As discussed above, we always link the memes to a relevant piece of content, in order to use the memes to drive traffic to our website.

How can you use memes in your company’s marketing campaigns? Be sure to follow us on Twitter or like us on Facebook for more B2B marketing best practices.

While search engines remain tight-lipped as to the exact influence social media has on their site rankings, it has become apparent that social media has at least some influence on the way their search listings are ranked.

A study by SearchMetrics found that there was a correlation between the amount of shares a page has received on social media and its ranking on search engines. While these are not necessarily direct influencers of search engine rankings, it does show that there is at least some correlation between them.

 Image via SearchMetrics

Facebook

Facebook’s influence on search engine results is most evident in Bing. Due to a recent partnership, Bing search results now include content from a user’s Facebook friends (if they are currently signed into Facebook.)

Image via Hubspot

Twitter

Google admitted to using  a Twitter user’s authority as a metric to determine their level of influence, which in turn influences the ranking of pages that they tweet about. The level of influence that this actually has on search engine rankings remains unclear, but it is important to keep it in mind when developing a social media or SEO strategy.

Google+

Similar to Bing’s integration with Facebook, if you are signed into your Google account, you will receive personalized results based on the recommendations of those in your Google+ circles. Additionally, Google now shows the Google + account information for content creators who link their Google+ profile to the “author” HTML tag.

Google also uses author rank, an algorithm that takes into account several factors from the author’s Google+ account information, such as the number of relevant followers and the influence of those followers, to determine how trustworthy the source is (a factor in their search result ranking.)

YouTube

By optimizing the title and description of your videos hosted on YouTube, you increase the likelihood of them showing up in the search results for relevant terms on both YouTube and search engines.

Pinterest

Now generating more traffic than Yahoo! search (the fourth highest traffic source behind Google, direct and Facebook), Pinterest has emerged as a popular platform for content sharing and marketers are taking notice.

With Pinterest pins and boards now showing up in search results, it is a wise strategy to optimize the descriptions in your Pinterest account to target relevant keywords. For example, Hubspot’s Marketing Infographics Pinterest board (with over 85 pins) is the top result in Google for the search term “marketing infographics”.

Backlinks

An indirect way that social media and SEO is involved is through content creation. Posting your original content on your social media pages increases its reach, thus increasing the likelihood that someone will find that content and link to it from their website, creating valuable backlinks, which are integral elements of the search engine ranking equation.

To prove this, Dan Zarrella of Hubspot analyzed data from over 25,000 URLs that had been shared on various social media platforms. He found that on all three platforms that he analyzed, the more times a URL was shared, the more inbound links were generated for that URL. As you can see below, LinkedIn had the highest correlation, but Twitter and Facebook both drove the creation of inbound links. We highly recommend reading the full study, as his analysis provides many insights that marketers interested in SEO performance will find useful.

Images via SEOmoz

Overall, social media serves to broaden the reach of your content, which helps to improve SEO through the creation of backlinks on other websites. The more relevant, quality sites that link to your content, the more authority the search engines will give to your website, increasing the position of your website in search results.

While the evidence points to social media activity having at least some influence on search engine rankings, it is important to keep in mind that this is not a “magic bullet.” Simply tweeting a blog post multiple times won’t rank you higher on Bing or Google. An integrated approach to SEO and content marketing is key to successful placements in search engine rankings.

Do you need help with your social media or SEO campaigns? Contact Launch today! And be sure to like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for B2B marketing tips and tricks.

We recently began a Facebook ad campaign for Launch’s Facebook page and thought it would be helpful to share some of the insights we have gained so far. We’ve found that there are four essential aspects of a Facebook ad campaign, and that utilizing all of them are critical for success.

1. Ad Targeting

Facebook offers a wide variety of targeting options. Use several of these together to develop a target audience that is both highly targeted but still large enough to make an impact. Facebook recommends a target audience size of roughly 20,000 people as a minimum.

Categories available for targeting include location, age, gender, interests and advanced options such as education level and relationship status.

2. Ad Creative

There are 2 parts of an ad, the image and the copy. There are several best practices to follow for each.

Image

Photos of people tend to be successful, especially close-up shots. We used this image, which fit with our two target audiences of marketing professionals and entrepreneurs:

Choose photos or graphics with colors that will jump out of the screen. Avoid blue-tones images, as the Facebook interface is composed mainly of blue. One of the images that we found to be successful was this lemon picture:

Copy

Use a strong call-to-action.
Catch their attention by thinking outside the box.

3. A/B Testing

Set up A/B testing to determine the best copy, image and targeting. Continue to refine these aspects until you have found a “sweet spot” that garners you the best results based on your campaign’s goals.

4. Facebook Page Content

As important as the previous three aspects of Facebook ads are, it is perhaps more important to make sure that your Facebook page is updated, as you don’t want visitors to click on your ad only to see that you haven’t updated your page in six days. So before you begin an ad campaign, you may want to work on building your page.

Need social media help? Contact Launch today. Be sure to follow us on Twitter or like us on Facebook for the latest B2B marketing tips and tricks!