8 Social Media Hacks to Increase Customer Retention

8 Social Media Hacks to Increase Customer Retention written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing

photo credit: flickr and facebook via photopin (license)

Many times when businesses talk social media, they’re only talking about social media marketing. By neglecting the other components of social media and focusing only on marketing, businesses aren’t realizing the full potential social media has to offer their business in terms of building long-term relationships with their customers. In this blog, I want to talk about 8 social media hacks to help your business increase customer retention and loyalty.

Be Easy To Find

Having a consistent username across all social platforms makes it easier for your customers to quickly find your business when and where they need you. Tools like Namech_k let you easily check your username availability across hundreds of online networks.

Create of List of Top Brand Ambassadors

Just as important as engaging with industry influencers is making a list of your top brand ambassadors. Engage with them daily about their every day lives, interests and hobbies. I’ve developed some of my most loyal customers as a result of knowing their favorite sports teams, music, food, and tv shows and proactively tweeting them about these things.

Make Use of Alerts and Listening Tools

Google Alerts, Hootsuite, and Topsy are all great examples of social media listening tools which provide immediate notifications to brand mentions and key phrases. By monitoring phrases beyond just your brand name, for example monitoring a key phrase within 5 miles of your business, you can ensure you’re always engaging in the right conversations.

Schedule (Some of) Your Posts

A fully automated social media strategy is not a social media strategy. But, scheduling some of your posts is an effective way to stay productive while consistently posting to your social networks. Consider a service like Buffer which adds an extension to your browser and automatically schedules any content you want to share at predetermined times.

Develop Platform Specific Content

With the growth of all-in-one social media posting platforms like Hootsuite, we’ve seen an increase in businesses posting the exact same content across all platforms at the same time. The psychology of a user on Twitter and the content they are hoping to discover is far different than what they expect on Facebook. Give customers a reason to follow all of your networks by providing platform exclusive content and promotions. The more places you can reach them, the more likely they are to build a long-term relationship with your business.

Engage In Real Time

More and more customers are turning to social media for customer service related questions as it’s a more immediate and public channel than calling an 800 number. Having a designated team that’s equally attentive to customer praise and frustration in a social context is key to retaining customers and addressing their needs as they happen. Response time can be the difference between a ranting customer and raving one.

Pay Attention to Your Tone

Todays consumers are in-tune to the social nuances of how businesses communicate online. Pay attention to how your target audience engages on each specific platform and adopt a tone that relates to your audience while still reflecting your overall brand positioning.

Create a List of Influencers

Make a list of the top 10 or 20 people in your industry that you want to engage with on social media – people who are strangers to you and your business. Spend at least 15 minutes per day engaging with some of this list in a non-spammy way. Contribute to the discussion they’re having and eventually they’ll start to recognize you and your business lending more social proof to your service or product.

Shifting The Perspective on Social Media

Next time your boss, co-worker, or client brings up their social media marketing strategy force them to think outside of the box. Social media marketing needs to expand beyond “marketing” and take into consideration the customer experience at all of the points where consumers are using these social platforms to experience the product, create and share their stories about that experience with others. Having a social media strategy that goes beyond just marketing helps businesses break the chains of needing high cost paid media placements by building long-term, organic relationships within their target audience.

Dallas McLaughlin is a Digital Marketing Specialist at The James Agency, a full-service advertising agency in Phoenix, Arizona. He blogs frequently at DallasMcLaughlin.com about Search Engine Optimization, Pay-Per-Click, and Social Media Marketing trends. If you have any questions, you can tweet him directly at @BossDJay.

7 Domain Name Considerations

1. Size Matters Generally, the shorter your domain name, the better. That’s because it’s easier for people to remember and type in a shorter domain than a longer one. Consider the above example, Pets.com is better than something like PetsPetEmporiumAndPuppyStore.com. […]

Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog

7 Domain Name Considerations

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Written by Sameer Panjwani, Mondovo

The post 7 Domain Name Considerations appeared first on Search Engine People Blog.

Interested In Knowing How To Build A Solar Panel?

If swithering about the opportunity to discover how to build a solar panel, but worry that you may not have the necessary skills, as long as you can understand and follow the basic instructions in carpentry, it is actually quite simple. And as for the necessary materials, you can easily shop at home improvement and on various websites.

For starters, the first task for you to do is calculate the number of solar panels that will be needed to meet the requirement of energy. As a guide, 80 solar cells typically have the capacity to produce 100 watts of electrical power. Before the placement of cells, be sure to use the voltmeter to test individually to determine the power produced each. It is important to determine the total amount of energy needed and to design a series of solar panels to better meet that requirement. If you find that this is an area that does not get much direct sunlight, the solution is to use more panels or simply accept less capacity.

While rectangular is the most popular form of panel used this does not mean that you need to ridgedly a common understanding. If the area to be used is not appropriate to use rectangular panels, so feel free to design the shape of the panel that will take the circumstances you are facing. Do not limit your use of the solar panel is only for electricity supply of a house. What would you consider creating a garden shed for the garden or illuminate?

What are the materials needed for how to build a solar panel? First, you get some plywood panels that form the basis of solar panel and a sheet of plexiglass and some glass cutters. The following is the number of solar cells that will be needed to provide the required amount of electricity as well as a soldering iron, wire cutters. The use of silicone sealant is to ensure the panel is sealed to the edge of the wood is done with UV protective varnish.

Now that the solar panel is completed, a voltmeter is claimed to measure the amount of electricity generated and also need a diode which is a one-way valve for transmitting power to battery power when electricity is generated ensuring it does not then you can not move back out of it. It also requires an inverter to change the DC power to AC appliances that require it.

These are all basic materials you need to learn how to build a solar panel. Do not be discouraged, it seems a little too technical at first because by simply following the step by step that anyone can learn and use these skills to save money instructions by not having to buy a ready solar panel for use more energy bills reduced. If a surplus of electricity then there’s the option to be injected into the national grid and therefore the panels will generate money for you.

Saving Energy With Solar Panels

The sun is here for 5 billion years. Electricity, as we now know, will occur the way for the coming years. So what should we do in this situation? Obviously, the use of solar energy to produce cheap, green electricity.

Solar panels are also known as photovoltaic cells that capture the sun’s energy and convert it into electricity. The good thing about these cells is that they need direct sunlight to work. You probably know that these toys, powered by solar energy, is distributed at home if you have kids toys. Even if they see no direct sunlight, which still work.

Inside a house, solar panels can be connected to your devices to save energy if these devices not only work on the energy provided by the sun. Obviously, this means reducing electricity bills. Over time, you can forget about your electricity supplier and use only the benefits of renewable energy.

Solar panels produce direct energy, which should be converted into alternative energy to work properly with the devices. Fortunately, there is an investor who can use.

Solar energy is green energy is not cheap, but no source of green energy is cheap nowadays. In fact, compared to other renewable energy sources, solar energy is the cheapest. We can all enjoy the benefits of the sun, all have access. We can not say the same for green energy supplied by the seas and oceans, for example; not everyone lives in a village near a water source.

Another disadvantage could be that at first you will have to do some work to install these solar panels, resulting in a higher energy consumption. But this is only temporary; Soon you will be able to use the energy provided by the brightest star of all, the sun – and for free.

In the UK, a solar energy system uses 3 kWp and costs around 10,000 pounds. This system generates over 2,500 KW / h of electricity per year. This is the amount of electricity to a household. For 2,500 KW / h, the system generates, it also saves more than a tone of carbon dioxide per year.

Given all the advantages, drawbacks are minor initial fairly insignificant, right?

Twitter Trending Topics Predict Future Breakout Search Trends

Americans increasingly get their information from social media. According to a recent 2015 Pew study, 63% of users reported getting their news from Twitter and Facebook. Regardless of whether something important is happening in the world or our favorite celebrity couple is breaking up, we’re hearing about it first on social media, long before we turn to search engines like Google to give us more detail. 

Consider this past month. In the early morning hours of December 10, the popular podcast “Serial” announced its second season. People have been dying (pun intended) for this news for months and rushed to Twitter. The hashtag #Serial quickly became popular as dedicated fans tweeted the news of the new season and within the hour, it was the #1 trending topic on Twitter.

But that’s not where the story ends for Serial. Although the #Serial hashtag was trending across the US by 7am EST, search traffic was just beginning to rise for the term “Serial” on Google. By the time it was trending on Twitter, Google Trends shows that searches for “Serial” had increased by 50%. But an hour later at 8am, searches for the term were twice as popular as they were previously and becoming increasingly popular. Searches for the term “Serial” would continue to become more popular for several hours, ultimately peaking at noon – 5 hours after first trending on Twitter. Even after hitting its peak search volume, searches for “Serial” remained elevated for several days.

Google Trends reveals search interest for Serial grew over the several hours it trended on Twitter.

The story of the relationship between the trending hashtag #Serial and the search term “Serial” is a common one. More often than not, people will react to news, sports, politics, and celebrity gossip by rushing to post on social media and these topics quickly trend. Later, the rest of us eventually see this popular content on social media and turn to Google to get us caught up to speed.

By looking at a dozen popular trending topics on Twitter from the week of 12/7, we can see that these trending hashtags often indicate breakout search terms hours in advance. For the dozen popular hashtags I followed that week, on average, search interest for these terms would increase 500% over the 6 hours of their breakout on Twitter and then stay elevated for many hours or even days following that.

Search interest on Google increases quickly for popular hashtags on Twitter.

This trend can be leveraged by savvy SEM marketers to identify breakout search trends early and be proactive with their campaigns – either by adding relevant keywords or increasing bids and budgets to capture more relevant traffic or by adding negative keywords and pausing campaigns to avoid paying for irrelevant trending traffic.

Using Promoted Hashtags to Drive Search Volume

Twitter advertisers and large brands may be in a particularly interesting position to leverage promoted hashtags. Although people may not be actively tweeting or searching for their terms, Twitter does allow advertisers to pay to promote a hashtag, having it appear at the top of the trending topics lists. Doing so not only guarantees brand exposure and often prompts users to engage with their brand on Twitter but can also drive users to search on Google. The search lift from promoted hashtags appears to occur more slowly and at a slightly smaller magnitude though:

Even paid promoted hashtags on Twitter see some lift in search interest on Google.

SEMs have plenty of resources to get data on the historical performance of their keywords and search terms, but to forecast future surges of search interest, SEMs may be smart to keep an eye on what’s currently trending on Twitter and other social media since it’ll likely quickly become a breakout term on the SERP.

About the author:

Mark is a Data Scientist at WordStream with a background in SEM, SEO, and Statistical Modeling. Follow him on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google +.

 

5 Free Market-Research Tools to Read Your Audience’s Minds (And Create Content to Delight Them)

Have you ever read something that made you think the person who wrote it was reading your mind?

They were speaking your language. It almost felt like they knew exactly what you were thinking…

And they probably did. They probably did the research to find out what their target audience was thinking, and then created the content they knew would resonate with them.

When you resonate with your audience you sell more product, build your email list more quickly, and connect with them on a deeper level.

So what’s the secret sauce? How can you, as a business owner, read your audience’s minds so you can create content to delight them?

We’ve found five free tools to help you do just that:

1. The Front Page of the Internet

As far as free market research tools go, reddit is among the best.

And reddit isn’t called the front page of the internet for nothing.

Reddit reaches over 200 million unique visitors each month with over 208 countries, which means that your target audience most certainly spends time on that platform.

Since reddit is completely free and powers communities called subreddits where a group of people discuss common topics, reddit is ripe with opportunity for any marketer.

To find your audience on reddit, search your keywords in the subreddit search tool to find conversations about your topic. For example, if you were in the nutrition industry, you might type in “nutrition” to bring up a list of subreddits related to that topic.

Then, start combing through the “top” results in the subreddit.

You can see the amount of “upvotes” between the arrows on the left-hand side of the post, which gauges the popularity of the post.

In the example above, you’ll note that of the top ten posts in this subreddit, two of those top spots are taken up by talk of energy and nutrition.

With this data, you can create content that will delight your audience by helping them achieve the results they want. What would be more compelling to you as somebody struggling to get enough energy during the day – a headline that the content creator obviously guessed at, or a piece of content that actually addresses what you’re struggling with?

Reddit is magic for any content marketer.

2. The Question and Answer Tool

One of the best ways to create content to help your audience with the exact challenges they’re experiencing is to discover what type of questions they have about your topic.

This is what makes Quora such a great free tool for market research. Quora is a platform on which your audience is actually asking the questions they want answered.

How’s that for reading their minds? Think of Quora like a sophisticated Yahoo! Answers. People ask questions, and other people – experts, content creators – answer them.

Use the search tool on Quora to search keywords for your industry. Let’s say you were in the business-to-business industry and helped new entrepreneurs start their businesses. You might type “entrepreneurship” into the search bar:

Begin to read through the Topic FAQ; these are questions that others have upvoted, shared, and re-asked over and over again.

You can use the exact language and concerns the asker uses to create content that gives them exactly what they want (and makes them think you read their mind – because you did!):

Then, Quora does a lot of the work for you by listing related questions (on the right hand side):

How’s that for being handed content ideas that will delight your audience on a silver platter?

3. The World’s Biggest Retailer

A market research tools list wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the world’s biggest retailer:

Amazon.

Amazon is marketing gold for reading your target audience’s minds, because almost your entire market buys from Amazon, and because they’re actively reviewing their purchases and providing detailed feedback.

Start by searching popular book titles in your industry. For example, in the personal finance industry, you might search Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey.

Then, sort by “critical reviews”.

Amazon reviewers can be very detailed, so you’ll get insight into the language they use, the gaps in the book, and the information they need.

In this detailed review of Total Money Makeover, for example, the reviewer says:

“…You need to impose self-discipline to break bad-spending habits. His methods require almost crash-financial-diet measures (such as taking on extra jobs, ceasing any and all unnecessary spending to the point of maybe not having much fun, selling your possessions, etc.), but if you can stick to it, it will probably yield results.”

If you served this audience, how powerful could it be to provide them with the exact, step-by-step strategies that actually work to build up self-discipline and stick to financial goals?

4. The Social Platform Marketers Love to Hate

As frustrating as Facebook can be for marketers, it’s difficult to argue that Facebook has a reach that few other social platforms have.

Almost everyone you know uses Facebook, which is why Facebook is mind-reading gold.

But don’t just stick to Facebook pages or profiles. Facebook groups are where the action happens.

Facebook groups are gathering places for people who are interested in a specific topic, and if you focus on targeted groups, you can eavesdrop on your audience’s conversations so you can create content to provide massive value.

For example, if you taught photography for beginners, you could search photography in the search bar and sort by groups:

This will lead you right to the water; this is marketing gold, a place where thousands of your target audience is congregating. In this case, over 10,000 members!

When your membership is approved, start combing through the posts and taking note of the language your target audience uses and the types of questions they ask:

You can create content to help them exactly where they are.

5. Where Your Audience is Already Having Conversations

One of the best ways to create content to delight your audience is by filling in the gaps.

Have you ever tried to find information that just didn’t seem to be out there? It’s frustrating and when you finally find it, it’s a huge relief.

Your audience feels the same pain when they can’t find the information they need, and you can find what those gaps are by going where the gaps exist and your audience is having conversations around your topic:

Blogs.

If you aren’t familiar with any blogs about your topic, use a tool like Alltop.com to find popular blogs in your industry. For example, if you’re a career coach, you might choose “Careers”:

You could choose any of these blogs, but the best blogs to focus on are large, popular, single-authored blogs. These tend to drive the most comments.

When you’ve found a blog that fits the bill, read through a couple of the most popular blog posts and take note of what the blogger isn’t saying, and what the readers are in the comments sections.

Read through the comments, and take note of the trends in the type of questions people are asking.

This will help you fill in the gaps and give your audience the information they need rather than competing with the information they’ve already been given.

When it comes to market research, many businesses think they need to shell out money and resources on focus groups and research.

However, these tools are under-appreciated, free, and powerful platforms for that will save you a lot of cash and time.

As you dig through these platforms, you’ll begin to pick up content ideas, sales copy wording, and even your next product idea to help your audience with their exact challenges, desires, and needs…

Creating a truly irresistible value for your business.

About the Author: Nathan Chan is the Publisher and CEO of Foundr magazine. He is extremely passionate about entrepreneurship and has interviewed some of the most successful entrepreneurs on the planet today (Richard Branson, etc). He shares all of these interviews at www.foundrmag.com.

Weekend Favs December Ninteen

Weekend Favs December Ninteen written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from Flickr or one that I took out there on the road.

Good stuff I found this week:

Teachable – Great platform for creating and selling online courses.

start A FIRE – interesting way to embed your content recommendations into any shared link

TeuxDeux – Simple, good looking to do list maker

All Facebook Verified Pages Can Now Stream Live Video

Live-video-streaming feature Live for Facebook Mentions is no longer limited to Facebook Mentions, as the social network announced that the iOS feature has been extended to all verified pages.

Facebook introduced Live in August for users of its Facebook Mentions application for public figures, celebrities and journalists.

The social network has been testing Live with some verified pages, and examples are embedded below from The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, U2, The White House and Real Madrid.

Product manager Vadim Lavrusik and engineering manager Dave Capra detailed how page administrators of verified pages can get started in a Facebook Media blog post:

To share live video, go to your page on Facebook for iOS and tap publish. Select live video and write a quick description before going live. During your broadcast, you’ll see the number of viewers, the names of other verified people or pages who are tuning in and a real-time stream of comments. When you end your broadcast, it will be published on your Timeline so that fans who missed it can watch the video at a later time, although you have the option to remove it just like any other post.

People who like your page can discover your live videos in News Feed and through notifications on Facebook. While watching a live video, people can tap the subscribe button to get notified the next time your page goes live.

The social network also pointed users to a best practices page for Live.

Verified page admins: Ready to get started?