Kate Rose

Integrating social media and your website

Published June 17, 2013 | By Kate Rose

Your social media presence is an integral part of how your company presents itself online. So, if you have anything more than the most passing of relationships with a client or prospect on social media, the chances are they’ll have checked out your website – and vice versa.

So, if a potential client comes to your website, where would they find your social media details, and what impression would they get from what you provide?

Quick, get us some icons…

The most common scenario we see with clients is that they either haven’t put their social media “addresses” (Twitter username, Facebook page, LinkedIn group, etc) on the website at all, or they’re quick to say they have…but on inspection it turns out that this is just in the form of each site’s linked logo, in their footer. Often, both of these approaches have been driven, one way or another, by their website Content Management System or Web designer / agency. The details haven’t made it on there yet because their CMS is too tricky to use, they’re anticipating a redesign, or they don’t update the site regularly so it doesn’t reflect what they’re doing. In the “icons in the footer” situation, they’ve often been put there as a standard “value add” during a previous redesign, often regardless of whether the client was intending to use the linked sites at all, or had a strategy to do so.

Earlier this week I was told by one enquirer, “Well my web designer has put a Google Plus icon on my website, so I’ll need to do that then“. As an evaluation of which sites should be included in a social media presence, that one is right up there with the worst.

Effective social media integration

So, what’s the best practice approach? First of all, make sure your details are at least available somewhere; don’t expect your visitor to rifle through Facebook on the off chance you’re active there.

Secondly, there’s nothing wrong with putting icons in your header or footer; in fact, it’s become such a standard part of visual web “language” that the footer is often the first place visitors will look, so it’d be self defeating not to.

BUT. Give a few moments’ thought to why you’re actually on Twitter or LinkedIn or wherever, and it should become obvious where those details should really be. Social media is part of your communications strategy, right? So you’re conversing with your peers, clients or potential clients. Best place to tell them where they can chat to you? On the Contacts page.

But don’t stop there

If you have a thoughtful strategy behind your presence on each social media platform you use, you’ll very likely be doing different things with each one. So, a company creating artisan jams and preserves might use Facebook to spread (no pun intended, but as it’s there, we might as well enjoy it) the word amongst consumers. On LinkedIn, they might focus on investor information and networking with industry peers.

So when you set up that Contacts page, make sure you do your website visitor a favour, and signpost them towards whichever site will be most relevant to them. If a consumer hits your LinkedIn group and finds lots of discussion about sustainable preserving chemicals, or whatever, they’ve wasted their time – and might close their browser window without bothering to check out your lively and engaging Facebook community. It doesn’t have to be War and Peace, but a short statement explaining what you do on each site, and how it would benefit them to join in, goes a long way in providing a good user experience.

Widgets, Plugins and Live Feeds

If you’re active on Facebook, it’s a great idea to use the free Social Plugins that Facebook provides – you can find them in “Use Social Plugins” under the Resources section of your main Admin menu.

For example, the “Like box” code generates a “Like” button which logged-in users can click to Like your Facebook page without leaving your website; an optional feed of your latest posts; and an optional “face” display of others who like the page, highlighting the user’s own friends if any of them got there first. It looks like this:

Twitter also provides a similar function, including a real-time updating feed of your latest Tweets. This can be great if the tone of your Tweets normally follows the tone your website is generally written in. Ie, your website is reasonably informal and chatty, and so is your Twitter feed.

If that isn’t the case, or you’re given to having a little banter with others in your industry via your Twitter account, think carefully before implementing a feed to the website. Taken out of context, your website visitors might find your Tweets inappropriate and / or confusing.

If you’ve integrated your social media to your website in a really strategic way, or have come across examples of sites which have, please do share in the Comments!

Posted in social media strategy | Leave a comment

Writing for social media

Published May 9, 2013 | By Kate Rose

If you’re creating written social media content for an organisation, one of the biggest challenges is getting the “tone” right.

Conveying your message creatively requires a completely different approach to writing for other marketing materials – at least, it does if you want to make an impact with your audience.

For this post, we’re going to use Twitter to illustrate, because it’s the most challenging platform in terms of creating great content; it’s noisy, busy, there’s a lot of competition for your target audience’s attention, and you only have 140 characters to play with.

So, how do you need to change your writing style?

Writing the Old Way

It’s so much easier to learn from specific examples, so we’re going to go very specific here to illustrate the difference between an “OK” tweet and a “great” one.

Let’s pretend we’re tweeting for a hypothetical software company. Our imaginary company is about to release a new version of its flagship product, and you’re going to tweet about it.

If you were following the “old” rules – the kind of writing required for a press release, or even an email to customers, the content would just announce the release:

or perhaps, shout about a few of the new features it includes:

There’s nothing wrong with these; they’re “OK”. A typical “OK” tweet for business keeps to the old rules; properly spelt and with correct grammar, and informal enough not to be wildly inappropriate for the Twitter environment. But, a “great” tweet does so much more.

A slam dunk Tweet

A “great” Tweet will be more engaging (in terms of grabbing the imagination of the reader and creating some resonance with them), do more for the reader’s perception of the company, and make better use of the opportunities Twitter offers. Here’s our take on it:

Obviously, the image is important, but we’ve just grabbed a stock one – your “real” image would show your developer team half-hidden behind pizza boxes, or a row of takeaway cups from a well-known coffee purveyor stretching away into infinity. You get the idea.

Good social media content

So what makes our last tweet better? A number of things, and these would be our “top tips” for making your social media content writing more creative:

1: Offer real Insight

The tweet gives a “behind the scenes” view of what’s really going on at Fabsoftware; the reader is getting a privileged insight. This is always more interesting than the official corporate line!

2: Humanise the organisation

One of the messages that the tweet very clearly conveys, is “real people work here”. Showing that, over time, is a great way to build affection and brand loyalty – and also perhaps more tolerance for the odd mistake…

3: Be Entertaining

Playing to stereotypes about coders pulling fast-food fuelled allnighters – what’s not to like?!

4: Exploit Twitter’s unique capabilities

Including a quick snapshot image (even if it’s been, ahem, slightly staged) works well because of the sense of immediacy. And as we all know, a picture can be worth a thousand words…..

Change your thinking

Doing social media content well isn’t really about changing your writing style as such; it’s about thinking differently about how you present your organisation, and what you can share with the wider world. Get that part right and the writing will follow.

Posted in Advanced Social Media, Learning Social Media, Social Media, Twitter | Leave a comment

How often should I tweet for business?

Published April 11, 2013 | By Kate Rose

Almost every client we work with raises the question, at some point, of how frequently they “should” be tweeting, posting to Facebook or updating their other social networks.

It’s another of those areas where there is some absolutely terrible advice doing the rounds (some of which we’ll share with you below) so an article here seemed to be called for!

Tweets and Facebook posts – back to basics

Hopefully, before you even think about tweeting or posting on your business Facebook page, you already have a strategy. You know who your likely audience are, and have figured out what you can offer them that they value. That means, you have an outline idea of the type of content you’re going to be sending out. If you haven’t done this, go back a stage and get your strategy sorted; it’s amazing how much else will then come into focus.

Like the answer to today’s question. You know what your value is to your Twitter and Facebook audience, so you should Tweet or post….when you have something interesting or relevant to say.

But won’t we lose followers?

Let’s explore this a bit further. I’ve been told, just this week, by the social media team in a large and prestigious organisation that they have to post constantly because

“we were told by a big Social Media company that we must tweet and post several times each day”

Unpacking that a bit further, it seemed that the “reason” was to do with not losing followers, and with gaining new ones.

Will somebody please think of the children users!

As with so many things in marketing and comms, if you’re able to put yourself into your audience’s shoes for a moment, the lack of logic behind this becomes pretty clear.

From the point of view of one of your Twitter followers or Facebook Likers, they have connected with you because they think that your content is going to enhance their Timeline in some way.

If, after a few days or weeks, they often see content coming into their timeline which is not interesting to them, what will their likely response be? They will unfollow you. It might take a while for the irritation to build, but sooner or later, they will depart your social media shores.

Now let’s look at the alternative. Someone connects with you on social media, and in the first couple of weeks they only see a couple of pieces of content from you in their timeline – but both of those are useful or funny or whatever.

Who on earth would think “ah, but two days have gone past and I heard nothing from that company, so dammit, it’s not good enough. I’m unfollowing them.” Nobody, that’s who.

Silence is golden

Basically, very few people will break their connection with you on social media because of what you don’t do – unless your account really does go completely dormant for a significant period. You get unfollowed because of what you DO do. Posting irrelevant, repetitive or just plain dull stuff repeatedly into their social media feed.

So in summary, never, never post or tweet for the sake of having posted or tweeted. The only exception to this is if you are actively pursuing a spam strategy of the “chuck enough mud and some will stick” variety, like the one suggested in the helpful article here. Nobody likes mud anyway, and you might not like what it sticks to, but as with all kinds of spam it must do something for someone or nobody would do it. However, if you’re a reputable company, this is not a road you want to travel. In fact, “...to get noticed, you will need to tweet a lot more frequently” may be one of the worst pieces of social media advice we’ve ever seen – time to start a Hall of Fame, perhaps…

Posted in Facebook, social media strategy, Twitter | Leave a comment

Social Media Courses are not all the same

Published March 13, 2013 | By Kate Rose

A social media course is a social media course, no?

Um…..No.

In the last couple of months we’ve been particularly busy with social media training, as more and more organisations realise the value of developing in-house skills in this area. And I can confidently say, that even after years of putting together training materials, we have never delivered two sessions which are exactly alike.

In the last few weeks alone, we have developed social media courses for the marketing team on a large event for young people, an NHS training and conference provider, and an author looking to promote her most recently published novel. Each was genuinely unique in terms of the culture they work within, and therefore every aspect of their communications from the language used, to the behaviour of their target market online.

In each case, they came to us asking for “social media training” – but of course, social media is a very big place. Without help to identify where social media is relevant to their work, they could have spent a very long time on classroom or online courses without much benefit to the organisation at all.

Two contrasting examples

If you’re still not convinced, let’s look at a short case study for the Event team and the Author in a little more detail.

The first organisation needs to connect with young people aged 14-25 (the target audience for the event itself), but also exhibitors and sponsors. They have good in-house skills around using Facebook and Twitter, and a presence on LinkedIn, but need to build their audience more quickly in a limited time period.

Before we began developing their training, we reviewed their existing social media presence. We always do this, to gauge the level of reach and engagement the client already has, and ensure we’re not teaching them to suck social media eggs, as it were.

Based on our own experience of delivering campaigns and building audiences, we identified activities that would help them. That included tactics- online and offline – as well as functions within the social media sites themselves, and free third party software and apps.

Their training was then focused around the strategic thinking behind this, as well as introducing them to the new functions and software. We also looked at fine-tuning the match between the different audiences they need to reach, and the way they were currently using the different sites.

Finally, we gave them a detailed plan for maximising the impact of social media before, during and after the event.

The Author was a complete beginner with social media, but had been advised by her publisher that being active has a large impact on visibility and book sales.

With no personal experience of using the main sites, she needed to understand the fundamental principles of each, and the kind of activity which would appeal to her readers and get them talking. We also helped her get a “head start” on finding her online community with examples of great author Facebook pages, key Twitter hashtags and more.

Again from our agency experience, we showed her some niche sites and forums which would also make a difference.

Can social media training be standard?

So in both cases, the clients needed to find the right people to talk to, and the community where the action was – but in each case, the right people were different and to be found in different ways. Multiply that by *every* social media course we’ve developed, and to create a single, standardised course would either involve days spent in the classroom in order to cover everything, or a very narrow core course. And it’s those elements which are totally unique to a particular client that really deliver the killer value!

Training individual organisations allows us to work much more consultatively, identifying for them which aspects of social media will be most important to their communications or sales strategy, and showing them exactly how to put those skills into practise. Those “all the same” off the shelf courses are great if you already know what you don’t know, and can choose the exact right one to meet that need. If you know you need to learn but aren’t sure what, this can be a really time consuming and expensive path.

For more on this subject, try our article on finding the best social media training for you.

Posted in Social Media Training | Leave a comment

Take your business blogging to the next level

Published February 18, 2013 | By Kate Rose

We’ve written before about the benefits of business blogs, and why we’re big fans of getting a blog properly integrated into your website.

Previously, the key benefits of blogging were keeping fresh content on your site, and providing informal insights into your organisation’s work and related topics. For most businesses, that was enough, and if they built a regular audience of readers who liked the “newsletter home” type of content, so much the better.

That approach though tended to lead to what I call a “whimsical” posting style. So a typical article might involve giving a personal opinion or commentary on current affairs, often linked (with varying degrees of awkwardness) to the business’s products or services. That’s how you get articles like “Why cupcakes are like the Olympics” or “Have you made anyone’s day this week?“.

Now, there’s nothing terribly wrong with that; it does give some insight into the personality of the writer (and thus the organisation), and if readers are enjoying it, then the “fresh content” and “informal engagement” boxes are definitely ticked. But, to really make your blog deliver, you need to start thinking a lot more out of the box.

Shareability – that’s what you need

There are two things which have changed in the last year or so.

Firstly, Google’s algorithm has had a few changes, all of which favour genuine, original content which is being shared on social media. The days where crude keyword stuffed articles (think those About.com style posts which seem to have been written by robots), and random bulk-bought links from websites which had nothing to do with your industry, pushed you up the search engine results ladder are rapidly disappearing over the horizon.

And of course, there’s a virtuous circle of more links > more traffic > more authority with Google > more visibility in SERPS.

Secondly, the rel=author markup has come along. This is designed to identify an individual as the author of a body of web-based content, even if that content is spread across a number of websites (for example, guest posting). If you’ve got your blog or website set up to use the markup, it further enhances the value of great content and helps that content to stand out in search results.

So, if you can take your articles to the next level and start creating content which your readers want to tell other people about, it will make a big difference to your website’s authority ranking – as well as enhancing your credibility with readers.

So, what should I be writing?

Think about the last few articles you personally have bookmarked or shared. What did they have in common? The chances are, they will be doing one of the following:

First out with industry news
Showing you how to do something
Articulating something you’d not quite understood previously
Providing a resource – the best free WordPress plugins, or top 10 beautifully designed websites in your sector.
and so on

No matter which sector you’re in, there will be aspects of your own business which lend themselves to these kinds of articles – which will provide real value to others, and which they’ll want to share.

If you’re a printer, you could include a downloadable “cheat sheet” explaining key printing terms and options which your clients will need to understand to get the best from your work.

If you’re canning sardines, you might want to talk about sustainable fishing, but could also include a well-researched survey of the latest stats around global fish stocks.

If you’re helping people get to grips with social media, showing the thousands that get phished each day on Twitter what’s happened and how to fix it might send you hundreds of web hits each week (it does!).

So whether you’re writing about double glazing or ballet slippers, start thinking more widely about your topics. Think about what your target customers would get kudos from sharing with their peer group, and how you can make their lives easier. They, and Google, will thank you for it.

Posted in Blogging, SEO | Leave a comment