Do you want more organic traffic from Facebook? Have you considered pinning your ads as Facebook page posts? In this article you’ll discover how to drive organic traffic and conversions by pinning a Facebook carousel ad to your page as a post. #1: Set Up Your Facebook Carousel Ad First, you need to create your Facebook [...]
This post How to Pin Your Facebook Carousel Ad as a Page Post first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
To trust or not to trust. That is a question small and medium-sized business owners often find themselves asking when it comes to relying on certain brands for day to day business operations and other needs.
Keeping their interests in mind, Alignable, a Boston-based platform for local businesses, has launched the SMB Trust Index. It measures companies based on an assigned Net Promoter Score, submitted by contributors on the Alignable platform.
The SMB Trust Index identifies brands that small to medium-sized businesses trust the most and would recommend to their peers. With the help of this index, companies for the first time will be able to use a Net Promoter Score as a benchmark when measuring themselves against competitors. The index also aims to create a network of trust between businesses that may choose to do business together.
Small business tools like the SMB Index give technology providers a clearer picture of how they are being perceived by their users too. More than 20 small business service providers are ranked in the Q4 2015 Index.
Based on the results, the brand most trusted by small businesses was WordPress, with a Net Promoter Index of 73. Battling at the bottom of the list were Yelp and Groupon, with a Net Promoter Index of -66 and -65 respectively. The index also showed that Facebook fell out of the Top 10 compared to previous quarters.
MailChimp and Square, however, saw their scores go up by 3 points compared to previous quarters.
All 25 national brands that made up the list for the survey, represent companies, products and services that small business owners use. Each brand was ranked on a siding scale of 0-10 by Alignable members. The Net Promoter Index was then calculated by subtracting percentage of detractors (those rated 0 to 6) from percentage of promoters (those rated 7 to 10). The result was a range in which 100 represents the highest rank of trust and -100 the lowest.
In a release announcing the results of the Index, Eric Groves, the CEO and co-founder of Alignable, said, “There is certainly huge opportunity for brands in this market, but in selling to small businesses, success revolves around gaining a disproportionate share of the available market. To claim this share, brands must be both present and trusted among the small business community. These net promoter scores reflect just how well some brands are and aren’t doing that.”
This quarter, the SMB index showed top brands as WordPress followed by Authorize with a Net Promoter Score of 58, MailChimp with a Net Promoter score of 50 and so on. WordPress’s score gave it the highest rank out of 25 nationally recognized brands used by small business owners.
GoDaddy fell one point in positioning and Wix and Weebly fell 4 and 8 points, respectively.
A 2-year old company co-founded by Groves and Venkat Krishnamurthy, Alignable is a social network for local business owners. The platform allows local businesses to connect with each other, share information and post to a communal news feed. It can also be used for marketing.
The scores for the index were based on ratings and reviews from more than 6,000 small business owners and managers across 7,000 communities in North America.
Check out the full infographic to see how your favorite brands ranked:
Images: Alignable
This article, "Brands Small Business Owners Recommend and Some They Don’t" was first published on Small Business Trends
With our world becoming increasingly more digital every day, we need to become accustomed to interactive conferences.
Online events are fast becoming an easily accessible way to improve your personal brand, deliver a one-of-a-kind experience to your audience and connect with influential people.
Plus, digital interaction at offline events is now the norm, with conference organizers embracing the intersection between technology and audience engagement.
Digital interaction is without a doubt the biggest factor influencing audience engagement – which is a key contributor to the success of an interactive conference.
With that in mind, the rest of this article will help you increase audience engagement at your next interactive conference.
A couple of weeks ago I moderated a panel discussion about Virtual Reality at Pixel Heaven (Retro & Indie Gaming Fest) in Warsaw. I used Engagenow to bring the audience and the panelists closer. How?
I felt like the audience participated in 100% of our discussion, vividly commenting on the highlights from the stage. More than half of the hall logged into the app via Facebook and voted in the poll.
Interactivity is a rising trend in the event industry. So it’s good to add as many occasions to interact with speakers and other guests as possible.
At the moment, interactive sessions are considered as a “nice to have”, but in the next couple of years they will be a must!
Our concentration has its limits. According to numerous studies, the human concentration span lasts no longer than 20 minutes. No matter how interesting all the talks are at an event, it’s impossible to stay focused for a couple of hours. Therefore, it is a very good practice to intermingle informative sessions with the entertaining ones.
You can choose between:
One of the examples of a great workshop that I gave was earlier this year with a group of workers from a Warsaw-based corporation. I divided people into 5 groups sitting at 5 tables and gave them a task to complete: imagine the greatest team that you’ve ever heard of and describe it using any form of expression you can imagine.
Another way to empower your audience is to interact with them during the session.
Take a look at the video below to see a quick demonstration:
When the speaker was talking about the return rate of different investment options, the app (exactly the same app as mentioned earlier) asked for the opinion of guests. The next time the speaker discussed the trends in the banking industry, everyone could show the most important trend in their opinion.
The moderator is not only a person who introduces the speaker, a good moderator can make the conference an unforgettable experience. The moderator also has to coordinate the speakers in terms of how their presentations work together, who talks about what, facilitate the discussion, avoid overlap, stay on track and run Q&A with presentations.
Let me expand upon the last one. Q&A is a vital part of every conference, because of the interactivity component. The biggest mistake that you could make would be to force your audience to listen to a prolonged talk without any interaction. Therefore, it’s always advised to plan at least 30 minutes of Q&A for each hour of talking.
Take a look at the mockup below to see how I prefer to capture conversation at the conference when I’m asked to moderate.
I’m starting a conversation by introducing the topic of the panel. Later on, attendees can share their thoughts and comments over the app. It’s also a great way of crowdsourcing questions. My work is to select the best ones and weave them into discussion.
A big advantage of employing technology (Engagenow in this case) to your Q&A, is a smooth flow of your event. The moderator doesn’t have to ask around for questions, waiting for raised hands, but can just look onto their smartphone.
If you’re dealing with a small group of people (eg. in a workshop) you should introduce a few ice breakers to start the meeting on a friendly basis. Your audience in most cases consists of unfamiliar people and some activities will help them feel more comfortable.
Here is an example taken from a conference where I was involved. There were about 30 people sitting in a circle and the moderator was asking two people to step into the middle. Their task was to say as many expressions as they could, connected to certain ideas, in a limited period of time.
Ideas were like: Social Media, David Bowie, smartphones or McDonalds. All of the participants had the opportunity to get to know each other just a little bit by discovering associations coming to others minds.
Here are four of the best resources with ice-breakers that I found: 1, 2, 3, 4.
The most important social network that enhances a conference is Twitter, but there are a few things to remember to leverage its full potential.
There are a few things to remember when using Twitter at an interactive conference:
Tweet the essence of each talk to share the valuable information with your followers and start a discussion. Keep the conversation going by responding to tweets and engaging with other discussions under the common hashtag. You can use this phrase to connect your online discussion with the real word: “Let’s continue with this topic at the lunch break”.
To help manage your Twitter presence you could use programs like Tweetbot or TweetDeck. Hootsuite and Buffer are also very useful for scheduling posts.
You can find even more tips on tweeting in the infographic below:
If for any reason you don’t want to use Twitter at your conference there is an alternative – Facebook. Start by creating your event and inviting people. You can use this page exactly the same way as you would use Twitter, which is to share information.
Fortunately there’s one big difference between these two social networks, which is notifications. Facebook will ping people interested in the event every time you post something on the event page. Thanks to that you can share information very effectively, knowing that almost everyone will see your post.
But as always – with great power comes great responsibility – people may unsubscribe from the event if you are spamming them with irrelevant information.
Good practice is to show the social media discussion on the big screen at the event using Social Hub. It can collect all of the posts from certain accounts (eg. official conference accounts) or hashtags.
You can create your own Social Hub here.
For many people, networking is the highlight of any professional meeting, giving them the possibility to grow their business by attracting partners or customers.
Here are some tips to network like a pro:
Applying interactivity to your conference will make it an unforgettable experience for the audience. I hope my advice will help you plan your own event with the trend of two way communication. If you give the voice to your audience, they will come back for more!
Still hesitating? I’d be more than happy to answer any questions you may have
Guest Author: Karol Kopańko – Quiz Master at 4screens, the company that developed Engageform – easy to use tool to engage customers on every screen with quizzes, surveys and pools. Follow him at @kkopanko or @4Screens.
The post 6 Effective Ways to Manage a Successful Interactive Conference appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.
We’re living in a golden age that finds more and more entrepreneurs going into business for themselves, and it’s not hard to see why. Thanks to the Internet, anyone with a marketable skill can build a website or start a business for very little cost up front. If they play their cards right, work hard, and stay the course, they stand a real chance of becoming wildly successful.
However, it’s also increasingly common for self-starters to think that they can and should handle every aspect of managing their business themselves, up to and including their Web marketing efforts. This is especially the case when it comes to marketing methods that seem self-explanatory and simple at first glance. Pay-per-click advertising is a perfect example.
PPC campaigns require a lot of knowledge and experience in order to be as successful as they should be. In other words, they’re best left to the professionals. Let’s take a closer look at some of the most important reasons why.
Starting, managing, and ultimately succeeding with PPC requires a detailed, well-thought-out strategy if it’s going to generate results. An expert can help you formulate that strategy by putting his or her head together with yours in order to settle on something that could really deliver.
You contribute the insider knowledge as far as what you’re looking to achieve with your business, services, or products. The expert brings years of hands-on experience to the table and applies it to coming up with a strategy that’s been proven to deliver results for businesses like yours in your industry. Having expert knowledge in your corner right from the get-go helps take the guesswork out of the equation. Your results will be faster and more dramatic because of this.
You as the website owner may already have a decent idea what keywords and key phrases have been working well, just via the experience of search engine optimizing your website. However, an expert will be able to tell you whether or not you should be targeting the same set of keywords with your PPC campaign or expanding your horizons.
Experts can make short work of researching which choices will be best by taking multiple factors into consideration. They can accurately assess the market and determine what’s working thanks to current trends. They will also be in the know as far as the constantly changing face of what approaches are most effective with the search engines. In other words, experts know important information that a layman would only be guessing at.
There’s a lot that goes into a PPC ad that is successful. Choosing the right keywords and making smart bids on those keywords are only part of the equation. Successful ads are written and structured a certain way, and PPC marketing experts know everything there is to know about what might make one ad significantly more successful than another.
A well-written ad put together by an expert will be more effective at attracting and holding the fickle attention of a Web surfer that is on a mission to find information. You’ll be able to rest easy knowing you’re not unwittingly breaking any of the rules and regulations the search engines might have in place.
Most of the major search engines — including the big shots like Bing and Google — assign something called a quality score to advertisers. What your score is and how it will evolve over time depend on a variety of different factors. Part of your score is determined by the quality of the keyword usage, not only within your ads, but on the landing pages they point to. Your account history with the platform and the degree of focus with which you target your ads will be part of the equation, too.
Expert PPC teams know all the ins and outs of helping you establish a high quality score, and they’ll be able to help you keep it that way. Not only do advertisers with higher scores tend to achieve better results when it comes to their campaigns, but they stand to save a lot of money on their bidding costs to boot.
While it’s true that most independent business people wear many hats these days, it’s simply not possible for any one person to wear them all, especially as a business grows and picks up steam. A PPC campaign that’s as focused and well curated as it should be can take up a lot of your time.
Hiring a professional to strategize, manage and direct your campaign will make it possible for you to spend your own time on product development, employee management, company blogging or customer service. The right company will keep you involved throughout every step of the process but will handle all of the nitty-gritty details so that you can focus your energy where it’s needed most.
Of course, realizing that a professional PPC marketing company is the way to go with your campaign is one thing. Determining which of your many options is a good bet is another. Make sure that you choose a company with years of hands-on experience managing PPC campaigns for companies like yours. They should, of course, be able to show you evidence of past successes to prove any claims they make about the value of their services.
You also want to make sure you choose a company that places a high premium on customer service. They should seem personally invested in what they do, seeing you as a person first and a customer second. Explore your options today and experience the true power of a well-orchestrated PPC campaign firsthand!
PPC Photo via Shutterstock
This article, "5 Reasons Why You Need a PPC Expert to Help You with Your Campaign" was first published on Small Business Trends
Website can provide a huge boost for your business. But in order for your website to be effective, you need to have the right content, audience and tools to make it work. Members of the online small business community have plenty of experience using websites to grow their businesses. Read some of their top website creation tips below.
A great website is only great if people actually read it. That means you need to learn how to grow your website’s traffic. This article by Jerry Low of Web Hosting Secrets Revealed shares some tips for doing just that. You can also see discussion about the topic over on BizSugar.
To be a great entrepreneur, you need to learn from great sources. Business websites can be very helpful in keeping you up to date with the latest news and trends. And in this article from Wealthy Gorilla, Dan Western shares 40 of the top websites for entrepreneurs that you should add to your reading list — including Small Business trends. Thanks, Dan!
In some industries, it seems like more and more websites are focused around companies rather than individuals. That’s a trend discussed here at Cardwell Beach by Brian Erickson. But if you’re going to have a company website, you need to make sure it’s a good one. You can find some tips for doing so in Erickson’s article.
In order to have a successful website, you need to be able to fill it with a lot of content. That means you need to be able to write a lot. Here, Erik Emanuelli shares some tips on Reviewz’n’Tips that may help you write more. And the BizSugar community chimes in with their thoughts here.
The images that you share on your website and social media accounts can make a big difference when it comes to grabbing people’s attention and having them understand your content. This article by Kristi Hines in the Social Media Examiner includes some tips for easily creating quality images for your website or social media accounts.
Posting simply articles and content isn’t enough for your online presence either these days. True, great content like this is an important part of your online presence. But it isn’t everything. Your website needs more, including the must-haves outlined in this article by Sharese Hendricks at Hendricks Design Studios, in order to be effective.
Including a regular roundup in your content can be a great way to drive traffic. In this article, Gracielle of Blog Booster Pro shares how to create the best roundup posts to drive traffic. Members of the BizSugar community discuss the article further here.
SEO can be a great strategy for getting visitors to your website. And link building is a big part of that. But you don’t need to just focus on getting links from major sources. Even second tier links can be helpful to your strategy, as Julie Joyce explains in this Marketing Land article.
Different people react differently to various types of content. Some people like getting straight facts, while others may be drawn to more of a storytelling style. But Nichole Elizbeth DeMere thinks you should combine both styles in order to create persuasive content, as she shares here.
Being social is also a huge part of creating a successful website and Web presence. Whether it’s responding to comments or asking questions of your audience, you can’t forget to embrace the social aspects of these platforms. Mike Allton shares some tips for being social online in this article on the Social Media Hat. BizSugar members also share thoughts on it here.
If you’d like to suggest your favorite small business content to be considered for an upcoming community roundup, please send your news tips to: sbtips@gmail.com.
Bloggers Photo via Shutterstock
This article, "10 Community Tips for Boosting Your Website" was first published on Small Business Trends
Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention. What’s New This Week Facebook Prioritizes Facebook Live Videos in News Feed: Facebook announced that it is “making a small update to [...]
This post Facebook Live Video Gets Top News Feed Exposure: This Week in Social Media first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Have you tried Facebook Live video broadcasting? Want to know what it means for your business? To discover how to use Facebook Live, I interview Mari Smith. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to help busy marketers and business owners [...]
This post Facebook Live: Why Live Video Matters for Marketers first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
