Businesses on Facebook need to have a Facebook Page. For the past couple of years, many business owners have struggled with using a profile or a business page. Many businesses start marketing on Facebook with a personal profile until they understand its limitations. Then, they have difficulty scraping their personal profile and starting from scratch on a new Facebook Business Page.

Facebook recently launched a new tool for business owners that will now allow them to convert a personal Facebook Profile page into a Facebook Business Page. The new Profile to Business Page Migration Tool transfers the photo from the profile page and converts all friends of that personal profile into people who like the new Business Page. However, this migration will delete all other content from the personal profile page, including all wall posts and other photos.

Other rules from the migration include page brands and interests. Profiles with fewer than 100 friends will be able to rename their new business page. However, profiles with more than 100 friends will have to use their profile name as the name of their business page. Additionally, converted pages will not appear in the interest sections of users who were previously friends with the profile. Profile friends will not be notified that their friendship has been turned into a Like.

Marketing Takeaway

Facebook Pages are public pages and have distinct marketing benefits over Profile Pages. As a business looking to increase traffic and leads from social media marketing, you should create a Facebook Page or migrate your existing profile into a Business Page. But simply having a page isn’t enough.

You need to think about the content that appeals to your prospects and customers. Share your blogs posts on your Facebook Page as well as articles from other quality industry sources. Begin to think about Facebook News Feed Optimization. Attracting likes to your page is only the first step. The more a person interacts with your content, the higher the likelihood that your Page updates will appear in their Facebook News Feed. Engagement on Facebook is a critical component for increasing the reach of your content and calls-to-action.

Do you think Facebook’s new migration tool will increase the number of Business Pages?

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C.C. Chapman, author of Content Rules, joins us for another episode of Inbound Now!

C.C. is the founder of DigitalDads.com, a marketing consultant and frequently speaks at industry events on the topic of content marketing.

In the show we talk about:

• Why producing content for your market is more important than ever.
• How to get started in the content marketing game.
• How curating content can be a powerful way to help supplement your content creation efforts and share valuable information with your community.

For the full transcript of the show and the audio, head over here: How to use content marketing and curation for your business

The Shift

Companies need to start thinking about themselves as content publishers.

“One of the first rules we laid out was you need to embrace that you’re a publisher.”

This is a critical piece of inbound marketing success and we cannot stress that enough.

The content that you are creating online is what is going to bring in more organic traffic and help build your companies position as thought leaders in your space.

Offer Something of Value on Your Site

Your brochure-ware website will not cut it anymore. You need a site that is the hub (no pun intended) of your industry that keeps prospects and customers coming back into your site.

Provide useful and valuable information that answers questions your would be buyers are searching for.

Creating (Good) Content Is Hard

Creating content has to become a major part of your company and it’s not a one off project. It’s a continual process that you can refine over time.

“The hardest thing is you really need to figure out what you want to create. Because let’s face it, content is a beast. Once you start doing it, to do it right, this is not a one and done thing. This isn’t, oh, we’re going to set up the website and then forget about it. This is something that has to become part of your core DNA, that you keep doing on a regular basis”

Perfection Is The Enemy of Shipping

Far to many people wait strive for absolute perfection when creating content.

This drags out blog posts, puts off that video being produced 8 months into the horizon, and nothing gets shipped.

Not every piece of content will be the Mona Lisa, especially when starting out. These imperfections and rough spots when first getting into producing a piece of content helps share your companies authenticity with the world and shows a more human side to your business.

How Do Your Customer Consume Content?

Ask yourself this question before you being creating different pieces of content.

How does your target audience consume content? In what scenarios do they commonly find themselves in? Do they typically have a long commute? Does your content need to be snack sized or can it be consumed in a longer time frame?

Reimagine Don’t Recycle

Repurposing content is key. Ask yourself “What else can we do with this?”

Thinking about what content you are going to produce doesn’t have to be rocket science. Start with a big idea and break it into smaller chunks OR start with smaller ideas and piece them together into something bigger.

Do a content audit of the pieces of content you have right now and tackle the beast one way or another. 

Content Curation

“Content curation is a great way, especially for small businesses or companies who don’t think they have the time to create all their own content, to pull together relevant content and share it with your community”

Pulling together the top resources from your industry can be a great way to supplement the content you are producing.

Make sure you are linking back to the originals and by all means try and add in your 2 cents as to why you are sharing the content. This is both to avoid penalties from Google and to add value and context to whats being shared.

Remember, content curation is not a replacement for content creation!

Metrics For Content?

Emily Evelina: Could you ask how to measure content value when clients are so hooked on SEO metrics? You talk about this in the book, what are some core metrics to keep an eye on?

“The key part is figuring up front how you’re going to measure. Say, for the next three months, we want to increase . . . one of the things I say is don’t say we want more views. Say we want to increase our viewership by 10,000 or whatever the number is. Pick the number that’s right for you. But then you can look at it and do it short term, look at three months. We want to increase our readership by X. Then you can look and go, “Did we hit it or did we not? How can we ramp it up even more?” “Oh, look we did do this with like no budget. What if we add some budget, what could we do then?”Content takes a while to get going.

Connect with CC Online

CC blogs regularly over on CC-chapman.com and you can tweet him @cc_chapman

For more about the book see: Content Rules

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Recently there has been a lot of talk about Facebook versus Twitter and which is more valuable to web publishers. If you’re looking for the short answer, IMHO it’s Facebook; but, to understand why, you need to have deeper understanding of how each system works.

One of the key aspects of Twitter’s meteoric rise was a very low barrier to entry: basically all you needed was a working email address. This is also one of Twitter’s drawbacks, making it extremely easy for one person to create and manage more than one Twitter account. If you’ve ever gotten a robo-tweet from an egg account after mentioning the word “iPad”, “iPhone” or the word “dating,” you known what I mean.

The second issue with Twitter lies with how it’s used by the power users and social media experts. The Twitter maven drank the kook-aid about being Malcom Gladwell style connectors and mavens. Their misguided belief that their style of curation and expertise was some how unique–enough to be a value add–shows how truly delusional they are. If you’re unfamiliar with the term “connector” and “maven”, I strongly suggest reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book the Tipping Point. It contains essential lessons every marketer should know.

Next we need to look at Facebook. While the barrier to entry is still low (requiring just an email), there is an element of social proof built into it. It’s not hard to get 50 people to friend/follow you on Twitter. It’s a lot harder to get 50 people to be your friend on Facebook. There will always be friend whores in Facebook, but there are a lot less of them (percentage wise) compared to Twitter.

Another key difference is that a large part of the Twitter population, especially the darlings of the media, is nothing more than a marketer or social media guru looking for a retweet or click. They are not looking for a quality lead or conversion. Social media for many people is still about traffic and eyeballs, not sales and conversions. If you’re trying to build a follower base, these type of users are practically useless. They may retweet your message, but only to other digital con men. They simply are never going to fill out your lead gen form or pull out a credit card. To be honest, when you’re looking for followers who are going to turn into prospects or customers, traditional social media metrics like klout are useless. You should be much more interested in the person with a 12 klout score with 50 friends and followers who’s generally (or genuinely!) interested in your product, service, or area of operation. One person who is interested in what you’re selling is much more valuable than 500 people who will simply retweet your message to 500 other social media parrots.

However, it’s important to note that, like nature, spam will adapt and find a way in. Since Facebook consolidated its social equity into the “like button“, it has become an attractive target for marketers, so much so that it’s even got a name: “like -gate“. Basically the “like” action is being corrupted and incentivized the same way links were on Google. Some companies are even having a bit of fun being irreverent in acknowledging the insincerity of the like action (screen shot credit MarketingPilgrim)

Mio Advertisement

As a marketer, what should you do? Right now Facebook isn’t prepared to deal with the incentivized likes, so it’s in your best interest to take advantage of that before the gap is closed. I’m not saying go out and buy as may likes as you can, I’m saying buy as many qualified likes as you can while it’s still cheap and easy. Remember Facebook traffic and Twitter traffic have different values and should be treated differently and given different priorities and resources within your overall marketing plan.

Related posts:

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Advertisers:

1. Text Link Ads – New customers can get $100 in free text links.
2. BOTW.org – Get a premier listing in the internet’s oldest directory.
3. Ezilon.com Regional Directory – Check to see if your website is listed!
4. Directory Journal – Get permanent deep links in a search engine friendly directory
5. Glass Whiteboards – For a professional durable white board with no ghosting, streaking or marker stains, see my Glass Whiteboard Review
6. Need an SEO Audit for your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services
7. Link Building- Backlink Build offers 45 PR5+ Backlinks for $295
8. KnowEm – Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites.
9. Scribe SEO Review find out how to better optimize your wordpress posts.
10. TigerTech – Great Web Hosting service at a great price.
11. What Motivates You – what makes you want to get up and be successful

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.

Facebook vs Twitter: Which is More Valuable?

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My last two posts reviewed how to setup and promote a webinar, and then how to host your first webinar. In this final post, I’ll review what comes next – how to figure out how the presentation went and how to make the most out of this great content you just created.

How to Host Your First Webinar – Part 3: After the Webinar

Stage 4: Measure & Next Steps

24 hours after the webinar

• Post Your Webinar Slides and Recording Online – If you offered this to your attendees, create a page on your website where people can view and/or download the slides and video from your presentation. As a bonus, I recommend posting your slides (we usually do so in PDF format rather than PPT) to a slide sharing site like SlideShare. In addition to spreading your content further, SlideShare has an embeddable slide viewer that you can post on your own website.
• Follow Up with Registrants with the Slides and Recording – Now tell your registrants where they can go to view and/or download the slides and recording you just posted.
• Measure Your Webinar Statistics – How do you know if your event was a success? Measure a few key metrics for each webinar you host, including number of registrants, what percentage of registrants attend (40% is the industry average), conversion rate on your registration landing page, and of course how many new leads and customers you generated from this event.
• Make it Evergreen – Your live event may be over, but that content can continue to serve as a lead generating tool. Some ideas to make your content “evergreen” are to create a landing page to download the archived presentation, and write a follow up blog post to drive additional interest to your archived download.

What else do you look at to measure the success of your webinars? Any other ideas to make your content “evergreen”?

Now Go Become a Webinar Legend!

Flickr photo by adjourned

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I’ve recently seen a lot of chirping and discussion on the value of nofollow links for search optimization, with some people saying that there was value to having them. I asked three industry leaders in search engine optimization what their take was on nofollow links.

Specifically: “What’s your take on no follow links? Is it still valuable to get them when you can, such as from social media sites or Wikipedia? Under what circumstances do you pursue links from Wikipedia? Is their huge reach and audience worth it, even without SEO value?”

Answers From The Experts

Tom Critchlow works for the SEO Company Distilled as VP Operations NYC (office opening in June!) but is currently working alongside the web’s most popular SEO Software provider; SEOmoz to help them with their SEO:

There is a lot of debate around nofollow links and their impact on SEO. Will wrote a great post on the weight and authority that nofollowed links can carry. As SEOs I think that we shouldn’t be so obsessed with only getting “followed” links. If a link is from a strong site and will pass traffic then I think you should go and get it.

Search engines these days are paying attention to social signals like tweets, Facebook shares (both nofollowed) and traffic data (from toolbar & browser usage) so if you’re really trying to build your brand online you shouldn’t obsess over whether a specific link is relevant for SEO – you should be thinking about whether a link is good for your brand, because you can be sure this is what Google is trying to reward. In particular, I’ve seen Wikipedia drive significant amounts of traffic even for niche terms without huge search volume.

I would urge businesses to look at the Wikipedia pages for their niche and consider whether they can provide a resource of such value that you can get a Wikipedia link. If you can, you can be sure it’ll drive good volume of high converting traffic.

Gianluca Fiorelli, SEO, ItaliaSEO:

When it comes to links, I personally don’t think at first if they are going to be followed or not. Even though, from a pure classic SEO perspective, any backlink should have to be a followed one in order to increment the PageRank of your linked page, I consider that actually a link is not just about PageRank anymore, but trust and brand awareness. In fact, even though search engines do not carry PR through the no followed link to your site, they record it and they take notice that your site has been cited in a site. If that site is an authoritative one or a trusted seed, somehow its aura will reflect on your own web site, which will gain trust and relevance to the eyes of the search engines, therefore better rankings.

Just for this reason it is good to be linked by Wikipedia or any authoritative social media site, and I include in this definition sites like forums, blogs and Q&A sites, which are social by nature. Obviously, they can directly send good traffic to your web site: just think at Quora and the traffic a link in a voted or most useful answer can lead to your site.

Under what circumstances can you pursue links from Wikipedia? First of all you must have great great content or very specific and unique. Wikipedia folks are very picky about what sites to cite as external sources for any voice. If you have that content, then you can suggest it for the right Wikipedia voice.

Example: during an competitive research about travel to Patagonia related web sites, I saw that the one that was ranking first in Google.it had a link from Wikipedia. I dug into that link and discovered that it was to a post about the Welsh immigration in Patagonia present in that site’s blog. Is that link sending traffic to the site? Probably not at all, but it was noticed by someone in the BBC website, who finally linked to that same post citing Wikipedia. Boom, now that travel site not only as one link from Wikipedia, but it has also an important backlink from another trusted seed: the BBC.

Moral of the story: Wikipedia maybe won’t send you directly great traffic, but to have a link in it gives authority to your site, therefore others will tend to cite your site and link to it.

Barry Schwartz, Executive Editor, Search Engine Roundtable:

Nofollowed links do not pass any search engine ranking value for most of the search engines, including Google and Bing.  You can have a nofollowed link on Wikipedia or even Google’s main blog and it won’t count in terms of improving your rankings. That doesn’t mean the link is not valuable.

Sites with lots of traffic with links on them, even if they are nofollowed, still can send traffic.  That traffic can help with leads, conversions and even encourage other sites to link to you without a nofollow attribute on the link. When it comes to getting links and social media, it is more about creating awareness about your content or product. That awareness will lead to more link building opportunities and create even more awareness for your content.

What’s your take? Have you seen value from nofollow links to your blog or website, or none at all? Let us know in the comments.

Photo Credit: Dawn Huczek

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Today, Google came out with a counter punch to Facebook’s Like button. Earlier today, the search engine giant began rollling out a new button called +1. The +1 button will apear next to search engine results and AdWords advertisements. In the future, website owners and publishers will be able to add a +1 button to pages and articles on their sites.

How Google +1 Works

How does Google’s new +1 work? First of all, +1 is currently being rolled out as an experiment and you need to opt in with Google to have access to it in the short term. In order to view +1 search results and AdWords results, the user will have to be logged in with their Google profile. Once a user is logged in and clicks on the +1 button next to a search engine result, Google we keep track of that +1 and highlight that search result if it appears for any of that user’s friends for that or a similar search.

Check out a quick video from Google introducing +1:

A Real Step Towards Social Search

With +1 Google makes a major step forward in its quest for more social search results. Not only do the +1 recommendations play a significant role in Google’s series of social search improvements, but they will also highlight content people are actively interested in. Now people using social search will be able to see content created and shared by those in their social network, and recommended by those in their Google +1 network. All of the +1 data, TechCrunch points out, will be available to the public likely through an API.

Google +1 Is a Social Network

While +1′s initial impact might be seen in social search results, it is important to realize that +1 is more than that; it is a social network. Google Profiles are at the core of Google’s future plans for the discovery and sharing of contextual information. With the launch of +1, Google Profiles got much more useful because a new tab has been created in Google Profiles to let users keep track of all of their +1s.

Marketing Takeaway

It seems like Google keeps making changes and adding new tools that will impact how your business will get found online. Don’t worry about understanding all of the details and granularity of every change Google makes. However, you should notice the patterns that are occuring with all of the changes Google is making. Clearly, Google is rewarding social businesses. The more your business connects with prospects and customers online, the more you increase your odds of getting found in Google’s evolving search results.

The days of obsessing over keyword rank are over. Instead, make your business social and create relevant information that will help to attract +1s and influence who decides to visit your site from search engine results pages. Blogging and sharing content on social media has never been more important. In a world that is being built on personal recommendations, it is critical that your business becomes social through remarkable content.

What do you think about Google +1?

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This blog post is one of several Marketing Transformation Success Stories we’ll be featuring in celebration of Marketing Transformation Week, April 4-8, 2011. 

Josh Shriber is like many small business owners. He’s passionate about his company. He loves his customers. And he has had his share of struggles attracting more of them.

“We had a website that was basically a commercial,” says Shriber, who is the Founder and Director of Jammin’ With You, a small business that provides in-home music lessons in Boston. ”The only way people could express interest in our service was by email or phone, and that didn’t happen very often.”

Jammin With You’s marketing transformation began in the fall of 2009. Eighteen months later, Shriber describes the impact of the transformation as nothing short of “game-changing.”

Here’s a quick look at how and why Jammin With You decided it was time to transform their marketing—and the incredible results they’ve been able to achieve.

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3 Steps to Better Rankings and More Traffic

It’s no secret that when it comes to SEO, a lot of real estate websites are in bad shape. If you are a broker or a service provider, there’s a great deal of potential in your online presence. For the vast majority of people – 90% according to a survey conducted by the National Association of Realtors - the search for real estate begins online, and as such, if you can tailor your site to your customers search patterns, you can dominate the search engine results and generate high quality, relevant traffic for your site. Whether you’ve already got a website or if you want to create one, following these three steps will help you get a leg up on the competition.

Step 1: Research - What Keywords Do Your Customers Use?

The first step is critical, and fortunately, it’s also relatively simple. What words do search engine users enter, when they’re looking for real estate in your area? Most likely it’ll be a combination of the geographic area and words like “real estate” or “realty.” The appropriate keywords will depend on the services you offer. Essentially you’re looking for the most searched phrase relevant to your business. There are a number of tools that will hep you find this information, keying in “orange county real estate” with Google’s Insights for Search reveals that “orange county property” is searched more frequently than “orange county homes” or “orange county realty.” Depending on the competition surrounding a particular keyword you might be better off picking a phrase lower on the list. Depending on your area there might not be enough information regarding search queries, but you can use your analytics data from your website. Sometimes the Google AdWords keyword tool has better suggestions or more complete data. But once you know what your focus is, what phrase or keywords you would like to optimize for, it’s time to get to work.

Step 2: Optimization – Tailoring Your Site

Optimizing in this case means tailoring your site to your chosen search queries. If you haven’t got your own domain name yet or if you starting from scratch you can book the search query as your domain name, if it’s not already taken. This can give your site an extra relevancy boost. Although it’s not as aesthetically pleasing, booking a domain name with hyphens, like www.thousand-islands-real-estate.com will have the desired effect as well.

In most cases your home page will be the focus of the high traffic keywords you picked, so it’s important that the keywords appear in the title, and early. That being said, it’s important that the titles make sense, if it’s just a jumble of keywords it won’t be clicked as often, you need to write something catchy that will win the click when your title competes with others on the SERP page. Sticking with the Orange County example, you could use a title like “Orange County’s Largest Property Website.” The title is coherent, the relevant keywords appear first, and it’s clear what the site offers.

Similarly the meta description for your home page should contain the keywords as well. Depending on the user’s query, Google and other search engines will display the meta description, or content from the page. So it’s important to have relevant keywords in both. Don’t worry about the density of the keywords, just focus on writing a coherent text.

Side note: You can tailor different pages to different search queries, for instance, “orange county” together with “homes” isn’t searched as often as with “property” but you can write a sub-page targeted for this search phrase as well. Don’t forget to use URLs with the search terms as well, this URL is written for someone looking for waterfront real estate in the Thousand Islands: www.thousand-islands-real-estate.com/waterfront-island-property.

The most common mistake, or the least used potential is the internal linking of one’s own site. The words you use to set links for the navigation of your site can also a deciding factor in your ranking for certain search terms. For instance, the link to your home page is often something like “home.” It would be better to use something like “Orange County Property (Home Page)” or if you have your logo as an image linking to the home page, then use an appropriate alt-tag. The former link might not be the prettiest in your design, but it’s important to remember that only the first link counts, so you could put this at the very top of your page and still have a navigation bar in your design – again, it’s important that the text for the first link as it appears in the source code is the one that counts.

Step 3: Socializing – Optimize Existing Links, Get More Links

For those who already have a site, you hopefully already have a number of other websites linking to yours optimizing existing links can be effective. Contact the original publishers, probably friends or business connections, and ask them to change the text with which they link to your site. You should keep track of who is linking to you but you can use Yahoo! Site Explorer if you want to find out (or double check). It’s important to note that you don’t do this en masse, and get penalized for manipulation, but it stands to reason that content changes and the links do as well. It’s likely you’ll only be able to change a few anyways, but pick the good ones and ensure that the wording is beneficial, not just “click here.” It’s important to mention that variation is also important – if all your links have the exact same text in appears somewhat suspect.

Side note: In step 2 I mentioned the benefits of hyphenated domain names matching search phrases, the implicit benefit is anyone linking to your site with the URL is also linking to you with the desired text anyways!

You can pay money or find free directories to list your site, but I would only dig into my wallet if the directory was well indexed and a major hub with lots of traffic. You might have heard that commenting on blogs is also beneficial, it can be, but links in the comment section are almost always no-follow, which means they lose their SEO-benefit – some argue to what degree this is true but the fact is posting comments on blogs is not a strategy that will have a great effect. Rather see it as an opportunity to take part in a discussion and make users aware of your site. Link building these days is inherently social – not in the twitter and facebook sense – rather, having meaningful dialogue with other like-minded individuals who are also looking to improve their websites. This strategy is likely to take you farther, and be more rewarding. If you’re a frequent visitor to a site and regularly post comments you’re more likely to be successful when you ask for a link as opposed to cold e-mailing. In the same way regularly posting and sharing on forums is also a great way to build a reputation and get links on good pages. Similarly, writing guest posts on other blogs or writing articles for other information hubs will establish you as an authority and get you good links. The key is finding out what other websites play a major role in your industry and establishing yourself there. Finding like-minded people will bring the largest benefit, you can also check the link-profile of other successful sites, already ranking well for the real estate terms in question.

Summation

The first two steps are relatively easy, there’s a lot you can learn with regards to site architecture, crawlability, etc. but as long as your site is well structured and easy to navigate, the deciding factors will be the optimization, the orientation of your site and its content towards a few, specific key phrases, and finally building a strong link profile. Depending on your region or niche you might be one of the few search-savvy operators on the market, and you’ll be able to capitalize and turn that traffic into business.

Feel free to contact Adam Vradenburg with any questions or comments.

Related posts:

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Advertisers:

1. Text Link Ads – New customers can get $100 in free text links.
2. BOTW.org – Get a premier listing in the internet’s oldest directory.
3. Ezilon.com Regional Directory – Check to see if your website is listed!
4. Directory Journal – Get permanent deep links in a search engine friendly directory
5. Glass Whiteboards – For a professional durable white board with no ghosting, streaking or marker stains, see my Glass Whiteboard Review
6. Need an SEO Audit for your website, look at my SEO Consulting Services
7. Link Building- Backlink Build offers 45 PR5+ Backlinks for $295
8. KnowEm – Protect your brand, product or company name with a continually growing list of social media sites.
9. Scribe SEO Review find out how to better optimize your wordpress posts.
10. TigerTech – Great Web Hosting service at a great price.
11. What Motivates You – what makes you want to get up and be successful

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis WordPress Theme review.

An Introductory Guide to SEO for Real Estate Websites

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Marketing? View from beach house on Sunset Beach, Oahu where I didn't think a lot about marketing.

I’m blogging on a plane coming back from a week in paradise. That’s part of my process for returning to the “real world”.  As a marketer I cannot help but think what’s behind the communications and actions of companies I engage with as a consumer. My time on Oahu talking with local residents and surfers in Haleiwa was a notable contrast to the techie social media marketing world I live in day to day.

In today’s digital age, things move fast. New models of communication establish themselves quickly and new categories of brand and consumer engagement continuously emerge. Defining the means for communicating with and engaging with customers is by no means static whether you’re trying to reach cosmopolitan buyers in London or tourists of a sleepy village on a tropical island.

Marketing evolves with consumer preferences, technologies and society. A specific definition of marketing is no more static than marketing itself.

Recently Heidi Cohen pinged me for a super-size roudup post on definitions of marketing. Here’s mine:

The practice of creating value for the mutual benefit of meeting consumer needs and business objectives. In action, that means knowing and meeting target audience/community information discovery, consumption and sharing behaviors with relevant and timely communications throughout the customer lifecycle. Engagment influence consumer behavior to drive revenue outcomes and strengthen relationships.

That’s just one definition and Heidi’s post came up with 72. That’s right, 72! If we ask that many people what marketing is and get such a variety of definitions, it’s no wonder marketing advice is such a crapshoot for so many companies. Asking a company marketer what they do should essentially define what marketing is for that company.

But I’m guessing it doesn’t.   A lot of companies are simply executing tactics without a broader vision of customer engagement trends. They’re in a perpetual state of experimentation to see what sticks and to see what works.  Does that work? Does it adapt? Does it focus on what’s important?

As our own online marketing agency evaluates it’s own marketing efforts, I also challenge our readers to reflect on what you’re really doing to communicate with and engage customers,  Are you executing tactics with uncertain outcomes simply because you’ve always done it that way? Are you continuing to experiment with things that have no clear connection to measurable results? Are you really engaging customers and developing relationships?

What’s your definition of marketing?

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Yesterday, HubSpot’s biggest webinar, the Science of Timing, shook up the Twittershpere and provoked curious discussions among marketers. With nearly 25,000 registrants, the webinar enjoyed hundreds of great questions. Here are the top 5 that stood out:

1. Should I tie my blog posts to my tweets to my Facebook status updates?

You should definitely feature your blog posts on both Facebook and Twitter. But be careful with auto-pushing your tweets to Facebook. On Facebook, Dan Zarrella’s research showed, it is much easier to flood the feeds of your friends. In fact, the best-performing Facebook business pages post every other day. So pace yourself on Facebook and be more selective with the content pieces you want to highlight there.

2. How does timing vary for B2C vs. B2B companies?

“There are false distinctions between B2B and B2C consumers,” said Dan. On the sales side, there are definitely tangible distinctions, such as length of sales cycles and decision makers. But on the marketing side, the distinction is less significant. B2B marketers are real humans who check their email late at night and on the weekends. As part of the Science of Email Marketing research, we learned that people don’t really separate their work and personal inboxes. More likely, people would maintain a separate inbox for spam. So stop obsessing over B2B vs. B2C and think about what’s going to appeal to your fellow humans.

3. Can you saturate your Twitter audience?

Yes, if you feature the same exact tweets. No, if you feature the same content but use different messaging. For instance, if you promote a blog post on Twitter, you can announce it using its article title. Later in the day, you can tweet certain stats from the post, or highlight key points, or draw attention to some important quotes. Be creative and just don’t post exactly the same thing over and over again.  

4. When do you start promoting a marketing event?

Before you start promoting your marketing event, take some time for testing. At least a month before the event, start experimenting with different titles and see what message resonates with your audience. Then, about 2 weeks before the event, continue with promotion: publish blog posts, use email marketing and finish up with some social media engagement.

5. Does experimenting with timing get in the way of consistency?

Experimenting with timing is valuable for getting to know your audience well. Consistency, on the other hand, is critical for creating certain habits in your audience. Can you marry the two? Probably not right away, but overtime you should be able to get a sense of when your audience is most responsive and how to optimize this timing best.  

Did you have a timing question we weren’t able to address? Post it below and we will try to tackle it here!

Webinar On Demand: Learn the Science of Timing

Learn best time to publish blog posts, update your Facebook status and post tweets!

View Dan Zarrella’s new webinar to learn more about the science of timing.

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