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The way we go to market to get our messages out to consumers has dramatically changed during the past five years. Social media syndication, in particular, has become a critical tool in getting messages heard by a large network of channel partners. Why the focus on social media? Because the business of marketing is no longer just a function of advertising and public relationship activities. Marketing has evolved into a discipline that integrates technology, processes and people to create and distribute messaging and managing reputation around the core brand promise.

Process and technologies are critical pieces of the puzzle, but with the advent of social media marketing, people (customers, employees, partners, industry watchers, etc.) have moved to the center of this new era of marketing. No longer is there a monologue that supports brand messaging. Instead, marketing it is very much dependent on public dialogue and conversations that dynamically determine the depth and breadth of the brand. And, when it comes to channel marketing automation, social media syndication not only plays a critical role in creating and managing brand presence and promise, but also becomes a critical tool for lead generation via the channel.

1: Biz Sugar

BizSugar is a community site that allows entrepreneurs, small business owners, publishers and bloggers to share, discover and comment on small-business content.

Bloggers can increase the visibility of their content, drive additional traffic back to their sites and network with entrepreneurs and small business owners. Plus, readers can discover small business–focused content rated by the community and add their own comments and questions.

The site accepts blog posts and videos containing advice, tips, news or resources of interest to small business owners, managers and entrepreneurs. Content is then voted on by the community, with the best content advanced to the “hot” section or homepage of the site. The most popular content gets into the weekly top 10, where it’s also highlighted in the BizSugar Friday newsletter.

Price: Free

BizSugar operates similarly to syndication sites like Business2Community, Social Media Informer or B2B Marketing Zone, but is focused solely on small business content. Editors and the reader community keep the site virtually spam-free.

2: Publish on LinkedIn

Publishing on LinkedIn is a phenomenal way to be seen by not just your network, but also by plenty of others who use LinkedIn. (If you don’t already have access to LinkedIn Publisher, be patient. It will be rolled out to all members soon.)

For best results, create unique content for LinkedIn (don’t recycle your old blog posts) and optimize headlines. There is no word-count limit, but fewer than 500 words probably isn’t worthwhile and more than 1,500 is likely overkill, so that’s a good range to stay within. The most popular topics on LinkedIn include leadership, professional self-improvement, productivity and customer service.

LinkedIn shares the top published posts on LinkedIn Pulse, which increases your visibility.

With more than 300 million members, LinkedIn provides exposure on the largest professionally focused social network. Unlike other social networking sites, LinkedIn members are there solely for professional guidance and networking. This makes it an ideal platform for publishing how-to or informative B2B content.

Price: Free

Just as not all of your tweets are seen by all of your Twitter followers (actually, only about 1.6% are) and not all of your Facebook status updates are seen by all of your friends, publishing on LinkedIn doesn’t guarantee a large audience. It’s got tremendous potential, but actual added brand exposure can be modest.

3: Share Articles With ExploreB2B

ExploreB2B is a social publishing platform for business content. Contributors publish articles with a focus on B2B communications. Then, exploreB2B spreads the word using its social media presence. They have more than 800,000 followers/fans spread over various accounts.
While many other outlets focus on increasing the reach of influencer content, exploreB2B seeks to increase the reach of the average businessperson.

Price: $12 per month; 30-day free trial.

Note: While early adopters of the platform were primarily in marketing or technology, the site has expanded the range of industries and topics covered. The company now maintains more than 25 different Twitter accounts. Its goal is to become the Huffington Post or BuzzFeed of the B2B world.

4: Automate With Bundle Post

If you want to amplify your brand using other people’s content, check out Bundle Post.
Bundle Post automates content curation and social sharing. It enables social media marketing professionals, social media agencies and brand marketers to add feeds and alerts.
The system aggregates, ingests and saves the latest posts from each feed multiple times a day. Posts are formatted and ready to be selected for scheduling. Users have complete control over what is shared, and can find, schedule and hashtag the most recent unique content for 3-5 days in about 20 minutes.
Bundle Post helps you discover great content to share.

Price: $20-$100 per month; 30-day free trial.

The social media management platform improves the efficiency of content discovery, scheduling and hashtagging. It’s also a repository of brand content users can schedule to insert in their social sharing streams.

Effective online presence Horizon Web Technologies Akola

According to Google, 97% of consumers use the web to search for local businesses – and if the vast majority of your potential customers are online, you should be, too. Having a strong online presence is a crucial component of your marketing strategy, no matter what size your business is or what industry it belongs to. effective online presence Horizon Web Technologies Akola

An online presence is important for outbound marketing because it reinforces your brand and what you offer to your target market. Once you’ve communicated with your audience, you’ll need to have a web presence that helps portray why your product or service is so great – because that’s the next stop for the majority of your potential customers.

It’s also vital for inbound marketing, because quality online content will help attract customers even if they haven’t heard of your brand.

So here are three of the first things you need to look at when building your online marketing efforts.

1. Your website

All businesses, no matter how small, should have a website. It can be extremely basic, but it should contain the fundamental information customers – both existing and potential – need. For example, one frustration I encounter far too often is restaurants that don’t have a website with a current menu, opening hours, location and contact information. I know I’m not alone in that if I can’t find these details, I’m less likely to visit the restaurant – but there’s no reason a business should lose potential customers over something that’s so easy to remedy and costs very little.

A basic website is pretty easy to set up using an application like WordPress. WordPress is a free blogging tool and content management system that gives users the option to pay a little more for the premium version. If it’s relevant to your business, you can even add an online shop – after all, in 2013, 70 percent of consumers preferred to do their retail shopping online.

If you’re not sure where to start, there’s a great guide to WordPress for small businesses on Social Media today. It’s easy to understand and runs through the factors you need to consider and steps you need to take when setting up your small business website.

If you’re starting from scratch and not sure what your website should include, survey your existing customers. Whether you send out an email asking for their input, or mention it casually while making their coffee, it’s the best way to get the insight you need – people love to be involved and share their opinions.

2. Search engine optimization

Once you have a website, it’s vital that it can actually be found by search engines. After all, 89 percent of consumers use search engines to research a product, service or business before making a decision. To take advantage of this, you need to make sure to look at search engine optimization (SEO) for your website.

In case you’re not completely sure what SEO means, how it works, or why it’s important, here’s a quick rundown:

• What: The purpose of SEO is to make it easy for search engines to find your website and list it in their ‘organic’ (as opposed to ‘paid’) results.
• Why: People tend to trust search engines, so websites that appear high in results pages are more likely to receive traffic.
• How: Using search-engine friendly methods to improve your website.
• Who: Everyone – anyone who has information that people want to find on the internet should be using SEO techniques.
• When: All the time – SEO is an ongoing process. It’s important to monitor the information on your website and make sure it’s current and correct. Search engines also love new content, which is why starting a blog can do wonders for your SEO.
• Where: Major search engines include Google, Yahoo and Bing. They connect people all over the world to the content they desire, from products to services to information.

The Beginner’s Guide to SEO by Moz and Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide both give a fantastic overview of the basics and will help you optimize your website.

3. Social media

Social media is an important part of your online presence that improves your chances of generating additional revenue and building customer loyalty. It allows customers, potential customers and other interested parties to engage easily via a channel that plays an important role in their everyday lives.

Although not every social media channel will be relevant to each business, it’s definitely worth looking into your options. For example, Facebook and Twitter will serve a purpose for almost any business – it’s a great place to post news, tips, photos and videos and ask and answer questions.

In addition to Facebook and Twitter, you might find Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Tumblr, FourSquare helpful. Make sure to research available channels and find out if they will work for you. Instagram, for example, is a photo-sharing network, so it works wonderfully for businesses selling ‘beautiful’ products such as jewelry, food or housewares. It’s important to consider your target demographic – Instagram has around 130–150 million users, over two-thirds of which are women between the ages of 18 and 35. With Instagram, you’ll also need to keep a smartphone handy to properly access your account and engage with your audience.

Once you’ve decided which social media channels to use, get a clear idea of the kind of content you can share. The more compelling and engaging your material is, the more likely your followers will like, comment and share your posts. Engagement is key to promoting your brand – not only will it make you more appealing to existing customers, the more positive social activity that goes on, the higher the chance is that their friends will be exposed to your brand and intrigued by what you have to offer.

When they do this, they’re engaging with your brand and their networks (friends, family, colleagues) are seeing that engagement and may be prompted to check you out for their own needs

Have you noticed a decline in your Facebook organic reach?

Looking for ways to more effectively reach your audience?

With changes to Facebook’s news feed algorithm, you’re facing increased competition to get your content in front of your fans.

How to Track Your Organic Traffic

To look at your organic traffic, you need to dig into your Facebook Insights. Go to the Posts tab to check out your posts’ performance for the last month. Click on See More to find out about older posts.

You can track your post reach in terms of organic and paid by selecting Organic/Paid from the Reach drop-down menu.

Look at three months of data at least. If you discover your organic reach is gradually decreasing or you simply want to improve your results, there are a number of ways you can do that.

1: Use Organic Post Targeting to Serve Relevant Content

Facebook’s organic post targeting enables you to deliver your content to the audience most likely to engage with it. In other words, Facebook gives you the option to target your content to specific groups of fans.

Facebook offers eight options to set your target: gender, relationship status, education level, age, location, language, interests and post end date. Select the targeting options that will help you zero in on the right audience for your content.

For example, this post is targeted to 150 fans, selected by their interests and educational status.

Only the people who are most likely to be interested in this content can view it on their timeline. If this post had been targeted to all 12,000+ fans of the page, the engagement would have been much lower. Targeting posts to specific groups of fans is one way to increase your post engagement rate.

2: Post Quality Content, But Less Often

We’re living in an age of content overload, and Facebook is no exception. According to Facebook, “Of the 1,500+ stories a person might see whenever they log onto Facebook, News Feed displays approximately 300.” As a Facebook marketer, you’re fighting for one of those precious spots.

You don’t need to post a high volume every day to get attention. Instead, work smarter by creating quality content. More posts won’t necessarily bring you more love from Facebook.

The graphic below shows an analysis of the Facebook pages for Coca-Cola India and Pepsi India on Fanpage Karma. Coca-Cola India posts less frequently on their Facebook page than Pepsi India, but when it comes to fan engagement, Coca-Cola India is the clear winner.

There’s no rule for how many times you should post each day. The Buffer blog suggests that two posts per day is a good number for businesses on Facebook. The Post Planner blog recommends that you post three different types of posts per day. You’ll need to figure out the right number of posts for your business. Also try to mix and match links, images, videos and text updates.

3: Publish Evergreen Content

The lifespan of a Facebook post depends on many factors. One is its usefulness. Even an old post can show up in your news feed if your friends like, comment or share it.

For example, this update was 18 hours old when it showed up in a user’s news feed because one of her friends liked the update. It’s as simple as that.

So when posting to Facebook, it’s important to create some evergreen content that will remain fresh and relevant to users for a long period of time. The more people engage with your content over time, the longer the lifespan of those posts.

4: Choose Content Types That Resonate With Your Audience

According to a Socialbakers study published in February 2015, Facebook audiences love videos and links more than images.

If you look closely at the results of the study, images get the lowest organic impressions, links and text-only status updates perform better and video is the highest impression generator of all.

But before jumping on this trend, examine your Facebook Insights to see what type of content resonates well with your audience. If you discover that your fans still prefer images to other types of content, don’t change your strategy now. Instead, introduce different formats slowly and track how they perform.Over to You

5: Post at Off-peak Hours

During times when fewer people are sharing content on Facebook, your chances of getting noticed are higher. Typically the best time to post on Facebook is 3 pm. But you can try posting at different times, depending on when your fans are online.

Go to your Facebook Insights to check out when your fans are logged into the network. Then choose the hours when the majority of your fans are online and your competitors aren’t posting.

If you don’t know how to track your competitors and their posting trends, this article will help you find out.

Facebook organic reach has gradually declined for many business pages. Try any of the tips in this article to improve the chances that your content will appear more often to your Facebook fans, through organic means.

Remember to test your tactics and adjust your content delivery accordingly.

Whether you’re a small business or an individual seeking opportunity, you need to market yourself effectively. But don’t worry: there are easy (and inexpensive) ways to do so, and you might already be doing them! Here’s how to get some extra mileage out of your organic marketing efforts.

1. Content Variation

It can be tempting when your business is starting out or when you’re eager to find new opportunities to over-promote yourself or your brand. Buyers, prospective clients, employers, or potential business partners are interested in more than hearing about you, you, you: they want to know what makes you good at what you do, do, do and what you think about topics that are relevant to your niche or area of expertise. One way to showcase this that fits into point number 1 is to vary your social media posts, blogs, and other content-driven marketing efforts. For example, if you’re posting on social media six times per day, only one or two of those posts should be self-promotional. If you want to be seen as an authority in your field, it’s important to curate, share, and create content focused on relevant topics (always giving credit to any original sources, of course).

The same goes for your resume or online portfolio, job-seekers: a great resume is like a highlight reel. Showcase your strongest achievements and most relevant career experience, but don’t list every single piece of professional work you’ve ever laid a hand on. Leave room for an employer to want to call you and interview you to find out more. Pepper your resume with numbers, percentages, and other figures to highlight exactly how much you helped your last company grow, how many people you managed, and other specifics that can be digested in bite-size morsels of information instead of run-on sentences and paragraphs. Don’t be afraid to use words like “team” and “department” to show that you’re capable of not only working with other people, but recognizing them.

2. Consistency

Something that’s difficult for many busy people is staying consistent (myself included). It’s much easier for me to commit to a schedule of something I’m managing for my clients than for myself (full disclosure), because they simply come first. But I know, especially because I tell my clients the same thing, that consistency is key. When internet marketing and content development are part of your brand, the presence of your voice needs to be consistent. If you have a flurry of social media activity for a couple of days and then you fall off the face of the earth for a month, you’re pretty much yelling into a void. Any traction or momentum that you gain from internet marketing can quickly be lost when you take your foot off the gas pedal. If you normally blog once a week, or if your email list is accustomed to hearing from you regularly, don’t let dips in activity prevent you from having anything to say.

Develop a content calendar ahead of time that you populate with at least a week or two of content to be scheduled and automated. Time-block a few hours at the beginning of your week (or over the weekend) to do this and make it a weekly habit, so that your voice is always resonating and your audience always growing. And keep it brief: don’t overwhelm yourself or your readers with dissertations and white papers all the time. A page or two on the long side is plenty, with clear and linear sections for ease of skimming. Anything less than a page in length is easiest to consume on-the-go (on a mobile device).

3. Add Value

This is the “why” of everything you do. When sending out a message, whether from a personal or professional account, you’re creating a sort of brand perception. Every bit of information you share, create, post, and distribute should have a clear “why” behind it. What were you trying to achieve? Who were you trying to help? Why should the reader be interested in this bit of information?

Everyone who’s marketing, whether their business or themself, has something to offer. Unless what you’re offering is so far out of the ordinary that you’ve got no competition, you have to add value. Something has to set you apart or compel someone to click that link, pick up that phone and call you, submit that contact form. Sure, reading emails and blogs is free, so is scrolling through social media, but you can’t assume your audience’s time is free. You’ve got to give something back, or their attention will drift elsewhere. To win your audience’s loyalty, you have to provide content that is interesting to them on at least three of the six levels below on a regular basis:

• Helpful and useful
• Breaking news (you’re their source)
• Entertaining
• Time-saving or money-saving
• Memorable or poignant
• Helps them meet a goal

Sending out an email detailing all of your products and services, even if they’re on sale, will get tiresome after the second consecutive email. Let people know that when they open something from you, they’ll be getting something out of it instead of just being advertised to and prodded to buy or sign up for something. And if you’re going to ask for something, like contact information or a referral, then you should have something to offer in return (like a free downloadable resource or graphic).

4. SEO

In its purest form SEO applies to businesses or websites within the context of this post, but you can apply similar principles to your resume, online resume and CV, and LinkedIn profile if you’re an opportunity-seeking individual.

Search engine optimization is something that gives all websites a boost and helps them get found by people performing related internet searches. Without getting overly technical, your website and any online content should provide high-quality, relevant information; be well-structured and layered (show hierarchy and progression with headings and formatted text instead of having everything look the same); be keyword-rich (use the words and phrases that you hope will lead people’s searches to your site); pages should have meta descriptions and images should have alt tags; and should be optimized for multiple channels.

Think of employer buzzwords as the SEO for your resume, online portfolio, or LinkedIn profile. When hoping to attract the attention of prospective employers or business partners, get creative. Use words that will attract the kind of attention you want, but try not to use the same words or phrases that everyone else like you will be using. Be specific and targeted.

5. Have Multiple Calls to Action

We live in an automated society where most people are fantastic at multi-tasking. This can hurt you because the busy person’s shortened attention span diminishes your window of opportunity for capturing their attention and getting them to take action. This effect is dramatized by mobile devices. People commute or quickly scroll through an email or a feed while in between other tasks. If your message takes too long to get through without any clear call to action, then it will most likely not be revisited or even remembered.

One way to avoid this is to share short snippets of information on a varied (yet linked) group of topics, with a clear call to action for each. This call to action should serve the reader or prospective buyer and it should help you. Clicking a button or link and/or submitting any information should take them further into something they’re interested in. Providing the ability to choose to explore any of your snippets in more detail (instead of throwing it all at them and making them sift through it) will inform you of your readers’ interest and which topics, products or services are resonating with your audience in addition to ensuring that more of your content per session is seen. If you only have one link or call to action and it’s buried at the end of a rather long piece of material, then your likelihood of engagement decreases.

For individuals, if you’ve got an online portfolio, a resume, a business card, or some other way of promoting yourself to your network, make sure that the things you want people to know first are displayed prominently, as well as more than one method of contacting you. For your LinkedIn profile, whether you’re between jobs or a freelancer, your title/description should be something original that will command attention and hint at your strengths.

What Is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is the most often heard phrase in the sector of media and advertisement. It is precisely the new wave of advertising which is driving companies forward in the stream of industries. The most effective tool to beat the competition with old and new players alike, the strategy is a compilation of tactics and assets that have gained companies an edge and saved them a space in the front row of the market.

What are “backlinks”?

Backlinking for SEO are links that are directed towards your website. Also knows as Inbound links (IBL’s). The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.