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How LinkedIn can help you grow your business

10/25/201910/09/2019 by scmarketing

If you’re looking to grow your business then you’re likely to embark on joining some local networking groups, attend events and catch up with old acquaintances. This is you building on your network of contacts to help grow your business. And, LinkedIn is no different, it’s a place to network – it just happens to be a social media platform.

LinkedIn is a business2business (B2B) social channel with networking at its core allowing you to connect with other professionals, clients, colleagues, prospects and employers. It provides another touchpoint to promote who you are and your business which all helps build trust and brand awareness.

So, depending on your products or services, we would recommend LinkedIn to target more B2B focused customers.

LinkedIn company page

When you first create a company page, make it your own. Make sure your banner image and profile image is consistent with your brand. It’s a perfect place for a logo too.
Add your company contact details including your website URL.
When you post something be sure to use relevant hashtags to extend reach. So, for example an accountancy practice can add hashtags such as #accounting #BusinessOwner #Taxation #Taxadvice, to help target the audience it wants to provide a service to. But make sure it’s in context to your content you are referencing.
To help your inbound marketing strategy, use your posts on LinkedIn to insert links back to your website, preferably to fresh content like a blog. Add an image to help create stand out. Producing engaging content will encourage likes, shares and connections. If you’re new to the platform, get used to the channel first by sharing posts. Then start to build your connections, comment and share other connections posts.
If you are attending an event, review the list of attendees and see who you want to chat with when there. Then connect with them on LinkedIn. However, if you weren’t able to speak to the key connections you had hoped to, then why not send them that message via LinkedIn post event. The guest list has been shared with you for a reason so make the most of it.

Book a Practice Growth Session

If you feel you need some support from a social media consultant in getting your social media channels set up then get in touch with us today.

We also run Practice Growth Sessions which are tailored for businesses keen to grow and ready to invest in a digital marketing campaign to achieve their goals. You can book a session with us for £95.

Simon Says: Come dine with me – SEO special

11/06/201901/12/2015 by scmarketing

At the end of each year we get together with a group of friends and over a course of several nights have a come dine with me competition. For those of you who are not familiar with Come Dine With Me, this is where we take it in turns to cook for the other guests each night and the performance gets marked. After all, contestants have cooked the scores are counted and a winner is crowned.

We do this every year and have noticed how closely the world of SEO mimics the real world. The example of this is that in the first year when the competition was new one of the competitors decided to be “creative” with a scoring. Thinking that by scoring everybody with zero this would give them a better chance of winning the competition. This might sound a little bit underhand and yes I did feel a bit guilty at the time. However, we did have some great results and we won the inaugural competition. We walked away with the gold rolling pin trophy proud as punch. Not to mention some of the other competitors were a little bit upset with this (and boy do they go on about it year after year) and so as a penalty we were unmarked rather harshly the following year and came last.

You may equate this to the early days of SEO when people may have embedded their web pages with keywords to try and trick the search engine algorithms. They might have filled the pages with so many keywords that some of them were printed on white text with a white background to hide them from invisibly recognised. Other methods were that the site would have a page for 10 different locations with the same content except for the name of the town they were targeting. This worked well for a time and like ourselves with a come dine with me trophy, great results at the top of the rankings. However, just like our annual competition the people got a bit upset and thought that this was unfair and they have quality work into their websites. So Google quickly learned this and set building computer program known as the algorithm with a nickname “Panda” and closely followed by another called “Penguin”. These are here to make sure that the quality sites will be praised and sites that try and trick the results will be penalised.

So after learning a lesson we returned to the competition with our tail between our legs, however after some time and a lot of hard work eventually came back and regained the trophy. Resting on our laurels and subsequent years meal was not up to standard as the year before and hence dropped down the rankings again. Whereas other couples in the come dine with me competition were consistently putting full day’s effort to create a superb meal are always in the top two.

So just like the world of SEO, it goes to show that you can only choose a system for very short time for being caught out and penalised heavily and that people that perform consistently best over a long period of time for those that we are sitting and produce high-quality work.

That said you can always ply your guests with alcohol in hope for a good score or if you are in business for your website to provide them with some goodies such as tips and tricks to help them with their business.

What is Twitter churn?

11/06/201910/15/2014 by scmarketing

Many Businesses are still falling into the trap of following back everyone who follows them, this can be a very risky strategy of building up and audience, as they may not all be interested in your brand.

However, having a large audience of people who are interested in the brand and who will talk about it can have many benefits, from increasing lead potential to good old fashioned brand lift.

Although, it is difficult to know the difference between followers who will engage with the brand and those who are ‘ghost’ followers and will not interact. But how would you find out?

There are many sites that can monitor data from twitter feeds such as www.justunfollow.com or www.followerwonk.com. These sites provide information on who is following/ unfollowing you on a daily basis. There can be many reasons as to why someone may unfollow you and these sites give you the ability to try and find out why.

You can look at the time at which they unfollowed you and try and see if there was a correlation to a post you may have tweeted at this time? Check their profile, perhaps they are no longer active on twitter? Maybe they’ve changed career and no longer need the information you’re providing? Perhaps you were tweeting too much and flooding their feed, or they may just want to change things up and keep their feed fresh. It is then down to you to decide what action you’re going to take to prevent this from happening too much.

Twitter does have limits on following to followers so unfortunately you can’t just follow loads of users and hope they follow back. Although twitter have kept the exact ratios a secret, it has become obvious that once a page has reached over 2000 followers you can’t follow more than 10% of that. So if you had 5000 followers, you couldn’t follow more than 5500 users or you’ll run the risk of having your account suspended. As well as this, if you use third party websites or apps to follow/unfollow users, this would also leave you at risk of your account being suspended, to avoid this from happening you shouldn’t let the website/app automate who you follow/unfollow, you should choose yourself as the suspension of accounts is automated based on patterns.

What you need to know about submitting to online directories

11/06/201912/17/2013 by scmarketing

One of the best ways to get good traffic for your website is to submit your website to many directories online. These directories are categorised (languages, health, entertainment, etc.), so when submitting your website, you suggest the suitable category that matches with it.

Often, you will be able to submit to a sub-category inside the major category. For example, let us say that your website is about aromatherapy. In the submission request, you can suggest “health” to be the main category.

Some of online directory leaders are MSN, Yahoo!, and DMOZ directory. To get a listing in these online directories is not free. Sometimes, you can submit for free in some search engine directories but they don’t give you any guarantee on how quickly your website will be accepted to be indexed.

So, if you need your listing reviewed faster, you have to pay premium listing fees to get an expedited listing service and they can review your website within few days then if your website is accepted, you would get it listed for a full year and then you can renew it in the next year to gain traffic from that source for longer time.

Listing at the major directories will pay off its costs in many and different ways:
• You will get high traffic to your website and your website will get a higher rank in search engines which will help you gain organic type traffic as people usually search in the directory listings and browse the listed websites.
• You will get many back links to your website. Certainly, this will give more traffic to your website.