Part III: Track Your Success

We’ve come to the last but not least part of our social media optimization journey. Today you will learn how to analyze the results of your social media optimization campaign and what instruments you might need for this task.

TRACK YOUR SUCCESS

Step #1: How to Track the Results of Your Social Media Campaign

[ Quantify your success with Social Analytics Tools ]

Social media marketing ranges from “somewhat effective” to “very effective” for businesses.

Your results will come in figures. Real success comes in high figures.

A lot of statistics for business accounts are provided by social media platforms in the form of APIs. Through WebCEO or stand-alone social media analytics tools, you can access these data pipes. You will need to analyze percentages, graphs, and diagrams. The advantage of using tools is they offer a coherent investigation and control over your performance on multiple social media platforms starting from the research steps and going straight to the gathering of results.  

Let’s learn some of them:

1. Buffer

Buffer is a platform where, apart from analyzing the results of your content promotion, you can publish on major social media platforms. You will get access to the following helpful features:

• post writing and planning: write posts and add them to a calendar to control the timing and campaigns dedicated to special events on specific platforms;
• posts an “achievements” analysis: get stats on the quantity of new followers, engagement rate, unique reach on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, etc.;
• collaborate with your team: if you work on a team, you will get the necessary elements for building a convenient working environment for team members; sharing the responsibilities will become significantly easier and more effective;
• communicate with your customers: start a conversation with interested customers, reply to their messages, sort them by tags and folders, give your team members the right to take part in specific conversations.

2. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo will lead you through the whole process of promoting on social media. Research, planning, content creation, results analysis; cooperation with influencers will no longer be a tough mission.

• pick up what is trending now and follow the newest ideas: analyze the freshest content on the Internet by different locations and time of release. Build a clear picture of who you can attract and surprise new users with;
• analyze the essentials: get a list of formats your audience might be most satisfied with and find out why your competitors outrun you;
• find your influencers on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, analyze their performance by different metrics; you will have an opportunity to examine the influencers who work with your competitors and identify their strong and weak sides.

3. Social Sprout

Sprout Social will help you organize your working process and make it easier, helping you and your team act in rhythm. 

Sprout Social provides everything a user needs for research, analysis, planning and publishing. You will be able to manage your publications: create drafts, schedule them and add to a corporate calendar, administer several platforms simultaneously and assign specific team members to particular tasks.

Sprout Social creates all the conditions for efficient work with messages. Your team members will be able to hold conversations with customers as soon as a team leader gives permission. You will receive reports on your social media performance.

4. TapInfluence

If you are going to work with influencers, this platform is totally for you. It will help investigate influencers who are popular in your niche by keywords and their performance. Get a full profile on a person you would like to cooperate with: age, gender, location, education, etc. Influencer’s history on social media, his or her insights and revenue you could get after the cooperation – these will be outlined for a user to help choose the best representative for a product. You will find a top-notch influencer for your business.

5. Google Trends

A free SEO tool provided by Google will be helpful if you don’t know what keyword to choose between several variants: it will demonstrate how popular these have been through time. This tool will also show you recently trending keywords, stories and insights.

If there are other tools for social media performance analysis, then why do I need the WebCEO Social Analytics Tools? – you might ask.

First, WebCEO puts everything in one place. This is significantly more comfortable than switching between different types of statistics on different websites and applications.

Second, WebCEO not only shows you statistics, we analyze the statistics for you and determine your weak and strong points.

Third, WebCEO helps you spy on your competitors.

All you need is to create content. WebCEO will care about everything else, for example:

WebCEO’s Web Buzz Monitoring Tool will show your mentions on different blogs, news sections and tweets. You will see the headlines of articles, the time of their publication and a link to a source and its name. Regarding Twitter, you will be provided with the list of tweets you are mentioned in, plus the number of their retweets and likes.

WebCEO’s Social Engagement Tool will tell you everything about your Facebook and Pinterest performance:

• The level of engagement on Facebook with detailed data concerning likes, shares, and comments;
• The total number of Pinterest shares;
• Your competitors’ citations in comparison with yours;
• Your social traffic in terms of the number of sessions, average bounce and conversion rate, the number of completions and their monetary value.

WebCEO’s Facebook Insights Tool takes the data from your Facebook account to present it in the most comfortable way. Using this you will be aware of:

• Your competitors’ Facebook engagement level: reactions, shares, and comments on their Facebook pages by day;
• Your page metrics by chosen periods of time in comparison with previous results: likes, feedback, organic page reach, level of post engagement, and the number of clicks on them;
• Page demographic.

To learn all this data without traveling between websites and tabs, start scanning on WebCEO and we will present you with everything at once.

No need to thank us; we are happy to do this for you!

Make Your Social Media Work for Conversions with WebCEO Sign Up Free

Step #2: What Are the SEO Benefits of Social Media Marketing?

[ Learn what you get when your website performs well on social media ]

Social media has become an essential part of SEO, even if search engines were not measuring likes and shares on various platforms (Google does this). You will help your website grow significantly because your traffic should increase to become 25% of your total traffic if you use social media.  

You will build your reputation. Social media can make you popular as soon as you go there with viral content. Give this a lot of quality, thorough research, and build your material using expert thought processes and real evidence. Write as well as you can and present your work to a relevant audience. A great job will be rewarded and lead to great results.

Why is this worthy of any attention?

If you are respected, you are linked to. Your words, your work and you yourself will have some value in the eyes of your niche audience. And here we smoothly go to the next benefit.

You will get backlinks. Not directly, because of the NoFollow aspect of links posted on social media platforms, but with the help of “mediators”. For example, you will promote your content or its extract on social media platforms. People will go to your website, if you attracted their attention, read your stuff and decide to share it on their websites. As a result, your domain authority will rise. However, always check your backlinks! Toxic or spammy links will cause harm to your website and rankings.

Use WebCEO’s Backlink Quality Check and be aware about the value of the links leading to your website.

IN CONCLUSION, social media platforms are among the most powerful instruments for marketing. The benefits you will get should easily be worthy of all the effort you are going to put in. If you still don’t use social media professionally, it’s high time to start doing this. Begin your journey with WebCEO’s Rank Tracking Tool, identify your competitors and build up a proper marketing strategy for your future success.

The post A Step by Step Guide to Social Media Optimization. Part 3 appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Part II: Writing a Post

In the previous part of the article we discussed the following points of social media optimization:

• Research,
• Target audience identification,
• Planning, and
• Social media profile optimization.

In short, that was the preparation stage.

Today in the second part, we will dive into one of the most essential parts of SMO: content creation and optimization.

Social media content isn’t the same as the content you create for websites. On social media platforms, certain rules apply. Length, style and visuals – here are just a few things to double-check and improve. This is where your creativity and passion are put in the spotlight.

It doesn’t matter what type of content you have been producing or are going to produce; social media accepts everything. You can run an educational channel or one for entertainment or news. There is a different strategy for each of these types of channels.

Step #1: How to Make Your Post Visible

[ Find your keywords and optimize your posts properly ]

Optimized social media profiles are undoubtedly important. However, you will never succeed if your posts aren’t seen by social media platform inhabitants. If you want to be noticed, use keywords.

Social media platforms work a bit like Google, exploiting keywords. However, social media’s most important keywords consist of hashtags. They should be relevant to your niche and popular among users:

There is a range of different services which can help you choose relevant and highly demanded hashtags in your niche.

Those are:

• WebCEO’s Keyword Research Tool which helps to find the best and most profitable keywords depending on the niche you perform in. It gives you suggestions on what people look for besides your query. You can easily use these substitute queries as hashtags on social media:

Not only will more people find you in searches on the social media platform itself, but Google will often show social media posts in their results if a relevant hashtag is used, like this:

• Keyhole is a good site to gather analytical data on hashtags and track results of a social media hashtag campaign; 
• Flick shows hashtag statistics in terms of general and recent popularity, month and week trends, and will provide you with a list of relevant hashtags and where they are mostly used.

Pick the best keywords with WebCEO's Keyword Research Tool Sign Up Free

Step #2: How to Behave on Different Social Media Platforms

[ Learn how to optimize your social media like a pro and use it to the fullest ]

Social media is the easiest and fastest way to spread any kind of information.

Each social media platform is used by a specific audience. You must be careful because a wrongly prepared post will have weak results. Analyze properly who uses each social media platform in terms of age, location, nationality, etc.

Each platform has its rules and features, so you should follow the game:

X (TWITTER) POSTS

Age group: 25 – 34

Since Twitter sets limit of 280 characters for a single tweet, think wisely about each word you are going to type. Each post should contain a relevant hashtag or two, so the number of characters will be reduced even more.

Surprisingly, too many tweets will actually work against you. Users don’t like their content diluted. Three or four posts per day should be enough.

There are a lot of other useful features on Twitter you can use for your marketing campaign along with hashtags. Look, please, at the screenshot below. There you can see some options to use in order to make a post more engaging:

• Photos and videos: people absolutely fall for various types of content. Make your post entertaining, interesting, and bright! Attach short, yet funny videos or photos for an ordinary follower to watch with pleasure!

Remember to optimize your image size so that those will load faster. Avoid posting photos or videos people are likely to have seen before or, worse, think they have seen before. Snap your own photos before borrowing one from the Internet. Get a photogenic friend or employees to do various things with various tools and emotions so you’ll have a library of compelling shots others have definitely never seen before.

• GIFs: These 1 to 2 second mini-videos are a lot of fun and very popular. Relevant and witty GIFs will make your post attractive and hilarious!
• Polls: people like polls because they like to share their opinions. These are also a great way to check the level of engagement on your Twitter and maybe learn what products people prefer to use in terms of your niche;
• Location: if your business is location-focused, you can add the exact location to a post or mention it in hashtags in order to analyze how much your product is demanded in a specific area:

• Threads: this will definitely come in handy if you want to share a big amount of information on Twitter and don’t want this data to be lost in a long line of replies. You can “attach” tweets to the main post and those will be the first on a queue.

How can Twitter help to increase traffic and extend your audience?

You are likely to benefit from followers’ and hashtag searchers’ actions: likes, retweets, replies, tags, embedded tweets, and other.

Track Twitter mentions of your brand and products with WebCEO Sign Up Free

FACEBOOK POSTS

Age group: 18 – 34

Facebook is one of the most comfortable places to run a business campaign and sell your content. Facebook works well even with local SEO.

Facebook is all about reactions and discussion. It is actually used by all generations since its main goal is communication. Create posts that are highly engaging: ask questions, inspire people to leave their feedback, like, share your posts, or just thank you for great content. As Facebook is created for communication between friends, give followers the opportunity to set a connection with you like with a close buddy.

On Facebook you can use a large set of features to promote your content or products. Let’s learn some more about them:

• Live video: if you a running a presentation open to the public, you will not find a more comfortable way to share it than use social media. This is easy, comfortable, and all encompassing in terms of an audience being able to search for and find you. Insert hashtags to the posts with webinars or live videos, to make finding you easier.
• Photo/video: the classic way of sharing your content. Got anything your audience would love to see? Post photos. Videos are even better.
• Life event: a great feature to bring some attention to your product and your actual location:

In the post itself:

• Feeling/Activity: not a really useful feature for optimization, but it may stir some reaction from followers and make them ask questions, like or comment on your actions:

• Tag people: invite people you want to react to your posts. Naturally, you should avoid tagging random people who have nothing to do with you or your page.
• Polls are similar to those on Twitter where people like to share their opinions.
• Check in: a location feature that specifies where an event/photo/video, etc. takes place, a useful option for location-focused businesses.

Add Facebook Insights data to your marketing mix with WebCEO Sign Up Free

INSTAGRAM POSTS

Age group: 18 – 24

Instagram is now especially favored by people interested in their local environment. The post optimization on this platform is similar to other ones mentioned earlier. Except for:

• There are a set of filters which help users to make their images prettier before publishing, and
• Carousels – a set of several photos or videos within one post.

Instagram allows live videos and STORIES. People like these update features and use them a lot. Follow their example.

Adopt the strategy of posting regular stories. They attract people even more than pictures on profiles! Trends are changing daily, and now people tend to create more stories and make posts only on special occasions. You may use a wide range of possibilities which this way of updating provides you with:

• Location;
• Mentions;
• Hashtags;
• Polls, questions, and quizzes;
• Gifs and stickers;
• Countdown;
• Music, and other.

You can upload a video or an image to your story, even insert links leading to specific websites.

Stories don’t live too long, only for 24 hours. However, if you want them to be permanent and visible on your profile, you can add them to the Story Highlights, where they will live as long as you want them to:

YOUTUBE VIDEOS

Age group: 18 – 75 (18 – 44 make up 90%)

YouTube is you. As long as you are unique, fresh, and entertaining. Nowadays, YouTube is a really powerful platform that embraces almost all the niches in this world. And as there are a lot of representatives of your field, you have to stand out and prove that your content is much better and worthy of being viewed.

The things you can optimize on YouTube:

• Hashtags: these are needed on each platform you are going to use and optimize. Remember, hashtags should be relevant to your niche and topic:

• Video itself: it should be of the highest quality in terms of content presented and resolution. People – your potential customers – prefer enjoying nice pictures, compelling commentary and valuable data, so make sure to meet their requirements. Create playlists by topics and add each new video to the appropriate playlist, so that users may find them quickly:

• Transcript: convert your audio into text. This is very useful for users because some of them may be foreigners, or your speech may be difficult to understand. And this works well for SEO. By doing transcripts for your videos, you help Google crawl and index it. Speak with keywords and then transcribe your words. Help Google show your video as an answer to a searcher’s query.

• Translation: if you own or work for an international company, do not be lazy: translate your video into some of the most widespread languages. A wider audience will have the opportunity to understand you and learn more about your product. This will help you to get the highest search result positions in different locations.

And a live video:

• Basic info: here you are limited to 5000 characters. The description box is really useful, so exploit it undoubtedly! What you can type there:

1. Keywords in title, description itself, and tags:

2. Place links to your website and other social media platforms accounts;

3. Links to materials you used for a video;

4. Notes about important events related to your brand;

5. A brief script of your video with the times you mention certain things – people like this a lot;

YouTube has a lot you can optimize.

Make time to care about each of the underlined points below. These will help you get more value out of using YouTube and feature higher on YouTube search:

People like to leave comments on YouTube, whether they are bad or good ones. Be polite with everybody because it helps to increase the level of engagement and shows that everybody is respected at your place.

Do you know that YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google? According to Global Media Insight, YouTube has more than 2.7 billion active users. If we can’t find what we want on Google, we will jump to YouTube and find it there.

WebCEO understands the importance of YouTube and other platforms in contemporary 2020+ SEO and tries to embrace all the channels you can potentially get some traffic from and optimize your content for. In the WebCEO Rank Tracker Tool, you can easily monitor your YouTube performance with a few clicks, adding it to a list of search engines you can work with. After a fresh scan, you will be able to enjoy a full report regarding your keyword performance on YouTube.

Check your YouTube rankings with WebCEO Sign Up Free

LINKEDIN POSTS

Age group: 18 – 49

LinkedIn is all about being official. Here you present and sell your professionalism. Time to humblebrag and describe why you are a great specialist or why your company is worthy of attention. Don’t be shy!

After filling out the forms regarding your experience and achievements, it will be time to learn how to optimize your posts. If you use a company account, some features of the ordinary posts are not available, for example articles.

Since LinkedIn is more official than other social media platforms you have to present your content thoughtfully. Work on the presentation of your idea a lot, let it be professional, of high quality, and structured so your readers will be compelled to join the conversation and express their opinion regarding a chosen topic. Ask interesting and intriguing questions, challenge readers to take part in your considerations and let them prove whether you are right or wrong. This will bring more engagement. 

You can make your post fully optimized by following the next tips:

• Keywords should be everywhere! Hashtags in your posts make them visible to the users, even if they are not your followers or aren’t connected to you.

• Photos and videos make posts brighter and attract more attention to your content. Be sure to add alt text to your images for better accessibility.

• Articles: this feature lets you share your knowledge with the others and proving that you are indeed a professional in your niche.   

• Share a document: If you have a guide, a PowerPoint presentation or another valuable piece of content, you can easily share it and let the search engines index its content. People will come to you more often knowing you can provide them with well written and useful material. If you don’t want everybody to see and examine your material, you can easily set a limited access to the post;

• Access: in a box under your photo, you have the Access feature. You can decide on who can see the post you are going to publish. If you want to attract as many people as you can, choose “Anyone + Twitter” option, and your post will emerge on your Twitter account as well. 

Make sure you haven’t blocked the comments section and people are able to leave some words regarding your content!

A little BONUS

SlideShare

If you have a lot of in-demand and in-depth content, like presentations, documents, infographics, try SlideShare. It is owned by LinkedIn’s hosting service and is an easy way to spread your content and bring some attention. On SlideShare such features as likes and shares are also available. You can insert links leading to your social media platforms on a SlideShare profile, so people will know where to find you.

PINTEREST PINS

Age group: 18 – 49

Pinterest is all about images. How can this platform be useful for product promotion? All images are supplied with links to their original websites and short descriptions.

Pinterest is a little bit easier than other platforms in terms of content presentation. Let’s dive into it without further ado:

• Images: choose an awesome photo relevant to your business niche, bright and of high quality, and catchy enough for an ordinary user to notice it. Actually, this is the most important part you have to do on Pinterest. Be careful with photos and don’t steal them from other people!
• Title: it’s more than just the name of your image. Write anything you want (relevant to your content of course) to present your image and article to the audience in the most interesting way. The title is also a place for keywords with the help of which people will find your pin.

• Links: there are two places where your links are visible:
  • in the image as you hover a cursor over it, and
  • under the image:

• Description: here you have 500 characters to present your content (be creative!) and interest viewers to learn more. Don’t forget to put keywords in this box.
• Boards are similar to playlists on YouTube with pins replacing videos. This is really useful for followers and beneficial for you because people may observe more of your older pins, which are related to a newer one.

Track Pinterest likes and shares of images on your site with WebCEO Sign Up Free

Step #3: When to Post on Social Media?

[ Choose the right time for your posts ]

Scheduling posts is also an important part of the whole optimization process. A lot of specialists compose their posts in advance, working on each word and preparing respectable material. With a feature for post scheduling, such as on Facebook and YouTube, this process becomes significantly easier.

You can determine the best time for your business to post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other platforms after reading some articles on this topic.

Why don’t we just tell you what are the best times to post?

The audience isn’t the same everywhere. What may be a great time for one type of audience could be the worst variant for another. Everything depends on your products, your target audience, and its location. Time Zones are obviously extremely important for your performance on social media.

How to find the best time periods for posting?

Trial and error.

Do you remember those words about starting your social media optimization long before the specific campaign you are about to run? This time can be devoted to experiments and gathering statistics. This will help you to determine your audience’s “chill out time”: the time when they are best able to soak in your material. You will learn what times during the day are the “busiest” and the “freest”: when readers enjoy your posts to the fullest and when they just miss them. Besides, at the same time, you can track other types of vital statistics: age and location of the readers.

The frequency of posting: specialists have come to the conclusion that it is better to post more than once a day. However, do not create a huge wave of posts; otherwise you will annoy your readers. 3-4 posts per day are enough to stay visible.

Shares also count and should also be optimized. If you repost something, express your opinion. People follow you for your thoughts and ideas, so even when you repost and share others’ material, your added comment should reflect you.

Twitter, of course, is in a league of its own. On this platform, less is more, and people can express their opinion even in three words. However, it’s okay to be more talkative on Twitter if it’s about your industry.

IN CONCLUSION, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn and others have become increasingly significant avenues for your content promotion. Experience and hard work matter. If you start a campaign on your own, you will quickly pick up the essentials, improve your skills and work on your social media professionally.

The WebCEO Keyword Research Tool will help you choose the right keywords for your posts and stories so that you will be seen by the right audience!

TO BE CONTINUED…

The post A Step by Step Guide to Social Media Optimization, Part 2 appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Part I: Let’s Conduct Some Research

Social media has taken control of our lives. A large number of Internet users nowadays can’t imagine living without chilling out on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Statistics says that:

• Over 62% of the worldwide population use social media;
• The average time for chilling out on social media is about 2:22 hours per day;
• 71% of customers are satisfied with purchasing goods via social media and would recommend a company or a brand to their closest people.

These are the aspects that make social media platforms an extremely profitable field for promoting products, brands, or services.

Using Social media for business these days is indispensable. Even if you already run a successful website on the Internet, you should still raise awareness about your existence on social media platforms. Your activity there greatly affects your site rankings and can often deliver 25% of your overall traffic.

The problem is how to do this properly. How do you optimize your social media and get more revenue?

Social media isn’t about a single funny post on your profile which, you may suppose, will instantly attract an enormous and interested audience for your content. Let’s be honest: it happens, but it’s the exception rather than the rule. Social media business posts will need to be in the hundreds, if not thousands, and the process consists of: work, strategy, and proper organization.

Social media users have become more capricious and used to various types of content presentation. You will have to devote a lot of effort and spend a lot of time to bring something new and amusing to the public, keep your current and future audiences on your side, and leave your competitors far behind.

And we can’t discuss post optimization without mentioning social media optimization in general. Your posts will shine bright only if you prepare a field for them, a place for growing and living. Don’t wait for fruit to sprout without any effort.

There are several steps you will have to take to make your social media accounts relevant, profitable, and popular.

LET’S CONDUCT SOME RESEARCH!

Step #1: What Is Important to Know About Working on Social Media

[ Prepare your team for hard work ]

91% of small businesses use social media to promote their business.

Social media platforms need the kind of attention you will pay to your own website. Experienced social media marketers can name hundreds of reasons why people should use social media for promoting their goods. We are going to save you time and present only the most essential reasons:

1. Nothing will give your brand a more powerful advertisement and a greater boost than social media.

Your brand’s popularity may rise dramatically in a matter of seconds with a proper marketing campaign. It’s a fact that social networks help attract new consumers, increase authority, and bring trust to your goods, brand and company.

2. You will get the opportunity to widen the circle of your customers.

Social media is undergoing constant development. Developers try to make these platforms the most convenient places not only for leisure, but also for business. By drawing people in day and night, many of your targeted followers will be around at any time to see something you post. Your products will be shown directly to this targeted segment of purchasers.

3. Your brand/company will become recognizable due to constant online visibility.

Social media platforms are awesome venues on which to conduct marketing campaigns, because they leave a record. Posts, shares, reposts – everything stays visible on profiles until a user deletes something. It allows people to take a close look at what your company was in the past and is now. Help potential customers learn about you and get a lot of benefit.

4. Managing social media, you will open a communication channel with your audience.

A modern and mobile-friendly website does not always equal a comfortable place for users to be active in the comments section. On the other hand, social media is designed perfectly for this, and that is why people do not hesitate to readily leave their feedback, like your posts and share them. The greatest thing is that you will be alarmed instantly if there are any actions to take and you can reply to them at any moment, even start a conversation in private messages. Followers appreciate it when their opinion is noticed and considered important.

After analyzing the benefits of social media marketing and how crucial it is, IT’S TIME TO GET TO WORK. Maintaining social media accounts is no easy task!

1. Be ready to work hard and spend a lot of time on brainstorming. Your team should always be aware of the latest trends, people’s interests, and know how to present content on any given platform.

2. Before starting the process of optimization, set specific goals to be achieved. This brings extra motivation and lights the path for you to follow and complete the task.

3. Develop a successful social media strategy. At this stage you should analyze and use your competitors!

Identify your rivals with WebCEO’s Rank Tracking Tool. Click on the Dangerous Competitors tab and enjoy the detailed report. Learn who you are going to compete with, who the most alarming ones are, and eventually get the better of them with the next step.

4. Track your competitors’ social media accounts. Here your real journey starts. Study the history of their posts from top to bottom, the level of engagement and what were and are the reasons of their success. An important task in this phase is to go through their feedback and – especially – complaints. Take this into account while developing your own strategy to avoid any mistakes and stand out decently.

5. BEFORE starting your social media campaign, work on your website optimization. Needless to say that SMO (Social Media Optimization) is a great way to promote your business, however, the SMO and SEO cooperation will bring you more value. Through social media, people get acquainted with your products and even purchase them, but your website is the place where they really start trusting you.

Your site architecture, appearance, content, and other components of on and off page SEO matter a lot because first impressions matter. Make your website as attractive as your social media accounts.

Social Media matters. So does SEO. Take care of your site's SEO with WebCEO. Sign Up Free

Step #2: Where to Run Your Social Media Marketing Campaign

[ Identify your target audience and decide on a few social media platforms ]

Before making any attempt to promote a website on social media, you will have to identify your target audience. A target audience comprises the type of people you produce your product for. They are of a specific age, nationality, location, interest, and lifestyle. Your goal is to identify all those points and use them in your campaign.

“My product is for everybody” – if only. Genuinely all-purpose and everyday goods and services are rare. Coca-Cola used to imply it was the case for them, but there are identifiable demographics who drink soda a lot more or a lot less than others. Your product is made for a certain group of people, so your marketing campaign primarily should be based on the needs of this very group.

There are a lot of ways of identifying your target audience. We’ll outline some of them:

• Analyze your current audience. Gather data regarding you current followers and website subscribers. Knowing who is interested in your products at the moment, you can see right from the beginning who are among those you are going to work for in the future. Their interests and hobbies will help you decide on the direction and theme of your campaign. Google Analytics will help a lot with this:  

• Analyze your competitors’ current audiences. Your competitors promote goods that have similarities with yours, so you will have roughly the same circle of customers. Your task is to learn who is interested in their goods and yours besides the group of people you outlined from your current audience.
• Online Polls and Surveys are easy and fast ways to determine who would buy your goods. You can conduct them on your website, some other websites for a fee, and of course on social media platforms with appropriate hashtags.
• Analyze your own product. You should have determined your target audience at the stage of creating your product. Now think about people who may be interested in this besides those you originally considered. Learn who else may get any benefit from your product.
• Create a persona for your target audience: a general portrait of your target audience presented schematically as a person with a set of characteristics. It will be easier to work on your strategy when you have such a useful picture of potential clients. Here is an example:

After identifying your target audience, it’s high time to choose a platform that fits your campaign the most. However, our advice is to USE ALL AVAILABLE PLATFORMS. More likely than not, your customers spend their time on more than just one platform, and so should you.

Step #3: How to Optimize Your Social Media Profiles?

[ Make sure your social media account is ready to be popular ]

Most businesses maintain between 4 and 10 social profiles.

Social media profile creation is not a big deal: the two main components you have to work on are appearance (well-prepared posts) and optimized profiles. But you can’t start your marketing campaign until you have covered the following checklist:

1. Logo and cover image.

The first thing we do as soon as we enter any website is to look at its architecture and appearance. We look for colors and build a certain picture in our minds. Learning the content comes only after.

Optimize your social media profiles to make them easy on people’s eyes – bright and modern. And most importantly, use your own images! Never use stock photos in your profile nor any of your posts. Spend some time to take your own pictures or design your own cartoons, so people will recognize your style everywhere.

2. Business name.

People should know who owns the page, so place your company’s official name for people to know who they have met.

3. Bio or “About” information.

Present information about your company in a short, yet appealing way. List the essential information with your most important keywords and go to the next step.

4. Niche.

On some social media, you can mention the category (niche) your company performs in. If your company is not popular enough yet, don’t miss this part! Even world-renowned companies like Coca-Cola or Starbucks specify their sphere of activity, so why shouldn’t you? Of course, on some platforms, selecting a category is mandatory.

5. Links to a website and other social media platforms.

Always place a link to your website on your social media accounts! All your marketing goals in social media involve people visiting your website (although some businesses only need to have people call their phone number). After all, most of the information about your company and a full list of your products are on your website.

Some platforms allow you to insert links and even have special boxes for them. Use this chance for sure! Everything is for your followers’ convenience.

5. Make it easy to reach you.

Followers and potential customers will appreciate the option to ask a direct question or write some feedback privately. Make it possible and don’t worry about spammers, you can block them if need be.

Moreover, via non-public messages, you can receive a profitable offer from another company, or a good idea from an interested follower. LinkedIn messaging can produce more business for a company than email itself. Always check your social media inboxes.

6. Take your time to prepare.

If you are planning to start a social media marketing campaign in the future, begin the process of optimization at least a few months beforehand. Start making posts, uploading videos and images in order to gather relevant followers and test the waters of audience reaction to your product.

For instance, on Twitter you should have spent a few months following relevant people, unfollowing those who did not follow back and following more relevant people. Be sure to follow/invite those in your database if you have one.

Take a good look at the screenshots below to learn what social media profile optimization entails:

• Facebook:

• Twitter:

• Instagram:

• YouTube:

• LinkedIn:

• Pinterest:

Summary

If you want to join social media and start promoting your business, only wanting is not enough. First and foremost, social media optimization needs YOU: your time, your creativity, your contribution.

You should begin with research and planning. If you want to create a powerful and pleasing place for visitors, you will have to put yourself into data searching and processing. An accurate examination of your business possibilities on social media platforms and your competitors will clear the road to success.  

Proceed with identifying and analyzing your audience. The right people attracted to the right places in the best case scenario will bring you traffic, recognition and customers. When we are talking about Internet use, there are two places where we all party hard most of the time: on websites we like and on social media. Use these two. Become that very liked website lots of traffic after getting loved on social media. These are two components of your strategy.

And finally: optimize your profiles and then go right to the next step: writing a post on social media.

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TO BE CONTINUED…

The post A Step by Step Guide to Social Media Optimization. Part 1 appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

There’s always been a lot of argument around how social media affects SEO. Despite the fact that Google renounced social signals as a ranking factor, websites with lots of activity on social platforms tend to rank higher than those without. Clearly, they must be doing something right? However, most SEOs agree that there are proper and improper ways of utilizing social media, and a ranking boost isn’t guaranteed if you manage your pages without giving it much thought.

Why is that? Because all websites are different, as are the social networks. Sometimes they aren’t a good match, and your campaign on Facebook, or Twitter, or LinkedIn suffers as a result. What is the best social media for SEO, and which social platform is the best for your business in particular? These questions can be answered only by looking at the platforms individually and exploring their strengths and weaknesses. Below are some of the most popular social networks that SEOs use.

Facebook: Where All Types of Content Are Equally Loved

On the top of our list is Facebook, the most popular social media platform in the world. The number of its users has exceeded 2 billion this year, and it keeps expanding. That’s almost two Chinas! Keep up the good work, Facebook folks.

With such a large user base, Facebook is the most obvious choice for website owners with ulterior motives. Need to make a first contact with your target audience and let them know you come in peace? Blue pastures will welcome you with open arms. Facebook allows so many ways to submit content that it’s closer to a forum than a social network. You know, if forums allowed you to advertise your brand.

Using Facebook for SEO or business purposes (thankfully, those often overlap) involves creating a business page if you are promoting a brand or a simple group page if it’s something more ordinary like a blog. That’s in addition to creating a page for your own person, if you intend to be the admin; otherwise someone else will have to run your website’s Facebook page. A custom name is preferable since it will be used in the page’s URL and fulfil the role of a keyword. Once you are done filling out all the necessary information (the more detailed it is, the better), the preparations are complete.

Note that you shouldn’t use a personal page as the main frontline of your Facebook SEO activities. Groups and business pages are much better suited for the task; personal pages will do for commenting, liking and sharing the updates.

Now it’s time to communicate with your target audience. We’ve covered the “what”…now we can go through the “how”.

1. Post high-quality content. I know you’ve heard the phrase “content is king” a thousand times already, and I can repeat it again. Linking to high-quality content on your own site works, too; in fact, there’s no point in *not* doing it. But you have to always make sure you are giving your audience something that is well worth their time and will make them want to come back for more.

2. Post often and regularly. It’s another way of saying “strike the iron while it’s hot”. Don’t let the iron get cold, or your audience will become disinterested, and you’ll be back to square one.

3. Make your content engaging. Internet users love participating in what they find online. Create opportunities for a conversation between you and your audience. It could be as simple as asking them for their opinion (e.g. a poll), or you could try something more sophisticated like uploading a photo of your favorite city and asking users to share theirs. The payoff for your imagination will be immense.

4. Include images. Visual information is processed by users faster than raw text. Users are more likely to share a post with a funny or interesting picture than one without anything to spice it up.

These recommendations are more or less the same for all other social platforms. Naturally, there are differences and exceptions, which I’m going to cover.

YouTube: Excellent Videos Need Excellent Keywords

Here’s the other social media giant. Of course, it’s different from the rest because it accepts only one type of content: videos. Text is pushed on the back burner, static pictures got an even worse deal, but that’s no reason to underestimate YouTube as a promotion platform. It gets 30 million users a day; how can you not be tempted to harness such power? Rev up your video editing software and start selling yourself!

YouTube uses a number of factors to evaluate a video’s position in search results. As you can imagine, they all indicate how well a video is received by its viewers, so giving your audience something nice to watch should be your main concern. Quality is measured by:

• Views
• Percentage of the video watched
• Comments
• Subscribes after watching
• Shares
• Thumbs up and thumbs down

However, YouTube videos are also picked up by Google and displayed in its search results, too. Logic dictates that it makes sense to optimize your videos for Google, as well. This may be the easiest part because all it comes down to is keywords. Long-tail keywords that go in the video’s title and description. Surprisingly easy, right? To find the best long-tail keywords for your content, explore WebCEO’s Keyword Research Tool.

Twitter: Strength in Followers and #Hashtags

It’s amazing how a social media platform known for its notoriously short messages managed to make it so big. Was it the element of surprise? But I digress. In case you haven’t heard, Twitter has increased their character limit to 280, isn’t that nice of them?

Twitter and SEO have a somewhat shaky relationship because not all tweets get indexed by Google. That’s no reason to give up on keyword research, of course: neither in your tweets, nor in your profile information. But Twitter has its own well-known equivalent of keywords called hashtags (words with the # sign in front of them), and that’s what is mainly used to find specific tweets on the site. Guess what you need to include in your tweets to make sure they are seen by as many people as possible? Hashtags are the means towards attracting more followers and expanding your audience, and a large number of followers is the factor that tells Google that the tweets from this person deserve to be indexed.

Of course, you can’t rely on hashtags alone. In order to progress with your expansion campaign on Twitter, you need to actively look for users to follow. If you share interests with them, they are much more likely to follow you in return. Make sure to include your hobbies and occupation in your personal info to help your potential followers decide to stop being potential!

LinkedIn: Business Club with a Blog as a Bonus

LinkedIn is Facebook’s older and more mature brother. Less fun, more business-like and professional. Its profiles look like CVs more than anything else. In fact, they are CVs both in form and purpose. You have a much greater chance to find a job on LinkedIn than on any other social media platform, and even if that’s not your intention, you should set up your personal profile, groups and company pages with that mindset. This is a playground for serious kids.

The good news about LinkedIn is that it comes with its own blog platform which you can use if you don’t feel like creating a blog on your own site. Or maybe the role of writing posts for your company’s official blog belongs to someone else, in which case you could write additional original content for LinkedIn’s blog and give your website more online exposure (especially since Google indexes LinkedIn blog posts). The benefits are rather transparent.

Filling out your personal information is greatly encouraged as it increases the chances of your profile appearing in LinkedIn’s search results. Joining groups and participating in discussions is also a must, as it works towards building a stronger presence for you and your brand.

Pinterest and Instagram: Let the Visuals Sell

I am lumping those two together because they share many similarities, both being visual social platforms. At the same time, it’s fun to talk about the differences between them. Shall we begin?

As is the case with other platforms, you start with picking a username, keeping in mind that it will be used in your account’s URL and work as a keyword. Your profile name that will be displayed on the screen is a keyword, too. If you are making a page for your company, its logo is the best candidate for the profile picture, and don’t forget to introduce yourself or your brand in the bio.

You can also add a link to your website on your profile page, and on Instagram, it will be the only link you’ll be able to add anywhere. Pinterest is a lot more generous in this regard: it lets you freely add (or “pin”) images and videos from external resources, automatically attaching links to them.

Your content’s primary selling point will be the visual aspect. What you upload or pin will decide how well your updates will be shared by other users. Titles and especially descriptions come a close second. Choose titles that would be easily found by users and descriptions that are thoughtful and also easy to find by performing a search. Naturally, it goes without saying that the text in them should be optimized with keywords.

You can mark your Instagram galleries with hashtags for discoverability. Evidently, a hashtag with your brand’s name will make it more discoverable. Pinterest, on the other hand, doesn’t use hashtags.

You can also make your Instagram updates automatically appear on your Facebook page by connecting the accounts.

For Pinterest, it’s recommended to verify your website in order to give it priority over non-verified ones in search results, and to use rich pins which provide more information and have a better visibility.

As a downside, Pinterest has a smaller user base than Instagram – in fact, smaller than most other social platforms. On a brighter side, the link to your site in your profile will be dofollow! Such a nice treat is worth putting some effort in winning over Pinterest’s audience.

Even though this list of social platforms is far from being complete, you can see that each of them requires its own specific approach. But knowledge is power, and keeping yourself informed about the lands you are conquering is the key to winning the top positions in Google. Beyond that, it’s a matter of creativity and optimism. May you always be good friends with both, and see you on page 1!

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The post SEO + Social = Married: Are You Maintaining the Relationship? appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Companies these days tend to have their own page on at least one social network. Many SEOs recommend being active on social media as much as possible: it’s said to boost your website’s position in SERPs. Despite that, the status of social media activity as a ranking factor remains a controversial topic. Does being active in social media help you rank in Google or not? Contradicting statements on the subject from Matt Cutts only served to add fuel to the fire and distressed SEOs who had poured their resources into social media campaigns.

We do use Twitter and Facebook links and ranking, as we always have, in our web search rankings. – Cutts, 2010

…As far as doing special, specific work to sort of say, “you have this many followers on Twitter or this many likes on Facebook”, to the best of my knowledge, we don’t currently have any signals like that in our web search ranking algorithms. – Cutts again, 2014

I haven’t experienced trust issues of this magnitude since the day I opened Grandma’s box of cookies (you know the one) and actually found cookies inside.

Why is this a topic for debate? Because almost everything we know about SEO came from researching what works and what doesn’t. We would’ve given up on social media long ago if we were convinced there wasn’t any point in sticking with it. Whether or not it deserves to be called off-page optimization, the positive influence of social media activity on websites is a certain known.

8 SEO-Improving Perks of Using Social Media

1. New pages on your site get indexed faster

A newly created page needs to be added to Google’s index before it can appear in search results. In order to be indexed, there has to be at least one link pointing to it – and if it’s in a place that’s often crawled by Google’s spiders, all the better. Among such places are… you guessed it: social networks.

The simplest example is a blog. If your website has a blog, you absolutely should share links to your new posts in social media (like we do). They’ll get crawled in a matter of minutes, which is nice in itself… but the list of benefits is just beginning.

2. Social sharing gets you more backlinks

Dofollow backlinks are the bricks that build the temple of your presence in the Web. Or a small shed, if you don’t have enough. Outbound links on social networks are usually nofollow links and don’t hold the same power. But Google favors sites that have both dofollow and nofollow links in their link profiles, as opposed to sites with few nofollow links. The latter are often suspected to be involved in machinations and may earn a penalty.

You can use WebCEO’s Backlink Checker to monitor and analyze the quality and quantity of backlinks to your site, contributing to a balanced and effective link-building strategy.

3. Social media buzz drives you more website traffic

This is a logical consequence of the above point. More links naturally mean more traffic. How much extra traffic you receive depends entirely on your pages’ popularity: the more subscribers, the more visitors and potential customers that will buy from you. It’s definitely worth investing your time in helping your pages grow!

4. Your website gets more exposure via sharing

The Internet is all about sharing content with others. It’s easier on social networks than anywhere else. If the content you post on your page is good and interesting, your visitors are likely to share it. Then ”their” visitors will learn you exist.

Word spreads and your brand gets recognized, increasing your chances against your competitors. Google will see your site’s traffic rise and they may be counting that as a ranking factor now. Which leads us to the next point…

5. Customers can find you there

Social networks have plenty in common with search engines like Google, they pretty much are search engines themselves because people conduct searches for specific keywords within them. Social networks are just better fit for socializing than regular search engines. That’s what makes them so popular. Because people spend several hours a day on social media, they are more likely to find your company’s page there than in Google. Make it easier for them to find you – by getting subscribed and shared or via PPC ads, including retargeting campaigns. Then it’s only a matter of whether you can convert your visitors into clients.

6. You can easily follow the latest trends

If you know what your customer wants, your marketing campaign is already on its way to a bright future. What better place to learn more about your audience’s interests than a platform where they openly discuss the latest trending topics? That’s how you can create and post content they’ll find enjoyable, both in social media and on your actual site. To create high-quality content that is optimized for both your customers and search engines, you can try WebCEO’s Content Assistant Tool, designed to help you strike the perfect balance between engaging and search-friendly content.

7. Google ranks social network profiles too

When you optimize your site and it shows up in top positions in SERPs, that’s great. When you don’t and your brand still shows up in top positions, that’s even better. A social media page that’s well-optimized for specific keywords is as likely to appear in SERPs as any other web page out there.

8. It’s easy to receive feedback from your audience

Social networks are all about being, well, social. You can ask your customers to leave reviews and testimonials on your site, but it’s so much easier to ask your audience for feedback in comments on your social media page. Ask, and you shall receive; sometimes you shall receive without even asking if your followers are impressed by you. Be sure to impress them in a good way.

8 Tips to Use Social Media Effectively

1. Be where your audience is

Choosing the wrong place to advertise yourself is like fishing in an empty pond: you’ll waste your time and starve. Research a social network’s demographics before making your decision to post there. For example, the majority of Instagram users are female. Are you selling a female-oriented product? Then you should consider Instagram as your main battleground.

2. Post regularly

The more content you produce, the more awe-inducing and engaging it is, the happier your followers will be. Especially if you do it often. It’s best not to keep them waiting too long: excitement tends to die down quickly, and then your audience forgets why it loved you at all. Besides, don’t you want them to know what you’re up to? Some of your visitors are your prospecting customers, they just don’t know it yet.

Keep them entertained and ready to become your clients. Strike the iron while it’s hot!

3. Emphasize on the visual

An old and verified truth: visual information is powerful. It leaves a much deeper impression on a viewer than raw text and is processed easier. Since your job is to promote your brand, you have to employ visual media – images and videos – and use them to impress.

A picture is worth a thousand words; a video is worth that and a thousand more. Consider putting your effort into making cool, unique, shareable visual content. It will make you so much more distinguished and memorable.

4. Make your text posts short

In social media, less is more. Twitter in particular is notorious for its limit of 140 characters per post. Information, when distributed in small portions, is easier to swallow and digest than a wall of text made of overly long paragraphs. Make your text posts just long enough to motivate the user to visit your site and do something there.

5. Write and reply to your customers

If I had to name a difference between social media messages and emails, I’d say it’s the environment. Social networks feel friendlier and more relaxing, with a stronger sensation of chatting with a real person. Can you relate? Of course you can. When both sides feel comfortable, the task of winning the audience over feels much more enjoyable. As they say, do what you love, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.

6. Tag other businesses and share their pictures

Actively linking to other sites on your own is one of several ways to gain backlinks. The same is true in social media.

Tags and linked mentions of other companies in your posts cannot go unnoticed; the beneficiaries are likely to return the favor in the future and mention you in their own content, giving your brand more exposure. On top of that, bringing up a popular competing brand’s name in some of your posts can help people make an association between your two companies as part of a defined niche. Google values webpages and posts that mention various websites as part of a category.

7. Recycle expired content

It’s difficult to publish the same text twice on your own site without risking trouble with duplicate content. Fortunately, your pages in social media are exempt from this thorny issue. You can recycle old posts with virtually zero risk, except for annoying your audience if you abuse this. Do it right, and you can breathe new life into a piece of content that made you profits in the past (for example, one tied to a seasonal event like Christmas).

8. Optimize your social media activity for Bing

How many of you saw this coming? Not many, I bet. However, Bing has a healthy relationship with social media – more so even than Google the search giant, and gets a special mention.

In 2010, Bing made a statement about social signals being a ranking factor. But unlike Google, Bing has never retracted it. Without an overturning statement, it makes sense to assume it’s still true and use it as a basis for your social media campaign.

As one of Google’s main competitors, Bing has been gaining momentum lately. Don’t be quick to disregard it; rather, include it in your plans. Should Bing get big while riding the social tide, Google might get worried and review their stance on social media signals. And then you’ll be glad you’ve built a strong online presence.

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The post 8 Reasons Why Social Media Activity Affects Your Rankings – With 8 Tips appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

For years, Google has been the brand to beat in online advertising. Its AdWords platform has been the central component of countless advertising campaigns, and since Google is such a household name, it’s often the first thing that comes to mind when people consider online advertising. Not only is Google by far the most popular search engine in the world, giving the platform access to billions of users, it also has some of the deepest reserves of user data, some of the best reporting technology, and one of the best models for ad pricing—a bid-based cost-per-click model.

But Google isn’t the only player in town; in fact, it’s quickly becoming outclassed by a certain social media platform with a similar—yet distinct—advertising model.

Facebook’s Big Draws

Facebook offers advertising in a cost-per-click model, much like Google, and has a similarly huge base of followers, with 1.59 billion monthly active users. Its advertising revenues grew from $1.8 billion in 2013 to $4.3 billion in 2015, and there’s no sign that this growth will come to a halt any time soon. According to datapine, this growth is largely due to Facebook’s flexibility for marketers, but what other specific factors have allowed Facebook to compete with, and sometimes outcompete such a massively established juggernaut?

Facebook’s Advantages             

When you compare Facebook to Google directly, it becomes clear why Facebook is becoming a more popular choice among marketers:

1. An intuitive ad platform. Google AdWords is fairly straightforward—if you already know what you’re doing. If you’re getting started with Google for the first time, you might be intimidated by all the advanced options, metrics, and features that it offers. In fact, it might take you weeks or months to feel comfortable launching a campaign. Facebook, on the other hand, has a more approachable, intuitive design, allowing the average small business owner or novice marketer to put together and launch a campaign in the span of a few minutes.
2. Accessibility for low-budget campaigns. When it comes to budgeting, both Google and Facebook have tons of options, but overall, Facebook tends to be friendlier to low-budget campaigns. In Google, if you restrict your budget to less than a few hundred dollars per month, you’ll be scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of keyword choices, but on Facebook, you can opt for a $5-per-day budget and still get in front of your ideal target users (just at a lower volume than you would at a higher budget level). This also makes it easier to scale a campaign over time.
3. More user data. Google has a ton of user information at its disposal, which is one reason why it remains so popular—but it’s all limited to how users search and engage with websites. Facebook, on the other hand, digs much deeper into the user’s psyche, with detailed information on all our likes, dislikes, past behavior, and even our connections with friends and family members. Because of this, you can target audiences in much more advanced ways with Facebook than you can with Google.
4. Lower competition. Though this becomes less and less true as Facebook ads become more popular, for the moment, Facebook has less competition than Google. Because Google is so popular, brands from all over the world are competing for ad space, which drives the cost of advertising up for everyone. On Facebook, competition isn’t this intense, so you’ll enjoy lower prices for a similar scope of advertising—at least for now.
5. Greater ad diversity. Facebook also offers a wider diversity of different advertising options, including “promoted content,” which are essentially basic Facebook posts that you put in front of new audiences with a paid “boost,” traditional advertising options, and ecommerce-like product listings that enable people to purchase your products directly.
6. Willingness to evolve. Finally, Facebook has shown a greater tendency to evolve, improve its offerings, and adjust its advertising platform over time. This may be a recent phenomenon, thanks to Facebook’s relative newness in the advertising world, but it’s worth considering if you’re looking for a long-term advertising partner.

Of course, none of this is to suggest that Google is no longer a valid advertising platform, or that Facebook is objectively a better choice. Facebook does have some clear advantages, but don’t forget that Google still has plenty of unique features and tricks up its sleeve, including advanced analytics information and product-specific targeting with its keyword-centric approach.

If you’re interested in paid advertising, it’s likely in your best interest to use both platforms to get the best of both worlds, or do some extensive research to decide which platform will perform best for your brand.

For those exploring the possibilities within Google’s ecosystem, WebCEO’s Online SEO Tools offer a comprehensive suite for managing and optimizing your campaigns, ensuring that you’re fully equipped to navigate the complexities of Google’s advertising network.

The post The 6 Advantages Facebook Advertising Has Over Google appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Earlier in the previous post we talked about essential sources to mine hot trending topics which are the most engaging and sharable for your audience. Today, we would like to share with you some thoughts on the places you can take ideas and data for your visuals from, in order to give them a ripple effect as they spread via social media. It’s true that more than 50% of people are visual learners. IMHO, Numbers by themselves can be really frustrating, but if you implement them into structured infographics, it all sinks in better. That is why creative infographics and charts are so popular. Everybody creates them and you should as well. The question is where to source accurate and catchy data and turn that into trending linkbait?

Your Own Data

If you have stored valuable knowledge and experience taken from your customers’ data, make use of it. Transform it into an attractive visual form and use it as a hook for PR promotional and marketing campaigns. Pick up data on industry trends and interesting insights and make them the bottom line in your press releases, infographics, presentations, social media updates etc. Be careful when using your own data. Be objective.

Official Statistics

The best way to capture minds is to provide data sets based on government related scoring, surveys, researches etc. Source from the government website of a specific country to provide a grounding for some of your future visual content.

Your Partners Data

Consider your partners who you work with to see whether they have some valuable, relative data. They may cooperate on creating joint visual content. Share the costs, time and effort spent on the creation of visual assets with your partner and get the mutual benefits of double publishing and distribution results.

Social Media Buzz

Accurate data sourced from authoritative and solid websites and implemented into your visual content does not guarantee viral social engagement and distribution. One of the honey spot places to find hot topics and trends is in the social media realm. Get inspiration from surfing your Facebook, Twitter home feeds, or using Twitter and Facebook search. It is so easy to draw creative ideas for your own visualized content from viral images, memes and other visuals.

Use Google Trends to ease your brainstorming on what terms related to your business you can use for your visual assets. It is the right tool when you want to follow trending terms. In tandem with Google Trends, surf on the web in search of the latest news, blog posts and discussions relative to your business niche. The WebCEO Web Buzz Monitoring tool will help you to track and pick the latest killer content for your future visuals. Just enter your brand name, trending keywords and long tail phrases as well as competitor names and start your research about interesting topics that may become a theme for your visuals.

Sport/News Events

Play upon worldshaking events and sport news. It is most likely that your visuals based on content that appears on first page search results will get additional points after being indexed and shown in the SERPs. Be sure to distribute your newly created visuals via social networks and content submission sites. Read on the recent Klout blog post about how to increase your content engagement during the #WorldCup.

Start to appeal to your customers and targeted audience using the language of visuals that convey the most essential data taken from trusted sources. Most of us find content supported by true and valid data, provided in the form of creative image, infographic or presentation, is much more appetizing than hard, long-descriptive copy pushed down the throats of customers and perspective buyers.

The post 5 At-Hand Data Sources for Informative Visual Content appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.