Social Media | Netwave Interactive

ALERT! Update Your LinkedIn Account Now

Business // Marketing // Social Media // Social Networking

LinkedIn, the resume style social network, has been making headlines the past few days. It’s being reported that 6.46 million encrypted LinkedIn passwords have leaked online.

The social network, which is best known for its ability for users to connect with other professionals, find jobs, and share industry news, said on Twitter that it is currently looking into these reports and to stay tuned for more information.

If you’re a LinkedIn user, we recommend you sign in and change your password right away. This is the perfect opportunity to do some profile updating as well.

Many people have LinkedIn accounts but fail to keep them up to date. Why not take this as an opportunity to do a little self-promoting.

Promote Yourself

Have you changed jobs recently? Been promoted? Finished school? Learned some new skills?

Let everyone know about it!

You never know who will view your profile. Updating your job title and responsibilities as well as experiences and skills can be very beneficial to your career and increase your online visibility.

Every Connection Counts

LinkedIn is all about connecting with other professionals. Search out some new people you have worked with or know to connect with. These new connections might just lead to your next big job opportunity.

Don’t be shy!

Ask for recommendations. People look for recommendations and reviews for everything nowadays. There’s no better way to give people a good first impression than to see a list of people who think highly of you and your work.

Take an active role in your career. Start networking through LinkedIn. We can organize a seminar for and your staff in our office or at your workplace.

For more information about how LinkedIn and other social networks can help you and your business contact Netwave Interactive Marketing today.

Solving the Dilemma of Social Media

Social Media

Manage.Monitor.Maintain

For Social Media to be truly effective, a company should give its designated social media employees the space to interact with their community, yet maintain some control over what’s said. We had a restaurant client who had a real cheerleader of a waitress. She was a great Facebook and Twitter ambassador—until a customer took umbrage with her service—then the goodwill ambassador became a character assassin. Because we were monitoring all SM messages, NetWave was able to step in and diffuse the situation.

It’s a fine line companies walk to maintain a successful social media campaign. But the payback can be significant. Most clients don’t have the time to keep up with their social media accounts. They find it worthwhile to assign the task of “tweeting” and “posting” to one of their more web savvy (and usually young) employees. Therein lies the dilemma. The employee may know the ins and outs of Facebook, but they have little if any brand and marketing experience.

What’s needed is a silent mentor that quietly oversees all posts, makes sure they adhere to company standards and diffuses any potential issues before they become social media nightmares and examples of what not to do. We call the program our Manage, Monitor and Maintain Program. It’s designed to give your accounts the attention they need, all while growing your fan base and strengthening the connection with your customers.

Manage

Train you and your staff on Social Media outlets. Managing the scheduling of posts is an essential task. Your customers represent many different backgrounds and access social media at many different times throughout the day and week. We will make sure you are scheduling posts at the appropriate times to maximize reach, making adjustments when necessary.

Monitor

On a day-to-day basis your accounts will be monitored for any new interaction that requires action, such as a comment or inquiry from a customer. We will also monitor brand mentions on Twitter and checkins on Foursquare.

Maintain

Maintaining your accounts is a very important step in growing your fan base. Through the use of Foursquare and Twitter, we will be able to grow your “follows” and “likes.” Also, with the constant update and invention of new apps and social networks we will keep your accounts up to date and make suggestions of new ideas when appropriate.

To schedule a consultation or for more information about our services, contact NetWave Interactive Marketing, your Central New Jersey, full-service marketing firm.

Social Media Makes Brand Monitoring Easy

Business // Social Media

New media is the new form of communication, which includes almost all online conversation such as social media, blogs, vlogs, and rating sites like Yelp and Google Maps. For a brand to successfully compete in today’s market they need to be in the know of what people are saying about them.

More likely than not, your consumers are talking about your brand through new media, even if they aren’t talking directly to you. A recent study shows that “60% of Millennials spend time rating products and services and uploading videos, images and blog entries online.” With that said, it’s time you find out what they are saying.

Using social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare will allow you to connect with your consumers on a more personal and interactive level. The very same study, mentioned before, found that more than half of the Millennials surveyed (53%) reported using social networks to explore brands.

If your brand is not already on or ready for such social networks you may want to consider setting up your account for monitoring purposes. Many brands do not use their Twitter account to send tweets but rather to respond, if necessary, to mentions of their brand.

Social media can also serve as a great public relations tool. By monitoring your Facebook account daily you prevent a possible issue from spiraling out of control. Here at NetWave one of our clients had an issue posted on their Facebook wall. Thanks to our monitoring and our New Media Manager working with their Marketing Coordinator, we were able to address the situation before it had a chance to spread through the social networks.

Learn more about how to handle bad publicity in social media. Contact NetWave Interactive Marketing to learn more about our new media and brand monitoring services.

Sources: Mashable & BCG Perspectives

10 “Do It Yourself” SEO Techniques

SEO // Websites

SEO is a highly sought after topic. Everyone wants to know how do you get your website within the first page or two of the search engines? What factors go into determining my Google page rank? Are there any items that I can do myself to increase my ranks?

There are companies who dedicate themselves full time to doing SEO at a pretty penny. Hiring an SEO agency comes at a high price and a lot of companies can’t always afford. Here is a list of 10 “Do it yourself” SEO techniques that assist in gaining organic ranks.

1. Title Tags

Each page on your website has a title tag. This tag serves as a heading to a chapter of a book. Search engines use these title tags for indexing. The title tag is viewed by search engines as the most important tag compared to the description tag and meta tags. When creating a new page on your website, make sure you include specific keywords in your title.

A page title is the first line item a search engine will look at when determining just what the particular page is about. It is also the first thing potential visitors will see when looking at your search engine listing. The more relevant your page title is to a search word or phrase, the higher your website will appear.

It’s important to include a keyword or two in the title tag of each page, but don’t overload with keywords. If you do, you will be committing a cardinal sin in SEO world which is known as “keyword stuffing.” This act actually penalizes your site and reduces your changes of increasing organic rank. Netwave Interactive recommends 20-30 characters in a title tag of each page. Most people will include either the company name, or title of the particular page here, as well.

2.WWW Canonicalization

Every website has a own domain name (example.com). However that 1 domain name can be viewed as 2 different pages by Google, Yahoo, and Bing (www.example.com and example.com). To help major search engines index your home page, Google and Microsoft allow users to determine their preferred listing. Through the use of Google and Bing’s webmaster tools section, you as a website owner can inform major search engines which domain name you would like to use. Once completing the preferred domain, all home page traffic will be directed to your choice. This will keep search engines from seeing two different sites on the same domain.

3. Proper Use of Heading Tags

This is a very important element to consider when writing out your site copy. Use of heading tags helps users, web browsers and search engines alike know where the major key points of your copy are.

Your main page title should use the <h1> tag — this shows what your page is about. Use of additional tags, such as <h2> and <h3> are equally important by helping to break down your copy. For one, you’ll see a visual break in the text. But as far as the search engines are concerned, it will automatically know what your topics are on a page. The various heading tags give a priority to the content and help index your site properly.

4. Update robots.txt file with new pages added

By creating and adding this type of file to the root directory, you are guiding Search Engine robots as to what pages to read and index and what folders to bypass. Some pages that are commonly blocked by site owners are CSS folders, https pages, sort pages, etc. By creating a robots.txt file, you are directing search engine robots through your site to important information, while eliminating them from entering trap doors. This in turn aids in your organic results because when SEO spiders enter into your website, they will not get “caught up” in any areas that they should not be in. These SEO spiders will only index/review the pages that you want visitors to find.

5. Title Attributes on Links

Including title attributes on links is another important step that any good web site will have. That’s the little “tool tip” that pops up when you place your mouse over a link. These are especially important for image links, but equally useful for text links.

As a note, you should use descriptive text for your links. “Click here” doesn’t really tell a person – or more importantly, the search engines — what the link is. At the very least put a title tag that will explain that “Click Here” really means “Web Design Portfolio” for example. Better yet – make the main link text something like “View my web design portfolio” — this will give some value to the link showing that the resulting page is relevant to searches for portfolio’s.

6. XML Sitemap

Similar to the robots.txt file, XML sitemaps “guide” search engines to your published pages on your website. XML sitemaps are strongly recommended for site owners who have more then 100 pages or are constantly producing new content. Also located in Google and Microsoft’s webmaster tools, website owners can constantly update their sitemap when adding new pages or updating a websites navigation. There is also a free tool to use which generates your XML sitemap for you. Simply download your sitemap, and upload using a FTP program to your root directory. Once completed, log into your webmaster tools section and notify Google and Microsoft that your sitemap has been completed. your reward? Faster indexing and higher organic ranks.

7. Relevant Content

So you have rewritten your complete website to have a large amount of keywords sprinkled through your text. You have watched your organic rankings increase each week. However, you are no longer receiving phone calls from new prospects. Why? Perhaps because your website copy makes your company sound unprofessional. There is a fine line between over doing it and fully optimizing your website’s copy. Make sure you err on caution. Keep in mind your website is a sales tool that is supposed to spark interest. Although traffic coming into your site is a plus, if you are not receiving any inquiries, you have a bigger problem. When creating your site copy, just write as if your were having a conversation with a new prospect. Keep your information relevant to the topic of the page.

8. Link Building

We’ve probably all heard of Google Page Rank — it seems to be every web site owner’s dream to have as high a page rank as possible. While the algorithm for determining page rank encompasses many elements, and is constantly changing, one item is the number of links pointing to your web site.

Now, you’ll want to steer clear of link farms and other spammy attempts at getting links to your site. However there are many reputable and niche directory sites that you can use to submit your web site, or specific blog articles to.

With genuine content — especially if you have a blog — you’ll be able to generate links with other web sites and blogs, as well. It’s somewhat of a give and take, in that if you link out to other sites, you’ll find sites linking back to you — and hopefully see your page rank going up, as well!

9. Register website with multiple listing directories

As the internet has grown, there is a need for a directory. There are free directories that allow web owners to create a website and company info listing. These listings provide company location, link to their website, and sometimes a brief paragraph about services offered. Some directories are strict as to what content you can add. Others like Google Maps allow the website owner to register business location, website, hours of operation, services offered, company reviews, etc. All of these directories send links back to the website owner’s website which helps with Search Engine ranks.

10. Create Flat Websites

The Creation of flat sites has proven to be very effective. The key is to purchase a keyword specific domain. On this domain, develop a 4 – 5 content heavy website that then points to your main website. Make sure your website is keyword specific. Therefore when developing your flat site, you want to make sure your domain name, title tags, meta tags, meta description, and website content all focus on one keyword string. Once this new flat site starts to appear higher in search engines, visitors will be clicking in to find our more information. Offer enough information to make the visitor interested to find out more. Have the Contact Us and About us links on the flat site link directly into your parent website.

Forced Facebook Timeline Update: What to do?

Social Media

It’s official; Facebook will be converting ALL brand pages to the new Timeline layout as of March 30th. That means there will be several changes that will affect your business page. This post will explain these changes and show you how to take full advantage of these modifications.

First thing’s first.

Facebook Timeline will be in full effect as of March 30th, 2012.
The new layout is intended to be much easier to read and more informative (see the attached reworked NetWave brand page as an example).
Admins may choose to preview their page in timeline before the full rollout.
You have the option of publishing the Timeline now, before March 30th.

What’s changing?

Cover photo

The biggest change, besides the way posts are displayed on the page is the Cover photo.
This is a larger image where you can be as simple or as creative as you want, but should ultimately reflect your business.
There are several restrictions for the cover. (No direct promoting or advertising)
NetWave can design and optimize this image for you (more on this later).

Tabs

No longer will all the tabs (currently on the left) be showcased.
Tabs now have larger logos.
The ‘Photos’ tab cannot be moved.
You may swap out the other 3 tabs, as much as you want, with your other tabs you want to feature. (Perfect for current promotions, menus, contests, etc.)
Custom apps/ tabs can now be wider.
NO more landing tabs, which means ‘Welcome’ tabs are irrelevant.

Great Improvements for Brand Pages:

Featured content

Pinning
- You may “pin” a post, which will make it “stick” at the top for up to 7 days. You can change which post is pinned as much as you want.
Highlighting
- Makes the post wide across the screen.
Milestone
- Milestones are just that, any milestones for your business may be added separately to make them stand out on your timeline and provide a history of your business.
Messaging
- Users can send private messages to brand pages.
- Brand pages can respond to these messages.
- Users must initiate the message first.
- You no longer have to ask a customer to send you an email (listing the email address for all to see). Simply ask them to message you.

See our example here.

In an effort to make the switch easier for you, NetWave Interactive will offer two services:

Basic Update: Includes a simple cover photo, provided by you, and editing which tabs are displayed.
Custom Update: Includes a custom designed cover photo and edits to the tabs. Option for new tabs to be generated.

Our professional services rate is $125 per hour.

A basic update for our current clients will take approximately ½ an hour because we know your layout. For new clients the change may take about an hour.
A custom update for existing clients will take approximately 1-1 ½ hours. Additional custom work will be quoted upon request.

If you would like to move forward with one of the above services please contact us at 732.701.9797 or email our New Media Manager.

NetWave Interactive Marketing would like to remind you of our full Social Media services, which includes management and monitoring. Thank you and have a great day!

Marketing Creative: Think outside the ad box to produce revenue

Blogging // Marketing // Social Media // Social Networking

Every business wants to have that next big ad, but at what cost? New York City creative is full of elaborate ideas and abstract thoughts, but take a look at your annual budget and then tell me you want to spend it all on that full page ad with the flashy tagline and zero accountability. Small businesses cannot afford to waste such a large percent of their integrated marketing budget on creative that, well let’s face it, won’t bring in the revenue. I’ve listed three tips that I have found successful in building creative brand awareness that won’t break the bank.

1. Connect with your customers on new levels.

Don’t advertise to your customers, get to know them instead. Social media is the latest, cheapest and most engaging form of creative. Instead of a fancy tag line saying “We are the best and this is why,” ask your customers what they think of you. Social media is absolutely free to use and easy to learn, all you need is fifteen minutes a day and a little creativity. Here are three tips for business starting out with social media who want to optimize their experience.

Offer special promotions and contests for social media users and give back to the actual customers, not the people seeing your ad.
Use multiple social media sites, link them together and expand your community. #AwesomeIdea!
Ask for feedback and make your conversations as engaging as possible. Don’t say “We have a special on hardwood flood this month,” ask your Facebook friends and Twitter followers which they prefer better and why. Better yet, make a YouTube video on how easy it is to install hardwood flooring.

2. Give your Email a makeover.

When we wake up in the morning, we put on a pot of coffee, let the dogs out and check our email. Ideally, this opportunity can only be derailed by the snooze button. Whether you email clients as a newsletter, with specials or simply a personal message from the CEO, you have the ability to be creative. Although Email may seem to be falling behind social media and mobile technology, it’s still one of the most effective ways to reach your customers directly. Unless you plan on going door to door or dropping thousands of dollars on a direct mail piece, Email is the way to go. Using websites like Constantcontact.com, your emails can be constructed efficiently and creatively. By linking your Emails to company pages, social media sites and blogs you are able to track customer navigation and show off your new Twitter account you are still trying to figure out. Other than a small monthly fee for lists and creation, Email is a low cost way to reach your customers all at once.

3. Share your company’s knowledge, passion and insight with your readers.

Blogger Erica Swallow of Southern Swallow Productions states “small businesses with corporate blogs receive 55 percent more traffic than small businesses that don’t blog.” Blogging is an exceptional way to cut your creative budget in half. Having a company blog is not necessary, although proven successful for small business by dramatically increasing placement on organic searches. These tips will get you on the right track:

This is your chance to be creative, find a voice (theme) that relates to your business and won’t scare off your clients.

Blogs are read by people who find your line of work interesting, so give them something interesting to read about.

Linking to media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube) and your company website is a great way to increase blog and website placement in local searches.

Blog as a human, not a robot. The only thing creative about a robot is the idea of one.

Now that you’re ready to Socialize, Blog and Email, there are two main points I hope you take away from this. The first is that by intertwining all your online media, you save on your marketing budget and increase customers, viewers and followers, while still being as creative as you’d like to be. The second is that you don’t need to pay for expensive creative to be successful. Integrating simple online tools into your marketing campaign is more than enough for small and rising businesses to stay profitable.

If you have any questions or would like to read more on this or other related subjects, Contact Us. Remember, no budget is too small to let your customers know they are important to you.

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