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The Ultimate Twitter Marketing Setup for Small Businesses: TweetDeck, Topsy, Disqus, or Buffer

Wednesday, January 1, 2013by The BWD Team in Marketing, SEO, Twitter

Social media marketing is an essential and low cost form of marketing for small business, with one of the most affordable and high ROI options being the micro publishing service Twitter.

As a service that has been “traditionally” viewed as a platform for 140-character bites of content, Twitter provides the best conduit for professional conversation-making online as well. When we consider the fact that word of mouth marketing is the single most influential sales factor in many consumer and enterprise industries, it’s easy to realize that a great presence on Twitter is essential for a business’ success in 2013 and onwards.

While your typical Twitter activities probably include posting a link to your latest content on your website including blog posts, research, case studies, or any other type of content marketing, many small business owners and managers have yet to realize the potential that Twitter provides for in gathering new clients, building your company’s professional authority, and constructing a vast, healthy network of inbound links to elevate SEO and traffic to your website.

Think conversations, not 140 character serial publishing

Inbound marketing options are truly limitless as this SEOmoz graphic demonstrates.

Remember: your Twitter marketing should always be just one part of a greater inbound link building strategy that will also build SEO.

The first step towards this comprehensive and holistic approach in word of mouth marketing online is realizing that these types of services must be about conversations and not simple 140 character bites of our own content all day long. When we think about Twitter as a link-generating, conversation-buzzing platform, it’s easier to understand how this digital medium is really just like word-of-mouth marketing in the “real” world.

To this end, we really tell our clients to tweet about everything. Instead of thinking about how you can share 10 links to your website in a single day, start by framing various conversations that you think would be helpful in generating new clients, sales and more. Use hashtags and reach outs to other individuals or organizations on Twitter often. Did you mention a great company or vendor in your most recent piece of content? Mention them through the @username function and there’s a great chance that your shout out will be continuously shared from their own feed as well. Do you have a question for a competitor or colleague that you think might fascinate your followers or potential clients if it were on Twitter? Ask away! The possibilities here are endless: simply think about creating helpful and enriching conversations, not necessarily pure 140 character micro-publishing. As you may realize from our research this past month, the entirety of these techniques all fall under the umbrella of content marketing and link building–the gold standard in digital marketing–as well.

Here’s an example of this technique that helped BWD earn a new tweet on the @KISSmetrics feed, definitely giving our traffic a healthy boost of inbound traffic (and of course, search engine “juice.”)

@kissmetrics Thought you’d like the love in our latest article here: blogwhatdesign.com/2013/01/22/3-c… #analytics #metrics #betterthanGOOGLE!

— BWD Inc.(@bwdinc) January 22, 2013

While Facebook certainly fosters conversations to a certain extent as well, it’s quite often the case that professional industries interact at a much quicker, and more detailed pace on Twitter thanks to its purely chronological nature, as opposed to Facebook’s more popularity-based distribution system through the news feed.

Calculating your social media ROI

While some may argue that tracking social media ROI is near impossible we argue that those types of agencies and individuals just aren’t doing their jobs very well. An analytics systems like KISSmetrics and others actually can pinpoint where social media users come from, how long they stay, when they come back, where they go from your website, how many dollars they spend, and more. If you can’t calculate social ROI with a tool like that, then we hate to say it, but your marketing team is just plain lazy.

Take a look at KISSmetric’s great infographic on tracking the ROI for social media here, and then read through our article about how analytics tools like this are essential to successful tracking of your investment in social media and other digital marketing.

3 Keys to Beginner’s Conversion Optimization for Small Business Websites (& the Money You’re Losing Without Them!)

Tuesday, January 1, 2013by The BWD Team in Marketing

While the art of the sale is ages old, digital tools have done quite a bit to innovate the entire process from start to finish. One of the most fundamental updates for marketing through these tools has been website conversion optimization and the resulting metric called “conversion rate“ used to denote those individuals who actually following through with a goal achievement–such as a sale–over the number of total browsers, or those just looking around.

As you can imagine, there are many many people simply “looking around” on any given website, and what a company like ours specializes in is getting those looky-loos to follow through with a positive outcome or goal achievement. All of the SEO, external advertising, or link-building in the world can send tons of traffic to a page, but how can you best ensure a sale once they arrive? This is the art of conversion optimization.

Prefer to outsource this to the experts? Send us an email and we’ll get started on your project right away.

Defining “conversion optimization” for small businesses

As you might expect, a “conversion” can involve a lot of different things for many different businesses. The one consistent factor is a goal achievement or positive outcome, small or large, for every successful conversion. While large goal achievements like a newly closed sale or a purchase of any kind online or off are best, smaller conversions such as a new email subscriber or social follower can be highly valuable as well. Sometimes these smaller conversions can lead to larger conversions later on, all acting as part of a “conversion funnel” throughout the digital sales process. At a minimum, it’s essential that your website enables some form of initial connection between the visitor and your brand.

While there are many robust solutions that control and segment the entire customer relationship after first contact known as CRM or customer relationship management systems for salesmen to continue following up with clients (our favorites are our favorites Infusionsoft or Streak), what we’re discussing today is more specific to the initial exposure a visitor has with your brand through your digital properties and the immediate outcome. What we want to do with great conversion optimization is not only get your visitors in the front door, but to the metaphorical cash register line–such as a contact form submission or e-commerce sale–as well.

Key #1: The importance of solid analytics in conversion optimization

What makes conversion optimization both fun and fascinating is the fact that statistics and analytics play such a major role throughout the entire process. While Google Analytics is–somewhat–free, we feel there are a host of other, higher quality systems out there at great value as well. While every business’ needs are different, we really love KISSMetrics right now starting at $49/month for our clients. It offers the most user friendly setup and customization we’ve seen yet, plus their API lets engineers (like ours!) create tracking for almost any kind of digital event–such as a click on a button, or a view on a contact form or shopping page–very easily.

Blog What? Design: What will you publish today?