Facebook Stats that Every Social Marketer Should Know

With over 1.23 billion active users (including 71% of online adults in the United States), a 94% increase in shared content since 2012, and enough spending money to buy several small countries, it’s clear that Facebook isn’t going anywhere soon. Smart marketers are already using Facebook’s impressive reach to their own advantage, but the network is still relatively new and constantly evolving. It’s hard enough to keep up with Facebook’s changing algorithms – how can marketers be sure they’re using Facebook strategically, not just “marketing at random”?

In addition to arming yourself with a rock solid social media tactical plan (click the link for a comprehensive sample plan, including high-level objectives and granular action items), marketers need to approach their Facebook strategy with the most up-to-date insights and stats.

With that in mind, I was excited to read a new report from competitive intelligence platform TrackMaven: The Marketing Maven’s Guide to Facebook. This report analyzes 5,804 Facebook pages, spanning a total of 1,578,006 posts, and examining patterns in Likes, Comments, and Shares. As a marketer, this kind of data is invaluable – read on to get a prime sample of their findings:

Is There a “Best” Day to Post on Facebook?

TrackMaven focused their investigation on Facebook pages with – at minimum – 1,000 Likes. Of the 5,804 pages they analyzed, posts were published almost evenly throughout the workweek, but then then dropped off during the weekend.

The least popular day for Facebook posts is Sunday, on which only 8.73% of total posts are published. But if you look at effectiveness by day of week, weekend posts actually get a lot more engagement than those published on weekdays:

In fact, posts published on Sundays – the least popular day for posting – are 25% more effective, in terms of engagement (or average interactions per post), than posts published on Wednesdays. So while there’s no “best” day to post on Facebook, if you’re looking to tap into a little more engagement per post, why not experiment with some posts on the weekends? If you see increased engagement, make weekend posts a habit.

How to Make Facebook Work “After Hours”

To get a little more granular, TrackMaven also looked at the time of day most people post, and the time of day posts get the most engagement. Surprisingly, Facebook posts published after work hours (between 5pm and 1am) seem to get the highest engagement.

Keep in mind that because TrackMaven limited their report to official pages, rather than profiles, these posts were coming from brands, not people. So the numbers above show that we’re more likely to engage with brands (not just with our personal networks) during our own free time.

Marketers can find two key takeaways from that fact:

1) Schedule your posts. If you’re not using Facebook’s scheduler function to publish posts after work hours, you should definitely start. Scheduling posts ahead of time will keep your cadence steady throughout the evening.

As you can see below, scheduling posts on your Facebook Page is easy. Simply click on the clock icon below your message, and choose the date/hour. You can actually schedule these out as much as six months in advance.

2) Facebook is a “social” network, not a business network. As we’ve mentioned, consumers are now engaging with marketing messages on Facebook during their free time – in the midst of their personal social networking interactions.

So when you’re posting on Facebook, think about how your sales pitch will look amongst the wedding pictures and new baby photos…that’s right, not so good. Instead, use a conversational (maybe even humorous!) tone, and post content that is fun, entertaining, and human.

Higher Word Count Equals Higher Facebook Engagement

But while a simple, conversational message is key to successful Facebook marketing, you don’t want to dumb your message down. Although TrackMaven’s report found that the average length of a Facebook post is between 10 and 19 words (posts with between 0 and 9 words were the second most common), posts with between 80 and 89 words were actually the most effective:

In fact, posts with over 80 words they had twice the amount of engagement of any other post. This may be because of that intriguing “Keep Reading” link, but it also may be because Facebook users are interested in lengthier, more valuable content that tells a story — not sales pitches.

Need help with more followers, likes or targeted traffic?
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3 REASONS WHY YOU NEED TO LEARN SEO

Even if you decide to outsource your SEO campaign execution and management to full service SEO company I believe it is incredibly important that site owners and marketing managers take the time to learn SEO for themselves, even if it’s just an understanding of the basics. I know what you’re thinking—Why do I have to learn SEO when I can just pay someone to do it for me? I know that site owners and SMB marketing managers are incredibly busy and their daily to-do list only seems to get longer and longer and learning SEO seems like just another time mongering but I promise that it is well worth your time in the end. Here’s why:

1. LEARN SEO TO PROTECT YOURSELF FROM SPAMMY, CHEAP SEO SERVICE PROVIDERS.

There are plenty of great, white hat SEO agencies out there that will do a phenomenal job with your SEO program and you’ll never lose a wink of sleep over it. There are also more than a few low-end, spammy, cheap SEO service providers that are just looking to make a quick buck and don’t really care about the long term impact their actions might have on your website. If you don’t learn SEO for yourself (at least enough to understand what is and isn’t Okayed by the Google Webmaster Guidelines) you are putting yourself and your website in a vulnerable position. What if the advice your SEO firm is giving you is bad advice? Obviously you don’t have to become an expert, but you should want to learn SEO well enough so that you can at least notice the red flags should they pop up. You don’t want to get penalized 6 months from now because your SEO provider was engaging in black hat SEO tactics and you didn’t know about it.

2. YOU’LL BE ABLE TO TACKLE YOUR SEO INTERNALLY.

Even with a great white hat SEO firm at your side, there are some things that need to be done internally when it comes to SEO. For instance, you are going to be the in-house SEO champion that makes sure every department is onboard and understands how what they do fits into the SEO program at large. Everything you do can be leveraged for SEO provided you know how to look at it! A little SEO knowledge helps you find the SEO value in everything else that you do to market your business online.

If you understand how SEO works you’ll also be able to explain the “grand plan” to your own managers and make sure everyone has realistic expectations. For instance, if you learn the fundamentals of SEO you’ll come to understand that SEO is a long term, building process and that link building is really something you’ll be doing forever. You can’t hit a certain benchmark and call it quits and expect things to stay that way! But if you didn’t take the time to learn SEO for yourself you might be expecting bigger results faster than your SEO program can deliver them. I’ve seen plenty of good SEO programs get the legs cut out from underneath them because site owners were too impatient.

3. LEARNING SEO ON YOUR OWN MAKES YOU A VALUABLE ASSET TO YOUR SEO PROVIDER.

If you learn SEO for yourself that also means you’ll be better able to help your SEO partner. There are some link building tactics that require your cooperation or approval (like joining an association that has a membership fee or becoming a guest blogger somewhere) and the more you know about and understand SEO the more you can help move your own SEO campaign forward. As you learn SEO you start to see link building and content marketing opportunities in everything, including things your SEO provider might not find. You know your business inside and out and learning SEO is only going to bring good things your way in the long run.

You need some SEO improving?
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How to Improve Your Site Speed for Better SEO Results

You’ve created what you believe to be the best website to sell your products or services, you’ve incorporated search engine optimization into every facet of your online business and yet you are still not getting the high ranking for your website that you feel it deserves. One aspect you might be overlooking is site speed, i.e. how fast your site loads on your website visitor’s computers or mobile device.

How Site Speed Affects SEO Rankings

Site speed is actually one of the elements which major search engines use in determining your site’s SEO ranking. Your website load speed can make a significant impact on how your website ranks on SERPs (search engine result pages). If your website is feature packed (e.g. fancy galleries, live chat, Flash elements etc.), you might think you’re giving your visitors the best possible experience, when you could be doing the opposite by giving them slow loading pages. You should aim for a balance between fancy website features and giving visitors the optimal site speed experience.

Check Your Site Speed

You can run your own test on a computer to see how fast your website uploads. Ideally, your site should load in less than 3 seconds. Between 3 and 5 seconds you’re doing OK but there’s room for improvement. If your website takes more than 5 seconds to load then you should really look into this because chances are it’s hurting your SEOrankings.

How Important Is Site Speed for SEO

While site speed in itself is not a dominant factor, it can help you rank higher than your competitor, all things being equal. So, to get that needed edge over your competition you should work on maintaining a site speed of below 3 seconds. While Google for example states that site speed affects on 1% of the results that belies the importance of having good site speed for your website since it can make the difference.

4 Quick Ways to Improve Site Speed

So we’ve established that site speed is an important factor in SEO and all webmasters should aim to maintain the optimal site speed. Thankfully, there are a number of quick and affordable ways to help you achieve this. Below I’ve listed just some of the quick and dirty fixes

Reduce Image Size:

Images are one of the biggest memory hogs on your website, the larger the image, the more information it carries and the longer it takes to load. By reducing the size of your images you can significantly speed up the time it takes for your website to upload. Start with reducing each of your images by 10%, starting with the larger ones.

Reduce Codes and HTTP requests:

You should minimize the number of codes on your website. Every code requires loading from a computer, so the more code you have, the more loading requests sent to the visitor’s computer, thus slowing the site response time. The same principle applies to HTTP which may contain multiple, redundant pages that you don’t need.

Limit the Use of Plugins:

This tip applies to WordPress websites. Whilst plugins are an easy way to extend and customize your website’s functionality, they can also cause your site to load slower because of the extra code they inject in order to work. We’ve already discussed in the above how extra code affects site speed.

Add Site Speed Tools:

There are a number of great site speed tools you can use to augment your website. This is not a complete list, but here are a few you can use to start.

• WebPageTest: A free online speed test which tests your site speed using multiple browsers from various locations around the world. Simply enter your site URL and submit.
• WP Super Cache: A free WordPress plugin (I know I advised against too many plugins but this is one of the more useful plugins which improves site speed by clearing the cache and generates html files instead of heavier PHP
• YSlow: A free Yahoo site speed tool that analyzes your site and makes suggestions for improvements. It’s available as a plugin for major browsers like Firefox, Chrome, IE etc.

These tools help you optimize your website performance by analysis, trimming the fat on your website, or by providing site speed recommendations leading to a better visitor experience, resulting in better SEO rankings.

Hopefully you’re now clued up on how site speed affects your SEO rankings and it is important. Although important, it’s also one of the easier SEO elements to fix because of the relatively straightforward procedures and tools available to improve site speed. My final advice to webmasters: regularly keep an eye on your website speed and follow the above advice if and when your site becomes too slow.

Check my SEO Improving website
here: http://www.smartseoservice.com/convert-web-traffic-into-sales-or-leads/

4 Tips to Setting Your Social Media Budget in 2016

As we are half-way through the year, many marketers are starting the exercise of looking ahead to 2016 and beginning to think about what their social budgets should be.  Since we frequently consult with brands on social media planning (including the budgeting exercise) we wanted to share some tips on how to set your social media budget for next year.

1. Compare benefits with spend

The first part of every budget exercise should be an evaluation of your spend to its actual performance and benefit.  While every line item may not help you achieve your social
objectives, it’s good to scrutinize costs and to fully understand the benefits you received from them. In this exercise, don’t overlook tool costs.  While they may seem like they are the cost of “keeping the lights on”, they should be cut if they aren’t resulting in efficiencies, insights, or meaningful outcomes to your strategy or tactics.

2. Diversify media dollars beyond Facebook and Twitter

In previous years, most social media advertising dollars were primarily allocated to Facebook and Twitter.  Now that we’ve seen many other platforms starting to offer new media opportunities, it’s important for marketers to think ahead and allocate enough money to test new ad units as they arise. Go ahead and earmark media dollars so that when the opportunities arise your brand can have budget to try them in 2016.

3. Invest in content that is sharable

Take a critical look at the content your brand is producing to-date.  Is it sharable?  If it isn’t – uncover why.  Odds are that your brand doesn’t have a ton of highly visual or organic content at its fingertips. And even if you feel your brand is killing it, I bet your brand still has some work to do if you were to ask your customers.  The truth is, it’s hard to create content that people naturally want to share, simply because the brand always has a hidden agenda.  Creating highly sharable content that accomplishes a business objective is a craft, and you need to invest in the creation of it.

4. Account for rising costs

While highly efficient, the costs of social media marketing are obviously rising.  With more competition entering the space, and continual platform changes that make it more difficult to reach your audiences, you’ll need to account for these rising costs in your budgeting.

The following are a list of rising costs to consider as you plan your budgets:

• Reaching your audience organically and paid (expect increases in media costs per quarter)
• Developing visual & video content
• Working with influencers
• Social network fragmentation (more channels to manage than before)
• Developing social programs with mobile in mind
• Developing & optimizing content
• Retaining & attracting social media talent

Increase your visibility and Sales Today.
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Increasing your site’s visibility to search engines

Use search tools to maintain updates

Search engines won’t notice changes to your site instantaneously. Google and Bing offer search tools to help you manage your site’s search presence. Whenever you make major changes to your site, you can request that a search engine re-index your content by using these services. For help, visit the following guides:

• Verifying your site with Google Search Console
• Verifying your site with Bing Webmaster Tools

Customize page and site titles

Search engines typically prioritize site titles, page titles, blog post titles, and headings. These titles also appear in browser tabs and search results, so it’s important to write them so they’re friendly to both search bots and human readers.

In the SEO panel, you can set default title formats for the homepage, collections like Blog, Gallery, Album, Products, and Event Pages, and items like blog posts and events. You can manually enter text or use default variables. The benefit of using default title formats (versus customizing them for every post) is to keep them consistent for all content.

For step-by-step instructions, visit Customizing title formats.

Differentiate page titles and navigation titles

Every page in your site has a Navigation Title and Page Title. You can edit these titles in Page Settings. Page Titles appear in browser tabs and search results and are indexed by search engines. The Navigation Title is what displays in your navigation menu.

You may want to title these separately. For example, you can use the page title to promote keywords for search engines, but keep the navigation title short to help it fit in your navigation menu. To learn more, visit Renaming a page.

Structure content with headings

When adding content to Text Blocks, select Heading 1 or Heading 2 from the text format drop-down menu to organize content. These styles automatically create <h1> and <h2> tags in the page’s HTML, so there’s no need to add them manually.

Like titles, search engines typically give headings a higher priority. Clear headings that describe the content that follows make it easier for search engines to detect the major themes of your site. At the same time, they helps visitors scan your page and quickly find the information they’re looking for.

Add alt text to images

Alt text is text associated with an image that people can view by hovering over it. Search engines usealt text to identify the content of a page, since bots can only read text. Adding alt text to images lets search engines understand what the image is so they can include it in relevant searches.

When adding alt text, it’s best to use short terms that describe the image and relate to your overall site content. To learn more about adding alt text, visit Adding alt text to images.

Tags and categories

Search engines scan tags and categories to identify what products, blog posts, or gallery images are about. Adding tags and categories that accurately describe the item could help it appear in search results. For our guide on tags and categories, visit Using tags and categories.

Start blogging

All Squarespace sites include blogging capabilities. Blogging involves updating your site frequently, which helps search engines see it as an active site. Even if you’re a business and not a blogger, adding a Blog Page and updating it regularly with relevant content could potentially benefit your SEO while building your brand.

When adding blog posts, use tags, categories, and H1 and H2 tags to label content.

Physical location

If you’re a business with a physical location, listing your address on your site could potentially help visitors find you in location-based services. There are many places where you can add your location:

• Map Blocks
• Basic Information Settings
• Text Blocks on a Contact page
• Text Blocks in a footer

Visit my website and Improve your SEO power!
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4 Ways of Rethinking Your Referral Traffic

1. Reliance on Google Organic

Just as you can be overly reliant on social media, you can also be too reliant on Google organic. While organic search is your best traffic referrer in terms of engagement, site stickiness, and returning visits, if you accidentally trigger an algorithm negatively and it takes a slap at your site, well you might wake up with a cliff dive on your analytics and a sunken feeling in your stomach.

2. Organic Is Still King

Organic traffic is not just Google, though we typically think of that first. It can also be Bing, Duck Duck Go, and Yahoo, or even a contest or event. Whatever your organic source, the users are likely to be more engaged and user intent is typically going to be more aligned with your site content. While Google organic should and will be the largest organic referrer, building up your alternative referral sources will help protect you from getting hit in one area or another.

3. Watch Out for the Bots

Semalt, Buttons-For-Websites, and other bots visit your site and show up in your analytics. These referrals are not real humans, but bots meant to send traffic back to its owner by you clicking on the referrals in your analytics. There is no reason to support this traffic and there is no reason to not get rid of it. There are several methods for doing this, however Jon Henshaw of Raven Tools has the most comprehensive post explaining the issue and how to get rid of it.

4. Reliance on Social Media

Often we see sites that get a lot of their traffic from social media. If your site is one of those sites, congratulations – that is not the easiest code to crack. You have done good things.

Social traffic is a positive signal. It means your site is being shared and talked about. It means your site has relevancy to your user base. However, it is imperfect traffic and a strategy that is unsustainable on its own. Why is this?

First, if you are relying too heavily on your social media presence for traffic and the site you are getting that traffic from decides to change a factor that takes away that traffic, you have little recourse. There is really nothing you can do. Well, you can pay, but that requires more money and time, which following a loss of large amounts of traffic, you might now have to invest.

10 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love

1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.

2. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.

3. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

4. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.

5. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.

6. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.

7. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.

8. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.

9. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.

10. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.

9 Proven Marketing Strategies For a Small Marketing Budget

1.  Comment on blogs – a great way to get your website popular is to comment on other blogs. For this to work you have to leave comments on blogs that are related to your website and the comments you leave have to be insightful.
2. Optimize your website for search engines – google is the most popular website on the internet so why you wouldn’t you leverage it? Through search engine optimization you can rank higher on google so you can get more visitors to your website.
3. Google local – search is becoming more and more personalized. When you perform a search on google you’ll start noticing that the results are becoming tailored to your location.
4. Become a guest author – an easy way to gt your company out there is to write guest blog posts on other blogs. From TechCrunch to Huffington post, there are thousands of popular blogs on the internet. And the one thing all of these blogs want is more content.
5. Write beginner’s guide – do you remember when companies used to write white papers? Although they are still effective, the new version of them are “Beginner’s guides”. These guides vary in length, but the one thing they have in common is that they are thorough.
6. Start an affiliate program – if you don’t have the money to spend on marketing, you can always get people to market for you for free. The only thing you have to do is pay people for each sale they bring to you. Think of it as performance based marketing.
7. Talk smack – the good part about having a blog is that it gives you an audience that you can communicate with. And when you tell them something, it will start spreading virally on the web.
8. Ask for referrals – do you already have customers? If so, have you asked them for referrals? It’s a pretty effective approach as long as your current customers are happy with you.
9. Leverage YouTube – not only do videos now appear in search result but you also can use them to show how good your products actually are. Blendtec has done this for years and it’s been effective. They don’t just claim that their blenders are powerful, but they also show you by blending things like bricks, iPhones, and other cool devices.

About the Author

My name is Lissa Anderson I am a full time SEO consultant. I’ve been doing freelancing,web development,web designing & internet marketing stuff for more than 8 years. Now I am affiliate with one of the world’s largest online advertising company. If you need Increase your SALES or SEO contact me.

Build Your Business on Google+

Google plus has a huge user base of over 300 Million and counting…..

Why should you use Google Plus?

Google plus has become growing platform, which is only ever getting bigger.

• 42% Interact with brands content
• 70% of top 100 brands use Google+
• 40% of Marketers use Google+
• 22% online adults use Google+
• 33% growth rate per year
• 50% users sign on daily

And how does Google Plus aid your Business?

Google plus offers huge benefits:

VISIBILITY – having a google plus account connected to your business website can increase your overall SERP rank.

ENGAGEMENT – circles and communities allow you to promote your content to a large, targeted audience who are more likely to engage with your material.

ANALYTICS – get accurate & up to date information by linking your Google plus account with Insights.

INFORMATIVE – use G+ to display current information to your clients, which will in turn exhibit this Information via google and rise your chances of being interacted with.

Optimise your Profile

This is the first step in building your business through the use of Google Plus.

Profile Image: Always use a relevant profile picture. Use a professional image of you self for personal profiles, or a logo for a business page.

Background Image: Again, you want your background image to be relevant to what you do. Think hard about how you have an image which is both aesthetically appealing but also conveys something about your company.

About Me: Fill out this section with every detail about yourself, or your business. Drop in keywords and relate it back to your industry.

Google plus are host to many features

Understanding these features are key to fully using them to your advantage.

1. CIRCLES

• Create & Manage – create circles to easily organize like-minded people into different groups. You can then tailor your posts in accordance with the interests and unique composition of each group.
• Target Audience – tailor your content to specific circles & spark engagement from those who genuinely identify with your topic and are more likely to share it on.
• Filtering – you can easily filter various figures describing posts and attach notifications to circles which are more important to you.

2. HANGOUTS

• Quick Conversations – message, send photos and emoticons to your Google plus friends, even if they’re offline!
• Live video – you can easily have live video conference calls with up to 10 members.
• Versatility – everybody can use Hangouts – its available on Android, iOS & Windows.

3. COMMUNITIES

• Find Shared Interests – communities bring people with similar interest together to have discussion, or create private communities for specific topics.
• Engagement – share pictures, images, videos and gifs to communities and communicate with them via hangouts.
• Private Communities – create private communities for any closed groups so you can stay connected with them.

About the Author

My name is Lissa Anderson I am a full time SEO consultant. I’ve been doing freelancing,web development,web designing & internet marketing stuff for more than 8 years. Now I am affiliate with one of the world’s largest online advertising company. If you need Increase your SALES or SEO contact me.