Try doing this now. Take out your phone and enter your website url into your phone browser and find out right now.

Chances are your website is already outdated. The times are moving fast.

Technology is advancing and accelerating at speeds never seen before.

This means it’s probably about time you updated your website to be mobile enabled. Then, once enabled, you wan to make it as easy as possible for customers to find.

Why Mobile?

Today (July 01, 2011), there are over 4.4 Billion mobile devices worldwide and the industry is growing 4 times faster than the Internet itself.

In fact, one out of every seven minutes of media consumption now takes place on a mobile device, and that number is rapidly increasing.

It’s already happening: people right here in Australia are going to your website from their mobile phones. What do they see? Does it load? How long does it take? Can they find information easily? What does it look like on the iPhone? A BlackBerry? The Motorola Razr? And can people even search for your site via the many mobile search engines currently available?

These are the questions we as business owners need to be asking.

Why a Mobile Website?

The fact is, mobile websites are the way of the future. Over 90% of all internet searches will be done via mobile in the next 2-3 years and if your business isn’t mobile enabled, well, you’re simply cutting access to a massive portion of your customer audience.

Here are just some of the reasons why you need a mobile website:

• Mobile Websites Are Far More User Friendly – Mobile users on the go need different information. They should be able to find it quickly, and easily.
• Mobile Websites are Fast Loading – A website designed for mobile will load in about 4 seconds, while a desktop site can take up to 40 seconds or more to load on a mobile device.
• Mobile Websites Offer a Better Brand Experience – You control the brand experience which means you are not at the mercy of the various mobile browsers to decide how your site will look.
• Mobile Websites Get Picked Up By Mobile Search Engines – As with traditional websites, mobiie sites can be optimised for mobile search engine traffic.

That last point is specific what I want to talk most about here. Because it’s no secret that businesses must view mobile as a significant piece of their overall marketing strategy, and optimizing your mobile site for mobile search engines should inevitably become apart of that strategy.

So here are some high level SEO strategies that brands can implement into their overall mobile efforts to ensure they are getting maximum visibility via mobile enabled search engines.

Optimize for All Mobile Devices and Browsers

A fully optimized mobile website that has extended functionality and key content will simply rank higher in search results than a website that has just been reformatted for a smaller screen. Search engines now incorporate various criteria in mobile browsers to determine page rank, including: overall site performance, usability, download speed and screen rendering.

An example of this would be simply transcoding a webpage through the use of a cookie-cutter template which ends up stripping the site of key content while leading to incomplete pages and decreasing overall usability.

Poor navigation and broken pages will also result in a lower page rank and a negative user experience which, at the end of the day, will fail to encourage repeat visits.

It’s also a fact that different mobile web browsers will determine how your site renders on a particular phone, so this is why it is essential for companies to develop a device agnostic mobile strategy that supports the wide variety of available mobile operating systems.

Tennis.com’s mobile website is a good example of this and was developed to support all web-enabled devices.

To decrease bounce rate (i.e. when a user views only one page on a site and then leaves), a companies mobile site must automatically recognize the consumer’s device as it loads and then render the page accordingly to ensure a view that is best optimized for the user’s particular screen.

Continue Reading… >> Translating Traditional SEO Practices to the Mobile Platform

Who’s this for?

Anyone wishing to improve their sites’ interaction with both users and the search engines.

These tips should also be applied to sites of all sizes and types as they are universal SEO practices that have stood the test of time.

Keeping in mind, I would like to say that you should base your optimization decisions first and foremost on what’s best for the visitors of your site.  Because at the end of the day, they are the consumers of your content and it just so happens that they have used a search engine to find your work.

I hope this gives you some fresh ideas on how to improve your website, and I’d love to hear your questions, feedback and success stories in the comments box below, or in the Buzz Network SEO forums.

No.1: Optimize Your Title Tags

Probably the most important SEO practice of all is to make sure that your title tag includes your target keyword in the title of the page that you are trying to rank for, preferably at the beginning of your page title.

For example, if the keyword you are trying to rank for is “Blue Widgets”, then you will want to try and craft your title tag to include “Blue Widgets” at the beginning of the page title. I.e. “Blue Widgets at Wholesale Prices”.

If you can craft your title to include a compelling call-to-action, this is even more ideal as this will attract a better click-through rate in Google search results pages – thus improving your overall ranking for that particular search term.

You will also want to make sure that your title tags are unique to each page on your site.

And avoid keyword stuffing at all costs. In other words, try to only include no more than 1-3 target keywords in your title phrase.

No 2: Optimize Your H1 Tag

Here you will want to include your keyword in the H1 tag of your page copy. Using your keyword in H1 or H2 can give some minor positive effects to SEO.

<h1> is typically the most important heading on your page – use it only once or twice per document and include your keyword there if it fits naturally. And try to avoid keyword stuffing in any of your heading tags because it will do more harm than good.

No 3: Optimize Your Body Tags

Here you will want to make sure that the keyword you are targeting for a particular page is present and fits in with your body text.

Again, avoid keyword stuffing by all means in the body text so be sure to targeted just 1-3 specific keywords only per page.

Ideally, you will want to put your main target keywords closer to the top of the document and be sure not to hide text through colour by blending with the background color.

Finally, be sure to avoid high keyword density in your page copy as it may lead to penalty. A good rule of thumb is, if it doesn’t sound natural (i.e. too many keywords repeated), the chances are you’ve got too many of your target keywords in your page copy.

No 4: Make “User Friendly” URLS

“User-friendly” URL’s are URL’s that describe the page that you are on accurately.

Try to put your keywords in your page URL and leave out stop words like “I”, “a”, “an” etc. as well as special characters like “&”, “?”, “=”, “$”, “%”, “^” in the URL.

An example would be this URL here from an article on my blog: http://jarrahrobertson.com/mobile-website-optimisation-is-your-site-up-to-scratch/

Notice the keyword “Mobile Website Optimisation” in the URL.

Once again, avoid keyword stuffing in your page URL and try to keep them within a reasonable length.

Google also suggests that you should use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your page URLs.

No 5: Install XML Sitemap

A sitemap is a file (or multiple files) that list all the URLs for a particular site.

It is important to submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools and to include a link to your sitemap file in your robots.txt file. You can also submit your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools.

If you want to put a sitemap on a different domain you must put a link to it in your robots.txt file to notify Google of the location to your sitemap.

You can read more about sitemaps here – http://www.sitemaps.org/ and if you don’t have a sitemap, you can try a sitemap generator – http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

No 6: Optimize Robots.txt File

Robots.txt is a file on your site that tells web spiders (like Googlebot) how to behave on your site.

Robots.txt should contain a link to your sitemap (for example: Sitemap: http://www.mediaquay.com/sitemap.xml)

All information about robots.txt can be found here – http://www.robotstxt.org/

No 7: Optimize Meta Robots Tag

The meta robots tag is a special HTML tag that tells robots how to behave on that page.

You can use a meta robots tag if you want to prevent search engines from indexing a particular page.

For more information about the meta robots tag and how to use one can be found here – http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html

No 8: Optimize Meta Descriptions

Make sure that the keyword you are targeting is in your meta description, ideally at the beginning of your description, and keep it under 160 characters (15 – 20 words) to ensure that your message isn’t truncated in search results pages.

You will also want to create unique meta descriptions for every page that you want to optimize.

A compelling call-to-action in the meta description can also help attract a higher click-through-rate (CTR) in search results pages, so try working on persuasive descriptions that attract more clicks over your competitors.

Of course, avoid keyword stuffing in your meta description and be sure to make sure it’s different from your page title (<title>) tag.

No 9: Optimize Internal Linking

Here you will want to follow Google’s suggestions on URL structure, found here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=76329&hl=en

For internal linking – put a “nofollow” attribute on links to unimportant pages such as your “Privacy Policy”, “Contact us” and other pages.

You can also put keywords in anchor texts throughout your pages (1 – 2 links per keyword, per page).

Avoid keyword stuffing in anchor texts.

Avoid using un-related phrases like “click here” or “more…” in anchor texts.

Keep in mind that linking to similar external sites will also help search engines to determine your site’s theme and relevance to your target key phrase.

No 10: Optimize HTML Code and Page Load Time

Using less <table> tags may result in faster page load times.

Having smaller HTML will result in faster page load times.

Avoid broken images on your site as it slows down page load times.

You can also ask your web developer to put your CSS in an external file. Ideally, if you can combine all CSS information into one file it will make your page load faster.

Put JavaScript code in an external file. And again, if you can combine all JavaScript code information into one file it will make your page load faster.

If you are using common JS libraries (like jquery, prototype, moo tools and others) use Google Ajax Libraries API (more info here)

No 11: Optimize Image Files

Optimizing images is a great way to gain additional traffic to your site. Google images is widely used and when done correctly, image optimization can produce significant increases in traffic.

Use “alt” texts to describe the image for accessibility and SEO purposes. But be sure not to overuse them. For example, don’t add them to spacer images.

Aim to put your target keyword in “alt” texts if they make sense in the context of your page content.

You can also use keywords in filenames. For example, an image file for Blue Widgets might be: blue-widgets.jpg (instead of: 980198.jpg)

Avoid keyword stuffing in “alt” texts or filenames. Only include 1 or 2 keyword phrases per image file at most.

In summary,

Each of these on-site optimization practices still offer good weight in terms of ranking your website for specific target keywords (some more than others) and will continue to do so. But, it’s important to remember to make your website for people first, and search engines second.

If you can also aim to position your website and individual pages to convert to your end goal (not just rank for keywords), then your chances of success will increase – because at the end of the day, you’re looking for real tangible conversions.

Finally, if you can build a community around your brand, one that loves you and will fight for you because they love your products and services – then this will be the holy grail of your SEO efforts moving forward into the future, because Google and other search engines are getting smarter at noticing social activity in relation to your site, and your chances of outranking your competition will significantly improve as a result.

A topic for another day, but just keep this in mind as the industry evolves.

I hope this gives you a better understanding of how to optimise your site for the search engines, and I’d love to hear your questions, feedback and SEO stories in the comment box below.

Here are some of the common SEO practices that should be incorporated into your mobile web design:

Create Relevant Page Titles and Accurate Page Descriptions

Mobile site page titles are one of the first factors mobile browsers use to determine where a page will show in search results. Similar to traditional SEO, it is important that page titles reflect the terms that people use to search, increasing the likelihood that the site will appear relevant and receive better page rankings.

Apply Appropriate Keywords in Page Headlines and Text

Consumers use mobile for more focused and task-oriented searches (i.e. for a specific location or product). This is different from how most people search from a desktop computer. By understanding consumer behavior, companies can anticipate queries and incorporate key search terms into page text, increasing detection from mobile search engines.

Optimise Outbound Links

Incorporating outbound links to relevant sources provides a more complete user experience and associates the mobile site with other trusted sites and companies on the mobile web.

Attract Inbound Links

As with traditional link building, working to attract inbound links to your mobile pages will garner higher quality scores and page rankings. This can be accomplished through social media tags, buttons and working to build links from other mobile sites relevant to your brand.

Build in Accordance to Standard Web Coding

With the wide variety of operating systems supported by mobile, it makes it extremely important for companies to follow valid HTML coding. Browsers parse through HTML code to determine search relevance. Any errors or invalid coding or links will result in broken pages and a lower ranking. Sites built in accordance to quality standards will ensure a consistent experience across all devices.

And for those of you who are more advanced SEO’s, you might also want to investigate next generation languages like HTML5 to further increase page rankings in mobile search engines due to it’s inherent faster loading and cleaner code.

Additionally, you can also read up on my SEO Best Practices: Guide to Optimizing your site for the search engines here should you need further information regarding on-site SEO practices.

At the end of the day, mobile SEO is a powerful tool to dramatically increase your mobile traffic to mobile pages and drive revenue, and it’s essential for companies to think strategically about how to leverage common mobile SEO practices in order to increase brand loyalty and maximise traffic.

Please submit your comments or questions below.

Here is a simple introduction to the Mobile App development world.

Mobile Apps

A mobile app is a piece of software that a consumer downloads onto their phone from a specific location or store created by either their mobile phone provider (i.e. Telstra or Optus), the device manufacturer (i.e. Apple or Google) or third party app stores (I.e. GetJar).

Simple apps exist for standard feature phones, but today’s mobile apps are typically associated with smartphones (like the iPhone) where their functionality is enhanced by rich graphics, animations, video and the ability to trigger phone functionality such as the GPS or the camera.

Mobile Apps are specific to phone platforms and must be developed using special code such as the iPhone “Xcode” for them to work. iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Windows are the current major mobile platforms, but the iPhone has by far the greatest reach here in Australia.

Depending on what type of a company you are, there are three main types of apps that marketers should be concerned with:

Branded Apps

These apps are specifically developed to enhance some aspect of the company’s product and while not typically used to sell that product, they encourage use of it.

Examples of this might be the Zippo Lighter App (the phone looks like a lighter), Coke’s Spin the Bottle (play the iconic game with a Coke bottle), KRAFT’s iFoodAssistant (menu planning with grocery list functionality), or the BMW M Power Meter (measure the vehicle’s acceleration and Gforces).

Mobile Media Related Apps

These are often extensions of well-known media properties that have functionality unique to the app.

Top media related apps include 2GB, ABC, BBC News, SBS World News, Weatherzone, NineMSN and The Age, just to name a few.

These apps sometimes have paid or metered versions, but are often ad supported and thus are free for downloading.

Mobile Shopping Related Apps

Retailers such as Amazon, Best Buy and Target are taking the lead with their customers and trying to establish a continuous on-phone presence on mobile devices through their apps, which offer m-commerce made easy should the consumer have their payment data stored with that provider.

CNet has also created a shopping app that enables consumers to compare reviews for products in store. ShopSavvy is another very popular app in the US (nearly 18 million apps downloaded as of April of 2011) that consumers use to scan a barcode and do comparison price shopping.

Continue reading… >> : Understanding the Mobile Web Development Landscape

Marketers typically need to be concerned with four forms of mobile web sites:

Mobile Micro Sites and Landing Pages

These are created specifically to focus consumer attention on one aspect of a company’s message or brand, such as http://slimfast321.mobi which is used as a “landing page” or simple payoff to the consumer to get more information from a larger marketing campaign.

Tara Scarlett, Senior Manager of CRM and Mobile Marketing for Coca-Cola reported that at any given time, Coke has several different mobile web sites/landing pages operating that tie into various campaigns.

This enables marketers to tag their company URL in broad scale ad campaigns, so they can now actively promote their mobile web presence through their “mobile URLs” or drive customers through mobile ad campaigns that click directly to these landing pages.

Corporate Mobile Sites

These are basic corporate sites featuring a mixture of static and dynamic content that’s configured for the smart phone interface.

They may also include secure, membership areas or they could even be a pure B2C site such as http://autovantage.com.

Mobile Media Sites

This could be a media-driven site optimized or created specifically for the mobile web. ABC News, SBS World News, BBC News, Nine MSN etc all have mobile optimised sites and generate millions of views per month through them.

Facebook also classifies as a large scale media site and is widely publicized to have one of the largest, if not the largest, mobile traffic on the web: http://m.facebook.com/

Mobile Commerce Sites

Here in Australia, the last three years truly have been a wake-up call for retailers to the fact that consumers want to connect with them via the mobile web.

One major retail store noted recently just how much activity was coming directly from mobile devices (by looking at their web log files and analytics) – and what brands of mobile devices their customers tended to have. They found the results to be quite astonishing with more than 50% web activity coming directly from mobile devices here in Sydney.

Mobile web activity can often be driven simply by a consumer wanting to know a store location on the go, or a phone number to check product availability – and can often lead to a mobile commerce transaction.

So with this category in particular, understanding customer needs and determining optimal content strategies is as essential as the ability to tie into overall company promotional efforts.

If your company is running a national advertising campaign across specific (or multiple) channels in a given week, chances are that specific content is what consumers may be looking for on the mobile web, so be sure to parallel path your mobile website or app with your advertising campaign. Mobile retailers who do this are noting higher order sizes and conversion rates with mobile optimized sites, as compared to non-optimized mobile websites.

The reality is, if you want the edge over your competitors in a technology driven economy, consumers have already voted with their phones and you need to jump on board.

In conclusion

The difference between mobile web functionality and app functionality is simple. Mobile web provides the audience with a destination, an access point and a conduit into our full website(s), or specific content verticals. Whereas apps provide a greater level of community, locality, and specificity to the audience and how they prefer to use their mobile device.

So let‘s get started with Twitter!

The first thing you‘ll need to do is register a twitter account.

Register a Twitter Account

For the purposes of this tutorial, we’re going to go ahead and set up a company account (not a personal account), for the purposes of:

• Keeping your customer base up-to-date on your company events
• Promote recent blog articles or news items
• Update consumers about your products and services
• Give real-time updates at conferences and events
• Offer additional layers of customer service and support

Clicking this button will bring you to a page where you will select your username and password.

Your username is very important. This name will be how people refer to you on Twitter and potentially how people will acknowledge you if you ever meet any of your Twitter followers offline. Think of your username as your personal brand name. It’s that important.

For example, if you’re a gifts and rewards company, than you might want to choose something along the lines of:

• #GiftsandRewards
• #GiftRewards
• #SydneyGifts
• #CorporateGifts
• #CorporateGiftsAu

Or, you could just use your campany name. #YourCompany

Keep in mind you only have 15 characters to work with.

Some things to avoid when creating your twitter username:

• Avoid using numbers (Company123). Unless there is a reason for the specific numbers.
• Avoid using underscores (Company_AU). Using an underscore won‘t hurt you, but it doesn’t look professional.

After you choose your username, click “Create my account”. This will launch a screen that gives you the option of choosing people to follow based on your topics of interest.

I recommend that you complete your profile design and details, make a few tweets, and then start following people. So just skip this step for now. You can always come back to this once you’re ready to start connecting.

Twitter will now ask you to check if any of your email contacts are currently using Twitter. Again, I recommend that you wait until you’ve set up your profile entirely before connecting with people you already know. You can come back to this step once you’re ready to start connecting.

Build & Brand Your Profile

Now that you have your account, you need to brand your twitter page with your company details, logo or desired image graphic, and a background image (if preferred).

It’s important that you brand your profile before you begin interacting with and following people.

Before you add your company information, your account will look inactive, and if you start following people without a personalized profile, your chances of being followed back will decrease dramatically, obviously!

So let’s go ahead and brand your profile.

Click on the “edit your profile” link as shown:

Then fully complete all details, including your company bio, your web URL, your primary location, your company name, and your profile logo (otherwise known as your Avatar).

Quick tip regarding your Bio section, be as descriptive as possible in as few words as possible describing what your product or service is and the benefit to me (your customer). OR, a short elevator pitch to convince me (your customer) why I should follow you?

Next, click the “Account” tab within your profile settings, as shown:

Here you can alter your username, account email, language, timezone, tweet location, tweet media and privacy etc.

If you happen to click the “tweet privacy” checkbox, this will privatise your twitter stream and no one will be able to see your updates without following you first.

I don’t recommend checking this box to protect your updates unless you’re creating a private company profile strictly for customer service. And even then, you might not want to privatise.

People judge whether to follow someone or not by the value that your updates offer, so I recommend keeping your tweets public to avoid people simply clicking away.

Customise Your Twitter Background

As a business that wants to use Twitter to drive revenue, you have to take your presence to the next level. While anyone can quickly set up a free account, few take the time to customize that account.

Customizing the actual background of your Twitter profile is a great way of boosting your credibility and educating new and potential followers to the content and products your business provides.

When customizing your Twitter background, you will need to have some design skills (its pretty simple if you don’t mind getting involved with Adobe photoshop or illustrator). Otherwise, you must be willing to pay a designer to help with the project to get the look and feel your company deserves.

A good idea is to do a couple searchers for similar companies who have customized their twitter background, just to get a few ideas for the type of things people are doing in your industry.

Here are a few tips for designing your twitter background:

• Decide what you are trying to communicate to people on Twitter. While you understand your prospects and customers, it is important to note that Twitter might be the first place that many new prospects discover your business. In your background, make sure to communicate information that appeals to prospects who are extremely new in the buying cycle.
• Be aware of the Twitter Toolbar element of your twitter page. Be sure to leave head-room for the toolbar.
• Take advantage of prime real estate. The left-hand side of the Twitter profile for example is the best place for a company logo, company description, or important links that you want to share. However, it‘s important to note the dimensions of the left- and right-hand columns are fluid and change with the size of the user‘s browser window – in which case, try to design your background image for smaller monitor sizes, and you will cater for all screen types by doing so. Designing for larger size monitors might result in elements of your background being cut off on some users‘ screens.
• Background images should be one image (not tiled). Tiled backgrounds just aren’t professional and they often don’t handle the transitions from the columns on the page as well.

Once your image has been designed, you can visit your Twitter account settings under the “Design” tab on this page here: http://twitter.com/settings/profile. You will notice a button down the page to your left called “change background image”. This will enable you to upload your new image to your account.

If you prefer to stay clear of Photoshop, Themeleon has some great Twitter themes for customisation, or you can contact me for advice on custom twitter designs.

Begin Tweeting

Before you start finding people to follow, we recommend tweeting a few times to give potential new followers an idea of the type of content you will be sharing.

Your most valuable asset is the information you provide, and it will often be the deciding factor for whether another user decides to follow you back.

Some of the things you can tweet about may include:

• Tweet about what you‘ve recently observed in your industry. Give your opinion or insight into a particular topic.
• Post links to videos, articles, white papers or press releases that your company has recently produced.
• Tweet About Events You’re Attending, Promoting or Participating in.
• Post a link to your most recent company article or blog post.
• Post a link to someone else‘s article (an employee, or customer’s article maybe?) as a helpful resource or insight into your industry.
• Direct message to other Twitter users using an @ sign. More on this down the page.
• Retweet (using ‗RT‘ or ‗Retweet‘ at the beginning of the message or by clicking Twitter‘s Retweet button) to repeat to your followers what another user has tweeted.
• Start a discussion by asking your audience their opinion on something relating to your industry, product or service (or just something completely random)
• Give occasional product and service updates
• Cross promote: Encourage people to join discussions on your Facebook Page.

The important thing here is to be creative, and to offer high value content that truly helps your potential customers, while building trust in you and your brand.

If you can give away a ton of great content and information that’s current, relevant, and informative – your chances of getting people to know, like and trust will be dramatically improved.

You can’t guide someone down a sales funnel until you’ve achieved this first with your audience.

So go ahead and make your first couple of tweets to get the ball rolling. But keep in mind, don‘t say anything you wouldn‘t say at a networking event.

Search for Relevant People to Follow

Building your network is the most challenging and time-consuming part of using Twitter. Expanding your network doesn‘t happen immediately; you need to commit the time and energy to use this tool effectively.

By following people, you will be able to view their updates in your Twitter stream. This is your chance to learn more about them: their lives, the blog posts they are reading, the types of links they like to share, the people with whom they interact. And the products or services that they like to buy.

Where can you find ideal people to follow?

It’s simple, use the “Who to Follow” feature provided by Twitter which you can access by clicking the link in your Twitter toolbar (shown below).

Here you can choose a few of Twitter‘s highlighted topics or search using your own keywords in the search box above to find and start following interesting people relevant to your business and industry.

You can also use Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com) which is a free twitter search engine that helps you find people who are tweeting about specific topics (keywords). For example, you can find people who have recently tweeted about “Social Media” and then follow the people who are currently talking about the topics related to your business.

You can also use Twitter Search to see who has tweeted about your company.

Another good strategy is to Follow the people that are following your Followers. Once you begin receiving updates from a handful of people, watch to see whom those people chat with by looking at @replies. Quite often it will make sense to follow that person as well as people congregate around people they like or are interested in and talking about the same things they’re talking about.

Collect People’s Twitter Names at Events: Like we said before, many social media-savvy people will include their Twitter handle on their nametag at an event. Be sure to write down their usernames and follow them later. You can locate their Twitter account by replacing their username in the following URL: http://twitter.com/USERNAME

For example, if someone tells you to ―follow @MobileSocialSEO, you can type http://twitter.com/MobileSocialSEO in your browser‘s navigation bar to find us. If you are not sure if someone you just met is on Twitter, ask them!

Finally, be sure to follow hashtags (#) at events.

Many event organizers will establish and publicize a specific ”hashtag” (#) that they have created specifically for that particular event (example: #event123) so that people attending can follow all the discussions relating to the event on twitter.

Here you can use Search.Twitter.com to follow tweets using the hashtag of a particular event, and then follow the people who are attending the same event as you who you may not have met in person.

This is a very powerful way of making great close nit connections with your community on twitter through local events.

Quick Note: Don’t follow too many people at once (no more than 50-100 people a day) because there will be a time gap between following people and when they follow you back. If your profile says you are following 2,000 people and only 30 followers have followed you back so far, it appears that 1,970 of the people you followed chose not to follow you back. This unfavorable ratio won‘t help boost your credibility and may negatively affect people‘s decisions to follow you, or worse, get your twitter account banned.

Be sure to give your followers some time to follow you back before finding a new batch of people to add to your network.

Attract People to Follow You

Following people and viewing their tweets is great, but in order to have valuable two-way conversations, you want people to follow you back and view your tweets too. This is why it‘s so important to get your profile fully set up before reaching out for new connections. If you follow someone who doesn‘t already know you, you need to display sufficient information about your company in your profile so he or she can make an informed decision of whether to follow you back.

Attracting followers is important because they will serve as your network who will view your tweets and share with others to attract more interest and followers.

Here are several tips to attracting new followers.

Add “Follow” buttons to your blog and web pages.

Make it easy for people to find out if your company has a Twitter account.

Visitors to your blog and website might like your content and will want to know how they can subscribe to your tweets. So be sure to add Twitter follow buttons to your site so people can easily find you.

Tweet useful resources and information that people need.

People will want to follow you if they think they will get value from your tweets, so avoid making your Twitter account a purely promotional tool.

Would you subscribe to a newsletter if it didn‘t offer anything of value?

What specialty knowledge do you have that you can share and give away for free?

Make it easy for people to find your Twitter username(s).

Create a web page that lists all the Twitter handles of the people in your company. By giving your customers an easy way to interact with individual people, it helps them get to know the type of people who work at your company. It also gives them insight into your brand!

Interact with the people you follow (who haven’t yet followed you back). 

Keep an eye on your Twitter stream and comment on what other people are saying. Give feedback and compliment people where appropriate. The key is to engage. This will give them incentive to follow you back.

Connect and Engage

This involves tweeting to specific individuals by sending a direct message to another person on Twitter.

The way you do this is by using an @ before the person‘s username anywhere within the tweet.

Remember that this type of message is still public or viewable by anyone, even if they don‘t have a Twitter account.

Keep in mind, to make your tweets as visible as possible, avoid putting @username in the very beginning of your tweets. Adding the @username to the very beginning will make your tweet viewable only in the Twitter streams of people who follow you and the user to whom you‘re tweeting.

Here is an example of how you would send a tweet to myself.

Example: Hello to the team at @MobileSocialSEO! (viewable to everyone). Whereas, @MobileSocialSEO how are you? would only be viewable in Twitter streams of users who follow you and who also follow @MobileSocialSEO.

By putting @username within your tweet, Twitter will know who to send it to.

This type of tweet is also called a reply or @reply.

All of the @replies you receive will go into your @Mentions tab.

Please also note that anytime you put an @ in front of someone‘s username, it automatically becomes a link to that person‘s profile. This feature makes it easy for you to easily visit those particular users‘ profiles and engage with them as well.

Direct Messaging

As you are probably aware, it’s also possible to send someone a private message on Twitter. This is called a direct message or “DM”.

You can send a direct message by either visiting a particular person‘s profile and clicking the “message” link on the right hand side of the user‘s profile or by beginning your tweet with D Username and then including your message.

And example would be: D MobileSocialSEO Do you want to meet tomorrow?

This will communicate a private message toMobileSocialSEO that won‘t be viewable in the public Twitter stream.

Keep in mind, you can only DM people if you follow them and they follow you back, and you‘re still only allowed 140 characters per message.

So there you go, a simple guide to establishing and marketing your business on Twitter.

If you have any comments to add or questions relating to this guide, please comment in the box below and I will personally respond to all.

Here are several simple tips on how to improve the performance of your Facebook advertising campaigns.

Note: Although these may sound simple, in most cases they will triple the effectiveness of your Facebook advertising campaigns – so pay close attention because the slightest tweak in the wrong direction can cause significant differences in the effectiveness of your facebook ad campaign.

Tip # 1: Target “Likes & Interests” Within Facebook

Note: You must be logged into Facebook to complete this tutorial. Once logged in, click here to create your first ad campaign

Facebook advertising enables you to target consumers according to highly specific demographic and geographic information. But why stop at age groups, location, or gender when you can ensure that your ad only displays to people who have explicitly stated somewhere in their profile that they share a particular “like” or “interest” that aligns with your product, brand or promotion.

For example, in setting up this sample ad campaign for Buzz Network, not only can you target Australian men and women between the ages of 25 and 55 (the target demographic for Buzz Network), you can also target people who list the following ‘likes’ or “Interests” on their Facebook profile.

In this example, I did a quick search for groups and Facebook pages on Facebook that have a good following of people who fit well into my target demographics. I then decided that the Facebook page called “Social Media Solutions” had a good number of Australian followers who might also be interested in some of the things Buzz Network Australia has to offer.

I then copied the exact name of that Facebook Page (in this case it was “Social Media Solutions”) and entered that into the “Interests” field, as shown on point number 3 below:

I now have a very specific group of about 25,020 Australian users who have shown an interest in something similar to what we’re promoting. This ensures I now have a more targeted group of people to potentially broadcast my ad to.

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Important note: Only enter ONE “interest” and “country/region” per ad.

Just like Google Adwords, the more precisely targeted your add is, the higher CTR (Click Through Rate) you will receive. Thus, reducing your cost per click.

I highly recommend that you set up individual ad campaigns (copy, images etc) for each individual “Interest”, “Demographics”, “Country/Region”, etc. That way you can test and optimize your campaign more accurately. Whereas, by entering multiple interests for the one ad campaign, you significantly reduce your chances of working out where the optimal points are in your campaign (i.e. which ads are performing the best, which ads you need to get rid of, or make tweaks to, etc), as well as significantly increasing your cost per click.

More on this in a later post.

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Another strategy that I recommend is that you access your existing Facebook page Insights report to get a glimpse of your current demographic as this will give you a good idea of who to target when you configure your ad.

To access Facebook Insights, login to your Facebook page, then click > “Edit Page” (top right hand corner of your page) > then “Insights”.

Tip # 2: Point Users to Your Facebook Page

While you can use a Facebook ad to point to anywhere on the web, your Facebook advertising will be far more effective if you point to something within the Facebook site itself, such as your Facebook Page.

Sounds simple, but I can’t tell you how many ads running on Facebook these days are taking people away from the place they wanted to be in the first place.

Imagine for a moment while you put yourself in the shoes of a Facebook user. You’ve just popped online to engage with your friends, profiles, photos and feeds and have become interested in an ad. But once you click, you’re removed from your Facebook experience and taken somewhere completely away from what it was you were initially engaged in.

Now, unless the new location you’ve come upon is especially compelling, or in some way satisfies the experience you came to Facebook to achieve in the first place, many users will simply click away from the advertised site and return to what they were originally doing online, which in this case was Facebook.

Studies have shown, and in my own experience, that up to 62.7% of surveyed users much prefer ads that are designed for destinations within Facebook, as apposed to ads where a click takes the user away from Facebook.

In fact, i’ve recently noticed that Facebook will actually REWARD it’s advertisers for keeping their users within Facebook by way of lowering their cost per click, as well as increasing your “click-through-rate”, just as Google does when you have a high Adwords quality score.

Now this hasn’t been confirmed precisely, but I have reason to believe Facebook puts more weight toward advertisers who keep their users on Facebook.

Regardless, it’s better that you do keep your users on Facebook as it provides a better experience for your potential customer. Because your goal with Facebook Marketing isn’t to directly pitch your product or service, but rather, it’s to engage, listen and interact with your customers so you can better serve their needs.

At the end of the day, if your customers don’t know, like or trust you, then it’s unlikely that they’re not going to buy from you.

SO, remember that if you point your Facebook ad to a page within the Facebook network, the user is far more likely to engage with it.

Tip # 3: Optimize Your Campaign by Targeting Friends of Fans

We learned from Facebook that the often overlooked ‘advertise to friends of your fans’ feature performs significantly better in terms of brand lift than regular Facebook ads.

The reason being is because when you advertise to the friends of your fans, every single person viewing your ad will see that someone they know is already a fan of your business or brand.

For example, if my friend John Smith has “Liked” Jill’s Jellybeans, the message ‘John Smith likes this’ will appear beneath the Jill’s Jellybeans Facebook ad when I view it.

This has been demonstrated many times before, but the fact is people will respond best to personal brand and product recommendations from their friends.

So if every person viewing your ad campaign sees that at least one of their friends is associated with your brand, the response will dramatically increase.

You might be thinking “I only have 100 fans – if I advertise to friends of fans I won’t reach anyone??”. Keep in mind that on average each Facebook user has 130 friends. So if you advertise to friends of your fans and you have 100 fans, you will be able to reach 13,000 of their friends.

On the other hand, if you have 10,000 fans, you would be able to reach 1.3MM of their friends!

Side note: Don’t be discouraged by the estimated reach box (shown below on point number 2) if your reach looks low initially when aiming to target friends of fans. Rest assure that your reach will increase exponentially as people “Like” your page.

Advertising to friends of fans is easy to do. Simply select the “Only show my advert to friends of the fans of Your Page” option under “Targeting”, as shown here:

Tip # 4: Have a Brick & Mortar Business? Target Customers Locally!

If you have a business that primarily serves customers in a particular city or region, you can drill down ad targeting to very specific locations with Facebook advertising. You can even get as close as a 16 kilometer radius of your city, which is great for localizing your ad campaigns.

If you have a good idea of the target demographics of your local business, you might also want to try targeting other businesses in your area that may have the same type of customer.

For example, if you own a beauty store, then you might want to create Facebook ads that target women with an interest in “Spas” that live within 16 kilometers of your shop.

Even better, there might be a really popular spa within a block away from your shop that also has a Facebook page with a ton of fans, so why not target their page specifically by entering the page name in your “Interests” setting for your ad campaign.

Now we’re getting somewhere!

I hope these tips will help you improve the performance of your Facebook advertising campaigns.

If you have any questions, comments or additional tips to add to this list, I would love to hear from you.

Please submit your comments below.

# 1: Use the Facebook Page Status Updater

It is crucial that you start engaging your Facebook fans as soon as possible, because whether something shows up in a user’s news feed, or not, is determined by whether or not they actually come to visit your Facebook page – so you need to encourage them to visit frequently.

If you’re not engaging your fan base by offering regular status updates or note worthy content items, you will loose your audience before you ever have a chance to show them how great your business really is.

The fact is, Facebook will only show status updates (or news feed items) on a particular users news feed depending on who that user has engaged with recently. If the user hasn’t spent much time viewing or engaging your Facebook page, it is unlikely that they are even seeing your Facebook page status updates at all.

# 2: Post News Updates, Videos or Note Worthy Articles

To post a news item, simply type in your message (and or “link”) within the “Status field” on your wall and click the “Share” button, as shown above.

Note: you must be an administrator of the Facebook page in order to post status updates.

If you add a link to your post, be sure to put it in the status update message field, and not the separate “Link” Attach box, for better results.

Also be sure to only post HIGH QUALITY news items, videos and/or articles. If your news item is bland and boring and not relevant to your audiences interests, you will quickly be put into the “messages from this person aren’t important to me” box.

# 3: Get Your Fans to ‘Like’ Your Posts

Fans are more likely to “Like” your status update if you specifically ask them to click the Like button in a particular message.

A simple example of how to ask your fans to “Like” your post would be:

“We just released our Buzz Network iPhone app! Click the Like button if you think this is cool.”

It’s a known fact in the social media marketing world that you are more likely to increase the number of “likes” by 200-500% simply by adding an explicit request to the end of your status updates, exactly as I’ve done in the above example. I.e “Click the Like button if you think this is cool”.

# 4: Ask Questions to Get Comments

A great way to get fans to comment on your post is to simply ask them questions, particularly ones that are easy to answer.

So be sure to encourage brief answers – such as yes or no. For example, “we’ve just released a new jellybean flavor. Do you like this – yes/no?”

# 5: Entice People to Promote Your Page to Their Friends

Tell fans that you will release something new or provide a coupon or win something special if they send a message to their friends or post a status update.

For example, give them a message or “status update” that they can share to their friends or post on their wall, such as: “I just liked this page to win a FREE years supply of Jellybeans!”.

I hope these ideas got you thinking about ways you can engage your fans.

At the end of the day, you are only limited by your imagination. The sky truly is the limit! And that’s the beauty of Social Media.

# 6: Segment Your Audience and Target Your Message Accordingly

Do you know that you can push out status updates that only specific segments of your fan base will see?

For example, if you have an Australia wide business and you have an offer that is only relevant to your Sydney customers, you could push out a story that only your Sydney fans will see.

Right next to the “Share” button in the messaging box is a targeting tool– while the default targeting is normally set to “Everyone,” you can limit the outreach by location and by language.

If you have a message that you don’t need or want all of your users to see, you can customize who the message will be revealed to, by using this functionality which is built into the message box!

# 7: Make it Worth Their While to Lookout For Your Status Updates!

Studies have proven that the greatest percentage of people, by far, responded best to ‘exclusive deals & offers’. So, if you want your fans to watch out for and look forward to receiving your updates, you should reward them from time to time with special offers like coupons, giveaways, contests and more.

We’ve seen companies that offer regular scheduled deals (e.g. Friday specials or Tuesday Giveaways) build highly engaged fan bases. So why not start by creating a promotion today and working this into your fan base culture. They will love you for it!

Have a question or comment regarding this Facebook engagement? Please post your comment below.

The first mistake most businesses make when they start out in the Facebook marketing game is assume that all they have to do is set up a Facebook page, make a bunch of friend requests and away they go. Don’t be one of these businesses.

Just like any other communication medium, Facebook requires a well-thought out marketing strategy.

There are no shortcuts in social media, and Facebook certainly isn’t the acception. The bottom line is companies have to build a following, connect and build trust with their fans before they can ever begin selling (recommending/advising) to them.

This requires a well thought out strategy plan before doing anything.

People are not on Facebook to be sold

Instead, they are there to communicate with friends and family, be entertained and avoid boredom. You need to understand the mindset of your customer when engaging with them on Facebook and other social networking sites. Not all digital platforms are the same.

Make sure your business is following a logical customer acquisition process by thinking about Facebook from the users perspective and their needs in the current “Social” environment.

More on this here: 7 Ways to Engage Facebook Fans & Generate Sales

Facebook marketing tools are great, but it’s the psychology that counts

While Facebook marketing tools and software can be very useful, a Facebook marketing strategy should work no matter what medium, tool or method of distribution you use.

The smartest businesses will focus on strategy because in the world of Facebook, the tools are constantly changing, and at the end of the day, it’s the psychology and the strategy behind your Facebook marketing campaign that’s most important. You must develop an execution strategy, not just rely on tools!

Avoid selling too early

If you happen to build a big following but you’re not making any sales, it’s more than likely because you haven’t yet connected with your customers at the right level.

Engage, listen to, interact and build trust in the relationship with your fans before you promote your products or service.

At the end of the day, if your potential customers don’t know, like and trust you – you will have very little success with getting tangible sales enquires through social media.

Creating impersonal accounts

Users don‟t follow companies and software; they follow engaging people who work for a brand or a company.

Every account and Facebook page should have an actual person who has a name and a title that clearly signifies him or her as a face of the company.

This person should also write with a conversational tone and respond to other participants in the conversation. Automated accounts or accounts that are automatically updated with a stream of links (i.e. from a syndicated blog) rarely produce results.

Trying to control the message

Facebook is not about controlling a message. In fact, the very nature of Facebook and social media in general is such that no one person or organization can control the message.

Because Facebook is a medium to share information through a network, companies must realize (and be ok with) that once they put the message out there, they have no control anymore. Users can choose to edit the message, inject their own opinions into the message, share the message, or ignore the message entirely.

Because of the nature of Facebook, companies that try to control the message will have difficulty reaping any of the benefits of the medium.

But the fact is, if you choose not to participate at all, you also run the risk of loosing market share to your competition who will, inevitably, master Facebook marketing and dominate your market before you do.

So don’t be afraid to make mistakes, because users (now more than ever) prefer to deal with companies who are more transparent and trustable and who take the time to listen and engage with their customers while putting aside their ego.

And at the end of the day, if you’re delivering great products and service, you really have nothing to hide, do you! And the chances are, if you are delivering great products and services, your customers are talking and doing the marketing for you – which is the ultimate form of marketing any business can acquire.

I hope these additional tips help you improve your success with Facebook Pages.

If you have a question or common mistakes that you’ve seen recently, I’d love to hear them! Please comment below.

The reality is, 80% of businesses will FAIL in their first 5 years (most in the first year to two years), 90% of businesses will fail within their first 10 years, and it’s something like 99% of ALL businesses fail within 15 years.

How could this be?

I think that this failure is largely as a result of most entrepreneurs, founders and business owners not learning, understanding, practicing and mastering marketing.

Think about it, if you really understood marketing, you’d know if what you’ve got is something that people want and need, you’d know all the tools, platforms, distribution channels, technology etc etc to use to get your message out their, and you’d never have to worry about getting more customers and making a profit, ever! Right?

That’s how important marketing is.

The truth however is that most business owners will embark on a business thinking it’s the hottest thing since slice bread and 6 months down the track desperate to sell more product to pay the bills but doesn’t really know how.

To be honest, if you want to fail and not get the results that you want in life. If you want to not attract and connect with the type of people you want to work with… If you want to not have the types of power, control and influence that you need in life and business to succeed – well, just continue to avoid learning, understanding and implementing marketing – and that should all work out just fine.

Why You Need To Learn Marketing?

As you now know, marketing is the key to your success in business. But the real reason why we need to learn marketing, is so that we can get the money we need to succeed in our business and our lives – to be in control of our destiny.

Ultimately, if you can learn how to get your clients and customers to make decisions to buy from you instead of your competitors, and you really understand the psychology behind that, then your success in business is guaranteed. Because you’ll never be in doubt about whether your product is good enough, whether people actually want and need your product, whether you are the right person to buy it from, whether you have the right distribution method and strategy, or where the next dollar will come from.

Now more then ever, you need to understand the true psychology behind your marketing, or find someone who does. Your business depends on it!

Did you enjoy this post? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Please submit your comment below.