Social media can be a powerful tool for driving traffic, engagement, and growth for your website. Here’s how to leverage social media effectively to help your website grow.

Share links to your website’s content on your social media profiles. When your followers click on these links, it drives traffic to your site.
Use eye-catching visuals, engaging captions, and compelling headlines to entice users to click through to your website.
Brand Awareness:

Consistent social media activity helps raise awareness of your brand, increasing your website’s visibility.
Share your website’s content, promotions, and updates regularly to keep your brand top-of-mind for your audience.
Content Promotion:

Share blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, and other website content on your social media platforms. This extends the reach of your content beyond your website’s visitors.
Use hashtags and keywords relevant to your niche to make your content discoverable by a broader audience.
Engagement and Interaction:

Use social media to interact with your audience. Respond to comments, answer questions, and engage in conversations.
Engaging with your audience fosters a sense of community and encourages users to visit your website for deeper discussions or information.
User-Generated Content:

Encourage your social media followers to create and share content related to your brand, products, or services. User-generated content can serve as authentic endorsements and attract new visitors to your website.
Promotions and Contests:

Run social media promotions, contests, and giveaways that direct users to your website. Make participating in these events fun and rewarding.
Use this opportunity to collect user data, such as email addresses, to grow your subscriber list.
Live Streaming and Webinars:

Host live streaming sessions or webinars on social media that provide valuable information or entertainment. Promote these events on your website and encourage attendees to visit.
Live sessions allow for real-time engagement and Q&A, building a stronger connection with your audience.
Visual Platforms:

Leverage visual social media platforms like Instagram and Pinterest if your website features products, designs, or visually appealing content.
Share high-quality images, videos, and infographics that showcase your offerings and link back to relevant pages on your website.
Social Sharing Buttons:

Add social sharing buttons to your website’s content. This makes it easy for visitors to share your articles, products, or pages with their own social networks, increasing your reach.
Targeted Advertising:

Use social media advertising platforms (e.g., Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, Twitter Ads) to target specific demographics, interests, and behaviors.
Craft compelling ad campaigns that drive users to your website’s landing pages.
Analytics and Insights:

Monitor social media analytics to track engagement, click-through rates, and conversion metrics.
Use these insights to refine your social media strategy and focus on the platforms and content that yield the best results.
Consistency:

Maintain a consistent posting schedule to keep your audience engaged. Create a content calendar to plan and schedule posts in advance.
Experiment with different types of content, such as images, videos, polls, and stories, to keep your social media presence fresh and engaging.
Cross-Promotion:

Collaborate with influencers or other businesses in your niche for cross-promotional efforts. These partnerships can introduce your website to a broader audience.
Social Proof:

Showcase social proof on your website by displaying social media icons and follower counts. High numbers can instill trust and credibility in your brand.
Mobile Optimization:

Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly, as many users access social media from mobile devices. A seamless mobile experience can lead to higher click-through rates.
By integrating social media into your overall digital marketing strategy, you can tap into the vast user bases of social platforms to drive traffic, increase engagement, and ultimately grow your website’s audience and influence.

In this article, we’re going to look at 5 ways good social media use can influence your website. Social media has become an important part of many people’s lives and it’s a great way to connect with potential customers.
When used correctly, social media can be a powerful tool to help promote your website and increase traffic. However, it’s important to use social media in the right way, as bad social media can actually have a negative impact on your website.
Keep reading to learn more about how social media can influence your website in a positive way!

1. Branding

Branding is perhaps one of the most important aspects of small business success, and social media provides an excellent platform for small business owners to create an all-encompassing, recognizable brand for products or services. Creating a strong, consistent brand image across multiple social networks, from Twitter to Instagram, will help customers and potential customers become familiar with the company’s offerings and story.
By providing consistent branded content across all platforms, small business owners can give their customers a better understanding of the values and consistent offerings they bring to the market. Additionally, by incorporating visuals such as company logos and colors, small businesses can better distinguish themselves from others and make customers more likely to remember their products and services. By creating a strong, consistent brand image through social media, small businesses can give themselves a competitive edge and better chances of success.
2. Community
Creating a sense of community on social media is essential to help small businesses grow and maintain a loyal customer base. Customers, who feel like they are part of a community, are more likely to stay loyal and continue to purchase products or services.
Small business owners should engage with customers in a casual and conversational way online. Social media can be a great way to build an interactive and engaging platform for customers, by providing valuable feedback and advice on topics of interest. By fostering relationships with customers, small business owners can create an emotional connection and increase the likelihood that customers will become loyal to the brand. Additionally, small business owners can use social media to thank customers and share their successes, creating a personal connection and building trust.
3. Traffic
Another benefit of social media usage for small businesses is its ability to generate website traffic. Social media helps small businesses reach larger audiences, as well as to build valuable backlinks from social media pages to their website. This can greatly increase the organic reach and visibility of the website.
Small business owners can use social media to showcase products and increase website traffic by promoting the website or offering special discounts or deals for customers who follow on social media. By creating shared content, small business owners can provide content that customers will find valuable and which will encourage them to visit the website. Additionally, small business owners can curate content from other sources and share helpful articles, videos, and podcasts with customers on their social media profiles, allowing customers to easily find the website.
4. SEO
In addition to driving website traffic, good social media use can also help with SEO. This is because search engines reward websites for generating attention and engagement on social media platforms. When content or pages from the website are shared and discussed on social media, search engine ranking algorithms take note and reward websites for these conversations.
Furthermore, social media is an effective way for small business owners to communicate with their customers, build relationships, and cultivate an audience. Having customers interact with your content and related information helps these search engines figure out the relevancy of your website and pages. They then use this information to rank websites in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
Good social media interactions can also help small business owners boost their brand recognition and credibility. When customers share and discuss content from the website, they act as promoters, helping spread the word more quickly. Thus, social media and search engines can work together to help small businesses rank higher and reach more customers. Utilizing a combination of both can help small businesses get more organic web traffic, higher search engine rankings, and increased brand recognition and credibility.
5. Leads And Sales
Good social media use is also beneficial for leads and sales. Through social media, small businesses can identify potential customers, engage them with interesting content and drive them to your website. As customers interact with your website more often, they will be more likely to take desired action, such as signing up for a newsletter, providing personal details, making a purchase, etc.
Furthermore, content shared on social media is also presented as ‘organic’ marketing content. This means that your content is seen as authentic and trustworthy, since it isn’t being paid for. This, in turn, helps build customer trust in your brand, which encourages more sales and leads.
Additionally, you can use social media platforms to direct potential customers to the exact product they are looking for. With the help of a website analytics software, you can track which content is being shared the most and models your future campaigns according to this data. You can also use a tracking link to monitor how successful your campaigns are. All this data is invaluable for businesses so that they can gain insight into customer behaviour and target the right kind of audience.
To wrap things up, using social media strategically is essential for any small business website. It is more cost-effective and efficient than traditional marketing techniques and helps businesses reach their target audience. Social media allows businesses to get the word out about their website and products, capture the attention of potential customers, and motivate them to take the desired action.
Furthermore, social media also allows businesses to engage and interact with current customers, resolve their queries quickly, and build better customer relationships. The insights gained can also help businesses improve their products and services, giving customers a better overall experience.
Ultimately, businesses must remember that building a good social media presence takes time and patience. Being consistent will increase your chances of success, so focus on creating high-quality content that is relevant to your target audience. This will help your business stand out from the competition and also build a deeper connection with your audience.
If you are interested in a new website or updating your old website contact us! (937) 232-1155

Social Media & Reputation Management

What if I said you could eliminate a lot of customer service headaches by using social media?

Imagine going to your favorite fast-food joint and getting home noticing your hamburger doesn’t have the pickles you ordered on it. You love this place so you don’t make it a big deal, you simply go back and have them correct the order. A week goes by and you’re craving a juicy burger again so you go back. Low and behold, you get back to the house and they didn’t put pickles on your burger again. This time you go back, but you’re a little upset considering this place has always made good food and provided great service. What do they do? They correct the order and give you a gift card to use at a later date for the inconvenience. Ever since, your favorite place to get burgers have never messed up an order. They corrected the problem and you’re back to living the good life. Now let’s say you had the same problem at your favorite bakery, but they never corrected the problem and were quite rude to you during the process. Do you think you’ll go back to that bakery? Probably not; you might even write a negative review. Hey, you might even write the review on social media.

 

Use Social Media as a CRM Tool

Clearly, social media holds some weight and can be used in many different ways. The use of social media has limitless possibilities, one being a tool for customer reputation management. If a person or company has done business with you for a lengthy amount of time, but been having similar issues with your product or service as you did at the burger joint, they would want the problem to be corrected. Social media can be a valuable customer service tool so you can make things right with your customers and make sure they keep doing business with you.

 

What Can Using Social Media as a CRM Tool Do?

  1. Stop negative reviews and save face with your consumer
  2. Let you be where your customers are (this definitely goes for B2B companies as well. Whether you’re dealing with consumers or companies, everyone is on social media.)
  3. Help you listen to what your customers are saying
  4. Answer questions quickly without making people wait on the phone
  5. Provide transparency to your business, which people like!
  6. Shall I continue?

 

Final Thoughts

Social media is here to stay and should be a significant part of your marketing campaign. As you can see, social media can play a pivotal role for customer service as well as many other ways too.

 

How do You Get People to Review Your Business?

For most industries, it can be difficult to get positive reviews. This is most certainly something to focus on considering Google’s algorithm penalizes your company’s organic search results if you have negative reviews.

Bounce Back From Negative Reviews

Have you ever went to Amazon to buy something but looked at the reviews and because most were negative, you decided not to make a purchase?  Most of the time that’s because your customers don’t usually review their gym, grocery store, retail store, and most especially, B2B companies and their products. Most consumers typically review when they have a negative experience.  So what does that mean exactly? Is your company and/or products tarnished for life or will those negative reviews hurt your sales or reputation? The truthful answer is that it absolutely can, but there is also good news: you can bounce back from it. All you have to do is ask for positive reviews from happy customers. Sounds easy, right? Well, let’s take this one step at a time.  

Tip The “Review-Scale”

Capitalize on your happy customers and have them fight on behalf of your brand. As mentioned earlier, i’m sure you have been to Amazon and saw a product or company that had a significant number of negative reviews. I’m also certain you saw negative reviews at one time, but you decided to purchase anyway because the positive reviews drastically outweighed the negative ones.  It’s all about tipping the scales back in your favor and making sure the bulk of your reviews are positive.

Ask for Reviews in Person:

The best way to get reviews is by asking in person. Asking for reviews in person is much more personal than an online initiative, especially if you and the customer had a great experience. For example, let’s say you walked into a health and wellness store, but you don’t know what products would be best for you. When you ask an associate for help, they steer you in the right direction and you two have a lengthy conversation that included anything and everything. If that customer asked you to give an online review so it helped him and  others who are researching where to shop, you would probably be more inclined to do so.

Another way to gather positive reviews is by providing incentive. Research has shown most people respond to free incentives and give-a-ways. For instance, you could start a campaign that gives the customer a chance to win $100 (You may want to do something else, but that’s a start.)

Ask for Reviews via Email

Another way is by asking via email. If you already met the customer, there shouldn’t be a problem reaching out through email. Obviously, if the customer wasn’t happy with the experience then it’s best to leave that person out. You can find out by pre-screening your customers by survey so you don’t rack up the negative reviews (though, let’s hope that never happens.) Email may not perform as well as asking in person, but is still a valuable option to gain positive reviews.

Here are some of the best practices for your email request letter:

  1. Have the email come from a real person’s email address (Even better, have it come from a name they’d recognize, such as someone they worked with).
  2. Have the email written as a personal request from that same person.
  3. Have a very clear call-to-action link/button. Remove random social media or website footer links — just as with good conversion rate optimization, have a singular goal of users clicking the review button.
  4. Test using a plain-text email versus an HTML email.
  5. Test different subject lines: We’ve found that using the person’s name in the subject line works well in many instances but falls completely flat in a few others.
  6. Test different email copy to see what performs best.

One way to ensure success of any review-gathering initiative is to make sure everyone in the organization is on board and stress its importance. Ways you can do this is by:

  1. Making better reviews a top-down focus; executives need to communicate the importance.
  2. Obtaining organizational buy-in on the importance of reviews by helping employees understand the direct impact they have on the business.
  3. Training key employees on how to ask for reviews.
  4. Developing a scorecard that tracks reviews by locations (similar to our SERP score, but for reviews).
  5. Providing bonuses and awards for the locations that have the best online reviews.

Final Thoughts

As with any good campaign, you must strategize and go through a series of tests. See what works best for you and your customer base. Just make sure you’re focusing on gathering  positive reviews, you’ll thank yourself that you did.

Should your B2B company be using social media?

The answer is a resounding yes. I hear this question all the time, especially when talking to companies about their marketing. Most B2B companies have hopped on the social bandwagon and know social media is a valuable marketing outlet, but they don’t know how it fits into their business model. Most B2B business owners or presidents make the mistake of thinking they don’t need to be on social media because they sell products that aren’t for the everyday consumer. When thinking this, they are forgetting some of the crucial ways why social media is important. It’s not all about selling a product or creating brand awareness, it’s about much more.

It’s About SEO.  

I’m sure you have all heard the term SEO before; some marketing person telling you something about Google and how it’s important. In defense of the marketing person, it is important – better yet, it’s imperative. Despite being a B2B company, social media can be used in correlation with SEO. SEO is all about getting your website and other media on the first page of Google. This is important because it pushes your competitors media and website farther down the page and provides more outlets for your customers to contact you. There’s much more that could be said, but let’s move to the next reason.

It’s About Your Brand Story.

Utilizing social media allows you to push your brand out to the digital landscape and let people know exactly who you are and what you stand for. It’s somewhat difficult to show why you’re different and why companies should be doing business with you just from your website. With social media, you can create and push out content that is engaging and shows why companies should do business with you and only you. That’s not all though, there’s more.

It’s About Brand Integration

This may go without saying, but Integration on social media is key. Look at your website as your foundation or digital hub of sorts. Your social media allows you to have other outlets to funnel or lead the customer to your website. This gives you more opportunity to capture leads and make sales.

Final Thoughts

These are only a few ways how social media can benefit and be used by a B2B company. Just remember, simply creating social media isn’t enough and if not used properly, it can actually hurt you. It’s also a problem If you create social media and post, but the consumer doesn’t find the content valuable. Making sure you utilize the platforms and provide content that engages the audience helps with SEO, funneling your consumer to your website, and ultimately leading to more sales and business overall. Don’t be left behind while your competitors take advantage of what’s out there. Be better than your competition!

Social media has become a major player in the realm of online marketing. We can all agree on the advances of social media since the old days of MySpace.com in 2003. And now with 27% of total U.S. internet time spent on social networking sites (Source: Experian), businesses are expected to have a social presence online.

Social media is a way for customers to interact directly with the brands they love. It’s not enough to just have a presence, implementing a strategy to correctly reach and cultivate these communities on social media websites is a must. In many cases business owners are just too busy, which is completely understandable. This is where you and I come into play as the savvy “social media specialist” we are. Follow these simple steps below and you will be on your way to social media bliss. These are some steps I would take to manage a company’s social media accounts.

Communication Is Key

The first step is to communicate with the client to discover the purpose of creating their social media profiles. Every industry is different, therefore there is no one size fits all strategy. Nor, is there an official right or wrong way to manage a social media profile, so communication is key to stay on the same page with the client.

Here are a few questions I would ask a client before I set up their profiles:

What do I want to accomplish through social media? What Are Your Goals? Example: To drive sales or to supplement customer service

  • What is your target audience?
  • Will there be anyone else, beside myself, who will be managing your social media accounts?
  • What’s your social media policy on what can be said and by whom?
  • What are some important topics you would like to cover?
  • Who are some of the industry influencers?

These questions will give you better insight to create the correct content, to reach the correct audience.

Research and Planning

The next step is to do preliminary research on your client’s industry news and trends. You want to create content that is relevant to the industry now. This would be a good time to set up Google Alerts to alert you of any new or interesting trends Google indexed, related to your chosen topic.

*Note: It is also good to speak to your client about any discounts, sale promotions, or any other company related news their audience may want to hear.

Keyword research would also be beneficial to stay on topic when creating content for a social media post.

There are tons of tools to help you conduct keyword research. My favorite tools are a Raven Tools, Google Keyword Tool, and Spyfu.

Once you have a finalized, client-approved list of keywords it’s your choice of how you want to organize the list on a content calendar, which brings me to my next point.

Organize Your Content

The next step after the research is completed is to organize the information in a content calendar. Again, how you organize the information is completely up to you. I recommend using a keyword as a theme for each month. Once that is completed you can further brake down the monthly theme into weekly segments, where you cover different topics for that week.

For example:

For month one your theme is chocolate candy.

Week 1 can be the health benefits of chocolate.

Day 1 of Week 1 can be “ Top 5 reasons Chocolate Can Lead To A Healthier Lifestyle.”

Content Calendar Example:

A content calendar is an amazing way to organize and create actionable content. It’s also a way to keep you and the client on the same page.

Again, there are tons of tools to manage social media profiles. Currently, an industry favorite is Houtsuite. Houtsuite is relatively inexpensive and offers ways to manage and schedule content on multiple profiles simultaneously.

Conduct A Reputation Audit

After research and planning is complete and you feel confident that you can effectively manage your clients social media profiles, its time to see what others are already saying about your client’s brand. 25% of consumers who complain about products on Facebook or Twitter expect a response within 1 hour (Source: American Express). Social media is an amazing tool to connect with your customer base, acknowledge them by responding to their concerns.

You should conduct a reputation audit. There may be various ex-employees, demanding clients, or even competitors that may have written bad reviews or complaints. These complaints, no matter how ridiculous, needs to be addressed. By conducting a search on Ripoffreport.com and other similar websites, you can start to get a handle on what’s being said.

You can also do a simple search in Google by typing the brand name and adding “scam” or “reviews”.

Monitor, Promote, Report

Once your audit is complete and all of your marketing ideas are organized into actionable items, the next step is monitor you’re content on the profiles, promote and report your successes . Once again, there are a plethora of tools available to monitor your audience and create custom reports. Followerwonk is amazing for monitoring a Twitter account. I use the reporting and monitoring features on Raventools, but you should find the one that fits best for your budget and your clients needs.

Marketing on social media is about brand exposure, acquiring new customers, and cultivating your client’s online communities. Social media produces almost double the marketing leads of trade shows, telemarketing, direct mail, or PPC. (Source: HubSpot) So, correctly managing a brand’s image is vital for any business. Remember to stay organized and respond to customer inquires because this is a two way conversation.

I welcome any ideas to do my job better, what are some ways you monitor your client’s social media accounts?

Last weekend, I was looking for a video game to buy as a gift. I used my smartphone to open up the GameFly app. (For you non-gamers, GameFly is the biggest video game rental service around—they offer around 30,000 games for PC, consoles, and mobile.)

I didn’t find a game to order. Not because there weren’t enough to choose from. I just couldn’t get past the way GameFly was using social media within its app.

It appears that any message posted by a GameFly member (an account can be linked to Facebook or Twitter, or created in-app) is immediately published to one of the app’s front pages. At first, this seems like a great idea: helpful reviews from real-live players! Seamless user interaction! Mad excitement-building for new product releases!

And GameFly’s not alone in adding this feature. Application programming interfaces, or APIs, make it easy for apps to pull tweets, likes, and posts from other programs into their own.

But here’s the problem. There’s zero filtering of vulgar, profane, hateful comments. And trust me, there’s plenty of potty-mouthed posting going on. That means when my 7-year-old daughter opens the app and looks for an age-appropriate title, she’s assaulted with this garbage. And short of deleting the app altogether, there’s not a thing I can do about it.

For me, this was a really negative experience. But it got me thinking. As more and more companies integrate user feedback into their digital marketing strategies, brands need to be aware of what exactly their fans, followers, or users are posting—and where their words are showing up.

That’s not to say you should delete or edit user comments. (As Applebee’s recently learned, moves like these can backfire, and may make you appear untrustworthy.) But you also don’t have to give nasty commenters the spotlight. In GameFly’s case, “mature”-rated games (and their associated commentary) could be sorted into a separate menu. And smart programmers could add “safe-word” filters to weed out bad language.

I’m all for a collaborative user experience. But not when that experience is hurtful to others. Above all, companies should ensure that they’re the ones in control of their content—on social pages, apps, and everywhere else. When a 7-year old has easy access to content that would shock a 70-year-old sailor, something needs to change.

At Atomic, we want to build a great user experience—for everyone who uses our apps. We can help you create content filters and choose features that will best highlight your brand. Contact us to find out how.

Business is changing fast. But as technologies come and go, these principles withstand the proverbial test of time: Marketing is about connecting consumers with messages. Find your consumers where it’s convenient for them, and make your message heard.

If you’re still wondering what social media has to do with your business, think for a minute about where you’d start if you were looking for a new TV and needed to compare prices. Or wanted to see what an old college friend was up to. Or were hungry for some Thai food, and were looking for good restaurants nearby. Still wondering?

I didn’t think so.

Create your plan of action

Once you’re on board with social media, the most important thing is to decide—in advance—what exactly you want your social media efforts to do for you. Do you want to provide better customer service? Sell more products? Increase brand awareness? Decide what the goal is, and strategy will follow.

Make your presence known on the social media platforms best suited to your product. If you’re targeting career-minded professionals, be sure your LinkedIn profile is top-notch; if mommy bloggers are your market, try daily posts on a well-maintained Facebook page.

Above all, make sure branding is consistent across platforms, down to the font and images you use. Customers want to feel reassured they’re getting a high-quality, dependable product—no matter where they go looking for it.

Don’t forget to designate a person within your company to take charge of social media efforts—and make sure it’s someone who really gets social media, and who enjoys it (or risk tweets of “I hate my job” going out to your followers).

Track your progress

Once you’ve got a campaign going, take a step back to assess your work. In Web 3.0, success is measured in fans, followers, shares, and clicks, so make sure you’re keeping up.

Advanced analytics tools (I recommend Google Analytics) can tell you how many people viewed your Facebook profile, how many of those viewers followed a link to your home page, and how many of them went on to buy something from your site. A little Big Brother-ish? Maybe. But for companies trying to understand what makes their customers tick, it’s seriously cool.

Assess and adapt

So you’ve launched your campaign, upped your likes, and tallied some results—what’s next?

If you’re reaching your goals, well, by all means keep doing what you’re doing. Maybe reallocate some of your budget toward further social media awesomeness.

On the other hand, if you’re not getting the results you expected, it’s time to reevaluate. Figure out where your strategy is lacking, and adjust accordingly. Maybe your message isn’t consistent from platform to platform. Maybe you’re not reaching the audience you want. Maybe you need to try a different site altogether (are you on Pinterest yet?).

If you’re not sure where you’re going wrong, try A/B testing—test one campaign against another. See which one engages the audience better. Stick with what works, and ditch what doesn’t.

But whatever you do, don’t let fear stop you from breaking into the social media webosphere.

By not giving your customers an easy way to find you (and, in turn, doing some analytic sleuthing to learn about them), you’re missing out on a huge opportunity. And if you’re not getting your message out there, you can bet your competitors are.

Ready to jump on the social media bandwagon? Contact Atomic for help launching a killer social media plan of action.

blog-socialmedia

One of our clients asked for advice on approaching different types of social media. She knew in theory that creating new content is good, but she wasn’t sure what content to put where.

“I have a blog, a Facebook fan page, and a Twitter account,” she asked us. “Should they all have different types of content? How often should I post on each one? Is there an easy way to replicate posts across different media?”

Starting from short content (Twitter) to longer content (blog posts), here’s our answer.

  • Twitter. There’s no real limit to how often you should post on Twitter. Things move quickly there, and it’s easy to miss people’s tweets, so posting frequently will give you a better chance of being seen and heard. In fact, it’s expected. If you’re not interacting pretty much every day, people will lose interest.Also, Twitter is supposed to be for socializing, so keep your posts conversational – people get pissed if you’re salesy. If you write business-related tweets, do it some 20% of the time, and make your tweets as un-pushy as possible.Because you want to tweet frequently, it’s fine to “push” your Facebook posts to Twitter (i.e., every comment you make on Facebook will show up on your Twitter account). However, it’s not a good idea to push your tweets to your Facebook page, because theoretically, you’ll have way too many posts. People get annoyed if you update your Facebook status 10 times a day – it’ll do you more
    harm than good.
  • Facebook. What you’re trying to do with Facebook is build a community around your brand. You want to start a conversation with your followers in the hopes that they’ll eventually use your page as a forum to talk about your company.To get the community started, about once a day, you can post thoughts, questions, polls, surveys, or anything that might get discussions started. If you can get to the point where you just monitor the page and chime in when questions are asked or problems arise, that’s ideal.
  • Blogs. Blogs are a great place to promote yourself and your company. The blog is on your site, and readers are expecting you to write about yourself. So you can be a little more salesy here.You should blog regularly –at least once a month, and ideally once every two weeks. Once a week is great if you have the time and content.Blogs can be used to answer FAQs, to talk about industry trends, or to announce new products, employees, or clients. Most importantly, blogs are great for letting your visitors and Google know that fresh content regularly appears on your site. If you have certain keyword phrases you’re going after, you can write entire articles about them, linking the phrases in the blog to the appropriate
    pages on your site.

    Pushing your blog articles to Facebook is a good idea. The content should be tied to the discussions on your Facebook page anyway, and the posts will sit on your page long enough to let multiple people see them. Pushing blog articles to Twitter is pretty much a waste of time –a one-time mention of a lengthy article will often be lost on Twitter users.

Overall, think of the different mediums as having different communication purposes. You can use Twitter and Facebook to interact with customers on a day-to-day basis, and then use your blog to talk less frequently, but more in depth, about issues that are important to them. With a good strategy in place and a little luck, you should soon have a strong following in each medium.

blog-pic-icon

Does anyone surfing the web these days see a blue bird or a chubby aqua “T” and not think of Twitter?

Icons—pictorial representations of brands, products, or people—can be powerful tools to help you stand out in the cyber crowd.

A customized icon set—a group of similarly styled icons, much like a family of fonts—takes iconic branding to the next level by helping you:

  • Differentiate one product, application, or blogger from another.
  • Organize products into like groups—without sacrificing the consistent elements of your brand.
  • Streamline the back-end functionality of your content management system, which makes it easier for staff to navigate and to train new staff on how to use it.
  • Provide a consistent theme for graphic, product, app, and other designers to use for creating new icons.

Here at Atomic, my process for developing icon sets is pretty straightforward. It focuses on upfront preparation, which conserves your time, cuts down on costs, and ensures that we get the best results.

  • Brainstorm. First, I’ll brainstorm with you to learn who and what the icon set is for. What message, position, feeling do you hope to convey? I might just listen to how you talk about your products or brand, take notes, and then jot down some ideas to see what creative concepts emerge.
  • Research. Often, these early brainstorming sessions are augmented with additional research. I want to know what your competition is doing. I also like to check out how other sites use icon sets and to what effect.
  • Sketch. Next, I’ll sketch out some more concrete ideas for you to review—including color schemes that bring the concepts to life. I’ll typically present ideas from a variety of different angles to see which ones you think work best for your goals. And I’ll provide my two cents to help you decide.
  • Refine. Once I get more feedback, I can refine the sketches to create full, polished illustrations.

Soon enough, your customized icon set is ready to be deployed.

Now that’s iconic thinking for your brand and your business.