Tips to Manage Your Social Media Efforts in 2015

2015, A Exciting Year for Social Media, As you may have already heard that Twitter and Facebook have both started testing in-stream buy buttons. It's a good chance that Facebook and Twitter users will see more buy buttons in the near future.

To help you face 2015's Social Media Marketing Challenges, I'll share tips for social media success in the new year.

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How to Run a Successful Social Media Contest

Step 1: Create a Social Media Marketing Plan

Similarly to the way you do in Website Design and SEO, you must make a plan before executing. Same goes for social media. Creating a social media marketing plan will set you up for success, and will allow you to avoid any social media mistakes.

Step 2: Do a Social Media Audit

Before You Start Creating New Social Media Account, run a Social Media Audit of your current Social Media Presence Like SEO Audit involved in Search Engine Optimization Campaign. Social media audits are useful to keep all your social media channels in a row, such as social profiles and passwords.

Step 3: Deliver The Right Mix of Content

On social media, you need to deliver the right mix of content Regularly. Promotions on social media should always be balanced, whether it's for the Black Friday, Holidays or Every Day. Exception discounts are meant to be shared, and social media can multiply the reach of your promotions. At the same time, it's crucial to keep standards high for images and copy, and to vary your mix of content. People appreciate great deals, but a non-stop stream of "xx percent off" posts can come off as routine or lacking personality.

Step 4: Pay Attention to Social Media Engagement

Skimping out on social media engagement in your social media strategy can pose a huge threat to your company’s social media presence. The Easy 3 steps to doing social media engagement right are being proactive, always listening, and being engaging.

Step 5: Build Relationships

It's All about human relationships. Every brand in the world does holiday and special event campaigns, but the ones that succeed don't do so accidentally – most of them are warm, original, and authentic. Focus on making real connections. Instead of pushing your product, consider giving your customers a platform to discuss their memories, share your company photo, or just send a genuine message wishing people all the best.

Step 6: Monitor Your Social Media

When it comes to social media, people have all the power to say whatever they want about your company and brand. What they are saying can be positive or negative. Regardless of how or why they give you feedback, not monitoring your social media audience is a missed opportunity.

Social media monitoring allows you to gain powerful insight into your customers, competitors, and industry influencers. To take full advantage of social media listening, you need to spread your monitoring across several social media channels, and keep a constant watch for new opportunities. However, acquiring these insights takes time, and the use of the right tools.

Here are Top 15 Social Media Management Tools To Save You Time.

Google+ Insights: Google+ Insights gives you an overview of your Google+ Page Insights for the last 30 days. Your Insights show numbers for Google+ post views, post actions and new followers. You can also see how each of those numbers has changed in the past 30 days.

Facebook Insights: With the Facebook Insights Page API you can access metrics about your Facebook Page. For example you can get the total number of people who have liked your Page or the number of people sharing stories about your page.

Twitter Analytics: Twitter Analytics Measure and boost your impact on Twitter. The new and improved Twitter analytics shows tons of awesome data about follower demographics and tweet engagement.

Pinterest Analytics: With Pinterest Analytics, You can see what people like from your profile and what they save from your website. Get new data about your audience, too, so you can learn what your customers really want.

Hootsuite: Hootsuite is a social media management system for brand management. The system’s user interface takes the form of a dashboard, and supports social network integrations for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Foursquare, MySpace, WordPress, TrendSpottr and Mixi.

SocialOomph: Social Oomph started out as a service that just focused on helping Twitter users become more productive and they soon expanded to include other social platforms such as; Facebook and Linkedin.

Tweepi: Tweepi Twitter Follow Management Utility is a set of Twitter tools to add, follow and unfollow tweeps in bulk.

Spredfast: Spredfast is an social media marketing platform that helps marketers manage audience experiences and monitor brand engagement.

Sprout Social: Sprout Social is a social media management and engagement platform for businesses. Sprout enables social communication for business through three main functions: publishing, engagement and analytics. Sprout provides solutions for social media marketing, social media management, social customer service and social media analytics. Sprout’s platform offers users the ability to integrate with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+, Zendesk and UserVoice.

Everypost: Everypost is a social media publishing tool, enabling content publishers to post multimedia content across multiple platforms.

Bitly: Bitly is a URL shortening service. The company Bitly, Inc. was established in 2008. It is privately held and based in New York City. Bitly shortens 600 million links per month, for use in social networking, SMS, and email. Bitly makes money by charging for access to aggregate data created as a result of many people using the shortened URLs.

SocialFlow: SocialFlow uses real-time data and business rules to determine what and when to publish to your social media properties for both owned and paid social posts.

Crowdbooster: Crowdbooster measures and optimizes your social media marketing, providing powerful, easy-to-use analytics and recommendations on Twitter and Facebook.

Mention: Monitor millions of different sources and don't miss anything mentioning your keywords.

BuzzSumo: BuzzSumo is an extremely useful content-research tool. It has some incredibly powerful functionality and you should certainly test it out. There is a free version you can use to get started.

Step 7: Schedule Your Social Media Posting

Social media tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, and Sprout Social take the stress out of managing multiple Twitter accounts by providing you the ability to schedule Tweets ahead of time.

Step 8: Target your audience better with the use of Social Media Statistics

Social media statistics allow marketers who use social media for business to guide their Social Media Strategies. With so many studies being done on social media, it would be a shame not to take advantage of these very informative numbers. This blog post puts together a healthy selection of social media statistics that every social media manager should know.

Step 9: Use Content Management Tools to manage and share your content

Even with a social media content calendar in place, content management can be tricky—especially if you’re juggling several social channels. Picking out the right piece of content to share out to your social media audience can be a daunting task for any social media manager.

Step 10: Use URL Shorteners to Track and Measure Engagements on your URLs

Tracking retweets and likes is no longer enough to give you sufficient data about social engagement. Remember that link you included in your post to drive people back to your website? Well, when you use URL shorteners, you’re provided with a trackable URL, so you can measure the success of that social media post in driving traffic to your website.

Step 11: Learn about Hashtags

You’ve probably seen people use a hashtag with every word in their Tweet, or dedicate a separate Instagram comment to include hashtags. But that doesn’t mean that’s the right way to use hashtags. Educate yourself on the do’s and don’ts of how to use hashtags in this blog post that goes over the fundamentals of hashtags.

Step 12: Blog Regularly

Your regular blog is a good place to write longer-form posts when needed. To get the most out of your efforts, make sure your blog is mobile-friendly. You can test it with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. Learn More about How to Fix Common Mobile Content and Usability Issues.

Step 13: Update website old content and reshare them

Old content is your friend. Find your most popular posts and those that rank highly and update them as needed. Then reshare them across your social channels to draw new attention to those articles. A good way to ensure you have the most up-to-date news is finding reliable sources of information in your industry.

Step 14: Ask Feedback

If you’d like to have more customer feedback on your product or service, give your customers a reason to help you out. Incentives can run the gamut here, and most are simple and straightforward.

Step 15: Use Infographics

People have come to love and rely on infographics for explaining information clearly and concisely. Whether you create one yourself or hire a graphic designer, be sure to include your company’s name and URL. That way your work is attributed to your business as it moves across the socialsphere.

Ask those who share your infographic to link the image back to your site so you’ll enjoy more traffic as well. When you share your infographic on your own site, make sure to include some explanatory text that deep links to previous relevant articles you’ve published.

Step 16: Install the Pin It Button

If you want people to share your images, it’s essential to make it easy for them. By installing the Pin It button, users who like images in your post can share them on Pinterest and spread your visual content in a matter of seconds.

Step 17: Nurture Content Sharing

Whether your social media marketing department is comprised of a single person or a staff of 10, you don’t have to figure out meaningful company content on your own—ask for help from other departments. Who knows the current projects and goals better than the people who work with them daily?

For example, customer service can share success stories or ways they meet customers’ needs. Sales can tell you what was particularly hot this season. Product development can give you updates on new releases.

Tap into those resources as much as possible. Not only will you make your job easier, you’ll be sure to share the most important information.

Step 18: Participate in Conversations

If you want to connect with potential prospects, you have to engage with them. And to do that effectively, you need to know where they’re engaging most frequently on social media.

When you know where your prospects hang out, start connecting with them. If they’re on Twitter, add them to a Twitter list. Add Google+ users to a circle. Reach out to leads on LinkedIn. Read and listen to their content, and comment when you have something to add.

Step 19: Use YouTube and Vine

Creating brand awareness with quality videos posted on YouTube and Vine has been a go-to social marketing tactic.

Marketers should keep in mind, though, that YouTube is more than a platform for sharing video footage. It’s just as important to develop a channel that is in keeping with your brand identity (e.g., using consistent imagery, thumbnails, colors and graphics within your video and your channel page design).

Vine’s short looping videos have won the attention of businesses and fit the bill for a cost-effective and innovative way to promote products and services. To get your own creative juices flowing, check out how other businesses have been using Vine.

Step 20: Revisit Your Social Media Strategy

No matter how long your business has been on social media, it’s recommended to review your goals, assess your success and make any needed changes. Pulling back from one platform and switching it up on another may be just the thing you need to freshen up your presence and become more effective.

When it comes to Social Media Marketing Efforts, what tools are your current favorites? Are there new ones mentioned here that you might want to try or I missed important ones? Let me know by your comment below.

How to Fix Common Mobile Content and Usability Issues

From last year mobile became dominant device for search query, and from April 21, 2015 google's mobile friendly search algorithm update (Commonly known as Mobilegeddon, which is designed to give preference to mobile friendly websites over non-mobile friendly websites), it is your responsibility to make your site mobile friendly in order to claim higher position on search result.

A recent research revealed that Search is 48% mobile user's starting point, and it's increasing rapidly. The analysts of RESEARCHANDMARKETER says that the global mobile entertainment market to grow at a Compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.82% over the period 2014-2019.

The forecast is simple, mobile is taking over the control, and search engine like google and bing taking steps to adopt it. To help you, ensure that your website is good to go with this, here are few common mobile content and usability issue and solutions in Search Engine Optimization Prospective.

In this article, we'll cover

1. Viewport
2. Use Stylistic Images
3. Breakpoint
4. Font and Text
5. Flash
6. Loading Speed

Viewport Configuration: 

For those that are unaware, viewport controls the way web pages are displayed on different devices. Without a configured viewport, pages will appear on mobile devices as the typical desktop screen width, only scaled to fit the screen.

Because visitors to your site use a variety of devices with varying screen sizes—from large desktop monitors to tablets and small smartphones—your pages should specify a viewport using the meta viewport tag. This tag tells browsers how to adjust the page’s dimension and scaling to suit the device. Learn more in Responsive Web Design Basics.

There is clearly demand for the viewport meta tag since it is supported by most popular mobile browsers and used by thousands of websites. It would be good to have a true standard for web pages to control viewport properties.

Use Stylistic Images: 

Wherever possible Apply simple styling and Add stylistic images. These are always some images in our website that were important to the narrative of our product. Stylistic images are images that are not needed as part of the core content but add visual flare or help guide the user’s attention to a specific piece of content.

Set your Breakpoint:

• Constrain the maximum width of the design. 
• Give enough padding to elements and make bigger the text size. 
• Make the video float around the content. 
• Reduce the size of the images and have them appear in a nicer grid.

Font and Text:

Font

The viewport also impacts how fonts are scaled on different devices. A page without a properly configured viewport is scaled down on mobile devices, often resulting in the text on the page being illegible due to its small size.

Some mobile browsers may attempt to scale fonts for pages without a properly configured viewport. This scaling behavior varies between browsers and should not be relied upon to deliver legible fonts on mobile devices. PageSpeed Insights displays the text on your page without browser-specific font scaling applied.

Text

On the narrow viewport, you don’t have a lot of space to display content so the size and weight of the typography are often drastically reduced to fit the screen.

With a larger viewport, you need to consider that the user is more likely to be on a larger screen but further away. To increase the readability of the content, we can increase the size and weight of the typography and we can also alter the padding to make distinct areas stand out more.

Avoid Flash: 

As it currently stands, the majority of mobile browsers do not support Flash-based content. Sites that embed any content that relies on Flash, whether it be for animations, videos, or navigation, are essentially damaging the site’s potential since users on mobile can’t view the content. So you shouldn't have flash on your website.

Improve Loading Speed: 

Your website must deliver and render the “above the fold” content in under one second. This allows the user to begin interacting with the website as soon as possible. Since mobile device CPUs are less powerful than desktop CPUs, speed tips that reduce CPU consumption (for instance JavaScript Parse time) need to be addressed first.

See Google's PageSpeed Insights Rules for how to improve web page load speed.

These are just things I think you should take in consideration about Mobile Content and Usability Issues. I am sure you can come up with more opinions and am really looking forward to your thoughts about How to Fix Common Mobile Content and Usability Issues?

New Research Methods and more Features out in LinkAssistant Rank Tracker

Keywords are the foundation of any SEO campaign. Optimizing for the most cost-effective, relevant search terms is sure to bring you the desired rankings and traffic and save big in the meantime, both time- and money-wise.

Spot-on keyword ideas from Google Webmaster Tools, Analytics, and AdWords

DOWNLOAD RANK TRACKER FOR FREE

Obviously, the more of the right keywords you can target, the better. Alas, finding those gets increasingly difficult: with Google Autocomplete closing its API, many free keyword tools (like Übersuggest) may stop working — unable to get the data they were built upon.

But here's the good news: even after the API shutdown, Google Autocomplete will still be available in your Rank Tracker. And here is the even better news: in today's update, we've added 3 new keyword research techniques to Rank Tracker's 17 existing methods, letting you get even more valuable keyword ideas right from Google:

1. Keywords you already rank for (Google Webmaster Tools)
2. Keywords that bring you organic & paid traffic (Google Analytics)
3. Keywords relevant to your landing pages (Google AdWords)

And that's not all — read on to find out which other improvements in Rank Tracker's keyword research functionality are out today!

1. Find and analyze terms you already rank for

Ranking for keywords you haven't been specifically optimizing for (and probably haven't even thought of!) is surprisingly common.

What if you could have a list of such keywords? That would let you assess all of them comprehensively, pick the most profitable ones, and further optimize your pages for these. would require much less time and effort than trying to get to the top for keywords your site isn't even listed in Google for. A bit of keyword-targeted on-page SEO will get you a long way — and can save you months of hard SEO work.

The latest version of Rank Tracker lets you quickly import keywords your site is already listed for right from Google Search Console.

Read the how-to...

2. Discover all keywords that bring you traffic

Knowing exactly which search queries are attracting search traffic — both organic and paid— most affectively is a valuable asset.

With its latest update, Rank Tracker lets you easily discover all keywords that bring Google traffic to your site, pulling the data right from Google Analytics at a click of the mouse.

Read the how-to...

3. Uncover keywords relevant to any page

Google indexes web pages in correlation with certain search queries — alas, these may not always be the ones you've been optimizing your pages for.

The latest Rank Tracker lets you quickly get a list of keywords Google thinks are relevant to any page on the web (or multiple pages at a time!) right from Google Adwords.

Read the how-to...

More improvements for handier keyword research

Along with the 3 new keyword research methods, the latest Rank Tracker update also offers a bunch of improvements to make the process of finding and assessing keywords as easy and intuitive as it gets.

1. Tag keywords right in the Suggest Keywords wizard

The new Rank Tracker lets you add tags to keywords as it finds them — regardless of the keyword research method you're using. When the app comes up with a list of keywords, feel free to tag them right away — so that you can then easily tell which of the ideas came from which source.

2. Filter keywords in the Suggest Keywords wizard

When Rank Tracker finds keywords for you (using any of its 20 research methods), it lets you filter them right away to make sure you only choose keywords that meet certain requirements. Just click the  button and hit  to add a filter.

3. Get expected AdWords ad clicks for every keyword

In today's Rank Tracker update, we're also adding a new factor to make keyword research and analysis even more efficient for you. In Rank Tracker's SEO & PCC analysis workspace, you'll now find the Expected Ad Clicks column, showing how many clicks a month an AdWords ad can expect to get in Google, letting you easily estimate the cost-effectiveness of placing an ad for any query.

Search Engine Optimization in 2015

The change in Search Engine Optimization over the last few years have been quite exciting and, it seems, this trend is set to continue in 2015.

So how today's SEO Professional plan their Search Engine Optimization Strategy in 2015? To help you, here are a few of my thoughts on How to Do SEO in 2015.

Be a Content Developer

You should have a content-based SEO strategy in 2015, without a purely content-based strategy,  It will be harder to stand out from the crowd. SEO planning needed to get a lot more creative and employ more paid and non-paid elaboration to help content reach wider audiences.

Know About Google Ranking Signals

Google is using more and more signals to determine search ranking, and your job will be to fully understand what those signals are, and how they interact.

Google's “mobile-friendly” Algorithm

Google's mobile search is started changing the way it ranks site's that lack a good mobile user experience. Mobile-friendly websites have really taken off in the past four years and will only continue to do so in the next.

On-Page SEO

Search Engine is moving forward from getting the exact details of on-page SEO right and more towards ensuring that your pages, products, and content actually meet your website users' expectations.

So what does matter on your website On-Page SEO? 

• Website Title and Description
• Image "alt" tag represent similar name as your page content theme
• Heading
• Keyword Consistency
• Clean URL
• Internal Linking to Related Pages
• Sitemap and Robots.txt
• Page Speed
• Text/HTML Ratio
• Use of MultiMedia
• Social Media Sharing Option
• Website Usability

Be Authoritative

Becoming an authoritative source for information that meets users expectations more than search engine needs will become exceptionally important. While links still continue to be of primary value, Smart SEO Professional will more and more value other means of creating traffic and audience around a site.

Learn About User Experience

You have to need to understand a lot more about user experience and web development to continue building engaging website and content. Having a solid understanding of the latest trends in user experience might add value to your SEO campaign.

Keep in Mind that, Everything you do online could have some effect on your SEO Project.

How Google Handles New Top Level Domains (TLDs)

In a Recent Google's Webmaster Central Blog Post, Google's John Mueller explained how Google handles new top level domains (TLDs) such as .guru or .how. The nutshell is, there are no TLDs that Google finds preferential to others; they are all treated equally in rankings.

Here are the details Google published on this topic today:

Google does not favor any TLD

Google's systems treat new gTLDs (generic top-level domains) like other gTLDs (like .com & .org). Keywords in a TLD do not give any advantage or disadvantage in a search.

Googlebot can crawl and index IDN TLDs

Internationalized domain names (IDN) TLDs such as .みんな can be used the same as other TLDs. Google treats the Punycode version of a hostname as being equivalent to the unencoded version, so you don't need to redirect or canonicalize them separately. For the rest of the URL, remember to use UTF-8 for the path and query-string in the URL, when using non-ASCII characters.

A .brand TLD has the same weight as a .com domain

Those TLDs will be treated the same as another gTLDs. They will require the same geotargeting settings and configuration, and they won’t have more weight or influence in the way Google crawls, indexes, or ranks URLs.

Region or city TLDs like .london or .bayern are treated as gTLDs

Even if they look region-specific, Google will treat these TLDs as gTLDs (generic top-level domains). This is consistent with Google's handling of regional TLDs like .eu and .asia. There may be exceptions at some point down the line, as Google sees how they're used in practice.

Country code TLDs will be used for geotargeting

By default, most ccTLDs (country code top-level domains) result in Google using these to geotarget the website (with some exceptions); it tells Google that the website is probably more relevant in the appropriate country. For example, a .de domain is probably more relevant than a .com domain in Germany.

Moving your site to a new TLD is the same as moving your site to a new domain name

Google treats moves to a new TLD the same as any other site move. Domain changes can take time to be processed for search (and outside of search, users expect email addresses to remain valid over a longer period of time), so it's generally best to choose a domain that will fit your long-term needs.

I hope this gives you information on how the new top level domains are handled by Google. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask in Google Webmasters help forum.