Think before you post! Most organizations won’t hire you if they find something negative online about you. Job seekers should be mindful of their online persona and ensure any information that could negatively impact their job search be private or removed.
If you’re looking to develop a successful social media marketing campaign, you may first consider signing up for Facebook and LinkedIn. However, Twitter provides a plethora of opportunities for you to promote your business, but you must first gain an understanding of both the site’s features and how to successfully employ them in advertising. The following list will cover several ways in which you can leverage Twitter to boost your online marketing campaign.
You need to create a fully-optimized Twitter profile to maintain a presence on the site and inform followers of your products. Often, the first thing other Twitter users will see is your username, which should be your company name, or something as close as possible to it. Next, you should upload a business-related icon and header to advertise your brand. If you own a small business, you can make your account more personal by using a photograph of yourself as your profile picture. Lastly, you should remember to fill out your profile’s 160-character biography section, making sure to include pertinent company keywords and a link to your website. These additions not only help your profile stand out in Twitter user lists, but they also allow other users to search for and find your business more easily.
There are numerous support applications that you can use to heighten the Twitter experience for both your business and your followers. For example, web plugin TwitterFox creates a popup menu on which you can view your business’ Twitter feed, so you don’t need to constantly log into the site to view updates. If you have a limited amount of time to manage your account, you can employ TweetLater, which helps you create a queue of tweets that will automatically post at designated times. In addition, this app will send you detailed updates on the ever-changing keyword trends to help you employ them to your advantage. You can also provide a more engaging feed for your users by taking advantage of YouTube’s video URL sharing feature.
The success of your Twitter marketing campaign depends on the number of other users you follow, and more importantly, whom you connect with. You should follow the accounts of consumers in your target market, as well as those of your competitors, industry partners, and professional organizations. Twitter’s search feature allows you to easily find these accounts by using keywords related to your company’s line of work. You should also compile a list of the top influential professionals in your field or industry and follow their accounts. Making a point to connect with them daily will not only help you build relationships, but it can also open new avenues for future business partnerships. If you’re a small business owner, it is even more crucial to build a Twitter network of other business owners in your community, including those you know offline.
Twitter provides an excellent means of directing users to your business’ blog and web page, where they can obtain more detailed information about your brand and products. You can make better use of Twitter by linking your account to your company’s other social media pages as well. Apps such as Twitter for Facebook allow you to immediately share your tweets as status updates on your company Facebook feed, but you can also use Twitter widgets to post all tweets on your company blog to further increase your cross-platform sharing. It’s also important to allow readers to share your website and blog content through their own Twitter accounts. You can encourage sharing by including a “Tweet This” button on all blog posts and important website pages.
You must constantly engage with your followers to effectively promote your brand. Creating interesting, original content will capture your readers’ attention and encourage them to share it with other Twitter users, which will increase your online reach. You should use your Twitter account to tweet relevant facts, news, or helpful advice—every day, if possible. When relevant, you should also include links, photos, and video to pique the interest of those who see your post. Never forget to reply to tweets from other users, as this will help them gain trust in your brand. You should also spend time reviewing your feed so you can retweet and “like” others’ tweets. This can be a good way to obtain more followers.
One of Twitter’s most unique features is its hashtag system, which helps you categorize and keep track of your tweets and find others’ tweets using specific keywords. If you click on any given hashtag, it will take you to a feed with every tweet that features that particular keyword, including posts from users you do not follow. Using popular hashtags will thus widen your exposure on Twitter. For example, if your company is in the sales sector, you might want to include the hashtags #sales and #insidesales at the end of your tweets. It is even more important to create your own hashtags, which can help you promote a specific company event or product. If enough people use your hashtag, it will become a “trending” topic on the site and market your business to even more users.
As with any marketing endeavor, it’s important to track the progress of your Twitter campaign. You can use a wide range of tools to measure the impact of your tweets and the amount of traffic your profile sees; a few popular tools include Google Analytics, Kissmetrics, and Brandwatch. Other tools such as Klout analyze your popularity across several social networks and assign you a score between 1 and 100, which can help you understand the scope of your online influence. Twitter itself also offers its own analytics service through which you can track your tweet popularity and other metrics via an online dashboard. If you aren’t seeing the intended results, the application allows you to promote your posts for further reach.
Businesses cannot thrive without a loyal customer base. However, many companies struggle to achieve this goal during the startup phases when resources are scarce and few consumers are aware of their products. Thus, growth hacking has thus emerged as a low-cost means of online marketing, helping businesses to build their brands seemingly overnight. As such, a number of popular online companies can attribute their success to this strategy.
Following are seven of the most popular companies that successfully used growth hacking to boost their brands:
1. Facebook
During its startup phase, Facebook implemented numerous growth hacking techniques to achieve the seemingly-unattainable goal of attracting 200 million users within its first 12 months of operation. The site began as a closed network that served as means of communication between college-age adults. By limiting the number of users, Facebook maintained high traffic during all stages of growth and appeared more attractive to prospective members. Perhaps one of Facebook’s most effective strategies was the creation of embeddable widgets and badges. Inspired by traditional word-of-mouth techniques, Facebook encouraged its established users to post these buttons on their personal blogs. This not only generated hundreds of millions of click-through actions each month, but it also helped the site to gain numerous new users.
2. YouTube
One of the largest sites on the Internet, YouTube used a simple growth hacking strategy to rise from its humble beginnings as a simple video sharing platform. The site owes the majority of its success to its share and embed features. The features, which are included with every video, allowed early users to copy and paste an HTML code onto their blogs or websites. YouTube specifically targeted this strategy at MySpace, which had 25 million users, but no video sharing capabilities. This technique helped YouTube advertise its brand to a wide network of online users while providing direct links back to its videos, helping to lay the groundwork for its later success. The company’s other effective growth hacking strategies included account subscriptions, video comments sections, and contests for new users.
3. LinkedIn
Before the rise of LinkedIn, it was difficult for most online users to find themselves or their companies in the long list of Google search results. As a result, the site utilized a basic growth hack to solve this consumer problem and increase awareness of its brand in a short amount of time. The solution was simple: create a website that allowed members to build public profiles. By including these profiles in the Google search engine, account holders could easily find themselves through web searches. This technique helped LinkedIn quickly grow from 2 million to more than 200 million users.
4. AirBNB
AirBNB is perhaps the most popular example of a successful platform hack. By integrating with Craigslist, the company leveraged an established base of users to spread the word about its room rental services. At the time, Craigslist did not possess the application program interface (API) to facilitate this type of partnership, so AirBNB specialists reverse engineered the site to create cross-platform compatibility. Using this literal platform hack, the company saw a dramatic increase in incoming traffic. Craigslist soon fixed its code to prevent this cross-sharing, but not until AirBNB was well on its way to widespread popularity. In fact, this technique helped the firm to become a multibillion-dollar business.
5. Twitter
In its early phases of operation, Twitter did not struggle to draw in new users, but rather to keep them engaged with its services. Many account owners only logged in a few times time before leaving the site altogether, so the firm took advantage of creative growth hacking techniques to retain members. Through studies of repeat members and those who left their accounts, Twitter discovered that those who followed up to 10 other users were more likely to continually return to their accounts. As such, the company decided to abandon traditional marketing methods such as email newsletters and targeting advertisements, and instead remodeled its established services to increase user connectivity. The technique showed dramatic results in a brief amount of time.
6. Hotmail
Hotmail was one of the first sites to increase its user base through innovative growth hacking. Following its inception in 1996, company investor Timothy Draper proposed the idea of utilizing the site’s 20,000 members in a low-cost marketing campaign. As a result, Hotmail began including the tagline “PS I love you. Get your free E-mail at Hotmail” at the end of each message that users sent to members of their networks. This technique was met with almost immediate success, helping the site increase its user base by about 3,000 accounts per day. Within one year, Hotmail grew to 12 million users. Due to its popularity, Microsoft soon acquired the company for a staggering $400 million.
7. PayPal
Founded in 1998, online payment manager PayPal made clever use of a platform hack to drive business growth over a short period of time. Previously, eBay users primarily fulfilled purchases using such popular credit card companies as Mastercard and Visa. However, the site did not include PayPal in its list of options, so very few sellers accepted it as a form of payment. The two firms subsequently formed a deal that helped PayPal secure a permanent place on the list of other payment types. This not only helped establish the company as an industry competitor, but also helped increase brand awareness among all of eBay’s members. Consequently, more people joined PayPal to use its services, and eBay began using it as its only method of payment.
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