Have you followed or created a LinkedIn Showcase Page yet? LinkedIn announced the feature as a way to highlight a niche product within a company. For instance, I may want to follow Office by Microsoft, but skip the Visual Studio content.
Learn how to follow showcase pages or create your own:
For local small business owners, location-based marketing allows you to reach your target audience within your community. Before all other attempts at reaching your local audience, be sure to review Get Started with Mobile Marketing – Part 1, in which we looked at why your website needs to look good on mobile devices.
Location based marketing delivers multi-media directly to the user of a mobile device dependent upon their location via GPS technology (source)
Traditionally marketing within your local community has been based on contacting the local media outlets, billboard agencies, hanging signs or fliers, and networking or word of mouth marketing. All of these methods are still in play, but now with a few modern twists.
Contact your local newspapers, tv, or radio stations to find if you can advertise on their websites and mobile apps. Additionally, check with local coupon systems like ValPak for similar services. (Protip: also connect with others following these organizations on social media sites).
Where location based marketing has evolved is online everywhere else. Remember with all suggestions below, most of these systems rely upon users accessing content from their mobile phones. What content is delivered needs to triangulate where the visitor is physically located.
When people reach for their phones to search for what they are seeking, ideally they find only local results. This happens with a variety of methods.
First, on your website you need to include schema markup that tells search engines where your business is located. This is different than merely typing the address onto your site somewhere, and having the address appear in a graphic or flash image makes it rather useless for search engines. I like using Yoast’s Local SEO for the markup.
Next, on every piece of content that you create, whether on your own website or off site, you can add meta descriptions and often location based information.
In WordPress, add your city and zipcode to the tags on your posts.
In Youtube, include your GPS location (Youtube can help you find this)
And in Flickr, add your location:
And be sure to claim your business listing on every possible page that you can. Many of these are created on your behalf and are waiting for you to verify that you are the owner. Some of these lead in to social media, like Foursquare.
By incorporating location into your content, search engines will display your local results to visitors.
In many social network platforms, you can create ads or even status updates that are targeted to your location community.
When creating status updates in Facebook, tag your location.
When creating an offer, be sure to specify your location as well.
And if you are creating Facebook Ads, do target your audience.
Likewise, in LinkedIn, your company page can target a status update to a specific region.
While this is by no means a comprehensive list of of all aspects of location-based marketing, hopefully it has your creativity flowing for new ways to reach your local community.
Have you ever wanted to show a series of specific tweets on your website? Twitter has introduced custom timelines to do just that via it’s Tweetdeck dashboard.
Before you can add tweets to a custom timeline, you’ll need to create a timeline to add these tweets to. Click “A” to access the administration options.
Describe your new timeline. Remember that these are visible to others viewing your Twitter profile as well as intended to be embedded on your own website.
To add a tweet to your custom timeline, simply click on the + sign and select “add to custom timeline”
Or click and drag the tweet to the appropriate column:
To share your Twitter Custom Timeline, click on the options for that timeline. Then click the “share” link at the bottom and choose if you want to embed this, tweet a link for others to view it, or view it yourself on Twitter.
Now that you can make the these curated tweets appear, it’s time to put them to work for you. You can use this in a variety of ways.
What ideas do you have? Can you imagine a new way to share a Twitter Custom Timeline
Is your business ready to get started with mobile marketing? Before even beginning, it’s important to first understand what mobile marketing includes.
Over the course of the next few weeks, we will start reviewing each of the categories of mobile marketing, as well as exploring new areas yet emerging.
Ensuring that your website works well on mobile is the first priority before venturing into any other aspect of mobile marketing. If you attempt any other thing first and customers click your call to action and land on a non-mobile website, it will only infuriate them and make you look bad.
A website with mobile landing pages are useful when limiting users to a specific call to action. Like any landing page, the goal is to attract visitors to that specific page for a single purpose.
This is not meant to replace your entire website, but to only provide the necessary information. These are ideal for users that have scanned a QR code, but never a good replacement for the whole site.
Remember that if your blog post is shared to social media websites, people will be clicking through from Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or elsewhere to read your blog post. If the mobile landing page or a scaled back mobile website overrides their ability to read the blog post, something is very wrong with your settings. They want to read the blog post; help them do that!
I really like the University of Phoenix mobile landing page. It includes a click to call phone number as well as categories of service and a location finder with a big submit button that is great for thumbs.
A standalone mobile website is usually proceeded with a letter m such as m.yoursite.com. This will work to automatically redirect mobile visitors to your mobile site. Essentially, you’re duplicating your entire website in a mobile version. The problem with this method is that you must be sure that you can figure many settings correctly so the Google doesn’t think that you are duplicating your website which could lead to penalties.
A mobile theme will convert your website. This approach will work if the theme for your website is not mobile responsive. I like using WP-Touch for this on my clients websites that aren’t ready to change the entire theme for their site. By adding in a plug-in for a mobile theme, the website will look good on a mobile device although it won’t look like the same theme that they get on the computer.
Mobile responsive design will be the best choice when building out a new website or overhauling the team of your existing website. Mobile response of websites automatically scale every element of your entire website including photos and videos so that they display properly weather on a phone, a tablet, or any other mobile device.
This is the best solution for the look of your entire website, although mobile landing pages may still be a great option to include as well for additional elements like QR codes or links to specific mobile-only calls to action.
Because mobile marketing is such a large topic, join me next week as we review what is location-based mobile marketing.
The new Google+ profile layout changes cover photos slightly. No longer are users presented with the bottom 1/4 of the photo, but now displays the entire image. The dimensions are still large at 2120×1192 pixels, but now the full image displays. A great tutorial can be found at http://googlepluscoverphoto.blogspot.com/2013/03/Google-Plus-New-Cover-Photo-Size-Free-Templates-Download.html.
I took my cover photo a step further by turning it into an animated gif (a photo that moves).
Here it is in motion:
More big changes are coming to WordPress 3.8 and are focused around the administration dashboard. The latest list of features was announced at the contributor blog. The main changes to know about are:
WordPress 3.8 is due to ship December 12, 2013. The faster update cycle is based upon a new way that the development team incorporates new features. They have restructured teams into developing plugins that can be incorporated into core and if they don’t make the cut, they can still stand along in plugins. This new approach is leading to faster releases.
Have you noticed the way your content looks when it is shared on Google+, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest? It is important that you optimize your website for social media sharing.
Each platform can detect what type of content you are sharing and lay it out uniquely on the respective site. Types of content include:
There are a number of ways to include the necessary code into your website. Examples of this code is provided on http://moz.com/blog/meta-data-templates-123. This seems like the more tedious way to accomplish the goal.
Among the most popular WordPress plugins is Yoast’s WordPress SEO. Yoast has taken the work out of configuring all the individual social media meta data by including social setting within the plugin. The only not yet included is Pinterest’s Rich Pins. Be sure to complete these settings on your site.
If you want to include Pinterest Rich Pins on your website, ABG Rich Pins will include the proper code. Pinterest will require that you first apply to be a Rich Pins approved website. Configure the settings for AGP Rich Pins on each post on your website.
Once you’ve properly configured your settings, the previews that you see on each of the links mentioned above will be how your content is displayed when others share your website to their social accounts.
