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Promoting Your Website Part III: Social Media

August 19, 2015 by anoadmin Leave a Comment

In Part I of our series about promoting your website, we discussed the importance of SEO. In part II, we looked at branding. Today, in Part III we are going to look at how to use Social Media to promote your website.

Social media is a great outlet for driving traffic to your website and promoting your small business. Even if your social media presence doesn't lead to immediate direct sales, it is excellent for getting your name and brand out there to make it more familiar to potential consumers. Name and brand recognition are a huge part of promoting your business website, as we discussed last week.

Here are some tips for making the most of social media for promoting your website:

Diversify Your Social Media Presence: in addition to Twitter & Facebook, add an account with Pinterest, Instagram, or LinkedIn to give your business a more broad reach. Not only will you have a different audience, but these other channels will give you new opportunities to share things you might not on other Social Media outlets.

Connect Your Social Media Pages to your Website & Vice Versa: Make it easy for your website visitors to find your social media pages so they can follow them, and make it easy for people on social media to find your website from your social media account.

OldCity.com Website links to social media with buttons:

OldCity.com Facebook Page links to website:

Linking back and forth between website and social media accounts will drive traffic to both.

Build Relationships: The most important and fulfilling aspect of social media pages for your small business is to build relationships. Your social media pages are places for you to engage with your customers in a way you couldn't or wouldn't otherwise. Your social media profile makes you more of a person and less of a business entity - when you engage in conversation, answer questions, and offer services. Use this opportunity on social media to engage customers and drive them to your website for increased business.

At Old City Web Services, one of the services we offer is helping you to set up social media profiles to boost your business. Contact us at 829-2772 or email us today and let us help you get started on social media or improve your current social media presence.

Next week, we'll look at Promoting Your Website: Email. Be sure to check back!

Tips for Building Your Social Media Strategy

May 6, 2015 by anoadmin Leave a Comment

Setting up social media accounts and posting to them occasionally is not a sufficient social media strategy designed for success. You have to have a plan and a way to implement it to find success on social media and to have that success result in positive results to your business success. Here are some tips for formulating a strong social media strategy and how to implement it for success.

1) Know who your audience is, what they want, and what attracts their attention. This takes research and experimentation. Drop ideas that don't work or get little feedback and keep going with ones that draw attention.

2) Social media is a vehicle of your overall business strategy not the entire strategy. Use it in unison with the overall marketing strategy for your business. Measure your social media results. Experiment with your marketing approach, your social offers, your choice of social platforms. Then measure again.

3) Before you build a profile on yet another social site, make sure that you have the resources (people and time) to post consistently and respond speedily to all customer and prospect activity. Measure the effectiveness of your choices with analytical tools for social media. Don't start a Pinterest board if you don't have the time to dedicate to it or it doesn't fit your brand. Don't spend too much time on Facebook if the majority of your followers are on Twitter and they continue to expand your reach. Put your resources where the people are.

4) Choose and use a social media management platform like Hootsuite to coordinate all of your social accounts and RSS feeds from one screen, schedule posts. This will make the time spent on social media more organized and efficient and eliminate wasting your time.

5) Have one employee dedicated to the job of social media. This will streamline the message, give your brand a familiar voice, and will keep things simple and less confusing. Having someone posting to social media for your business who doesn't know the answers to the questions in #1 above will be worse than having no social media presence at all.

6) Be helpful, while promoting your business. Share useful information. Don't small talk and don't clutter people's lives and social media streams with information that doesn't help them or you. As with any marketing effort, your social media postings must have the ultimate goal of gaining and retaining customers and increasing sales.

Does this sound confusing or overwhelming? How can we help you understand social media better? Give us a call or email us today! Call us (904.829.2772) or e-mail us today!

Build and Develop a Social Media Presence for Your Business

October 9, 2014 by anoadmin Leave a Comment

Build - Once you choose the social media platform(s) you want to utilize to increase online awareness of your brand, set up your profile(s) including a short, compelling bio to attract people letting them know who you are and what you do. Having a presence on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Places, and YouTube in addition to your website can push your business up in rankings on browser searches. Include links to your website so that people can learn more about you and your small business.

Connect - To connect with your community and your existing and potential clients, you need to keep up with your page. Ask your friends, current clients, and other small businesses in your area to like and share your pages. Like and share their pages as well. Add a link to your email signature to your website, too. Establishing a presence on a social media platform requires active, consistent participation.

Engage - Social media is not meant to be one-way communication. You may use it to spread your message, share your business, and broaden awareness about who you are and what you do, but you must do this both by sharing and also participating in two-way communication. Listen to your customers and create community with other businesses and clients. Make your social media page not all about you. The 80/20 rule is a good one to follow: 80% of your activity is being friendly through retweets and comments. The other 20% is your chance to contribute your own content. Be an active participant and engage your audience with relevant content instead of just promoting yourself. Ask your audience to participate in the conversation, share photos of them using your product or enjoying your services.

Influence - Your ability to influence depends on your credibility and your reach. A strong, professional and engaging social media presence adds to your credibility. Your reach can expand beyond the number of fans and followers you have as your customers share your content, products and services within their circles.

How many people are finding your site?

December 11, 2013 by anoadmin Leave a Comment

Proven ways to market your website

So, you've taken the time and spent the money on a brand new website, but now what? You now have the challenge of bringing in traffic and not just any traffic, but new, qualified visitors that will spend time exploring your site and essentially contact you for either more information or to secure the deal.

Marketing your website once it's live is just as important (if not more so) than the site itself. Today, we are going to give you two HUGE ways to pull people into your site.

SEO, SEO & MORE SEO

We cannot emphasize the importance of this enough! Search engine optimization (SEO) is the primary way people are going to find you online. Search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo are taking over the web and you can guarantee people will be searching for you (and your competition!) on them. DO NOT let your competition get ahead. Make it easy for people to find you, and only you, by having your site fully optimized by a professional. Test it out by signing into your Google Analytics account and see what common keywords and phrases people are using to find you. Then Google these key-phrases and see if your website comes up as a result. If you don't see a link to your site on the first results page, people aren't finding you, plain and simple. Since SEO trends are constantly changing based on alterations made by search engines, this is something that should be ongoing and maintained to ensure your one step ahead of competition.

Facebook Ads

In September 2013, Facebook had 728 million daily active users and 874 million monthly mobile active users. Furthermore, these millions of users are spending a huge amount of time on the site-- an average of 55 minutes a day or 30 hours a month! The final kicker-- Everyone's on Facebook! All types of demographics are now regular users of the social network. So how does this pertain to generating more traffic to your website? Facebook Ads allow you to target specific demographics based on location, age and even those who have "Liked" your page. Basically Facebook Ad's are a cost-effective way to take advantage of Facebook's traffic in order to bring these users to your website.

Make sure your SEO and ad campaigns are done right the first time -- contact Old City Web Services so that people will start finding your website online today!

Once you've mastered these two crucial marketing challenges, you can focus on growing your website and expanding your social media presence, which will in-turn increase your web traffic exponentially.

Holiday Marketing Tip Challenge

November 20, 2013 by anoadmin Leave a Comment

FACT: St. Augustine attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each holiday season.

Whether a visitor stays for one night or all month, it is widely known that during the holidays, tourism in the nation's oldest city is thriving. If you own a B&B, restaurant or tour company, you're probably busy answering the phone and responding to email inquires this time of year.

Even though you're busy, don't forget to engage your customers with holiday marketing initiatives! This season, Old City Web Services challenges you to try at least one of these three marketing tips. Test it out and then shoot us an email or give us a call to let us know if it was a success!

1. Dress-up your Facebook page

As you dress your turkey for Thanksgiving, why not dress-up your Facebook and Twitter pages while you're at it! Create a holiday-themed cover photo that includes one incentive to customers--a promotion, discount or giveaway. What better way to engage customers while getting into the holiday spirit at the same time.

Not sure what a Facebook cover photo is? Old City Web Services specializes not only in custom design, but in Social Media too! Contact Us for more info.

2. Invite your website to the party!

Is your website holiday-ready? Make sure your site is updated with holiday flare, such as photos from Nights of Lights, a video featuring how to make a delicious holiday treat or a new Christmas package/special. Add a minimum of one piece of holiday flare to your website that will let customers know you're the go-to business to visit during their stay in St. Augustine.

Do you have the flare, but not the web expertise? Contact Us for a quote on giving your site that extra holiday glitz you need!

3. Give thanks to your customers

This is the perfect time of year to give thanks to those who love and support, not only you, but your business too! Send out an email to your past and present customers, letting them know you appreciate their brand loyalty. It's almost guaranteed this will bring back at least one new sale or prospect. After all, what harm can it do? If anything, you will put smiles on your customers faces...what more could you ask for?

No way of getting the message out? Old City Web Services can design an e-mail template using your photos, logo and colors & text, upload your contact list(s) and send out a mass e-mail blast to all your customers for you! Contact Us for more info.