Running an Effective Social Media Marketing Campaign.

 

Believe it or not, some businesses are still undecided as to whether using Social Media Marketing really helps their business.

 

We can say from experience that Social Media definitely can act as an effective suite of channels allowing your business to engage with and extend your reach to new audiences you would never have been able to, using existing channels.

 

1. Set Clear Goals
Clear and tangible goals should underpin all good Social Media Marketing Campaigns. This is the lynchpin upon which to execute, track and measure a successful Campaign. Whether it be based on ROI, number of sales, traffic to your website or increased number of followers, be clear on what you are aiming to achieve and what you will class as a successful campaign.

2. Choose Appropriate Channels
Rather than bombarding every Social Media channel with your messages, think carefully about the attributes that each of the channels has and which of them best suits the audience, messages and goals you are trying to achieve.

 

3. Plan, Plan, Plan
Always put a robust plan together before starting on your Social Media Marketing journey. The plan should contain a realistic set of goals (See point 1) underpinned by a selection of tasks or activities (with owners) that will take you and your business to where you need to be. This is a plan that needs to be explained and bought into by all parties involved.

 

4. Optimised Landing PagesIf your Social Media goals are to point your visitors, followers or fans to a specific landing page then a fully optimised landing page will massively increase your chances of converting. When we say optimised, we mean that the landing page should basically ‘cut to the chase’. It should easily and quickly provide the visitor with a seamless journey from the social media channel through to taking an action (e.g. order a product, sign-up to a newsletter, pick up the phone or download a document).

 

5. Compelling ContentThere is a lot of material being posted on Social Media these days, and trying to make your posts stand out from the crowd is becoming increasingly difficult. It’s for this reason that it is critical to think about the information that you post before you send it. Whether it’s an opinion, a blog article, industry news and information or simply an update, it is imperative that you provide quality and compelling content with every post.
It will be one of the main reasons that users come back to your channel to continue to hear what you have to say.

 

6. Measure & Track Probably one of the most overlooked elements is the continual measuring and tracking of the social media channels once they have been set-up. This is very important from the outset to, at a basic level, see what is working and what isn’t. However, having mechanisms in place to provide you with useful stats on the user’s journey around your social media channels will also enable you to see how they are engaging with you and the ways and means to help improve these initial points of contact.

 

7. Part of a wider Marketing StrategyWhilst Social Media Marketing is a no brainer to have as part of any marketing strategy, a business should never have this as the sole channel to market. A good balance of on and offline marketing methods should always be used in conjunction with each other to gain as much coverage and exposure as possible.

Does your business use Social Media Marketing? Have you managed to use it to great effect or has it become a hindrance? We would love to hear your Social Media Marketing experiences.

 

If you would like to find out more about Social Media solutions then please get in touch with My Hosting Bubble or visit our site: www.myhostingbubble.com.

What is and isn’t SPAM?

 

Even though there are plenty of spam filters and tools on the market that look to identify, restrict and protect us against the sheer amount of email spam we receive, it has now become a serious problem that we all face on a day to day basis.

 

With so many types of email it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish the real emails from the spam emails, so here are the key categories you should be looking out for when trying to decipher them all. 

 

Types of Spam

 

Random Advertising
These make up a majority of unwanted emails and consist of advertising of some sort. They can be advertising anything from beauty products, holidays, sports equipment through to cars, gambling and electronics.

 

Disguised Messages
Disguised messages can be very misleading as they give the recipient the impression that they are either from someone they are not, contain messages that are deceiving or send the recipient through to websites that they are not intending to go to.

 

Phishing

Phishing is an email that attempts to acquire sensitive information (such as usernames, passwords or credit card details) often for malicious purposes, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity.

 

Scams

Scams are similar to phishing emails in that they attempt to get the recipient to part with something they may not be intending to, usually money or sensitive details of some sort.

 

Offers & Competitions

Unsolicited offers and competition emails draw users in by giving them the opportunity to win great prizes. Usually they amount to nothing other than your details being added to further email databases that end up increasing the amount of spam you get. So the moral is, leave these alone.

 

Viruses

These emails can be dangerous to your machine and its contents if encountered. They usually contain links or attachments that when clicked on it activates a virus of some sort. Sometimes they are difficult to spot as they will act like a phishing/scam or a disguised email.

 

The types of emails just mentioned, should not be confused with solicited emails and emails that may be inconvenient, but are not classified as spam. Here is a list of some types of emails in this category, that you may think are spam, but are actually not.

 

Types of emails that are NOT Spam

 

Solicited Emails

Solicited emails are emails that you will have either signed up to or agreed to receive at some point. Sometimes you will have unwittingly ticked, not unticked or even got confused with a double negative statement and not opted out, however even though it may feel like it, this is not classified as spam. There should usually be a way to unsubscribe from these.

 

Email Newsletters

These are regular emails that you receive as a result of purposefully (or inadvertently) signing up to, or possibly purchasing products that have allowed the company in question to obtain your details for their mailing lists.

 

Social Media Notifications

There are very few people that now days do not have a social media account of some sort, and for those of you that do, you will be familiar with the constant notifications you will receive as a result. Unless you specify in settings the extent to which you wish to receive these notifications you will be bombarded with them, sometimes via text message but also via email.

 

App Notifications

App notifications will also bombard you with constant emails telling you that your village is under attack, to rate them, to upgrade, to invite friends, the list really does go on. So ensure that you are clear what notifications if any, you wish to receive via email and tailor the settings accordingly.

 

Virus Guard Notifications

If you have a virus guard, firewall or any other software that looks to protect your device, you will usually, ironically, receive plenty of notifications and emails about the state of the software, what it is doing, what it has found, whether it’s out of date and so on. This is all fine, but please remember that this can be useful information and is ultimately not classed as spam.

 

We would love to hear about your experiences with email spam and unwanted messages that you seem to have received. Do you have trouble dealing with the continuous onslaught of spam or have you found a tool that has eliminated this issue.

 

If you would like to find out more about email solutions then please get in touch with My Hosting Bubble.

The A to Z of Alphabets companies

Google announced on Monday 10th August 2015 that it would be restructuring to create a bigger umbrella brand called ‘Alphabet’ of which the original ‘Google’ company would then fall under.

Googles current CEO Larry Page, together with co-founder Sergey Brin will move over to head this new umbrella brand Alphabet leaving Sundar Pichai as the CEO of Google.

This announcement came as a shock to the industry initially, followed by the realisation that actually not much will be changing overall.

There will obviously be a growing number of companies that Alphabet will own, purchase or invent that will utilise the letters within the Alphabet.

Alphabet already has comprises of approximately 12 known companies, they are as follows:

• Alphabet: The umbrella company that will look to take over from where Google left off.
• Boston Dynamics: Is a robotics company that Google purchased in 2013.
• Calico: Is a company founded by Google looking into the controversial subject concerned with the ageing process.
• Capital: This acts as the investment arm of Alphabet (formally Google Capital). This company has been set-up with the sole purpose of the acquisitions and the purchase of smaller companies.
• DeepMind: Google purchased this company in 2014 and it looks into artificial intelligence and learning algorithms.
• Fiber: Fiber is Google's own broadband (and soon to be) Fibre provider in the US only.
• Google: The mighty Google, the one and only (or so it seems) search engine that has graced our computer browsers for about 20 years.
• Life Sciences: Previously part of ‘Google X’, this is all about studying and understanding living organisms and biosciences.
• Nest Labs: Google purchased this company in 2014, and it deals with home-automation ‘smart’ gadgets looking to bring homes into the 21syt century.
• Ventures: This is another venture-capital arm of Alphabet, but unlike ‘Capital’ it invests on start-up companies.
• Wing: Is the drone delivery service owned by Google.
• X Lab: This is the secret division of Alphabet that has been operating to discover and invent new technologies. Products and services that have derived from this company are Google Glasses, Project Look and Driverless Cars.

The whole world will be keen to see how this group of companies evolves in the coming months, but this is definitely an exciting time and one to keep an eye on moving forward.

We would love you to get in touch and let us know what your thoughts are on the new formation of companies and how you think this will pan out moving forward.