Social Media

What is Inbound Marketing and Why Should I Care?

By Gloria Randinbound marketing

Ask a landscape lighting contractor or massage therapist what inbound marketing is, and chances are, you may get a blank stare. They may not know the term. But the two small business owners are likely using inbound marketing to promote their businesses.

Inbound marketing is any marketing tactic that involves earning someone’s interest in your product or service, rather than buying their interest. Prime examples include SEO (search engine optimization), social media, blogs, and ebooks. Traditional “outbound marketing,” (the opposite of inbound marketing) involves activities like direct mail advertising, TV and radio ads, banner advertising and cold calls.

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Why I Like the New Facebook Insights

By Gloria Rand

Facebook is tweaking its Insights again, and from what I’ve seen so far, it’s a change for the better.  Here is a breakdown of what’s changing:

  • The People Talking About This metric has been broken out into people engaged, the number of unique people who’ve clicked on, liked, commented on or shared your posts, and other page activity, which includes Page mentions, check-ins and posts by other people on your Page.
  • Virality (the percentage of people who created a story from your page, divided by the total number who’ve seen it) has been replaced with engagement rate, which is the percentage of people who saw a post that then clicked on, liked, commented on or shared it.

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3 Easy Ways to Get Ideas for Your Company Blog

By Gloria Rand

blog ideasStuck for ideas on what to write about for your company’s blog?  It’s a common complaint, especially if you don’t think of yourself as a writer. But no matter what your industry or profession – be it plumber, landscape lighting contractor or chiropractor – you can come up with plenty of articles for your blog if you focus the topics on these three areas:

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How to Share Status Updates with LinkedIn Groups

post to linkedin groups2Got an event you want to promote to more than one LinkedIn group? Want to share a great quotation with several LinkedIn groups at the same time?

LinkedIn makes it easy to share articles with more than one group at a time. You’ve probably seen the LinkedIn share button on blog posts before, right? And if you’re reading a discussion in a LinkedIn group, you can easily share it with another group by hovering your mouse over the bottom of the discussion to bring up the “More” tab. When you click “more,” a dropdown menu comes up with an option to “share link.” As you can see in the image below, you can check the box that says “Post to group(s)” and then type in the name of the groups you want to see the article.

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Making the Most of the New YouTube One Channel

YouTube logoVisit one of the many YouTube channels lately and you’re going to notice a new layout. The video site has revamped the look to make your branding work across a variety of devices, including smartphones and tablets. You can show off more content to fans, and you can reach out to non-subscribed viewers.

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