Here’s an interesting Infograph I came across and wanted to share! What do you think of these stats? Is it what you thought or are they completely opposite of what you were thinking?

(Infograph Courtesy of: Online MBA Resource)

It doesn’t matter what products you sell on your website because regardless of their age, gender, or demographics your customer group is already highly engaging within social media networks and sharing site.  The latest stats show that males and females have an almost equal share of activity.  Don’t miss out on the opportunity of social media networks to increase your website conversions.  Listed below are some basic recommendations to help you optimize your profiles.

• Survey- Implement a survey to determine where you customers are congregating.  By sending a formal survey or launching a pop-up survey on your website you will be able to gather a wealth of demographic information.  UserReports or SurveyMonkey are two great companies to check out.  They are inexpensive and provide great analytics.
• Promote Exclusive Offers- By offering an exclusive item to social media followers or fans, such as a weekly coupon or 2 day delivery you leave these users feeling special which will increase conversion and customer loyalty.
• Proper Content Mix – Don’t only push promotions and products throughout your social mediums.  Expand you content to contain industry information or general information about your products and why they are important.  The primary goal of your eCommerce site may be to sell products, but your social media marketing strategy should encompass a wider range of tactics that simply promoting offerings. With too much product pushing and not enough engagement, you’re unlikely to experience optimal success.
• Sell products with the Social Mediums – By creating a simple shopping feed, you can actually sell products within Facebook through a Shopping tab listed within your category sections.  This will help to increase conversions and create awareness of this easy option to purchase.  If you are not ready to take that leap, you can always highlight new products or best-sellers and provide a link to the order page on your website. It may not be quite as simple as purchasing directly from facebook, but it can be just as effective.
• Learn from Your Competitors- Competitive intelligence can be very useful. We should be spending some time conducting competitive audits for your top 3 competitors on the social web and learn from their strengths and weaknesses.  Look at the social sites they are currently active on, the type of content they are pushing out, the number of followers they have, and the types of specifics offers, programs, or events they offer.
• Leverage Your Current Customers – If you haven’t already, send an email out to your current customers telling them the benefit (specific SM promotions and offers) of joining your social networks.  Also make sure to include links to your accounts in the footer of all email blasts you send.

Ever wonder how to find out what images have been “pinned” from your website onto Pinterest? Well I’ve got just what you need.  I’m going to use a well known Furniture company called Bassett Furniture for my example.

Here is the url you need and for it to work for your site just replace bassettfurniture.com with your domain.

http://pinterest.com/source/bassettfurniture.com/

The image above is an example of some of the images that are pinned from bassettfurniture.com and you can see who has pinned them. I recommend that every company be checking to see what’s been pinned and what people are saying about the products. Not only can you get great marketing ideas from what people are saying but you also can comment on any negative posts so that people know you are aware of a problem and are trying to fix it.

Do you have a Pinterest account? What are somethings you love about Pinterest?

Beacon kicks off its 2012 conference series with ASPDotNetStoreFront’s user conference in Ashland, Oregon on March 20th.  Members of our Development Team have been participating in the conference for several years, but this year Beacon wanted to exhibit the great things we have been doing with the platform in regards to design, development, marketing and hosting. So we’ll not only be soaking up knowledge in the sessions, we’ll also be sharing some on the exhibit floor.

Myself, Tracy Dirks (Dir. of Development) and Mike Wood (Sr. Engineer) will be manning the booth throughout the conference.  I’ll be holding down the fort a good bit of the time while Tracy and Mike are in the sessions, so I’m a little bummed to miss out on the interesting topics like: personalization, multi-store, mobile, social media and integration.  So if you are at the show, come by table #6 and say ‘hello.’  It would be great to hear about your business, cool things you are doing with the product, ‘take aways’ from the sessions, your journey to Ashland (14 hours and 3 flights from North Carolina), etc.

Also, If you are interested, I’m happy to talk about some of the awesome things Beacon has done for clients like Business-Supply, Robert Ham, BMI and dozens of others.  Our team has been turning out amazing sites featuring custom design and development work as well as really powerful solutions we’ve put together in conjunction with our partners, like: Bronto, Nextopia and Windsor Circle.

As always, please help keep those less fortunate (like the exhibitors, my fellow teammates back at Beacon and the others who couldn’t make it) in the loop via #ASPDNSFconf on Twitter – we’d really appreciate it!

Have a safe trip and see you in Ashland!

So, your company is on Pinterest. You’ve pinned. You’re repinned. You’ve created boards. And you’ve got some followers. Now what? What do you do with these people? Why, give fun stuff away! It’s the quintessential way to build links, followers, brand awareness, and virality (yes, it’s a word…. I think) on social media and it holds true on Pinterest too. What contest to have, you say?? Why keep on reading my friend.

Contests for Individual Pins

1. Comment Contest

A Comment Contest is very simple & easy. Simply pin a product, image, saying, or whatever you fancy and have followers post comments to enter. Outline entry rules & terms in the pin’s description box to cover all bases or link to these on your site. Then randomly choose a winner using Random.org or a similar tool.

2. Repinning Contest

A Repinning Contest is similar to a Commenting Contest but it uses the repin feature as a way for users to enter. This contest is great to spread a pin’s exposure!

Contests for Individual Boards

3. Photo Submission Contest

This is a great way to leverage your followers on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and other social networks and get them over to Pinterest! What you’ll do is post a request on your other social networks asking them to submit pictures related to your product or service. Think outside the box and make this exciting. You want lost of entries. Have them submit pictures to a special e-mail address or get social and use Flickr groups. OR, if you have the ability, have them submit to a particular page on your site. This will help build inbound links! Then, devote a board on Pinterest to these images and request that users like, comment, and/or repin to “vote” for the winner. The pin with the most user interactions wins! Added Bonus: Suggest that entrants share their pin with friends & family to help them win. This will bring in other, NEW fans to Pinterest that may not be on Facebook, Google+, or the like. Score!

4. Customer Appreciate/Your Favorite Product Contest

Although this contest is really aimed at rewarding loyal followers, the ease of entering can make this go viral. The premise behind this contest is to create a board with your most popular products. Then, have users vote for their favorites. Votes can be repins, comments, and likes. Followers can vote on as many thing as they’d like. Then, at the end of the “voting” period, choose a winner at random from all entries. Voila! Done.

Good luck & happy pinning!

Andrea

When playing around with the new Facebook Timeline format, this is what I found at the beginning. It struck me as funny so I thought I would share.

How are you liking the new Facebook Timeline?

Happy Friday,

Andrea

I recently came across an article talking about the new Wordstream PPC Grader. Of course my curious self had to go try it out and I’m happy to report this tool offers a lot of insight into your Adwords Campaigns.

(Not to bad of a score if I do say so myself)

Here is some of the great info you can learn from this tool:

1. Wasted Spending on Negative Keywords – Luckily my wasted spend wasn’t to high but knowing there still was some tells me I need to go in and add some more negative keywords so I can get the number closer to $0.

2. Quality Score – Here is let’s you know if you scores are below average, average or above average. It also give you an estimate of how much money can be saved by improving your score a point. Example from my report: “By improving your Quality Score by 1.1, you can save $112.28, or get 35more clicks / month.”

3. Click Through Rate (CTR) – This section of the report shows you the average CTR curve and where you lie on it. It also gives you an estimate of how many clicks you can expect to get by increasing your CTR. Example pulled from report: “If you increased your CTR to 4.41%, you could expect 11 more clicks or 1more conversions a month.”

4. Activity Time – This part of the report doesn’t offer much insight although it is nice to see how where you rank among others when it comes to time spent updating campaigns. I ranked in the 87th percentile for this client and got this message “You’re actively devoting time to working on your account — this is good news for your campaigns!”

5. Long Tail Keyword Optimization - We all know long tail keywords are great because they are more specific and most of the time offer high conversion rates. This section of the report let’s you know where you stand with your targeted keywords and how you rank among competitors. As you can see from the image, my campaigns use a lot of 3+ words and I rank pretty well. 

6. Ad Text Optimization – This section I found very helpful because of the visual it gives for your worst text ad and your best. Here I can compare the two in order to figure out why the worst one is performing so bad. As you can see from the image below, I’m doing pretty well with my text ads.

7. Landing Page Optimization – Here you can see how you compare to your competitors when it comes to the amount of landing pages you are sending traffic too. It’s best practice to have targeted landing pages for each ad group so that you’re sending people directly to the information they want to see rather than just sending them to any page on your site. Here I learned that my competitors have double the amount of landing pages I do and I need to step up my game in order to match them.

8. PPC Best Practices – This is the last part to the report and it gives you a Pass (thumbs up) or Fail (thumbs down) grade on each of the best practices experts have defined in order to have a successful PPC campaign.

I was really impressed with this tool and it’s ease of use as well as the great information it has given me. There’s no reason you shouldn’t give it a try considering it’s Free! So go here and check it out!

Make sure you’re following us on Twitter and Facebook! We’ve always got fresh new finds posted for you!

I checked out Insights for Search and was a little confounded about what I saw  for some industry terms.

• “web marketing” search volume is trending down
• “internet marketing” search volume is trending down
• “search engine marketing” search volume is trending down

Take a look at “web marketing” in Insights:

Click to Enlarge

And, according to analysts covering Google’s recent earning miss:

Google’s core search business slowed more sharply than expected, even in the U.S.

They merely shift the spending from the PC to the mobile device.

• In January 2011, one client example had almost 4,000 visits resulting from mobile devices.
• In January 2012, that same client example had almost 13,00 visits resulting from mobile devices

Click to Enlarge

2. SEO

People are becoming more savvy about search marketing. Search behavior is changing and more specific terms are being used compared to a few years ago as searches are becoming more focused. Businesses have recognized the importance of ranking well for their brand name and for relevant search queries.

Check out the trend below for “seo marketing”:

Click to Enlarge

3. Social Media Marketing

No need to explain this one.

Click to Enlarge

In their recent earnings, Google has seen the shift to mobile make its impact.  Companies have to adapt as visitor behavior changes. Developing a search strategy that fully realizes the search behavior of your potential customers is paramount in adapting to the fast moving online world.

“Web Marketing” is still stronger than ever but the name of the game has changed. Its become fractured into smaller and smaller sub-segments.

Giving web marketing advice is not always an easy endeavor. Let’s be honest, sometimes it is hard to be good in this game. But if you find yourself in a pickle with a client and have no idea what to tell them, fear not: Just use the button below to generate a random statement of web marketing advice that is sure to wow them. And if you don’t get what you want the first time, feel free to keep clicking until you get exactly what you need. 60% of the time, this works EVERY TIME!

Today I was looking over some of my clients Facebook pages and noticed they didn’t have a contact tab. I couldn’t help but wonder why? Having a method of contact on Facebook is so important. For one, it’s a way for potential clients to contact the business with questions. For two, Facebook pages don’t have an option to send a message. So if someone doesn’t want to write on your wall, they have to search for your contact information. I personally find it frustrating when I can’t find an easy way to contact the company. Thirdly, it just makes sense to make it easier on your customers to get in touch with you.

So with that said here’s one contact form I like to use. It’s by a company called ContactMe. Their form allows you to customize your contact information, add your social networks, and includes a map that that links to Google Maps for directions. Pretty cool huh?!

You can check it out by going to Beacon’s Facebook Page and clicking on the Contact Us! tab located in the left navigation.

Be sure to check us out on Twitter, @BeaconTec, for more great tips too! :)

 What are some of you favorite Facebook Apps?