Tag Archive for: twitter

How to keep up to date with trends in the digital sector

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The digital world moves quickly. It can be a daunting prospect knowing that a strategy you are using, or the tools that you find most useful, may soon be outdated. Having been in the digital sector over a period of great change, we know this only too well. However, we also know that keeping up to date with this ever-changing world can yield huge returns.

Knowing the trends and changes coming up will put you ahead of the competition, will give you valuable credibility, and will sit you on the road to digital success.

Below are 4 ways to stay up to date.

Blogs

This is our favourite way of learning what’s new and exciting in the sector. Regularly reading a range of articles on digital will give you a sense of the direction new trends and technologies are taking. There’s a huge range of blogs out there, so it is tricky to know where to start. Here’s a small selection that covers a variety of subjects within the digital sector.

Social media group

We love Linkedin groups. They seem to be less well-known than Facebook groups, however with the more professional audiences, you can be sure they contain treasure troves of useful articles and ideas. Simply search for your area of interest, find a group that looks interesting, request to join, and get scrolling!

Email newsletters

Don’t always be perturbed by the dreaded website sign-up form or checkbox, they can be game-changers. Email newsletters are controversial. Some people love them, using them as a tool to stay up to date and informed, some people hate them, seeing them as unwelcome clutter in their mailbox. We sit somewhere in the middle. Having a small yet varied selection of newsletters coming into your mailbox each month acts as a valuable pointer to what’s coming up and what might be worth reading more into. You can make this significantly easier for yourself by setting up an automatic forward to copy these into a specific folder in your mailbox. Then, when you have time to read through, they are all in one location.

Be inquisitive

The best way to keep up to date is also the simplest – talking to people in your industry and asking the right questions to potential customers will give you a foresight into common problems and challenges. These challenges will have been faced by people across the digital world and people will have written about potential solutions. The more your research these, the more rounded a picture you will gain of your digital surroundings. The clearer the picture, the better placed you are to adapt to changes in the digital world.

The digital sector moves quickly, and it can be daunting trying to keep up to date with the latest goings on. The above suggestions are just a few ways you can stay ahead of the game, but if you would like to learn how an agency specialising in digital strategy and creativity can help your business, why not get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.

Social Media: The Goldman Sachs Story

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In 2008 the landscape of worldwide banking was not a pretty picture. In the midst of what many economists called the most serious financial crisis since the great depression, ‘banking’ had become a dirty word. Although Goldman Sachs had initially benefited from the subprime mortgage crisis in 2007, this was what ultimately triggered a worldwide financial crisis leading to the company being bailed out by the US Government; it’s safe to say that Goldman Sachs were not held in high esteem by the general public.

2008 was also the year Barack Obama won the US Presidential election; having gone from a relatively unknown Democrat to the leader of the free world in a relatively short amount of time. His success has been credited in part to the use of social media in his campaign; finally, social media marketing had truly arrived.

Understandably, due to the financial climate and their poor public image, the fairly conservative Goldman Sachs were reluctant to make the leap to social media but, after much convincing from their marketing department, leap they did.

Allegedly what changed their mind is that the firm’s marketing department searched the phrase “Goldman Sachs” on YouTube and turned up more than 34,000 videos, none of which had been posted by the firm; they realised that people would be talking about their brand regardless of their actions; there was a lesser risk in having an online presence rather than not at all. As head of brand marketing and digital strategy, Lisa Shallet puts it: “We’ve learned that we have to invest in telling our story online and protecting the Goldman Sachs brand.”

Nevertheless, the initial Goldman Sachs online output may have actually alienated people. In 2013 The Banker’s Umbrella commented on the bank’s Twitter activity: “what Goldman is doing is conducting a good old fashioned direct marketing campaign. All they are doing is giving you an advertising brochure and delivering it through social media”, they were simply drip-feeding their Twitter followers with a standard ad campaign, 140 characters at a time.

Even with the backdrop of corporate impersonality, Goldman Sachs is already particularly faceless; it has no branches so there is no customer and community interaction. Maybe this explains their initial failure online; Goldman Sachs failed to grasp was that ‘social media’ is exactly that, social. Slowly, Goldman realised that as it turns out, having no social media presence is bad, but having a bad social media presence is worse.

Luckily for Goldman Sachs they’ve had a turn around.

Now, in 2017, Goldman Sachs actually excel at producing shareable content, regularly uploading accessible videos and blogs about current events and popular culture – OK, so maybe not entirely relevant to the Goldman Sachs brand, but a step in the right direction none the less.

Last week they even tweeted their own #TBT (as pictured below); Goldman is finally taking off the corporate mask to reveal the real people who work for the bank – and it working. They now have well over half a million followers and have slowly expanded to social media channels they feel compliment their brand, engaging with consumers on LinkedIn, Google+ and YouTube.

By 2015 90% of Goldman’s marketing activity was online, vital for a company with no physical high street presence, and now in 2017 that figure is undoubtedly higher. Amanda Rubin, managing director and global co-head of brand and content strategy at Goldman, has said that “from a brand’s perspective, digital platforms offer us an enormous amount of data. By using that data, we are able to know what is valuable, what is interesting, and what is imperative.” We couldn’t agree more, as recognised Facebook partners we are in the lucky position of having access to valuable census data and so experience first-hand the influence this data can have on a campaign and, moreover, the impact that carefully targeted and relevant social media can provide.

Why Bespoke Business Software is Vital for our Company

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As a company that specialises in lead generation it is vital that none of our own leads is ever dropped. We at Air Social use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application to avoid that from ever happening. However, many CRMs come ready made with a huge amount of unnecessary apps that a compact team such as ours simply doesn’t require. With such an unwieldy amount of apps a CRM designed to organise a company may actually make matters more complicated, with actions getting lost in the system.

This is where Bespoke Business Solutions come in. They allow us to mould the software we use to suit our business, rather than force us to adapt to generic software. The CRM they have provided us with precisely does what we need it to do for example to assign and reassign roles, track new and completed tasks and keep up with each other’s meetings. As we work with many clients being able to assign hours is very useful and being able to log hours spent on certain clients is absolutely essential to the way we bill clients.
This level of organisation makes sure every lead is followed up, and nothing gets forgotten. Obviously for a business with more employees it would be less relevant to have a joint calendar with everyone’s meetings in it, but for our team its perfect.

On top of these benefits, having a custom made system it means if our business changes we have the ability to call up and alter the system. It is customisable and free flowing with our own business.

It also avoids some of the main pitfalls of generic CRM applications. The system that BBS have made toes the line between an overly simple interface that will quickly be outgrown by an expanding business and cumbersome systems where you have to go through multiple screens to process transactions. With BBS there is no refreshing, no scrolling up and down, minimal transactions from screen to screen – yet it delivers the same service.

So next time you’re wondering what the secret to our success is… Well, it’s a secret. But you can be sure our fantastic CRM from Bespoke Business Software plays a big part in the smooth functioning of our company!

Find out more about Bespoke Business Software here.

This Year, Keep Your Social Media Healthy.

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At this time of year all anyone seems to be talking about is their New Year’s Resolution; the latest fitness regime or tasteless clean eating diet, but here at Air Social we are more concerned with keeping our social media profiles healthy. So here, as a belated Christmas gift to you, are some tips from the experts (us).

1. Maintenance.
There’s only one thing that looks as sloppy as a lack of internet presence and that’s an out of date, underutilised internet presence.
An unkempt social media profile is a bit like bad dental hygiene, it needs looking after, otherwise people will literally stay away from you. If a Google search were to show two similar business and one was fully up to date – and the other hadn’t posted since 2012, some may well assume the business no longer exists. Frequent posting also keeps your business in the forefront of people’s minds so next time they need the services you provide – you’ll often be the first they come to. So, like brushing your teeth, social media has to be maintained daily – and no, not just the once.

2. You get out what you put in.
What happens when you eat junk food? You may put on weight. What happens when you post spam? You will lose credibility and your potential customers will lose interest. Finding meaningful, relevant content that will keep your customer engaged can seem like an ongoing slog, but it’s worth it.

3. Stay connected.
It may seem obvious to some, but so many small businesses still fail to have a cohesive set of social media profiles. By not linking your website to your Facebook, Twitter and Instagram you make it harder for customers to keep up to date with your business developments and conversely by not making your website accessible from social media you may lose out on real business.

4. Engage.
The clue is in the name. ‘SOCIAL’. The beauty of social media is that it gives an informal platform to listen to your customers’ needs, solve their issues and answer any queries; failure to respond to your online customers will simply be viewed as bad customer service.

There are many ways in which your social media profiles may not be selling to their maximum potential, and for most people even the four things listed may be a lot to juggle on top of running a company. For more advice and information on how Air Social can help you and your business call 01483 789 434 or email alex@airsocial-build-com.stackstaging.com

The continued rise of Facebook: can anyone stop it?

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It’s no coincidence that the fall of Vine coincided with the ability to put videos on Instagram. This happened only a year after the photo sharing giant was bought by Facebook. Now it’s Snapchat under attack as Instagram has launched its own ‘story’ function that mimics the whole concept of the app, but conveniently tucked into a corner of the Instagram interface. Rather inconveniently for Snapchat, it’s only growing in popularity.

The reason for this is quite simply that Instagram is a much more open platform; the beauty of apps like Instagram and Twitter is the ability to gain an insight into the lives of people we wouldn’t normally encounter. We can get up to the minute insights into what the Kardashian’s are wearing or the latest diet fad is first hand, something that is much more difficult on Snapchat.

Of course there are benefits to Snapchat; Snapchat isn’t based on likes or followers so there is no scope for fake news to be spread, features such as ‘Discover’ are heavily vetted so that content is of a certain quality and, most relevant to us, advertising is integrated into the customer experience so it is un-intrusive whilst also interactive.

There is a reason for this. “Snapchat makes discovery of people who aren’t in your phone book extremely difficult because they believe peer-to-peer sharing is stickier than a so-called influencer model,” says Rob Fishman, co-founder of Niche, a company that connects brand with social media influencers.

The combination of this and Snapchat’s venture into wearable tech means there may be a future for the app but whether it will able to hold its own against the Facebook empire remains to be seen, as in 2017 Instagram’s influence is set to grow even further. In terms of advertising Instagram is predicted to usurp Twitter, meaning Facebook will hold the gold and silver medals in the social media marketing race, a truly astonishing feat. Luckily for Twitter, Facebook has already adopted some of the character traits of Twitter, such as hashtags and an increased ability to share content and news, but has never been able to mimic the balance of intimacy and worldwide scope that Twitter delivers – it remains safe for the time being.

In our expert opinion Snapchat remains a contender – for now. And there is no doubt that Twitter will be around as a major social media platform for a long time to come, but Facebook ultimately reigns almighty.

The Importance of Keeping Your Google Profile Up to Date

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There has been more than a little speculation over the relevance of Google+, in fact, last year Forbes declared it dead; as a social media platform it is widely known to be redundant and you wouldn’t be foolish to think it doesn’t exist anymore (in fact Google+ pages are now managed through Google My Business). Nevertheless as a tool for business, Google couldn’t be more vital.

In the battle of the search engines, Google undeniably dominates with 81.42 percent of desktop browser traffic in the US and over 11 billion desktop searches per month. The statistics are even more astonishing if you take into account mobile usage, where a vast 92.91 percent of searches were done through Google.

This year marks the first in which mobile internet access surpassed desktop usage, and is predicted to increase even further, with estimates of mobile making up 75 percent of global search traffic next year. Google’s stronghold on the mobile market means that, if we combine this information with the fact that search engine queries ultimately generate 300 percent more traffic to content sites than social media, we can see how the curtains might not quite be drawn on Google+ yet.

By having your business on Google you too can benefit from this kind of traffic, as your SEO is improved just by having a Google+ page; as a completely free service it would therefore be foolish not to have your business represented on Google with accurate, up to date information.

Aside from increased SEO, filling your Google profile with correct information and pictures builds a level of trust with potential customers as it enhances your legitimacy.

For example, if an individual uses Google to search for “dry cleaner in Woking” and two suggestions come up – one of a dry cleaner with good Google reviews and details such as opening times and professional looking photos; and one with just a name and address – which one are they more likely to choose? With this example, we can see how minimal browsing on Google can lead to potential business, and conversely, incorrect or out of date information can lead to lost business and customer dissatisfaction, therefore anyone not taking the time to update their Google profile will almost certainly miss out.

On top of this, Google+ could potentially make a comeback having last year streamlined the concept to resemble something more akin to Pinterest or Twitter, rather than standing as a direct rival to Facebook. With their change of direction there may be a future for the platform as a whole and anyone with an established profile will already have a head start.

Whether this comeback will materialise can’t be foretold but in a world where marketing is becoming more and more holistic, it is important to have as many strings to your digital bow as possible, and Google is no exception. Even though its failure as a social network is undeniable (so far) Google is a vital platform for your business and, if nothing else, a great way to get traffic on to your other social media accounts.

If, like us, you’re serious about your business then you need to embrace all facets of social media, let us help you.

‘16 Going On ‘17: What to Expect in Digital Marketing in the Coming Year

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In the year that has seen Donald Trump become president,  said goodbye to Ziggy Stardust and Severus Snape and, of course, seen families country-wide feud over Brexit, 2016 has been a year of mass upheaval. But how has the world of digital marketing changed?  Well, most obviously we have witnessed the continued rise of social media. In the US Presidential Election race we have seen how crucial social media can be; Trump attributes much of his success to his large social media presence, particularly on twitter. However, it’s not only been his social media presence but the presence of Twitter ‘bots’ that automatically tweeted pro-Trump propaganda and used hashtags to firstly infiltrate the Clinton support and then use the platform to smear her. Social media has been intrinsic to the success of many other unlikely campaigns; take the recent example of A-Level student Nick Jablonka’s fake John Lewis advert which went viral after social media users mistook it for the real thing.

The power of visual media platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest also continue to grow, where many consumers review and recommend products, and, with the continued popularity of audio and audio visual media such as podcasts and YouTube vlogs added into the mix, the power of word of mouth between consumers cannot be underestimated.

However, next year’s innovations look set to be on a whole new level.  It’s now commonplace to see advertisers using Snapchat, making it possible to ‘try on’ a new lipstick from your own home, or transport a person into the scenery of an upcoming blockbuster.  In 2017 experts predict this trend will develop into companies creating more specific apps to immerse the individual into their product. Nevertheless this is just a small dent in comparison to the impact virtual experience is going to make.

The dawn of virtual reality is upon us and there’s no wondering why people want to utilise it for their marketing strategies. A recent survey says that 90% of business owners now say they prefer personalised content rather than mass outreach. It’s becoming easier and easier to target advertising so to stand out content will need to be more unique, of higher quality, and as engagingly interactive as possible in 2017.

In the current digital landscape, engagement is everything, and marketers succeed when their audience not only consumes content but also enjoys and acts upon it, which is why interactive content will be so important going forwards. The facts back it up; static content generates conversions 36% of the time whereas interactive content generates conversions moderately or very well 70% of the time. So expect to be inundated with ground-breaking apps and virtual reality experiences and in the coming year.

But the innovation doesn’t stop there, not only will consumers be immersed within technology but they will be wearing it. After a slow start for wearable technology 70% of consumers now say they are ‘ready for wearable technology’, giving yet another platform for advertisers to take advantage of.

To summarise, marketing in the new year is only going to become more diverse; we predict that the tried and tested methods such as social media advertising will still has its place in digital, but new developments such as interactive content and virtual experience are going to enrich the digital marketing landscape. It’s up to marketers to embrace the changes and approach marketing in 2017 holistically.

Social Media is the heart of all marketing.  To understand how social media can impact your business with Air Social’s tried and tested social media lead generation expertise, contact alex@airsocial-build-com.stackstaging.com or come and meet the team at our Guildford office for a complimentary social media training session.

 

 

 

Seymours Estate Agents nab top spot on Zoopla thanks to social media

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In December 2015 TUCA launched a social media campaign on behalf of Seymours Estate Agents to market a stunning six figure, six bedroom family home in Walton on Thames.

Using the dedicated Seymours Facebook page and Twitter account to market the property it soon attracted plenty of attention with people flocking to view the property online. Figures from property website Zoopla show the spectacular home was viewed 86,000 times online during January 2016.

The property was also picked up by The Mirror and The Sun who featured the family home as the most popular property in Britain.

team@airsocial.co.uk
01483 789 434
Leapale House,
Leapale Lane, Guildford,
Surrey, GU1 4LY

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