So you've started to build your brand's online presence by creating a professional Twitter account. Creating and sharing content can be exciting, but it can also be frustrating if your aren't getting any retweets. One of the most effective ways to build your follower base is retweets, which is why it is so important to employ strategies that encourage them. Here are some tips on what will make people want to retweet your content.  

1. Use Hashtags

Hashtags make it easy for people to find your content. Including two to three relevant hashtags per post ensures that your target market can find you. Just make sure your tweets are still readable.

2. Tweet Often

Posting frequently and at different times of the day makes it more likely that your audience will find and retweet your content. Twitter software such as Hootsuite can help you schedule your tweets so you can post more frequently. Just don't overdo it. Posting too often might encourage people to unfollow you rather than retweet you.

3. Share Valuable Content

Knowing your audience is key when deciding what to tweet. Tweet about topics that your target market is interested in. Including links can make your tweets more share-worthy, and asking questions encourages discussion.

4. Ask for a Retweet

This may seem counter intuitive, but research has shown that asking for a retweet works. Ask people to “Please RT” only on content that you feel is especially relevant and interesting.

5. Include Social Sharing Buttons

Make it easy for people to retweet your original content. Include a button on each piece of content that lets people share it on Twitter.

6. Customize Your Twitter Profile

Customizing your Twitter background, Twitter profile picture, and Twitter bio to reflect your branding and messaging assures followers that you are a legitimate source for information and insight, and therefore worthy of retweeting.

7. Keep it Short

Just because Twitter lets you use 140 characters doesn't mean you should. Keeping your tweets around 120 characters makes it easier for people to comment on your tweet when they retweet. The easier you make it, the more likely people will retweet. 

8. Read and Comment

Never tweet about something you haven't read. It could be boring or irrelevant, and even worse it might be offensive or in conflict with your brand's messaging. Reading everything you post also allows you to comment, which makes your tweet more engaging.

9. Interact

Thanking people for retweets, retweeting others, and commenting on other people's tweets will create a stronger presence for your brand on Twitter and encourage people to support your brand by retweeting.

10. Don't Only Promote Yourself

Besides being a bad social strategy, being overly promotional does not encourage retweets. People want to retweet content that their followers will find interesting, which is unlikely to be a tweet that shamelessly plugs your brand.

THIS CONTEST IS NOW CLOSED. WINNER WILL BE ANNOUNCED TODAY (02/22/12)

Has your business accomplished something great recently? This month, we're giving out a professionally written press release for FREE. One lucky winner will get our writers to create it for you. And we’ll pay for the release to all the major news sites, bloggers, search engines, and more than 30,000 journalists.

Press releases are a great way to promote your business and generate local and national coverage from bloggers and journalists. We'll create a press release with a powerful brand message that will get the media talking about your business. Once it's ready and we've sent it to you for approval, we'll launch your press release, garnering huge publicity for your business and placing your brand in the media spotlight.



This exposure is powerful. But press releases are good for more than just getting the word out. They also help your website rank better in search engine results. As a press release is distributed, the news sites that choose to carry it will include a link to your company website. These links, called backlinks or inbound links, are the backbone of any strong SEO campaign, and a single press release can generate hundreds of them. In addition, press releases that mention your company and include relevant keywords related to your products or services can put your brand in front of searchers even if your website doesn't rank well. Suppose your press release is picked up by a major news site. Even though your website may not rank anywhere on the first page of search results for the keywords contained in the release, the news site will - and visitors to this site will see your company name, information, and link.



We want to hear your story and share it with the world. The winner will be chosen on Wednesday, February 22nd, so go ahead. Tell us why you deserve to win!


How to Enter



Leave a comment on this blog post. It's as simple as that. Feel free to be as detailed or as brief as you feel is necessary. Make sure to leave an email address (it will not be made public) so we can contact you if you win. (Your comment will show up after we have approved it.)

Two of our sample press releases:
Evergreen Realty Launches New Website to Challenge Real Estate Search Giants
Web Design Agency blazonco Announces Strategic Partnership with Business Plan Development Firm MasterPlans

Social media is not a quick fix that will bring in new customers overnight. It takes time and dedication to build a following on social networks. Strong social media communities are built in months and years, not days.

Keeping on top of how you are doing on each social network is an important way of seeing what is working and what you need to improve on. Monitoring the success of your brand on social networks is critical, but it can also be time-consuming and confusing. Here are a few suggestions for tools you can use to make it a lot easier.

Management Tools

Often, the best time to post on a social network is on the weekend or after work hours. Want to use social networks effectively without letting them take over your life? Several companies have created great social media management tools that allow you to schedule posts days, weeks, or even months in advance. TweetDeck and HootSuite are two great free options to help you manage your Facebook and Twitter account postings and monitor activity all in one place.

Free Monitoring Services

Free services such as Social Mention are a great way to get advanced knowledge about what people are saying about your brand. Metrics such as strength, sentiment, passion and reach of the people talking about your brand provide a full picture of the conversation taking place around your company online. The site lists relevant keywords for your company and the hashtags most often used in relation to your brand. It even lists the top users talking about your brand, which will help you identify your company's top brand evangelists. Insert the name of your industry or a competitor to get a broader view of where you company stands in relation to others on the social web.

Subscription Monitoring Services

Social Mention and similar tools are free, but if you want to take it up a notch and gain access to more advanced metrics, you can try out subscription services such as Sprout Social. Paid services like this give you a wealth of detailed information about your customers and help you align your social media marketing strategy for success.

Facebook Insights

Facebook provides detailed analytics to help you understand who is looking at your business page, how they are interacting, and what content they enjoy the most. Facebook Insights is very easy to use. It provides a graph of your weekly reach, how many people are interacting with your content, and how many people “like” your page. It also provides data about each individual post, giving you an idea of what content your community wants to see and what content they don't. It even shows you the demographics of people coming to your page and where they are coming from.

If you plan to handle customer service via Twitter, keep the following tips in mind.

1. Have a Personality

Don't send canned tweets. Your customers are approaching your Twitter account to hear the voice of your brand, and if that voice is stale and unengaged, they won't come back.

Pick a personality style that captures the brand image you want to reflect, and run with it. A law firm, for example, may want to go with an objective, authoritative tone, while an amusement park could stand to keep things lighthearted and informal. But personality is only marginally about tone. It's really about being personable. Listen and respond to your customers in earnest, and you'll be on the right track.

2. Respond Immediately

Speed is a large part of what makes Twitter an ideal customer service channel. A customer can post a question and receive an answer in a matter of seconds. But this only works if your company is able to monitor and respond to tweets immediately. A dead Twitter account is worse than no Twitter account at all.

If you've intentionally established your Twitter account to handle customer service issues and your customers are aware of this, you must be able to deliver. You must be able to monitor the account and respond in real time. If you can't, you'll end up harming your brand image and frustrating your customers.

3. Expect Complaints

If you're offering to help resolve your customers' problems, you better expect to hear about their problems. Social media users are more than willing to blast companies with complaints given the opportunity. There are two reasons for this.

First, negative feelings are more likely to spark action than positive feelings. You can expect to hear from a higher percentage of unhappy customers than happy ones for this reason alone, regardless of the channel. Second, the relative anonymity of the internet removes many of the traditional social constraints that would prevent certain outbursts from occurring in other situations, such as face-to-face. In short, the very nature of Twitter lends itself to complaints. Be prepared, but don't let this bother you. Every complaint you receive gives your business a public opportunity to make things right, which, rather than harming your brand image, will most likely improve it.

4. Keep Private Information Private

By definition, social media is primarily a public medium. This means most of what you do will be visible to others. For some customers service requests, this medium may simply be improper due to privacy concerns.

Put a standard in place to determine immediately which types of customer service requests or support issues can be handled and resolved in the eye of the public and which ones must be taken offline to a more private, one-on-one medium. Whatever you do, make sure you don't inadvertently include any private customer data when replying to a request or complaint.

5. Be Careful What You Say

What's said on Twitter lasts forever and could potentially be seen by thousands of individuals. Always think before you reply, especially when replying to a complaint. The way you handle negative feedback will affect how your brand is perceived, and even a single insensitive, sarcastic, or dismissive tweet can damage your reputation. Those kinds of things go viral these days. Be careful what you say.

Big mistake.  B2B companies absolutely can and should utilize social media.

Except under very unusual circumstances, products and services are always purchased by human beings.  Even in a B2B environment, your customer is an individual.  You're not marketing to a business.  You're marketing to the individuals who comprise that business.  Social media lets you find out who these individuals are.  You get to meet them, learn their names and preferences, and dialogue with them.

Define Your Target Audience

Are your customers small business owners?  Large business owners?  Entrepreneurs?  Specific employees at businesses in specific industries?  The way you define your target audience will determine the social networks you'll need to be present on, the types of content you'll need to create and share, and how you'll connect with and respond to your potential customers.

Develop a clear picture of your ideal customer.  Then start looking for the social destinations where these individuals congregate online.  Join groups.  Get involved in the conversation.  For most B2B companies, the best places to start include LinkedIn, Twitter, Quora, and Focus.

Create and Share Valuable Content

Valuable, relevant content lies at the core of any social media marketing campaign.  The best way to stand out from the crowd and draw attention to yourself, your business, and your services is by creating outstanding content.  Look at your target audience again.  What do they need to hear?  What information are they desperate to have?

The content you create and share could take the form of articles, news, blog posts, infographics, videos, tutorials, or virtually anything else.  Your audience will define it.  And you will create it, establishing you as a thought leader and a valuable resource and drawing the attention of your potential customers.

In many ways, B2B companies have it easier than B2C companies.  B2C companies are typically forced to rely on entertaining, catchy, fun, or shocking content to reach out to their audiences, and due to oversaturation, the competition for consumer attention is fierce.  As a B2B company, however, you have an audience of individuals who are constantly seeking the latest, most relevant information to help their businesses and their careers.  Distributing valuable content is significantly easier when your audience is actively engaged.

Connect, Retain, and Convert

This is where social media marketing becomes more difficult for B2B companies.  How do you actually use it drive business?  For starters, it's important to keep your social media marketing efforts in perspective.  You're most likely never going to close an enterprise software integration deal via Facebook.  This is because the B2B sales funnel or conversion process is almost always much more complex than the B2C conversion process.

Don't let this derail your efforts.  Instead, treat your company Facebook page the way you treat your email database.  Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networks are opportunities to collect a particular type of contact information from targeted prospects.  Use this initial contact information to build more advanced relationships with these prospects.  For example, you may be able to use Facebook or Twitter to increase visits to a seminar you host at an industry conference.  From there, you can build deeper relationships with these prospects by obtaining phone numbers or scheduling face-to-face meetings.  And at that point, you stand a very good chance of closing your enterprise software integration deal.

Social media is not a secret sauce, but it is absolutely a powerful part of an integrated marketing communications strategy for B2B and B2C companies alike.

When thinking about what to post on social media, it's tempting to make it all about you. While promoting your products or services is an important part of building your brand, your audience will shut you out if you're too self-centered. Think about social media as a conversation. No one wants to be friends with the guy who goes on and on about himself. Make the content you share valuable to your target market and you can create an online community that is excited about your brand.

With today's never-ending information flow, it is important to continually update and add to your content in order to stay relevant and keep people engaged. Trying out different times of the day and days of the week to see what works best is an important part of being effective on social networks. There have been a multitude of studies on this, but it invariably varies based on your niche market and specific audience. Start trying out different times of the day and days of the week and see what works best for you.

Here are some tips to get you started:

1. Know your audience - Own a clothing store? Tweet about an upcoming fashion show. Own a restaurant? Share a new recipe you found online and ask people what they think. Think about what your target market is interested in, and provide valuable content that will keep them engaged.

2. Provide something valuable – Whether you provide a special discount to your social networks, run a contest, share some great advice or announce an upcoming sale, make sure that your content is something worthwhile. Pictures and videos are always a great way to make your content interesting and exciting.

3. Experiment – There's no magic way of knowing what will work until you start experimenting. Don't be afraid to try different approaches. If one post doesn't get good feedback, try something else next time. The great thing about social networks is how easy it is to change strategies.

4. Be human - Showing your personality on social networks is one of the best ways to gain a loyal following and get people excited about your brand. Don't be afraid to get personal and make it fun.

5. Respond to everything - Make sure to respond to every comment or question on your social networks, even if it is negative. It shows customers that you care and creates an important dialogue.

6. Don't ignore feedback - Social networks can be the best way to get valuable feedback about your products or services. If a large number of people are having problems with a specific issue, it's a great opportunity to rethink that aspect of your business. Positive feedback is also important, because it lets you know what you're doing right.

7. Track your results – Whether you do this manually or through a monitoring service such as HootSuite, analyzing what works is an important part of improving your content.  

1. Define Your Goals

Before taking any marketing steps, you must have a goal in mind. Is your goal to increase sales directly from your website? Increase brand exposure? Obtain more followers on your business social media channels? It's important to have a clear goal, for two reasons.

First, your goal will define the nature of your content. It will tell you what you need to do. More on this below.

Second, your goal will allow you to measure success. Your goal will show you what metrics you need to track and what numbers to hit. With the endpoint clearly defined, you'll know when you've arrived, and more importantly, you'll know when you haven't.

Take time to define your goal. You may have several goals for your email marketing campaign, but whatever they are, define them. Understand them. And build your campaign to deliver results.

2. Define Your Audience

Once you know your goals, you're ready to define your audience. Who should you be sending these emails to? For the most part, your audience is the same as the target market for your products or services. But your audience is also defined by other, more practical constraints.

How many email addresses do you have in your database? Who do they belong to? Do these email addresses belong to current customers? Do they belong to people who have never heard of your company or your products and may not be interested in what you offer? These factors will all affect the specific audience of each email marketing campaign you run.

Make sure you have a detailed understanding of the audience you're marketing to with each email blast you send. Shape the content and frequency of your campaign to fit the needs, expectations, and preconceptions of this audience.

3. Define Your Content

Every image or word included in your email—from your subject line to your social media buttons—is content. And all of it communicates something about your business, something that either will or will not motivate your readers to take the action you desire.

The content you write or create or aggregate into your newsletter will vary significantly depending on your marketing goals. If you hope to drive direct, immediate traffic to your website, for example, you may want to create a promotional offering or feature an article or video that can be viewed in full only on your website. If you hope to gain more email subscribers by prompting recipients to share the newsletter with their friends, your content will need to be more social in nature and you'll need to feature a “Share” or “Send to a Friend” button prominently in the body of the message.

Develop a calendar that lists the email messages you plan to send out. Consider the goal and audience of each message, and create content that will drive the results you desire.

4. Track Everything

Tracking is perhaps the most important step in this process. If you aren't able to track how many people received your newsletter, how many opened it, how many clicked a link within, and so on, the entire campaign is worthless. You must have a tracking system in place to determine whether your marketing efforts are generating the right results or whether you need to revise your goals, audience, or content.

Most email newsletter management systems will track and deliver all the data you need. All blazonco clients have the opportunity to take advantage of a fully robust email newsletter management system built right into our CMS. Our system provides a full report of all relevant statistics after each newsletter blast. Use this data to tailor your email marketing campaign to deliver stronger and stronger results in alignment with your ultimate goal.

If you missed the video, watch it here. And read on below for a few critical pointers on small business marketing.

1. Make it easy for people to contact you through your website. Unless your website is an e-commerce site, you probably want your visitors to call you or send you an email to request your services. You want to turn your visitors into leads. This means either a lead capture form, a phone number, or an email address. Whatever method you use, make it stand out. Put your phone number on every page. Write a simple and compelling call to action.

The best social media campaign in the world is worthless if your website fails to convert your visitors into leads or customers. Make sure it’s easy for visitors to contact you, or your social media efforts will be wasted. This is true with SEO, too.

2. Build your email marketing list. Though not technically social media, email is still one of the most powerful ways to connect with customers. But don't spam people. The advent of social media has changed the nature of trust on the internet. If you want to build trust, you must be transparent and authentic in all that you do.

An email database is something you have to nurture. If your subscribers sense that you're sending them something to benefit yourself rather than them, they'll revolt. They'll ignore you. They'll probably even hate you. Like all things social, treating your visitors well means looking out for their needs more visibly than your own.

3. Build a media presence. If you have a website, this means you need to create fresh, relevant content on a regular basis. You may have heard that fresh content is important for search engine optimization. This is true, but content is also critical for maintaining visitor engagement. If you’re hoping to bring visitors to your website through social media, you need to be creating interesting, valuable media of some kind, like videos, articles, research findings, or blog posts. Always remember that your website is a media platform. Treat it like one, and your social campaign will flourish.

We're proud to announce the launch of our own updated and improved corporate website!  As you can see, we've changed our layout, structure, branding, and much of our content.  Why?  To show the world a bit more about what we do and how we do it.

Take a look at any of our case studies, designs, marketing packages, or skip right to the good part and get in touch with us for a free consultation.  We look forward to hearing from you!

In 2012, Vines' consultant plans to launch an email newsletter for patients and a blog to promote teeth-whitening techniques, new laser technology to identify cavities and other services.

Blazonco provides website design and its proprietary content management system has a newsletter and blog built in making it easy to manage marketing efforts from a single login.

The article does not mention anything about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Marketing and the power it can deliver, specifically for locally-targeted professional practices. Because of the increasing popularity to rank on the first page of Google, Blazonco encourages all its dental clients to step up to at least a 10 keyword package.

Dentists turn to marketing after getting brush-off from patients [LA Times]