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It’s been such a long time since we’ve collaborated on a blog post. We shared one of our old ones on cliches recently and decided to see if we still had that back-and-forth sassiness.

While we have written about social media fatigue before, today we are discussing how to overcome it and re-engage on both your personal and business channels. We hope you enjoy our conversation below. Please feel free to comment and let us know how you stay engaged on social media!

Why we need to re-engage in social media

Jim: Just a few days ago, I posted a status on Twitter that my social media fatigue was being caused by a lack of engagement. For some reason, brands (people trying to be brands) have turned social media into broadcast media. I came to Twitter in April of 2008 to talk – converse if you will. Heck, I can’t even remember the number of times we’ve both said, “We met on Twitter.” Wait, that could be a reason to not engage …

Shelby: Yep, it’s all Twitter’s fault that we met. Maybe that’s why I stopped using Twitter as frequently. Just kidding. That wasn’t why. It was because I follow 3,000+ accounts and my stream was almost exclusively the “Me, Me, Me” with zero @ messages or mentions and therefore zero actual conversations. I’m guilty of it too. I probably shouldn’t have my Instagram posts directly sent to Twitter and Facebook. And I certainly shouldn’t let that be my only communication on Twitter for days on end. But like anything in life, if you want to find a solution you need to stop being part of the problem. So recently I’ve been trying to re-engage on Twitter and Facebook with both my personal accounts and the brand accounts I manage and monitor.

Jim: I know I’m guilty of the “Me, Me, Me” syndrome on Twitter for sure. But it’s a unique platform that can still work. There a few friends that I only communicate with on that network. When I’m engaging with them, my stream is almost all @ messages. On the other hand, when I’m not engaging, I get very “broadcasty.” I do try to include a photo with many of my posts and try not to cross post using Instagram or another service. A native Twitter status tends to get more likes and/or engagements.

Shelby: It shouldn’t be this hard. We are after all social creatures. When I walk down the street and pass someone going the opposite direction, I say hello – unless of course that person is talking on the phone, texting or playing Pokemon Go. (Is that still happening?) Personally, I think we have too many gateways for engagement. I have picked three: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Those are the only three networks where I’m communicating regularly for my personal use. It’s harder for brands though. But I’m currently putting forth daily efforts for three different brands on both Twitter and Facebook. Trust me, that’s not easy and it’s very time consuming – and sometimes just a wee bit confusing.

Jim: Shelby, life is hard, get over it! I do agree, however, that we need to pick our battles as far as personal social media channels. I also focus mostly on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. I dabbled in Snapchat earlier this year, and while I found it intriguing, it just never seems to hold my interest for an extended period of time. This is my second time giving the network a try. On the other hand, I’d given up on Facebook a few years ago and now it’s one of my go to networks as much as it pains me to admit that. For some reason Instagram won’t go away either and Twitter just holds a special spot in my social media universe. You mentioned social for businesses. That is a different animal altogether. I’ve managed a couple of those business accounts and I believe it’s much harder to do well than most people realize. Honestly, compared to what you do with those accounts, I suck at social for business.

Shelby: Stop using Buffer, Hootsuite or any other post scheduling service! Honestly, that’s the key and that’s where you go wrong when it comes to social for business purposes. I know you think it saves you time and I’m sure it does. But it also makes your brand sound canned – less human – and therefore less conversational. If you want to engage people, why are you talking like a robot? Also, each network has its own voice. Twitter is short and to the point. Instagram is visual. Facebook is explanatory. How can you send the same post out to all three and expect people to engage with you? Also try being the one to start a conversation as a brand instead of waiting for someone else to comment on your broadcast. I’ve found that it’s a lot easier to re-engage if you are engaging.

Note: The contest ended on Aug. 31, 2016.

We’ve written in the past that it’s important that a company or organization’s tagline (or slogan, depending on what you prefer to call it) should be specific and clearly describe the products or services offered. We made the argument that if you are too vague, you might not be able to get your marketing message across.

This is particularly true for smaller companies with very local geographical interest and for those that mainly advertise through the written word. However if you are part of a larger company with a national or international focus that does a great deal of its marketing through broadcasting (radio or TV), a catchy vague tagline or slogan can work extremely well.

Why did the chicken cross the slogan?

Let’s talk turkey. Actually, no. Let’s talk chicken.

Below are three different chicken companies with three different slogans.

1. A pretty famous fried chicken restaurant that has the slogan “Finger Lickin’ Good.”
2. Another fried chicken restaurant with the slogan “Louisiana Fast.”
3. A chicken company that provides raw product to grocery stores with the slogan “It Takes A Tough Man To Make Tender Chicken.”

Can you name the three companies?

If we were betting people (and we might just be), we would say that almost everyone can name Company 1, about 65 percent of our readers can name Company 2 and maybe 5 percent can name Company 3. (Without Googling.) We’ll be nice and provide the answers below the Slogan Quiz.

There’s a Slogan Quiz???!!!

Oh, didn’t we mention the slogan quiz? Don’t worry. It’s easy. We give you 15 slogans with 4 brand choices underneath each. All you have to do is match the brand to its correct slogan. If you enter your name and email address at the end, you’ll be entered to win a $50 Amazon gift card!

But first … Let’s get back to playing chicken

There are good reasons why you may or may not recognize the slogans of the three chicken companies we mentioned.

In the case of Company 1, it’s a popular fast-food restaurant serving up fried chicken and mashed potatoes and gravy internationally. The sign is very recognizable and it’s been prominent in television commercials over the years.

Company 2 is also a popular national fast-food restaurant; but it’s a bit more popular in the southern part of the U.S. The reason it might not be as recognizable however isn’t geography driven. If you just read the slogan words “Louisiana Fast,” you may not be able to figure out what brand it represents. But if you watched a commercial and heard the music that accompanied the slogan, you would probably remember it well.

Now Company 3 is different altogether. It’s not a restaurant but rather a chicken supplier to grocery stores and restaurants. Its slogan “It Takes A Tough Man To Make Tender Chicken” isn’t very popular; although it was shown on TV commercials in the 1980s. (It was also a controversial slogan based on its Spanish translation; but that’s a different topic.)

The difference between the three is the level of recognition with advertising:

Company 1: Internationally known, TV commercials.

Company 2: Nationally known, TV commercials, musical component.

Company 3: Supplier. No recent TV commercials.

And now it’s quiz time …

Oops! We could not locate your form.

The truth about chicken

Company 1: Kentucky Fried Chicken

Company 2: Popeye’s

Company 3: Perdue

A cornerstone of our services is working with companies to help them get their message out to current and prospective clients and customers. We do this by helping them create a marketing strategy. Then we implement it through social media, email campaigns and even print materials.

But it’s the message that matters; and finding just the right words to convey that message can be challenging. However, it’s worth the effort because a strong marketing message can result in increased sales.

The problem with ‘soft marketing’

Over the years, we’ve seen a trend toward what we’ll call “soft marketing.” Companies who advertise are starting to be a little shy with their message. They tend to be too broad and general with their language in their marketing message.

If you own a restaurant, your marketing message shouldn’t just be “We serve food.” If you own a credit counseling service, your message should be more than “We solve problems.”

Soft marketing in this manner will only confuse your audience and leave them with questions. (What kind of food do you serve? What kinds of problems do you solve?)

Be clear and specific – but not long-winded

It’s important that you be specific and choose the right language for your marketing message. You want to be clear about what products and services your company offers. But you also don’t want to long-winded with your message. Short, to-the-point marketing messages (also called taglines) are remembered longer and resonate better with clients and customers.

You should also never be afraid to tell your audience why they should choose your products or services over those of competitors. If you’re the best at something in your area or a leader in a specific industry, go ahead and say so. Be confident about your strengths, without tearing down the competitors.

If you’re hesitant about using words such as “best” or “leader” in your marketing message, perhaps someone else can say it. Testimonials from current clients and customers can make great marketing messages.

Getting the message across to increase sales

Once you finally have your specific marketing message, you have to get it out to your audience. There are many ways to do this:

• Your website. It should be situated above the fold and as close to your company logo as possible.
• Business cards. Consider adding your message to each employee’s business card.
• Emails. Add the message to the end of each employee’s signature.
• Other print materials. If your company distributes brochures or sends out mailers, start including your message on them.
• Social media. Add the message to all your company’s social media profiles.
• Commercials. If your company advertises on the radio or TV, start incorporating your new message into the commercials.

Using your marketing message consistently and with a certain amount of repetition across all your channels will eventually cause people to turn to your company when they are looking for a product or service you provide.

This is the third of a three-part series. Read the first part of the series about search engine optimization and the second part of the series on writing and publishing blog posts.

When our clients ask us how they can increase traffic on their site, we normally give them these three answers:

1. Make sure all the posts and pages on their site have been updated with key words and phrases that are relevant to their business for good search engine optimization or SEO.
2. Update the content on the site on a regular basis – something that is achieved by publishing frequent blog posts.
3. Use social media networks and other tools to promote and share the new content when it is added to the site.

But what makes good SEO and how do you go about creating quality content that will drive people to your site?

Why bother with social media?

You’ve come to understand why publishing blog posts and updating your website on a regular basis is important when it comes to search results. And you’re keeping up on the search engine optimization (SEO) on all the pages and posts on your website.

You have observed that your search results for your site have been doing alright; but you’d like to see even more improvement. This is where you can use social media and other related tools to help promote and share your content.

While you can get some traction for your content through simple SEO, nothing brings you more traffic than word of mouth. In the online world, word of mouth comes from likes and shares in social media.

Social media also broadens your reach into the online world and allows you to make important customer/client connections with real conversations. This opens the door for building ongoing relationships.

Where should you build social media relationships?

People have probably told you that you need a Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and/or Instagram account for your company. There are many other networks that you can join as well: Pinterest, Google+, Snapchat, etc. But where should your company be having conversations?

It’s a hard question to answer because there are so many relevant networks. Our suggestion is that you take time to research the clients/customers you have now and the clients/customers you want to have in the future. Where are their conversations taking place? What social media networks are they on?

If you can determine where your audience is having conversations, you can narrow down which networks are relevant for your company. Pick the top three networks to concentrate on and build them out. Develop and maintain a yearlong social media strategy with those three networks. Monitor the traction from the networks and reassess their value after a year’s time.

By implementing a social media strategy, hopefully others will begin touting your products and services for you. This is great “free advertising.”

Building social media success

There are two key elements to success with your social media strategy: Engagement and maintenance. One doesn’t work without the other and both require a time commitment.

It takes time to post quality content on several different social media networks each day. It takes time to determine the quality content to share. And, most importantly, it takes time to engage with people when they comment on your social media posts or ask questions about your products and services.

So why pay for social media?

It’s true that you (and your company) can join almost any social network for free. You can also usually post for free. But free doesn’t spell success.

Did you notice in a previous section that we put the phrase “free advertising” in quotations? That’s because – despite the myth – social media isn’t really free. Sure, it’s free to sign up, post and participate. But it costs you time.

If you don’t have the time to maintain your social media networks by posting quality content on a frequent and consistent basis or you can’t find the time to respond to people when they engage with you on social media, then it’s time to consider hiring someone who can.

Find out more!

Are you interested in learning more about social media marketing? Would you like a custom client/customer social media status report? Please contact us and we’d be happy to talk to you about it.

Also, make sure you sign up for our newsletter and/or follow us on Twitter and Facebook so you can keep up to date on our blog posts!

This is the second of a three-part series. Read the first part of the series about search engine optimization.

When our clients ask us how they can increase traffic on their site, we normally give them these three answers:

1. Make sure all the posts and pages on their site have been updated with key words and phrases that are relevant to their business for good search engine optimization or SEO.
2. Update the content on the site on a regular basis – something that is achieved by publishing frequent blog posts.
3. Use social media networks and other tools to promote and share the new content when it is added to the site.

But what makes good SEO and how do you go about creating quality content that will drive people to your site?

We’ve decided to divide these important categories into a three-part series. In the first installment of the series, we talked about search engine optimization. Next on our discussion list is creating content through blog posts.

Why are blog posts important?

So you just spent thousands of dollars to have a new website developed. You have put a lot of thought into the website over the course of the months that it took to actually get it launched. It looks and works great. Launch day is a great day.

It’s a new site with new content and images as far as Google and other search engines are concerned. Content was changed (or newly introduced) so everything is updated and re-indexed. This can take days or even weeks. But pretty soon, your new website is showing up high in the search results. It’s another great day.

Two or three months go by. No additional changes or updates have been made to the site and you are noticing that it isn’t ranked very high in the search results anymore. Maybe the site was on page one and now it’s on page four. As another month goes by, you might find that the site has fallen to page eight. What’s going on?

Google and other search engines love new content on websites. When a website is updated or added to, it is re-indexed. The updates cue the search engines to recognize that the site is active and therefore the site is placed higher in search results. If a site remains stagnant – with no changes, it will likely fall in the search results.

Publishing regular blog posts is a great way to keep websites relevant in the eyes of the search engines and maintain search results status. Publishing blog posts relevant to your business also gives your company a sense of industrial knowledge.

Can you write and publish blog posts on your own?

In many cases, it can be for the best if someone from your company is writing the blog posts. No one knows your company better than you or other employees. Since it’s generally recommended that regular blog posts be published at least once a month, it’s a good idea to develop a blog post plan. Here are some things to consider:

• What will the topics for the posts be and how will they be determined?
• Who will be doing the actual research and writing? Will it be one person or will the writing be shared within a group of writers?
• Who will be editing the posts before publishing them? (Because it’s always a good idea to put a second pair of eyes on a post beforehand.)
• Who will do the search engine optimization for each blog post?
• How often will you publish blog posts? (Again, the recommendation is to publish at least once a month; but more often is better.)

After all these decisions are made, you’ll also have to be somewhat familiar with your website’s development area so that you can input and publish the blog posts.

So why pay for blog posts?

If the purpose of the blog post strategy is to keep your company website current, drive traffic to the site and keep it high in the search results, those posts need to follow certain guidelines. In addition to the considerations listed above, there are many more that affect the success of a blog post.

There are many reasons why you might want to hire a professional writer for your company’s blog post strategy. Besides being well-versed in online writing style, professional writers also tend to keep up to date on the ever-changing search engine guidelines that can affect a blog post’s overall performance. For instance, they know that search engines prefer blog posts that are at least 250-300 words in length and those that are accompanied by an image. They also understand that incorporating links to outside resources (backlinks) are important to a blog post’s performance. And they probably have a subscription or access to a tool that can analyze and improve a blog post’s SEO.

But the reason we hear most often is that many companies just don’t have the time or man hours to devote to a blog post strategy or marketing plan overall. And if that’s the case, your best option is to find an outside contractor who is willing to meet with you, have regular conference calls with you, learn about your company and its services / products and establish an ongoing relationship with you. When you successfully establish that relationship, you’ll find that your website and its content will be successful as well.

Find out more!

Are you interested in learning more about publishing blog posts? Please contact us and we’d be happy to talk to you about it.

Also, make sure you sign up for our newsletter and/or follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Read part three in the series: Why Pay for Quality Content: Social Media.

This is the first of a three-part series.

When our clients ask us how they can increase traffic on their site, we normally give them these three answers:

1. Make sure all the posts and pages on their site have been updated with key words and phrases that are relevant to their business for good search engine optimization.
2. Update the content on the site on a regular basis – something that is easily achieved by publishing frequent blog posts.
3. Use social media networks and other tools to promote and share the new content when it is added to the site.

But what makes good SEO and how do you go about creating quality content that will drive people to your site?

We’ve decided to divide these important categories into a three-part series. The first topic we will tackle is search engine optimization – or SEO for short.

Can you configure your own SEO?

If you are familiar with the development area of your website, you might be able to add relevant key words and phrases for SEO by yourself. And in some cases, coming up with those words and phrases might not be too difficult. If you have an Italian restaurant, your key words for your site would probably include pasta, pizza, etc.

That part seems pretty easy, right? But how many Italian restaurants are there in the world and how many of them serve pasta and pizza? How do you compete with those other restaurants in the search rankings?

Then there’s the algorithm issue. Google, which is by far the most widely used search engine, changes its search algorithms quite often. For instance, one month they might prefer you to fill out your images’ alternative text fields one way and the next month they might change their preference to something else. Of course, you can block out time to research algorithm changes on your own; but that can become time-consuming. (Sources note that Google sometimes changes its algorithms 500-600 times a year. Here’s a resource that explains some of those changes.)

What if you pay for SEO?

Here are some benefits for paying for search engine optimization (SEO) assistance:

1. If you hire someone familiar with SEO who works with it on a regular basis, he or she will be more aware of Google’s algorithms and be able to keep your website’s key words and phrases up to date.
2. Even if you want to track SEO on your website on your own, there are free services such as Google Analytics and other SEO tools you can pay for that can help you. (For instance, we subscribe to an SEO tool that we can apply to all posts and pages on the websites we develop and maintain. We also provide custom monthly or quarterly reports to explain your SEO statistics and rankings.)
3. Overall, paying for SEO help and/or tools will save you time and – overall – money.

There is more to good SEO than just key words and phrases, however. Quality content building, promotion and marketing along with e-commerce all play a part in building SEO. We’ll be covering those topics in the next two parts of the series.

Find out more!

Are you interested in learning more about SEO? Please contact us and we’d be happy to help you.

Read the second part in the series on blog post writing.

Also, make sure you sign up for our newsletter and/or follow us on Twitter and Facebook so you can catch the next two parts of this series on quality content!