How to Improve Your Social Media Calls to Action
Is your audience responding to your social activities?
Have you integrated the right calls to action into your social media strategy?
A call to action is a way for you to entice your social media audience to focus their attention on the next action you want them to take.
Here are seven steps for crafting calls to action to get your social community to do what you’d like them to and transform your social media marketing to get the results you want.
#1: Determine What You Want Prospects to Do
Your call to action should encourage readers to engage with you further.
You’ll want to break the activity into smaller steps that make sense to your audience. You can lose prospects at each step of the process, so you want to make it very easy for them.
Make readers an offer they want. What will get prospects to commit now? Your offer will vary based on your business and where the prospect is in the sales process. You can consider offering white paper downloads, ebooks, ongoing emails, discount coupons and/or free consultations. 
7 Tips for Making Your Blog a Content Marketing Magnet
Do you have a business blog?
Are you happy with the marketing role your blog plays?
Many businesses consider blogs “a cost of doing business,” or code for “We’re not sure what it does but we’re afraid to stop doing it.”
In this article I will explore why and how to make your blog the hub of your content marketing plan?
Why make your blog your content marketing hub?
To put a slightly different spin on what Chris Brogan says, blogs are your home base; they are at the center of your content marketing system.
Whether you’re a small business or a Fortune 100 company, blogs should be at the heart of your content marketing because blogs fuel social media, search optimization and the sales process.
The top five reasons to use a blog as your content hub are:
Top 10 Social Media Blogs: The 2013 Winners!
Are you looking for some good blogs to read? Look no further!
Our fourth-annual social media blog contest generated over 750 nominations.
Our panel of social media experts carefully reviewed the nominees and finalists, analyzing the quality of their content, the frequency of posts and reader involvement (among other things).
With that in mind, here are 10 blogs that need to be at the top of your reading list.
#1: Social Fresh
Social Fresh, the brainchild of Jason Keath, provides quality social media content from a community of bloggers.
Social Fresh is an excellent blog with an engaging editorial calendar.
13 Tips to Combine Photos and Social Media for Greater Exposure
Are you looking for new ways to help your business stand out with social media?
Are you wondering why Pinterest is so popular?
The answer is pictures!
Photos are the perfect social media marketing tool for small- and medium-sized businesses.
Why Use Photos?
Photos are eye-candy that attract and engage readers with your offering. As the Jack (or Jill) of all trades, small business owners tend to have limited budgets—and more importantly, time—to promote their business. Therefore, each marketing element must effectively drive results.
With Pinterest‘s recent growth and Facebook’s purchase of Instagram, now’s the time to expand your social media content with photos.
To put this in perspective, Pinterest has experienced exponential growth as tracked by Nielsen, passing Tumblr and Flickr.
Concurrently, Instagram‘s growth trend monitored by Experian Hitwise has also taken off. Furthermore, don’t overlook older photo social media options like Facebook, Twitter and blogs.
Top 10 Social Media Blogs: The 2012 Winners!
Are you looking for some good blogs to read? Look no further!
Our third-annual social media blog contest generated nearly 600 nominations (almost twice as many as last year’s contest).
Our panel of social media experts carefully reviewed the nominees and finalists, analyzing the quality of their content, the frequency of posts and reader involvement (among other things).
With that in mind, here are ten blogs that need to be at the top of your reading list.
Finalists: Top 10 Social Media Blogs 2012
We received over 570 nominations for our third-annual Top 10 Social Media Blogs contest (the blogosphere’s biggest contest for social media blogs).
The list of 20 finalists is pretty impressive! Take a look for yourself below.
The Judges: Our judges include Andy Sernovitz (author, Word of Mouth Marketing & CEO, SocialMedia.org), Rick Calvert (CEO, BlogWorld) and Michael Stelzner (CEO, Social Media Examiner & author, Launch). They are currently finishing up their reviews of these sites.
Here are the finalists (in alphabetical order):
