Social Media Marketing

Adjusting for the new Google Plus cover photo size

Last week, Google Plus made a pretty striking change to the layout of profile pages for both individuals and company pages. The dimensions of the cover photo used to take up a pretty small amount of real estate on profile pages, at a long and narrow 940×180 pixels. The new cover photos? They’re huge. At 960×540 pixels, they are the largest cover photos on any of the major social networks – Facebook’s comes in at 851×315. In addition to the cover photo size, there are some other formatting changes that you should take a look at if your business is on Google Plus. The profile photo is now displayed as a smaller, circular avatar. In status updates and interactions around Google Plus, the profile photo still appears as a square. Page title, page +1s, and additional company/brand information (including the…
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Verification Required on Google Plus Local Business Pages

A change came quietly to Google Plus this week that may impact the visibility and content of Google Plus pages for local businesses. Late last summer, we wrote about merging or verifying Google Plus pages with Google Local listings. Now, verification is required on all local business pages on Google Plus. If you set up a Google Plus page as a local business (meaning you business has a local address where you conduct business) and you haven’t yet verified your page and merged it with your Google local listing, this change will affect your page. Fruition recommends that you complete the verification process immediately to avoid the consequences, which range from missing profile information to removal of your Google Plus page from visibility on Google. At Fruition, we help many of our clients set up and maintain Google Plus pages…
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Get the 2013 Facebook Best Practices for Business

FRUITION just published the 2013 Facebook Best Practices Guide for Businesses. Find out the latest and greatest about Facebook marketing for you business today. The Facebook Best Practices for Business is updated about once a month so you can also opt to receive these updates FREE as well. The entire guide is free for you to download and share within your company. Please do not re-post elsewhere. The Guide covers many topics from a big picture view and also many technical details on how to actually benefit from improving your business’ presence on Facebook including: Facebook Business Pages, Demographic Targeting, Updating Images, Facebook Milestones, Adding videos properly, Optimizing photos on Facebook to generate the most views from Friends of Friends, Improving your brand’s visibility, Audience building, contest setup and promoting increases, Also, detailed information on promoting engagement such as: Tips…
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How Google Plus Communities Could Impact Your Business

Google Plus has been growing steadily since its start, though critics of the new network on the block have expressed concern that although Google Plus has many users, they are not typically as active as they are on other networks. Because of this, it has been more difficult to create and sustain social interactions on Google Plus with the same success rate as on Facebook and Twitter. Like other social networks, Google Plus offers the opportunity to create a business page, but given the difficulty in earning interactions, how can Google Plus benefit a business? There are many different answers to this question, including a new Google Plus feature, Communities. But first, a little background on why Google Plus is important. Search Engine Optimization: Having a Google Plus page can help positively impact search engine rankings. Google values the quality…
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How-To: Merge a Google Plus Local Place and Business Page

By Sara Villegas Recently, we noticed that users can now merge Google Plus Local Place pages and Google Plus Business pages. It’s a long-awaited answer to one of my biggest pet peeves about the Google Plus network, and best of all, it’s pretty easy! One of the main frustrations we’ve had in the social media department lately is the fact that Google Plus Local Places listings and Google Plus Business Pages are separate, and are not linked to each other in any way. Google Plus Local Places, when claimed by the business owners, could house tons of company information, including photos, videos, reviews and other business details like hours of operation and contact info. Google Plus Business pages display most of the same information, minus the reviews. Both Local and Business pages factor into our SEO strategy at Fruition, which means…
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Be an SEO Movie Star: Optimizing Your Video Content

By Sara Villegas Video content is becoming increasingly important for businesses with an online presence. A video-rich site can increase search rankings, and having a video library to fuel your social media content strategy can be very useful. Video content also encourages your audience to interact with your content, both on your website and on social channels. But have you ever thought about optimizing your video content for search? If not, you might be missing out on a big opportunity. We’ve compiled a list of some bet practices to remember when you are building your video library on YouTube. Your YouTube Channel This is where many viewers will get their first impression of your brand on YouTube, so it’s important to make your information clear, branded and useful to your audience. This will also make it easier for potential customers…
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Not a robot: How to auto-publish your content and stay authentic

By Sara Villegas Automation is the next frontier for social media. Think about it – who has time to sit around and manually publish every new piece of content they create on all the social profiles they own? For many of Fruition’s clients, this would be overwhelming – many of them have upward of four individual business networks to update, not including additional promotion via personal profiles. But aside from the inconvenience of visiting, logging in, crafting and posting individual messages on every social platforms, it seems there are now a few good reasons to consider using a social media scheduling tool to share your content socially. HubSpot recently released some new data about users who auto-publish their blog content to social sites – and the results are pretty impressive. In their analysis of 3,308 business to business and business to customer…
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Facebook changed its Reach metric – will it impact your business page?

By Sara Villegas If you use Facebook to market your business (and who doesn’t these days?) you might have noticed a little change when you viewed the Insights for your business page in the past couple of weeks. According to Marketing Pilgrim, some users were greeted with a pop-up telling them there were changes to how Facebook calculates reach for posts. Some users (myself included) never got the popup, but noticed that some of their Reach numbers had gone a bit…wonky. For some, this meant that Reach increased for most posts. For others Reach significantly decreased, as I noticed with a few of Fruition’s clients. So what happened?  Short answer: Facebook changed how its reach metrics were calculated. According to Facebook, Reach is now defined and measured as: …the number of people who have seen your post. Figures are for the first 28…
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Lost public access to Facebook pages

By Sara Villegas We had a bit of a surprise this morning when we were monitoring our clients’ Facebook pages: people are no longer able to visit a public Facebook business page when they are not logged in to Facebook. Facebook outreach is becoming a large part of many of our clients’ marketing strategies, and public Facebook pages are where many potential new customers land when they’re looking for a particular business. As of this morning, anyone who lands on a public Facebook page without being logged in to Facebook will get a dialogue box informing them that they need to log in to continue on to the page. The implications of this bug – and we do hope it’s a bug – are potentially harmful to businesses and their customers. Imagine visiting a Facebook page for a business you…
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Social sites that impact SEO

The following social sites have agreements with Google to share data that can then be used as social signals which impact search engine rankings: AllVoices Badoo Blogger Delicious Digg Diigo Disqus Echo Gigya Google+ Google Groups – Merging into +1 Hatena Livefyre Meetup Read It Later Reddit Screen Rant SodaHead TypePad VKontakte yaplog! Twitter – Twitter’s Google deal expired and has not been renewed. Google is still using Twitter to find relevant new content. Facebook – There are rumors of a Google and Facebook agreement but that has not been verified.