The AboutUs Blog

4 Ways To Stand Out On Twitter

by Meg Hartley on 23 March 2012

Editor’s note: This post has been moved to here on the AboutUs.com blog.

Imagine: you’re on Twitter and you find an interesting tweet with a link that you want to check out.

You click on the link and read the article or look at the image outside of Twitter – forgetting to open it in a new tab.

You want to retweet the post, but you can’t find the tweet again. It’s lost in the rapidly changing Twittersphere.

Has this happened to you?

It happens to me a lot. And it’s super frustrating!

Nearly 99% of the time, I re-discover tweets with profile pictures that stand out and have stayed in my mind, as a result. (Not the normal headshots, sorry folks!)

So, if you want people to remember you on Twitter and find you again – make your Twitter avatar stand out.

Get More Twitter Followers (But Don’t Buy Them!)

by Aliza Earnshaw on 20 March 2012

Let's hope this Pied Piper is leading these children to business success!

Everyone wants more Twitter followers. But if you want those followers to retweet you, respond to you – let alone engage you on in a business deal – you need the right kind of followers.

Kristina Weis’ new article, How To Get More Twitter Followers, offers a quick and easy guide to getting more Twitter followers in 10 steps – plus an 11th, “Don’t buy followers.”

AboutUs has a very active Twitter account (handle: @AboutUs), and a lot of that is due to Kristina. She takes an active interest in other people’s websites and online activity, and reaches out to offer tips, support and praise. She also answers people’s questions on Twitter promptly – and you can see how grateful people are for that support if you follow our stream. The result? When Kristina tweets our articles for business owners, people retweet, thank us, and best of all, actually click the links and read our content.

You can get these great results, too, by following Kristina’s common-sense advice. Be interesting, don’t be too self-promotional, tell people who you are with an informative bio and nice profile photo, and make sure your Twitter handle is visible on all your communications.

How To Be a Social Media Humanitarian

by Meg Hartley on 14 March 2012

Editor’s note: This post has been moved to here on the AboutUs.com blog.

Image courtesy of Neil Feree

I just had an “AHA moment” about using social media for marketing. It’s not just about promoting yourself or your company – it’s about helping people.

This may not seem like the stuff of memoirs to you, but it was big for me.

I’m always deliberating over what social media is for, and the best ways to use it, since I use social media both personally and for our clients.

Is social media for building community? Connecting with people of similar interests or in your industry? Developing brand reputation? Or is social media simply for fun and the occasional rant?

SearchFest = Social Media Feast

by Aliza Earnshaw on 2 March 2012

Better late than never, as they say (and who are “they” anyway?)….Here’s our wrap-up of last week’s brilliant SearchFest 2012.

Social media, social media & social media

For us AboutUs folks, SearchFest was really about the social media presentations. These took place in the Heritage Ballroom at the Governor Hotel, which is where sponsors had their tables. Since we were sponsors this year, we stayed put and enjoyed great presentations by Ian Lurie, John Shehata, Marty Weintraub (dig that headshot, Marty!), Will Scott, Justin Kistner, Kelly Feller, Greg Sterling and Chris Silver Smith. Gotta hand some praise also to moderators Jessica Ward (who guided three sessions!) and Portland’s own local search expert, David Mihm.

Here are a few of our biggest takeaways:

Social media doesn’t have to be as big a time suck as you think (or fear). Take Ian Lurie’s tips and you can do it in less than an hour a day. Fifteen minutes in the morning, a few 5-minute sessions during the day (between other tasks) and 10 minutes at night, keeps you current. Of course, using good social media tools really helps, and Ian and others shared their favorites.
To get the best SEO value out of Web directory listings, make sure your company’s name, address and phone number are consistent across all listings. (You can get a good start on improving directory listings by going to David Mihm’s site, GetListed.org.)
If you can talk about something that’s current right now in the news, you can get a big spike in engagement on social media. But make sure it’s pertinent to what you do, so it makes sense for you to be commenting.
Get visual! Facebook posts with photos draw 50 percent more likes than posts without photos.
A comment on your Facebook wall is worth four times as much as a “like.” Elicit comments by asking questions that require real answers, not just “yes” or “no.”

There was a lot more to glean from the social media sessions – let alone the analytics and SEO sessions. If you missed out this year, do yourself a huge favor – join SEMpdx, go to the monthly educational meetings, and sign up early for SearchFest next year.

Title Tag Mistakes To Avoid

by Aliza Earnshaw on 3 February 2012

Title tags are incredibly important for telling search engines what web pages are about. They also help people using search engines decide which search results to click on.

We’ve written about title tags before, and this week, Kristina Weis published a new article, based on the most common mistakes we’ve seen people make with their title tags.

9 Common Title Tag Mistakes and How to Avoid Them points out things you’ll probably recognize, and tells you how to write better, more effective title tags to get better search rankings and more site visitors.

If you really want to delve into title tags, you could also read Improve SEO and Clicks with Great Title Tags. That’s just one more helpful article in the Learn section of AboutUs.org, where we publish articles for business owners who want to become more visible on the Web.

Don’t Be a Robot on Twitter

by Aliza Earnshaw on 30 January 2012

Don't be this guy on Twitter. Image courtesy of Andy Field on Flickr.

Twitter is a wonderful place to promote your company’s product, services, blog posts and news. But we’ve all seen the auto-tweets that make it feel like nobody’s at home for that particular Twitter account. You don’t want your company’s account to look like that.

Our new article, Create a Personality for Your Brand on Twitter, shows you a few examples of companies with interesting, interactive Twitter accounts. We think it mostly comes down to abandoning your fear of being a human being. After all, if you make a mistake, you can always apologize….it’s only human.

Another comforting thing to remember: Tweets go by really fast. If you say something awkward on Twitter, it’s not fatal. The only times we’ve seen really bad reverberations from a company’s Twitter post was when it was nasty, mean-spirited or when the company simply refused to apologize. It turns out, Twitter is a lot like real life

Tempt readers with your headline, feed them with your content

by Meg Hartley on 20 December 2011

Photo courtesy of Simon Forsyth on Flickr

Writers and marketers wear many hats.

Teacher, persuader, motivator, advisor, and entertainer. Which hat are you wearing today?

Deciding that can help you craft your article or blog post so people will want to read it.

Jonathan Morrow of Copyblogger speaks to your plight in Sex,Lies and The Art of Commanding Attention. He recommends using powerful words in your headlines to wake up readers and tempt them to dive into your article.

He emphasizes that certain words – sex, lies, death, money, dangerous – elicit emotional responses and command attention. But that attention is worthless unless your topic words are also in the headline.

Give your readers meat, with some fat for flavor. Continue marbling your substantive content with tasty fat – entertaining bits – to keep them reading right through to the end.

In a subsequent blog post with an equally catchy headline, Mr. Morrow recommends sleeping with your reader…metaphorically speaking. You need to be as in tune with your readers’ deepest hopes and fears as with your lover’s.

You may think that’s not possible if you’re writing for, say, General Motors. But it is – car buyers are worried about paying car loans, concerned about how much they’ll spend on gas, worried about their children’s safety. They also care about their image, about how their car adds to (or detracts from) that image. Plus, there’s the sheer pleasure of owning and driving a shiny new car.

Someone writing for General Motors needs to think about all of that – and, says Morrow, once you figure out your readers’ emotions, write about nothing else.

So, choose your hat – a daring, gorgeous, smart, funny, silly or stylish one one with sequins and frills – get into bed with your readers, and get writing!

Cascade Your Content for Better SEO

by Aliza Earnshaw on 19 December 2011

Let your expertise flow to new audiences. Photo courtesy of vl8189 on Flickr.

You know you need high-quality content on your website if you want to engage customers and rank well in search results. Once you’ve taken the time to create great articles and blog posts (and it sure does take time!), make the most of that content by getting it out to the social networks.

You can learn how to do this in our new article, Cascade Content for SEO. We offer an outline for promoting your content to wider audiences, and include some examples, including some great cascading work by New York-based fashion site Refinery29.com.

Apart from sharing your expertise with new people, and persuading them to visit your site, cascading your content can earn you retweets, comments, “likes” and posts. These social signals help your SEO, which in turn can help your site rank higher in search engines, bringing even more new people to your site.

This new article joins the 100+ other pieces about SEO and Internet marketing in the Learn section of AboutUs.org. All our articles are written for business owners and marketers in small companies, and they’re easy to understand, even if you’re just starting to market your business on the Web.

Is there a topic you’d like us to cover? Do you have some Web marketing expertise of your own to share? Let us know: Editor@AboutUs.org.

Welcome to Blake Biesecker, Our New CTO

by Aliza Earnshaw on 14 December 2011

Portrait of Blake Biesecker We’re happy to be working with Blake Biesecker, our new chief technology officer here at AboutUs. Blake has been on the Portland technology scene for quite a while – he was CTO at Second Porch (which was purchased by Home Away earlier this year) and chief architect at SnapNames (and then at Oversee.net after it purchased SnapNames). He also worked at Gemstone Systems and Object Intelligence.

Blake has settled in quickly, and is turning his attention to hiring more developers to join AboutUs. We’re creating some exciting new things here, so if you have the skills we’re looking for, we’d love to hear from you: Jobs@AboutUs.org.

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Tempt readers with your headline, feed them with your content

Welcome to Blake Biesecker, Our New CTO

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