Automated social media posting systems – Why do you need it?

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The newest trend is social media is automated posting systems that manage your posting to your social media accounts. When this initially started there was a big “hooray!” sounding from the offices of social media experts. Finally there is a way to schedule posts to various platforms without having to sit online and wait for the optimum time for this post to go on Facebook. And yes – this definitely is reason to celebrate, BUT it doesn’t mean you can now sit back and scratch social media posting completely off your to-do list. Let’s look at why you need this system and how you can make it work for you.

The first and very important thing to notice is what I’ve mentioned – this does not mean your work is done. It’s like doing washing. You put your dirty clothes in the washing machine and it’s great, but nothing will be washed until you tell your washing machine what it needs to know. You need to set the programme, choose hot or cold water, washing cycles and so on. It works the same with social media automation. The goal is not to take your work away, but rather to help you work smart. So in order to work smart, there are a few things you can do to use your automation system to its fullest capacity.

You need to understand when to automate. Once you start automating, you can find that you may become a little addicted. When you’ve discovered its efficiencies in one area, you might want to keep going with this automation thing until your entire workflow has been automated – not cool. One way of building a brand and an audience on social media is sharing great content. Automation helps here, because it helps you to post this content online when your target market is in the best position to read it. It also frees up some time to find more content. T.A. McCann has a very interesting rule called the 5-3-2 rule of social media sharing. This concept states the following:

For every 10 updates you post to a social media channel;

• 5 should be content from others that is relevant to your audience
• 3 should be content from you (no, not a sales pitch, just relevant information)
• And 2 posts should be personal and non-work related that shows your audience your human side

The great thing about this concept, or rule if you like, is that it forces you to focus more on your audience instead of on yourself. It helps you to convey the right message.

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Is Social Media Marketing Still Viable?

Facebook recently had businesses up in arms and nearly saw many a social media consultant pack their bags. All of a sudden no-one sees business posts, likes are plummeting faster than Husain Bolt can run and reach stats cause sleepless nights. What is happening? Should you take social media marketing off your to-do list?

The simple answer to the first question is that Facebook is trying to limit business accounts. All companies came flocking to the platform to join in the conversation and reach the millions of relevant people waiting to buy their product. Well, Facebook saw this and have now introduced a price tag on what used to be an open floor.

The second question depends on your business. The best place to find justification for or against social media marketing is the cost-benefit ratio. Are your costs in line with the benefits you receive from marketing on Facebook?

In the old days, someone who likes your page, would implicitly see your content in their newsfeed. Then Facebook started using an algorithm called EdgeRank, which tries to figure out what should be the most relevant information a user wants to see. As a result, many businesses have seen that any post of theirs only shows up in the newsfeed of 15 – 20% of their total followers. This is less than ideal, but if you have a large following, this percentage might still be manageable. Since October 2013, EdgeRank has been put into high gear. Now your post will only be seen by 5 – 6% of your page followers and independent studies revealed a staggering 2% range for pages with more than 500,000 followers. This just shows that larger businesses’ posts are being held hostage and paid advertisements is the only ransom.

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This is what you need to know about SEM

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When the term SEM, or Search Engine Marketing, was introduced into business lingo just over a decade ago, it was used as a blanket term for any kind of marketing or targeted advertising that would allow companies to expose their websites to a wider audience on search engine results pages. Now, however, the term has expanded and evolved to mean something slightly different.

Now when we speak about SEM, we take it as referring to the practice of utilizing paid advertising, such as Google’s ‘AdWords’, or Bing Ads. These products allow companies to target keywords and other statistics such as frequency of searches, location based searches, and more in order to have adverts and links to their websites and pages appear within the search results on popular search engines.

In most cases, search engines will charge a minimal fee in order to host the advert, and an additional fee based on how many times the link is actively clicked from the search results page. In this sense, advertisers pay more for their advert if it does well, but that is supplemented by more traffic to their site, and therefore potentially more sales and exposure.

Search Engines usually have two different sections on their search pages available for advertising - a designated bar at the top of the page, allowing users to clearly see that what they are being presented with are adverts, and those that are integrated into the list of results itself. While these look like regular search results, and are usually always relevant to the search terms that were entered, they do have a disclaimer showing that they are paid advertisements.

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Using SEM for your business website: Is it worth it?

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In order to optimize your business website to take advantage of the full scope of the power of search engines, you will need to understand the basic idea behind Search Engine Marketing. One of the biggest buzz terms around these days is “Search Engine Optimization", more commonly known as SEO, yet this is only part of your potential arsenal when it comes to creating an online presence for your company.

While SEO focuses on getting your website itself ready for user interaction, and helps ensure that your website is visible in the search results that appear when users type in certain keywords, there are also more direct ways of getting your brand out there. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is most commonly identified as paying to have your website advertised when certain keywords are typed into a search engine.

While SEM is actually a collective term that encompasses all aspects of online marketing including SEO, pay per click advertising and various other online marketing tools. It is important to remember that your first priority when creating a website should be to optimize your site using SEO basics; that way, your content and website are well adapted to search engine requirements, so you will be rewarded with a higher SEO ranking. Once that is done, you can focus on other marketing techniques, such as paid advertising that will show up as text content on the right hand side of the search results page once relevant keywords have been entered into the search bar.

For the full article, please feel free to read it on our main blog: ATKA SA Online Marketing

The basics of optimizing your website

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The process of starting up your own website may seem like a daunting task at first, and having the potential to be viewed by millions of people on the Internet means that you’ll probably want it to look and work as well as possible. In order to have those millions of people visit your website, however, you will need to be taken seriously by the search engines that will display webpages for potential users to visit. In order to ensure that your website is listed as high as possible in the search results, you will need to optimize your site in order to show the search engine’s algorithm that you are able to offer something worthwhile to the users.


This is where SEO, or Search Engine Optimization’comes in. The ref termers to the practice of revising the content of your website in order to make the experience more user-friendly, and by doing that, increase your chances of being listed in the organic results section that is generated when keywords are typed into the search bar.


Some of the easiest ways for you to increase your rating with search engines like Google or Bing is to make sure that the content on your website is relevant, fresh and accurate. This means that it is important to constantly add new content to make ganging new users easier, as they will tend to return to find new content (no one wants to read the same thing over and over!).


Flooding your website with key words so that the search engine’s algorithm is also quite ineffective, as the algorithms used these days have advanced past reading plain text, and are looking for context.


Making your content easy to read and your page easy to navigate will also go a long way towards increasing your SEO, since clear and value laden URLs, page titles, headings and subheading will not only allow users to navigate directly where they want to go, but it will also give the search engine more to work with when running through results for certain keywords.

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What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

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The importance of SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is something that should not be overlooked when creating your website, no matter what you’re selling or promoting. In order to get as much traffic to your website as possible, you will need to convince search engines like Google and Bing that your content is well thought out and user-friendly. Learning the basics of SEO will go a long way towards giving your website the best chance of being ranked on the first page of Google or Bing’s search results.

Depending on how you structure the content on your website, search engines will give you a rating that will affect how high your website or content appears on the results page when users search for keywords relevant to your product or service. Since there can potentially be millions of results that appear once the ‘Search’ button is clicked, you’ll want your content to be as visible to users as quickly as possible.

Effective SEO involves every aspect of the website, including the overall performance of the website, how fast it loads content and responds to input, originality of content posted, authority of your website (which us judged by how many other sites use yours as a reference or find your content worthy of linking to), and the user rating, which is based on how easy your content and website is to navigate, how long users stay on the page for,  how safe it is from malware, etc.

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SNAPCHAT: 101

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"Snapchat is a photo messaging application developed by Evan Spiegel and Robert Murphy, then Stanford University students.  Using the application, users can take photos, record videos, add text and drawings, and send them to a controlled list of recipients. These sent photographs and videos are known as "Snaps". Users set a time limit for how long recipients can view their Snaps (as of December 2013, the range is from 1 to 10 seconds), after which they will be hidden from the recipient's device and deleted from Snapchat's servers." 

Yet there is much more to Snapchat than a simple snap and share.

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How to leverage holidays for your social media campaign

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Many companies use the holiday season, whether its Christmas, Halloween or Valentines Day as a way of getting customers more involved with their products and services. By doing this, they not only allow their customers to interact with them, but they show their clients and potential future clients the lighter side of their business. Here are a few ideas on how you could use the holidays as a marketing tool to help boost your social media coverage and interaction on your pages.

1.     Build up to the day

A lot of people tend to forget about holidays, not because they don’t enjoy them, but simply because we all get so busy doing other things. Use your social media profiles to create a build up to the day for one or two weeks before the time, perhaps with a competition or a series of posts that count down to a climax or a product giveaway, etc. Remember not to go too far overboard too early, since people may get fed up and just ignore your posts until the shenanigans are over.

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How to use LinkedIn as an effective marketing tool

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LinkedIn prides itself on being the social network most focused on building a professional presence online. The following is a list of ways in which you could use LinkedIn in order to promote your business to your network and build a strong marketing profile.

1.     Create a strong professional profile

One of the best ways to keep your connections informed about your happenings is by posting ‘status updates.’ Status updates are brief statements that you feel your connections will find useful. In addition, they can include links to related content on your website. To appear active in the LinkedIn community, post useful and actionable status updates on a regular basis. LinkedIn also allows you to easily syndicate your Blog posts to your profile. As you post to your blog on your Website, your LinkedIn profile will be automatically updated with your posts’ title, abstract and link to the full post on your Website.

If you are an active participant in Twitter, you can integrate your LinkedIn status updates with your Tweets to keep your connections and followers informed. LinkedIn makes it easy for you to request recommendations from your connections. A collection of glowing recommendations that underscore your expertise and experience will significantly enhance your profile.


2.     The LinkedIn Community

LinkedIn Groups help you stay informed and keep in touch with people that share your interests. You can create your own LinkedIn groups or join any number of groups that focus on your area of interest or expertise. Participating in LinkedIn Groups by adding value to the discussion is a great way to expand your circle of influence.

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YouTube upgrades its comments!

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Since its creation in 2005, YouTube has been one of the most visited websites in the world, as well as the most popular video sharing site. 

Until now, the very nature of the YouTube comments section has been somewhat shaky. Because it is open to the public, the comments section of this (like many other websites) site is usually home to many different kinds of reactions to videos, many of which don’t even pertain to the video content at hand. 

In recent years, the act of ‘trolling’ (typically characterized by intentional attempts by some commenter’s to cause a reaction from the rest of the community) has become more popular, as well as the mass marketing practice of flooding every possible format with links and advertising. 

These types of comments are usually never linked to the content of the videos they get posted to, and as a result, moderators and video owners have to work hard to keep their comments free of harmful and useless material, since it is always important to posters and YouTube employees alike to maintain a stable and functioning forum.

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Tips and Tricks for iOS7

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It was a long wait, but finally iOS 7 arrived! Users have reported it as a strange new land that they eventually got used to. 

Favourite apps appear completely different and if you are not extremely tech savvy, you might not know that iOS 7 has many little tricks tucked away in no obvious way. 

Let’s take a look at a few you might know and a few that might be new to you.

1. To search, swipe down

Spotlight search can now be accessed from anywhere on the homescreen. All you need to do is swipe down in the middle of the screen. Spotlight can be used to do a quick search across your iphone’s apps, emails and contacts. Funny enough, it seems that Apple removed Spotlight’s ability to search the web. Many users didn’t even know Spotlight could be used for that, so it’s probably not a big miss.

2. Message timestamps

The iphone has always been strange when it comes to seeing when a message was sent or received. Some messages have a timestamp, but it will most likely only show it for the first message in a conversation. iOS 7 allows you to reveal the timestamp for each and every message. All you need to do is hold one of the speech bubbles in the tread and swipe to the left. Now you will always be able to put a time with every message.

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Social media is the new word of mouth

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Any business owner will tell you that the best way to steamroll your way through the competition is through improving word of mouth exposure. 

Potential customers tend to trust the advice given to them by their friends and family more than anything a company might say to convince them of the superior quality of their product. Most of the time, these tactics are seen as marketing tactics that are used to hype up the product and downplay anything bad on the part of the seller. 

It is easier to convince someone to buy your product if they are already aware of it working or being good quality from experience, or from the experience of those they trust.

In the 21st century, what better place is there for any one person to communicate easily and effectively with as many people as possible than over the Internet – more specifically, on social media networks? 

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