Webinar

Were you in the loop on the webinar that happened this Wednesday? Over 34,000 people signed up and listened in, breaking the world record for 10,899 participants, set by Hubspot just a few years ago in 2011. The Best Social Media Webinar of All Time We were there, and the event was worth the hype. No less than three of today’s top social media platforms had a senior director or marketing head present during the webinar, with Hubspot hosting: Russ Laraway, Twitter’s Senior SMB Director; Jed Clevenger, Facebook’s Global Head of SMB Channel Marketing; and Scott Engelman, Head of Online Marketing at LinkedIN. The host was @Dan Zarrella, Hubspot’s own Social Media Scientist. Check out the event page on Hubspot. Since the webinar was not recorded, we took direct notes while listening in. Here are our favorite tidbits from the experts who spoke. Enjoy! Twitter Company Page tips shared from @Russ Laraway: “Your first impression on Twitter counts. Use your bio to be descriptive and reflective of your business. Give people a compelling reason to follow your account. Include URL to an important landing page, your store hours, and anything that makes it easy to find you. Feature your logo and visual elements to describe your company. @Bonobos is an excellent example that does all of this for their Twitter profile. Be relevant on mobile. Twitter was born on mobile; 75% of users are mobile; think of your Twitter profile as your mobile website.” Business Facebook Page tips by @Jed Clevenger: “We have over 1 million active advertisers. Setting up your Facebook page is huge for your business. Three things to get started: Fill out complete and accurate information about your business: type, location, hours, URL, contact information. This establishes your business on Facebook, makes it indexed to search. Have great cover pictures and cover photo. Customers want to see that you’re legitimate. Use our free Facebook tools: contact importer, where you can upload all your contacts, and friend invites, where you can invite all your friends. Test new types of content and spend time in your Page Insights to get information on your posts, audience, and traffic. SweetHaus used no advertising dollars to grow their account to over 3,000 likes: promoting to existing customers and finding new customers.” LinkedIN Company Page tips from @Scott Engelman: “Write a company page that is informative and engaging. Use keywords that are relevant to your business to get your company in search results. Think of what image to use—an eye-catching image that invites visitors to learn more. Once it’s set up, invite your company network to follow. Engage with your followers by posting updates.” Of course, we loved this question: So much of marketing in social media is copywriting. Should my Twitter campaign copy be different from other copy? Russ, Twitter guru, answered: “The short answer is no, but it’s safe to acknowledge that Twitter offers constraints – 140 characters. Generally speaking, consider email marketing. I bet everybody here does this. With email marketing, you’re creating and constantly refining a list of interested parties; create content; send it out regularly, with minor adjustments, you can use this for your Twitter audience. Your followers are your lists. Work on shorter-form for Twitter. Most of you will create bigger content pieces like blogs, newsletters, e-books, think of these as base documents that you can carve into bite size pieces and use Twitter to drive those bits. For example, take a newsletter. Instead of tweeting the link with “check out the newsletter,” tweet a tip about the newsletter, a series of tips all day, and link to it or that excerpt in it. You can get a lot of mileage out of what you’re already producing this way, just modify it to make it work on Twitter.” How do you get engagement with your tweets? A great question, and it got a great answer from Russ Laraway: “Forgive me for being obvious, but you can get more engagement with your tweets by giving your audience what they want. Really think about the 80/20 rule. 80% of your content should NOT be focused on what you are selling. Non-direct selling, direct offering of value that is informative and helpful. What can your followers benefit from? Best practices, industry trends, are examples of great kind of content. Tweets that include rich media are more than likely to be shared. If you upload an image that tweet will do twice as well. 20% of your content SHOULD be focused on what you are selling.” I can’t seem to grow, how do I get a relevant following? Russ answered: “It is true that it is really important to build a great follower base on Twitter. Remember, followers are optional. The users on Twitter regularly refine who they follow. There is no friction to stop following an account. So, users are very careful about the accounts they follow. Your followers will be interested to hear from you with regularity. Use the profile tips from earlier for a compelling profile, and jump in on industry conversations with hashtags—like the smart marketers hash-tagging #WLW14!  For example, if your target audience is educators, reach out to Alexander Russo and build a relationship with them. If you just tweet out valuable content in order to get a retweet, you’ll get more relevant followers over time.” How do I target content for Facebook industry audience? Jed says: “A lot of the same principles from Russ for Twitter can be applied here for Facebook. We encourage you to start testing your way into great content. We have tools similar to A/B testing. From your page, any post you publish can be available to the public, but not all the public. Target your post by location, country, state, city, language, gender, relationship status, educational status, age—there is a ton of targeting option. Speak with an authentic voice to reach core audiences.” How do I use hashtags successfully? Russ said: “Hashtags are best used for tweets driven for … Read more