rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_24bc1cf7-86bd-5e5e-97d9-112e374e107c">Gaining Visibility in Real-Time Search
Gaining Traction on Google with Social Media
Monitoring Your Search Engine Ranking
4 Chapter 4: Using Social Bookmarks, News, and Share Buttons Bookmarking Your Way to Traffic Sharing the News Benefiting from Social Bookmarks and News Services Researching a Social Bookmark and Social News Campaign Submitting to Bookmarking Services Submitting to Social News Services Using Application-Specific Bookmarks Timing Your Submissions Encouraging Others to Bookmark or Rate Your Site Using Social Media Buttons
Chapter 1
Discovering Helpful Tech Tools
IN THIS CHAPTER
In Book 1, you discover that the key to social media success is planning. This minibook reviews useful tools and resources to make your plan easier to execute. Before you start, you may also want to check out Book 9, which focuses on measurement tools for traffic, costs, and campaign performance.
As you select tools and schedule tasks from suggestions in this chapter, remember to enter them on your Social Media Marketing Plan (Book 1, Chapter 3) and Social Media Activity Calendar (Book 1, Chapter 4). You can also download blank copies of these forms by clicking the Downloads tab at www.dummies.com/go/socialmediamarketingaio5e.
Try to select at least one tool from each category:
Resource, news, and blog sites that cover online marketing and social media
Content-distribution tools
URL-clipping tools
Shopping apps or services for social media, if appropriate
Buzz-tracking tools to monitor mentions of your business
Keeping Track of the Social Media Scene
Unless you take advantage of online resources, you’ll never be able to stay current with the changes in social media. Here’s a quick look at how much the landscape changed in the course of just a few years:
Use of social media continued its explosive growth. According to WeAreSocial.com (https://wearesocial.com/blog/2020/01/digital-2020-3-8-billion-people-use-social-media), nearly 4.54 billion people around the world are online, of which 3.80 billion are on social media. And as amazing as it might seem, Internet users in 2019 averaged more than 7.6 social media accounts each (www.brandwatch.com/blog/amazing-social-media-statistics-and-facts).
Social media acquisitions run rampant. Facebook alone purchased Instagram for $1 billion in 2012; WhatsApp, a messaging app, for $19 billion in 2014; and Ascenta, a drone manufacturer, for another $20 million, also in 2014.
During the 2020 COVID-19 crisis, social media usage grew by 61 percent and usage of messaging apps like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp grew by 50 percent. Twitter alone saw a 23 percent increase in daily users (https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanholmes/2020/04/24/is-covid-19-social-medias-levelling-up-moment).
New social media platforms continue to pop up, proving that the power of innovation is still strong. Watch the growth of Meetup (social event planning), Viber (secure instant messaging app), and Vero (ad-free social network).
At the same time, other social media services went belly-up. Casualties of the social media wars included Sulia (a subject-matter social media service that connected users to experts), Blab.im (which allowed narrow-casting of video to a defined set of followers), and most notably, Vine.co (the site noted for sharing short, looped videos, which has limited its recording functionality and become mainly a site to review old videos).
To keep current on the changing tides, subscribe to feeds about social marketing from social-marketing blogs or news services; check at least one source weekly. Also, review traffic trends on social media services weekly; they’re amazingly volatile. Table 1-1 lists some helpful resource sites.
TABLE 1-1 Social Media Marketing Resources
| Name | URL | Description |
|---|---|---|
| HubSpot |
|
