How Vines Can do Wonders for your Local Business

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About a year ago, Twitter took social media by storm with the release of their video-sharing app Vines, on Android and iOS. Today, we show you how you can engage your consumers more efficiently with this game-changing application.

1- Act it out

First things first: Vines’ main purpose is fun. It gets people to show 6 second-long slices of life so they have to make them count, and so do you. As a company, your opportunity here is to make your audience engage in a personal way. It gives them a chance to create a relationship with your business that doesn’t rely on sales, but on storytelling. With a good Vines contest, you can broaden your audience and engage them to have fun with the brand, making it memorable for them.

2- Generate wide exposure

With Vine, users can share their video on other platforms straight from the app. This means they can create Vines, share them on Twitter and Facebook instantly with your hashtag and link, which will tie the user-generated content with your page or campaign. It allows better customer experience and guarantees higher exposure. It’s up to you to make your customers want to Vine with you.

Vine

Vine

3- Be original

Vine has no editing option or filter, just press your screen and it records so it’s easy to cut and start again. In other words, you can make stop motion and use editing tricks for more humorous or surprising clips. You can make product demos, talk about your brand history (see GAP’s history of denim) or simply stunning mini clips to fit an event, but don’t forget to tailor your execution to the occasion. Speaking of which…

4- Hit the trends

A great example of Vine usage in contextual communication is Dunkin Donuts’ Superbowl campaign. They recreated the greatest moments of this year’s edition with their paper cups, sometimes prompting their audience to guess the game in which the action took place, with the hashtag #DunkinReplay. Dunkin Donuts engaged customers with a game and hit a trending topic, making their hashtag relevant and interesting to the American audience. What trend can your business use to reach its audience using local and/ or current events?

5- It’s free

So go ahead, enjoy!

Have you ever used Vines for online marketing? Tell us about your experience in the comment section.

Marketing with Twitter Chats

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Marketing with Twitter Chats

If you’re looking to widen your audience and generate leads, Twitter chats can be a strong tool to boost your marketing outcomes.

Twitter chats are open and moderated conversations that use a significant hashtag for a certain topic, ie: #ChatWithEastline or #ELMchat, where participants usually filter conversations based on the hashtag to easily follow the chat.

Include a Twitter chat in your marketing strategies to help you reach your followers and their followers. A successful chat can introduce you to hundreds of potential leads.

Below are six ways Twitter chats can help you reach a bigger audience and enhance brand awareness:

1- Use Crowd Sourcing For Content Ideas

Collect information and opinions from a lot of people at once as you ask chatters about their needs and wants. Don’t forget to take notes and finally use their input to give them what they want.

2- Get New Leads

Answer questions, provide useful information and engage with your followers. Promote your upcoming Twitter chat to appeal to a bigger audience. Attract new leads by hosting a general themed fun Twitter chat, include giveaways or tackle a common problem and show your knowledge.

3- Build Your Social Reach

Twitter chats are a great way to leverage your existing followers as a successful one attracts a large group of tweeps whose followers are watching the conversation. When fans share your content or product, they’re giving it their approval, which will have their friends considering your brand when they’re ready to take action.

4- Create a Community Through Live Tweets

At in-person events, try live tweeting and invite your followers to join the event’s hashtag and share their ideas and opinions about the topic at hand.

5- Monitor Your Success

Track your Twitter chat successes from the first day as when you determine the popularity of your guests, topics, questions, interactions and hashtag, you can determine what appeals to your followers.

Use the evaluated data to determine successful topics and important ideas to your participants, and use that information to create follow-up content.

6- Increase Your Knowledge

Participating in industry Twitter chats is another way to network locally and internationally, expand your contacts base and discover and discuss “holes” in the industry.

Eastline Marketing defying harsh economic conditions

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Building a Powerful Twitter Community with Influencers

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TwitterUsing Twitter to boost your company’s growth is about building a community of followers who relate to your industry and who will eventually develop a passion for your brand.

Finding connectors, thought leaders or industry experts and building relationships with them is vital as it’s the quickest and easiest way to build a significant Twitter community.

1- Discover influencers in your network

Use Followerwonk [ https://followerwonk.com ] to check out your current Twitter followers ranked by the platform’s statistic called ‘social authority’, which is based on the retweet rate of users’ latest few hundred tweets, the recentness of those tweets and a retweet-based model trained on user profile data.

2- Learn your competition’s connections

Twitter’s transparency makes competitive research super-accessible and your competitors’ networks are most likely to include influencers who are directly related to your business. Find these connectors on Followerwonk but this time using your competitors’ handles.

3- Look for influencers in your niche

You can use Followerwonk’s ‘social authority’ to guide you through this process but keep in mind that you have to zero in on the tweep’s emphasis as people who are involved in what you do will best fit your community.

Start off by building a list of 15 to 20 people who would be fit to nurture a relationship with.

4- Follow and interact with tweeps

Building your community requires you to focus on the conversations you have. Keep in mind that replying directly to a person will only show up in their timeline and the timelines of people you both follow, so include your response in a retweet, which will reach a greater number of users.

5- Track your influencers’ posts and mentions by setting up alerts

Use tools like Google Alerts [ http://www.google.com/alerts ] and Fresh Web Explorer [http://moz.com/tools/fresh-web-explorer ] to dig up where your industry influencers share their thoughts and opinions outside of Twitter and shine the light on them by sharing on Twitter a good article they’ve written.

6- Add value outside of Twitter

Now that you’ll be aware whenever connectors you follow are mentioned across the web, you’re able to point people’s attention to their relevant resources and maintain mutually beneficial relationships with them.

Share their stories, comment on their blogs and give them a helping hand whenever it’s possible as this will increase the chances you have at them being receptive to what you have to say later on.

Biz Stone Launches Q&A App Jelly

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Jelly App

Twitter cofounder Biz Stone along with a seven-person startup, has launched a question-and-answer style mobile social networking app called Jelly, available for free for iOS and Android users.

Jelly enables users of submitting questions with an attached photo captured from their smartphone camera, which will become available for their Facebook and Twitter connections to then respond to via the app with a link, a drawing on the original picture, or simply a text. Questions can also be forwarded via text message.

“In a world where 140 characters is considered a maximum length, a picture really is worth a thousand words,” Stone wrote in a post on Jelly’s blog. “Images are in the foreground of the Jelly experience because they add depth and context to any question.

Born out of a passion for helping people, Stone believes that Jelly is capable of making an act of kindness relatively simple. Stone got the idea for Jelly with cofounder Ben Finkel, cofounder of Fluther, another question-and-answer service that Twitter acquired in December 2010.

The “Finkel Rank” displays questions to the most relevant audience of a user’s social connections and is expected to improve over time as the application gathers more user data and should help improve Jelly’s functionality.

The app’s name was inspired by jellyfish, which have “a loose network of nerves that act as a ‘brain’ similar to the way we envision loosely distributed networks of people coordinating via Jelly to help each other,” Stone wrote in the blog post.

Links:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jelly/id685652528

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jellyhq.starfish

Facebook Sponsored Stories to Be Eliminated in April 2014

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FacebookAccording to a blog post, Facebook will be retiring Sponsored Story ads starting April 9, so you better hurry up if you’re looking to invest in one!

Sponsored stories appear when a user’s Facebook friend engages with a sponsored Page, app or event. For example, if one of your Facebook friends Liked a Brand Page, and that page has chosen to promote that engagement, a Sponsored Story would appear on your News Feed.

By April 9, Sponsored Stories will not be up for purchase for Advertisers and existing Sponsored Stories will turn into other format of ads. In example, a Sponsored Story highlighting a page Like will just turn into a Page Like ad and the “social context” component of Sponsored Story ads where a single or multiple friends of yours are featured in the ad, will simply become commonplace in all of Facebook’s advertisements. The social context will become a greater part of the Facebook’s advertising strategy in June.

A  Facebook spokesperson explains:

“As announced in June of last year, we’re bringing the best of sponsored stories – social context – to all ads. Since this update makes sponsored stories redundant, we will no longer offer them as a standalone ad unit for marketers. Social context will continue to appear with all ads where eligible. Our social advertising honors the audience that people choose, so nobody will see information in social context for an ad that they couldn’t already see.”