In this new world of social media marketing, it can be difficult to know what type of content to post on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc. This post is meant to help you create better content for your audience.

The first step is easy. Make sure your content is relevant to your area of expertise. You would think that would go without saying. However, that’s not enough. Second, and more importantly, know for whom you are writing. Do this by creating “buyer personas”.

Create “buyer personas” for your target customers

We recommend creating a “buyer persona” for each group in your target market. This means create a detailed composite representative of each customer group you want to reach.

Let’s say you own an upscale women’s boutique. After brainstorming with your team, you break down your customers into three distinct groups: River Oaks Rachel, Newlywed Nicole and Cheerleader Charlotte. However, labels aren’t enough. Get detailed.

Let’s take one of these “buyer personas” as an example. The women’s boutique decides that River Oaks Rachel is 42 years old mother of two, whose kid’s attend St. John’s high school. Her husband is a prestigious Houston neurosurgeon. She drives 2009 BMW X3 and a carries a Luis Vuitton handbag that she just purchased on her annual fall weekend trip to New York she takes with her three best friends from college (SMU). She runs five days a week in Memorial park, eats a vegetarian diet, but loves to drink two glasses of Californian cabernet dinner. Her favorite TV show is Mad Men and she subscribes to Vanity Fair and Vogue.

Get as descriptive as possible so you feel like this person exists (you could actually base this on a real person). For further tips, check out this article on how to create “buyer personas”.

Is it interesting to your customer?

After creating “buyer personas”, now you have a litmus test for posting new content. The women’s boutique owner would ask herself, “Would this interest River Oaks Rachel, Newlywed Nicole or Cheerleader Charlotte?” If not, don’t post it! Is it self-promotional advertising that would annoy someone when they receive it in their Facebook feed? Don’t do it! Are you posting a viral video of a cat doing somersaults just because it’s funny? Stop right there!

Remember two things when trying to engage your audience via social media marketing:

1) Stick to you area of expertise
2) Keep it interesting for your target audience

- CF

Although there are virtually limitless ways to improve your search ranking, one of the most effective ways to increase your rank is actually easy: create keyword-rich title tags.

What is a title tag?

The title tag is the line of text at the top of your web browser above the web address.

Why is the title tag important?

The title tag communicates the topic of a particular web page to search engines. The title tag is also the exact same information shown in the first line of search results. So you can essentially control how you want Google to view your page as well as how a user views your web page in search results.

How do you create a good title tag?

• No longer than 70 characters long (including spaces)
• Incorporate the most relevant keywords and phrases for the specific web page
• Identify your company (if you are not well known company, we recommend at the end)

Let’s take the imaginary company Italian Live, an online language school that teaches Italian language classes over the internet to students across the globe. A good title tag for its home page might be:

Online Italian Lessons | Learn Italian Online | Italian Live

• 60 characters long
• Two keyword phrases at the beginning
• Name of company last

What is an example of a bad title tag?

A painful thing to see is a beautifully designed website with poor title tags. It happens all the time. After all, writing keyword-rich title tags is not always of utmost importance to designers, whose primary concern is aesthetic. Here are some examples of common, but poor, title tags that do not incorporate keywords:

• Home
• Index (another name for “Home Page”
• Welcome
• Company Name (Unless you are Coke or Google, just your company name is not sufficient)

I’ve written my title tags, how do I place them on my site?

If you have a content management system (CMS system like WordPress or Joomla), ask your web master to show you how to place them into your site. However, if you don’t have a CMS and are not familiar with HTML code, send the title tags for each web page to your web master and he or she should be able to pop them in for you with ease.

Don’t forget all your web pages

Now you’ve got the tools to create excellent title tags and increase your visibility with search engines like Google. But, don’t forget to create separate title tags for each web page on your site. Every web page has distinct content, so make sure you let search engines know how this content differs from other pages on your site.

- CF

Navigating new social media can be confusing. Between tweets, Facebook posts, Foursquare check-ins, and YouTube videos, your message can get distorted by all the many outlets available these days to share information. It is important to deliver a focused and strategic message that puts your company’s best “tweet” forward. Here are five tips to consider when implementing a social media strategy.

1)   Be Creative

Since your business is competing with millions of content on the World Wide Web, it is imperative for your organization to differentiate from others. This can be a daunting task, but realizing what your business does differently and putting it out for the world to see is a good start.

2)   Start A Conversation

No one wants to be bombarded with ‘Buy my product’ messages. Instead, foster a conversation with your potential customer by providing useful information to them. Establishing a relationship where followers can depend on you for credible news and messages will create a relationship that keeps them coming to you as the expert source in your industry.

3)   Quality vs. Quantity

When embarking on this social media journey, you might be tempted to create an account for each site available. By identify which sites your target customer is on, you will better be able to serve them.

4)   Be Patient

In a perfect world, your posts on these new social mediums would be well received by all and thousands of followers would hang on your every post. But this is the real world, and getting out these messages takes time. You might not get one thousand followers after your first tweet, but you might get ten, and that is a great start.

5)   Practice Makes Perfect
With any new technology, there will be a few missteps. Allow these mistakes to happen and learn from them. Rushing into a social media strategy and then abandoning it just because it doesn’t garner millions of hits after two hours is not proactive. If one message appears to have no effect, reevaluate that message and research new tactics. Your next post will surely be better.