Finally, some of the promised changes to Twitter’s famous 140-character limit have been implemented. The frustration of trying to write a tweet short enough to accompany a photo is now eased after Twitter excludes photos, quoted tweets and other items from the 140 characters allowed for a tweet.

The good news about social media marketing is that advertising provides a fantastic opportunity to spread your message to a much wider audience. The bad news is that it’s very easy to waste a lot of money if you don’t carefully set up and plan your campaigns. 

For those of you who had just got used to Facebook’s 20% ad rule and were carefully using a gridchecker to make sure ads were Facebook friendly, you may have been somewhat confused recently. You’d be forgiven for not even noticing the 20% rule had been dropped, for it happened very quietly in March without any announcement to advertisers at all. If you’d been searching for the grid tool – it’s gone! 

If you read our blog post on the customer journey you’ll understand that a customer may visit a website many times before making a purchase. They may visit your site, along with several others, when doing initial research on the product they want to buy. How can you make sure they remember your site once they’ve moved on elsewhere? The answer is remarketing! 

If you’re currently scratching your head wondering why on earth your Google Adwords campaigns aren’t performing as well as you expected, it may be that you’re missing some crucial settings which will make a massive difference to the effectiveness of your campaign.

 Have you noticed a recent dramatic change in Google desktop search results? This change may effect your bidding strategy in Adwords and the strength of your organic position so read on to find out more.

We all know that marketing your product online is vital for a product based small business. In 2013, 72% of all adults bought goods or services online, up from 53% in 2008¹. The number of people who buy online in 2016 is set to be even higher. The challenge for you as a small business comes when trying to decide the most effective online channels to spend your time and marketing budget on. This is when it helps to understand your customer’s purchase journey. Armed with this knowledge you can then plan your sales strategy intelligently.

Would you like more website traffic to increase internet leads, online sales, enquiries, raise online awareness etc? Whatever your objective is for your organisation the following approach being suggested should help. It’s a proven approach that we adopt ourselves. In the process it should also help build an online following for customer retention purposes and constantly attract new customers.

Using social media with the right strategy can have a considerable impact on brand awareness. We saw this happen for one of our clients, Board Game Extras, where their online brand presence grew considerably over their first year of using social media. As part of an in-depth analysis we undertook in tracking the impact of their digital marketing activities, we saw two significant factors in Google Analytics that hinted at an increase in awareness of their brand name.

Running competitions on Facebook can be very effective in increasing engagement and growing likes. But if you don’t do it in the right way your page could be shut down. Here’s how to correctly run a Facebook competition: