Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Social media is an extremely valuable tool for promoting your marketing content.

But with so many social networks providing their own individual content sharing and follow buttons, it's often difficult to know which social media button to use for what purpose.

To address this, we've put together a comprehensive guide to help you understand the differences between the share and follow buttons for six of the biggest social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest), as well as how to implement them on your website, blog, and other content....

There are only six things that you want a business website to do:

1. get found

2. natural search

3. answer questions

4. bring in enquiries

5. get prospects to reveal their identity

6. showcase expertise.

What this means is that an effective website should be shortcutting the amount of time it takes to get a new customer. Three tests to do now.

So how can you tell if your current website is performing? Here are 3 tests you can run which are free and will take you around five minutes to do...

What if you wanted to place text or an arrow on your Facebook cover photo without it getting covered by the profile photo? And what about the shared link thumbnails on Facebook or in-stream photos on Twitter ... how big should those be?

If you're looking for a detailed guide to social media photo sizes -- including recommended dimensions, minimum and maximum dimensions, image scale, and more -- then this is it. 

The infographic below from Jamie Spencer of MakeAWebsiteHub.com is a great reference to bookmark or keep close-at-hand the next time you're creating an image for your social media profile. 

Tired of chasing down sizes for images in your financial institution’s social media channels? Here’s everything you need for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Linkedin.

Whether it’s a brand promotion, video, news update or even a meme, visual content rules the social media landscape. What has become so important is effectively conveying your brand on social media through images and video.
In this quick-scroll world of social media, the visual face of your brand is often times the first thing your audience sees and possibly the one thing they remember. It’s hard to cut and paste an image and reuse it across all of your social networks unless you have a tool like Landscape.

Sprout Social’s very own tool is free to use to resize, crop and scale social media image sizes. And along with our resizing tool, we’ve provided all the specific dimensions and a few quick tips to help you decide which image best fits each position....

I moved five times in the last year. And every single time I moved, I forgot to sign up to have my mail forwarded to my new address.

Mail forwarding is an important step in any moving process, as it ensures you don't lose any valuable information that's sent to you. And the same can be said for your website: If you're moving a website from one URL to another, you need to take the necessary steps to ensure your visitors get sent to the right place. In the world of tech, this is called a 301 redirect.

A 301 redirect is key to maintaining a website's domain authority and search rankings when the site's URL is changed for any reason. It easily sends visitors and search engines to a different URL than the one they originally requested -- without having to actually type in a different URL....

It’s an easy mistake to make.

You slap some words on your About page, wrench them apart, shovel in a bit fluff, a pinch of jargon; and give it no more thought. Because it’s not that important, right?

Not exactly.

You see, this is where so many of us get it wrong, and leak piles of cash in the process. Even though we may pay it less attention, our About page is one of our most visited - which makes it low-hanging fruit, just waiting to be plucked.

By which I mean, if your visitors aren’t captivated, bewitched, mesmerized or just plain hungry-for-more after reading your About page, you can grab yourself a hanky and wave them goodbye.

In other words, you just lost a sale.

Because your About page isn’t just about painstakingly-crafted words that make you look good. Your About page is like speed dating

Let me explain.

When it comes to your welcome page design, there are many patterns to choose from. You can launch your new users into a product tour, or create a personalized experience. You can have them populate their feed with relevant content or do something entirely unique.

Whatever your pattern, your user onboarding starts with your welcome message. Here are 12 design tips to optimize your welcome page