The Perfect Tweet

A formula for making those 140 characters count

By: Mira Shenker 

While many a post has been devoted to this subject, what makes people click through to your content from Twitter is still up for debate. It's never going to be a perfect science, but there are ways to increase the chances that your 140-character nuggets will draw people to your website.

Neomobile has created an infographic showing the best construction for a tweet. Most of the advice has been given before (keep it to 100 characters, don't overuse hashtags) but it's useful to see it all in one place. Order matters, and this formula has every tweet starting with a call to action and ending with the URL.  Follow that last piece of advice with caution: placing the URL at the end of a tweet looks neater, but it also means that's the first thing to get cut off if someone adds their own commentary when they retweet you.

10 Ways to Add Pinterest to Your Marketing Strategy (Infographic)

BY Karen Leland

 Pinterest may be the third largest social media site after Facebook and Twitter, but it's still a relative newcomer to the scene. Businesses are actively searching to create boards and pins that inspire customers and promote their brands. From integrating with other social media to pin placement to image creation, there is a learning curve for many companies getting started on Pinterest.

The infographic below, from my new book, Ultimate Guide To Pinterest For Business (Entrepreneur Press, 2013) provides the 10 best ways to promote your business using Pinterest:

Which Ecommerce Platform Is Right For Me? [Infographic]

by Eric Lyday

For today’s infographic, we have some info on the world of ecommerce. What is ecommerce you say? Well, essentially it’s the method by which you choose to sell your junk on the internet (aside from ebay and craigslist). Sites like Ebay and Craigslist are ecommerce strategies, but the following platforms will give you the resources to build and manage an online store of your very own. There are many possible platforms for you to choose from, but here Brightpearl compares three of the biggest names. They have their own pros and cons, depending on your tech-savviness or payment preference. Magento seems to be the most customizable due to it being an open-source platform. Bigcommerce and Shopify on the other hand will box you into prebuilt features. As far as the differences in payment for these various platforms is concerned, Bigcommerce requires an all-in cost, while Shopify lets you have a lower starting cost and then pay as you use add-ons later. Also, it should be noted that if you also use ebay, amazon, or another store, you should invest in a central management system so that the various branches of your business may be more manageable.

All in all, despite this infographic’s confusing nature (needs some arrows and a typo/grammar edit) it is quite useful for figuring out how to start your online business off on the right foot.

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Commanding your business' social media

As social media has grown in importance, some businesses have committed substantial resources to create their own listening centre to give them a wide and detailed view of the social media landscape.

A new infographic from BeingYourBrand will make interesting reading if your corporation is planning its own social media centre at the moment.

Picking several businesses that have well-established social media centres the infographic makes it clear that one size doesn’t fit all. It’s vital that your business clearly assess what insight your command centre will be required to give about the social media landscape your company is part of. Only then will you be able to build the tools that are needed to track the vast quantities of data available, and of course make commercial sense out of these touchpoints.

A social media obsession

If your business has an inkling that its customers are social media obsessives, your hunch is correct. New research from Experian has revealed that UK consumers spend nearly a quarter of each hour on their social networks. In the US this figure is slightly higher at 16 minutes, but UK social media users are more likely to buy goods and services during these sessions.

James Murray, Digital Marketing Manager at Experian Marketing Services commented: “The online landscape is constantly changing and we’ve seen some pretty dramatic shifts in consumer behaviour across different geographic regions and in the various vertical markets. Consumers are changing the way they interact online and the rise of 3G and now 4G mobile internet access means more visits are being made on the move, particularly in social and email.

“As brands become increasingly global entities it’s more important than ever to understand the differences between regional online behaviours so that marketing campaigns can be tailored for better and more effective brand engagement.”

Is Pinterest the new Facebook for marketers?

A new infographic from BloomReach puts a shot across the bows of Facebook by claiming that for marketers looking for good ROI, Pinterest is clearly the platform to be exploiting now. This certainly seems to be the case with corporations stating that they intend to increase their marketing spending over the next five years from their current 8% to a whopping 21%.

What is interesting is that the research that BloomReach have carried out shows that more Pinterest users are ready to buy when perusing the site. Also, when a brand moves from simply building its number of followers – which Facebook is clearly the leader at here – moving to more targeted marketing on networks like Pinterest pays dividends as 22% more traffic on Pinterest converts than on Facebook.