Important Tips for Sharing Content on Social Media

According to U.S. copyright law, it is illegal to publish someone else’s work on your website or blog without their permission. It doesn’t matter if you give proper attribution and link to them. If the artist or writer never gave you their permission, then it is theft.

Content Theft On Websites Vs Social Media

Now, that’s how it works when it comes to scraping text or copying photos, cartoons and videos off other people’s websites and publishing them on your own. But when it comes to sharing on social media, things are a little different.

Sharing someone else’s work is very different from stealing it. You don’t have to look very far on social media to find users who will copy someone else’s images, erase their signature or watermark from the images and then share them as if they themselves had created them. That is theft, and if you do that sort of thing, you will eventually get reported and have your account shut down.

Social Media Sharing: Best Practices

To protect yourself from crossing the line into copyright infringement and content theft, there are a couple of simple steps you should take before copying and sharing someone else’s art, photography or writing on social media.

First, look over the person’s profile to see if they specifically request that people not share their work without permission. Remember, many of these creators are making a living from their work, so they are losing money when people share their work without permission or without attribution. So if they specifically ask not to share, then don’t share without their permission.

Most content creators and influencers will be happy to have their work shared with attribution – that’s why they’re posting their work on social media in the first place. But it doesn’t hurt to check their profiles first. And ALWAYS ask for permission before posting.

Second, when you do share, always tag the writer or artist or account from which you took the content. This is just good etiquette and common courtesy. But don’t just tag them in the photo. Instead, tag them in the caption or text so that your followers will see the tag and click through to see more from that creator.

Many content creators love shout-outs like this to grow their business. So if you enjoy their work and want to support them, then be sure to give attribution in a way that will send more people to their page. But, do be careful not to share from the same person over and over. There’s a fine line between sharing content and scraping/stealing.

Ready to outsource your digital marketing? Top Tier Media provides a full range of social media marketing and influencer outreach services. Contact us today to find out more.

Top 14 Instagram Apps for Bloggers and Social Media Marketers

Tips for Optimizing Pinterest Photos

We know that you want to receive as much traffic as possible when you write a blog post. Unfortunately, you may be missing some of that traffic and interested visitors if you aren’t paying attention to the important factors of correctly placing images on your website. Fortunately, we are here to help you and can offer some tips on optimizing blog photos for visually-oriented social sites like Pinterest.

Use Text on Your Images

Sites like Pinterest can be helpful when a person is searching for home interior ideas, crafts or recipes. Let’s say that you are a food blogger, and you have a delicious chicken Marsala recipe that you want to share with other people. It does take extra time, but you should be sure to add text onto your images. If you have a picture of chicken Marsala, pull up a fun font on your image editor and watermark your picture with the words, “Tasty Chicken Marsala.” This will catch someone’s eye when they’re browsing images and increase the chances of them visiting your website. You may also want to include your logo or website URL so people can find your site easily. You may also want to use longer, portrait-style photos rather than horizontal images. Putting your text toward the top of the image can also help get clicks and saves.

Use Keywords In the URL

The next tip is to use the main keywords of your post in the URL. On most content management systems such as WordPress or at blog creating websites, this can automatically be done when you have the settings take your post title and use it in the URL. Your URL should look something like this,”http://www.yourfoodblog.com/recipes/tasty-chicken-marsala-recipe/.

Title Your Image With Keywords

We’re pretty sure that taking these next two tips and incorporating them into your arsenal will help boost your traffic and increase visitors. We would also bet that many bloggers fail to use these techniques, and this may help put you above your competition. Be sure to use descriptive keywords when you title your image files. If you use something like, “tasty chicken marsala.jpg” and not,” image356.jpg,” it will help boost your images in search engine results.

Don’t Forget to Use Alt Text Correctly

Here’s a golden tip on why you should make sure that your alt text for each image is descriptive. Did you know that Pinterest takes the words from an image’s alt text description and places them automatically into their pin description? By using “tasty chicken Marsala” in the alt text area of your image, you are automatically giving a Pinterest user the description for their pin. This top tip will definitely help pop your images to a highly visible area when someone is searching for specific keywords.

What tips do you have to share? What has worked for you?

How customer service can increase word of mouth marketing

Today’s business management focuses greatly on the customer experience to enhance revenue. You can be on every social platform, have a great marketing campaign and garner plenty of positive product placement in print and broadcast, but if your customer service is severely lacking, then all of that effort could be mute.

In terms of cost and efficacy, word of mouth (WOM) marketing yields the most profound results for companies across a bevy of sectors. At the same time, a negative customer experience expressed through WOM can affect the organization greatly as well. Nevertheless, positive word of mouth can be fostered by great customer service, as it reduces the marketing expenses of a brand. Many marketing executives have elected to nurture this approach given its impactful outcomes.

Marketing executives ask a range of questions to determine the WOM approach that best serves the needs of their organization. Questions such as what is the percentage of customers attracted to your service through personal referrals and is the customer service experience being translated via social media? Is great customer service translating into positive WOM messaging online and off?

Survey results have found that 20 to 75 percent of new customers to a business come through personal referrals due to a positive shopping experience.

In 2012, according to the president of the Cheesecake Factory restaurant chain, WOM enabled the company to spend 25 percent less than the competition in its industry because of the impact of WOM marketing.

Moreover, in evaluating the efficacy of WOM, brands weigh questions such as, what is the nature of word of mouth generated (whether it is negative or positive)? How predictive is word of mouth in terms of driving sales?

If brands are able to convert twenty percent of their dissatisfied customers to ten percent, they can transform the impact of WOM on their organizations. For instance, a customer service center that provides routine service for a company has the capacity to generate three hundred new customers per week if only one out of every 30 of the 10,000 positive referrals in a new customer sampling are leveraged correctly.

Ironically, many brand executives, when asked whether customer service is considered part of the overall brand marketing initiative, are perplexed as they still devote much of their resources to more traditional advertising.

At Top Tier Media, we live and breathe social media and know that exemplary customer service shown in the social media space is vitally important to the bottom line.

Where does customer service rank for you in your social media strategy?

4 Reasons to Choose a Social Media Marketing Agency

Every business needs a social media marketing plan. Social media helps companies build brand recognition, convert casual fans to diehard advocates, and keep an eye on their reputation. It can be a great way for small businesses to grow very quickly, but many business owners run into the following roadblocks.

1. There aren’t enough hours in the day.

Many professionals cannot send tweets and update their statuses on top of everything else they have to do in a day. They may want to add social media to the mix, but they need to focus on the things they already do that have a positive, measurable impact on the bottom line.

2. You don’t have time to keep up with “the next big thing.”

When researching social media marketing techniques online, it quickly becomes obvious that there is a lot to learn.

* Which platforms are right for your customers?
* How can you engage followers?
* What is the right message and frequency for your audience?
* Where should you look for useful metrics?
* When can you expect to see measurable results?

Someone who has already invested considerable time and effort in learning a skill can appreciate that although a social media education might be a worthy goal in today’s world, it probably is not worth investing in a new course of study. Social media is a dynamic industry that requires experts to update their skills continuously. A social media agency has these experts on hand at all times.

3. You don’t have established networks.

A social media agency also has the benefit of extensive networks across many platforms and different audiences. When working with a new client, an agency can promote to these networks and draw some of the followers over to the new venture.

4. You’re too close to the campaign or product.

Oddly enough, a professional may be too close to a social media campaign to appropriately evaluate its merit. Social media marketing is an art form. First time efforts often fail when someone cannot assess what works and what does not without getting defensive. Even worse, some campaigns end just as they begin to find success, because those managing the campaign did not know how to measure and prove true social media success.

A social media consultant not only knows what works and what does not, but also includes scientific evidence in the form of analytics data when determining the success of a campaign. Like all true marketing professionals, social media experts adjust campaigns according to what works and what does not, rather than feeding anyone’s creative ego.

Seek social media guidance

You have enough to do maintaining your business and staying on top of changes in your field of expertise. Trust an expert to manage your social media presence so you can project your professional image across all platforms.

How to Credit Bloggers for Their Images

In this day and age it is so easy to do a quick Google search to find the perfect image for a blog post or advertorial. This is, in fact, what many people do to find compelling content. But they’re missing the critical step – crediting the original source for the image.

Contrary to popular belief, Google images, Flickr, Tumblr and Pinterest are not original sources for images. Many times, those sites lose the information on the original content creator, which is sad, especially when it’s a compelling image. So you must take another step to find the original author if you find images by those means. You want to follow the image back to the blog or site it originated from to credit that blogger or photographer. To find the original image source, upload the image to http://images.google.com. The original source will usually be the first or second link listed.

When you are a blogger and you spend hours on your blog creating images, you don’t want someone taking those images and using them without proper credit. To give proper credit, it’s as simple as the following:

Image: Sugarpill Minty Blues eyeshadow via Phyrra

If the text can be hyperlinked (if you’re posting on a website), you want to hyperlink the blog name with the URL for the creator to give them proper credit.

If it’s for Facebook, Instagram or Twitter be sure to tag the influencer or blogger:

Source: @Phyrra

All images are copyright to the photographer that took the images, unless that photographer signs away those rights. So typically, you need to have permission to use that image, unless they have licensed their work for Creative Commons. Most bloggers are happy to have their images used with proper credit. If you’re ever in doubt, just ask! And if a blogger asks you to take down an image, you should do so immediately to avoid a lawsuit.

5 Ways to Tell if Social Media is Working for Your Brand

In the competitive world of the beauty business, beauty brands want to make sure that their social media campaigns are working for them. While some brands expect a direct increase in sales, this increase is sometimes one of the last ways to tell if a social media campaign is working. So until your beauty brand does start to see an increase in sales, how can you measure that your social media campaign is even doing its job?

Here’s how:

New fans – Keep in mind that the primary purpose of having a fan page on Facebook or Twitter is to build an online community for your beauty brand. Think of your brand’s Facebook page as an online hub for customer service, brand awareness and direct fan engagement. Tracking an increase in new fans over a period of time is a great indicator that people want to be involved in your online community. If you are posting relevant and useful content, responding to fan questions/concerns and actively engaging fans with contest, trivia and more – you should always be seeing a steady increase in fans.

More visitors – Similarly to seeing an increase in new fans over time, an increase in visitor traffic to a beauty brand’s website and/or blog is a great indicator that existing customers or even potential customers are interested in your brand. What to do if you start seeing a lull in web traffic instead of growth? Make sure that you are still driving traffic from all of your social media platforms on a consistent basis. While you should always focus of posting relevant content to build your community, you always want to be linking social media posts back to your websites.

Comments and shares – A simple ratio suggests that an increase in fan engagement usually begins after an increase in fans. While fan engagement may naturally increase due to an increase in page fans, you want to also make sure that you are posting content that is engagement-worthy! Are you hosting contests and giveaways? Are you increasing buzz about your beauty brand by offering free samples? Are you asking questions and are you genuinely interested in your community feedback? Continue experimenting with different types of engagement until you get a feel for what your community wants and is looking for from your brand.

Building new relationships – Whether you are building relationships with the beauty bloggers reviewing your brand or other beauty brands in a similar niche as yours, you’ll know your are building your online community right if you are getting to know more people than you did before. Online communities should always be open to RTs, positive commenting and engaging with other beauty brands because it does less harm than good. It doesn’t mean you are promoting another brand, it simply means that you are establishing your own part in an even bigger online beauty community!

Sales – Ah yes, an increase in sales. While it’s hard to measure a direct increase in sales from social media unless there’s a specific campaign (specifying to mention Facebook, Twitter etc.), you will also want to know if social media, on its own, can be responsible for an increase in sales. If you remain consistent in efforts to build a lively and knowledgeable online community, you’ll increase the probability that a potential customer will select your beauty brand by simply being involved and being aware of your brand by being in the online community you’ve worked so hard to build. Remember, it often takes 7 points of contact before a customer is ready to buy. So increase the frequency by staying active on all social media channels.

Naturally, this has caught the attention of marketers worldwide and has once again shifted the mindset of social media marketing. Intermingling with personal boards of mothers keeping crafting or dinner ideas organized are businesses and brands maximizing their marketing opportunities on Pinterest. Since Pinterest is based on the forwarding of visual images, keywords begin to play a different part in order for a product, blog or business to successfully stand out.

According to 2012 statistics, around 68% of all Pinterest users are women. Knowing that women are a majority of Pinterest users, should say something to marketers on how to better attract users to their pins. For example, even men’s products can be pinned by a high number of Pinterest users if the wording attached to a pin is enticing to a female user as well.

80% of all pins are also re-pins, which speaks volumes of the amount of content that is originally pinned versus content that is being forwarded by users. Images inking back to your website is what makes Pinterest so useful for marketers. To make sure your business, blog or product is getting the most out of Pinterest, always make sure to label your pictures with company names, names of products or websites so that pictures (pins) will always link back to your brand.

Hashtags are equally important when it comes to helping users find your pins. Hashtags (#fashion or #beauty for example) can maximize the opportunity for your pin to be found by hundreds of users who may not be following your boards

While Facebook gains new fans with content shares and friend endorsements (every like is seen by an average of 130 Facebook fans), Pinterest allows users to bring in new followers that might not have found your website otherwise. For example, if you were a small hardware store owner, pinning and linking back pictures of new lawnmowers in the summertime might only bring your website partial traffic. Whereas if the store owner got creative and started pinning pictures of inspirational quotes about hard work, articles about home repair or BBQ recipe ideas, the store owner is them maximizing his opportunities to get a wide range of potential new customers. On Pinterest, diversity of boards is always better.

Just like Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest has peak times when users are researched to be more active. Pinterest users are generally more active during the “coffee hours” between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m., the lunch hour between noon and 1 p.m. and the hours before and during dinner, between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m.

With a little creativity, using relevant keywords and hashtags and finding a way to always link back to your brand, Pinterest can become a great asset for web traffic and a powerful social media marketing tool for any brand or organization.