Case Study: A Website for Coastal Maine Getaways

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Case Study: A Website for Coastal Maine Getaways

Coastal Maine Getaways was a great opportunity to start a website from scratch. Lindsey, the owner, had been managing vacation rental properties for some time, but hadn’t yet named her company and had only advertised her listings on VRBO (Vacation Rentals By Owner). It was working fairly well for her, but she wanted more control over her web presence, including the name of the company, SEO (search engine optimization), and the ability to add and highlight more options than VRBO allowed.

Lindsey engaged me to do some market research and to eventually design and populate the site.

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Hootsuite: Social Media Management Lifesaver

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Hootsuite: Social Media Management Lifesaver

For non-profit and small business staff juggling multiple social networks, Hootsuite is a lifesaver.

If you’re not familiar with the social media management tool, here’s the run-down: Hootsuite allows you to manage most of your social networks in one place.

Like a web browser, you can set up one tab per network, so you can toggle between, say, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.

Within each tab/network, you can monitor a home screen (feed, wall, etc.), your own sent and scheduled messages, and searches and mentions of your brand or specific keywords.

Furthermore, you can create and schedule messages, on one or many networks, with features like shortened links, images, location tagging, and more.

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3 Steps to Creating a Social Media Will

Posted by On Filed under Marketing, Pause for Reflection
3 Steps to Creating a Social Media Will

Several friends have passed away over the last few years. For months after their passing, Facebook still told me whether or not they were online. Google+ suggested I add them to my circles. And Twitter suggested I invite them to join.

Most disturbing of all were the Facebook reminders. Birthdays were the most shocking: being asked to wish someone a happy birthday, months after their passing, with their smiling face or familiar profile picture popping up in my feed all day.

This got me to thinking about what was happening with their account and started my research social media wills. Yes, it’s that kind of will: a way to protect and even pass on your (digital) property after your passing.

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Tracking Campaigns, for Non-Profits and Small Businesses

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Tracking Campaigns, for Non-Profits and Small Businesses

Within Google Analytics, non-profits and small businesses can track where website traffic is coming from in several different ways. For example, you can track referrals or Adwords through the acquisition tab.

But what if you’re running a campaign and you want to track how it’s performing across channels? For example, how do you track a holiday message as it performs on social media versus your e-newsletter versus digital ads?

That’s when you need Google’s URL builder.

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Non-Profits and Facebook Audiences

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Non-Profits and Facebook Audiences

No one has been exempt from Facebook’s “curation” of our News Feeds. At any given time, you’re seeing 1/10th of the posts from all of the pages and friends you’ve liked, possibly even less.

As a non-profit (or small business) marketer, you’ve seen the flip side of this coin: your Facebook posts are going out to 20%, 10%, 3% or even less of your Facebook fan base.

If you’re on top of all the changes, you’ve improved your game by:

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Why LinkedIn “Skills” Are Useless – and What LinkedIn Can Do About It

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Why LinkedIn “Skills” Are Useless – and What LinkedIn Can Do About It

LinkedIn makes it very easy to add new skills to your professional profile – and this is what makes this section of the site irrelevant.

As of today, I have 11 skills for which colleagues have endorsed me. By clicking “Add to Profile,” these words will quickly appear on my profile and position me as an expert in Facebook, WordPress, Teaching, Research and more.

Facebook? Yes, I’m a pro. WordPress? Yes, I’m very good at that too. Teaching?  Well, I’ve run some good workshops and I enjoy mentoring, but I dislike most forms of “teaching” and wouldn’t use that word to describe my skills. Research?  Hmm, I like to learn and I Google a heck of a lot of stuff every day. Does that make me skilled at research?

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Social Media Image Sizing Cheat Sheet

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Social Media Image Sizing Cheat Sheet

Properly sizing a social media image, whether a Facebook cover, Twitter profile photo, or custom YouTube thumbnail, can be the bane of any marketers existence.

Just looking at this infographic and all of the details that go into properly imaging social media accounts makes my head hurt.

But thanks to this cheat sheet from LunaMetrics, I’ve got a quick and handy reference:

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