Insight, advice, news and chit chat

What's new and useful in digital marketing social media and technology - September 2014

Changes happen so quickly in our industry – the industry of marketing, social media and technology. New tools and apps keep being launched, add ons and upgrades, social media networks changing their minds all the time, new stats and insights, and social media success and failure stories for brands big and small.
Today, in light of our latest newsletter theme which is “changes are afoot”  – we will start with three (always a good number) which I believe are immensely relevant, helpful and useful.
I have a social media tip, a tool we use for task management at TLD, and a new way to think about your website. I hope you find these things as useful as I do!

Twitter Analytics Dashboard

Twitter Analytics Dashboard - now accessible to all - analytics.twitter.com
Twitter has allowed access for all users to its Twitter analytics dashboard. Well – not all – but nearly all. If your account is 14 days old and isn’t a private account, and you haven’t had the account suspended, then you can use it.
This gives amazing insight into the engagement and reach of your tweets. From this data you can learn which types of tweets will work best for you. You can also check the comparison of your current activity results with previous weeks. It’s free to use and just looking at it will not only give you useful insight but motivate you to continue and improving. Try it and you will see what I mean.
Access the Twitter Analytics Dashboard here (you will need to login to your Twitter account)

Trello for organising your life and your business

Trello - amazing collaborative organising and, task management and project management tool
I can honestly say, right now, that I am running my business largely using Trello. It’s been a few months since we started to be actively using it, thanks to a tip from Al Cattel. Each member of the team has a Trello board, and we put in all our projects and tasks into different “cards”. When a task is done, we move it to “done” (very satisfying!). Boards are shared so other team members can assign tasks. We can include images, documents and deadlines – and checklists to break down projects into steps. It’s been so useful, especially now that each member is using it. I really encourage you to try it out – first by using it for your own tasks, and then with shared boards for you to use with people you work with and collaborate with. It’s a simple tool with huge capacity for use – and it is so adaptable. For more see this very thorough review on Trello and for ideas, take the Trello tour

Sideways surfing – and how people are skipping your homepage!

Sideways Surfing - website browsing trend
Studies are showing that the amount of people arriving at your site via the homepage is dropping significantly. Because of content marketing and social sharing, many people will be arriving at your site via links from social media sites and via Google searches that come up with OTHER pages that are listed – especially blog posts. Makes sense. It’s known as “sideways surfing” which may be a phrase coined by Robert Algeri in this post.
Now, we at TLD like to start designing websites with the homepage – as it sets the look and feel, the style, the positioning of consistent elements like the navigation, header, and footer. However, each page in your site is important – and this trend highlights the importance of design, calls to action, branding and cross-linking on all pages and posts on your site. This is why we take care and attention on inner pages and not just homepage designs.

Changes are always happening

I am constantly learning about and testing new tools, trends, and insights. I have deliberately kept the above to three items as I want to ensure this post is ultimately useful to you, and haivng too many things to try and test can be overwhelming, Would love to know which of the above you try, and what you think, so, let me know. And be sure to read my other post about 6 digital marketing truths you should be aware of, even if you ignore the rest.
Surfing image from Michael Dawes (Flickr)

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