Digital Marketing Power

Hashtags can be a powerful communication tool for businesses. Rupert Staines, European MD at RadiumOne offers seven best practice tips on getting them right.

The social media boom showed no signs of relenting last year and with that exponential growth came the wider use of hashtags by businesses and consumers. In fact the American Dialect Society crowned ‘hashtag’ as the word of the year and the French government’s General Commission for Terminology and Neology have issued a recommendation that French social media users should shun the term in favour of a French alternative due to how widely used it has become in the country. Whichever way you look at it, the hashtag revolution is certainly causing quite a stir globally and has become one of the most popular and recognisable phrases – with one couple even naming their child Hashtag. Although I wouldn’t recommend this, hashtags are clearly worth keeping on top of, so here are some tips to help marketers effectively use them to benefit their business

Social media marketing provides the ability for companies to build strong, lasting relationships with their target markets. The key to developing relationships is engaging in compelling conversations, and one of the fundamentals of being an excellent conversationalist is good listening skills. Twitter and Facebook, the most notable social media marketing outlets, are ideal platforms for listening.

Social media is part of our everyday life and we enjoy the conversation and the friendships that we develop everyday. You can find people blogging or sharing songs, pictures and links on Facebook and Google plus but you will find them sharing more on Twitter.

Even though the site has been in existence for over 5 years now, there are a lot of people who still don’t understand those who are addicted to the microblogging platform. Here are some reasons to love Twitter...

.Marketers are not typical consumers: They're more likely than other online consumers to explore new digital environments, own a smartphone, and use various digital media frequently. Consequently, marketers can lose touch with the people they're trying to reach, according to a study by ExactTarget.

Below, additional findings from ExactTarget's new "Subscribers, Fans, and Followers" study titled "Marketers From Mars," which polled online consumers and marketers about their use of digital media.

Can brands bridge the physical and digital divide and establish deeper connections with their social media fans and followers? This post suggests a few ways it can be done.

Small business on a tight budget looking to promote their business in 2013 might want to consider making this the year they start tweeting.

eMarketer projects Twitter to expand to 36.3 million monthly U.S. users in 2013, up from 31.8 million in 2012.

Twitter can be a great way to drive traffic to your website. Twitter is free to use and if done properly, tweeting can be a powerful tool in helping your site get found while raising your rankings on search engine results pages.

One of the quickest and easiest viral campaigns you can start right away that can increase your SEO rankings is to start a Twitter petition.

Here are 48 online marketing stats - each one with a bite-sized Tweetable link. Share them easily on Twitter and look like an online marketing smartypants.

So, you added social buttons to the header of your website, next to your other contact information. Now you think you’re socially integrated. We hate to break it to you, but that’s not integration. There’s no appeal to your visitors to click those buttons. You have to encourage your visitors to interact with you socially and make social media part of the user experience of your website. Twitter has created several simple and quick ways to integrate with your website and enrich user experience, and each method has a proven track record of success.