I've been resting at home, well rolling would be more descriptive - after eating my way all through the Christmas break and New Year break. I hope you're all well rested and ready and raring for another year. Here's some of what you may have missed over the last month in the lead up to Christmas. I hope to see / speak to you later this month.
Let's get started:
2023 has arrived, so let's start off fresh shall we? I won't lie to you, I do neglect the updating a little bit too much but its something that has been on my mind recently. Every six months or so I update and make sure pictures, About's and bios are still correct and relevant. With this post from Search Engine Journal it's about the small things that we ALL neglect, so have a cuppa and read this with me and let's un-boring our socials.
What a fabulous tool to be given by Instagram this last month. If you're wondering if your reach has been reduced or if you're shadow banned then you can now check your account status in the actual app. I checked mine and all is good. It's very handy and will help your better understand the best practices going forward. Read about this and check yours today.
We've had LinkedIn Newsletters for a while but its now been rolled out to everyone and subscription has been made a whole lot easier! Now they've added Product Pages as well, which kinda follows as we've had the Services page for a while too at this stage. Finally they have added a Competitor Analytics page that you might just find handy too. Check out the full blog here for details.
On the 18th of December Elon put up a tweet poll asking if he should step down from Twitter as CEO, conversely 24 hours later 57% said he should. Even if he did he will still be heavily involved. The monetary investment alone means he's not likely to really ever walk away from it but personally I think he should. He was making such a difference to the space race, finding new technologies to improve things and devoting hours and hours to the Mars mission. That seems to all have fallen by the wayside for months now. It's January now and there's no sign of him leaving, guess he never meant it?
It seems that Elon will still be asking people to pay for their Blue Tick. Its so changeable right now that when I press the button to send this out today I'm still not sure if this is accurate but lets say he has to get his money back some how. Have a read of this.
The blogging though. To me the certain attraction of Twitter was the actual short form of it. I was aghast when it doubled. I'm sure you can imagine my horror when this update happened. Then there was all that kerfuffle about Twitter not allowing links to other socials half way through December. So I guess that will have some impact. So if you can't send your viewer / customer to another website, you'll have to let them read what you mean right on Twitter correct? Either way I think there might be a bit of a backlash on using it like that. Then it'll belike every other social media platform and its really not what made it so great before. What are your thoughts on this?
A nifty little tool to remove the the TikTok branding on your videos. Check out snaptik.
Just before Christmas Mari Smith asked a question on her page about what platforms people were going to be putting emphasis on in 2023 and many, many, many people talked about the ones that had video content at its premium. She agreed it was important, very actually but cautioned throwing all your eggs into one basket. She said to have at least a "presence" on Facebook and Instagram. Even Mari knows the algorithm sucks on the platforms (especially Facebook) but some of your audience will go to look for you on those platforms and if they don't find you, won't bother looking further.
I do agree with this premise and although it is very hard to manage several platforms at once, remember you can repurpose in so many ways these days.
It's finally happened - access to the GBP through the 9 buttons in the top right hand corner of a Google search page has now gone. Now you can ONLY update in Maps and in search. I miss is already! The functionality is still there though and if you can teach me something new, you can do it too!
This new version is now referred to as the Google NMX or New Merchant Experience. Although it is a very different display it still has a lot of the things we like and love about GBP. I personally have grown quite fond of it quite quickly. Check out this blog for the further updates.
I will have to make an admission here. My eyes tend to glaze over when it comes to Google Analytics, because in my head it's just so "techy", but GA4 is so different I am having to force meself to get the hang of this! I shared this blog with my website developer and bless them, they got very excited.
Getting reports on your landing pages previously was a heavily involved affair of multiple clicks and a lot of work afterwards. Now this has been streamlined and essentially automated. This means you have even faster ways to see what is and isn't working on your website and takes a lot of the hard work of investigating out of the wheel house of the developer. So do you best to get your head around this, this will only serve to help you both!
YouTube Community Posts Upgrade by Amanda Webb, Spiderworking (video)
How do You Know by Carmel Seery
Writing in Our Clients Tone of Voice by Louise Brogan
If you're looking for a more one on one style of training to create a strategy for your social media and overall digital marketing and would like to know how to do this by yourself for your own business or for the company you work for, then you maybe interested in doing this training that I offer.
I help you create it at a pace you set, filling in the gaps in your knowledge along the way. You'll be given work to do between the sessions that you can manage and that won't be overly disruptive to your everyday workload.
This will give you accountability and you can contact me anytime during the training if you have any questions that crop up between sessions.
Are you on track for your goals and targets so far? If not, then maybe you should contact me. I have set aside some regular time slots to offer this training and it can run either in 1 month, 6 weeks or even 12 weeks if you prefer! I can give you the dates to fit around both our schedules from day one so you know this in advance. If you would like to learn more about what this covers, then visit this page.
This course has been currently accepted by 5 Local Enterprise Office Areas as suitable for the Trading Online Voucher but you can also get this training directly. Check out all the lovely testimonials I have received regarding this course.
From January 2023 I am running a monthly subscription of 30 minute per week Business Strategy Pods. These pods are one on one and are strategy and accountability weekly sessions that are pre booked by you at times that work around your own schedule.
You will first complete a pre qualifying form so I know where you're starting from and we shall then speak weekly and have a private 1:1 Facebook Group that keeps you pushing forward and getting stuff done.
How they work:
What do you need help with? Creating Goals, starting or finishing a project, creating an event, writing a book, marketing?
Book weekly dates for the next month that we can talk straight into my calendar.
Pay the monthly fee - visit the webpage
You will then receive an email from me with a link to the Facebook group and we shall meet either in person at my office if you're local or via zoom, the choice is yours.
Podcast 153 - Stop Advertising to Save Money
Podcast 154 - Managing Yours and Your Customers Expectations
Podcast 155 - Leveraging your Business with Fabienne Fredrickson
Podcast 156 - Good, Fast or Cheap - Choose Two
It's been a mad whirlwind of updates these past 12 months. Let's hope I can keep you up to date with the next load over the year. Be sure to subscribe to my email list and get updates, blogs, the odd discount code and more useful things to keep you and your marketing on track
I hope you find this useful and look forward to bringing you more updates in a few weeks time. If you need anything, don't hesitate to contact me.
Working with clients Nationwide from base in Mullingar.
