5 More Annoying Social Media Behaviors

In posts earlier this year, I talked about mistakes you can make on social media that were specific to Facebook and Twitter.
Here are five more annoying behaviors that would be a mistake to make when you're trying to develop relationships and build trust on social media. These are not specific to any one social network but can be applied to them all.

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Busting 3 Facebook Myths

Social media is surrounded by many myths. Facebook, the largest social network with more than 1 billion users, is no exception. Here are a few of the biggest Facebook myths.

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Why Buying Followers is a Waste of Money

When agents begin marketing their agency via social media, they tend to focus on the quantity of likes and followers as opposed to the quality of those likes and follows. You’ll see advertisements all over the web trying to sell you “real” followers and likes for anywhere from $5 to $200 depending on how many you purchase. But 2,000 spambots and fake accounts (by the way, they're never real followers) do not make a successful social media presence. Basically, all buying follows and likes will do is make your page seem more popular than it is. It’s like paying to sit at the popular kids’ table at lunch.

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Marketing Tips for LinkedIn

The third social network of what many consider to be the big three, LinkedIn may not be as popular as Facebook or Twitter, but it has its own niche as the social network for business.
Because it is for business, how you use LinkedIn will differ slightly from how you might use Facebook or Twitter. If you're looking for ways to use LinkedIn to market your agency, there are several things you should be doing that will impact your marketing results from LinkedIn.

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Inbound Marketing vs Outbound Marketing

 Marketing is changing. Now, I know that’s easy to say, but every day there are more and more studies done on the two different types of marketing. Some people refer to these two types as “new age marketing” and “old marketing.” The proper terms are inbound marketing and outbound marketing.

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What is Facebook EdgeRank?

The first thing that someone sees when they log into Facebook is the newsfeed. The newsfeed is compiled of status updates, photos, RSVPs, and many other things. You might think that the newsfeed just updates the most recent posts from all of your friends, pages you like, and promoted ads and pages. Instead, Facebook calls every action that happens an “Edge.” Whenever someone posts a status update, tags a photo, etc., they generate an Edge. Facebook decided to create an algorithm to predict how interesting each story will be to each user. EdgeRank ranks each Edge that is connected to each user and decides how high on his or her newsfeed it should be displayed.

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Why You Should Inventory Your Digital Agency Marketing

Once a year you should take an inventory of your digital marketing resources, assets, and anything else you use to connect with your customers online. This inventory will help you determine what works for your agency, what doesn't and what areas may need more attention and effort to get it working the way it should. The more complete your inventory, the better you will be able to understand your resources and make strategic decisions about your digital agency marketing.

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A Hit Parade of Twitter Mistakes

If you're new to using social media for business and still trying to figure out how Twitter works, you can easily end up spending too much time on the social network. It's also easy to make mistakes that could cost you followers.
To help you avoid the awkward learning phase and start building a Twitter following, I've put together this hit parade of Twitter mistakes to avoid.

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9 Mistakes to Avoid Making on Facebook

 You've decided to use Facebook as a way to connect and engage with your customers online. There are many great things you can do on Facebook: share a side of your agency your customers don't normally get to see, connect with your business partners in a new way by liking their pages, share your insurance knowledge and expertise.
However, there are some things to avoid doing as you might actually drive followers away.

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2013 Predictions – Insurance Agency Marketing

In 2012, ITC continued our pledge of helping insurance agents grow and succeed with their agencies through constant upgrades to our products: Insurance Website Builder, AgencyBuzz, TurboRater, and InsurancePro. Now, the New Year is upon us, and I am looking forward to the great things we can accomplish together in 2013. Let’s explore my predictions regarding insurance agency marketing in 2013.

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AgencyBuzz, Creating More Buzz for Your Agency in 2012

The AgencyBuzz online marketing system saw some phenomenal new features get released in 2012. These features are helping AgencyBuzz become the central online marketing tool for agents nationwide. Let’s take a look at the great features that were added to AgencyBuzz in 2012 and what you have to look forward to in 2013.

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4 Tips for Building Relationships on Social Media

Social media has many uses: driving traffic to your website, promoting your agency and services, sharing insurance information and knowledge, and increasing your online visibility. However, my favorite use for social media is building relationships.

Getting more followers can be exciting. But if you're not having meaningful conversations with your followers and building relationships, your posts will be seen by very few followers. Try these four tips to make your social media efforts meaningful and start building relationships.

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How Social Media Can Hurt Your Agency's Brand

The insurance industry has begun to embrace social media. It's even become the norm to have more than one social media account. (Heck, we have five Twitter accounts, four Facebook Pages, two Google+ accounts and one LinkedIn business page.)

Social media moves quickly. Poorly managed social media accounts could backfire and instead of building relationships and raising your awareness online you could be hurting your agency. How? Here are six things to watch for and take care of immediately.

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Easy List of How to Fully Benefit from Your Website

1. Site Title & Description
   This is what search engines read and display, so make it concise, but descriptive. (For example, ‘Auto, Home, Life Insurance – Dallas, Plano, Richardson TX’ for the title and ‘Example Insurance Agency specializes in auto, home and life insurance in Dallas, Plano, Richardson and the surrounding areas of Texas.’ for the description ) Limit your title to 65 characters and description to 150 characters. Search engines will not index characters beyond this limit. Use this Javascript Kit webpage to count your characters.

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8 Reasons Why Social Media Isn't Working For You

Social media has been talked about a lot these past few years as the marketing strategy you must be using. If you're not seeing the results you would like, you're not alone.

Here are 8 reasons why social media may not be working for you.

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How to Build a Following for your Email and Social Media

A growing number of consumers prefer electronic communication over phone calls or face-to-face. Do you know what your customers prefer? If you are not communicating with them via the methods they prefer, you customers will at some point leave you for your competition who will email instead of call or tweet instead of email.

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How to Use Facebook Scheduled Posts

The benefit of using third-party social media tools like HootSuite is that you can schedule your posts ahead of time so you're not spending time every day updating Facebook.

Unfortunately, Facebook's algorithm for determining which updates to show in a user's newsfeed favors those updates that are posted manually on Facebook over those using third-party tools. Meaning your update has a better chance for being seen by more people when you use Facebook to post it instead of a tool like HootSuite.

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7 Tips for Marketing an Insurance Agency Online on a Limited Budget

There are many reasons to focus on online marketing. For one, consumers are relying more and more on the Internet and use it to get the majority of information about products and services before they buy, including insurance. It’s easier to monitor your online marketing campaigns and determine their success.

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Gaining Followers

Here's another presentation in  our Masters of Marketing webinar. This presentation discusses how to use social media marketing to gain followers for your brand. If you would like to join us every Thursday at 12:00 p.m. CST when we discuss marketing tips, you can register here.

Masters of Marketing: Social Media & Gaining Followers

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Don't Know What to Tweet? 11 Ideas For When You Have Writer's Block

One of my biggest pet peeves about businesses on Twitter is when they make it all about themselves. The beauty of Twitter is how easy it is to have conversations with brands as consumers that we couldn’t have before. Twitter is not a broadcast medium and shouldn’t be treated as such. Otherwise, you will be spinning your wheels instead of gaining traction as you try to build relationships and position yourself as an insurance expert.

A good rule of thumb for brands on Twitter is the 1:10 ratio. Meaning for every one tweet  you share about your agency, you need to have 10 that are about other topics. 

So what do you tweet  about if you aren't supposed to tweet about yourself? Read more