Today for our blog, we thought it would be a nice idea to round-up lots of the hints, tips and questions that we were asked during #CosmicHour this week.
#CosmicHour happens every Thursday on Twitter and it is aimed to be a support hour for individuals and organisations to ask questions about digital marketing and technology.
One of the first questions we had was around the possibility of a digital solution for keeping track of someone suffering from dementia. We were able to link in with Honiton Dementia Action Alliance and provide a few articles which suggested technology that could help with this. The first was ’10 Lifesaving location devices for Dementia Patients’ and the second ‘8 apps and gadgets to keep track of your child’ from Mashable. This showcased a range of apps which could also double-up to be used to know the location of your loved one.
We then gave some advice around using social media as a commercial insurance broker. The key to this is to use the more business-friendly networks such as LinkedIn and Twitter and make sure that you have a high level of awareness of your social channels amongst current and new clients. This will encourage engagement and partnerships to grow. It’s also important to content-market to your followers (provide useful and informative articles to clients which give them the edge against competitors).
A quick question came in asking ‘what’s the best way to get a PDF sent out via social media’. This was a simple solution to give: you are currently unable to share a PDF directly via a mainstream social network so the best thing to do is to upload it to your website and then share a link to the file. You can also use a website called smallpdf.com where you are able to compress PDFs if they are large files to make them quicker to download.
Another question came from a holiday homes company based locally which asked ‘I’ve tried to link Instagram to feed onto my business Facebook page but it doesn’t seem to be showing’. Although it can be a good way to save time, linking your social networks in this way means that users across each network aren’t receiving personalised content. It also means they usually need to click on a link to see the photo that you have posted onto Instagram. If possible it’s better to post natively on these platforms and tailor posts to each audience.
One of the final questions we had was ‘What do you recommend for checking hashtags? How careful do I need to be and what's the best way please?’. This is a question we get asked a lot and there are some fool-proof methods of ensuring your hashtag is safe to use on social media.
- Take a look at the hashtag on Twitter. Simply pop it into the search bar and scroll through what comes up. If it has very little on it, chances are it’s safe to use and if there are tweets on there, are they tweets which won’t harm your brand or reputation if you use the hashtag as well.
- Ask a colleague. When developing new hashtags, it’s a great idea to run them past some colleagues, friends and family to see whether there are any hidden words you haven’t spotted or any meanings you hadn’t thought of. There are plenty of examples online (we’ll let you search them!) where even the biggest social media campaigns have come unhinged or backfired due to a poorly researched hashtag.
- Make it memorable and relevant. Your hashtag needs to stand out from the crowd. Alliteration is a great way to achieve this but also making sure it is local or industry-specific are good ways of making the hashtag relevant and memorable.
That’s all of the stand-out points of this week’s #CosmicHour but we’ll be back every Thursday at 1pm to answer all your questions about digital!