About Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is known for bringing the latest marketing strategies to online and direct marketing. Beasley provides services in inbound and outbound marketing including:  content creation, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), print advertising, social media advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), website design, media planning/public relations, direct mail marketing, lead generation and nurture campaigns, and database management. Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., helps clients in both B2B and B2C marketing and is privately held and headquartered in the Silicon Valley suburb of Morgan Hill, California. For more information, go to www.BeasleyDirect.com .

About Silicon Valley Business Journal

The Silicon Valley Business Journal is the local version of the American City Business Journals (ACBJ), which is the largest publisher of metropolitan business newsweeklies in the United States, with 43 business publications across the country reaching more than 3.6 million readers each week. They also offer specialty publications for sports fans, sports business readers and classic car enthusiasts.

Is your Digital Marketing initiative failing? Beasley’s professional marketing team can help. Start with a free SEO audit of your company’s website. Sign up here.

By Laurie B. Beasley

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Andreas Ramos has joined Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., as Vice President, Digital Marketing.  Andreas will assist clients in global digital marketing strategy and in training their teams in content marketing, SEO strategy, social media, and Google advertising.

Andreas is the author of fourteen best-selling books on SEO, social media, and content marketing, including: #TwitterBook, How to Write a Book!, The Big Book of Content Marketing, Search Engine Marketing (McGraw-Hill), and technical reviewer of Search Engine Marketing, by Mike Moran (IBM Press). Andreas co-founded two digital marketing agencies. He also led the digital marketing team at Acxiom and was Manager of Global SEO at Cisco.

About Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is known for bringing the latest marketing strategies to online and direct marketing. Beasley provides services in inbound and outbound marketing including:  content creation, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), print advertising, social media advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), website design, media planning/public relations, direct mail marketing, lead generation and nurture campaigns, and database management. Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., helps clients in both B2B and B2C marketing and is privately held and headquartered in the Silicon Valley suburb of Morgan Hill, California. For more information, go to https://www.beasleydirect.com/.

Need help with your digital marketing? Review our digital marketing offerings and get free SEO and PPC audits here.

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Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., a full service direct and online marketing agency, is selected by Got It, Inc., to provide digital marketing services. The initial work will involve managing paid advertising on Google Ads, Google Display Network, Facebook and LinkedIn.

About Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., is known for bringing the latest marketing strategies to online and direct marketing. Beasley provides services in inbound and outbound marketing including:  content creation, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), print advertising, social media advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), website design, media planning/public relations, direct mail marketing, lead generation and nurture campaigns, and database management. Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., helps clients in both B2B and B2C marketing and is privately held and headquartered in the Silicon Valley suburb of Morgan Hill, California. For more information, go to www.BeasleyDirect.com.

About Got It, Inc.

Serial entrepreneurs Peter Relan and Hung Tran with their YouWeb incubator have launched a “knowledge-as-a-service” (KaaS) company, Got It, Inc. Got It is a web platform to connect (human) experts with professionals seeking the answer to specific tech tool-related problems. The platform helps professionals, learners, and consumers quickly and affordably get personalized, interactive solutions to their questions. Got It matches a user with an expert to solve the user’s problem in a one-on-one chat session within a fixed time period, with a service guarantee.

In the first instance the target users are professionals wrangling Excel and Google Sheets. But the wider ambition is to be able to use its expertise-ranking algorithms to intelligently assess more categories of tech knowledge by connecting relevant experts with different professionals to solve them.

Get started with a free PPC Advertising audit. Contact us for a free consultation!

Find case studies and white papers at https://beasleydirect.com/resources/white-papers

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The Direct Marketing Association of Northern California (DMAnc) and Online Marketing Institute (OMI) are offering Three Live Online Digital Marketing Training Certification Workshops on Web Analytics, Web Usability and WordPress. The workshop schedule is as follows:

Web Analytics: Moving the ROI Meter

(Friday, November 17th, 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM Pacific Standard Time)

Marketers are being tasked to report on web activities and interpret the results to management. This session will help you go beyond taking the top line approach and help you take full advantage of Google Analytics and other tools. This two-hour, intensive training will help you identify reporting goals and how to use web analytics to track and measure your success effectively. Learn more.

Web Usability: Maximizing the Visitors to Your Site

(Friday, December 1st, 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM Pacific Standard Time)

Once you’ve driven the traffic to your site, are you maximizing the value of it for your visitors? Too many sites have been developed over the years without a good, clear plan that leads visitors to what they are looking for. Learn more.

WordPress: The Smart Marketer’s WordPress Workshop

(Friday, December 8th, 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM Pacific Standard Time)

In one session, get a better understanding of WordPress and what it can do for your business. Learn why over 74 million websites use the powerful WordPress CMS today, and the right or wrong reasons to use it for your business and marketing. This workshop skips technical jargon to share truths and myths about moving your site to WordPress. You’ll gain real-world insights, tips and warnings important for marketing decision makers. Learn more.

About the DMAnc (www.DMAnc.org)

The DMA of Northern California was formed to educate, inform and provide networking opportunities for Direct and Online Marketing professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We hold monthly luncheon meetings, workshops, periodic half-day seminars, and provide opportunity for the best in learning and job networking in the Northern California marketing community.

For More Information, Contact:

Laurie Beasley
Chair, DMAnc
President, Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.
408-782-0046 x21
lbeasley@beasleydirect.com

Want to learn more about Online Marketing? Read our White Papers here.

The post Three Live Online Digital Marketing Training Certification Workshops on Web Analytics, Web Usability and WordPress Offered November through December. appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

Finding ROI in Healthcare Marketing.

Healthcare Marketing is Challenging!

Healthcare marketing is a very competitive digital marketing space. Even more so in the midst of a dramatic shift as the ACA (Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare) will be modified or replaced. Marketers in the healthcare industry need to proactively research and implement strategies to stay at the top of search engine search results. Below are some steps we implemented to help the Center for Elder’s Independence (CEI) increase their organic search rankings and therefore bring in new healthcare consumers.

The Center for Elders’ Independence (CEI) is an Oakland, CA- based PACE affiliated healthcare organization. PACE is a Medicare and Medicaid program that helps low income elderly people stay at home. They also have their care needs met in the community instead of going to a nursing home or other care facility. CEI gets most of their new patients through online inquiries and phone calls. We wanted to get their listing moved to the top of search engine searches for elder care in the Oakland and San Francisco East Bay. We implemented several steps on their website to increase search awareness and new patient registrations. These steps will apply to any healthcare organization.

First, Find The Right Language for Your Site Via Keyword Research

Comprehensive Keyword and Key Phrase Research is Essential.

Your target audience finds your site through online searches using keywords or phrases. So, your first problem will be researching keyword or key phrases most frequently used by potential site visitors. In this case we were targeting a specific set of elderly healthcare patients. Start by reviewing both your website and your competitor’s sites. Talk to key stakeholders – the sales team, your product development team and, most definitely, your customers. Listen for key phrases that best describe the healthcare market niche you’re researching. Once you have a base of key phrases, then go to Google’s Keyword Tool, or SpyFu. Or, consider “Searches related to…” at the bottom of a Google search page to refine your research. Be creative researching the marketplace and the language your potential customers are using for both voice and traditional search.

One consideration for CEI was targeting clients in a small geographic area, the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area. Therefore, inclusion of geographic modifiers in key phrases was necessary to attract well-qualified local web traffic, i.e., “Oakland Elder Care Services” vs. just “Elder Care Services.”

The other consideration for CEI was potential changes to Medicare, so the best research information was found on government websites, such as www.medicare.gov or The Department of Health and Human Services.

Sources for reliable information are dynamic. So, don’t fall into the trap that what you knew a month ago still applies. It might, but be aware even subtle changes can add to the success of your campaigns. News sites are okay, but they mostly report what’s current for the day. Ultimately, you want to keep ahead of the game by following the data as it unfolds.

Secondly, Be Objective in Your Research, and Follow the Data

Secondly, objective and effective results come from following the data.

Opinion doesn’t matter. Whether your healthcare marketing target audience is local or national, as healthcare legislation changes appear you’ll need to objectively analyze the data. Start by setting a baseline search engine traffic measurement before you implement changes, then compare it to results post-implementation. Google Analytics is a great tool, and it’s free! As we rolled out changes on CEI’s website we closely monitored the search traffic generated by Google and the other major search engines. Were our changes to the language of the site demonstrating success or did we need to revisit our assumptions and tweak the copy more? Were we attracting well-qualified local East Bay traffic? Was the client satisfied with the results?

Third, Google’s Rules Rule

Google sets the rules on how it ranks a website for any particular search query, and we have to follow them. Understanding how Google analyzes your website is key to restructuring the content to get the broadest exposure within search results.

When writing META Tags (Titles, Descriptions) and headlines, front-load the target key phrase that best describes page content. Include the company name at the end of the Title, and with Descriptions be concise, close with a strong call-to-action.

Google uses Titles to rank web pages. Descriptions aren’t a ranking factor. But, they are critical in getting a viewer to click through for more information. Remember, they’re your sales pitch to get a click from well-qualified searchers.

Read details about Titles and Descriptions in Google’s Guidelines.

Content will remain king. A large part of Google page ranking is based on content focused on a topic, its authoritativeness, and the authority of links from other web pages to yours. It’s a vicious circle. To attract the best backlinks your content has to be among the best.

Lastly, maintain awareness of coming and current changes to Google’s search algorithm. Moz has a “Google Algorithm Change History” page. Also, run periodic searches for changes in Google’s search algorithm. While keeping up with digital healthcare marketing, you don’t want a surprise penalty because of a Google rule change.

Comprehensive Data Analysis Pays Off!

In conclusion, a successful healthcare marketing strategy.

Changes we made to CEI’s META data (Titles, Descriptions, Headlines), along with on page content, resulted in an increase in monthly traffic of about 6,500 new users. Further, potential clients on average visited 3 pages, reading each page for over 2 minutes. Thousands of Bay Area site visitors per month found the healthcare services they were looking for.

How can Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.’s organic search marketing team expand your healthcare business? Contact us today and let’s get started.

We’d like to hear from you! Did this post help you understand part of healthcare marketing? Please leave a comment below!

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Download the Case Study

Andrew Hoover has been a consultant in Internet Search Marketing, Web Site Optimization, and pay-per-click/CPM/Display for over 15 years. He has extensive experience with Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, AOL and was a beta tester for Amazon’s search engine. Andrew started a Network Consulting corporation in 1999 (GLT, Inc.), and a search marketing company in 2003, Lead Adrenaline: he has worked with medical, financial services, real estate, retail, entertainment and high-technology companies. His educational background includes degrees from both the University of California, Berkeley, and California State University, East Bay.

– See the Beasley Team.

The post The Challenge of Staying on Top of Search Engines in Healthcare Marketing. appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

The dates, topics and descriptions are:

Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals:
How to Build a Solid and Search-Friendly Site

Date and Time: June 22, 2017, 10:00AM-12:00PM (PST).
Register Now

Google and Bing have all pushed the boundaries of how they look at websites in order to give the most relevant results. But they have also stood by a set of core areas that they continue to look for on a website. By understanding what the engines are looking for, you can optimize your site to deliver it, and you will have a solid foundation for future search success.

What you’ll learn:

• How to review your site as a whole, that will support the individual sections and pages in the search results
• How to do solid keyword and language research, using the language your customers are using
• How to develop an architecture that re-enforces your site’s content for the search engines
• The top three tools to identify technical and on-page issues
• On-page factors that need to be optimized
• Top five WordPress optimization tips
• How to understand inbound link profiles for your site and start a solid link building campaign that plays by the engines’ rules

Advanced Search Engine Optimization:
Beating Your Competition in a Constantly Changing Search Landscape

Date and Time: June 29, 2017, 10:00AM-12:00PM (PST).
Register Now

The landscape for search engine marketing is constantly changing and requires sophisticated techniques to beat your competitors and achieve your marketing goals. As search engine marketing moves away from the old keyword centric paradigm, new approaches need to be laid out to aid in your site’s visibility.

What you’ll learn:

• SEO in the time of RankBrain, Panda, Penguin, Hummingbird, etc:
• How to insulate your site from Google’s constant updates
• Understanding the new ways in which Google tracks search quality
• Optimizing your domain for the best search visibility
• Optimizing your servers for the best search performance
• Structured data markup and why you need it on your site
• Advanced Link building and offsite factors:
• Going the extra mile to find the right link targets in the right “neighborhoods” without violating Google’s rules

For more information on the LIVE Online Certification Workshops, or to register go here.

About us:

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc. (www.BeasleyDirect.com) is known for bringing the latest marketing strategies to online and direct marketing. Beasley provides services in inbound and outbound marketing including: content creation, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), print advertising, social media advertising, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, website design, media planning/public relations, direct mail marketing, lead generation and nurture campaigns, and database management. Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc. helps clients in both B2B and B2C marketing and is privately held and headquartered in the Silicon Valley suburb of Morgan Hill, California.

About DMAnc:

(www.dmanc.org): The DMA of Northern California was formed to educate, inform and provide networking opportunities for Direct and Online Marketing professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We hold monthly luncheon meetings, live online workshops, periodic half-day seminars, and provide opportunity for the best in learning and job networking in the Northern California marketing community. Become a member the DMAnc, click here.

For More Information, Contact:

Laurie Beasley
President
Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.
408-782-0046 x21
lbeasley@beasleydirect.com

The post LIVE Online SEO Classes held by the DMAnc. appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

DMAnc.org

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Facebook is one of the largest social media sites with more than 936 million daily users worldwide. With such a large user base, Facebook marketing strategies are a great avenue for marketers to promote their company’s brand, products, services, and build up a following of loyal fans. In fact, 42% of marketers report Facebook is a critical part of their business. A large part of successful posting and marketing on Facebook is accumulating the largest number of user interactions possible, such as views, likes, comments, or even shares. We’ll share how you can get the most out of each of your Facebook posts by optimizing the timing, content, and frequency of posts. (https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/)

Timing Is Everything

Every minute on Facebook about 510 comments are posted and 293,000 statuses are updated. Every day over six million likes are accrued by daily active users. One would think that with all this activity, any time would be a good time to publish a Facebook post. According to statistics published by Track Maven in their guide “The Marketing Mavens Guide to Facebook,” this is not exactly the case. (https://trackmaven.com/resources/facebook-advertising-budget-report/)

Most marketers post during the weekday, with Thursday being the most popular by a small margin, and then the number of posts drops nearly in half over the weekend, with only 9.04% of posts being published on Saturday. Post interactions, on the other hand, have a completely opposite trend. Facebook post interactions actually decrease during the weekdays and then increase sharply upward during the weekends. According to Track Maven, posts that are published on Sunday have 25% more interactions then posts made on Wednesday, making them significantly more effective.

(https://trackmaven.com/resources/facebook-advertising-budget-report/)

Of course, you don’t want to only publish posts only on the weekends. Good Facebook marketing strategies maintain a healthy posting schedule throughout the whole week. So is there a best time slot to get the most out of the weekday posts? The answer is yes. The majority of weekday posts occur during the workday, 9:00am-5:00pm. The highest average peak of interactions, however, is found during after-hours from 5pm-1am with an average of 2.49 interactions. This means that posts that are made during, or close to, 5pm-1am are more likely to receive the highest number of views, likes, or comments.

(https://trackmaven.com/resources/facebook-advertising-budget-report/)

Words, Words, Words

Now that you know the best time to publish a post, you have to write one. Since Facebook has no limit to how many characters can be in a post, the writer has the freedom to make a post as long or as short as they desire. Most writers go for the “‘simpler is better”’ approach, but is that really the best policy for Facebook writing?

(https://trackmaven.com/resources/facebook-advertising-budget-report/)

More than half of all Facebook posts consist of fewer than 20 words. Posts that consist of fewer than 10 words were the next most common number. However, it may surprise you that posts with a word count under 20 receive the least amount of daily user interactions. What may surprise you more is that Facebook posts consisting of 80 words or more will receive twice the amount of user interactions than posts with a smaller word count. Several theories exist about why this happens, but most seem to agree that people are more willing to interact with a post that requires a time investment.

Call-to-Action

The goal of a call to action is to cause the reader to take a specific action that helps increase the viewership of a post. Track Maven examined four of the most common call-to-action words (Share, Please, Like, and Now) used on Facebook to determine how effective they were at increasing user interaction. All four of these call-to-action words increased the interaction of posts compared to posts that did not have a call to action, with Share garnering twice as many social interactions than the other three words.

When marketing on Facebook marketers must bear in mind there is a potential pitfall attached to using a call- to -action word. Facebook changed its news feed algorithm to penalize pages that engage in like-baiting. Facebook defines like-baiting as “when a post explicitly asks News Feed readers to like, comment or share the post in order to get additional distribution beyond what the post would normally receive.” (https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/04/news-feed-fyi-cleaning-up-news-feed-spam/) The best way to avoid being penalized by this algorithm change is to use call to action terms sparingly, and find alternative ways to encourage interaction from readers.

What Is a Picture Worth?

Words are only part of creating an effective post. Most marketers prefer to add an image to increase the power of their chosen message. Facebook has one of the largest collections of online photos in the world, and as of February 2014 350 million photos (on average) were being uploaded to Facebook every day. Over 88% of all Facebook posts include an image of some kind, but does including an image in your post increase the frequency of user interactions? The answer is yes; posts that include an image saw 2.35 average user interactions per post while those that did not include a photo only saw 1.71 interactions.

 (https://trackmaven.com/resources/facebook-advertising-budget-report/)

How Many Hashtags Are Too Many?

Hashtags are a relatively new part of Facebook, with their use starting to pop up in June 2013. (https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2013/06/public-conversations-on-facebook/) Facebook decided to make hashtags a clickable part of a post in order to allow people to indicate they were a part of a larger conversation or group, and find others who were posting similar content.

About 83.93% of posts do not include hashtags, so it is not the most popular addition to posts. However, posts that do include one or two hashtags saw a user interaction increase of 60%. Posts that had three or four hashtags also had a larger user interaction than posts without hashtags, but the percentage was lower than the posts with only one or two hashtags. Posts that included seven or eight hashtags experienced the largest amount of user interactions, but it is good to note that posts using a lower number of hashtags usually contain better content and do not need to rely on so many hashtags.

Putting It All Together

Posting on Facebook is one of the key ways a company can build and maintain a powerful social media presence. By planning a healthy posting schedule during peak viewing hours, and keeping in mind the different aspects of a post such as word length, image use, and additions such as hashtags, a marketer can greatly increase how much attention they get out of each of their Facebook posts.

* * * *

This post was authored by Elizabeth A. Beasley, Account Manager, Beasley Direct Marketing, Inc.

Elizabeth Beasley serves as an account manager at Beasley Direct Marketing, Inc www.BeasleyDirect.com.  Elizabeth manages new client on-boarding and accounts, social media, corporate presentations, corporate website, and database maintenance. She also serves as an account manager for the Direct Marketing Association of Northern California www.DMAnc.org, managing event logistics, registration and promotion. She holds a B.A. in Communications from National University.

The post How to Get the Most Out of Your Corporate Facebook Marketing Strategies appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.

The Importance of Segmentation & Targeting.

Traditional public relations uses the media gatekeepers to get the message through to the audience. That means that you must segment your audience, determine which media best targets your audience, and craft the message. The message must appeal not just to the intended audience, but also to the media gatekeepers themselves.

In social media, the gatekeepers have been eliminated, allowing companies unhindered access to their audiences. This does not mean that you get to throw out the rulebook. In effective social media marketing the same old rules apply. Segment your audience, determine which social media will best target your intended audience, and craft your message to appeal to your audience.

Targeting Social Media

Not all social media will be equally productive. It depends on what you are selling, how you are selling it, and who your customers are. Just because Twitter is wildly popular doesn’t mean Twitter is the place to put a lot of time and attention if you are selling gynecological instruments. As Forbes Magazine put it:

“Social networks have been ‘played out’ in the consumer landscape for around a decade now. We are all used to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and others. It was inevitable perhaps that the business world would develop the networking and collaboration principles of social and evolve them into something that could a) serve users and b) be monetized. But simply creating one network for all business users is too broad a proposition. Train drivers don’t want to network with brain surgeons and landscape gardeners.”*

B2B Organizations and Social Media Marketing

This is especially true for the B2B organization. If you are promoting to IT professionals, there is Spiceworks. If you are a university professor who must publish and hopes to gain citations of h/her work by others, there is Academia.edu. For physicians, there is Doximity. The gynecological instrument manufacturer will do a great deal better on Doximity than Twitter, where they will be competing with 304 million other monthly users—most of whom are not doctors.

That being said, should you abandon Twitter, Facebook and the rest? That depends on your social media marketing resources and whether or not you are reaching people effectively through these social media streams. Twitter is still a productive place to promote events, white papers and the like. Facebook­­ for the B2B company may not be making much sense these days. People seem to be using Facebook for personal news and interests. So, if you’re a nail polish manufacturer or you’re selling cute puppies or kittens, it probably works wonders. Pinterest is great if you have a lot of visual interest (food, clothes, crafts). But, if you’re selling IT services, not so much. LinkedIn is really for individual professionals who want to network with similar professionals. You can get a LinkedIn business page (as you can on Facebook), but the jury is still out on the effectiveness of these pages.

None of these social networks will do you any harm (unless you do something stupid), but you need to determine on a case-by-case basis whether they are doing you any good. If not, put your resources into the most productive social media streams.

Targeting Content to Your Audience in Social Media Marketing

Crafting your message to appeal to your audience is still the basic #1 most important rule of communications. This is regardless of the media employed to deliver that message. At the same time, you have to be aware of the value of keywords in social media. This will assure that search engines will select and deliver the right message to the right person. It’s a balancing act—but that, too, is nothing new in marketing.

Here are a few rules to follow when creating content for social media

Have a valid keyword list

We have covered how to do this multiple times on this blog, and here are a few links to give you some ideas:

• SEO Audit Part 3: Content
• Best Practices for Copywriting in the Digital Age
• Boost SEO Effectiveness through PPC Testing
• Boosting SEO with an Organic Site Review

Put yourself in the shoes of the customer

What does the customer want to know? How can you make things better for the customer? Give away information that your customer values to build interest, trust—and eventually—desire to purchase.

Do not focus on your company or your product

Focus instead on the customer’s needs. No one cares that your admin had a baby, but they care very deeply when you solve one of their pressing problems.

Invite a conversation

This is easier said than done, but the objective is to get your customers involved in an interactive discussion with you and among themselves. An engaged follower is more likely to become a customer. How you achieve this depends largely on the nature of your business. Ask questions. Invite people’s viewpoints on critical issues in your industry. Have a contest with a giveaway. There are lots of ways to do this, and many of them do not involve spending money.

Does Social Media Work?

As marketers, we are always looking for ways to improve our results—and perhaps more important, prove our results. Marketing automation software developers have eagerly tried to give us what we want: lots and lots of numbers. But sometimes the numbers don’t actually mean a great deal.

What does it mean, for example, when 75 people re-Tweeted your post? It obviously means that more people potentially saw your post, but how does that translate to customer acquisition or sales? How many people actually read your post out of that number?

Social media occupies the same position as traditional public relations; when you’re doing it right, it works, but it’s hard to quantify how or how much. The most reliable way to know it’s working is when a customer says, “I saw your post on Twitter,” or “I follow your blog.”

Automated social media marketing software can help in this respect. Software that can take over the task of posting for you (although someone still has to develop content and load it in the queue) takes some of the sheer drudgery off your hands. And there are tools to analyze and refine your Twitter feed, for instance, getting rid of false or inappropriate followers and helping you to more accurately target your audience. Managing social media takes the same strategic mindset and hard work as any other marketing vehicle.

* The Specialized Vertical Social Network Cometh

* *The Author* *

Kathy Keenan, Social Media Marketing Manager, Beasley Direct Marketing

This post was authored by Kathy Keenan, Social Media Marketing Manager, Beasley Direct Marketing. Contact Kathy at kkeenan@beasleydirect.com.

Kathy brings depth of experience in business and high technology communications, having worked in public relations, marketing communications, and social media for clients ranging from semiconductors and networking equipment to consumer goods.

Prior to joining the Beasley Direct Marketing team, she worked as a senior writer/editor for Cisco Systems, Inc., developing thought leadership for C-level executives across industries ranging from healthcare to telephony. Before Cisco, Kathy worked for 10 years as a freelance writer and editor, working on marketing materials for a variety of clients.

Before becoming a freelancer, Kathy was CEO of Oak Ridge Public Relations, Inc., an award-winning PR agency in Silicon Valley, with clients such as IBM, Solectron, Philips Semiconductor, Bay Networks, Epson, and Xilinx. Kathy founded this company and managed it for 13 years.

Kathy was vice president of Tycer-Fultz-Bellack (now BBDO), formerly one of the largest advertising and PR firms in Silicon Valley. She managed a team of professionals who delivered strategic communications services to clients such as Informix, Exar, and Monolithic Memories. She started her career in PR at Acurex Corporation, an aerospace technology firm.

Kathy is a published novelist, writing under the name K.D. Keenan.

The post Effective Social Media Marketing: The Same Old Rules Apply appeared first on Beasley Direct and Online Marketing.