2014 - Bob Cargill

26Dec 2014 by Bob Cargill

Lessons Learned from 10 Terrific Tweets

There’s both an art and a science to writing for Twitter. To stand out from the crowd, you want to be creative and clever, but you also need to be smart and strategic in order to drive a high level of engagement. It’s not easy for even the best copywriters to strike such middle ground in 140 characters or less. But many brands today manage to capture the right voice on this online communication channel, in many cases enhancing the impact of their words with equally compelling visuals. They’re able to come across as entertaining as they are educational, as personable as they are promotional. Culled from a custom timeline (which you can see here) I’ve been curating on Twitter, here are 10 terrific tweets that would appear to go…

06Dec 2014 by Bob Cargill

How to Plan a Social Media Strategy in 12 Steps

Marketing, Social Media

Unless you’re a popular celebrity or a big, iconic brand, a lot has got to come together in order for you to succeed on social media. Not only do you need to have an engaged, loyal audience and something valuable to offer them, you need to be able to maintain a strong social presence by sharing timely, relevant content on a non-stop basis. There’s no rest for the weary on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and other such online communication channels. If you make the development of a solid strategy a top priority, however, everything else should fall into place. A comprehensive strategic plan articulates the action you’re going to take during the course of your campaign. It explains the who, what, where, when, how and why of what you’re going to…

15Nov 2014 by Bob Cargill

10 Ways for Health Clubs to Flex Their Social Media Muscles

Social Media

More than 50 million people belong to over 30,000 health clubs in the United States. They join these clubs to get in shape and stay healthy, to play sports and socialize, to pass the time and relax. When they’re working out, they’re essentially a captive audience to club owners and staff, there primarily for the exercise, of course, but in the right place and mood for chitchat and conversation. What about all the time when they’re not at the gym? How do health clubs stay in touch with their customers when they’re not on the premises? How do they keep them coming back for more action and fun? How do they ensure that they’re not both out of sight and out of mind? Enter social media. Just as they’re willing…

26Oct 2014 by Bob Cargill

10 Questions to Ask Your Social Media Audience

Social Media

Engagement rate. It’s one of the most important metrics in social media. After all, you could have a boatload of fans and followers, but if only a few of them are engaging with your content, they’re worth next to nothing to your brand. What you want from your social media audience is a lot of positive chatter and buzz. You want likes, shares, comments, mentions, retweets and replies. The more interaction between you and your constituents, the greater the chances are of them doing business with you in the long run. Of course, there are many different communications strategies and tactics for capturing people’s attention and triggering a response of some kind. You can make a lot of noise and be interruptive. You can get creative and stand out among…

05Oct 2014 by Bob Cargill

10 Reasons Why You Should Use Vine to Build Your Brand

Advertising, Branding, Marketing, Social Media

If your bandwidth is limited, the best social networks on which to set up shop and share are probably going to be sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest, four of the most popular players in the field today. But if time is not an issue and you really want to make a splash in the social media waters, you should try making videos with the mobile app, Vine. Sure, with more than one billion unique users visiting the site each month, your potential audience on YouTube is going to be gargantuan. And with over 150 million monthly active users on Instagram, you’d be hard pressed not to experiment there as well, even if your videos can only be up to 15 seconds in length. If you want to…

06Sep 2014 by Bob Cargill

10 Ways to Build a Social Media Audience

Branding, Business, Marketing, Social Media

In direct marketing, it's long been said that a bad offer to a good list will perform better than a good offer to a bad list. The point being that without a decent audience, you may as well forget about it. You may have a great product or service, but unless you have a long list of people who are at least prospective customers, even the best marketing efforts in the world probably won't be able to sell it. That's how it is in social media, too. You can spend a ton of time and money in creating content that absolutely rocks, but if you aren't reaching enough people, your efforts will be in vain and you won't have a chance of going viral. You'll be like the proverbial tree…

17Aug 2014 by Bob Cargill

17 Vine Videos of 125 Places to Get a Bite to Eat in the Boston Area

Boston, Vine

Anyone who knows me knows how much I love to explore the nooks and crannies of Boston with my wife, Barbara. Walking around town is one of our favorite things to do together. My friends and family also know how much I love social media. Using the Internet to connect and communicate with others has been a passion of mine long before it became a thing for practically everyone. Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. You name it, I’m on it. And that includes Vine, an app which allows its 40 million users to easily record six-second looping videos and share them with the world. How do I use Vine along the course of my travels? In a number of different ways, all of which you’ll be able to see if you take…

09Aug 2014 by Bob Cargill

10 Types of Visuals to Boost Your Social Media Engagement

Facebook, Marketing, Social Media, Twitter, YouTube

As a writer by trade, it's not easy for me to utter these words, but I'm not going to lie: On social media, a picture is worth a thousand words. It's true. Content may be king, but visuals rule. All the latest studies and statistics suggest that images on social media command more attention than text alone. If you want more likes, comments, shares, retweets, and clicks, you want to include pictures with your social media posts. You want to be more visual. As Carla Gates says here on her 3 to 5 Marketing Blog... "Images used in your social media (and by definition, your blog content) are far more attention-grabbing than text or plain old links, more likely to be shared, evoke emotional reactions in viewers (and emotion SELLS),…

26Jul 2014 by Bob Cargill

Smile, You’re on Social Media

Facebook, Social Media, Twitter

When Ellen DeGeneres pulled together some of Hollywood’s biggest superstars for a group shot at the Oscars this year, it may have been a moment of spontaneous fun, but the resultant tweet of this selfie will go down in social media history. Having been retweeted over 3.4 million times at last count, this one epic tweet from @TheEllenShow easily surpassed a tweet of President Barack Obama’s as the most retweeted ever. Statistics aside, this tweet served to underscore a point that social media practitioners like me have been preaching to businesses and brands for a long time. Lighten up. You heard me. Take your work, not yourself, seriously. If the likes of Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt and Kevin Spacey can strike a pose for a rather silly selfie…