For a number of years, the internet has been getting smaller. Not in volume, but in how it is viewed. Mobile is becoming a key way of getting online & will continue to grow as the main way people access the internet as phones become more convenient, faster with access to services such as 4G & easier to use.

Social networks such as Twitter, Instagram & Path are optimised for smartphones, so a strategy that works now doesn’t need to be amended, but you may need to look at tweaking your approach to blogging, Email campaigns & Facebook to cope with your community viewing your content on 3.5 inch screens.

The big change you need to make is to make everything smaller. A smaller screen can only contain so much information & reading for sustained amounts of time becomes a strain, so a reader is likely to give up reading long paragraphs of text unless it’s super interesting.

For your blog posts, make them around 200 words if possible (This one is over 200, but it’s not 2013 yet! ), this is long enough to make a great point but not too long.

In your email campaigns, keep it simple. Have one call to action, one product focus & try to target it to your audience. If they have bought children’s clothes from you in the past, make sure the product you email them is for kids. If they bought a TV from you, make sure the CTA is based around the same theme, like a home cinema system.

2013 is going to be a big year, only smaller. How are you going to change?

There are a couple of factors as to why you would want to reduce your descriptions into bullet point format & one of them is that it will take you far less time to write!

• Bullet-point the features of your product

Thinking specifically about your customer & their habits, customers are browsing your website at a super high rate. If their question isn’t answered within a few seconds you’ll be lucky if they bother to email you. They’re just going to find it somewhere else & that could be one of your competitors.

By placing all the key information about each product it makes it easier to see the highlights of the product & this will help customers find the answer they need & help to improve your conversion rate.

• Keep it concise

If you can say something in 1 sentence rather than four, then do it. People get bored, really quickly! Keep things short, snappy & to the point.

It’s becoming a little more evident over the past couple of days, but a battleground is forming as the social media war continues between Twitter & Facebook. The latest being the removal of Instagram’s integration with Twitter & the linked article from Forbes quotes the Instagram chief as stating “the company eventually plans to shut out Twitter entirely” saying it makes more sense to try to shuttle people to his own site.

This may seem insignificant, but with the internet still being very young we have to remember that the landscape can change really quickly & while it’s great to build a community on these social media platforms, should they disappear one day you’re effectively left with nothing. You can stop laughing now!! I know it seems unlikely that Facebook or Twitter will disappear anytime soon, but I’m sure there were plenty of people saying that about MySpace at its height of popularity & before that was probably Yahoo!, both of which are now trying to stay relevant. And that is going to be the issue going forward, it’s not so much that Facebook as a company will disappear. It’s more an issue that the community that you built is no longer active. This could be because something comes along that makes everything easier than the current platform. Or that the constant changes irritate people into finding another option.

So, what does all this have to do with Email being the most important social media tool? Well, email has been around even before the internet came on the scene and the great thing about an email community is that it’s yours. You’ve earned the right to communicate with everyone whenever you desire & on any email distribution platform you choose. If you decide you don’t like MailChimp (affiliate link) you can move to Aweber, there is simply no way of doing this with other social media platforms.

The secret behind a successful social media strategy is EXPERIMENT. Try lots & lots of different things & find out which stick & ditch the ones that don’t. You should be able to run your social media strategy much the same as you run your business, if there is a product that your customers don’t like or a service none of your clients need then you should make the decision to remove it from your offering. After all, the secret is to find products that people want & turn them over to make a profit as quick as possible. The same holds true for social media. You may be doing things that work as a social media strategy, just not on the customers you have at the present time, so if people are not commenting on your blog posts, write different articles. If people aren’t interacting with your Facebook posts, try something else.

It sounds simple, but everyone seems determined to find the same cookie-cutter strategy to be successful on Facebook, the fact is not all businesses have the same customers & those customers interact differently. So be bold, go against the grain & above all have fun with it!

Social media can be done in-house, no problem at all. Just as you can do PR & marketing in-house and you can have success from it. There are many companies that have built their business based upon their in-house social media & then built a team around existing operations. Many business owners prefer to keep things in-house to maintain contact with customers, it also allows a business to shift their marketing message based on what they find out from social media conversation.

Looking at the opposite side taking on your own social media is time-consuming, you can lose hours every day trying to get traction. Many companies give up after a while after spending countless hours trying to build something but failing & end up dismissing social media as a waste of time.

For the slightly larger companies, considering hiring a social media manager can be costly, according to payscale.com the average salary for a social media manager with 1-4 years experience, in a company with up to 9 employees is up to £36,000. Compared to an outsourced company this salary can often be at least double often at least three times as much as you would expect to pay a social media agency.

Another benefit of hiring a social media agency is they come with the skills needed to maximise the effectiveness of social media, a good agency will keep on top of the constant changes of the social landscape & utilise the platforms required for your business.

It’s not a straight forward yes or no answer s to whether you should outsource, it comes down to costs & personal preference.

I find a lot of good topics to discuss in my articles from the types of questions people ask in specialist forums. I’ve already talked about using social engagement to generate ideas & a forum is a form of social engagement, but in this instance we don’t need to do any talking & our search should yield a cornucopia of requests we can use to convert into informative articles. Not only that but the information we generate will actually be of use to our target audience, because our target audience is actually requesting this information.

A quick search for a DIY forum yields this plentiful result within a painting & decorating section, which offers us at least 6 differing topics & questions from the first dozen results. We can then use these to generate an article based upon our knowledge of the topic area. The great thing about using forums as a rich source of blog content is that it’s always relevant, it’s readily available & for a long-standing forum it will offer a huge selection of topics dating back for as long as the forum has been in existence.

So now all you need to do to google, find a good quality forum for your sector, one which your target customer is likely to use & get collecting those ideas.

If you’re struggling to find one, by all means get in touch & we can help out.

It’s common practice to thank people for retweeting our message, a show of appreciation goes far in building a relationship & can help towards getting future messages retweeted too. But I often feel that we’re missing out on a golden opportunity to engage. From a company perspective, if someone is retweeting one of your articles it’s usually pretty safe to assume the retweet is a show of appreciation for the article you have just tweeted. Most will thank the person & then move on, as we’re on autopilot. In fact, this is only marginally better than getting an autoresponder (and for the record, automated responses go against the very nature of social media).

The next time someone retweets you, use it as an opportunity to engage in conversation. If they retweeted an article, thank them & ask if it was useful, if it was an opinion, ask them if they agree. Use it as a platform to build a conversation that will help you improve a relationship with however many people respond.