September 2018 - Mindstream Media Group

[SEPTEMBER 2018] Google’s Medic Update Examined

Posted on September 27, 2018January 30, 2020 by Mindstream Media Group

It’s been a little over a month since Google rolled out their latest algorithm update on Aug. 1 – The Medic Update. Since then, SEO professionals have been carefully analyzing the effects it may have on different sites. At first glance, this update appeared to mainly affect sites in the medical or healthcare verticals. However, after further analysis and a tweet from the Google Search Liaison Twitter account, this algorithm update is confirmed as a broad core algorithm update that has impacted sites in various verticals.

A Closer Look

The update’s impact on local businesses was put under a microscope by local search expert Joy Hawkins. As part of her observation criteria, Hawkins looked at dozens of sites that were (1) optimized for local SEO and (2) that displayed a pattern of the same items across sites.

She found six major patterns during her analysis:

This update was not related to backlinks but instead seemed to be geared more towards on-site content quality.
Visibility for tracked keywords with geo-modifiers outside the local business’ physical address improved. For instance, Hawkins provided the following example: “We work with a company in a suburb of a large city. Let’s say they’re in Addison, Texas, but they get all their customers from Dallas (they’re not, but it’s a similar scenario). With this update, the majority of keywords we were tracking that used [keyword + Dallas] increased, even though his location is in Addison (the suburb of Dallas).”
In most cases, algorithm updates impact either organic or local results. However, The Medic Update impacted both local and organic results. Local rankings were impacted first from Jul. 31 to Aug. 1, while organic rankings were impacted immediately after on Aug. 1 through Aug. 2.
A local business that saw big increases in their organic rankings didn’t necessarily see increases in their local listing rankings, and vice versa. In the past, this wouldn’t have been the case as there is typically a correlation between organic and local results.
After the update, a lot more video carousels appeared on search engine result pages (SERPs) that weren’t previously there.
This update seemed to focus on Your Money Your Life sites (sites that can have an impact on your current or future well-being) the most, with the healthcare industry seeing the biggest impact.

Mindstream Media Group will continue to monitor the impact of The Medic Update and will keep you posted on any significant changes.

How to Use Facebook Boosted Posts to Increase Local Social Media Engagement

Posted on September 20, 2018January 24, 2020 by Mindstream Media Group

This is the fifth post in our Local Social Media series – a comprehensive look at how multi-location and franchise brands can improve their local social media presence. This post will cover how multi-location brands can use Facebook Boosted Posts to increase page followers and drive engagement at the local level.

One of the most frustrating challenges local businesses face when it comes to social media marketing is not having enough followers. It’s a common problem that often leads to other issues like low engagement on social posts. Multi-location businesses face a similar challenge – sure, the corporate social media pages have thousands of followers, but the individual locations? Not so much.

While working with multi-location brands, one of the most common questions we hear from local employees and franchise owners is “how can I increase my page’s followers and drive local engagement?” While there are free ways to accomplish these goals, doing so with organic social content is becoming more and more difficult. The recent drop in organic reach for Facebook brand pages means businesses have to go beyond creating higher volumes of quality posts, they also need to start paying if they want people to see them.

The good news for multi-location and franchise businesses is that you don’t need to start Facebook ad campaigns from scratch to increase followers. Instead, you can pay to boost the content you’re already posting on your locations’ pages. Facebook Boosted Posts allow your locations to promote their organic social content to reach and engage audiences outside of their existing followers.

But, it’s not enough to just throw money at the problem. You have to create highly-engaging posts and place that content in front of the right audiences.

How to create engaging Facebook Boosted Posts

Start by creating attention-grabbing posts that will make users stop scrolling through their feeds, pay attention to your message and, hopefully, act on those messages. Here are a few tips to help your locations create engaging Facebook Boosted Posts.

Use high-quality creative

Make sure each post your locations create includes some type of creative like images, GIFs or videos. They should avoid blurry images, spelling/grammar errors on any overlaying text, choppy video or any non-brand compliant creative.

There’s one exception to this rule – live video. According to Facebook, live videos earn six times as many interactions as regular videos. For individual locations, live videos can be an engaging way to show off their work. However, live videos tend to be more raw so you may need to deal with a slight trade-off in quality.

Share stories with your audiences

Building a strong social media following requires creating personal relationships with consumers. Your locations should communicate with customers the same way those people would with their friends and family. And, when people communicate with one another, they use stories.

Make sure your Boosted Posts include stories like how your business got started, the history of a location or how that location has helped specific customers. Look for stories that showcase how your brand has brought value to your customers’ lives, without overtly selling your products and services.

Include a call-to-action

Like a lot of good advertising, effective Boosted Posts inspire consumers to act. When you or your locations create Boosted Posts, make sure a good portion of them encourage and allow consumers to take actions that drive value for your business like:

Visiting your website or blog.
Signing up for your newsletter.
Answering a question or providing feedback.

Targeting Boosted Posts to the right local audiences

Once your locations know how to create engaging Boosted Posts, it’s important they get the message in front of relevant audiences. For multi-location brands, this means starting with nearby audiences then honing in the users who are more likely to engage.

Facebook has an array of targeting options for Boosted Posts to help you out with this:

Geo-targeting: Target people based on locations (e.g., province, city, congressional district, ZIP or postal code).
Age: Target ads to people within an age range.
Gender: Target ads to women, men or people of all genders.
Languages: Target ads to users of certain languages.
Detailed targeting: Include or exclude people from an audience based on demographics, interests and/or behaviors.
Connections: Include or exclude people from your audience based on connections to your pages, apps or events.
Custom Audiences: Target audiences from internal customer files or from information generated from the Facebook pixel, the Facebook SDK and engagement on Facebook.
Lookalike Audiences: Target people on Facebook who are similar to your Custom Audience lists.

Launching your Boosted Posts

Now for the last step: getting your Boosted Posts to go live. Like standard Facebook ads, you can manage Boosted Posts through the platform’s business manager; however, that’s not the only way. Throughout this series, we’ve highlighted the value of using a dashboard to engage local consumers at scale. If you’re interested in using a dashboard to manage your local social media content, you might as well go with one that also allows you to boost Facebook posts.

We’ll stick with our previous example – Rallio – to show you how easy it can be to incorporate advertising into your local social dashboard. Start by creating an ad account for each location and connecting it in the dashboard. Once that’s complete, it’s easy to set up Boosted Posts for your local pages.

Here’s what setting up Boosted Posts looks like in the dashboard:

From here, you’ll be able to select your default boost settings:

Daily Spend: Select the maximum daily budget for Boosted Posts.
Target Audience: Zero in on the Facebook users most relevant to your business using the targeting options above.
Connections: Control whether your ad is shown to Facebook users who already have a connection with your profile.

In case you missed it: [Infographic]: Why Multi-Location Brands Need a Local Social Media Presence

Want to learn more about Facebook Boosted Posts? Contact Mindstream Media Group today to learn how our local social media services can help your multi-location brand increase followers and drive engagement at the local level.

ICYMI: Watch Saves Apple’s Otherwise Mediocre iPhone Event

Posted on September 19, 2018January 30, 2020 by Mindstream Media Group

Last week, Apple brought the expected to the marketplace by announcing three new iPhone models with marginal improvements and added features. Sharper and larger displays, improved cameras and face recognition, better water and dust resistance, slightly better battery life and boosted speed are the headlines across the devices. Again, features you’d expect as technology progresses. Less expected were new and expanded features of the Apple Watch Series 4.

Apple also brought higher price points, creating speculation that near-term revenue increases from the release will eventually move Apple products into the luxury category and push out once-loyal, but more cost-conscience consumers. While the $1,000-plus price tags are too rich for many Americans, Apple is reportedly charging double to Europeans, according to Forbes.

Here’s the rundown on the iPhones slated to ship this week (Xs, Xs Max) and next month (XR):

iPhone XR (starting at $749)

The new entry level iPhone debuts a 6.1 inch liquid retina display, a 12MP camera and water resistance to one meter for up to 30 minutes. Capacity ranges from 64GB to 256GB. Full specs are available from Apple here. You have more color choices with this model. It comes in white, black, blue, yellow, coral and (PRODUCT)RED^TM to support HIV/AIDS programs.

iPhone Xs (starting at $999)

The iPhone Xs includes an improved dual-camera system with true-tone flash and new sensors for better portrait pictures. The front-facing camera is double the speed and offers improvements to the facial recognition system, FaceID, used to unlock the device. Regardless, the camera features are less impressive than the Samsung Galaxy S9 and Note 9’s variable apertures or the triple lens and 3x optical zoom seen in other brands, according to CNET. Storage capacity for both the Xs and the Xs Max is higher than the XR at 512GB, and you’ll get an extra 30 minutes of battery life out of the deal. Here’s a look at the iPhone Xs technical specs. You can pick up the iPhone Xs in white, space gray or the newly offered gold.

iPhone Xs Max (starting at $1,099)

Bigger than Plus screens, the Xs Max has a larger display than any iPhone before it at 6.5inches, but the overall device dimensions and weight are extremely similar to the iPhone 8 Plus. The size difference is one of few variances between the Xs and the Xs Max. Get into the tech details here. Just as with the Xs, the iPhone Xs Max comes in white, space gray and gold.

Beyond the anticipated iPhone features, comes the Apple Watch Series 4 with enough variation from the Series 3 to make it worth noticing.

Apple Watch Series 4 ($399 – $499)

The Watch is a more impressive upgrade with unique fitness tracking and health features, including electrocardiogram (ECG) capabilities, sensed through the fingertip, that are FDA approved. The ECG app will be out later this year. The Series 4 also includes a Fall Detector and Emergency SOS to safeguard the wearer. With two options available – GPS or GPS + Cellular, the lower cost Watch comes without steel, a slightly smaller screen size and no cellular connectivity. While the Series 4 has a larger case, it’s still thinner than the Series 3 and claims a processor that is double the speed. Battery life clocks in at 18 hours. More details are available here. Meanwhile, Apple continues its brand partnerships with Nike for sports enthusiasts and luxury brand, Hermes, by offering designs specific to each.

The Latest from Google: September 2018

Posted on September 18, 2018January 30, 2020 by Mindstream Media Group

Google recently deployed an algorithm update, released the new Search Console from beta and rolled out more new features powered by their machine learning efforts.

Continue reading “The Latest from Google: September 2018”

Protected: How Mindstream Media Group’s Creative Approach Brings Customers to American Express

Posted on September 12, 2018January 24, 2020 by Mindstream Media Group

How to Manage Online Reviews at the Local Level (and Why You Need to)

Posted on September 11, 2018January 24, 2020 by Mindstream Media Group

This is the fourth post in our Local Social Media series – a comprehensive look at how multi-location and franchise brands can improve their local social media presence. This post will cover why customer reviews are so important and what multi-location brands need to do to manage online reviews at the local level.

Online reviews play an increasingly significant role in how consumers judge brands and evaluate purchase decisions. For multi-location and franchise brands, reviews are even more crucial to your reputation since they’re typically coming from members of your community.

The impact of reviews on local consumers

Before making important buying decisions, local consumers turn to the internet to scan reviews on products, services and businesses. And, consumers put a lot of faith in those reviews. In fact, 85 percent of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, according to a study from BrightLocal.

Consumers today often tread carefully when making important buying decisions. BrightLocal found that consumers read an average of seven reviews before trusting a business. And, good marks from other customers can be a gamechanger for multi-location brands as 73 percent of local consumers trust local businesses more when the business has positive reviews.

The importance of reviews for local businesses

And, it’s not just consumers that place a lot of value on reviews. Search engines use online reviews as a major determining factor in their local rankings.

Impact of online reviews on local search rankings

For multi-location brands, the online review profile of individual locations plays a significant role in getting found when local consumers search for nearby businesses. Review signals are an important ranking factor in both Local Map Pack results and Localized Organic Search results, according to Moz’s 2017 Local Search Ranking Factors study.

Review signals account for factors like average score, velocity, diversity, depth, relevant terms included, etc. However, the number of reviews for a local business does matter. Moz’s study ranked the quantity of Google reviews with text as the fifth most competitive factor to help local businesses improve their search engine rankings.

Using technology to manage online reviews at the local level

Managing online reviews can be a difficult task for any brand. There’s an array of platforms that support online reviews that you have to monitor, and responding takes some customer service skills. Multi-location brands have to face this challenge at scale, managing reviews across platforms for hundreds or thousands of locations.

Luckily, there are technology solutions available to help you manage online reviews at scale. Leveraging a dashboard allows you to import your brand’s local profiles and monitor reviews across a variety of platforms. And, depending on the technology, you can even respond to some reviews directly from the dashboard.

Here’s an example of how your multi-location brand can leverage technology to manage online reviews using our sample dashboard from previous posts in this series – Rallio.

Note: Rallio is a technology partner of Mindstream Media Group.

Monitoring reviews

Through the dashboard, you’ll be able to monitor customer engagement across locations and provide local owners and managers access to see reviews for their location(s). You’ll then be able to filter reviews by platform, locations/regions, star rating, etc.

Replying to reviews

It’s important to let your existing and potential customers know you care by responding to reviews. According to BrightLocal, roughly 30 percent of consumers say responding to reviews is a key factor when judging local businesses. Using a centralized dashboard will allow you to:

Respond to customer engagement across social platforms.
Communicate internally on the best way to respond to reviews.
Mark reviews closed after you’ve responded.

Best practices for responding to online reviews

There’s no one way to handle responding to reviews. The right response will depend on your brand messaging, the sentiment of the review, the intensity of the review, etc. Here are some basic best practices to help you get started:

Respond to every review

Negative feedback can feel like a punch to the gut, and it’s natural to be a little upset in these situations. That’s why it’s critical that you make sure your locations understand the appropriate way to respond. Provide them templates to help guide their responses and let them know how important it is to establish a genuine relationship with customers who were disappointed with their experience.

Also, make sure your locations respond to feedback quickly. The goal should be to respond within 48 hours of the customer leaving the review.

Offer a sincere thank you on positive reviews

Just because a review doesn’t require a follow up from your locations, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t respond. Positive reviews are an opportunity for your locations to let their customers know they appreciate the kind words.

“When contacting a positive reviewer, your purpose should be simply to deliver a human thank you and let them know you care. That’s it. No gift certificates. No mailing lists. No event invites. No reactions to the minor complaint in their review. No requests for them to tell more friends about your business,” according to Yelp.

Respond to reviews publicly

Rather than sending reviewers a private message, respond to reviews publicly. This way, not only does the reviewer know your locations are engaged and care about their customers, everyone else who sees it will know as well.

The most important thing when managing online reviews is to let your customers and local audiences know that you care and are committed to providing exceptional service.

See next: How to use Facebook boosted posts to increase local social media engagement

Need help managing your local reviews? Contact Mindstream Media Group to learn how our local social media services can help you monitor and respond to reviews across platforms.